Tag: bible study for women

Dealing With Gnats and Other Problems

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She stood at the top of the slide pointing them out to me and I stood at the bottom of the slide smashing the gnats.010

When it’s over 70 degrees outside in the middle of winter, you play hookie from chores and pop your preschooler into the minivan for an afternoon at the park.  We had rushed up the hill to the playground and she tried the swings and the sandbox and the seesaw (which exhausts this mommy who has to do all the see-sawing with my own muscles).

When she climbed to the top of the slide, though, she complained about all the bees…or were they ants?

“Gnats,” I tell her.  Fifty of them at least dotted all along the yellow slide.  The closer you looked, the more you saw.

“They’ll bite me,” she whined.

I reassured her.  Gnats are a pesky, annoying nuisance, but hardly a health hazard or a reason to fear the slide.  But she stood there paralyzed, so I wiped them away.

When she climbed up again for another slide down, though, they were back.  Or, to be more accurate, fifty other gnats had landed.

We repeated it relentlessly.  I smooshed bugs.  She slid down.  She climbed back up.  I smooshed more bugs.

In between, I swatted the pests away from my face.

Like most kids, I spent a week during several summers away at camp and the line for the dining hall there at this camp along the Potomac River stretched outside.  We lined up morning, noon and night for our meals, knowing one thing for sure:

The gnats would drive us crazy.

They swarmed in tiny black clouds around us.  Some of the other girls started walking around with one hand raised up on top of their heads, looking like a rooster with feathers all fanned out.

“Gnats always go to the highest part of your body,” they explained, all-knowing as sixth grade girls always are.

I never was sure if walking around with a hand on top of my head really kept the gnats from swarming around my face.

Perhaps it really was as ineffective as squashing the gnats on the playground slide over and over again only to watch more land within seconds.

But when you’re bothered or stressed, anxious, annoyed, pestered, worried and troubled, solutions are what you seek–no matter how ridiculous or sane.

Unfortunately, sometimes God is the last solution we seek to the messes we find ourselves in.

Certainly for Pharaoh, the pattern of the plagues was clear (at least to us) and yet he was desperate to find a solution outside of God.

Over and over, Moses asked for the deliverance of God’s people.
Pharaoh refused.
A plague of boils, blood, frogs, gnats or worse descended on the Egyptians.
Pharaoh asked Moses to pray.
The plague ceased.

So, when “gnats infested the entire land, covering the Egyptians and their animals.  All the dust in the land of Egypt turned into gnats,” the solution to us seems obvious (Exodus 8:17).

Pray Pharaoh.  Pray hard.  Step down off that mighty Egyptian throne, throw yourself on God’s mercy, so abundant, so longsuffering.  Bow that head and bend that knee in humility to God and God alone and obey His Word.

But that turning aside from self, that relinquishing of personal programs and plans and the solutions you’ve charted out so carefully takes humility.  It means confessing the hard-to-swallow truth.

I can’t do this on my own.

God, please help me.

Even Pharaoh’s magicians exclaimed, “This is the finger of God!”  But he resisted.  That proud earthly king would rather breathe in gnats and swallow gnats and swat gnats away from his face and sleep with gnats rather than rely on the mercy of a Merciful but Mighty God.

Oh, the humbling.  For Egyptians who prided themselves on hygiene and personal cleanliness, the perpetual buzz of pests must have been the ultimate pride destruction.

Still Pharaoh resisted.

Still we resist at times, too. We’re puzzling out our problem and feeling the shame of broken relationships, broken marriages, broken finances, broken lives, broken ministries, broken hearts, brokenness.

And what God wants is for us to just ask Him, to turn to Him first, to confess that we’ve messed up and to do things His way this time.

To pray and pray hard.  To bow that head and bend that knee.  To lay it all out at His nail-scarred feet and say what’s true:

I can’t do this on my own.

God, please help me.

Oh yes, we pray: “Let Your mercy, O Lord, be upon us, just as we hope in You” (Psalm 33:22 NKJV).

Kyrie eleison.  “Lord, have mercy.”

Amen and amen.

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in the Fall of 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King

Her House, My House

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Every room in her house could be featured in Better Homes & Gardens in an article entitled “Pinterest Meets Reality.”

My kids, however, are randomly inspired to create art projects with shreds of paper, sparkles of glitter, dots of glue and Popsicle sticks, so my house hovers under a perpetual cloud of sparkles and the art work generally involves hand prints.

Cleaning her house probably means dusting the magazines.

Cleaning my house involves wiping down fingerprints from walls and scrubbing toothpaste splatter from inside the sink and all around the bathroom counter twice every day.

My furniture is worn and stained and scratched to shreds by cats.  My floors could be an archeologist’s dream—the interpretation of an ancient artifact to determine what every stain and tear reveals about its history.

She had collectibles and antiques.

I have toy bins, overflowing bookshelves, and craft supply buckets.

She had perfectly matching, expensive China dishes for entertaining.

I have a mishmash of plastic princess bowls, fairy mugs, cartoon character cups, and bent silverware.

When she needed to find something, it took her less than a minute to pull it from the appropriate folder.

Ask me for a particular piece of paper and it will take me two days of alternating frantic searches with desperate prayers for God to help save my sanity before I (maybe) can find it in the one place I never thought I would put it….ever…but probably seemed like such a safe spot at the time.

I have kids, three of them, what can I say?  I live a slightly disheveled life in a perpetually imperfect house.

And as much as I feel like “just a mom,” more than slightly nervous sitting in her Ethan Allen furniture surrounded by breakable objects, still I know that we aren’t better/worse or right/wrong.

We aren’t in competition and we don’t need to be the same.

I reminded myself all that day, after I returned home and spotted the streaks on the dining room windows and the smudges on the refrigerator door handles, as I sighed over the clothes that needed sorting and the school papers on my counter: I’m happy to be a mom.

And I am.

I might have slight twangs of jealousy over exotic vacations and perfect hair-styles, designer outfits and picture-perfect houses.

I might feel awkward and out of place in discussions about career success, financial affluence, and the three fancy restaurants others ate at just this past week.

But these three daughters of mine, this precious family, this messy home where we live this busy-crazy-funny-life of love and seeking God, is a gift.

And while I’m worrying over my life and feeling “less than,” maybe she’s looking over the grassgreenerfence of her own yard and thinking my grass looks slightly greener.

The world shoves arbitrary standards of success on us, labels we attach to our foreheads, categories we sort women into (working and stay-at-home), and hierarchies of value.

And the thing about God is that He isn’t interested in any of it.  He’s utterly uninfluenced by the way we determine “success” or “failure.”

He’s got a way of turning all these systems of judgment upside down.  Like how He uses the least of these or blesses the poor and gives the Kingdom to the meek.  Or how He gives the foolish understanding and defies the analysis of the self-declared “wise.”

That’s why Jacob, an aged man who raised sheep and unruly sons, stood in Egypt before the throne of mighty Pharaoh and “Jacob blessed Pharaoh again before leaving his court” (Genesis 47:10).

Pharaoh could raise a mighty army, commission massive pyramids, and alter the economy of the known world.

But Jacob closed tired eyes and prayed a blessing over a king.

We compare bank accounts, careers, clean houses, decorating skill, cake-baking ability, creativity with crafts, personal style, husbands and kids, haircuts, parenting choices, churches, ministries, Pinterest and Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and blog subscribers.

Yet, all that pressure you feel to be the same as her, to achieve as much, to own as much, to be gifted in the same way and called to do the same thing—that breath-stealing stress isn’t from God.

God is just looking to see if we’re obeying what He asked us to do.  Just as Paul commissioned Timothy, so God asks us to “fully carry out the ministry God has given you” (2 Timothy 4:5).

Not her ministry or her calling or God’s will for her or her gifting or her family or career or home…No, the one God has given you.

Just breathe.  Just serve.  Just minister.  Here and now and today and tomorrow, carry out this ministry un-distracted and unhindered by endless comparisons and value judgments.

And then let her do the same thing.

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in November 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King

Babysitters, Magicians, Teachers and other choices

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“Mom, do you think I should be a teacher or a babysitter when I grow up?”

She asks me as if she needs to decide all the life plans and pathways of her future right here in this minute.

I ask this eight-year-old what she thinks about it all and she tells me how much she loves little kids and babies, and I know it’s true.091

While I’m thinking of all her potential and all the possibilities, though, she’s narrowing it down to two choices.  A or B?

Then my next girl chimes in.  “Mom, do you think I should be a teacher or a magician?”

Again I ask what she thinks, and she’s decided definitely, 100%, no doubt about it, her future career will start with a course at the magician’s school of tricks and entertainment.

So, I bend down low, cradle those chins in my hands and one at a time I tell them so they’ll hopefully understand what I’m saying deep down in the parts of their soul that they’ll only remember later when it really counts:

God made you so special, so unique, so gifted in amazing ways.  There are many possibilities for you, so much hope.  Your job is to work hard now and we’ll pray and discover what He wants you to do then.

That’s their job…To practice the piano and dance, to study in school and make their art projects when they feel inspired.  To write away creating stories on the computer and telling jokes and walking on stages unafraid.  To say their memory verses and listen to God’s Word and sing and sing and sing.  To hold the hands of little ones and teach their little sister letters and sounds and how to count just a little bit higher.  To cheer for friends and to serve those in need.

This is how they grow in the gifts God has given them.  This is how they make themselves ready and available for His purposes.

That’s their job.

I have my own and I look to King David as a reminder.

Knowing all that God had planned for his son, knowing that Solomon was called by God to build the holy temple, David stockpiled immense resources to give him a head start.  He amassed gold, silver, iron, bronze, timber and stone and trained carpenters, stonecutters, masons, and artisans for service on the temple project (1 Chronicles 22).

And then he gave it all to his son and blessed his ministry.

David said:

My part in this was to put down the enemies, subdue the land to God and his people; your part is to give yourselves, heart and soul, to praying to your God. So get moving—build the sacred house of worship to God!
1 Chronicles 22:18.

Sometimes we get so focused on our own careers and futures and ministries, what we need from others, what we need to do ourselves.  Our lives can become day after day pursuits of our own personal successes.

But God creates this perpetual ministry for us—to give and give again into the lives of others. 

I look at my daughters and I wonder, “What’s my part?”

David’s job was to fight wars and conquer enemies so his son could reign in peace.  He gathered supplies and did everything to make the temple project possible short of laying the gold bricks himself.

I’m no warrior king and I certainly don’t have some vault stocked with precious metals and gems.

But I can do my part to help them discover and develop those unique gifts that could make them a wonderful teacher or (even perhaps) a funny magician.  I can teach them about God and truth, kindness, service, and Scripture.  I can spend time on my knees for them, for now and for their future.  I can let them know they are loved.

We can do this for others, for our children, for the teens in our churches and the young moms in the next pew over on Sunday morning who look just a little tired after getting so many little people ready for church service.

We reach back in ministry, bending low to give helping hands and encouraging words to those just starting out, the discouraged, the uncertain, the teachable, the wide-eyed and hopeful.

We open a world wide open to students and pray for our pastors, pray for missionaries, pray for our ministry leaders.

We take time to say thank you to those who rock babies in the nursery and stock the shelves in the food pantry.

We all, after all, have a part.  No one ministers to this world alone or on their own merit or in their own strength.  It’s always about God at work, and He works through us, through the giving and blessing of others.

Whose ministry can you bless today?

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in November 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King

Weekend Walk: Shifting Shadows

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I can’t quite explain it or rationalize it, but I love Groundhog Day.  I love the fun of it and the silliness and the groundhog himself and the mock seriousness of the traditions.  Maybe I love it even more than my kids do.

So today my family gathered on the outskirts of the crowd and pressed in closer until we 011could see the podium and the table holding a small pet carrier.  The speakers introduced the groundhog while we shivered and rubbed our hands together, hoping for news of an early spring.

This adorable creature gnawed away on his corn cob, caring not a bit for the flashing cameras and rolling video.  And those officials who eyed the groundhog watchfully finally announced that, unlike the more famous groundhog Phil, our particular prognosticating creature predicted six more weeks of winter.

Instead of booing over the news that we’re stuck with the cold longer than we’d like, we accepted it with good-natured whimsy.  It is, perhaps, the cutest way to deliver bad news.  Send in the groundhog to tell it.

Then we toured the museum and colored groundhog pages and played games with shadows.  It struck me that this is what we watch the groundhog for, to see his response to the shifting of shadows.

Shadows shift.  They change.  The direction of the light, the time of the day, the traveling of the clouds across the face of the sun all make the shadows dance or lengthen or shorten or perhaps even disappear.

Life shifts, too.  It changes.  Groundhogs are right and sometimes they are wrong.  Experts are right and sometimes they are wrong.  Circumstances alter unexpectedly.  You make a plan and then God interrupts you with the unexpected.

But here’s what we know: God is our constant, our reliable, ever-faithful, un-shifting Light in a world of uncertain shadows.

And it’s nice to know that we aren’t in the hands of whimsy or relying on the predictions of unreliable sources.  He knows us.  He knows what we need.  He knows where we’ve been, where we are, where we’re going.  He knows what tomorrow holds.  He knows how to take us through.

He knows.

This week, I’ll be meditating on a verse that reminds me of God’s constant character and His trustworthy love, and I’ll be using this as my third memory verse for the year with Beth Moore’s SSMT plan.

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. James 1:17 NIV

What’s your verse for the week?

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in the Fall of 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King

I’m Building an Ark Here

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They say, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

This morning, I think: “The ark wasn’t built in a day either.”

I think it as my baby girl (too big to be called “baby,” she tells me) bursts into my room far too early to announce, “Mom, it’s morning time!” And I’m tired.

The ark, remember the ark.

I’m pouring cereal and reviewing ancient China with a girl who is taking her big test today.  I pulled my other girl’s hair back into a ponytail, but it was the wrong kind.  She wanted it differently.  Using her hands, she tries to explain it to me and I’m slow, so I lean down trying to understand and experiment with the brush until I get it just right.

That ark takes time to build.

They’ve dressed and stepped into shoes.  I’ve reminded and reminded them, brush your teeth, grab your back pack, zip your coat.  Hurry!  It’s time!  We huddle at the bus stop with our backs to the February wind and I snuggle close to block them from the strength of the blasts.  Then I whisper a prayer for their day, for their tests and their friends and their obedience and their learning and how proud I am of all their hard work.

Just building an ark here.  Just taking the time.

Because sometimes you wake up tired.  Sometimes you’d rather pull those covers right on up to block out the sun and the cold and sleep away some of the day and lounge away the other half in pajamas and slippers.

Sometimes you just need the reminder that what you are doing has significance and value.  Sometimes you need to know….This Matters.

Even if today isn’t the day you pound the final peg into the ark and the animals step on two-by-two and the rain falls…

Even if you don’t see the final results or immediate success, know that every peg you place and every board you lay has purpose.

It takes about nine months for God to intricately fashion a human life in a womb.
It takes 365 days for the earth to circle that sun, spinning around in its orbit.
It even takes 8 minutes from the sun to stretch its light down to our planet.
And it took decades for Noah to build that ark.

Progress happens over time, seconds and minutes and day after another day of don'tgiveupperseverance, dedication and refusing to give up.

How often Noah must have woken up to a new morning and wanted to stop.

Surely there were days it felt impossible to construct a massive floating vessel without power tools and contractors.
Surely the ridicule from the masses and those he considered his closest friends—yes even from his family—must have wearied his soul.
Surely there were moments he just needed God to reassure him that he wasn’t crazy, that he heard correctly, that what he was doing was necessary.

Some days it must have seemed so hard.  Some days maybe he wanted to give up.

Yet, had he given up one decade….one year…one month…one week….one day too soon, had he abandoned the project and left the ark unfinished, it wouldn’t have saved anyone.  God couldn’t use an unfinished ship to rescue, save, and redeem.

God saved him…and us…because “Noah did everything just as God commanded him” (Genesis 5:22).

Just one simple verse; it makes it sound so easy.

But I know the truth.  I know every time I sit down and open the Scriptures up on my kitchen table on days when I’m tired and the interruptions just keep coming, that I can’t give this up.  Even if the inspiration doesn’t come, even if God seems silent or my soul unstirred, still I build this ark.

When the chores seem endless…when you’re deep-soul tired…when you can’t seem to find your joy and don’t know where you lost it…when no one says, “thank you” or appears to notice your serving them…when others ridicule your efforts and tell you it doesn’t matter…when you’re teaching but they don’t seem to understand….when you’re pouring everything you have into this but you don’t see results….when you give with passion and what you receive back is criticism….

You get up in the morning and you lay one more peg and one more board into the ark that God told you to build.  You do everything just as God commanded you, not because it’s easy or fun or seems so rewarding in the moment.

We do it because we’re building into eternity:

“Therefore we do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all”
(2 Corinthians 4:16-17).

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in November 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King

Glowing

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Originally posted on January 11, 2012

“When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13)

I think I must have a sign on me when I shop at Wal-Mart.  It says, “I don’t work here, but I can help you.”

I don’t mind really.  There’s something satisfying about knowing the aisle for laundry soap and the one for body soap and that they are about a mile walk away from one another.  Or that there’s tape in hardware and different tape in stationery.

Perhaps it’s that I usually shop with at least one of my kids.  Strangers probably see me and think, “She has children. I bet she’s in here ALL the time.  I’ll ask her where to find stuff.”

It seemed natural enough until I realized just how familiar I was with the Wal-Mart after trekking there more times than I’d like to admit every week for almost eight years.

I glanced down at my shopping list one day and discovered I had automatically organized it by quadrants of the store.  Every item was listed in the order I would find it on my usual route.

Now that’s a lot of time in Wal-Mart.

The time we spend anywhere shows up in our lives.  We can’t hide our influences or interests or the habits and relationships that take up the most space on our calendar. Our conversation is flavored, our mannerisms influenced, our choices altered by the way we spend our days.

It was the same for the disciples.

After Jesus’s death, resurrection and ascension to heaven, these Christ-followers became quite the trouble-makers.  They preached sermons and performed miracles all in the name of Jesus, to the dismay of the Sanhedrin or religious leaders, who thought that a dead Jesus was a problem solved.

When Peter and John were arrested and stood before the Sanhedrin, Peter—the guy arrested for giving sermons about Jesus— decided to give another sermon about Jesus.

Bold, huh?

He spoke the bottom line truth: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

Was this a fisherman talking?  Was this the guy who had denied Jesus three times, now preaching salvation through the crucified Jesus to a group of men who could crucify him, too?

The Sanhedrin wondered the same thing: “When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13)

You couldn’t miss the miraculous change in them. “These men had been with Jesus.”  And it showed.

It should be that evident in our lives also.  Our time praying and meditating on His Word should cause a life-revolution.  People should see us and think, “I bet she knows where to find hope, joy and peace.”  They should witness the changes in us over time and think, “Clearly she’s been with the Lord.”

For Peter and John, this brought life change—spiritual insight and boldness.

For Moses, time with God impacted Him physically.  All those days in the presence of God’s glory on the mountain made his face glow–literally.  And he couldn’t cover it up with some Covergirl face powder.  Even Mary Kay couldn’t do the trick.

It was so distracting to see this glow-in-the-dark face and how it faded over time, that Moses began wearing a veil to hide it.

Paul tells us that we glow like that, too, when we’ve been with God.

Yet, he also tells us that unlike Moses, there’s no reason for us to hide the glow of glory that comes from God’s presence.  In 2 Corinthians Paul writes:

And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Unlike Moses, our faces are unveiled so that all can see the transformation God works in us over time, making us ever more like His Son.  This change only happens, though, when we’ve been with Jesus.

People will be able to tell where we’re spending our time, what’s occupying our thoughts, and what our priorities are.  If it’s not God, that will show up on our faces and in our lives, too.

But I want my face to glow with God’s glory.  I want my life to be a like a sign that says, “This girl has been with Jesus.”

Just like Peter and John.   Just like Moses.  Just like Paul.  When we spend time with Christ our life will glow as we reflect Him.

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in the Fall of 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King

Today, Not Tomorrow

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“I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation”
(2 Corinthians 6:2b NIV).

“I don’t always obey Mom and Dad, but I do obey God.”

It made sense to her six-year-old mind.  Well, sure I might not obey my parents, but at least I’ve got the God-thing covered.

What’s a little family Bible time without some lessons on what this all means?  So, it didn’t take two seconds for my husband and me to jump on this one with a little Scripture quoting: “Children obey your parents.”

That’s what God says, we tell her, so you can’t obey Him without obeying us.

Oh.

I understand what she’s going through because most of us grow too comfy with our own sins and misbehaviors.  We try to justify or ignore, or create some arbitrary system of categories and hierarchies.

Well, I might gossip…..but I don’t lie.I might tell white lies….but I don’t tell all out whoppers.
I might lie….but I don’t steal.
I might steal….but I don’t murder.

The truth, of course, is that we’re all sinners, and sinners don’t just make mistakes, accidentally mis-step, or suffer from minor character flaws.

We sin.

And while we might try to dilute the definition a bit to take the sting out of the conviction, Scripture says, “…everything that does not come from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23b NIV).

We know what sin does, don’t we?  We know because so many of us have dragged that heavy burden along with us, refusing, forgetting, or just plain failing at leaving it behind.  It holds us back.  It keeps our hands encumbered instead of free to raise in worship and to extend in service.

Hebrews 12:1 describes it this way:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us (NIV).

Before we can run forward and make progress in this race, we’ve got to begin by leaving some things behind.  We’ve got to throw everything off that hinders.  We’ve got to un-knot the tangle of sins that are tripping us up.

We’ve got to ditch the load and then run free.

In a new year, so many of us are looking forward to goals and expectations, but we won’t go far without throwing over what has entangled, encumbered and ensnared.

Angie Smith writes, “Part of moving forward is always letting go of what has held us back, and it is never less than a battle.”

The truth is we can’t drag it all along after us and still expect to move forward with God.  We’re inhibited and stuck.

So that worrying….that gossiping….that perpetual busyness and never resting….that sharp tongue…that lack of grace….that lack of faithfulness to our commitments…that pride…that jealousy…that disobedience…that bitterness…that unforgiveness…that fear.

Whatever it is, it’s got to go.

Why not begin letting it go today?

At Women of Faith last summer, Christine Caine taught on the plague of frogs that struck Egypt in Exodus.  The nation was overrun by frogs, just as Moses had warned Pharaoh:

“The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your frogbedroom and onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs.The frogs will come up on you and your people and all your officials” (Exodus 8:3-4).

Imagine frogs everywhere, between the sheets of your bed when you lie down to rest and in your kitchen, jumping all over your food.

That’s too many frogs for anybody!

So when Pharaoh begged for Moses and Aaron to pray that God would end the plague and remove the frogs, they agreed.  They even went beyond that.  Moses said Pharaoh could choose the exact day and time when the frogs would disappear.

Shockingly, he didn’t say, “Right this very second!”  or “Before I go to bed tonight and have to sleep with another creature in my bed.”  He didn’t want it “over with by dinner so I can eat my food without it tasting like frog.”

He wanted the frogs gone, “tomorrow” (Exodus 8:10).

Why did he do this?

Why do we do this?

If God has promised us deliverance, if He’s asked us to leave something behind, if He’s challenged us to lay it down and move forward, why do we linger here?

Why do we endure one more day and another and then again of hindrances and snares instead of letting go?

Today is the day of salvation.  Let it be today—not tomorrow—that we ask God to search our hearts, to know us, to reveal the anxious thoughts and the waywardness and help us lay it down, let it go, so we can move on (Psalm 139:23-24).

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in the Fall of 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King

Weekend Walk, 1/26/2013: Snow

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Last year, I don’t remember seeing a single flake of snow.  No snow days off of school for my kids.  No bundling them up in two layers of pants and shirts and socks, then piling on coats, hats, gloves, scarves, and boots to send them outside.  No scraping off the frozen clothes when they pile back in and then making hot chocolate and snuggling them under fleece blankets.

This year, it hasn’t been much snowier (so far), but yesterday the tiny flakes finally piled 005up onto earth cold enough to hold them.

Snow!!!

My kids ran outside as soon as they finished breakfast this morning to play in it.  When they were done, my oldest brought in “clean snow” for snow cream—a recipe we’d never tried before.

Me, I like snow outside while I stay inside.  I like to watch it fall, so peaceful and hushed.  I like the brightness of it, especially when it covers over the drab muddy browns and muted gray-green of a snowless winter landscape. I like the untracked snow, the kind before boot prints and tire tracks and melted slush.

I like the reminder of what Christ has done for us.

Such a simple beauty this Saturday morning: A reminder as clear to me as a rainbow in the sky showing God’s faithfulness to His promises.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow
(Psalm 51:7).

They used this hyssop (really the ezov plant) for ritual cleansing in Israel–for purification and the ceremony to pronounce a leper healed and made clean again.

We’re self-condemners so often—listening as Satan reminds us of past sins, beating ourselves up in our minds, calling ourselves all manner of cruel names: stupid, a mess, flaky, foolish, failure, idiot…

God is so much more gracious than that, willing to cover over our sins, able to wash us and redeem us, able to purify our hearts and heal us from the diseases that plague our souls.

This snow–mostly still outside, some melting in spots on my kitchen floor from where my children have trekked in from outside– reminds me of His powerful, cleansing grace, a “grace that is greater than all my sins.”

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in November 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King

Recalibrating the Measure

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I had been wooed by the digital display and the sleek design, but I should have stuck with the tried and true older model.

The new scale promised to be scientifically accurate because of some high-quality triple sensory design. It could track the weight gain and loss of two different people by storing the weigh-in results in its memory.

So I brought it home from the store, opened the package, read the instructions, dropped it down on the floor and stepped on. Then I scowled.

This didn’t seem right.

I tried again a few days later and then after a few more days, I tried again.

According to this handy dandy super scale, I was gaining about a pound a day despite snacks of yogurt and granola, exercise sessions and water.

I could rail about the injustice of the world or blame the metabolism shifts in my 30s, but how could I argue with such a scientifically accurate device?

Finally, I carried out two scales from the cabinet: The old one with the tiny arrow that scalescrolled through the numbers and eventually landed on a miniature line and the new one with the flashing white numbers against a black display.

They were different.  A lot different.  I pushed the digital one around a bit and stepped on and off a few times.

I’d been using a faulty measure.

What else am I using as a faulty basis for my thoughts and emotions, my plans, my faith?

A.W. Tozer wrote: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

This, after all, is our foundation, our measure by which we weigh the world, and the filter through which we understand our circumstances.

But it’s not just what we think that matters, certainly not what we say.  We can confess:

I believe God is faithful.
I believe God can provide.
I believe God forgives me.
I believe God is all-powerful.
I believe God is with me.
I believe God will never abandon me.

All that sounds good and right.  We say what we’re supposed to say.  Sing the words we’re supposed to sing.

We might even think we mean it.

But sometimes we’re really looking at the world through circumstances and emotions.  Slowly, without changing what we’re saying, we’ve still changed what we believe.

The Israelites wandering around the wilderness outside of Egypt professed belief in the God who had led them out of slavery.

When Pharaoh’s army chased them to the edge of the Red Sea, however, they complained: ”Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?” (Exodus 14:11).

When they realized they could no longer shop at the Egyptian grocery stores, they whined:  “you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death” (Exodus 16:3).

And when the desert diet proved restrictive, they remembered: “The fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic” (Numbers 11:5).

They said they believed in God and His miraculous power, but, as Kelly Minter writes in her study on Nehemiah:

“whenever the Israelites faced difficulty in the desert they chose to believe something false about God.  Three of the biggies were that he had abandoned them, withheld from them, or wouldn’t meet their needs” (p. 125).

It is Nehemiah’s prayer, centuries later, that reminds the people of the truth:

You did not abandon them in the wilderness
because of Your great compassion….

You did not withhold Your manna from their mouths,
and You gave them water for their thirst.

You provided for them in the wilderness 40 years
and they lacked nothing (Nehemiah 9:19-21).

But in the middle of the wilderness, with Egypt behind them and the unknown ahead, without a meal plan or a guaranteed buffet, Israel believed false things about God.

And I get that.

It’s hard to see the truth when our eyes are shut tight to the wonder of God or our bad attitude is crowding out the glory from our field of vision.

We’ve decided we’re stuck.
We’ve determined to feel unhappy.
We’ve felt cheated and gypped out of what we really want.

So we just rack up more and more circumstantial evidence, cementing what we feel.

And we believe it.  God can’t use this situation.  God abandoned me here.  God is withholding from me.  God can’t rescue, save or provide.  God doesn’t know what He’s doing.

That’s false evidence, a faulty measure, a shaky foundation.

Today, let’s pray for God’s eye-opening grace, for His perspective, for a reminder of His goodness, for revelations of truth.  Just like Nehemiah did, let’s recount the goodness of God rather than letting our dissatisfaction or hurt determine what we see and what we believe.

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in November 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King

Living in Between, Part I

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Originally posted on December 28, 2011

It’s a mess; that’s what it is.

It’s this awkward time when my daughter isn’t quite size 7, but not really still a 6x either.  Triple that for all three of my girls and imagine the wardrobe fallout.

They’re just in between.

The dresses are too short, the sleeves on the shirts ride up on their arms, but the next size of pants fit like clown clothes.

So, there’s this season where their wardrobe is a hodgepodge of sizes, a paradise for Goldilocks.  Some too small.  Some too big.  And hopefully enough that are “just right.”

And there are the disagreements about what fits and what doesn’t.  They swim into bulky dresses and shirts that slip off their thin shoulders just so they can wear something new.

Then these same girls cram themselves into shirts that crawl up above their belly button and pants that now look like capris because they don’t want to give up their favorite outfit.

It’s all about transition.  It’s a time of in-betweeness.  It’s uncomfortable.  Messy.  Awkward.  Ill-fitting.

It’s life.

So often we live in the in-between.
We’re preparing for a ministry we haven’t yet started.
We’re moving from job to job, home to home, ministry to ministry.
Our children somehow change from babies to toddlers to little kids to big kids to teens to adults and we can’t say when it happened.
We’re saying goodbye, but haven’t found a place to say hello.

Our transition pitfalls are the same as they are for my daughters and their fashion crises.

We want to leap ahead before we’re ready and end up tripping all over ourselves.

Or, we cram ourselves into comfortable situations that are now stretched to the max and busting the seams.  We resist change.  We linger in the past.  We’re trapped by shame or even nostalgia and we’ll miss out on the new in order to remain in the known.

Scripture is strangely silent about many transition times.

Take Paul.  After his dramatic conversion, he spent time learning how to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, putting aside his old life as a persecutor, but not yet leading the church or serving as a missionary to the Gentiles.

He was in between.

In Galatians, Paul tells us, “I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.   Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days” (Galatians 1:17-18). 

So often we forget this time in Paul’s life.  We see him converted and then we see him as a radical missionary enduring shipwrecks and stonings and imprisonment. At least, that’s how it went on the flannel boards in our Sunday School classes all those years ago.

But his was no overnight commissioning.  It took years of radical change for Saul to become Paul.

Surely Paul could have met Jesus on the road to Damascus, had his eyesight restored, and then high-tailed it to Jerusalem to present himself to James and the rest of the church leaders.  He could have declared, “Send me in, Coach!”

Yet, he would have been immature: full of enthusiasm, but little spiritual maturity.  He probably would have scared the Christians into hiding.  They likely thought he was faking his conversion in order to infiltrate the church and kill them all.

Most of the time between Jesus’ birth and His public ministry is a blank also. We know He lived in Egypt as a child, but we know nothing about His time there.

Scripture only tells us about one event in Jesus’ childhood, when his parents left him during their pilgrimage to Jerusalem when he was 12 years old.  Traveling as a large group, they just assumed he was with others in their entourage.

Jesus’ response to His parents when they found Him teaches us what to do when we’re in the in-between times of life.

  • He told his parents, “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49).  We need to be where God is, not running ahead of Him or lagging behind His timing.
  • During his transition time, “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52).  Soak up everything you can learn while you wait.  Dig deep in His Word.  Learn from others.  Wear your knees out in prayer.
  • Be sensitive to others: Transition times aren’t just hard for us; they are difficult for others, too.  Some people will try to hold you back.  Others will push and nudge you ahead of God’s timing. After His parents found Him in the temple, Jesus “went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them” (Luke 2:51).  Obey God’s timing, but be gracious always and submissive to your leadership when possible.

In the in-between times, we look to God as our guide, we enjoy His presence and remain contented in His plan for us, just like the Psalmist wrote “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11, ESV)

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in the Fall of 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King