Looking for a God-centered Perspective

Once again we are fasting tomorrow for God to work in men, work in us, and work out some good marriages.  I’d encourage you to pray with a friend if you can, even over the phone. Also, consider taking the next “fasting” step:  if you aren’t fasting, consider skipping lunch; if you are fasting lunch, try fasting breakfast as well; and if you are fasting breakfast and lunch, you might take the plunge and fast from when you get up until breakfast the next day.  There is power and strength in choosing to be weak through fasting.

One of the challenges of choosing to live a life of faith (whatever your marital status) is continually setting our eyes on God, looking for what he is doing, rather than dwelling on what we can see from our vantage point.  I used to work with the kids in my church, and we would teach them to remember that “God’s eye is watching your life, and God’s hand is working in your life.”  He is the director of our lives, we taught them, orchestrating each event and working in all the details.

It can be incredibly painful to ponder why he hasn’t given the gift of marriage, why he didn’t cause a specific relationship or potential guy to come to fruition.  You may understand why at some point, or you may not.  The ache of not knowing can make the loss feel worse.  Even though there may be (from your vantage point) zero activity on the marriage front, or pointless missed opportunities, God is up to something.  He’s working in your life.   From time to time, as I try to grapple with painful situations in life, I do a little self-counseling project:  I take a piece of paper and write down these questions, then try to answer them as specifically as possible:  What is my circumstance? What can I see God doing? Where do I see him providing for me? What might he be trying to teach me? What does he promise to be for me? What does he promise to do? What, based on Scripture, do I know is true about this circumstance?  Sometimes just thinking through these questions and writing them out can bring fresh perspective.

Here are a few promises from Scripture that I often use to start with, because regardless of the specifics of a particular situation, we have promises from God

of what He is doing and will do.  He will work everything for our good (Romans 8:28).  He will never leave us or forsake us (Hebrews 13:5).  He will give us everything we ask for in prayer – or something better (Luke 11:10-13).  He will forgive us (1 John 1:9).  He will complete his work in us (Philippians 1:6b).  He will guide us (Proverbs 3:5-6).  He will hear our prayers (Psalm 34:15).  He will discipline us (Proverbs 3:11-12).  He will give us strength (2 Chronicles 16:9a).  He will not withhold any good thing from us (Psalm 34:10).  He will keep us from harm (Psalm 121:7-8).  He will provide what we need (Philippians 4:19).  He will fight for us (Hebrews 13:6).  These promises are always true, no matter what; the trick is asking for the Spirit to give insight into how they apply specifically to our circumstances.

It’s not a fool-proof exercise; imagine Joseph trying to come up with answers to these questions in prison!  But, it’s a place to start, and it’s been helpful to me in trying to refocus my heart towards a God-centered life perspective.

May God give us grace pray, fast, and see what he is doing in our lives.

Anne

With a Glance

[We fast and pray over Monday lunch for God to work in men, to show us and change us where we need to be changed, and to create and sustain marriages for those who desire it.]

Ok, ok, I promise to stop stealing my pastor’s Sunday morning material for this blog but it’s been so good!  And encouraging.  So I’m going to keep writing about it.  We wrapped up the sermon series on faith last week with the first two verses of Hebrews 12:

Therefore since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of God.

The pastor explained that the phrase “looking to Jesus” is more literally translated as “keeping looking away to Jesus.”  The idea is a continual looking away from other things by purposefully gazing on Jesus Christ.

Of course, I had to think about where my own gaze is fixed.  It was a lot of mundane things: how does the fridge get dirty so quickly?  Where are those stamps I just bought?  Is anyone going to notice if I use Sharpie to “fix” the scuffed spot on my black heels?  And then it’s bigger questions: Why do I keep accumulating dating disaster stories instead of relationships?  What exactly am I supposed to be learning right now?  What if I’m a horrible mom?  What if I’m never a mom?  What if I fail at my job?  Have I really understood what grace means?

Yes.  That is the sad but true reality of things that go on in my head on a daily basis.  Using that as a starting point, it is easy to see why I need instruction on “looking away.”  Instead of being consumed with a) me and b) my circumstances, maybe there’s a slightly bigger horizon.  Of course I can never see how all the pieces of suffering and joy and growth and faith fit together, and wrestling with God in the storm is painfully real.  Yet raising my eyes from my own constantly shifting emotions and circumstances to the One who never changes is a solid place to start.

And I get practice on this immediately: my dear friend (and roommate) got engaged yesterday to a great guy.  For the record, I introduced them and she was on my Monday fastpray list!  Honestly, my heart is so full for both of them; I couldn’t be happier with the match!  

But this means I begin, for the third time in four years, the process of walking with a roommate through the ups and downs of wedding planning and preparation.  I know there will be moments over the next few months when my eyes will be distracted by the contrast in our circumstances and my perception of our relative future happiness.  And that will be exactly when looking away to the risen conquering Christ is invaluable and, quite frankly, life-saving.

So I think, for this Monday, I want to, a la Psalm 27:4, simply look at Him and leave everything else (roommate, shoes, family, fridge, work, school, future, hypothetical kids) in His hands.

Praying with you,

Amy

What Women Want

Dear Praying and Fasting Friends,

This is your reminder that we are fasting and praying during what would be Monday lunch for 1) marriage for those who are designed for it and for 2) the courage for men and women to walk upright and into relationship–with God and one another.  If at all possible, find a friend with whom you can pray, in person or over the phone, during that lunch slot or whenever it works.  There’s something about two people praying together that is deeply encouraging.

And as you pray, you might consider using the following video as ‘fodder’ for your prayers.  I was sent this by a friend, Kevin, who warned me that before he saw it, he was scared it might seem “a little cheesy” but was actually spot on in its content.  Anyhow, Washington, DC is a decidedly sophisticated place, and anything with a high ‘cheese’ quotient normally receives a few rolled eyes and is pitched out as irrelevant.  So when I clicked on it, I was internally prepared to feel a little cynical and eye rolling myself.  But I was surprised.

When I watched it, I thought, “Oh my goodness–this guy totally knows what I’m after!  He has said it better than I could.”  So, I’m sending it on to you, thinking that it’s actually worth watching, worth discussing, and worth praying into.

Take the 6 or so minutes and watch the video.  Then I’d encourage you to pray in light of it.  I’ll put a few suggestions below, and let’s pray together and see what happens this week.

Many Blessings, Connally

What Women are Looking for in a Man

What are my honest thoughts are about men and power?  What symbolizes power to me?  What is real power?   Pray for the men you know to gain deeper relational power.

What might it feel like to be wanted/desired “without fear” by a man?  Pray for the men you know to be set free to desire without hesitancy.  Pray for the men you know to have the confidence that they have something to provide/offer a woman.

What does a ‘healthy’ man look like in my experience?  Pray for the men you know to be able to:

• connect,
• be present
• have good boundaries and be able to say ‘no,’
• be comfortable with their imperfections (and that of the women in their lives), and
• be able to grow up and be adult, able to treat women neither as mommies nor as children, but as equals.

Pray for the men you know to get healthy and show up as full people (even as, of course, we pray the same for ourselves as women).

Let’s take our energy around this topic and pour it back into our prayers before God!

Returning to Imagination

A reminder that tomorrow we will commit to praying and fasting for God to bring marriage to those of us who desire it, to strengthen both men and women in their personal and relational lives, and to bring change within our hearts, minds, and spirits.

I have always had a vivid imagination.  As a little girl it could be my best friend or my worst enemy.  The rich inner world I created had the capability of taking me to soothing places when real life was too hard to face, but it could also take me to scary places when I began to worry about things that made me afraid. And yet I have always seen my imagination as a gift God has given me that, when used well, can be an incredible force for beauty and good.

I’ve been considering imagination a lot lately, because I feel it has so much to do with whether we embody our lives in an active, engaged way, or a constricted, limited way.  Some of the work God is currently doing in my heart involves revealing areas of my life in which I hide my light under a bowl out of fear that if I show my true self and all I’m capable of, I’ll either fail or be rejected.  In this way imagination is a barrier, only letting me see what there is to be afraid of rather than the rich possibilities that come with taking risks.  From another angle, it can be easy to simply daydream about what I wish my life would look like rather than putting my dreams into action.  In this sense I see the same tendencies I had as a little girl:  Using imagination either as comforter or as a portal for fear.

But as God and I continued to think together, I realized a third option, one that also showed up in my life as a child:  Imagination as pure joy and creation.  I recalled the hours I spent as a girl drawing pictures, playing dress up, having conversations with my stuffed animals, and writing stories, with none of the judgment that so easily accompanies our attempts at these kinds of things as adults.  And I started to wonder if I could begin trying to re-capture the joy of pure imagination I had as a child and use it to grow and transform my life as an adult.  I started to wonder what that could do for all of us.

It’s so easy at this stage of life to get mired down in the day-to-day burden of the grind, thoughts of things we want but don’t have, the exhaustion that walks hand in hand with achieving that ever elusive notion of “being successful”.  And most of us being single, it is easy to feel disadvantaged as we work harder to find fulfillment in the face of not having the relationship we long for.  In light of it all, it is absolutely impossible for us to live the transformed, richly imaginative life God deeply desires for us without His help.

The way I see it is that we need God to be our imagination, to let His vision be our vision, to bring to light the possibilities within ourselves that we can’t begin to tap into on our own.  We need to ask him to remove the vices that hold us back and allow Him to let us bravely become what we didn’t know we could be, or have been told we can’t be.  Really, there are no limits beyond those God puts in place for our goodness and protection.  With that in mind, I invite all of you to let your imaginations run wild with God this week and see what fruit it might bring.

Blessings,

Kirsten

 

 

 

 

 

Love That Won’t Let Go

[Fasting and praying on Mondays for God to show up and surprise us by giving the gift of marriage to those who desire it, showing us where we need to change, and empowering men to live into their God-given purpose and identity.]

Exactly a year ago today, ten great girlfriends and I headed to the beach for a weekend of enjoying the sun, walking an empty boardwalk and sharing our journeys as single Christian women. After that wonderful weekend, I wrote this post: (Not) Afraid to Hope.

If I had to imagine what a year later would look like…well, it’s somehow simultaneously better and worse than I would have imagined.  A new job in a new industry.  Delayed (but soon!) graduation.  Wonderful new friendships.  Roommate’s impending engagement.  Dates but no dating.  Growth and failure co-existing in every corner of my life.  Blah blah blah.  So here I am.  Asking questions to which I know I can’t get answers.  Wondering if I missed the turn for “The Life of Really Amazing Nonstop Closeness with God and also World-Changing Adventures We will have Along the Way.”

I recently found the history of one of my favorite hymns: O Love that Will Not Let Me Go.  (Accounts vary a bit but the gist is the same.)  The author, George Matheson, didn’t have an easy path: early blindness, a career cut short, and a painful broken engagement.  He relied on his sister for help in pastoring a large church and, since she was getting married, he was faced with the prospect of life without her help as well.  He wrote the hymn lyrics in five minutes the evening before her wedding.

The thing that really caught my attention was the author’s honest-but-inspiring description of his own life:

an obstructed life, a circumscribed life…but a life of quenchless hopefulness, a life which has beaten persistently against the cage of circumstance, and which even at the time of abandoned work has said not ‘Good night’ but ‘Good morning.’

And right there I decided that quenchless hopefulness is what I want to be about too.  In this season, it’s about singleness.  But as seasons change, the question stays the same: do I trust Him?  Trust Him when things are bright and sunny at the beach?  Trust Him when clouds make everything gray and lifeless?  Trust Him when present realities do not seem to match His promises?  Matheson’s words provide a clear answer:

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

Praying with you this Monday that such God-anchored hope overwhelms our doubts, our anxieties, and our circumstances with its persistence and certainty!

In His Grace,

Amy

His Eyes are Everywhere

This is your reminder that we are fasting and praying during what would be Monday lunch for 1) marriages for those are who designed for it, and for 2) the courage to become, including relationally, the men and women God has called us to be.  And as you fast and pray, you might consider….

This weekend I got to co-lead a track at an event called the AFAM Congress on Discipleship.  My co-leader, Sherry (who is African American) & I (who am white) got to speak to a group of men and women, ranging from college age into their 60s, about prejudice, racism (and the freedom God has wrought in me) and identity in Christ.  And though my specific focus was on telling my story, as I looked around at this amazing group of people, I could not help noticing the disproportionate number of attractive predominantly African American, young single women there were.  

Then on the last evening of the gathering, I talked with an African American woman with whom I’ve been acquainted for 12 or so years.  She and her husband are a gorgeous, gifted, savvy couple.  They have 4 gorgeous, gifted, savvy daughters, all but one of whom are now in their 30s.  Only the youngest is married.  And as we spoke about marriage and this mother’s desire for her daughters, the topic inevitably moved towards statistics about the numbers of Christian men relative to women, in this case, within the African-American community.  This mother said she knew she had to put her hope in our God who knows the situation.

Meanwhile, returning home yesterday, I noticed that WordPress (who hosts this blog) has just started a new feature for site managers.  It’s in the “stats” section, and it lists hits on the blogsite by country.  I was shocked when I looked at it; in the last 30 days, there have been hits from 62 different countries.  62!  As you might expect, the US had the most, with Canada, the UK and Netherlands following.  But there were also surprising countries like Nigeria and Malawi, India and the United Arab Emirates.  Then there were countries  whose names I did not even recognize:  Seychelles and Vanuatu.  The list goes on.

Reflecting on the vast array of countries and people within those countries who follow fast.pray, reflecting on the experience of so many gorgeous, gifted, and savvy African-American women/believers, and reflecting on the realities of the typical hip, smart, believing women whose paths I repeatedly cross in this DC area, I was struck again by the heart-longing common to so many women:  for a good, fruitful and loving marriage.  And I realized:  none of us is so terribly unique or ultimately alone in our longing or our hopes.  The specific intensity of my desire, my particular set of issues, or my actual experiences with men, etc. might be different from yours.  But really, we are in this together, across cultures, around the world.  And the amazing thing about this is that our triune God transcends culture, revealing himself to people–including currently single women–around the world.

This week, no matter your cultural context, I hope that you can slow down, create space, and once again entrust your very normal heart to the God of the universe.  This is the same God who thousands of years ago revealed himself to Hagar, a husbandless woman of Middle Eastern extraction with no social status.  When he did, she was able to rejoice:   “I have now seen the One who sees me” and her life was changed.

You are seen by the One who sees you.  Receive his loving gaze.

Many Blessings, Connally

Looking Deeper & Finding Courage

Dear Fast Pray-ers,

A reminder:  we are praying for marriage for those who are designed for it and courage for men and women to become all of who God has created us to be.  And as we pray, perhaps consider….

For almost a year, I’ve been slowly going through a devotional about hope.  Most recently, I’ve liked its focus on “resurrection.”  Jesus was the first to be resurrected, and his new body is simply the firstfruits of what is to come for all who are in Him.  Fast forward to the reflection section at the end of this week’s devotional.  The author asks: “Which areas of your current life do you fear are dead?  Where do you need to see the power of the resurrection demonstrated?” (because though the real deal is still come, we get tastes of new life in this earthly one)?  What would your answers be?  My answers went something like this.  ”I need your power…

• to arouse more of a passion in me for You
• to generate intimacy in my life as the woman you created me to be, a woman building bridges between people & God, caring about community, & fanning hope in the resurrection that begins now and will one day be a done deal.”

Then I wrote, a little tentatively:

Who I aim to be right now.

“I believe that I am a woman shaped like this” (see immediately to the right, and please forgive the sketching; this is just straight from my notebook!):

I continued jotting notes into my prayer journal…

“And yet, Lord, I fear the hope might die (and sometimes I wonder if it should) that maybe I could be connected to a man, like this…”

Who I'd really like to be.

(see to the right, again):

“God,” I continued, “I do still desire this.  But this often feels impossible to me.  Please change my desire if this is not of you, not the best.  But in the meantime, I’m going to ask, listen, obey, work, and hope in this direction.”

Now I knew as I wrote this that this was not a new prayer, nor one unique to me.  It’s a ”single woman, 101″ kind of prayer, which I ‘m starting to feel too old to pray.  And yet as I prayed it, as I have done many times before, I found a strange sort of freedom run through me.  I recognized the growing freedom to own desires for which–when I survey the landscape, my history, and the choices available to me–I can’t see a path to realization.

So much of my life is built around what I think I see, what I can envision, and what, as a result, I can at least try to make happen.  But as Larry Crabb says:  ”the things we desire the most, we control the least.”   He’s right.

Strangely, though, the more I get a hold of the fact that the resurrection is real, that Jesus really did rise from the DEAD and that he one day will remake all things as they should be….the more I find courage to name the places where I long to see his resurrection power shine today.  He may or may not turn a dead-like area into life.  I know that.  But I can ask–and I encourage you to ASK–boldly.  For if he says no, it is okay.  The ultimate YES to our deepest desires is coming–it is just a matter of time; Jesus’ resurrection is the guarantee.

So this week, keep offering your desires to the Lord.  His power is at work.

Connally