Fear is so often our motivator. Instead we need to know that it’s Jesus who's out on the water. We should be willing to join him and walk on water. It’s more important to be where He is, not in the safety in our boat. The boat often represents our comfort zone. Even in our fear, the best response is to tell God what I’m afraid of. Don’t hope for an island in the lake between you and Jesus, just in case you start to sink and need to swim to the safety of the island.
Are you in a boat? Is it being battered by the wind and the waves? What waves, sins, what broken relationships grieve you, what fears, destructive habits do you have or impossible needs that won't go away? Don't pretend, cry out to Jesus. Take a step, any step. If you sink, it's ok, ask for Jesus. You're not a failure, you've just realized you need Him more than you realize.
1. Express to God you're willingness to get out of the boat.
-Then wait for God to give the go ahead.
2. When you get the go ahead- go ahead!
-It doesn’t matter if you think you can.
-How do you know if you're getting the go ahead? From the Bible, as you pray and talk with wise friends.
3. If you start to sink ask for help
-Cry out, “Lord, save me!”
-We must be faced with fear and weakness, broken, bent, afraid and beaten.
-Don't let the storm have the last word in your life.
4. The impact on your life is worship and healing
-Jesus wants us to walk on water with him because it's impossible. We need his grace and power each step of the way.
-He draws us to step out and sometimes sink. This causes us to realize it's all him and none of us.
Friday night brought a dozen girlfriends over to make earring holders from picture frames. This is Hannah and me with some of our frames. It was a great night of AMAZING food, a variety of Christmas music (everyone brought a CD) and most of us walked away with some Christmas gifts.
I forgot how much I love the intense colors. I've thought about and reflected on why I love and yet fear Autumn. The leaves are so beautiful and yet their turning is an indication that Winter is around the corner. I hold my breath and brace myself for the season I like least. It's hard for me to truly enjoy the few weeks of Fall because I'm dreading the Winter. I don't want to live like that. Help me enjoy the moments.
Philly has been buzzing with the excitement this whole week. It's been so fun to be a part of it all. I joined in with all the honking as I drove home tonight. My dad and I chatted tonight just after the Phillies won the World Series. He said that I was in Philly the last time they won. It was 1980 and I was about 6 months old and my dad was a teaching assistant at Temple. Crazy things happened on Broad Street the night they won. He remembers that his students didn't show up for class for days after the Phillies won the World Series. I don't remember their win in 1980 but I'll sure remember this win 28 years later!Endings
I hate endings. I'm bad at them—horrible actually. Beginnings, now there's something I can sink my teeth into. Beginnings are beautiful, fresh, teeming with life and possibility. Middles are for obedient muddling, the holding patterns of the "known," but endings…Endings are unnatural, awkward, painful and downright wrong.
Think about it. You only want something to end when it's undesirable. We long for bad things to end. But, we long for the good things in life to never end, and when they do we experience loss.
Actually, I don't know that endings were part of the original design. I think they are largely a consequence of the fall. The original breaking of perfect, trusting fellowship with the Father was the first and worst ending, and we feel the ripple effects throughout our consequently broken pilgrimage.
I'm not even a fan of the so-called good endings, like having just earned my Master's degree. I find myself grieving the loss of classes and classmates, lectures and papers, reading and learning in semester-long rhythms—that whole school-student- professor-campus thing. I will miss it.
I long to accomplish the goal without losing the season. I long not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But the baby has graduated, and full-time work she must. So, school ends, a beloved season passes, as all things flesh and fallen are wont to do. But, we carry this eternity in our hearts that nothing good should end, that there's a wrongness about endings that eternal beings were not designed for.
And good endings like graduating are just the tip of the ending-iceberg. There's the end of a cherished friendship, the end of a romantic relationship, and the mother of all endings—DEATH.
Enter Jesus: Jesus ultimately silenced the bitterness of endings when He hung there and died, saying, "It is finished." It is finished. All death and endings are swallowed up by life, and even the endings we so desperately experience are somehow wrapped into His finished work that we walk out and work out in our anguished and fallen, yet redeemed state.
Finishing is very different from ending. I daresay that finishing is an opposite of ending. And while often listed as synonyms, even Webster makes a clear distinction: "the end" is the limit or conclusion, whereas, "to finish" is to complete or perfect.
Finishing a paper or a project garners the sweet fulfillment of accomplishment, as does any job well done. Fine wines are described as having, "a crisp, clean, finish," not a crisp, clean ending. No one would dare disgrace the finish line of a race, by calling it the "ending line."
And yet, the end of Jesus' life on earth signaled the beginning of our hope against death and endings. By His crucifixion, Jesus plays a cruel trick on death making it His instrument to bring about true life. He turns all endings into mini-death surrenders to His life-giving Lordship, because it is indeed finished. And we rise with Him in His resurrection life, of using even us in His global mission of putting things to rights.
"Death, you have no more sting!" Someday, all will be rightfully eternal; the fullest fullness will be fully realized. For now, we groan purposefully; hopeful and confident in His finished work that puts all endings to death, and rights all that is wrong—gradually, patiently, eventually.
