Commune or Communicate?

If you've been in church for any length of time you've heard of communion. Maybe it brings to mind thoughts of tearing off bread and dipping it into a glass of wine, or images of individual cups of grape juice and small crackers. Perhaps you think of an ornate ceremony or a humble offering. Coming to the throne of the Lord in repentance, knowing you don't deserve the forgiveness He offers or approaching in triumph, grateful that He allows you to share in His victory.

Whatever comes to your mind communion is a time when we, as believers, approach the Lord to ask for forgiveness, declare His victory, and reestablish our relationship with Him.

One definition of the word commune is "to communicate intimately".

The definition of communicate is "to convey knowledge of or information about".

Do you see the difference? To commune is to communicate intimately. Just think about that word for a moment, intimately. It's very different then just conveying knowledge and information isn't it? It's the difference between going to God and saying, "Hey, so you know, I'm a sinner" (He already knows that!) and saying, "Lord, I'm a sinner". The first is to communicate information, the second is to acknowledge His place in your life, and your place under His authority once again.

So let's move past communion for a moment and talk about how we approach the Lord on a daily basis.

Do we come to Him with our problems to communicate with him? Telling him about our day and what we need? Or do we come to Him to commune with Him? Sharing about our life and dwelling in His presence?

Strength Will Rise

I'm reading this book called "Dangerous Calling" by Paul David Tripp and he talks about waiting. That's not a word I like to hear very much. 'Wait.' Especially when I hear it from God.
You know there's a song we sing in church a lot. It's by Lincoln Brewster and it's called "Everlasting God". The chorus says:

"Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord
Wait upon the Lord, we will wait upon the Lord
Strength will rise as we wait up on the Lord
Wait upon the Lord, we will wait upon the Lord

Our God, You reign forever
Our hope, our strong deliverer"

Now I love this song. And I love the verse it comes from.
Isaiah 40:31
"but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint."

But how often do I really take this verse to heart?

In the book Paul David Tripp gives examples of Abraham, and how as he waited his strength and faith in the Lord grew. But mine doesn't. The longer God tells me to wait, the more I tend to doubt. Instead of soaring on wings like eagles I plummet towards the ground, instead of running, I struggle to walk and instead of not growing faint I just want to lay down and go to sleep.

So what do we do?

Will the answer's right in front of us and always has been. Those who hope in the Lord. Our hope needs to be in the Lord, not in our circumstances or even the people around us but in the Lord.

Easier said then done but it also may be one of the most important lessons we can ever learn.

So There's This Country Song

I have a habit of starting conversations with my parents by saying "So there's this country song..." and they know that whatever comes next is because something we've been talking about or something I thought of reminds me of a song that I know and they just start laughing.

Well there's this country song by Rodney Atkins called "Watching You" and it talks about the things that this little boy does because he's seen or heard his dad do/say them.

It's amazing the things that kids do or say after watching us. My sister-in-law called me the other day when the 5 year old was having a tantrum and the 2 year old said "Sister, you need to go to bed!" because she knows that when they're throwing temper tantrums they get sent to bed until they calm down.

Or today when a different almost five year old says to me "Miss Katt, your eyes look tired." And I can practically hear her mom telling her that her eyes look tired so she needs to go to bed. Apparently Ellie thought it was my bed time!

The point is that sometimes we need to be very aware of what little eyes are watching and what little ears are listening so that we know what little mouths will repeat.

Well it's not a perfect theory though because trust me, kids come up with some hilarious things to say!

Another conversation from today with a 7 year old went something like this.

Zeke: Miss Katt I don't think you should get married.
Me: Why's that Zeke.
Zeke: Because I don't think that kissing part is very good. What if he has stinky breath?

Hahaha so a lot of the things they come up with are totally original but hopefully you don't have to be nearly as concerned about what they're going to come up with when you're not paying attention to what they might be hearing.

Forest Through the Trees

It's been a rough week. Not for me, for me it's been a pretty normal week of work, church, writing and so on and so forth. Others though, have had a much harder time. This week I've had several people from different cities come to me with very different prayer requests. Some of them have been smaller things in the grand scheme of life, a presentation or adjusting to a new school or church, others have the potential to be life altering. All of them have one thing in common. God cares about these things.

But when you feel like you're drowning and you can't keep your head above water, when you're at the end of your rope and you don't think you can hang on any longer, when you're too exhausted and beat down to take another step you start to wonder... Where is God?

That's the thing though, no matter what's going in your life God hasn't abandoned you, He's still there, He hasn't gone anywhere. But how do you know? I mean if He's still with you shouldn't you be able to see Him or hear Him, something?

How many times have you heard the phrase, "You can't see the forest through the trees?" That's how life sometimes is. Things get so dark that you can't see Jesus standing right next to, even holding you as you're going through hard times.

So what do you do?

You go on faith, there's nothing else you can do. You have to trust that the Bible is true, the promises in it are true and if you're a believer God has never left you and He's never going to.

I don't know what you're going through this week but please, if you're standing in the dark and you can't seem to find God, don't assume He's not there. Call out to Him, if you feel like He's not listening ask someone else to pray with you or for you.

God loves you, he hasn't abandoned you in that dark forest, He's still there with you, even when you can't see Him.

Laugh About It

In life things won't always go as planned, things are going to get tough and disasters are going to happen. The best thing that you can do isn't to get upset or angry, or even quiet and intense while you figure out a new strategy. It's to learn to laugh about it. (Warning: If the disaster comes in the form of someone telling you about their problems you probably don't want to laugh at them. It's generally considered a bad idea.)

This week I went to cook dinner for my family and there was a crock pot on the back of the stove. Looking at it I wondered if it were too close to the burner that I needed to use but after trying to move it back discovered that it wasn't going to move any further. Without thinking I pulled the pan forward, inadvertently sending the heat out the back, towards the controls on the crock pot. Pretty soon I smelled something weird and went to check... there is now some missing plastic on the bottom of the control panel of the crock pot. Oops!
Thankfully instead of freaking out or getting upset I just started laughing. "Cooking casualty!" I labeled it before finishing dinner and moving on.

Well I moved on for two days until Thursday came along and once again I was cooking dinner when I decided to make some gravy. I decided to make the gravy a different way so I got out the plastic container, poured the juice straight from the oven into it and added some flower before putting on the lid. Little did I know that this container is designed for the lid not to seal tight when you put hot liquids inside because it will melt the container and burn you. Or, if you're like me, you put the lid on, put one finger on top of it and start to shake it to mix up the gravy when the lid comes off and ridiculously hot liquid goes everywhere! (Including my hand! Which is healing very well by the way.)
Thankfully God kept me calm once again and I was able to laugh about it instead of getting upset. With some help from my family, dinner was finished, my hand was doctored and the second cooking casualty of the week was laughed over as as we sat down to eat.

So hopefully you're catastrophes this week have been a little less destructive and painful then mine but just remember whatever comes your way, before you get upset, take a step back and learn to laugh about it instead.

Drama, Drama, Drama

I always hear people complain about how much drama is created by Facebook, blogs, email, and the media. It's constant, someone posts something on Facebook that offends someone else and soon your friends are split in half because everyone takes sides, it's not a pretty sight. So I created a solution...

If you want to cut drama completely out of your life you....

Delete your Facebook account, take down your blog, cancel your email, turn off your phone, throw out the T.V., unhook the landline, shut down internet access and move to a cabin in the woods to grow your own food and never speak to anyone again.

Sounds like a great plan right? Very peaceful, lots of time to communicate with the Lord, enjoy nature and have no one tell you what to do.

Here's the problem, in three days I'd be talking to myself, within the first week I'd be arguing with myself and before the end of the month I'd be creating my own drama with myself!

"Ow I stubbed my toe!"
"Well what'd you do that for?"
"Because it sounded like fun!"
"Well was it?"
"No, it hurt!"
"Then maybe you shouldn't do it anymore."
"Well I didn't try to do it in the first place!"
"Well you don't have to get mad at me about it!"
"Then stop yelling at me!"
"But we're the same person, so aren't we really yelling at ourself?"
"I don't like this anymore, I'm moving back to town."

The fact is that drama comes from people, not the internet or television, you can choose to have people in your life that are less dramatic but as long as you're still talking to people (which by the way God insists that you love people as He does so good luck getting out of that!) there's going to be drama. It's just the way of the world.

All that to say, you don't have to have Facebook or email or anything else, sometimes the people on there do create more drama but it won't stop just because you get rid of those things.

Since I Haven't Mentioned It...

Since I haven't mentioned it in a while let's talk about my writing career. I don't know if you can call it a career or not but it's heading that direction, and it's the reason I started this blog oh so long ago. Any more I don't post about it very often because there are so many other things in my life that I like to share with all of you but for those of you who are curious here's an update.

As some of you know I wrote a series of five books (not published yet) titled "The Tisdale Chronicles". Well a few years ago through some very useful but not so fun critiques and conversation I learned there were some serious flaws in the manuscripts in the way of timeline issues and character development problems, parts that dragged and parts that just got skipped over. So began the very long, dreaded journey of re-writes. 

After a hard fought battle the first manuscript has been completed and is now in the editing stages. YAY!!!!!!

However after that mountaintop victory came a much steeper valley as I dug into the second manuscript. At first I started writing, stopped, realized the whole thing was a mess and had to scrap 70 some pages. Ahhhhhh! So then began the process of creating a new plot and timeline withing the existing story structure. Phew! That wasn't easy! Then I went back to writing, stopped again and realized I'd lost sight of the characters motivations. Throw in some procrastination, (which the holidays didn't help) and I finally got that part done. Now it's back to the timeline and then off to write another day.

So there's the update for those of you who are interested. 

As always friends, thanks for your encouragement and support, I can't wait till I get to announce that the books are finally available. We're getting closer every day!