Mutiny against excess?

I love to read, but I have to read something that effects me. I have to be challenged, stirred, compelled by what I read. I am sitting here with my 'child's training Bible' supplies, accompanied by "The Explicit Gospel" and "not mere words" strewn out across my bed, ordering another book on Amazon, "7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess"....... while echos of the words of transition for me, starting with "Blue Like Jazz", "Searching for God Knows What", "Crazy Love", "Forgotten God", "Radical", and "Broken Walls" haunt my all too comfortable assumption of what exactly the Gospel is, I let the words resound in my thoughts, ".... Mutiny against excess." My immediate retaliation to this harsh sentence is, "but I like the excess." 

My thoughts reel to my closet, a few feet from me and I number the excess in my head. Close to 50. 50. Pairs. Of. Shoes. Honestly, oh boy do I like the excess! Let me continue to expound on this romance between the excess and myself. I keep two to three purses in my car, always. A black one, a brown one and a wild card, just to keep things interesting. It rides in my front seat. I like to match. I also own around 50 different dresses. All sorts. I am excessive. Our family owns 7 ipods, not including our iPhones that double as iPods. iPod ouchess, nanos, whatever that other one is. I like the excess. No, as I say that, the pit of my stomach rolls. I LOVE the excess. There is a line in a song, " And we're waiting but our eyes are wandering To all this earth holds dear Look at all the pretty things That steal my heart away 

I can feel I'm fading 'Cause Lord I love so many things That keep me from Your face Come and save me." 
Ouch. 
I would like to say I am not attached to these things of the world, but I am. I LOVE Jesus. But I also love shoes. I love good food. I love nice things. I love Starbucks. I love  my iPhone. I love things, you guys. This doesn't sound as dirty as it feels in my heart. Don't get me wrong, I have no second thought about giving things that I have away or handing money to perfect strangers- as  a matter of fact, it is one of my greatest joys. I love blessing people. It's unlike anything I do. But I am talking about me and my things. Some of you will think, there is nothing wrong with enjoying things. There isn't, at all. But if I am perfectly honest with myself before the Holy Spirit I know these things still mean so much more to me than they should. I am still sharing the place in my heart that belongs completely to the most high God, alone with something manufactured and mass produced. I am a silly, simple being. 
I still can't excuse myself from loving the Lord and the ways, the words of the Lord more than the things of this earth. I tell myself all the time that I say I believe what the Bible says, and try to behave as though I do, yet I know the deep caverns of my heart that are stored up with love and desire for things of this earth. I am referring, even, to the music and entertainment I am willing to subject the Holy Spirit in me to. I do believe the deeper into this whole Jesus-walk I get that when He said, You can't be lovers of the world and lovers of God He meant it. I feel the velcro- tear effect inside myself every day. 

When He said,

 "You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, 

a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light." He meant it. When He said,  "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you..." He meant it. We are HIS. We are set apart. We are appointed to be different. We are to love different things than the world does. Do we have to sell all of our possessions and live on a plantation with everyone we are related to and use horse drawn carts. I don't know. If the Lord calls you to it, then yes. But I do know this, I am to love the Lord, my God with all of my heart, all of my mind, and all of my strength and all of my soul.... which is not so coincidentally followed by loving my neighbor as myself. If loving my neighbor as myself means letting go of the excess to provide for them what they need, then yes- let go of the excess. Sacrifice. Forsake yourself. The temptation to calculate how much money we would have in excess for frivolous things if we did NOT tithe and give faithfully in the areas that the Lord has led us to give in is never too far away, but we have established that all we have is the Lord's. We are only stewards of it. Here is my challenge to you- let the Lord highlight the excess and instruct you in what ways you are to love your 'neighbors' as yourselves by releasing the places in your heart that you hold the things of this world dear and by loving him with all of your heart, all of your mind....and all of your possessions. I have to ask, how often do our possessions possess us? In an economy where nearly all of us are in debt, at the very least paying a mortgage, a vehicle payment, etc., are we not enslaved by the things we own? Our HEARTS can only afford to be and must be enslaved to the only good master, who is loving and good enough to supernaturally transpose us from slaves to co-heirs.

My Happily Ever After is crooked....

I have several pictures hanging on one of my living room walls. Hanging above all of them is the phrase "Happily Ever After". A few days ago I noticed it wasn't level and I thought to myself, "My happily ever after is crooked," but then the Lord brought to my attention, " isn't that always how it is." 
It occurred to me the expectations, the dreams, the 'happily ever after' we fabricate in our hearts growing up. When we arrive at adulthood we can usually sum up the reality of our lives vs. the way we thought it would turn out with the sentence, 'My happily ever after is crooked.' Where we find ourselves isn't exactly the castle,  sunshine streaming through the windows, with our Prince Charming's white horse parked outside. 
Hear me out, because this is potentially an awesome thing, once we surrender the disappointment and embrace what we HAVE been blessed with. I will confess to you, I never saw myself having children or being married, and on the off chance that it did happen, I never saw it happening the way it has. I was always convinced I didn't 'want' children, which for many years has been the underlying attitude towards my position in motherhood. Somewhere, though, the Lord must have known the deeper desires of my heart better than I did. Through the events that are my four children I've come to terms with the fact that it was not my children that were unwanted but the endless hard work, heart wrenching pain, and inevitable failure that I had associated with family life. I can not imagine doing anything of more value with my life. The Lord has shown me such clear glimpses of his tenderness, goodness, and love for me through the journey of parenting my own children. My imagined crown of precious metals and jewels is, in reality, made of construction paper and macaroni noodles. Here are a few noodles in my crown that have showed me the happiness of my story being written outside of the source of my own hand.


Earlier today Titus brought me my Bible that had been sitting on the couch and said, " I want to sit in your lap. What is this book?" 

Even though he may not have realized it in his two year old understanding, this was a loaded question and symbolized what he, along with our other three children will be asking us their whole lives. 

"What is this book?" May the Holy Spirit give me the utmost ability to communicate the answer to that question every precious minute I have to respond to his inquiry. The story my life reads will dictate the 'happily ever after' my children formulate in their own hearts. By the grace of God it will read one that encourages them to let their expectations rest fully on Him.

Titus was in the front yard, I went out to the front porch and sat down. He had moved his chair off of the porch onto the side walk and turned around to say, " Come sit with me, mommy." My initial instinct was to say, "You come sit with me." The Lord stopped me and showed me how important it is to meet our children where they are because that is what He does with us. Father God has been ever patient in meeting me where I was at the time simply because I asked him to come sit with me. He has known the times I would not have been able to meet him any where other than the place I was because disappointment can be a crippling force in our lives if we allow it to be. 

So while I suffered for years from the delusion that my 'happily ever after' was crooked I have seen that I was simply reading from the wrong book. When I surrendered my 'way', my will, my dreams to His perfect love for me I found that nothing could make me any happier than where I am at this moment.