Yearly Archives: 2019

I’m no stranger to packing up and moving homes, so you’d think I would be pretty good at it by now.

Unfortunately, I have a strong streak of impatience and a high commitment to efficiency, so I tend to pack carelessly. This is particularly true in the kitchen because so much is fragile and requires extra work.

I remember packing a box of glasses once to give away. I debated the merits of squeezing them all into one box over padding them well enough that they wouldn’t break in transit (especially because I couldn’t find another box and was too lazy to keep looking. Also, I value efficiency over accuracy).

This is how we can fill our schedules.

When I look at my calendar and see wide open spaces, my instinct is to fill them.

It’s like Pac-Man, trying to level up by gobbling empty slots.

The problem is when I add something new, I don’t always think about the padding it needs to not bump up against other activities.

Here’s an example: Someone asked me once to take on a role that on paper is a 3-hour activity once a month. I thought, “That’s totally doable!” (this is generally my reaction to any prospect).

When I talked it over with a wise friend, though, he pointed out that it wasn’t just 3 hours. Taking on that time meant 6-8 new relationships with people I want to invest in knowing well.

It meant praying for them, probably meeting individually, social activities together, being available to them. When I thought about the amount of space it would really take in my box, I knew it wasn’t going to fit.

It’s not just about the activities we do, but all the bubble wrap time that will go into making that activity succeed. It includes all the prayer, preparation, thinking, and meeting that might surround it.

Most importantly, we have to consider the relational and emotional energy expended on top of the actual time invested. I don’t know about you, but I don’t often have an excess of that kind of energy laying around.

I’ve experienced the side effects of over packing. Things break.

I break.

Bubble Wrapping Our Lives

So I’m trying these days to bubble wrap my activities. Leave space around them to actually think about them.

Space to be fully present in what I choose, to let them bleed a bit outside the lines of the time I allotted for them.

It’s not easy. My ego gets in the way, wanting to prove myself through the busyness of my calendar.

My heart gets in the way too-I want to help. I love saying yes. But if it’s going to cause me to overwork, it’s not my best yes. It’s not the best yes for anyone.

So we need helping packing. Sometimes we need to run it by a friend, as I mentioned earlier, someone with no skin in the game, who can call us out when our hearts and egos run faster than our souls.

And of course, we need God. He knows how fragile we are; He knows He made us from dust. His wisdom will guide us if we’re willing to listen as we pack.

Related posts:

Learning to Respect My Limits

Choosing Slow

Finding Balance in the Seasons

I’m going to come straight to the point: we don’t talk about sin anymore.

We talk about brokenness and being messy, which is good. We talk about crushed Cheerios in our minivans or how we just can’t get to the gym. Maybe even about the truth of our hard days, and where we feel we don’t measure up. All good.

And in light of all that, we talk a lot about God’s love for us, a most necessary shift from the past. There is nothing we can do to make Him love us less; we know that now, right? It’s important to know that God sees into our brokenness and mess and does not turn away. Again, all good.

Authenticity is great. Being grounded in God’s love is necessary. But what happens when we divorce it from sin? When we don’t look past our crushed Cheerios and failed gym membership to see the ways we rebel against God Himself?

What Happens When We Don’t Talk About Sin

Well, if that happens, then we can go to church and just feel good about ourselves.

We go sing about how much God loves us and it fills us up to live another week. We sing what I call “Law 1” songs.

If you aren’t familiar, the gospel tract we often use in Cru ministry called “Knowing God Personally” used to be called “The Four Spiritual Laws.” Law 1 is, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”

Good news, but not if we forget law 2, “Man is sinful and separated from God.”

I know. Who wants to talk about that?

I do. Because what does it mean to us that God loves us if we aren’t conscious of the fact that we don’t deserve that love? If we don’t face the hard truth that apart from the death of Christ, I cannot stand in the presence of God?

Why We Need to Talk About Sin

When our “brokenness” and “mess” fails to encompass the reality of sin, we miss something of God.

When it’s only about bringing our wounds and not our moral failure to the surface, we don’t experience the full extent of what God has done for us.

Jesus didn’t die for our crushed Cheerios or our failure to work out. He died for the ways we choose to walk away from God, over and over, day after day.

Growing up, I was not acutely aware of my sin. I was a good kid. The kind other parents probably wished they had.

So when I was presented with the idea that I was a sinner in need of grace, I accepted it at a head level. I couldn’t really see much God was saving me from.

But as I grew, I began to be confronted by the depths of how I do try to live independently of God. I saw the deep desire in my heart to be my own savior, ruler of my own kingdom.

It was terrifying to me. I thought surely God would realize He’d made a mistake choosing me as a child.

But every time I’ve seen a new depth of my sin, it calls me to see deeper grace. And that’s why we need to talk about sin.

A dear friend of mine once said, “I am sobered by the depth of my depravity, and I’m thrilled by the depth of my redemption.” The magnificence of grace always matches the magnitude of our sin.

This is why we need to talk about sin: so that while we are sobered by how far we stray from God, we can simultaneously be overwhelmed by all that God has done to bring us back.

related posts:

Why Do We Keep Ourselves From Grace?

Permission to Make Mistakes

In my early 20s, God began to unveil lies I believed about myself-mostly tying my performance to my worth. Once I saw them (and thank God that I did) I quickly went to work trying to overcome those lies. Over time, He has helped loosen the hold they had over me.

No sooner had I started to see growth, I started to claim that I “used to” struggle with performance. You know, in the past, when I didn’t know any better. But now-ta da! All better.

But these days, I hesitate. Because even though God continues to untangle me from those lies, I am humbled by how easily I crane my neck to listen to their voices. How easily I find myself dipping my toes in their invitations to me.

So I don’t like to say that “I used to” struggle with those things anymore.

Instead, I think of myself as a recovering alcoholic in those places. I’m learning to use the language of recovery. “Hi, I’m Gina, and I’m addicted to performance.” (“Hi Gina.”)

Have I experienced freedom in these things? Absolutely. Do they hold me the way they once did? Not at all. But that is not because of my power but His. They are a constant reminder of how I will, on my own, try to save myself.

If I can be blunt, to say, “I used to struggle with that” stems from pride, not humility. It is the language of self-sufficiency, not recovery.

The minute we say, “I don’t do that anymore” we close ourselves to God’s Spirit revealing greater depths of our idolatry, and we cut ourselves off from needing Him to help us in those areas.

The things we struggle with the most will always be our, “there but for the grace of God go I” temptations. The first step is admitting we have a problem.

Living Like We’re in Recovery

And, like addicts, we must remind ourselves that we are powerless on our own to overcome our tendencies. It is only God who can restore. We must take a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves, acknowledging our addictions and admitting them to God.

It’s not a journey any of us can take on our own. As much as it would be nice to hide in the shadows while we sober up, we are called to do this in community. We can only go so far on our own. As we confess our addictions to others, we find we are not alone. We gather strength and courage for the journey.

Being in recovery means staying in a position of dependence, acknowledging our weakness, leaning on the strength of others. It means accepting that we may always walk with a limp in some areas of our lives.

So what is your addiction, if I might be so bold as to ask? How does it still hold you? As we bring these to Jesus, we invite Him to continue to do the deep and necessary work in us to make us whole.

We’re all in recovery.

related posts:

Leaving Our Kingdoms Behind

The Illusion of Having It All Together

God’s Long Term Growth Project

“I know you’re busy, but . . .”

If I had a dollar for every time someone prefaced an invitation to me with this phrase, I could quit my job and live a life of leisure.

Reality? Sometimes when someone says that to me, it’s simply not true. After hitting a wall last year, I have fought hard to eliminate hurry from my life. Is it full? Yes. Is it too full? Thankfully, most of the time, no.

But here’s the thing: when someone says that, it triggers something in me. It probably triggers something in all of us. Something that doesn’t feed anything good.

That word infers value. It implies that we’re in demand. We like to be in demand, don’t we? While we might tire of our overscheduled lives, there’s a reason we keep doing it.

That word reinforces our tendency to overschedule, overwork, overdo. It doesn’t invite us to freedom. In fact, it subtly tells us, “You should be busy. That’s how we do it around here.”

It also diminishes the speaker. “I’m probably not as important as everything you have going on.” There’s an unconscious out we give people in such a statement that says, “Your busy life can trump me.”

That word limits us. If I am busy when someone makes that statement, they’ve just justified me overdoing it. If I’m not, they’ve implied I should be. There’s no freedom to rest, no invitation to slow down.

Busyness is a cultural expectation. How often do you hear someone say, in response to an inquiry about how they’re doing, “Yeah, you know, we’re really busy!”

We say it with a smile and a shrug, like, “What can we do?”As though it’s something that happened to us, rather than something we’ve chosen. We say we don’t like it, but we continue to agree to it.

And it’s killing us.

How Busy Hurts Us

Busy undermines our ability to live well. All throughout scripture, God calls us to be people of rest, people who love others well, people who live in peace and joy. How do we do that when we barely have space to breathe?

Busy keeps us isolated, ironically. While we might encounter people in all our activities, rarely are there places where we sit and live slowly, deeply, intentionally with others. It’s sports practice or business dinners, church functions or birthday parties. Fun? Usually. Restful? Rarely.

The word itself, when we speak it over one another, keeps our eyes fixed on the wrong things. It tells us to value that which the world values. It reinforces that our worth comes from our productivity. We fear slowing down means we’ll miss out. It keeps us on an exhausting ride.

So What Should We Do?

I realize there will always be seasons of busyness for each of us. What we must guard against is them becoming continuous seasons. [ictt-tweet-inline]When a season of busyness simply leads to another season of busyness, then what you have is not seasons: it’s a climate.[/ictt-tweet-inline]

We lived in Singapore for 5 years. It’s one degree off the equator. When the daytime temp doesn’t shift more than about 5 degrees the whole year around, you lose a sense of time. You become acclimatized. It wasn’t until people came to visit us and complained of the heat and humidity that we were reminded of the climate in which we lived.

When we keep using this word busy in our vocabulary, we become acclimatized. I wonder if we even know what it feels like to not be so driven.

[ictt-tweet-inline]We must fight to keep “busy” from defining our lives.[/ictt-tweet-inline] It is a choice to be busy. And it’s a hard choice not to be.

To not embrace it means to say no, often to good things. We have to face FOMO. Maybe we miss out on something important.

Or maybe we realize it wasn’t as important as we thought.

It can begin with us eliminating this word from our vocabulary. Certainly, let’s stop speaking it over one another. You don’t know I’m busy. I don’t know that you are.

And even if we are, we don’t need others to encourage us to stay in it. We need to invite each other to step away from it.

Let’s Slow Down

What if our answer to, “how are you doing?” didn’t include the word, “busy” anymore? What if instead, we could say, “We’re in a slow season right now. It feels good.” Or at least, “We’re trying to slow down.” Can you imagine?

We were never meant to live as the world lives. In this aspect, in particular, we have an opportunity right now to live counter-culturally.

May we be people who live slowly, deliberately. God, make us people who rest well and love well. May we live just to the limits you give us, not beyond.

Related posts:

Learning to Walk (at an Unhurried Pace)

Choosing Slow

When You’re Starting the Week Weary

Warning: Don’t Forget to Breathe