human Archives - Gina Brenna Butz

The Soul Needs

Post author:Gina B
Post published:April 1, 2015
Post category:dependence on God faith word of the year

My husband traveled 4 out of the first six weeks of this year. I’ve built up some pretty strong “traveling husband” muscles over the years, but I have to admit it wore me down. I felt needy.

I don’t like to feel needy. Needy feels small and weak and helpless, which is scary. It feels vulnerable. What if no one wants to help me? What if they look down on me for my neediness?

Needy gets a bad rap in our world. We glorify people who are strong, self-sufficient, wildly capable, not a “burden.” We are impressed with them. You know who isn’t? God.

I have searched scripture, and never once have I found a verse where God says something to the effect of, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have managed to pull yourself up by your own boot straps and to rely on no one, not even Me! I’m proud of you for not asking anyone to step in and minister to you in your weakness. Enter your rest, you’ve earned it!”

Which is such a bummer, because I’m really good at all of that.

We tend to respond to tough situations by working harder, toughing it up, slogging through, as though God gives us tough circumstances to see how strong we can be. He doesn’t. He wants to bring us to weakness. He wants us to own our neediness.

Neediness doesn’t mean we’ve failed. It means we’re human.

What always gets me about Jesus is his humanity. He got tired. Hungry. Lonely. Overwhelmed. He knew need. He knew hard. He calls us to own our humanity as He did.

So I’m learning, in those needy times, to say it out loud. Not to complain about it, but to call it what it is. And to invite others in to walk with me.

I’ve written about a lot of the needs of the soul, but the bottom line that we have to own is that the soul is needy. Period. The end. It looks different on different days, but the fact is: We have needy souls.

It’s how He made us. And the beauty of it is that we can answer each others’ needs with love and grace. This is the gift we have in the fellowship of believers.

[ictt-tweet-inline]Is your soul needy today? Bring it to Jesus. [/ictt-tweet-inline]Bring it to others. The soul needs. It’s meant to need. And others are meant to meet it.

“Carry each others’ burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” Galatians 6:2

Embracing Weakness

Two Battles

Post author:Gina B
Post published:April 17, 2014
Post category:faith

Two Battles – from Thailand, January 20, 2012

I’ve been trying to think of how to share what we’ve been doing this week here in Thailand (aside from trying not to get sunburned, reading Kindles by the pool, and searching in vain for Coke Zero). We’re at a conference called re-LEAF (Leadership Evaluation and Formation). It’s a time to revisit the process that God started when we all went through this conference the first time.

So how do I summarize what it is we talk about here? I thought this excerpt from The Magnificent Defeat, by Frederick Beuchner might do it. He’s talking about “The Two Battles” Forgive me if it’s a little long – I cut a lot out!:

“The first is a war of conquest . . . All our lives we fight for a place in the sun . . . we feel that we must conquer a territory in time and space that will be ours. And that is true. We must.

“What is the armor to wear in such a war? Not, certainly, the whole armor of God here but, rather the whole armor of man, because this is a man’s war against other men. In such a war, perhaps, you wear something like this: Gird your loin with wisdom . . . put on the breastplate of self-confidence . . . let your feet be shod with the gospel of success . . . above all take the shield of security . . . and the helmet of attractiveness or personality or the sword of wit.

“The other war is not the war to conquer but the war to become whole and at peace inside our skins . . . it is the war to become a human being. This is the goal we are really after and that God is really after. This is the goal that power, success, and security are only forlorn substitutes for.

“(What we must be set free from is) the darkness in ourselves that we never fully see or fully understand or feel fully responsible for, although Heaven knows we are more than a little responsible. (Paul identifies it as,) ‘I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.’ . . . The evil in ourselves as individuals is greater than the evil that we choose, and that is great enough. This is the darkness which we need to be liberated from in order to become human.

“It is for this war, not the other one, that we need the whole armor of God . . . He is the truth about who man really is, about what it means to be really human, and about who God really is . . . In the great war of liberation, it is imperative to keep in touch always with the only one who can liberate.

“Even if we do not find our place in the sun, or not quite the place we want, or a place where the sun is not as bright as we always dreamed that it would be, this is not the end because this is not really the decisive war even though we spend so much of our lives assuming that it is. The decisive war is the other one – to become fully human, which means to become compassionate, honest, brave . . . (this) is the war which every man can win who wills to win because it is the war which God also wills us to win and will arm us to win if only we will accept His armor.”

So I guess we are talking about the battles in our ourselves, and where we are putting our energy – are we still putting it into fighting the first battle? Or are we learning more and more to trust in God and His armor to become who we were really meant to be in Him?

What about you? Which battle are you fighting?