Rewritten and Rebuilt

  I really dislike the word safe; so naturally that is exactly what God has been prompting me to accept about Him. I grew up in church; from before I can remember until I graduated high school, church was a stable presence in my life. But it wasn’t necessarily a safe place; I learned that very quickly. My first church memory is of kids chanting, “Heather doesn’t have a daddy.” It was quickly stopped but the imprint was there; I could be hurt at church, and more importantly by church people. Fast forward to becoming a pastor’s kid; church was definitely not safe! Lol, I mean that with some humor but there is truth. People telling you that your dad preaches too long or not long enough; mom doesn’t sing songs the way they like it etc. Word of advice, PK’s are probably some of the most perceptive and discerning kids, so be careful what is said around them, they pick up on the non-verbal cues like an English teacher looking for grammatical errors! We have to, it’s a learned sur...

   We have this song at my church that has a line which says, “It’s my joy to lose my life, and find it in Jesus Christ.” It’s a pretty line, quite poetic that conjures up romantic imagery of flinging my life away to prove my devotion to Jesus. Ok maybe it’s just me that thinks that dramatically. But it did get me to ask the question of how can it be joyful to lose my life? Think about it, it’s an antithesis really, I’m saying I’ll be happy to die for Jesus. Well I guess if I had to I would be able to be a martyr but it’s not really something I’m actively looking forward to! But is that what God is really asking of us, to get prepared to die?    “The Father has an intense love for me because I freely give my own life-to raise it up again. I surrender my own life, and no one has the power to take my life from me. I have the authority to lay it down and the power to take it back again. This is the destiny my Father has set before me” John 10:17-18 (TPT). Obviously,...

Sometimes I think we inadvertently guilt ourselves into loving God. We hear that He sent Jesus to die for us so we feel awful about how difficult that must have been. Don’t get me wrong, it was awful, but I think we look at it through the wrong lens at times. Instead of beating ourselves for Jesus’s sacrifice, what if we looked at how immense God’s love must be? Flip the idea process. It’s unhelpful to feel ashamed that we needed a sacrifice, that we were insufficient to provide payment; God already knew that from the very beginning and He loved us enough to willingly be payment. Ephesians 1:4, “And he chose us to be his very own, joining us to himself even before he laid the foundation of the universe! Because of his great love, he ordained us, that we would be seen as holy in his eyes with an unstained innocence.” God knew who we were before He ever created earth! He had already crafted us before He created Eden. Let that sink in for a second. Before the need for salvation was even ...

So then, surrender to God. Stand up to the devil and resist him and he will turn and run away from you.  James 4:7 (TPT)    When I was growing up I thought people got saved in order to stay out of hell. The rapture was possibly happening any day and I had to make sure I could recite every sin before I could receive salvation. It was nerve-wracking! I would spend a good portion of my night before I could sleep trying to remember every single sin, even the ones I had already prayed about earlier. What if the rapture happened while I was asleep and I had forgotten a single sin?! After a while it just became to overwhelming plus it seemed to really negate the idea that God was loving; it became a point of hypocrisy in my eyes. But I wrongly laid that hypocrisy on God and not on the people pushing these theories.    Anyone remember the Heaven’s Gates, Hell’s Flames plays or the halloween Hell Houses? Not that the plays themselves were  bad (well, the Hell...