I like to go to the beach every so often. Now, I'm not a fan of swimming so much as I am just sitting and watching the water or walking in the hard sand. Not the awful walk TO the water...that part is the worst. (Walking on squishy dry sand is miserable and a one-way ticket to me twisting an ankle. I'm just saying... Beach volleyball? You guys are so dumb. No thank you.) I like to watch the waves come in and wash over the sand. It's relaxing and makes me feel small...all my problems are so silly.
I went down to the coast of Alabama a few years ago with one of my best friends and her family. She has 4 kids and we packed up the van and away we went. While the car ride deserves it's own blog post (blowing out a tire in Elizabethtown, the baby Scarlett throwing up all over herself and my backpack, screaming children for hours on end...) I want to talk about what it was like to be in the water. We had a beach house literally steps from the Gulf of Mexico. We could see the oil rigs, there was debris from the hurricane on the beach buried under the sand, it was pitch black in the middle of the night. The stars took your breath away. I was swimming with the oldest kid, Jonah, and we were literally being pummeled by the waves. To be fair, we probably shouldn't have even been in the water. The waves were way over my head, we were clinging to each other as we were just tossed around like little ducks in a bathtub. It was awesome. We were laughing so hard, even though it was really scary at times. When we had finally swallowed enough ocean water, we laid on the sand and I picked up some beach wood and drew a picture in the sand. The waves kept coming and washing it away. I gave up, we went inside and moved on with our day.
We do that every time we go to the beach don't we? We use a stick, our finger, a rock, a shoe...and we write in the sand. A message we want to say, but it gets washed away every time. Even if we write it in the miserable-to-walk-in dry sand, it still won't remain. Sand is not a very good place to write things. It's probably the most temporary place I can think of to write something down.
And yet, when we are drawing boundaries in our dating lives, we seem to write things in the sand don't we? We have strong opinions about what we are going to do or not going to do with the opposite sex, but when the time comes to be firm about our boundaries, we suddenly find that they were written in sand and when we look back, they are gone. Or how about our boundaries for what we look at online (read: Pornography)? Or the substances we let in our lives like drugs and alcohol? Or what about our boundaries for the close friends we have? I think it's easy to be general with your boundaries but when you don't set firm and concrete lines, you wind up with a fuzzy line in the sand that is blown away by the wind and water. Before you know it, you are doing things you said you would never do, living in a way you said you would never live, and now you have to go back and try to fix the mistakes you made when you didn't have to make them in the first place. God doesn't set rules and restrictions on us because He wants to control us, He places them on us to protect us from heartache and shame. You know that old adage, "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission" that I've heard my whole life? Don't believe it. It's better to not have regrets and to be called a loser than to ignore God's love for you by doing whatever you want in your life. I know that sounds harsh. I'm feeling the conviction in my own heart too. Boundaries are so important in our lives...so take some time and be specific with them.
Oh, and maybe draw them in some wet cement instead of wet sand.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Blink and It's Gone
February seemed to fly past me at a blinding pace. Last I looked I was just remarking that it was the end of January, and now I missed all of February. Whoops.
February is a crazy month in the world of youth ministry at my church, so that accounts for why I was MIA for the past 30 days. We take our teens on a three day retreat--aptly named Snow Camp--and the preparation is brutal for the the two weeks leading up to leaving. Every year we say we are going to start earlier and every year, we never do. This year, our theme was the Hunger Games. It was pretty freaking epic. Our speaker, Brock, talked about how to Overcome things in our lives and the games and activities were District centered and it was a blast. But the decorations were pretty killer (if I do say so myself) and it took many long hours of breathing in black sharpie and spray paint before we were done.
My personal baby of the whole thing is always the Prayer Room. This year, I stepped it up a notch and spent every spare moment I had researching other ministries, Pinterest (I'm not ashamed!!), and creating 5 stations that would be powerful for this group of teens specifically. I spent time praying over each station, praying over each person who would enter the room, praying over each and every burden the teens would carry in there with them. It has been a long three weeks of preparing, and praying, and crafting (LOVE IT) and as I set up the room on Friday afternoon before the kids arrived, I couldn't help but feel like God was going to do big things in the room...not because of me, mind you....but because of the way He has been guiding these teens' hearts to Him for months now and this weekend was the time where they were going to have to finally decide what they were going to do with His presence in their lives. It was an amazing feeling to know that God was ready to move...I just had to be ready to respond to it.
And He did. Hearts were broken, wills were shattered, lines were drawn, and decisions were made. Tears and laughter, heartache and joy, restoration and forgiveness...God was there. But here's the problem. It's over. I had to go into the prayer room on Sunday and take everything down. As my friend Andy and I took everything down, we talked about our debrief groups and how we felt everything went, but part of my heart was really sad knowing that everything was over. Andy and my best friend Lexi (who both came up to be leaders this weekend) will go back to college, the teens will be back in school, I will be back nannying with my kiddos, and we will only interact a few times a week. And this amazing weekend of focusing on God and our relationships with each other is over. It's a bittersweet thing to come down off the mountaintop isn't it? Because the moment I got home, everything became real again and my room was still a mess, and work was still work, and there was still drama to deal with and time didn't slow down or stop for me to dwell in the victory of this God-moment.
Blink and the moment is gone.
The beauty of God-moments, however, is that they can be multiplied a thousand-fold. We can have God-moments anytime, anywhere. By yourself, with friends, alone in a crowd, God will always show up. That's what made this weekend so wonderful for me...because I knew God would be there for some of my teens who have never experienced Him before. And once you taste a God-moment, it becomes easier to sacrifice everything else in your life for Him. Because He is worth all of it. The reward is great...far beyond what we can comprehend or imagine...but again, more on that later!
February is a crazy month in the world of youth ministry at my church, so that accounts for why I was MIA for the past 30 days. We take our teens on a three day retreat--aptly named Snow Camp--and the preparation is brutal for the the two weeks leading up to leaving. Every year we say we are going to start earlier and every year, we never do. This year, our theme was the Hunger Games. It was pretty freaking epic. Our speaker, Brock, talked about how to Overcome things in our lives and the games and activities were District centered and it was a blast. But the decorations were pretty killer (if I do say so myself) and it took many long hours of breathing in black sharpie and spray paint before we were done.
My personal baby of the whole thing is always the Prayer Room. This year, I stepped it up a notch and spent every spare moment I had researching other ministries, Pinterest (I'm not ashamed!!), and creating 5 stations that would be powerful for this group of teens specifically. I spent time praying over each station, praying over each person who would enter the room, praying over each and every burden the teens would carry in there with them. It has been a long three weeks of preparing, and praying, and crafting (LOVE IT) and as I set up the room on Friday afternoon before the kids arrived, I couldn't help but feel like God was going to do big things in the room...not because of me, mind you....but because of the way He has been guiding these teens' hearts to Him for months now and this weekend was the time where they were going to have to finally decide what they were going to do with His presence in their lives. It was an amazing feeling to know that God was ready to move...I just had to be ready to respond to it.
And He did. Hearts were broken, wills were shattered, lines were drawn, and decisions were made. Tears and laughter, heartache and joy, restoration and forgiveness...God was there. But here's the problem. It's over. I had to go into the prayer room on Sunday and take everything down. As my friend Andy and I took everything down, we talked about our debrief groups and how we felt everything went, but part of my heart was really sad knowing that everything was over. Andy and my best friend Lexi (who both came up to be leaders this weekend) will go back to college, the teens will be back in school, I will be back nannying with my kiddos, and we will only interact a few times a week. And this amazing weekend of focusing on God and our relationships with each other is over. It's a bittersweet thing to come down off the mountaintop isn't it? Because the moment I got home, everything became real again and my room was still a mess, and work was still work, and there was still drama to deal with and time didn't slow down or stop for me to dwell in the victory of this God-moment.
Blink and the moment is gone.
The beauty of God-moments, however, is that they can be multiplied a thousand-fold. We can have God-moments anytime, anywhere. By yourself, with friends, alone in a crowd, God will always show up. That's what made this weekend so wonderful for me...because I knew God would be there for some of my teens who have never experienced Him before. And once you taste a God-moment, it becomes easier to sacrifice everything else in your life for Him. Because He is worth all of it. The reward is great...far beyond what we can comprehend or imagine...but again, more on that later!
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