Lesson of the Week...

You know what's strange? Finding contentment when you feel like you have no idea what you're doing; when you don't have a real plan for the near future, when you don't know who may come into your life, when you don't know where you may be in the next year... and the fact of life here on this earth is that you will never know. I've been encouraging a friend to read the book of Job recently, and it makes me think about how I've been reacting to my current stage in life right now. Unlike Job, I'm not being placed into the hands of Satan for insane trials and torture, and no one would say that I am one of the most 'righteous' persons of this earth. However, I do feel like nothing is in my hands concerning my future. It's like the Lord is watching me from up above with His research team, studying how I make the 'bigger' decisions for myself. He already knows the outcome, but maybe He's curious to know if I will be seeking Him for the answers to the questions that bombard my brain at night....or maybe He wants to see if I will begin seeking answers from the logic that I think I have.

I would say that the will that He has given us is a gift. I also know that when we don't think about it as a gift, we think about it as a 'right' or a 'property' in a sense. It's difficult to meditate on the fact that my sin is powered by will. When I deliberately disobey God, that's my way of saying, "Hey, you gave will to ME and I'm going to use it for MY pleasure!". My knowledge of having will power as a gift should cause me to give back to the One who gave; it should motivate me to use it for pleasing the Giver of all things. So I sit here and wonder what Job was thinking after He had praised God for His sovereignty in the last chapter...He must have finally understood that his life was something that was completely not his own. He must have seen that the Lord can easily take it away from him in a flash, just as He took away the lives of so many of his loved ones in one day. Job was such a righteous man, did he struggle with contentment after everything that happened to him, after the book ends? Surely, he must have at least once! However, contentment is directly correlated to His sovereignty... So maybe Job learned his lesson for good! Maybe when he was resting his head at night he sat there dwelling upon the goodness of life in the Lord's sovereign plan for it. My prayer is that the Lord will remind me of how He has brought me here to this place so far, and how He has something greater planned for those who want to glorify Him. I pray that I would remember that will power is a great gift when used for Him, and that the future is not mine, but His. May I view this all as a marvelous blessing...probably like Job did.

Come, Oh Lord. Maranatha.

Sincere Worship

This morning while walking in the gym before chapel, I came across a young woman who was sitting in the bleachers sulking. This greatly disturbed me, because I knew I could be one of the reasons why she was sulking, and it quickly changed my attitude from 'all is well' to 'all is annoying'. I thought to myself 'Really, does your life suck that much that you would act this way?'. To make the situation worse, the night before I was unable to complete my reading for government class, so this added more distractions onto my offering before the Lord. As I was singing along with the worship crew and my fellow students, I came to realize that I wasn't really paying too much attention to lyrics at all, and when I did, I did not feel that I was giving the Lord my everything. I began to then justify myself by blaming the young woman sitting on the bleachers for distracting me, when in reality I'm the one standing there, blocking my own view of the goodness of God. As my mind was drifting off into the dense forest of my thoughts, I began to realize that my heart was in a dark place at that moment. The only thing I can tell you from the message today was what passages we were in, other than that, I was lost. I knew I had sinned, and that was my time of figuring out why.
That young woman...she deserved grace from me. That young woman...she deserved compassion and understanding from me. What was I doing? I was thinking about myself the ENTIRE morning! HOW can a heart be prepared to worship the Lord if it is so self-absorbed?? She may have been sulking, but I was the one quick to sinfully react to it! The Lord has shown me immeasurable grace, and yet I still act like I deserve to be loved. I act as if my pedestal could not get any higher! My pride hurts me the most, and I have grown so tired of it, "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23). I NEED to remind myself of how depraved I really am DAILY, for if I don't, I will become poisoned by self-righteousness. A heart that is ready to worship the Lord is one that is clean, and humble. I found a couple verses on worship from the Psalms...


Psalm 95:6
Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;


Psalm 99:5
Exalt the LORD our God and worship at his footstool; he is holy.


LET US KNEEL, HE IS HOLY! What a reminder today of how far from that I truly am! The only person that is worthy of being exalted is the Lord, never me. I cannot offer Him sincere worship if my sin is entangling my thoughts. I cannot offer Him sincere worship if my view of Him is lower than myself.

 So, in conclusion, if you are having trouble 'getting into the worship', let me ask you...Do you have anything that you need to repent of? How often have you thought of just yourself up until that point of the day? How has the Lord shown you grace that week? In answering these questions, your heart may become broken, and spurt forth a fountain of praise, as mine did...

May He make me ready to really praise Him in His return. Maranatha.

The thing about birthdays is...

they're supposed to be all about you. I know...this isn't a letter, BUT I wish to share with the internet everything that has been going on through my head on this special day, (therefore, you may stop reading if you do not care). I have officially lived for two decades. Exciting? YES! But before I get too into that, I wish to start out with significant events that the Holy Spirit has used to transform my thinking.
I have been incredibly blessed beyond measure with true friends who love me by the grace of God. Recently, I have expressed to a friend that I was struggling with learning how to be humble. To help me with this, yesterday, we decided to go through Romans 12 together and discuss humility as a mark of a true Christian. It was a beautiful time of true fellowship among sisters, but sometimes, truths honestly do not click until later, you know? One can talk about the amazing grace of God and understand it, but to really be in AWE of it...that is a different story.

Does anyone else out there ever feel led to do something specific at a certain time? I know I have felt this, and I also know that that is the Holy Spirit, (if it is an action that acts against sin). To add to the amazing-ness of yesterday, that evening I felt like I really should continue reading Humility: True Greatness by C.J. Mahaney. What a wonderful blessing that ended up being! I read what Mahaney had to say about pride and the cross and exposing the grace of God in our lives...and it flooded my mind with questions of whether or not the cross has made a great difference in my daily thinking this week. With my birthday being a few hours away, I had no longer wished for it to come so soon! Earlier at dinner, I had comically explained to a friend that my birthday was going to be all about me, and that I will do whatever-the-heck I want to do! The sad part is, I was only partially kidding at the time. As a follower of Jesus Christ, my life is no longer about me, so why should I be SO excited about a day dedicated to me? This is when I started to think of how I can keep my mind focused on the savior instead of the sinner.

Now that I given you the context, I am ready to share the happenings of today! Funny thing is, the things that encouraged me the most came from some good friends once more! Gifts are wonderful on your birthday; it's another reason to praise God for His grace, don't get me wrong on that, but spiritual encouragement on your birthday...that's the best! I have received birthday messages all day long, but a few have been circling through my mind all day. Both of them have brought me back to the glory of the Lord. The Lord created me on this day twenty years ago to do His work and to give Him glory. I have come to realize that I need to be celebrating the Lord and praising Him for that grace on this day that the world says is supposed to be about me. Trying to fathom that this morning was so difficult! Therefore, to make my birthday even more awesome than it already has been, I decided to go off on a hike and just have that intimate time with God, and leave my thoughts to Him.

If you ever have problems finding a reason to praise God, just go outside. I honestly do not understand why some people hate being outside. You are surrounded by God's glorious creations when you are outside, how can you not like that? Today, the winds raced through the canyon walls. Normally, I do not appreciate wind, but when I'm outdoors ready to meditate on life...I love it. I could hear it howling, causing the leaves to dance. I can feel it push my hair back, and chill me as I move faster; and that's just the beauty of wind! God made so many incredible animals too...I could hear the birds calling out to each other and the crickets peacefully chirp and the woodpeckers tap away at the trees. I saw how the bobcat gracefully ran across the trail and into the bush. The rock formations, the bright green grass, the blue sky and the sun that warmed my face; I was in complete awe. God made man out of the dirt my boots stomped on. Meditating on God as the creator of the universe humbled me more than anything today. Everything I saw and heard and felt today in the canyon was a grace gift from God. If I were to die today or if Christ were to come back my heart would be found content in the beauty of my Creator and the grace of my Savior. These lyrics rang through my mind as I hiked back to my car today:


I stand amazed in the presence
Of Jesus the Nazarene,
And wonder how He could love me,
A sinner, condemned, unclean.

O how marvelous! O how wonderful!
And my song shall ever be:
O how marvelous! O how wonderful!
Is my Savior's love for me!



Maranatha Lord Jesus, thank you for revealing these truths to me on this special day! :)))

Dear ___________

Dearest Chameleon,
I have greatly missed your presence over the years, I do not recall the last time we had actually taken time out of our schedules to see each other. Those days are long gone. You were the one who made the decision to end our friendship...unfortunately, it was quite gradual and subtle, and it would have been easier to just tell us that you no longer desired our company. However, I wanted to let you know that I never was angry over our loss of communication...just sad. We had been friends for so long, but these things do happen in life as people grow older and change. My sister and I went one direction on a path that was more straight and narrow while you ended up taking the more twisted path, popular among others our age. When we were young I remember staying in your home over the weekend and wishing that our parents would forget to pick us up for church. Ironically, now I would love to pick you up to come to church with me every weekend! There are reasons why the Lord had saved me later, but sometimes I just wish that I had that same desire for Him now back when we were kids. The life that you lead now just blows my mind away, I can see that you left innnocence behind years ago. The Lord has had this in His plans since the beginning, which is why I suppose I am gravely struggling with trusting in His sovereignty when I think about you. I think back to what I could have done to prevent this from happening in your life, but honestly, your will was never under my control. My prayer is that one day you would realize that a life without Christ is a life not worth living at all, because pursuing earthly pleasures is meaningless and will never truly satisfy. You know the gospel friend, now is always the best time to repent and put your faith in Him! I'm begging you to drop everything you have and run to the cross empty handed, coming to the Lord with nothing but a broken heart. I'm telling you this because I love you, and it would be a great joy to me knowing that you knew the Lord before Christ came or before you died, either one.
To God be the glory in all of this. Maranatha.
-The Grizzly Bear

Dear ___________

Dearest Jack Rabbit,

To my dismay, I have peered into the small window of your life and seen things that I wish I did not see. It brings to mind past regrets; things I dreamed of telling you at the time, but ended up failing to speak in my little pool of fears. I'm going to start with a story and I would like you to take this story seriously, so please listen...

Imagine us as ants. Our colony has, out of blatant stupidity, built our anthill out of piles of crumbs. Obviously we cannot survive much longer with this home, for the coyote is coming to lick it up within a matter of hours. However, for reasons I cannot explain, a human being of much greater strength became an ant in order to save our colony. This ant built up another anthill with all the accommodations we needed to survive, but ended up dying in the process. 

Wouldn't you agree that this human being that became an ant was a bit absurd for wanting to save our colony? 

Why would he do such a thing?

I'm hoping that this story somehow rings a bell, or that you are making a connection with another story, for I was trying to convey the gospel of Jesus Christ to you. We are the ants, Jesus was the human in the story, and the coyote was Satan. Jesus, the Son of God, willingly gave up his life in crucifixion that we may be saved from our "stupid" sin. Just as it was a bit shameful to become an ant and die for the colony, so it was to become a human and die for us. Jesus' story did not end in death, however, because He conquered death and rose from the dead three days later! By this act, He gave us grace in letting us conquer death in sin by repenting of our sin and putting our full faith in Him. 

HOW LONG I have desired to share this good news with you, and honestly, it is one of my worst regrets. A few years back I recall standing in the hall asking you if you were a christian. You had said yes, but I asked you because I saw no fruit in your life. Therefore, I followed up with the question of ‘how do you know that you are?’; you had responded with ‘because my parents are?’. My heart sank, wanting so badly to tell you that christianity is a personal relationship with Jesus, it cannot be treated like an ethnicity that is just passed down to the next generation. Unfortunately, I kept my mouth shut and pretended like all was well. 

When I was with you I do not remember being the best example of what God's love looks like. A life living for Christ is one that consists of sacrifice in pursuing righteousness for Him. I would have shown you His love by sacrificing my pride and ignoring my fear of man in sharing the gospel that you may be saved too. In my silence I did not live out Romans 1:16 "For I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes; first for the jew, then for the gentile.".

So when I see you drinking and partying, it greatly saddens me. There was a day when I told you that I would always love you, and honestly I can say that I still do. I love you as a friend that I have lost to sin...a friend that I have prayed for for years. Your salvation has been prayed for so many times that I cannot count, but I admit, there were times when I got distracted and forgot to pray for you. This may be considered a reminder to continue praying, for I know that God is all powerful, and can save you just as He has saved a sinner like me. 

Maybe one day I will see you again here on earth, but my hope is in God's saving power. I would much rather be with you worshipping God in heaven for eternity, than to have that chance to spend time with you every week here. Who knows...maybe you will be the last one to be saved before Christ's return. Maranatha. 

-The Jaguar