Pondering love...

What is your reaction to something not going your way?

I have taken every personality test in the book. I am a choleric melancholy. I am a high D per DISC. I am an 8 on the enneagram. Meyers-Briggs called me ESTJ in my youth but as I’ve matured, I have morphed into ENFP. This information should be an indicator to anyone that has the information, how I might react in any given situation.

I am a firm believer that God does not make mistakes. He is I AM, and He remains the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. The Bible confirms this in Hebrews 13:8: Jesus, the Anointed One, is always the same—yesterday, today, and forever. Time and again, I return to Isaiah 55:8-9: My intentions are not always yours, and I do not go about things as you do. My thoughts and My ways are above and beyond you just as heaven is far from your reach here on earth. I return because I rarely understand what the holy heck He is doing. I do not understand why He is doing it or when He is doing it and being who He created me to be … I like empirical evidence. My life would be so much easier if He said, “Tiffany go this way because XYZ” but that is not faith.

He longs to stretch us. Remold us. Morph us from the mess we’ve created for ourselves into the perfected person that was His initial and very intentional creation. Jeremiah 1:5a states: Before I even formed you in your mother’s womb, I knew all about you. Before you drew your first breath, I had already chosen you. Isaiah 49:15 reminds us that He never forgets us: Is it possible for a mother, however disappointed, however hurt, to forget her nursing child? Can she feel nothing for the baby she carried and birthed? Even if she could, I, God, will never forget you.

He calls us to love…Those who are loved by God, let His love continually pour from you to one another, because God is love. Everyone who loves is fathered by God and experiences an intimate knowledge of Him. The one who doesn’t love has yet to know God, for God is love. The light of God’s love shined within us when He sent his matchless Son into the world so that we might live through Him. This is love: He loved us long before we loved Him. It was His love, not ours. He proved it by sending his Son to be the pleasing sacrificial offering to take away our sins. Delightfully loved ones, if He loved us with such tremendous love, then “loving one another” should be our way of life! No one has ever gazed upon the fullness of God’s splendor. But if we love one another, God makes His permanent home in us, and we make our permanent home in Him, and His love is brought to its full expression in us. And He has given us His Spirit within us so that we can have the assurance that He lives in us and that we live in Him (1 John 4:7-13).

Those words say to me that I am to love you and that love is the evidence in me that I love Him and by doing so, it ushers the very presence of God into me, personally, by way of the Holy Spirit.

What happens when my human heart encounters a person who will not love me back? Honestly, it depends on the person and what I perceive as our level of intimacy. I have found that in my day to day life, I can love just about anyone for a short period of time. I can love wholeheartedly that woman cashing out my groceries for the ten minutes I am in line or the server at the restaurant, I am only spending at most maybe a couple of hours with but the person I have allowed in deeper, the person I thought might be a friend or an ally…well, now the act of love becomes a whole lot less about them and more about me. I have had to ask myself earnestly how much of Him do I want in me because the more I have of Him the more of me I must crucify in order to love more deeply and correctly.

We often read and should quite honestly commit to memory, 1 Corinthians 13:4-10:

Love is large and incredibly patient. Love is gentle and consistently kind to all. It refuses to be jealous when blessing comes to someone else. Love does not brag about one’s achievements nor inflate its own importance. Love does not traffic in shame and disrespect, nor selfishly seek its own honor. Love is not easily irritated or quick to take offense. Love joyfully celebrates honesty and finds no delight in what is wrong. Love is a safe place of shelter, for it never stops believing the best for others. Love never takes failure as defeat, for it never gives up. Love never stops loving. It extends beyond the gift of prophecy, which eventually fades away. It is more enduring than tongues, which will one day fall silent. Love remains long after words of knowledge are forgotten. Our present knowledge and our prophecies are but partial, but when love’s perfection arrives, the partial will fade away.

BUT what about verses 1-3 which say: If I were to speak with eloquence in earth’s many languages, and in the heavenly tongues of angels, yet I didn’t express myself with love, my words would be reduced to the hollow sound of nothing more than a clanging cymbal.  And if I were to have the gift of prophecy with a profound understanding of God’s hidden secrets, and if I possessed unending supernatural knowledge, and if I had the greatest gift of faith that could move mountains, but have never learned to love, then I am nothing. And if I were to be so generous as to give away everything, I owned to feed the poor, and to offer my body to be burned as a martyr, without the pure motive of love, I would gain nothing of value.

These verses hold the practical consequences of what life without love looks like. If your words are astute but contain no love, then they sound like bullshit. If you know everything, even things hidden to the rest of us and have faith enough to produce miracles, but no love then you are literally nothing. If you gave away everything you possess to those in need and died in sacrifice for your belief in God but did so without love, you did it all for nothing…you lost everything and gained nothing. Brings to mind Matthew 7:21: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the realm of heaven’s kingdom. It is only those who persist in doing the will of my heavenly Father.”

God’s will ALWAYS includes love because HE IS LOVE.

When I am hurt by someone unexpected, someone close; my personality and instincts take over and I push away, build a wall, isolate but God will only allow me to remain there for so long because His expectation is that I continue to become more like Him which means, I have to not be irritated or take offense or take failure as defeat (mine or yours) or take delight in what is wrong or give up. No, instead His expectation for me is that I never stop loving.

Now Paul’s words have a potent value: I have been crucified with the Anointed One—I am no longer alive—but the Anointed is living in me; and whatever life I have left in this failing body I live by the faithfulness of God’s Son, the One who loves me and gave His body on the cross for me (Galatians 2:20). Every time, love brings me back to the cross. It is the ultimate mark of love. Love will, at some point, hurt you: emotionally, maybe physically, spiritually too perhaps but the sacrifices we make for love are also what slays our fleshly, human selves and allows the transformation into our God perfected, heavenly selves.

Love is a choice…as John Mayer sings: Love is a verb. It ain’t a thing. It’s not something you own. Its not something you scream. When you show me love, I don’t need your words. Yeah, love ain’t a thing. Love is a verb. So you gotta show, show, show me that love is verb. You can say I love you all day long but if you never act upon that love with action, chances are the recipient will never believe you. Jesus’s love was in action. He should us first. Now, we need to show ours.

Lord, I pray that in me, Your love will be a verb, in action and that those you call me to love will never doubt Your love for them because of something I do wrong but rathe ALWAYS KNOW Your love for them because of something I do right. Thank you for your patience with me. In the name of Jesus, AMEN.

What does being loved look like?

We all want to be loved. Women especially long for someone to love them, hold them tight and never let them go but that is just romantic love and REAL love is so much more. So what does being loved really look like? The answer surprised me…

Recently, the congregants at my church read the extremely short book: One Word That Will Change Your Life by Jon Gordon, Dan Britton and Jimmy Page. The point of the book is that instead of New Year’s resolutions that none of us really keep, what about asking God to give you a word to direct you for 365 days that applies to what they refer to as the dimensions of our lives: spiritual, physical, mental, relational, emotional, and financial. I read the book.

I read it New Year’s Day. It suggests finding a quiet place.  I did not.  It suggests being alone.  I was not. Still, I read. God is a BIG God. My thought, if He wants to give me a word today, He can speak over the noise. He did. Immediately, I wanted Him to take it back.

About three years ago, I read Captivating by Stasi & John Eldridge. Took me for freaking ever. Truths, that were hard on my mind and heart caused me to take well over a month to read a book that normally would take a few days. In the book, they encourage you to find the meaning in your name as a segway to discovering God’s pet name for you. I walked the process out and when He told me what His name for me was…I told Him, emphatically, NO. But He very much enjoys beating me in the head with His love until I surrender to its truth.

My name was Beautiful. If you know me, you know that I am loud, crude, funny: maybe, chubby: definitely, loving, giving, stubborn: for sure but beautiful…not so much. My testimony and life for are chuck full of yucky stuff. Hard stuff. Ugly stuff.  Good stuff too! Don’t get me wrong. Redemption and healing abound. It’s just people don’t look at me and think: there’s Tiffany! Isn’t she beautiful? Or at least from my perspective they don’t. God spent 90 days knocking me over with a feather and hitting me hard over the head with a stick until finally, I accepted that inside I was beautiful. Did I mention I was stubborn?

So, I am laying in my bed asking for my word and I am like, hey God? Need that word, buddy.  What about it? And don’t say beautiful! He says clearly…what do you always feel and without hesitation, I say alone. He said, Beautiful, you are the opposite of that and THAT is YOUR word. Smart ass me says, I don’t want “chosen” as a word, man.  He says to me that’s great because chosen isn’t your word. Look up alone in the thesaurus. First word that jumps off the page is LOVED. I am like, oh hell no! And He is like, oh heavens yes! And once again, I cried.

I won’t go into all the details here of why I fail to feel loved but let’s agree that we as humans like to collect and save all the bad things people who are supposed to love us speak into and over us. While I know a few people who love me; I don’t live in a state of feeling loved. Duh, alone was the first word to my mind, right? We hold tighter to the lies of the roaming lion seeking to destroy us than we do to the words of the very ONE who CREATED us…and in His own image, no less.

With a SIGH and a whatever God which included a strong eye roll, I grabbed my pen and notebook and started to journal, steering away from anything strictly romantic.

LOVED:

Opposite of alone

Liked very much

To find pleasure in

Desired

Adored

Precious (please tell me you hear Gollum too?)

Held dear

Admired

Treasured

Strong affection for another rising out of kinship or a personal tie

Affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests

Warm attachment

Devotion

Tenderness

Unselfish, loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another

All that and this verse: You love me so much and you placed your greatness upon me. You rescued me from the deepest darkness and you have delivered me from certain death (Psalm 86:13).

Though much of that tugged at my heart, I was still calling bullshit. So, I spoke to a friend who is a counselor and asked what does being loved look like? This man used to be a minister and he laughed, saying not what you might think because as we become mature in our faith, we are called to be more and more like Christ. Christ, who was bruised, scorned, beaten, rejected and crucified for LOVE. And yet, we expect somehow that our transformations into becoming more like Him means, we will escape the torture that turned Him from man back into God’s perfection, His son.

I am sitting stunned, mouth almost agape…already knowing the complete truth and impact of his statement having already come myself to a deeper understanding of God’s Love over the past 5-7 years. By His stripes we are healed. By our stripes, another behind us is healed. Once again, I am overwhelmed by both the beauty of God’s construct and the absolute absurdity of it. His ways are not our ways and they are higher (Isaiah 55:8). One of these days, I suspect that will somehow, really, FINALLY sink into the depth of my bones; so I don’t have to keep being reminded.

I am beautiful. I am loved. It doesn’t matter what my eyes see. It does not matter what my heart feels. It doesn’t matter my circumstances. It only matters what He says I am.  What the I AM says I am is the ONLY truth that is ALWAYS true. I am human and eventually, will disappoint you, fail you, hurt you BUT HE is GOD and He NEVER leaves you alone…only LOVED.

His ways are higher…

I am walking in high water. Have been for quite a while now. I’ve given up on the ideas of what I thought my life would be, what it would look like. I watched as decisions I thought I made for the “best” turned to rubble. I laid upon the altar my expectation of ever being a wife again. I’ve walked in places I never thought I would, especially considering I was never one of those girls who craved being a mother. A few weeks ago, I would have told you there was nothing left to make me doubt God, but then…

My world gets turned upside down once again by the news that my son is becoming a father. I have total faith in my son’s ability to be a loving father; that’s not it at all but you see God made me a promise back when I was becoming a single parent. He promised me that if I did not seek any man but Him to provide for me and my children until they were raised, he would break off all the generational curses upon the two of them both Kruse and Pierce. They would get a fresh start free from the chains that bind us to the mistakes of our families. My son expecting a child at 21 years old does not feel like the breaking of a pattern but another brick in the wall as both my mother and I were expecting at 21.

Deuteronomy 7:9 tell us: I want you to know that the Eternal your God is the only true God. He’s the faithful God who keeps His covenants and shows loyal love for a thousand generations to those who in return love Him and keep His commands.

I know in my head that God always keeps His word, but this feels broken.

I reached out to a close friend that encourages me with the whole His ways are higher rigmarole but what the mind knows, and the heart feels sometimes are at odds with each other…which on a side point is why God warns us in Provers 4:23 to guard your heart more than anything else because the source of your life flows from it. Furthermore, Proverbs 23:7 tells us as we think in our hearts, so are we.

The seeds of rebellion are found in the soul. I think (mind), I want (will), I feel (emotions and/or heart). When Jesus speaks to us about how we must die so that he might live, he's speaking to us about crucifying our souls so that he can control our thoughts, our hearts and our will...in this way, he can open us up to everything he has for us: his thoughts, his heart and his will which are higher than ours. When God uses me to bless other, it's always at my inconvenience.  God's calling doesn't suit man's convenience. – Derek Prince

As I read this, I think to myself…I couldn’t have been more inconvenienced over the past seventeen years, if I’d tried but I do not want the opportunity for the seeds of rebellion to have any soil to take root in my life, let alone good soil. I admit, I am struggling. I am feeling unloved, forgotten and lost. I have walked through so much and though He has never done a thing my way, He has never failed me. I KNOW that why I rarely understand in the moment what the heck He is doing, He has never left me alone. I can reason all of this in my mind but my heart struggles. Things come up in my life that add to the confusion and the pain enough so that I wonder if I had misheard God all together. I began to doubt where I had been walking. Had all of this been a mistake?

My mind was reeling with what if scenarios until the voice of my loving, kind Pastor broke through all the noise in my head and heart and said what if you aren’t looking at all of this correctly? I urged him to go on … he said: “Tiffany, only God can give life. Only God is the author of life and it is NEVER a curse. Would your mother if asked say that you’ve been a curse upon her life?”. I said no, of course not I am her favorite and laughed (don’t get pissy; my mom loves all her girls uniquely and gives according to their needs; this statement was simply to lighten my own mood by making him laugh). Warren went on: “I know I don’t have to ask you whether you believe your own daughter to have been a curse upon your life, I have seen you love her; so why then is this a curse upon your son’s? Has he not been taught by the strong women that have come before him the direct opposite?”. Right there, He could have knocked me over with a feather. Part of me wanted to reject the truth of his words but the majority wanted it to sink into the marrow of my bones and let it heal those last bits of me that have somehow been held back from the truth. I wanted to accept with finality, God trading my ashes for His beauty.

This isn’t just a learned / head knowledge of scripture, particularly Romans 8:28: so, we are convinced that every detail of our lives is continually woven together to fit into God’s perfect plan of bringing good into our lives, for we are his lovers who have been called to fulfill his designed purpose. Instead it is looking at my mistake of getting pregnant out of wedlock by an unsaved addict and KNOWING to the very depth of my soul the plan to wreck my life was taken away from satan and instead just like the death of Jesus upon the cross, was used by God to defeat him…my ashes for His beauty.

Warren then spoke words over the life on my son and his child, words that soothes my hurting heart, “this is where it ends, Tiffany. It’s not your daughter. It is your son and he is not like his father. He will love his child unconditionally. He will always be available and take care of what is his. It is who God created him to be.” I know those words are true. I know my son’s heart. His mind not so much. He surprises me from time to time, but his heart has been that of protector since before the time his father walked out the door of our home. God brought a lion to guard him, to guard his heart (read Give Peace a Chance, if you don’t get the reference). Honestly, I understand protector is who God created him to be and though not the way I imagined it, he is taking a giant step into becoming God’s best version of himself.

My Uncle Derald urged my cousins and I to never stop learning. He told me once that the more he learned, the more he understood he really knew nothing because God’s Word is alive and ever changing according to our needs; the message beneath the words on the page are just for you for just this time.

My thoughts and My ways are above and beyond you, just as heaven is far from your reach here on earth (Isaiah 55:9). He thought what my family and I need most right now, is a baby and because I am inclined to trust Him, I think I will agree. I hope you will all join me in praying for my son, his soon to be bride and their little one on the way…that in the name of Jesus, God will bring with this sweet baby, a healing for both of themselves and their families that will allow for all of us, not just the daddy to become exactly who God has created us to be and that as this child grows, he/she will be healthy and raised always in the love and admonition of the Lord. Thank you, Father, Son and Spirit for your patience with me. Amen.