His suffering has brought us every perfect gift.
Much love and blessings as we celebrate His life, death and resurrection!
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I’ll see you sometime next week and hope you enjoy the beautiful (and free!) Easter printables and fail proof cake pop method, just in time for a beautiful Easter weekend.
Reposted from April 2010.
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Something is happening to her. I’m not altogether sure that she fully grasps it. It started when she quit work. And it further heightened when she brought her children home to educate them. Maybe you’d call it an epiphany. Or an awakening. Sometimes it feels more like a death or at the very least a drowning of an old fantasy.
But something very peculiar happens when you face the truth about yourself and about your life in one area; it eventually creeps into all areas of your life, invading your presuppositions and putting to death the lies under which you’ve operated for so long, drowning them in a sea of life-giving water.
It took her by surprise and she must learn to swim again. Or so she thinks. She reaches out for something familiar but even her virtues seem to have washed away. There is no sure footing. There has to be another way. Or surely she will drown.
When you allow layers upon layers to be peeled back so that all you’re left with is the nakedness of your own depravity……
When the words of Christ sink in and take hold and gnaw at you and undo you…….
He is taking you into His death. “Deep calls to deep at the roar of Your waterfalls; all Your breakers have gone over me.”
She finds it hard to breathe. She fights Him. She finds it impossible to surrender…….
And then He comes. He has made another way.
And His surrender will be perfect, even to death.
His words play a melody in her heart.
how long have i been in this storm
so overwhelmed by the ocean’s shapeless form
waters getting harder to tread
with these waves crashing over my head
if i could just see you
everything would be alright
if i had to see you
this darkness would turn into light
and i will walk on water
and you will catch me if i fall
and i will get lost into your eyes
and everything will be alright
and everything will be alright
i know u didn’t bring me out here to drown
so why am i ten feet under and upside down
barely surviving has become my purpose
cause i’m so used to living underneath the surface
if i could just see you
everything would be alright
if i could see you
this darkness would turn into light
and i will walk on water
and you will catch me if i fall
and i will get lost into your eyes
and everything will be alright
and i will walk on water
and you will catch me if i fall
and i will get lost into your eyes
and everything will be alright
and now everything is alright
everythings alright
Blessed Holy Week to you!
This is week 5 of a Lenten book study of Grace upon Grace
This chapter on prayer is unlike anything I’ve ever read before on the subject. John Kleinig is a brilliant Lutheran pastor and seminary professor in Australia who has written and spoken extensively on the subject of prayer and here’s how he begins the chapter:
“More than anything else, I would like to be good at praying. That’s what I’ve been called to do as a disciple of Christ; that ‘s my basic task as a member of God’s holy priesthood. I truly believe that much more is accomplished by prayer than by anything else I do. Yet I must admit that I have been anything but a man of prayer. A sense of spiritual frustration, coupled with the longing for spiritual fulfillment, is common among devout Christians all over the world. Our disappointment is precipitated by the difficulties we experience in prayer and in our personal devotional life. Here we experience the biggest gap between the way things should be and the way they actually are. “
This opening statement hit me right between the eyes. I have been a complete failure at prayer. I don’t pray enough. I don’t know how to pray. It has never felt natural to me. It has never come easy and has always felt forced. I have made extensive prayer journals and have often pressed on in prayer despite my fumblings but I’ve always been sure that everybody else must be good at praying except me. In my daily life, I never meet a stranger and can talk til the cows come home on almost any subject but when I start to pray, I’m tongue-tied, hamstrung. The only thing I’ve had even a moderate amount of ‘success’ at in praying is praying before meals and with my girls in the morning and evening as we say the Lord’s prayer together. But the more systems I set up to turn me into a prayer warrior, the more failure I see. Turns out, Dr. Kleinig would diagnose my utter failure in prayer as precisely the way it was meant to be. Imagine the comfort when I read these words,
“Prayer should come as easily and naturally to us as breathing or eating. Yet, we all know how hard it is to pray. Prayer, mostly, seems to go against the grain. Unless we are quite desperate and have reached the end of our rope, we would rather not ask God for help. We know that we should pray. We would like to pray more regularly, ardently, and spontaneously. The harder we try, the more we seem to fail. But that’s how it’s meant to be. Christ lets us fail when we pray by ourselves so that we rely on His intercession for us. Oddly, our success in prayer comes from our personal failure and our willingness to carry on as He works for us and with us. Unlike us, Jesus is an expert at prayer…..He is its best practitioner…..He takes over for us when we fail, and intercedes FOR us. He fulfills God’s call to us to be praying people and get us to join Him in His praying.
Jesus does not leave us by ourselves in prayer. He helps us at every step. Long before we ever began to pray, He was praying for us and for our salvation. Whether we pray or don’t pray, whether we are awake or asleep, He prays for us….and he prays with us so that we can join Him in His praying. Jesus teaches us how to pray by giving us the Lord’s prayer. This is His prayer, the prayer that He prays. By giving us His prayer, He includes us in His relationship with His Father and allows us to act as if we were Him, dressed up in Him. He therefore identifies Himself with us and our needs, necessities, sins and temptations. He joins Himself to us so that we can join Him in prayer and borrow everything from Him. He swaps places with us so that we can be where He is before God the Father.
We need not be anxious about whether God is pleased with us or whether He will give us a favorable hearing. We need not worry about what to pray for, or how, because Jesus covers us with His righteousness and perfects our prayers. Our performance does not matter; what matters is Jesus and our faith in Him as our intercessor.
The Lord’s prayer makes praying simple and easy for us because, as we use it, we pray together with Jesus. It is much more important that we pray it regularly than that we wait until we have enough time to pray at length and in great detail with deep ardor and heartfelt devotion. Satan,quite commonly, uses our spiritual enthusiasm against us. He gets us to go on a prayer binge because he knows we will not be able to sustain it. Then, when we fail, he uses our failure against to argue that praying is not for us.
And just as has been my experience, Dr. Kleinig talks about how we learn to pray through suffering. It wasn’t hard for me to pray in the days and weeks following the fire. It was all I could do—cry out to God in helplessness. We learn to pray ‘in the belly of the whale’ so to speak. He emphasizes that prayer is not our work but God’s work in us. Prayer is a gift from God TO us, not an obligation He expects from us. He wants to give us Himself, His peace, His gifts, His life. We pray to receive from God what He alone can give us.
This chapter is so revolutionary. It’s not self-help. It’s Jesus; His life, His forgiveness, His obedience, HIS prayers——for YOU!
And the portion of this chapter devoted to praying for others is full of such wonderful wisdom.
So, now it’s your turn. Wasn’t there so much comfort to be found in how Christ prays for us?
Share your thoughts:)
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My blog friend Tricia has been such a source of encouragement to me and she has a great blog called The Domestic Fringe.Com. She’s sharing her homemade vanilla today at lifeingracegirls!
You can thank Stevie for this taco casserole recipe because here’s exactly what he said at dinner.
Stevie: “Is there a recipe for this?”
Me: “No, I improvised because I’m so desperate to go to the store and had to use what I had on hand.”
Stevie: “I want you to go write it down right now because a month from now I want to be able to say ‘Let’s have Mexican Hotdish’ and have this dish magically appear.”
(he suffers from too many good dishes being forgotten because SOMEbody doesn’t use recipes)
Me: “Do I have to name it Mexican Hotdish?”
Stevie: “Ummm, that’s what it is.”
Me: “Ummmm, only if you’re from Minnesota.”
But really, the name ‘Mexican Hotdish’ makes me wanna salsa dance so I’m keeping it. There’s far too little salsa dancing in the world as it is. And the ‘guacamole’ portion of the name, you’ll be getting later in the week. We ate the guacamole so fast that no pictures were taken. It’s that good.
As for the hotdish, here’s what you’ll need:
1 1/2-2 pounds of ground beef
large onion, chopped
1 package of taco seasoning
2 T. ground cumin
4 cloves of garlic minced
1 can black beans, drained
1 cup of cooked rice
1 15 oz can of fire roasted tomatoes
salt and pepper to taste (I always salt as I go)
1 jar of good salsa ( I used some homemade salsa canned from last year but use whatever you have)
3 cups of crushed tor-tilla chips
1 16 oz container of sour cream
4 chopped scallions
2 cups of cheddar cheese
1 can black olives, drained and chopped for garnish
4 T. chopped jalapeños (I didn’t use fresh but you could) for garnish
Serve with chips and your favorite guacamole!
Brown beef and then add onion and garlic. Saute until onions are translucent. Add tomatoes, salsa, black beans, seasonings and rice. Crush the chips and layer them in the bottom of a 9×13 casserole dish. Add the beef mixture and then layer the sour cream and green onions. Cover with cheddar cheese and bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes or until cheese is melted. Garnish with olives and jalapeños.
Serve with chips and your favorite guacamole and please your finicky kids and your foodie husband at the same time!
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And you DO NOT want to miss Angela’s nursery make-over at lifeingrace girls! It’s almost as beautiful as Angela herself, whose blog is chocked full of fun and beautiful things!
What do you do when you’re no longer a spring chicken and you know it?
You drive like mad to the nearest seller of spring chickens and you buy 6 of them in the name ‘home education’.
Your children crown you mother of the year. Again.
And then you start a Pinterest board called chicken coops.
And you find out that your darling husband thinks egg-laying chickens are all kinds of awesome.
Then you spot the most adorable chicken coop by the lovely Heather Bullard.
So you order the plans and tell your builder that you have the perfect spring project.
And then everyone calls you coo coo but they’re too late because you already knew that.
At least now you’ll be coo coo with the cutest chicken coop EVER and fresh eggs!
And really, does anything usher in the magic of spring like baby chicks?
Happy first week of Spring! Mwahhhh:)
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Speaking of cute chicks, my friend Michele is posting today at lifeingrace girls! She blogs about one of my favorite topics—books—-at her blog The Great Read!
And I’m in need of more contributors for our sister site. Send me your ideas this weekend! My email has been super annoyingly unpredictable lately so email me again if you haven’t heard from me!
I hope to catch upon on our book study this weekend.
Loves to all,
edie
