November 2017 - Gina Brenna Butz

What weeds are choking out life in your heart?

Post author:Gina B
Post published:November 30, 2017
Post category:faith hope perspective

What Weeds are Choking Out Your Life? — Photo by Jason Long on Unsplash

When I was a young staff girl with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, I crushed hard on a boy who worked with Campus Crusade for Christ. When I dreamed of my future, it was hard not to imagine a scenario where he would wake up and realize he couldn’t live without me. And yes it was a future serving God in some amazing, world changing way, but also, with the boy. Always with the boy.

Until the day he called me and told me he liked someone else, and we were only ever going to be friends. Ok, I thought. Change of plans. I can handle this. Apparently I am not going to marry this guy. But it seemed like such a good idea, God! So now what?

Growing up in Minnesota, I remember swaths of dandelions. We rubbed them on our chins and noses. Watched them fly lazily through the air. I couldn’t understand why my dad hated them, or the admonition from my parents not to blow them.

But our dad knew. Dandelions are not flowers. They’re weeds, and those innocent pieces of fluff, when blown, propagate them. The more there are, the less room there is for other life.

The hope of that relationship was a dandelion.

To be honest, I was not entirely surprised to have the rug pulled out from under me. The book I was reading at the time was When God Interrupts:Finding New Life Through Unwanted Change. Uncomfortably convicting and timely. In it, there was a quote, “When we have focused too narrowly on the dream we thought the Savior would give us, then it is the dream that has become the savior.”

The dream that takes His place. Or the activity, person, job. Whatever takes our focus off of Him. Chokes out true life. Keeps us from being fully open to God’s direction in our lives. Makes you scribble your potential married name all over the margins of your journal. The thing that looks good, but is a weed in disguise. The hope we are banking on to make us feel secure, happy, comfortable.

We have to let Him weed us of the false flowers.

With the boy out of the picture, my dreams got bigger. Or rather, my willingness to let Him shape my dreams got more expansive. Letting go of something I thought would bring life actually made room for God’s plans for me.

False flowers show up in many forms. A relationship, or the hope of one. The perfect job, or chasing an image. The activities that consume us, but God never actually asked us to do them. Anything that causes us to focus on something we think will bring life, rather than on the Giver of life Himself, can crowd out the Spirit. What looks good might not be good, if it isn’t God’s call or plan.

So what do we need to weed from our hearts today?

(oh, and by the way? I did end up with that boy).

The Illusion of Having It All Together

Post author:Gina B
Post published:November 15, 2017
Post category:dependence on God faith identity trials

Early in our time overseas, I thought I had it all together. I was busy balancing raising two preschoolers, learning a second language, living overseas, and having a personal ministry, with joy. I looked like Super Mom, but it was an illusion. Then God, in His mercy, shattered it.

In the fall of 2004, we moved to Singapore. Both our kids stopped napping at the same time. I no longer had household help. The first time my husband traveled that fall, he returned to a house that looked like a tornado hit it.

“What did you do while I was gone?” he asked me.

“How about we decide right now that’s a question you don’t get to ask me,” I responded (not one of our finest marriage interactions).

I was never Super Mom; I was just an over-functioning, bone-weary mom (with a maid). Then I started homeschooling (Jesus, take the wheel). Soon after that, allergies took over my life, forcing me to spend most days in an itchy, sneezing fog. I couldn’t keep it together any more. Gina came undone.

What a blessing.

God led me to feel my desperate need for Him. I was confronted daily by my own inadequacy, lostness, pride, and self-sufficiency (God is so not impressed with that quality, unfortunately).

It was one of the hardest and most frustrating seasons of my life. Many times I sided with Rich Mullins when he sang, “I can’t see where you’re leading me, unless you’ve led me here, to where I’m lost enough to let myself be led.”

The illusion of having it all together was just that-an illusion.

But as my illusion fell away, to my surprise, others drew closer. They met me in my need. When I showed them my lack of togetherness, they were gracious. They gave me a new place to rest, and even (dare I hope?) seemed to love me more.

As my friend Holly Sheldon once said, “People don’t draw close to strength. They admire it, respect it, but don’t draw near to it.“

[ictt-tweet-inline]Having it all together may impress, but it doesn’t invite.[/ictt-tweet-inline] And we need to extend an invitation to others, an invitation in to what is true about us: we are messy, weak, needy humans. Not super human. Just human, like everyone else.

And when we extend the invitation to others to see that we are, in fact, undone, we give others the freedom to be undone as well. We can all step out from behind the curtain and own what is true. Together sigh a breath of relief that we can set the illusion aside.

Letting go of our illusion invites God in too. There, He can sort out our messy places. Be strength in our weakness. Fill our needs. Help us be human.

None of us really has it together. Oh, we can try to keep up that illusion. But why? There is freedom, love, and rest on the other side. Let yourself come undone.

The Secret to Persevering in the Arena

Post author:Gina B
Post published:November 9, 2017
Post category:courage dependence on God faith trials

Developing a Stronger Theology for the Arena — Photo by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash

Recently I had a week of awkward engagements, mostly in the form of writing emails telling people what they don’t want to hear, or pushing into uncomfortable topics with others.

Yuck. I thought, “Is there a hole I can go crawl into now?” But each of those interactions was necessary because of the tough arenas of life God has called me into for this season.

Brene Brown, in her book Rising Strong, says, “an arena is any moment when or place where we have risked showing up and being seen.”

Inspired by the Teddy Roosevelt 1910 speech (below), those arenas are places of blood, sweat, and tears, where we fight for what we believe in. We hope for victory, but know that failing is always a possibility.

This is a “venture into tough new arenas” year for me. They ask more of me than I want to give sometimes. These arenas call me to risk, lead, take stands, and put myself out there.

Can I be honest? Making a difference, affecting change, living bravely, all sounds great in theory. But it’s tiring.

A lot of the time, I want to quit. Stop writing. Step away from leading. Let things go rather than fight for a stance. Comfort is more appealing than potential failure, regardless of what I or others might gain.

It’s hard to put yourself out there when there’s a risk of falling on your face. So much more appealing to stay on those safe shores. And yet, we must keep fighting.

When I am tempted to step out of the arena, wipe the blood, sweat, and tears off my face, and throw in the towel, I feel a check in my spirit. A voice says,

“Stay. Stay and fight. You don’t need to stop. You just need more truth for this.”

We don’t need to quit.

We just need to get stronger. And where does that strength come from? It comes from the truth. Here’s the secret to not quitting when life is tough:

We need a stronger theology for the arena.

What does that look like? To begin with, it means more strength training out of the ring.

We train our minds with the truth; that this is for His glory, not our ours; that there is no failure so great to put us out of His reach; that every second in the ring is only possible because of His power, not our own; that a knockdown does not define our worth.

The more we are called to the arena, the more we need to feed our minds and hearts the truth about who He is and who we are. Then, when we are tempted to quit, instead we choose to double down on those truths.

Second, we need to train our hearts to hear our coach’s voice, even in the thick of the fight. He is with us, for us, in us. No one is more for us in the arena than He is.

We can’t always step out of the ring, so we must learn the moment by moment Yahweh breathing to slow our hearts and call us back to depend on His voice.

Staying in the arena means growing the humility to admit when we need a minute in the corner to catch our breath. We take time in the corner to get toweled off and refreshed by His Presence, His Spirit, His words. The longer we’re there, the harder it is, but there’s always a place of rest.

It’s hard to win without anyone in your corner. We need cheerleaders, people who know why we’re in there and believe in what we’re doing. Those are the people who will shout at us to get back up when we fall.

And we need to remember why we stepped into the arena in the first place. If this is God’s call, He gives us what we need to fight.

He never promised easy. Nor did He promise victory in every battle. But if we strengthen our theology, we can stay in it until it’s finished, no matter how many times we fall.

Finding Balance in the Seasons

Post author:Gina B
Post published:November 2, 2017
Post category:peace rest

Years ago, I had a delightful life coach and mentor by the name of Dayle. She encouraged me to make a personal development plan for that season of my life. Being a planner by nature, I was excited to show her what I thought was a well-balanced plan. She took one look at it and said, “Gina, I’m exhausted just looking at this.”

“But I don’t know what I could cut out. All these things are important,” I insisted.

Dayle affirmed that yes, everything on my plan was important. But then, she suggested that maybe not all of them were equally important at this moment. That began a journey of understanding what it looks like to find balance, not in our days, but in the seasons of our lives.

To read the rest of the story, join me at Redbud Writer’s Guild!

The hope of that relationship was a dandelion.

We have to let Him weed us of the false flowers.

The illusion of having it all together was just that-an illusion.

We need a stronger theology for the arena.

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To read the rest of the story, join me at Redbud Writer’s Guild!