A Deck Full of Blessings

Tuesday night is C-Group night.  On Tuesdays, I have anywhere from 8 – 15 high school youth that invade my home for fun and Bible study.  We are like a little family and I love it when they come over.  I feel like my basement gets blessed every week when there are a bunch of teenagers having God-conversation and God-moments downstairs.  Who needs Febreeze when you have the Spirit of the Living God blowing through to freshen things up!  So tonight I was running late from a meeting and when I got here, I found about 15 youth on my deck!  Note that my deck does not have stairs.  They grabbed the ladder underneath the deck and climbed on up.  It was hilarious.  What a nice surprise to come home to.  That and the fact that my deck indeed will still remain standing with 15 teenagers on it.  Fantastic.

Its been a couple of busy days since I’ve returned to work.  Lots of meetings and I have been at the church until 7:30 or 8 pm both nights.  Then tonight kids and phone calls until after 10 pm.  Thus is the life after vacation and right before the summer storm.  But it is all good.

I wanted to share this neat quote from the book Searching For God Knows What. 

Jesus would act and think like somebody who had their needs met by God, like somebody who had no regard for what we thought was important or not important.  He would find the things humanity finds valuable and worthless absurd.

I really liked this reminder of the strength and confidence of Christ in heavenly things rather than earthly things.  It sent me to thinking about how I would be different if I lived with the faith that my needs are met by God.  It made me ponder how my interests, time, and resources would be spent if I based value and worth on God’s criterion, not humanity’s.  Honestly, it was a pretty humbling and convicting examination.  I spend a huge amount of resources on things that God would find absurd I’m sure.  And I often am looking to earthly things to meet my needs which is no way to go if you desire peace and true joy.  It is like grasping sand to think that the things of this world will be loyal and sufficient to meet your needs.  They couldn’t if they wanted to but most of the time they don’t want to.  It is the vicious, self-destructive cycle of selfishness and it lures us in so easily. 

The confidence of Christ is attractive to each of us who are tired of being tossed like a wave in the ocean.  The confidence of Christ is the result of a confidence in God.  Romans 12:6a in the Message paraphrase says this: "So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s jut go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t."   You are being given permission to be true to the way God made you and to stop comparing yourself to those around you and to the definitions of worth and value as dictated by humanity.  This, among many other ways, is why Christ is a liberator for us. So once again – let us look to Christ as the model for how to live.  Let us seek to live with the assurance that God will meet our needs and let us pursue the things of worth that God has declared worthy pursuits.

Peace – Melissa