Afflicted In Every Way, But Not Crushed

admin — Sat, 19 May 2012 17:53:36 +0000

For the last 5 years I have been pondering, studying, and personally living the very real paradoxes of life. It is so among my friends, coworkers, and society itself. The questions of suffering physically, spiritually, and emotionally in everyday life while the promises of God loom like a mountain in front of me.

Everywhere I turn articles about this subject appear in magazines, blog-posts, devotionals, and the daily news. Books are being written about these issues. And all the while I am surrounded by, and a part of, real suffering in this life here and now. These experiences have caused many to begin to slide in a way never before contemplated. Their minds and souls inundated with nagging questions. Where is God? Where is my faith? How does the church fit in all of this? Have I been sold a bill of goods? Should I throw in the towel? Is there a reason to press on?

Paul the Apostle wrote, “We don’t want you to be uninformed, brethren, about the afflictions and oppressing distress which befell us…how we were so utterly and unbearably weighed down and crushed that we despaired even of life. Indeed, we felt within ourselves that we have received the sentence of death…” 2 Cor. 1:8-9 The Amplified Bible

He went on to say that the reason was so that he wouldn’t trust in or depend on himself instead of on God who raises the dead! He then went on to describe his current state of being afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed…constantly being delivered over to death…in fact, death was at work in him!

Then He proclaims the promise of God, that as He rose Jesus from the dead, He will raise us also…and because of this Paul was not losing hope!

As I sit around with friends, some of us unemployed today, we are hoping to get work, but are constantly assaulted with the reality of being older in a worker’s nightmare of competition for the very few real jobs. All the while, the newspapers tell us of recovery. I have friends and family who suffer from bipolar disorder and the daily task of staying on track is a trial in itself. They hope to feel normal, to make sense of what is happening. Others escape from their troubles in any number of ways, hoping to avoid the tough decisions that faith, in the real world, brings up.

I don’t know your circumstances, you fill in the blanks. I am in no way saying that each one’s difficulty can be measured or that one difficulty is less than another’s. What I am saying is that everyone experiences difficulties. They are real. They are present. And they are often very long.

A.B. Simpson wrote many years ago, “That the pressure of hard places makes us value life. Every time our life is given back to us from such a trial, it is like a new beginning, and we learn better how much it is worth, and make more of it for God and man. The pressure helps us understand the trial of others, and fits us to help and sympathize with them.”

“There is a shallow, superficial nature, that gets hold of a theory or promise lightly, and talks very glibly about the distrust of those who shrink from every trial; but the man or woman who has suffered much never does this, but is very tender and gentle, and knows what suffering really means. This is what Paul meant when he said, “Death works in you.”

“Trials and hard places are needed to press us forward, even as the furnace fires in the hold of that mighty ship give force that moves the piston, drives the engine, and propels that great vessel across the sea in the face of the winds and waves.”

Pressing forward, overcoming, enduring…how? I stop and look up to that mountain that is looming before me. The mountain of the promises of God, where my help comes from. I look as far up as I am able and trust that tomorrow I will be able to look up even further. And I look back and see how many times God has delivered me. How many times He has been faithful. How many times the seasons changed. And how many times I had found that each season had it’s own reward. It is there, in the midst of my trials and suffering, that I find that I am surrounded by God, His faithfulness behind and His promises ahead. Hoping in Him enables me to stand one more day.

Paul Sisemore III

My Faith: Returning to church, despit my doubts

admin — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:01:50 +0000

Editor’s note: Andrea Palpant Dilley is the author of “Faith and Other Flat Tires.”

By Andrea Palpant Dilley, Special to CNN

During my junior year in college, I took a butter knife from my mother’s kitchen and scraped the Christian fish decal off the back bumper of the Plymouth hatchback I’d inherited from my older brother. Stripping off that sticker foreshadowed the day, a few years later, that I would walk out of church.

The reasons for my discontent were complicated. By most standards, I had a healthy childhood. I grew up the daughter of Quaker missionaries in a rural Kenyan community that laid the foundation for my faith. I spent the rest of my childhood in the Pacific Northwest, raised in a stable Presbyterian church that gave me hymns and mission trips and potluck dinners.

I was surrounded by smart, conscientious Christians, the kind of people who read 19^th century Russian novels and took meatloaf to firefighters when much of eastern Washington state went up in flames in the fall of 1991.

When I started into my skeptic phase, my Christian community gave me space to struggle. They listened to my doubts about faith. They took my questions seriously.

And yet when I turned 23 I left the church.

Listening to a sermon at my older brother’s church one Sunday, I stood up, leaned over to my father and said, “This is bulls**t.” I made my way to the end of the pew and marched out of the sanctuary. The sermon didn’t sit right with me. The pastor was preaching about Psalm 91, saying in so many words that a person just needed to pray and have faith in order to be protected from suffering.

More than just that sermon, I was sick of church. I was sick, too, of all the spiritual questions plaguing me: Why does the church seem so culturally insulated and dysfunctional? Why does God seem distant and uninvolved? And most of all, why does God allow suffering?

These questions didn’t come out of nowhere. I’d spent time in high school volunteering in refugee camps in Kenya and in college working with families on welfare in central Washington. I saw hungry babies. I walked into homes that were piled with garbage and dirty laundry.

In an orphanage in the slums of Nairobi, I held AIDS babies and worked with disabled kids who’d been left at the front gates of the orphanage by parents who couldn’t afford to feed them. I saw things that I couldn’t make sense of as a Christian.

Walking out of church was a way of saying “To hell with it; I’m done.”

For two years, I skipped church. My Bible gathered dust on the shelf. The local bars became my temples. I indulged in the cliché rebellions of a Christian girl, smoking cigarettes and drinking hard alcohol. I got involved with men twice my age without thinking twice about it. I wanted a break from being “good.”

And then, strangely, I woke up one morning at age 25, climbed into my car, and drove downtown to attend a 10 a.m. church service. I won’t relate here the whole story of how I came back to the church. But if I had to follow the standard testimonial narrative for Christians, the script for my life story would go something like this:

Step 1: Grow up in a Christian church.

Step 2: Go off to college away from said church.

Step 3: Be exposed to the enticements of secular life.

Step 4: Try drugs and cigarettes and Pearl Jam.

Step 5: Leave the church because of aforementioned enticements.

Step 6: Experience epiphany; realize vapidness of secular enticements.

Step 7: Return to church with penitent heart.

Step 8: Reestablish faith, discover good living.

In reality, I left the church more because of my own internal discontent than the lure of so-called secular life. When I came back, I still carried that same discontent. I was confused, and still bothered by questions and doubts. I stayed in the back row and didn’t sing or pray. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to be there.

And yet I sat there, Sunday after Sunday, listening to the pastor and the organ pipes and trying to figure out what was going on in my dark, conflicted heart.

Although I never experienced that dramatic reconversion moment, I did come to peace with two slow-growing realizations.

First: My doubt belonged in church.

People who know my story ask what I would have changed about my spiritual journey. Nothing. I had to leave the church to find the church. And when I came back, the return wasn’t clean or conclusive. Since then, I’ve come to believe that my doubts belong inside the space of the sanctuary. My questions belong on the altar as my only offering to God.

With all its faults, I still associate the church with the pursuit of truth and justice, with community and shared humanity. It’s a place to ask the unanswerable questions and a place to be on sojourn. No other institution has given me what the church has: a space to search for God.

Second: My doubt is actually part of my faith.

In Mark 9:24, a man says to Jesus, “I believe, help my unbelief.” The Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor called this the foundation prayer of faith. I pray that prayer often and believe that God honors my honesty.

I also believe God honors my longing. The writer and theologian Frederick Buechner said “Faith is homesickness.” C.S. Lewis called it “Sehnsucht,” a longing for a far-off country. I feel that sense of unshakable yearning. It comes from the deepest part of my heart, a spiritual desire that’s strangely, mysteriously connected to my doubt.

Sitting in church every Sunday, my doubt is my desire – to touch the untouchable, to possess the presence of God.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Andrea Palpant Dilley.

The Editors – CNN Belief Blog

God Knew What He Was Getting Into….

admin — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 16:51:50 +0000

Remember that it is God who is seeking you. It is God who is saving you. It is God who loves you.

Paul Sisemore III

watch?v=GLYB0F4Uzeo&feature

I knew what I was getting into when I called you
I knew what I was getting into when I said your name, but I said it just the same
I knew what I was getting into, and I still want you
I knew what I was getting into

I knew what I was getting into, and I still chose you
I knew what I was getting into, and I still want you
I knew what I was getting into, and I still said Your name, I said it just the same
I knew what I was getting into

I am not shocked by your weakness
I am not shocked even by your sin
I am not shocked by your brokenness

I knew what I was getting into and I still want you
I knew what I was getting into and I still like you
I knew what I was getting into and I still chose you

Cause only I can see the end from the beginning
And only I can see where this is going
Only I can see the end from the beginning
And I see anew the seeds of love
And I see in you strength

When all you see is your failure
And all you feel is shame
I can see deeper than that
I know you better than, better than that

I knew what I was getting into when I called you
I knew what I was getting into when I said your name, I said it just the same
I knew what I was getting into, and I still want you
I knew what I was getting into, and I still like you

You’re only at the beginning
You’ve only just begun
And I know where you are going
And all you can see is the moment that you’re hurting
And all you can see is the moment that you’re aching
But listen;

I knew what I was getting into when I called you
I knew what I was getting into, and I still want you
I knew what I was getting into, and I still like you
I knew what I was getting into, when I called you

Just don’t give up
And don’t give in
If you don’t quit, you’ll win, you’ll win

Everything is in my hands
It’s gonna be alright

Everything is in my hands
It’s gonna be alright
It’s gonna be okay

And you don’t have to pretend to be something or someone that you’re not
Cause I know you better than that
Even better, even better than that

Listen my beloved;
I knew what I was getting into when I called you
I knew what I was getting into when I said your name, I said it just to say
I knew what I was getting into, and I still like you
I knew what I was getting into, and I still chose you

By Misty Edwards

Jesus>Religion

admin — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:36:08 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1IAhDGYlpqY#!

A Simple Vision

admin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 02:06:05 +0000

A Few Questions and a Simple Vision

In my journey to discover what the church should be, what I find is once again, that the church is to be an expression of community, an expression of the life of God, it is the heart of every man and woman regardless of their place in the story or their progress on the journey – It is the bride making herself adorned and God making her ready through these and other mysterious means.

Equipping – empowering – encouraging – blessing – correcting (in love) and we the church need to know what this looks like.

I desire a “new” kind of church – it may look traditional, yet the heart of it will be different. Her witness will be different as well; it will be elusiveness and a longing, a desire as in two lovers in their first embrace, a dance celebrating this new life that is giving meaning to even the everyday mundane tasks as well as wings to overcome the most difficult struggles.

And all of this in a community that struggles together, not desiring that any perish and in fact sending out to deposit this seed, this living water that flows!

The church, you are missing it! The world is so jaded and uninterested in the current message and yet, love will find a way. Love is the way – Jesus like you have never seen Him before!

Francis Schaeffer wrote, “How Then Shall We Live?”

Chuck Colson wrote, “How Now Shall We Live?”

I am asking how shall we live together, not after 2000 years of Christ, but after our 5-25 years, or how many years of personal experience with Him and our corporate experience with each other (His bride)?

Should we continue as is?

Is there something more?

Have we settled?

Is the model right and we just need to make it better?

Or is it really all about the heart?

And if so, are our hearts all in?

Paul may have understood the mind of Jesus better than anyone who ever lived. He sums up his whole understanding of the message of Jesus in Gal. 5:6, “…the only thing that matters is faith expressing itself in love.” (NIV)

This is the vision, our hearts all in and our faith expressing itself in love.

Paul Sisemore III