reflections on philippians 4.

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:4-7

Do you remember the first time you received really good news? For me, that news came when I was 3 years old, and my parents told me I was going to have a little sister soon. I remember being crazy excited for that. I cleaned my room, helped my mom pick out clothes, and picked a whole bunch of flowers out of the backyard (which my mom wasn’t too stoked on because apparently new flowers are supposed to stay IN THE GROUND). I got so crazy over the flowers that apparently I was convinced that my sister’s middle name needed to be “flower”. Thank God I was three and not the one to make those decisions!

I remember the first time I received really bad news. I was about 6 years old, and my mother told me that we were moving away from my dad. Nothing about it made sense. As a kid, you don’t really understand warning signs very well. Even though everything around me for the previous few years pointed towards it, no 6-year-old kid is ready to process that. I remember going through a few years of craziness after that. I became easily angered. I threw fits at school. I got vicious towards other kids at times. A couple of years later, they told me I had this thing called “tourette’s”. I didn’t really know what it meant at the time, but I knew that I now had these nifty new pills that put me to sleep really quickly, and that there was an official reason why I twitched and hummed all the time.

“Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”

-Pastor Steve Davidson

For as long as I can remember, I’ve found that my happiness and my well-being can be easily swayed by the circumstances in my life. I became a Christian at the age of 15, and it took me a long time after that to reconcile the pain in my life with God’s sovereignty. Having never grown up in church, I had a really odd view of God growing up. My parents would occasionally mention God, usually coupled with a few choice swear words, when trying to either motivate or scare me. I heard the phrase “God is watching” often growing up. My knee-jerk reaction to that used to be to think, “Oh yeah? God’s watching? Then why can you do whatever you want?” As I grew older, I became even more jaded hearing this. As my family kept struggling with anger, drugs, and broken relationships, and I saw friends suffering all around me, my response became, “God’s watching? Then God, if you're watching, why are you still letting all of these shitty things happen to me? Why do I have to be angry and miserable?” I never doubted that God was there, but I began to feel that He didn’t really care, which only pissed me off more.

During my sophomore year, when I was probably at my lowest, I came upon a passage that shifted my perspective.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Matthew 11:28-30

This was really the first time that Jesus made any sense to me. This to me was the Gospel finally connecting; Jesus promised us rest from our burdens, and that his death would take those burdens from us. What’s crazy is that God didn’t just “lighten” our burden; he exchanged it. He bore the weight of it, and continues to bear it. That blows my mind! John 16:33 says, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” I had to start shifting my perspective from “God, why haven’t you fixed everything for me?” to “God, thank you for giving me rest.” That’s where Philippians 4 comes in. Studying through it this weekend rocked my world. Paul tells us to rejoice always. That’s super difficult in practice. It’s really easy to rejoice and praise God in the good things. We equate God doing good things with how “happy we are”, but we leave our happiness up to happenstance. God showed me this weekend that his constant nature allows us to rejoice not in the circumstance, but in the fact that God is in control. Terrible things happen. We don’t rejoice that those things are happening, but we rejoice in the fact that God is in control and will work it for our good and His glory. We don’t have to allow ourselves to suffer through the pain.

We can pick flowers out of the ground with exuberance and abandon, despite the thorns lying in our midst.

(Check out yesterday's message from Clovis Hills Community Church on Philippians 4. Blew my mind, and inspired this post).

isaiah 41 - overcoming discouragement.

But you, Israel, my servant,Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend;

you whom I took from the ends of the earth, and called from its farthest corners, saying to you, “You are my servant, I have chosen you and not cast you off”;

fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

Behold, all who are incensed against you shall be put to shame and confounded; those who strive against you shall be as nothing and shall perish.

You shall seek those who contend with you, but you shall not find them; those who war against you shall be as nothing at all.

For I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, “Fear not, I am the one who helps you.”

Fear not, you worm Jacob, you men of Israel! I am the one who helps you, declares the Lord; your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.

Behold, I make of you a threshing sledge, new, sharp, and having teeth; you shall thresh the mountains and crush them, and you shall make the hills like chaff;

you shall winnow them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the tempest shall scatter them. And you shall rejoice in the Lord; in the Holy One of Israel you shall glory.

Isaiah 41:8-16 (ESV)

I’ve spent a significant portion of the last three years of my life battling discouragement. We all experience it from time to time - that thought that what we’re doing isn’t important, or that nobody cares. Sometimes, it can come from others’ input (or lack of input in some cases), while in other moments we find ourselves being our own worst critic.

I’ve spent the past 8 months on staff at my church, and they have been some of the most rewarding, exciting, epic, and fulfilling months I’ve ever had. At the same time, it has been one of the most chaotic, stressful, and challenging endeavors I’ve ever encountered. I will say this, and you’ll probably hear me say it often if you’re around me: I LOVE MY JOB. It still blows my mind to think that I spend my days working with teenagers, playing music, building tables, Photoshopping my boss’s face onto cartoon characters, and changing lives, and I get paid! That being said, everything is not always that simple. Throughout this year, I’ve discovered the reality of spiritual warfare. Sound fake? I always thought so, too. That is, until I began to see it work against me. I met students whose parents did not want them at church because of their conflicting religious views. I work with teens who are living in a culture where broken families are the norm; where parents and peers place impractical expectations on them that drive them to the depths of depression, despair, and self-harm (I actually have a whole post on this coming soon). I’ve heard comments and rumors about myself from people I hold dear to me, which are aimed at discrediting me or questioning my motives. I’ve physically and emotionally exhausted myself by staying up into all hours of the night with racing thoughts and feelings (hence the 2am blog) and then running at full speed for weeks straight while on empty. All in all, the weight of everything can be rather overwhelming. I’ve found that often, my prayers look a lot like, “God, what the heck did you get me into? Why did you pick me for this?” When you pour your entire life and passion into a cause and a mission, it becomes incredibly easy to get discouraged when things around you seem to be crashing in.

Earlier this month, I had read Isaiah 40. I actually wrote about it as well. After I discovered it one night in a time of need, I began to revisit that passage quite a bit. I began dissecting it. I started to share parts of it with others. When God’s Word speaks to you, your life begins to speak it back. The power of this passage began to stick with me, and it began to dawn on me: “If I can feel my life begin to make sense after reading God’s Word, why don’t I do it more often?” In the past few weeks since, I’ve become fascinated with reading more and more of the Bible. Especially the Old Testament. There’s something about reading something that was composed thousands of years ago and have it jump out with as much clarity as if it were written yesterday. I discovered Isaiah 41 soon after (I mean, that’s logical. It’s the next chapter. Haha). God starts out with explaining to the Israelites that he has chosen them. That word carries a lot of power. God could have used anyone to do the work I’m doing, but he selected me. I find myself overwhelmed by that; not in the “ooh, look at me! I’m the best” sense, but as a child whose father has given him the attention he desires. But here’s the cool part: it doesn’t stop there. God didn’t just tell them he had chosen them and then leave them to fend for themselves. Check out Verse 10, my favorite:

“fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

Often, I feel as if God has thrown me into an arena in my underwear without a sword; a fighter whose weaknesses are fully exposed and who has no defense, fully vulnerable to attack and criticism. But God promises us strength. We weren’t meant to do it alone. But at the same time, we can’t be lazy. Verse 10 uses the words “strengthen”, “help”, and “uphold”. I watched Evan Almighty last night. Morgan Freeman (God) spoke to a character who was struggling, and shared the idea that “God [doesn’t just] give a man courage, but the opportunity to be courageous.” I’ve seen that movie many times, but last night it jumped out on me. We talk sometimes in Christian circles about God fighting our battles for us, when in reality we are given the opportunity to rely on him for the strength needed to take on our enemies. Verse 15 says that God gives us the strength to completely demolish the mountains and make chaff (waste) out of them. That’s huge.

I still don’t fully comprehend the mission God has created me to fulfill. And I don’t think I ever fully will. But my prayer is that I would continue to seek refuge in Him, that my strength would be renewed and in turn I would be able to share this glorious reward with others.

And if our God is for us,

then who could ever stop us?

And if our God is with us,

then what can stand against?

lake walks, part 1.

There's this bench that I recently discovered in my neighborhood. I've been living here for almost 8 months and am barely starting to discover all that this neighborhood has to offer. Mostly, because my late night sleeplessness leads me to hop in my car and drive aimlessly, usually in pursuit of food. Right now, I have no car. And so I walk. I never walked recreationally much until I moved to north Fresno. To be honest, I thought the idea of moving from one location to another without the idea of trying to get to the next destination to be a little lame. I mean, sure, I walked places before, but it was usually out of necessity. I think I've discovered that at this point, walking and running are a new necessity to me. My neighborhood is a giant 2.5 mile circle. I'll always end up back home.

I've started walking more in my restlessness. Life has this habit of keeping me up late at night thinking, and at most times over thinking. When God doesn't immediately give me the answers I need, I wander and become restless. I start believing that perhaps if I stay up longer, walk a bit, write a bit, whatever, then God will tell me what I need to do and it'll all be immediately fixed.

I stumbled across Isaiah 40 tonight. The entire chapter is incredibly powerful, but this passage stuck out to me:

27 Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”? 28 Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. 29 He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. 30 Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; 31 but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.

The idea that God gives strength to those who wait is a difficult concept for me. I HATE waiting. For over a year now, I feel like I've been waiting. But as I sit here and think about it, my waiting has not been out of trust. It's been out of a lack of options. I've felt forced to wait, which has led to bitterness. Part 2 of verse 31 says that for those who wait, God will "renew their strength." That's HUGE. I haven't felt strength in an awfully long time.

As I continue through this trying season of life, my prayer is that God would renew my heart to remember to wait on him. To delight in letting Him work, and in not relying on myself. Because I've proven time and time again that I have little strength of my own.

I may be weak, but his Spirit is strong in me.

"And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28 ESV)