Mindful of Christ - envy

Like a red hot poker shoved into my soul is envy

a piercing burning that goes straight to the core

of the deepest levels of who I am and what I long for

Oh Lord, it hurts

coming suddenly and unexpectedly

a sudden boiling swirling typhoon of the soul


the pain of what I deeply wish and long for

but has not been granted


what I think would make things better
would make me better

what you have not given at this time
and quite possibly might not give

Oh Lord, I don't want this green poison in me
choking out you and blinding me toall the good you have so graciously given me

1 Corinthians 4:7-8The Message (MSG)

7-8 For who do you know that really knows you, knows your heart? 
And even if they did, is there anything they would discover in you that you could take credit for?

 Isn’t everything you have and everything you are sheer gifts from God? 

So what’s the point of all this comparing and competing? 
You already have all you need.
You already have more access to God than you can handle. 
Without bringing either Apollos or me into it, you’re sitting on top of the world—at least God’s world—and we’re right there, sitting alongside you!

"Isn't everything you have and everything you are sheer gifts from God?"

Yes, everything, everything is a gift from you

You are the source of all life, all goodness, all everything that I need

You give different gifts to different people at different times in our lives

stop comparing

we all need you, desperately and deeply

we all receive from you, deeply and generously

What you want most to give, is YOURSELF

What I need most right here and now is YOU

You alone can cool the burning

You alone can fill to the brim and even overflowing with your love

your care, your goodness, your peace, your kindness, your self-control

your hope, your joy

Galatians 5The Message (MSG)

The Life of Freedom

5 Christ has set us free to live a free life...

13-15 It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. 

For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?

16-18 My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit. Then you won’t feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don’t you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?

19-21 It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.

This isn’t the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kingdom.

22-23 But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.

23-24 Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way. Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good—crucified.

25-26 Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original.

Dear Lord,

there is so much in this passage that I need to hear and deep down absorb.

please help me to receive your words

to trust and receive you into our deepest parts

whatever pain we are experiencing right now

you want to set us free to know your love for us   deeply     truly

and to be enabled to love others

help me right now where I am today to receive the gift of your love

of your Holy Spirit 

to let your fruit grow in my life and let go of all I am clinging to to try to desperately meet my deep need of you

you give me yourself

you hold nothing back

you intend good for me

fill me with you

and your love 

enable me to love 

you are the greatest gift

i love you Lord

amen

mindful of Christ - Pain and Anger

I hurt

I am angry

very angry

26 “Be angry, and do not sin” James 1:20

how is this possible???

to be hurt and angry is not sin itself

but what do i do when I am here??

Thank you Thank you
you don't tell me
its no big deal
just let it go
why are you so upset

you don't deny that to be human is at times to be like a wounded animal
deeply wounded
in great pain
thrashing around
(Psalm 73:21-24)

the deep cry for justice
for care
for healing

you do not diminish or dismiss

You see all
You know all

in this
in this very place
I am known
I am seen
I am loved

Genesis 16:13The Message (MSG)

13 She answered God by name, praying to the God who spoke to her, 

“You’re the God who sees me!

“Yes! He saw me; and then I saw him!”

yes here is a woman in a very unjust and hard place 

yet you saw her

you loved her

you sought her out

you cared

you gave her hope and a promise for the future

it was a messy and terrible situation

she was suffering the effects of others choices

But God saw her

God loved her

not for anything she was 

not for anything she did

Because  YOU ARE LOVE

Jesus came to seek and save that which is lost

Oh Lord seek us out in our deep pain and strong anger

we need you

only you can heal, comfort and turn us from the path of wrath and destruction

You are the God who judges righteously

not in our time or way

But you see all

you know all

you put all on Christ

the sins of all

He took on and bore

to the death

there is forgiveness with you 

that you may be wondered at

You want to work in me 

and in this situation/relationship

in ways i could never imagine

if I let you work in me

right here 

right now

in the middle of this hot mess

James 1:20New King James Version (NKJV)

20 for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

19-21 Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear. God’s righteousness doesn’t grow from human anger. So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life. 

James 1: 19-21 The Message


Write:
What is hurting?
Where is the pain?

Why am i angry?

what do I want ?
what do I need?

How can I see You who sees me right here and right now?

Yes, Lord, help me to let go of my wrath that will only make things worse
help me to see you suffering to redeem me instead of the sources of my pain and anger
help me to leave all this with you the Righteous Judge
make me your instrument of peace and healing
make me a salvation garden
so others can see you
i love you
Amen

related post :Do You See This Woman?

mindful of Christ - Fear

I am afraid

of so many things

people's hearts failing from fear

paralyzed and drowning in fear

How many times you say,

Don't be afraid

Fear Not

perfect love casts out fear  I John 4:18

only you are perfect

only your love is perfect

help me to believe and receive 

You

your perfect love

19 It was the first day of the week. That evening Jesus’ followers were together. The doors were locked, because they were afraid of the Jews.

 Then Jesus came and stood among them. 

He said, “Peace be with you!”

20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side....

24 Thomas (called Didymus) was not with the followers when Jesus came. Thomas was 1 of the 12. 25 The other followers told Thomas, “We saw the Lord.”

But Thomas said, “I will not believe it until I see the nail marks in his hands. And I will not believe until I put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into his side.”

26 A week later the followers were in the house again. Thomas was with them. The doors were locked, but Jesus came in and stood among them.

 He said, “Peace be with you!”

 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand here in my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

28 Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” 

 John 20:19 - 20 International Children's Bible

What Jesus gave to Thomas was himself

"put your finger here.

look at my hands. 

put your hand here in my side"

In the midst of my grief and struggles and terrors

YOU come saying, 'Peace be with you!"

YOU offer to me

not reasons

or explanations 

or my why's answered

or any security

except  YOURSELF

You invite me to touch YOU

where you were pierced

where you were rejected by those you came to love and save

where you were cruelly mocked and scorned

where you despised and abandoned 

even by your Heavenly Father

"My God! My God! Why have you Forsaken Me?"

Yes LORD

I see you

there is peace in you alone

Your love reaching out to me in a broken and scarred body

your willingness to suffer

not because you had to 

but because you chose to love

Because YOU ARE LOVE

You love me and have promised to be with me

no matter what

He loved his own until the end

Now before the Passover Feast, Jesus knew that His hour had come [and it was time] for Him to leave this world and return to the Father. Having [greatly] loved His own who were in the world, He loved them [and continuously loves them with His perfect love] to the end (eternally). John 13"1  Amplified

Write:

When feeling afraid - what am i feeling fear about?

what am I afraid of?

express it in words to you who love me

tell you all about it

See you and your perfect love

Isaiah 53

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+53

1 John 4:18aNew King James Version (NKJV)

18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear,

Can I See Your Face?

Can I see your face?

What I really need is to see You, O Lord

there is so much I do not understand

so much that is painful for me to try to look squarely at and understand

so much that is bewildering and confusing


Thank you

you don't call me to be wise or understanding in myself

when I don't know what to think or say really -  that's okay


You have called me to know You

To see who You are

You invite me to see your beauty

to be drawn into your wonder

only You truly amaze



Oh Lord,
I am tired, and feeling lost
help me to turn away from all else

to look upon you in all your loveliness

You invite me like Thomas to see your scarred hands
to touch your wounded side

you were wounded in the house of your friends

rejected and despised by those you came to save

you understand the grief and bewilderment that betrayal brings

it is by your wounds that we are healed

But even more than this

You invite us to look up into your face

to see the glory of the Father shining out

14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

15 John bore witness of Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is preferred before me, for He was before me.’”

16 And[e] of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace. 17 For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son,[f] who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.

Help us to be daily in your word so we can see you afresh day by day

Amen

Atlas Quit

crushing weight
an unbearable load
I was never meant to be carrying

the weight of the world on my shoulders
trying to keep myself and those I love safe
desperately trying to avert disaster on every side

this is exhausting and never ending



there is someone bigger than Atlas
much much bigger than Atlas

one to whom the nations are as a drop in the bucket

the weight of the world is nothing to these shoulders

let him be God
let him be God

letting go of trying to control

fear which drives me

Cease striving
and know that
I am God

Be still
and know that
I am God

 Psalm 46:10

Attention, all! See the marvels of God!

   
“Step out of the traffic! Take a long,
    loving look at me, your High God,
    above politics, above everything.”

Psalm 46:10 The Message

let me only fear to be separated from you
to let sin harden my heart so I can no longer receive from you

let me fear nothing else
Roman 8

8 1-2 With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

3-4 God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.

The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.

5-8 Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.

9-11 But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!

12-14 So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!

15-17 This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!

...

26-28 Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.

29-30 God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.

31-39 So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture:

They kill us in cold blood because they hate you.
We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.

None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.

link to all of Psalm 46  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+46&version=MSG

link to all of Romans 8  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+46&version=MSG

Do You See This Woman?

36 One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him. Jesus went into the Pharisee’s house and sat at the table. 37 A sinful woman in the town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house. So she brought an alabaster jar of perfume. 38 She stood at Jesus’ feet, crying, and began to wash his feet with her tears. She dried his feet with her hair, kissed them many times and rubbed them with the perfume. 39 The Pharisee who asked Jesus to come to his house saw this. He thought to himself, “If Jesus were a prophet, he would know that the woman who is touching him is a sinner!”

40 Jesus said to the Pharisee, “Simon, I have something to say to you.”

Simon said, “Teacher, tell me.”

41 Jesus said, “There were two men. Both men owed money to the same banker. One man owed the banker 500 silver coins.[a] The other man owed the banker 50 silver coins. 42 The men had no money; so they could not pay what they owed. But the banker told the men that they did not have to pay him. Which one of the two men will love the banker more?”

43 Simon, the Pharisee, answered, “I think it would be the one who owed him the most money.”

Jesus said to Simon, “You are right.” 44 Then Jesus turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? When I came into your house, you gave me no water for my feet. But she washed my feet with her tears and dried my feet with her hair. 45 You did not kiss me, but she has been kissing my feet since I came in! 46 You did not rub my head with oil, but she rubbed my feet with perfume. 47 I tell you that her many sins are forgiven. This is clear because she showed great love. But the person who has only a little to be forgiven will feel only a little love.”

48 Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”

49 The people sitting at the table began to think to themselves, “Who is this man? How can he forgive sins?”

50 Jesus said to the woman, “Because you believed, you are saved from your sins. Go in peace.”   Luke 7:36-50 

Footnotes:

1. 7:41 silver coins A Roman denarius. One coin was the average pay for one day’s work.

International Children’s Bible (ICB)

The Holy Bible, International Children’s Bible® Copyright© 1986, 1988, 1999, 2015 by Tommy Nelson™, a division of Thomas Nelson. 

Do You See This Woman?

Simon saw only a sinful woman

repulsive, undesired, rejected

But Jesus truly sees us as who we really are

both the need, the failure, the shame 

and who He means for us to be by his grace

What He Saw

O Praise you

What Jesus saw was a lost child coming home

What He saw was love and worship

gratitude and faith

What He saw was a gift that ministered to Him

The Gifts

"... you gave me no water for my feet. But she washed my feet with her tears and dried my feet with her hair.

 45 You did not kiss me, but she has been kissing my feet since I came in! 

46 You did not rub my head with oil, but she rubbed my feet with perfume."

Even her tears,  even her tears

were a blessing to him

her love was a refreshment to Him

her gratitude a beautiful fragrance to anoint him

What Do You See?

How do I see myself, others?

So many ways to see    

        or not see as the case may be....

SEE HIM  and how he sees

then I will see aright

" Then Jesus turned toward the woman and said to Simon,

 “Do you see this woman? 

When I came into your house, you gave me no water for my feet. But she washed my feet with her tears and dried my feet with her hair. 

45 You did not kiss me, but she has been kissing my feet since I came in! 

46 You did not rub my head with oil, but she rubbed my feet with perfume.

 47 I tell you that her many sins are forgiven. This is clear because she showed great love. But the person who has only a little to be forgiven will feel only a little love.”

48 Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”

49 The people sitting at the table began to think to themselves, “Who is this man? How can he forgive sins?”

50 Jesus said to the woman, “Because you believed, you are saved from your sins. Go in peace."