Countless Drops in Countless Buckets

"What can you even do there?  How does you going even help?  It's like a drop in the bucket."

These words, angry and fearful, hurtled at me and struck me like an arrow in my side.  I had been planning my second trip to Haiti.  It had only been three months after the 2010 earthquake, and scenes of the unimaginable inundated every news station.  Here I was, facing my mother in the kitchen, embroiled in another fight about my trip.  My parents and brother were incredulous.  They regularly looked at me like I was insane or naive, and in their minds, my inability to listen to reason frustrated them to the point of angry arguments.  I sometimes dreaded going home, and the tension made me feel like something was slowly crushing my insides.

I watched the same news as they did, but I was not afraid for my safety; I was not afraid for my life.  I had already been to Haiti, to Mission of Hope, and knew the organization's commitment to taking the necessary precautions, but most importantly, I was confident in God's protection for me.  Still, I believed that the commandment to honor my parents was not to be brushed aside.  The conflicting thoughts of what I knew to be true were warring in my head.  I thought God was calling me to Haiti, but now I questioned it all.  I left the house that night, driving to escape, crying and praying, calling out to God in confusion and doubt.

"Is she right?"  I asked, afraid to know the answer.  "Is it useless for me to go?  Aren't I just a drop in the bucket?"

Then God answered.  He told me that this is how he chooses to work-- with drops in buckets.  He has filled countless buckets with countless drops since the beginning of time, and he has many more buckets to fill.

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He affirmed my desire to honor my parents but cautioned me about my parent-pleasing nature.  Turning the mirror upon my heart, he taught me that my will must be to first please my Heavenly Father even when that made others upset.  "If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters- yes, even their own life-such a person cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:26)

He also taught me something that shocked me: the enemy can use even the wonderful and godly people whom I love most in an attempt to stop me from fulfilling God's will.  He did not use fear of safety or death, but instead turned to my desire to please, and went after my pride in being the good and obedient daughter.

Jesus told me to follow him, and he would bring peace to the hearts of my family.  So I stepped forward, trusting that God could bring peace to the storm raging in my own home.  Sure enough, over the months leading up to my departure, Jesus told the storm to "Be still," and my parents knew his peace.

Four years later, I write to say that what God says about drops in buckets is true.
Since then, God has amazed me with what he did with that one little drop.  He has multiplied it and multiplied it and joined it with other little drops to fill many buckets.  So I leave you with this charge: Let not feelings of insignificance hinder God's work.  Do not withhold the drop even if you cannot see what good it would do.  It is not always for you to know.  Your Father has many more buckets to fill.

Blessed are the Lonely

I love Jesus.  I'm single.  I am surrounded by beautiful family and friends, and I am so grateful and blessed.  I trust fully that God has a plan for my life that is far better than anything I could imagine.  That does not mean that I never cry myself to sleep after I spend a day holding a friend's baby.  Or that I never believe that voice that tells me there must be something wrong with me.  It does not mean that I never feel so sick with loneliness that it's hard to move.  I'm still terribly human and broken.  In the past few years, God has taught me a lot about himself and me and love and being single.  Here's some of that story.

"Singleness is a blessing."
Three years ago, those words hurtled at me from a friend sitting on the other end of the couch in her cozy living room as her loving husband and two beautiful children were playing in another room of their apartment. I was in a very raw and painful place in which getting out of bed in the morning everyday felt like a victory. I bit my tongue as I thought, "Thanks but no thanks."

It's not that I didn't believe her, but I wasn't ready for truth.  Something about people telling you stuff like that makes you feel like they're pressing their dirty thumb into a lacerated heart as an attempt to stop you from bleeding to death.  If that's the best you got, please, let me bleed out in peace.

As time went on, I would cling more desperately to Christ, and he taught me what it means to worship "when there's pain in the offering," and it is the truest and most beautiful to worship God because He is God even when everything else feels like chaos and pain.

In the years of healing that followed, I would discover that indeed being single is a blessing.  (I also confessed to my friend that she was right and that I had wanted to punch her years before) Singleness, like many great blessings, is also a cross.  But perhaps most importantly of all, it is a calling.  No, I'm not talking about the lifelong calling of being single.  You see, the church and the world in general often views being single as a limbo for most and a calling for a very few.  It becomes a time of waiting or perhaps searching, but we rarely think of a period of short-term singleness as a CALLING.  Even if we do think that way, we don't act as if it is indeed a calling and a purpose to be used for the kingdom.  Sometimes we ONLY think of it as some type of time of preparation instead of a distinct and ordained time on its own.

It's difficult in my pride to admit that I desire with an ache in my heart and lump in my throat to be a wife and mother. To serve. To love.  To honor God.  I don't like admitting it because I never want to be that girl, you know, the needy one, the husband-hunter.  God is teaching me humility though, and teaching me to ask for prayer.  It is a good and godly desire that I need not be ashamed or afraid of, but I lay it before God everyday.  Still I pray, "Thy will be done," and above even those desires is the knowing that regardless of what my future brings, I choose Christ.

Recently, my church has been preaching on the topic "Crave."  That we should hunger for and crave Christ above all else.  Also, that God created things and relationships for us to enjoy and even crave for the purpose of praise, worship, and thanksgiving to the Creator.  Those things and people should not be worshipped themselves.

One Sunday, as the pastor asked us what we craved most, God whispered, "Blessed are the lonely."  In my loneliness, I crave Jesus.  I couldn't help but smile and praise him and thank him for my loneliness.  Crazy, right?  Being grateful for loneliness?  But he is teaching me to honor him in my loneliness, and in return, he amazes me with who he is and how much he loves me.  I seek Him, and I know that no person or thing could ever fill me as he does.  My cup runs over.

Thirsty

I want more Jesus.  I want to know him more and love him more and feel his presence more.  I want to hear him speak more clearly.  I want him to take me deeper than I would ever dare go on my own.  And I know that I could not understand fully what I might be asking for, and believe me it terrifies me sometimes, but I know that whatever God calls me to do, he will supply me with what I need.

Some lyrics I love say it well, "Flood water rain crash down, soak the ground, still I thirst for you."
Jesus, you satisfy me completely and yet I am forever thirsting for more of you.

Recently I told a friend whose heart beats like mine that I just want more Jesus, and she replied, "You are the exception."
"That's weird," I replied, "because the very nature of who Jesus is- we can never have enough."  How can we experience brief moments in his presence and not desire more of him with our entire being?  How can we taste a shadow of the beauty and joy and love of the kingdom and look upon this lost and broken world and not cry out from deep within our soul "thy kingdom come"?

"Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander, and my faith will be made stronger in the presence of my Savior."

Like a branch in the vine

In the past two months, God has been hammering home that I must abide in him.  I keep reading and re-reading John 15, when Jesus tells his disciples that he is the vine and they are the branches.  I have heard this many times, but I am marveling at how new and beautiful the words seem.

Several weeks ago I was down the beach playing volleyball.  One of the guys was sitting on the sidelines because he had recently got a tree tattoo on his inner forearm.  "Any significance?" I ask him, "Or do you just like trees?"  He said there was actually a lot of significance, mostly based in Matthew chapter 21, in which Jesus curses the fig tree that does not bear fruit.  His tattoo is a reminder not to be fruitless.  Amazing.

Then, this past Sunday, I heard in a sermon (on John 15) that "there is no such thing as a fruitless Christian."  Basically they are mutually exclusive, they contradict each other.  To be a Christian is to be a person who bears fruit for God's kingdom.  This is something that I have no trouble understanding- our role as workers, kingdom-builders, fruit-bearers.

But the message that God is making sure I understand is that I am not to be so concerned with the doing but instead to be concerned with the abiding.  The more I abide in him and in his love, the more I will bear fruit that will last for the kingdom.  He will work through me, but I need to abide.

I think of a branch and a vine.  How the fibers of that branch are connected to the vine and through them all nutrients and water travel, through the vine to its branches.  I want every fiber of my soul and body and mind to be in Christ- that I thirst daily for his presence and his word.  That I know that cut off from him, I will die, just as a branch would die cut off from the vine.

If you are like me, you look at this world and see a lot of pain, a lot of people who do not know God, and all of this means that there is so much work to be done.  But Christ says, apart from him we can do nothing.  We can do all things through him, but nothing apart from him.  We must abide in him.  We must conform our will to his.  We must be people of prayer.  We must seek him first.  We must rely on the Holy Spirit to lead us, speak through us, act through us, open our eyes and our ears to all that God is showing us and telling us.



Jesus, teach us to abide in you like a branch in a vine.  Use us for your kingdom.

Blow up the Boxes

As humans, we like boxes.  We like putting objects in boxes, containing them in boxes, organizing them in boxes, carrying them in boxes.  We like putting ideas in boxes too- categorizing, labeling, organizing our thoughts.  Our God is a god of order, and we, made in His image, enjoy ordering our world- physically and mentally.

I have found, however, that people oftentimes put God in a box.  We put limitations on the limitless.  Most people, whether they realize it or not, are uncomfortable with the idea of an infinite God.  We love a great and powerful and very very big God, but we are uneasy with his infinity.  We put him in a box, a big one, so that we can still make out the edges.  We love feeling the edges of things and to think that God has no edges, that he has no limits, that he has no end- well we cannot quite wrap our minds around it.  As much as I love theology and having theological discussions, I have found that many of them seem to draw a box around a God who can never be contained in the human mind.

When I was in college, my heart began burning for unity in the Church.  We have greatly divided the Body of Christ, and I believe our disunity is the greatest attack of Satan against Christianity.  When Jesus prayed at Gethsemane, he prayed for future believers- that we may be one as He and the Father are one.  Imagine that- imagine all believers having the same unity as exists in the Trinity!

Unfortunately, many people think that unity means we all look the same.  I have taken part in many different denominations and traditions within the Body, and I am blessed to have worshiped the same God in so many different ways and have met so many different people who I know are truly my brothers and sisters in Christ.  I cannot say to the ones who kneel in silent prayer that they are more or less necessary than the ones who dance with joy just as I cannot say to my eye that it is more or less needed than my mouth.  As I was seeing the Holy Spirit working in the many different parts of Christ's Body, God has slowly been blowing up my boxes.  He loves to blow up the box, to astound us, to fill us with wonder.  He not only seeks to exceed our expectations but seeks to exceed them one-hundred fold.

One of our greatest obstacles to unity is our box.  We build our box for God and hold so tightly to it.  When fellow believers do not fit our box, we cannot fully welcome them as brothers and sisters.  We are afraid to blow up the box in fear that everything we know might come crashing down.  I have met many people who cannot conceive that God's blessing is on a church so different from their own.  I have heard some evangelical Christians say that prophetic gifts and praying in tongues were only for the years following Pentecost in the first century.  I have heard Protestants from a variety of churches say that the bread and wine cannot possibly be the actual body and blood of Christ but must merely be a symbol.  I have had a Catholic friend be astounded that the summer I felt God's presence most strongly was the summer I could not attend one Catholic mass.  I have had friends insist that Christians who have passed from this life cannot possibly be interceding for us.

Whenever you put a limit on God, be sure to ask yourself if that is a truth revealed to you by the Spirit or if it is a rule constructed by your own human reasoning.

Before you reach for the edge of your box and reinforce its walls, ask God to show you His truth.  Know that God is more and can do more than you can even imagine, so do not try to limit Him.  Pray that your heart will be open to know him more deeply and pray that God will blow up your boxes.  Stop trying to feel safe and instead expect God to astound you.  God works in more ways and in more places than we can even fathom.  Be open to his infinity, and He will amaze you.  And above all, pray for unity in the Body of Christ and that God will create unity between your heart and the hearts of true believers very different from you.

Heavenly Father, blow up the boxes we build for you and continue to reveal Yourself to us even though our minds can never contain You.