Most of you tuning in know of the ongoing saga with my stomach's alter ego, otherwise known as Petey (the Parasite). After a lifetime of stomach trouble, I have gone down just about every avenue available in efforts to alleviate my "stomach issues" (details spared). And though I've experienced little to no improvement (physically), the life lessons I've learned along the way have been invaluable:
1. there is no quick fix. and all who proclaim quick fixes are short-lived.
2. there is freedom in discipline. in my immaturity, i used to think freedom and discipline were opposing eachother
3. the details of my life are not arbitrary to God...good, bad, or ugly... everything runs through His sovereign hand. If He is allowing something in my life, I can trust that there is purpose and intention in it
4. God alone is my healer. And I may never experience full healing until I see Him and He hands me my new rockstar body.
5. if you're gonna be proactive instead of reactive in life, everything must run through the grid of scripture
6. society teaches us to protect our outer man while our inner man is dying. scripture tells us that God makes us new from the inside out. the choice becomes: keep up the facade and die inside -or- submit and live
7. God is most glorified when everything has gone wrong, and He's enough.
8. i choose who my Master will be. i can enslave myself to the frustration of living with a highly emotional stomach and become a victim -or- i can enslave myself to Christ and become a conqueror. Satan can't rob my joy unless I let him.
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all this to say, what Satan intended for harm, God has used for good. And I know that in a perfect world without sin and stain, my stomach would be free of its insecurities and would work as it was designed to. so until that day when Petey will no longer plague me, I say God is good.

My efforts to be intentional about praying specifically for physical healing over the next 30 days is not so much a plea as it is just a conscious committment to actively put my trust in God instead of the plethora of quick fix remedies on the market. Tune in for my updates and pray with me!
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8.28.2008: As I was praying this morning, the Lord showed me where I am allowing fear to create anxiety and worry in my life about my upcoming overseas trips. My fear is that I am going to be forced to eat things (i.e. Gluten) that I know make me sick. I ran across this verse in Matthew 6: 25"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?"
I rob myself of they joy of experiencing God as my Provision when a. I allow worry/fear to consume me and b. when I am too busy trying to provide for myself.

9.3.2008: I read Mark1:40-42 this morning where the leper falls before Jesus saying "if you want to you can heal me". The text says that Jesus was deeply moved by the man and He responds with "I want to. Be healed." This is an encouraging verse for me, especially on the days I feel that my prayers travel no further than my ceiling. God wants to heal me...and in fact already has in Christ. Although God may withhold healing from me while on this earth, it is not a matter of His lack of desire. In an instant He could touch my stomach & make it whole again, but for whatever reasons He doesn't I can still trust that He wants to. Therefore, His restraint just as much as His healing is His story for me. My God is not arbitrary...seems to be my mantra these days. Praise to Him

9.13.2008: Of course, my intentions were to update this every few days. I guess every 10 days will have to suffice. Although I haven't updated here since 9/3, my prayers for healing have continued. And as I was reading in Luke this morning about the woman who was healed after 12 years of hemorrhaging by just the touch of Jesus' cloak, my heart was stirred by this story (found in Luke 8: 43-48). The simplicity of the woman's faith is humbling. She didn't clean herself up or go through any sort of ritual so that Jesus might heal her. She came to Him as she was. Weak. In need. Broken. And in complete confidence that Jesus was the only one that could heal her. Scripture says that she had spent every penny she had on doctors (sounds familiar) and none could help her. She heard Jesus was coming and placed her sole faith in Him as her Healer. She knew if she could just get close enough to touch even his cloak, that His power could stop her bleeding. She didn't care what people thought, even though she was 'unclean' and she knew she would be receiving some condescending looks if she were to enter the crowd of people. But she laid all that aside, and reaching out she closed her eyes and touched his cloak as he passed. At once her body felt whole. The bleeding had stopped. Jesus felt the power go out from Him and asked "who touched me?" She was scared but came forward. Jesus responded "Daughter, you took a risk trusting me, and now you're healed and whole. Live well, live blessed." (The Message). May I take that same risk and be found as bold as this woman.

9.20.2008: I've had a bit of a "crisis of faith" the last few days. I haven't been taken the matter of my stomach before the Lord & have allowed my heart to settle into frustration. I have moments where I feel exhausted with the pre-occupation caused by the chronic pain in my gut, the anxiety of continuously questioning what I should/shouldn't eat, the doubt that I'm ever going to see relief, and the frustration that there seems to be no pattern. It makes me want to throw my hands in the air and resign to eating whatever I feel like at the moment. But even in my frustration the Lord speaks tenderly to me, reminding me that this earth suit is going to be made whole one day and teaching me that my current pain is producing depenedence on him and faith in what is to come.



9.29.08: I just got done reading...correction, listening to the audiobook of....The Shack. I intend to blog further about what the Lord accomplished in me through that book...it is one of the most beautifully articulated pictures of The Trinity I have ever encountered. One thing I got a firmer grasp on through The Shack was God's bigger purposes through our pain. He is not the orchistrator of pain, pain is a result of our fallen state & sometimes of our choices, but He uses the pain as pieces of thread in the great tapestry He is weaving. This is a comfort to me.

Alcohol-flavored Escapism and Diminishing Conviction
Fabricated Perception, hiding behind Idolatrous Pretensions
Conditioned Reactions, based on Covetous Illusions
Leading to Quiet Desperation underneath Evil Oppression

Religious Affiliation, void of Heartfelt Intention
Self-Imposed Deception, caused by Worldly Comparison
Creating Spiritual Devastation and Bankrupt Passion
Caving to the Opposition, Treacherous Submission

Disguising Perpetration as Inconsequential Diversion
While Mocking the Provision
For my soul’s Rebellion

Adulterous Decisions and Prideful Perversions
All for Self-Preservation and Superficial Protection
A Paralyzed Condition
Of Lifeless Contradiction
Who will lead me to freedom?

Chaos scatters
Hope enters
Redemption covers
It is finished

To try to describe the shame in my heart leaves me at a loss for words
A well of darkness
Filled with hatred of self and a deep sense of unworthiness
I'm unsure of its depth
Am I willing to enter the blackness?

I peer over the edge and hear echoes of a little girl's cries
The darkness swallows her in its thickness
Her silhouette is all I can see
How long has she been there?
Something snagged her along the way and time froze
And so she hangs there caught on the nail of pain
Waiting to be rescued

But that requires me to jump and grab hold of her in my descent
And as I freefall with her in my arms, the promise is that You are there at the bottom
Give me freedom from the lie that tells me the darkness is too scary
And give me courage to free this little girl

[two weeks ago real time]

i spent the day attempting to avoid myself....that's hard to do & requires alot of caffeine. i think i began an addiction to Monster energy drinks today. i consumed two. the back of the can says not to consume more than 3 a day. scary. i don't normally consume things that have words i can't pronounce on the nutrition label.

i filled my time with work, busyness, and distraction... all with the hopes of not facing the realities going on in my heart. my efforts were in vain and as i face the end of another day, i'm saddened by my lack of intimacy with my Savior & my trust in myself to cope with life. oh, how much time i waste and how easily my heart is hardened when i cope with life rather than deal with it.

so now, exhausted by this hamster wheel of my own creation, i finally give up... and find that in surrendering my avoidance tactics i at last find peace. the unrest results from my own striving... but rest comes when i'm finally willing to come to that place where i stop trying to "fix" myself.

i don't have to avoid... i can deal.... and Romans 8 reminds me how.

"With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ's being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death. God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn't deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life." -The Message

i can only life my hands in praise and repentence to You, Father. you did it... its done. i don't have to run. make my view of me, your view of me. i offer You rubbish to say "i love you"