The Verse of the Year
I had not planned anything specific for the New Year’s Eve this year. I just decided to stay home and enjoy the tranquility of my loneliness. But plans changed and I was spending the New Year’s with my roommate and a good friend of mine who was passing by Montreal.
We’d watched a movie and it was close to midnight. We didn’t do the countdown as we’re not that cheesy (yet), but when the last second of the last 2010 years behind us passed and we entered into the 2011th year I took a Bible and told my two friends we should have “The Verse of the Year”. So I opened the Bible, then put my finger on some random verse, then read out loud:
“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” (Deut. 5:8)
We all were sort of surprised that we hadn’t fell on something random like “The sons of Hashum, 223.” (Ezra 2:18) or Romans 11:11 “So I ask, did they stumble in order that they might fall? By no means! Rather through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous.” It’s so very easy to fall on a verse that wouldn’t really fit. But what we got spoke to us in a straightforward manner.
I wish you all lots of grace and truth this year.
7-day Fast
Yeah, I did a seven-day fast and I’m in the process of getting used to eating again. Why? I thought that after 25 years of accumulating bits and pieces of garbage in my body, it was time to flush at least some of it out. I also did it for the challenge… maybe mostly for the challenge.
I started Tuesday night of last week and I broke my fast last night with half an orange. I’ve been eating half oranges all day (well, only two oranges actually!) and I’m looking forward to supper when I’ll steam a small amount of veggies for a meal. I found it weird at noon, it was time to eat half an orange and I just didn’t want to eat it. I felt no need to eat at all, but I forced myself.
I didn’t really plan on fasting for seven days, it just sort of happened. Last Tuesday night, all of the sudden I just felt like I could try fasting for seven days. I hadn’t planned that I’d be spending the weekend at my mom’s and miss all that nice roast beef and potatoes and birthday cakes and chips and chocolate… I think that all I needed was the will to do it and I did it.
The greatest side-effect I had during the fast was that I lost about 10 pounds in the process (which will be regained pretty soon probably!), but apart for weight loss I simply felt weaker walking up stairs, dizzy and faint when I got up too early. Obviously, I wasn’t working during that 7-day period and I only had two classes (on the first and last day of the fast), I wouldn’t have done it if I would have been working or going to school every day.
Anyway, that’s my little story.
Liberty and Love
I’ve been reading and journaling on the book of Romans for a little bit now. Maybe I should have done better to choose a different book. In spite of the fact that I’ve read the book many a time and spent … 20 hours in Bible school studying it, when I take the time to read and understand it, I feel that I only get to see a tiny bit more of the treasure that can be found in this epistle. I was reading W. Graham Scroggie’s ”The Unfolding Drama of Redemption” (that I got for 4$ at Value Village!) as I was walking my way through the book of Romans and last night, commenting on Romans 14, where Paul speaks of the great freedom one can enjoy in Christ and the reality that those who are strong in faith cannot destroy the faith of their fellow brothers and sisters who have different beliefs when it comes to food and special days to observe, Scroggie writes:
There is something greater than liberty, and that is love.
That’s all that needed to be said. I’ve known people who (and I myself do at times) find it difficult to reconcile our freedom in Christ and the fact that we’re called to not be stumbling blocks for our brothers and sisters who don’t have the same thinking. Our freedom is constrained to what other believers think, as if we’d be free to live outside the box but had to live inside it in certain circumstances for the sake of our brothers and sisters’ faith.
Well, Scroggie’s words are quite appropriate here and what’s neat about it is that it reminds us that love indeed is greater than liberty. We would naturally think the other way around, but no, love is indeed greater than liberty and so we’re called to think of loving before thinking of personal freedom.
Sorry if this sounds like a devotional…
“He scarce had said, when the bare Earth, till then Desert and bare, unsightly, unadorn’d, Brought forth the tender Grass, whose verdure clad Her universal Face with pleasant green, Then herbs of every leaf, that sudden flour’d Op’ning thir various colours, and made gay Her bosom smelling sweet…”
John Milton’s Paradise Lost – Book 7, lines 313-319a
I was at the banq (Bibliothèque des Archives Nationales du Québec) today in between my translation and psychology class, reading a book I started two years ago in my English literature course. I only had to read the first two books of John Milton’s Paradise Lost for the course, now I’m working my way through the 12 books that make up the whole book. I was sitting in a comfy banq chair by the large windows facing the bus depot on the third floor and those lines (313-319ff) really struck me.
I don’t know about you but my life can most of the time be defined by Robert Coles’ words: “… the only consistency in my life is my inconsistency”. I know that from the outside I’m a pretty boring and stable person, but inside, my relationship with God and this “new creation” that I am, is more a constant struggle of flesh against Holy Spirit, lots of ups and downs and redefining what I think I believe and being confused and not trusting God enough and not expecting great things from God and wanting to be 24/7 in God’s Word for a few days and then just totally waste my time and not caring about giving Him more than my 25-minute reading and praying a day. I don’t know, that’s just me right now, and it’s been me for … several years. So that’s me, reading those lines of Milton’s book.
At the same time, I think of people around me who are going through some tough times, waiting for God to act on their behalf or freeing them from A, B, C or D, crying over their sins, needing liberation, or bearing some health problem burden when it just seems to get worse or having to deal with some emotionally heavy issue in their lives or having to bear that with someone else. Life’s full of ups and downs and sometimes those downs and struggles, whether they be on a spiritual, relational, emotional or physical level, just seem to be never-ending and impossible to get through, seeing some light just seems impossible, we just don’t see how things could change, how springtime could come.
Milton reminded me that when the earth was still formless and as a “Desert and bare”, God, out of nothing, “Brought forth the tender Grass”. There was nothing to make the earth produce grass and trees and vegetation of its own. Nothing. It was bare like a desert, dry and cold. On its own, the earth was just a mass of I don’t know what without life. But when God simply spoke the word, grass appeared. Life appeared.
I know this sounds cheesy, but I really think that cheesy’s good a lot of the time: No matter the inconsistency I’m going through or the burdens I’m bearing, there’s always, always hope. God speaks and the earth lives. God only needs to will it and springtime appears wherever He desires and that can be in my life, at any level, because of Jesus who became sin for me and covered me with His righteousness so that God’s justice could be satisfied in Him and I, become an heir, a daughter of God. Crazy. That’s why I can’t give up clinging to Him and seeking after Him, because He gives life, He gives healing, even in the most barren of worlds.
Shoes
Yes. I should be doing some reading or studying or homeworking or assignmenting (ahahah the words you can make up), I know. But I feel that it’s all I’m always doing and I actually feel almost guilty when I do anything else than school stuff. But I still need small breaks to retain my sanity. This time, my break project was to present to you my birthday present-to-be, from you to me. Hopefully you were planning on getting me something for my birthday and you were still idea-less. I kind of like talking to “you” ’cause it really might not apply to any of “you” reading this!
So, my shoes are hurting me. I’ll be able to wear them until… well knowing me I could wear them for several months still just ’cause I don’t consider small pain in my feet and legs and getting wet heels when it rains such a big trial. But since it’s my birthday soon I thought I’d grant you the privilege to store one more birthday present idea in your head. But please, don’t buy me shoes! Shoes are like clothes, you don’t buy clothes to people (well, generally) you give them money to that end.
I think myself pretty funny right now, but eh, you’ve been asking for birthday presents ideas!
Oh, I also need a new ink cartridge, pay for my drivers license that I never use, and… that’s about it!
Oh and lastly, here’s a proof I’m turning 25 soon!
Can you see the white hair? Well, I’ve had those for a while now but…
I really am having fun writing all that stuff! But you know, what’s amazing is that I have SO MUCH MORE stuff than needs. That’s so true. I need ink, but I have a printer and a laptop and paper and pens. I need new shoes, but I have socks and nice shoes for teaching and feet to walk and run and jump (I don’t dance!). I need to pay for my drivers license but I have the ability to drive a car, with glasses though… but that means that I have glasses and still don’t need new ones, that shows that I can see! Man, there is no use in counting my needs ’cause they’re so small in comparison with my blessings. God is always good and our Provider.
Psychology’s brighter now
Psychology isn’t brighter (smarter) but the going-to-class looks brighter (isn’t as dark and hopeless as before) now.
I was in class, it was break time. It was good ’cause I needed a break from hearing the usual evolution garbage that I alway hear in my psychology class. Especially when the prof had just explained away why family members had a hard time getting along, basically the parent/child relationship is always easier than e.g. brother/sister or brother/brother relationship because parents and their children share 50% of the same genes whereas siblings only share 25%. The less similar the genes, the more competition you get (competition involves survival, but also stuff like: There are two bedrooms and three children, they’re going to fight to get one of the two bedrooms, food, etc.). So after the prof talked about that for a while, I needed to take a break. I can’t believe how easy it is to replace the word “sin” by “genes” just about everywhere.
So it was break time, I needed to stretch my legs a bit, so I was standing by a door, reading a Piper book entitled Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ. A girl passed by me, obviously looking at my book, then she stepped back and took a closer look at the cover. She then proceeded in asking me, “Are you interested in him?”, so looking at the cover together I said, “You mean, Jesus Christ or John Piper?” So we started talking just to find out she and I were Christians. It didn’t take long before she said, “You’re a Christian eh?”. Crazy. Anyway, I just praise God for this little blessing He’s given me. Just to know that there is someone else who probably has the same kind of perspective on this psychology cheered me up for the rest of the class. We didn’t get to talk so much but I’m sure we’ll get to know each other a bit through this, now brighter, psychology class.
Confession
I really should be reading stuff on second language acquisition or working on my anglicismes assignment, but it’s a grey Saturday. Instead, I’d rather think about confession. I usually would prefer doing assignments than having to think about confession, let alone actually confessing my sins. It’s not something I’m prone to do, it’s not natural for me to want to confess sins, so assignments looks more interesting or at least, easier to deal with than confession.
But confession is good. It’s more than merely ‘good’, I just don’t have the words. I remember that as a teen I’d “confess” my sins (that is, I believed that confession was the ‘reading’ of a list of sins to God) every night and I couldn’t believe how a person could fall asleep without going though that kind of confession. I suppose it wasn’t a bad thing for me to go to God and tell Him the sins I’d done during that day and ask for His forgiveness, but confession has taken on a different meaning or depth maybe in the last few years for me.
Confessing my sins to God (that is, acknowledging that God is in the right and I am in the wrong about a bunch of stuff I’ve thought, said and done), can be easy. I don’t see God and I don’t have a great enough fear of Him and understanding of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, so that makes confession seem easier. I do realize that my sins are always done in rebellion against Him, no matter who else is involved, but confessing to God often seems easy. At other times, confession is tough and doesn’t want to get out of me, but those times aren’t as frequent as the other times.
Confessing my sin to the person I’ve sinned against is one, tough thing. But when my sin is just between me and God, I’ve found that confessing those sins to a trusted sister (well I’m a girl eh) is like being put through fire to be refined. For me, it’s so much more demanding to confess to a human being than to God. It should be the other way around, but I’m obviously a human being and a great sinner. So I’ve discovered a bit more, how that kind of confession is good and healthy for me. It’s not that my friend has the authority to forgive my sins, but having to humble myself before that other human being provides me with a proper shame and repentance that should accompany confession… such things, unfortunately aren’t necessarily with me when I only “confess” to God. It’s no fun to have to confess, once again certain sins to someone who keeps me accountable, but it’s helped me a great, great deal to deal with certain sins.
Anyway… those are some of my thoughts.
