The Truth is Enough

Learned about the truth behind the Council of Nicaea and the reason for a creed. Have known the creed all my life, but it means nothing if you don't know why you say it. Chills as we read the creed together in church today. Such amazing history! And the telephone game of today when it comes to attacks on beliefs and doctrine is prominent and dangerous and needs to be corrected. What do you believe about God? And what's your source?

Happy Sunday!

What Jesus do you worship? Faith-Filled Fridays

Our pastor's sermon on Sunday is very critical to take away pre-conceived ideas about Christians and who they worship. It's telling of the times, and the confused ideas about who Jesus was/is.

Which Jesus do you believe in?

Click Here To Watch: Five Jesus'?

Bully Mind Games

Mama bear came OUT the other day.

While I can talk peace and negotiations on almost all issues...when someone physically and emotionally harms my kid and gets away with it? I see red.

So when my teen son comes home and says a kid physically "bullied" him unprovoked, and I see the wounded pride and fear in his eyes, my mind scrambles any intelligent advice I should give.

Thank God this parenting thing is a two person gig around here.

Because, while I hadn't really had much experience with being physically bullied, my husband had. And he knew the feelings and the mindset of both the bully and the bullied. He also knew that our son, who has had an extremely tough year, was at a crossroads. We'd seen a confident young man allow image, insecurity, and meanness steal his joy and his love of being a kid. Eighth grade has been awful around here...just as it was for me. And my heart has been hurting for my son for a very long time. My husband told me that our son would have to stand up for himself if he had any chance at getting past his extremely large internal hurdle. But what did that look like? I didn't know.

The next morning, fully prepared to storm into the principal's office if my son so happened to defend himself (as I shamefully advised in my effort to "equip" my son), I overheard my husband prepping him before the bus arrived.

"Be confident. Even if you're scared to death inside, be confident. Stare the guy in the eye when you see him. Don't let him see you scared. Be prepared to defend yourself, and don't let him intimidate you."

Most of all, my son left the house knowing that if it came to it, he had full permission to defend himself, and his parents were on his side.

That afternoon, my same son, who had admitted to leaving class early the day before to avoid more confrontation with the bully, informed us of his newest encounter.

And he didn't hide this time. He stood tall, and did his best to exude confidence.
When the bully said he was going to fight him after school, my son said,

"Fine."

In class, my son stared the dude down (I can imagine the look as he often gives it to his younger brothers...scary)! And just as his father told him, my son used his mind before his fists and had a very tall, bulky friend stick by his side after school. The bell rang, and they waited around in the hallway-- the bully and his friends on one side and my son and a friend on the other side. Waiting. Probably wondering...probably fighting away nerves inside.

Finally, my son looked the bully in the eye once more and said,

"So, are you going to fight me?" 

And you know what happened?

The bully walked away. THE BULLY WALKED AWAY!

After my son's glorious retelling, I don't think I've ever seen my husband so stunned, my son so at peace, and I've never felt so dang proud of both my son and my husband.

Mind Games won. Even if my son shrunk into the corner the day before, he went to school with a new weapon: CONFIDENCE. And while my son was ready to defend himself (with our permission...sorry if you don't agree) and he used back up...knowing he would be defended by his extremely kind friend who said he would...it never came to that.

IT came down to a bully wanting a wimp to dump on his brokenness and frustration with life, and what he got was a no-nonsense, get-what-you-asked-for response from my son.

Thanks to my husband who knew the mind games needed, and kudos to my son who FINALLY listened to his father!

A character('s) study: #amwriting

"when fiction dances with humanity 

"She'd trip up often, when she was aware of the absent obstacle, the soaring strength of her heart beating its steady, fluid rhythm even at the prod of old emotional bullies.

There was a frenzy only for a split second, as she checked herself to be sure the obstacle truly had disappeared. Her heart didn't wrestle like it used to, and she could hardly pinpoint when that change had occurred.

Her tears were nowhere to be found when old pricks tried to draw blood. One blink, two blinks, and she kept walking forward without another thought to the thing that once made her wretch, sob, and claw from her soul to her skin, feeling raw and beaten. It was only a brush of a shadow now, a flit of memory, a single cloud passing by on a rather cloudless day. For a second, the subtlety would usher up fear that her heart might be callous and hard, but then, she'd remember the journey, the growth, and the things that had died to give her a second chance to live with hope.

Maybe strength truly did arise from pain.

Maybe beauty was the treasure left after the ashes.

Maybe was too weak.

She knew. Strength was beauty, and beauty was left after the ashes fled to their rightful place again. With the wind, the breath of God blew them away to show the gem He'd never abandoned, He'd never forsaken, but the treasure He refined through the pain and sorrow."

My Journey to the Color of Ash: Faith-Filled Friday

A friend told me she was adding verse mapping to her life for Lent. Instead of taking something away, she wants to give something to God. I loved this idea. So I am copycatting and committing to verse mapping again.

I decided to start in the gospels at Palm Sunday, and go through to the end of each. As I turned to Palm Sunday the day after attending the Ash Wednesday service at my church, I thought to myself, This feels like I am jumping ahead of the Lenten season...reading Palm Sunday now? I was just marked with the ashes to remind me of my lowly, dust-derived state desperately in need of a Savior and have 33 days until Palm Sunday.

But with the beauty of verse mapping, and the Holy Spirit, I discovered that I was in the exact place of the Bible that I needed to be for the ashes to truly gain significance.

I actually went way before the gospels, to the prophesy of Palm Sunday--Zechariah 9:9. And somehow, in my study, within the verses before and after, I discovered the ash, the marking that had been on my forehead, the symbol used for men and women in the past who were described in the same way as Christ upon the donkey:

Lowly. Humble. Poor. Afflicted.

There was something more that God was trying to show me. I felt frustrated as I found possible
symbolism that seemed to be just between the words I studied. I kept searching, and I wondered if I was making it up. But I know, there is something more...something so beautiful and mysterious that to find it would dig deeper than I had ever gone. Maybe deeper than anyone has ever gone. And that's when I became resolute in my study, and surrendered the curiosity to mystery. Maybe there was nothing there. But I doubt that. Only because God has taught me that He truly is even more grand than what is written in the black and white of a page. Verse mapping Zechariah gave me a feeling of rubbing through the black and white to discover a new color beneath the page...a color nobody has ever seen. A color that I couldn't see but knew could be there.

And it really all started with the obedience of a church, filling a man-made tradition, or two, to revere a Holy God. Ash Wednesday and Lent have become something treasured in my heart this year...more than ever before.


The pastor was clear in stating that Ash Wednesday is not found in the Bible. That we keep this tradition because it adds to our walk in Christ, and reminds us who we are and Who He is.

But in my verse mapping on Palm Sunday, I discovered more to the ash and the tradition. The ashes are a humanity-old symbol--something used time and again throughout Scripture. The ashes are the black of a human heart in mourning, the dust of a dry, pitiful soul, and the outward symbol of a lowly, afflicted man in need of a Savior...a Savior who came to us, lowly and afflicted.