Unforced Rhythms of Grace

The beginning of this year has been a roller coaster ride. Usually that has a negative connotation and I have to admit that I do find it exhausting. Yet if you think about it when you are riding a roller coaster you are held in securely. You go up and down and even upside down and you are held securely. In hindsight I have noticed a change in the way I handle things. I noticed that I tend to be less likely to carry shame (or at least more likely to notice that it is getting in my way and push through it.) I used to think that if something went wrong I was somehow responsible. If I was responsible I thought that I should try to handle things myself. Somehow without my knowing that is changing. I have also noticed that I tend to go to God with my emotions more quickly. Although I can’t claim that I leave all my troubles at the cross I can say that I find myself at the cross often. I used to not even understand what that meant. In some ways the language Christians use make things more dif...

James asked me what I thought about my question of the place of dreams. I have to admit that my response a week or so ago would likely have been in the neighborhood of ‘life’s a bitch and then you die.’ And although I don’t want to seem fickle or flighty I have to say I feel better today. I think that dreams are a fundamental part of the human experience. God has created us to dream and he would be cruel to allow us to dream without allowing us to realize any of those dreams. I know that I tend to focus on pain quite often but if I look for the truth I know that God has allowed me to realize some dreams. As I write this I think of the position I have at work right now. I applied for the same position when I first started at the company I work for. So it took seven years. I even forgot that I ever wanted the job. Yet unexpectedly I am suddenly doing it. I guess the struggle is that I need to know where my striving needs to end and I need to allow God to step in. One of my big...

Today my pastor spoke on the topic of hell. The last time he talked about that I found myself really upset. In fact I sent an email to him expressing my struggle with the topic of heaven (and hell.) I was upset because I needed to reconcile with the existence of heaven. My mom loved me a lot. She was strong and courageous. She raised me on her own on a waitress’ salary. I didn’t have everything I wanted but I always had food to eat and clothes on my back. We were very close. We argued a lot because we were very different. My mom had been through a lot of things I just didn’t understand as a teenager and young adult. I can hardly blame her for being bitter. She didn’t know how else to survive. My mom got cancer when I was 17. She had surgery and although it was scary at the time that seemed to be the end of it. We moved on and then around the time I turned 22 she told me that she had found a lump in her other breast. She died 11 months later. Those were the bleakest most horrible times...