Sovereignty

Photo by Timon Studler.

I pray and I hope that God will provide. When He does, I am glad and when He doesn’t it can be frustrating.

I forget that just because God doesn’t show up in the way I expect Him to doesn’t mean He has abandoned me. My expectations and preconceptions of the Lord do not verify the gospel or determine the existence of God. My hopes and imaginations are vain and fleeting.

If anything, I am the one who abandons God when I decide He isn’t there after my wishes aren’t met.

I am deeply selfish. The human race is driven by self. Our disappointment with the Father is burrowed inside of this ego. The gospel is solidified by the Living Word of God, what we say or think about it does not change that. Believing it doesn’t make it true and disbelieving in it doesn’t make it false. It is a clear sign of self-absorption to think that things are correct because I’ve decided on my own they’re correct. I’m not God. Despite the claims of humanists all around the world, no one can assume the position of a divine being who curves the shape of earth and chooses to make gravity a thing.

There is only One Heavenly Father and He is sovereign.

The gospel is an honest account of history. It’s written in the pages of humanity, in the cells of our bodies, in the growth of a forest, and in the fire of galaxies. Most of all, in His Book.

I thank Jesus for His boundlessness.

My feelings are varied and my realm of comprehension is limited. My soul stops at the epidermis on my arms and my chest, my heart is caged within my ribs, my brain is bottled up inside my skull.

He is constant and He is alive and He is with us. Even when we misunderstand Him and we run, He will still pursue us and wait eagerly at the gate for our return.

Oh thank you Jesus. What a beautiful thing.

Joel 2:13 "Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love."

Back to Earth

Sometimes I forget that Christianity is more than the tallest church steeple and the prettiest Sunday clothes. I get caught up in the sweetness of notes sung by the choir and the whiteness of the paint along the foyer walls. Is the wine good? Is the bread soft enough to break? Have the organ tuned. Align the pews.

I am brought back to earth by the sound of a blue jay in the magnolia tree. It is the perfect hymn. The dew in the grass moistens my heels. The wind is rough against my face and it stirs the flower beds.

I am reminded by all this where the heart of God lies.

Not only in the caverns of well vacuumed sanctuaries that smell like your grandmother’s living room or in gaudy chapels where Michelangelo once stood. He is here among us.

In my home where my mom hums as she cooks dinner. Wafting through the aisles on the subway. Deep in the ICU of Memorial Hermann. He is close by during the monotonous routines we keep day by day. His sorrow rests on the hearth of my fireplace after I fight with my sister. He listens to my broken song echoing through the tile of the shower. He’s awake in the early lull of dawn before most of the population has thrown off their sheets and flipped their pancakes. At 3 a.m. when I am writhing with sadness and pain, tears puddling on my pillow, He is gentle with my soul. Arms cradling my body, He gives me the kind of peace that nations crave and mothers can conjure with the recipe of hot tea and the creak of a rocking chair.

Every second he is with us burning with love for our souls.

When my scalp is not clean and my church dress is wrinkled, I have a Father who jumps up at my entrance because He sees beyond the scalp and the dress and the soft bread and the taste of the wine during the Lord’s supper, His eyes see the souls behind the skin and the bones. He is in us when we ask Him to be. He is there at our beckoning call.

Zephaniah 3:17 

"The Lord your God is in our midst, a mighty One who will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness; He will quiet you by His love; He will exult over you with loud singing."

The Illusion

Don’t give in to the illusion. The white picket fence life. The women on the front page of magazines. The next iPhone or android that you just have to have. There’s a prescription for how your life is supposed to look on the front pages of journals and books, on billboards and commercials. A model of who you’re destined to be on Instagram and snapchat and Facebook, recipes for how you’re expected to turn out, who you “should” be and how and when.

It’s nice to gaze at on your walls in pictures or in the windows of shops while you’re walking down the street, but it’s not the only way to live. We aren’t made to be the same. None of us are exhibits in a museum for others to gaze at through a glass window, disconnected and unmoving. We’re humans. The world feeds us this constant diet of what our lives need to become, and some of us just surrender. No more yielding to the collective hopes and aspirations of society; if they aren’t yours, find what’s pumping your heart and moving your muscles in the morning. Find God. Tell Him things. Anything. Release the pressures brought upon us by people who don’t care about the well-being and soon-to-come future in our lives.

What does your mind wander to when you’re alone? Talk about it, look around for it. Revive the healthy portion of your personality that has been lulled to sleep by the world. Sink into the mold you were born for.

I’m honestly talking to myself here. I get it. I have to remind myself every day, and I hope this encourages you. If the white picket fence life is for you, then go get some wood and paint, chop it up and put it around your house. This post is simple, it’s just about throwing out all the extras, the scraps that aren’t a part of your personality. Whatever God calls you to do. Do it.

He’s invested a bunch of oxygen and time and space into you and one day the oxygen and the time and the space will run out so just be who He made you to be. Wear the old dress your grandmother gave you because you love it. Speak up about your beliefs regarding utilitarian views in that one philosophy class you signed up for. If you’re a history nerd, then read all the dang history books in the library just because you like it. Every day, every year, people steal this precious, one in a million wealth of individuality that inhabits each and every one of us, the makeup of our hearts. The people who do that are replacing us with some man-made synthetic imitation of whatever they feel is perfect.

Those people are dumb. Do not listen to them. Save yourselves and be free.

Portrait

Photo by Madison Musser 

I want to be my own portrait. Every line and curve of my face formed gently by a greater paintbrush. Creases and freckles have been lightly added as time passes. The Painter is not finished with me. Over the years, He adds depth and meaning to the image. One more color, another aspiration. Pink is dabbed faintly across my skin, love has been discovered. Strokes of sadness begin to show up underneath the eyes. There is a hot and heavy red spot on my left cheek, a mark of pain. He finger paints the rest, even the asymmetrical smile, the crooked teeth, an eye that is slightly bigger than the other eye.

My portrait is near another, and another, and another. The gallery is vast and diverse. A beautifully crafted assortment of lives, hopes, dreams, futures. The Painter is great and creative, the only reason any of us are still breathing is because He chose to trace the lungs we use to inhale and exhale. He touches the picture with life. He adds your love for espresso, or your hopes to travel to India. Beginnings happen because He is the beginning, and endings are there because He is there.

I often pretend to perfect the images He paints. My own strokes are faint and imperfect. When I ask for His colors though, He never says no. Softly, the bland hues I tried to make are washed away and I am new.

We can all be new. Just one question, one act of repentance. He will take the bucket of white paint, and toss it against the deformed image we created on our own.

And then we are clean. Then we are white as snow.

"In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace." Ephesians 1:7

Pursuit of Happiness

By Madison Musser

It starts in the home. Most people teach their kids that the pursuit of happiness is the key. Sometimes not even with words, just with how they model their lives. From there we can find it in schools and textbooks. Kids are raised to want happiness. We tell them to work hard and dream big.

After high school, people continue to pursue their dreams. They think, “If only I can be happy. I’ll be alright.” They get married in hopes of a greater happiness and they achieve their ambitions to pursue it. It’s practically pummeled into our brains since birth. It’s all we know.

In some ways, this can be dangerous. 

Being happy is not the issue here. Im talking about the dangers of a closed mind. It’s a narrow mindset to think that everything we do is in pursuit of happiness. There’s an intersubjective agreement in the Western world that happiness is the ultimate peak of living and I find this extremely alarming. It leads to a phobia of sadness and pain and all other feelings or experiences that do not lead to complete happiness. It’s crippling. We end up handicapped with this mindset that our lives are useless without some end result of never ending pleasure. If we fear this exposure to failure, hurt, irritation, or any other feelings other than happiness, then we fear health. If we are scared of experiences that will wear down our beating hearts, then we are scared of living.

Without the parts of our lives that leave us scarred and bleeding, without the moments of failure, or the time when you yelled at your sister, when you ran the red light and totaled your truck, after your best friend stopped talking to you, or you were fired from the tea room because you sucked at cutting pastries, without any of this we would be lost. We would be in complete darkness. These moments teach us how to live, and without them we wouldn’t know how to hold a pencil or brush our teeth. At some point there was a time when we messed up and held the pencil wrong or failed to put the toothpaste on correctly.

Every point of living should be like that. When we’re happy, we don’t always learn very much. We celebrate all the wrong things. We should celebrate this learning experience that we call life just as it is with all its cuts and bruises because that’s the end result right there.

Something my dad used to say when I would complain about a worn out shirt or my old skateboard was, “It’s better because it’s got character.” And I think that goes for people too. 

By Madison Musser

"I think the things we want most in life, the things we think will set us free, are not the things we need." - Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz