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Friday, March 8, 2013

Hi blog! I've been meaning to post, but have had a crazy week! Tests and rehearsals and just hanging out with people. Life has been twisty and turny. And I am waiting. Whatever that means. But more on that later.

It's now spring break! I'm taking a needed rest from life planning and school stress. I plan to be back to posting after the break.

Friday, March 1, 2013

Freedom and Messiness

My last post was kind of about fear. About how I sometimes I freeze up because I'm scared of something. I'm scared to give up the title of "right". What if someone looks at me and thinks I'm not doing the right thing? Heaven forbid they think I'm sinning! See, I have always always been a rule-follower. And man, I'm pretty good at it. From a young age I knew how to keep up appearances even if my heart wasn't in it. My Dad likes to tell the story of the time when I was 5 and he was disciplining me. He told me to sit on my bed and I told him, "I'm sitting down on the outside but I am not sitting down on the inside." Pretty insightful right? Talk about an innate sin of pleasing people and being reallll good at keeping up appearances. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?), I keep discovering more ways in which this tendency has rooted itself in my life. And since it seems to be a theme of my life right now, I want to talk about it.

My church recently finished a sermon series on Jonah. I don't think I ever would have guessed that the book of Jonah would apply so much to my life. But wow, it's powerful. One of the biggest things that stuck out to me during the weeks we spent on it was that we shouldn't be afraid to get messy. You know when you're standing by a gross pond and a kid throws a boulder in and you get splashed because of his actions? Yeah..... Think about it. Jesus got pretty messy. But wait. It's not just that He hung around the people who were splashing around in the pond - and He basically did that all the time. He actually took on all our sin - God turned away because of the sin that was on Jesus! JESUS WASN'T AFRAID OF SIN! At all. Yeah, He hated sin. But He didn't hate it just because it was sin. He hated it because it kept us in bondage. It kept us away from Him. It kept us from being able to talk with Him and go spend eternity in His presence!

Sometimes I think sin is gross. I try to stay away from it. I try to stay clean and make sure people know that I'm saved and that I fight sin. Seriously. I've thought this way. But this isn't what Jesus died for. He didn't die to make me "clean" and nice. He died so that I would be free and would be like Him. And Jesus didn't fight sin - He fought darkness and bondage. And you can't fight darkness and bondage unless you go to those places. Sometimes I'm afraid of sin. Sometimes I'm afraid. Father, help me to remember that perfect love casts out fear. You died so that I may live, that I may live free from bondage. And because I am free, I can get messy.