Life is Beautiful

It's official. I have made the leap to a smartphone.

A couple weeks ago I upgraded my old semi-smartphone (you know, the kind that looks like a dumb phone, but you can check email on it) to a really basic blackberry-looking phone that didn't come with extra data charges. I thought it'd be better to go simple, save some money, and limit the time I spent glued to my cellular device. Within the first few days, however, of using that basic phone, I had problems with it insisting on randomly restarting itself and displaying the wrong time. Not O.K. After enduring the stress of returning that phone, I gave in and bought a smartphone: the HTC Rhyme. It actually works AND it's purple! It does a bunch of other stuff too, but that's all I care about at this point.

I've been challenged this week to do a self-check and re-evaluate what I consider to be important. When technology spirals to the center of our lives, it becomes difficult for us to see beyond the screen in front of us. Materialism is highly addictive; with just one taste, we're hooked. We start thinking that a good life means having the coolest gadgets, the biggest house, and the prettiest profile picture. When we idealize life like that, we cheat ourselves in one of two ways: either through self-pity, resulting from an insatiable desire for more of the things we can't have, or through self-indulgence, resulting from too much of the things that we think we need.

Either way, we miss out on this.

52 Week Project 2012 ~ Week 28

A holy life is a beautiful life. "Worship the Lord with the beauty of holy lives" (Psalm 96:9). Worshipping the Lord and bringing glory to his name should be our goal as long as we have breath. That's our purpose; the essence of life. If we deny that, we deny God the praise he deserves and we deny ourselves the experience of a truly beautiful life.

Jesus came so that we might have life to the full. Not full of stuff, but full of Him. For only in Christ will we ever be complete. Jesus spoke to his disciples these words which hold true for us today: 

"I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing...You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit--fruit that will last" (John 15:5, 16).

May we live abiding in Christ this week and worship God with the beauty of holy lives. 

Daddy's Girl

52 Week Project 2012 ~ Week 24
Beloved Child of God

This adorable little girl's name is Sydnie. She just so happens to be my boyfriend's one year old niece, and we had the blessing of spending some time with her last weekend. On Sunday we stopped by her house to deliver some pictures to her parents that we had taken of her on the boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ. I couldn't help but snag a few more photos of her before we left that day though. Seriously. Look at that face! No camera can stay tucked away for long with Sydnie in the room.


When I look at this picture, I can only imagine the kind of love that this child's father has for her. I'm reminded of the love that I've received from my own father: unconditional, self-giving, sacrificial love. This love has made me desire to honor, please, and respect my dad in response to the kindness he's poured out on me throughout my life. Although no human love will ever reach absolute perfection, I think the purity of my dad's love for his children sure comes pretty close.

I wanted to dedicate this post to my dad as part of his Father's Day present, but it's already Wednesday night so it's a little late. Better late than never though, right? I love you Daddy!!!

I would've posted sooner but the past week and a half has been so filled with painful headaches and migraines that I haven't had the energy or concentration to write. I have endured a lot of trial and testing this week and have confronted the recurring questions and seeming inconsistencies that so often accompany the long hours spent in bed with unrelenting pain. I've mainly been challenged with the idea of how an all-powerful, all-loving God, our Father in Heaven, can allow his children to suffer all kinds of pain, sickness, and distress. I'm not just talking about the common cold or typical knee scrap, but the serious stuff. The stuff that keeps floors upon floors of children occupying rooms in hundreds of children's hospitals around the country: unexplainable pain, incurable illness, insatiable anxiety, failed treatments, harsh medicinal side effects....the list goes on, making it increasingly harder to reconcile the two realities of this painful life with a loving Father God who has good plans for his children. I'm so easily tempted to succumb to the thought that if God is really all-powerful, than He is obviously unwilling to heal because complete healing has not come.

With my focus solely on the present pain that I'm suffering, this seems like the most logical conclusion: that for some reason, God does not want to heal me. What a sad, depressing, and nearly heart shattering statement! I know I'm not alone in that thought either.


Our conception of love requires protection from pain at all costs; yet the greatest act of love that the earth has ever known required that God allow his only son Jesus to suffer the greatest pain of all, dying a cruel death at the hands of the ones he came to save. Isaiah 53:4-6 states:

Surely he took up our infirmities

    and carried our sorrows, 

yet we considered him stricken by God, 

    smitten by him, and afflicted. 

 But he was pierced for our transgressions, 

    he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,

    and by his wounds we are healed. 

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, 

    each of us has turned to his own way; 

and the Lord has laid on him

    the iniquity of us all. 

Most of us tend to feel like we're entitled to a good, long, healthy life. We get mad at God when bad things happen. We think that if God is God, He needs to do something about all the evil, pain, and suffering that's tearing this world apart. When we don't see Him doing anything to make things better, we turn our backs on Him, harboring our feelings of bitterness and betrayal, which morph into despair and hopelessness in a matter of weeks, days, sometimes even hours. Digging our own graves, we blind ourselves from seeing God's masterplan of redeeming this broken world and everything in it. He didn't design creation to look like the mess we're used to seeing. God doesn't want anyone to suffer pain for all of eternity, although that's honestly the punishment that our sin deserves. But that's why Jesus suffered for us; paid our penalty and took our place. As a result, we all have the opportunity to be healed completely from the sin that sickens our wretched earthly bodies. Whether that healing happens this side of Heaven in a way that we can see or not is beside the point: by his wounds we are healed.

Next time we get frustrated and angry over the pain and suffering that we see and experience in this life, I pray that we'll quickly be reminded of Jesus' words he uttered in his last breaths as he hung on the cross, "It is finished!" As children of God, we can rest assured that this place is not our home; we're just passing through. While we're here though, I don't think that God will allow us to endure any suffering that He does not purpose for good. No pain goes wasted on God's watch. We just have to wait with the hope that God provides and trust---through the tears---that Daddy knows best. 

After all, God is love, and love never fails. 

Longing For Where I Belong

In my last post I wrote about how I've experienced God as my shatter-proof refuge through the shock and disillusionment of unexpected troubles and difficulties. When we trust in the Lord, who acts as our strength and our stronghold in times of trouble--our Rescue and our Deliverer--the trials we face possess the unmatched potential of developing within us an irrevocable desire for eternity. Hurt and pain can either drive our hearts into the ground or intensify our longing for that hopeful day when we'll experience complete healing and renewal. Nurturing this craving, as opposed to ignoring it or writing it off as a far-off fantasy, has been essential to my spiritual, physical, and emotional well-being and has drastically transformed both my understanding of God and my relationship with Him.

Have you ever felt frustrated, discouraged, or dismayed by the pain and the suffering you see throughout the world--natural disasters, poverty, oppression? Have you ever felt outraged by the evil of our day that has polluted innocent children like those in Uganda--KONY 2012 anyone? Have you ever felt that this is not how life should be, that there's gotta be more than this?

52 Week Project 2012 ~ 10/52
Warwick Furnace

On a smaller scale, when we see abandoned buildings, or trees split by lightning, or thorns and thistle choking the life out of plants, we often have a similar reaction...that is, assuming we take the time to react. We know that the sad remnant in front of us does not line up with its original purpose or design. Even if we simply look away and refuse to acknowledge the brokenness, that reaction still speaks to our desire for wholeness, for a world where life and love reign, for something more than this. Our normal reactions, and whatever emotions they encompass, indicate our recognition that something is wrong with this picture.

However, despite these reactions, I also suggest that just as everything has a purpose--form does not exist without function--the existence of pain and suffering conveys the fact that it, too, must have a function. My psychology book presents pain as a biopsychosocial phenomenon that we must seek to understand in terms of its biological, psychological, and social influences. It argues the purpose of pain lies its message, which warns us that something is wrong. If pain indicates that something is wrong, the logical flip-side to this phenomenon illustrates the "rightness" of a time and place free from pain.

I'd like to encourage you in the midst of the confusion and chaos by proposing that the very existence of your feelings of frustration and wonder suggests that this is not how the world was originally meant to be and that there is, indeed, something better yet to come. Otherwise, we would not have a problem with pain and suffering nor would we have a desire to see it to go away.

With that logic in mind, I believe we can confidently and rationally justify our hope and our longing for Heaven, the place where pain and suffering cease to exist. Through eyes of faith, we can view our present suffering as a promise of the future glory that will soon be revealed to us. Until that day, we continue to persevere in faith, being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we cannot see. We continue to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ who entered into our suffering and took it on completely so that we could have the opportunity to take on his righteousness and his glory if we so choose. We shall continue to rest in the arms of our God, who created us out of love and desires to comfort us and pour out his blessing upon us in the midst of our pain.  We continue to live with the perspective that this world is not our final destination. We were created for perfect relation with God which is why our hearts long for something more than the brokenness that we experience here on this earth. Not only do we feel it, but nature feels the same deep ache and groans in anticipation for the day of redemption as well. Restoration is coming!

If home is where the heart is, I hope that we will embrace the truth that Heaven is our home because our hearts belong with the One who "heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds" (Psalm 147:3). His name is Jesus.

"...and my soul is getting restless for the place where I belong, I can't wait to join the angels and sing my Heaven song"

 ~ Heaven Song by Phil Wickham

Living Loved

52 Week Project 2012 ~ 2/52

For my birthday this year, my boyfriend Pat and I celebrated by going to Buca di Peppo for dinner, just the two of us. Before we left, Pat surprised me with this single red rose pictured to the right. Classy, huh? I carried the rose with me into the restaurant, signaling to every turn of the head and every glance of the eye that someone (aka the man next to me who's holding my hand) loved me a lot. After all, everyone knows red roses say, "I love you."

This past week, week 2 of my 52 Week Project, I’ve been thinking a lot about love, but not in the dramatic teenage girl way. Now that I’m 20 years old, I’ve left those childish trains of thought to choo-choo back to where they belong. Wherever that is, I’m not quite sure, but it is certainly not in my head. At least not for now. No, this week I’ve traveled down a curiously winding path of thoughts about what it means to be loved, to feel loved, to live loved.

We all need love; our human souls hunger for it like our stomachs crave food. We want it bad. Many of our decisions even stem from our desire for love. Often times we act one way when we know that someone really loves us, when we feel loved, but other times we act totally different when it feels like no one really cares. Feeling loved, or the lack of love, can significantly affect our mood, self-esteem, eating and sleeping habits; our joy, peace and contentment; our patience, kindness, and generosity. Needless to say, love is important. This we know.

Now, I’m not so sure that love literally makes the world go ‘round, but I do know that Love created this world because the Bible says that God is love. It also directly states, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). Surely I’ve read that verse many times, but this week, it has unmistakably colored my vision. In our eyes, roses act as a good signal of love, but as a sign of God’s love, roses don’t nearly suffice, for God’s love infinitely exceeds our own. Jesus, instead, is like God’s rose given to us, something we can hold on to, an indicator of how much we are passionately loved by the Creator of the universe.

If we really are loved by God that much, so much so that he would descend from Heaven, live among us, and die in order that we may have life, than we should act differently, right? We should not be ashamed of God's love but rather should put Jesus on display through the manner in which we live. Every turning head and glancing eye that sees us walking through the restaurant, or wherever we may be, ought to recognize God’s great love radiating from our faces. With Jesus as our red rose, our sign of God’s love to us and to the world, we can all rest assured of one thing:

We can live loved, for that is what we are. Loved. Dearly loved children of God. May we start acting like it.

Experiencing Power in Weakness

I’m so glad that I was able to go to youth group tonight because I came away refreshed, with a deeper understanding of a lesson that I thought I had on lock. Let me explain.

One major truth that God has been showing me through out what at times seems like a never-ending trial, is that weakness is not something to be looked down upon, but rather embraced. The message tonight was so encouraging and exactly what I needed to hear. Despite having a really bad headache, I got a lot out of it. I’m just going to share a little and hopefully someone will also be moved by it.

Mike, the pastor of the high school ministry at our church, started off with some background on the Hebrew culture during the time of Jesus’ ministry, which shed a new light on some familiar passages. In those days, rabbis (spiritual teachers) had very prestigious roles in society. Similar to a doctor, or a lawyer, or a rocket scientist, rabbis were held above other occupations. As a result, they also had money. Families who were "well off" would send their children, at age SIX, to study under a rabbi in hopes of them learning, growing, and becoming a rabbi themselves. However, it was not an easy undertaking in the least. By age ten, they needed to have the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, memorized. I've recently read through Leviticus, and well, you try reading through it if that statement doesn't shock you. At that point, the rabbi would decide who had the most potential to learn the best and then send the rest back home where they would resort to learning the family trade—carpentry, fishing, blacksmithing? Or whatever it may be. By age fourteen, those who made the cut and remained under the rabbi’s direction would have the entire Hebrew Bible memorized! Woahhh! Crazy stuff right?! The rabbi would then make another cut, deciding who would stay and who would go home. By the end, I guess after more years of training and more cuts, only one or two students would remain, and so they would eventually “graduate”, become rabbis, do ministry, and continue the cycle.

Before people acknowledged Jesus as the Son of the Most High God, he was recognized as a teacher like the rabbis, specifically, though, as "one who taught with authority." Jesus was counter-cultural.