Green Pasture

Life has definitely taken a turn, things are dramatically different for us as a family.  It’s hard to let go of something familiar, something you love, but now it is actually freeing to take our hands off and back away.  We need some space but have such a mixture of feelings:  love for friends but the need for our hearts to move on from a chapter God’s finished writing for us.  We watch Him turn the page with some sadness, reflection, and fondness.   It was a chapter wrought with change, quite a bit of stress and challenge, but also growth, much love and joy.  Toward the end of it, some of the characters God had written in affirmed us and let us know that what we had been and done in these last few years made a difference.   I hope many of those characters will also appear in the next chapters as we watch our life story keep unfolding, as God writes it one page at a time.

I was sharing with my mom how I was intent on staying close to these friends, keeping in touch, not letting things fade away.  She understood but said, “be careful.”  At first her words hurt a little – why would it be bad to stay close with these special people who had become so important to me?  Continue reading

Love

“Could it really be that simple?”  I thought as I read “The Shack”*.  Jesus had just told the main character that the expectations put on us as believers in this world are not from God – that all we need to do is to love without agenda.  Love.  Just love.  Love God.  Love people.

What a freeing thought!   It bears up to thorough scrutiny, too, aligning with what God’s Word tells us to do and with all that Jesus taught.  To love is to accomplish everything else that God wants from us: bringing others to Him in relationship, helping people in need, maintaining and thriving in relationship to other people, knowing and enjoying closeness with our Creator, having fulfillment and purpose in this life, and more.   God is love.  He’s relational.  Interacting and relating are what He’s all about.  After all, He created people to have relationship with them, to interact, to love them and be loved by them… by us.

Whatever you’re about today, however long your task list, however heavy the load of guilt that you’ve piled upon yourself as you try and be a “good Christian”, let it go and just love.

I am remembering a song my parents taught me as a child

Tell me, Mimi, do you love Jesus?
Oh yes I love Jesus….

Tell me why do you love Jesus?
Because He first loved me.

*The Shack, by William P. Young