Grace for Grace

 God's love is the simplest subject that I keep returning to. It continues to challenge me. I will think I have grasped it, and then something will happen, and I will feel all those same feelings that I have felt since I was a preteen: shame, embarrassment, and those pangs of false holiness that tell me I should have done better.  Today I was driving home from work and turned on the radio. The song could not have been more timely. "Let me introduce you to amazing grace. No matter the bumps, no matter the bruises, still the truth is, the cross has made you flawless. ...the cross was enough." It is the foundation for salvation and yet I cannot grasp it. Whethor it's pride, fear, or plain human stupidity, I am constantly having to relearn that nothing I could do on my own will make me "holy enough" to go to the Father. It is out of my hands, it just is. It is remarkable pride to believe that the cross is not enough to take every sin that I have every committed ...

 Entering my 20s feels really special and really new, not just because of the novelty of being two decades, but I feel like there has been an invitation to mark this new decade with some foundational growth, again. My teenage years were all discovery and amazement and big emotions that I didn't know I was allowed to have, and now... I want to step aside, I want to take a back seat and quiet whatever keeps me from hearing God. I'm starting to learn what being a lamb in a world of wolves can mean for me, the softness and genuine gentleness that I am reaching for, that I feel every time I focus on God. It is the peace and love of the Comforter, which maybe sounds unattainable to strive to bring others the peace of the Holy Spirit, but...the Bible said that He would teach us all things so I don't know why He would hold that back.  I want to be gentle, I don't want to be quick to judgement or opinion. I've always had opinions, I was raised in a family that wasn't ove...

 "We have never seen a sane human." by I don't know. Basically, no one has gotten out unscathed or unscarred. Every single person in the world has a hurt or trauma or fear or sOMETHING that is rooted deeply in their chest.  That is the beauty of Jesus. we are all hurt or bruised in some way and we are all forgiven and held and healed in a greater way.  We are invited to view the world through His eyes, to see those broken and patched over hearts that are aching for love and aching for recognition. His mercy is freedom, it is healing.  "It is finished." He came once, and for all, and we can't do anything to change the truth of that. We are uncomfortable with the fact that His sacrifice is the final word because it goes against our pride and our false holiness and our whatever else that we have twisted religion into. We are saved by Him and Him alone, and we can't do a thing to change that. We are not powerful enough to stop His love for us. Are we truly t...

 This year my view of marriage has really soured. For various reasons, both personal and societal, there have been a lot of lies that I have believed about marriage and this year I think I saw those beliefs for the first time and felt how wrong they were. I wrongly associated them with the infrastructure of marriage when they were things that flawed humans had created.  Marriage was God's creation, not man's, which means that I can't listen to man's words or examples of marriage and take them as fact because they are just opinion, not truth.  So what is the truth about marriage?  In the Bible, the basis for marriage is this: " For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh."  Man and woman as one flesh, one unit together. And the second greatest commandment (and also lowkey the hardest) is to love others as we love ourselves. I think we also le...

This past year of my life, my last year of being a teenager, has felt so different than anything else. Life has picked up in a way that I wasn't really expecting, for better or worse. But more than that, I feel like my inner life has changed far more, my heart and my attitude are being sanded down to something smoother, more even and unafraid. I am not afraid of my bad moods, I am not afraid of my tears, I am not afraid of the ups and downs, I know that I am not alone in it.  But what is amazing about me knowing that is that I have spent the least amount of time with God this year than ever before, but I still feel Him working in me, when I haven't done anything to earn it (not that we could ever, but sometimes I think I can).  Discovering the truth of who God is will be a lifelong pursuit, but especially this year, He has made Himself known to me, His heart for me in the littlest ways. He is showing me that my foundation is Him, that He has grown something good in me and that...

If you have grown up in the church, or even if you have just seen others in the church for better or worse, you probably have negative associations with the word "righteousness". I know that I have, and I'm still working that. I ask that you set aside that negative history and maybe even hurts that get tangled around other's expectations (or our own expectations) of what we should be.  God's righteousness is not the world's definition of righteousness.  CHOOSING RIGHTEOUSNESS: "I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way." Psalms 101:2 I have lived and rested in grace for the past years of my life. I have allowed myself to feel freely, to share my heart with God, to understand the power of His love in the face of my fragile, fleshy human heart. It has been the most transformational process of my life, understanding the absence of condemnation, the absence of separation. Accepting God's grace also revealed a lot of false standards that I hold for...

I am 19. This is my last year of being a teenager, which is super uncomfortable and lowkey terrifying.  I have always struggled with my future in various capacities, but recently, all of that uncertainty and trying to trust God and anxiety and fear of losing my precious dreams has been building and became too obvious for me to not solve and work out.  I am constantly so amazed by God's timing, and I feel so close and cared for by the Holy Spirit.  I had a few days where I was home alone, and spiraled pretty hard. I was listless, fearful, unmotivated, and anxious. I ate anything I could find and watched childhood TV shows to try and find some source of comfort (which, now that I'm writing that, I am feeling convicted that I didn't go to The source of Comfort. I wanted easy, I wanted fleshy comfort. But there is grace for that, and He still made Himself obvious, and He still came through for me. wow). I've also been realizing that my self-image preservation is deeply root...