New Testament

When You Can’t See God

May 7, 2015 By Michelle 15 Comments

No matter how many times I read the story of the road to Emmaus, I always get hung up on one verse: “God kept them from recognizing him.” (Luke 24:16)

It wasn’t that the two travelers simply didn’t recognize the risen Jesus come alongside them, but that God “kept them,” or prevented them from recognizing him. It was intentional.

At first glance, that intentional obscuring of the truth seems unnecessarily cruel. After all, the followers of Jesus had certainly been through enough grief and devastation at that point. They’d witnessed the arrest, torture and murder of their beloved leader. All their expectations, everything they’d believed in and hoped for, lay smashed at the bottom of the cross. They were lost, bewildered and reeling from the shock.

Yet God kept the travelers from recognizing the risen Messiah in the moment of their deepest and most profound despair.

This, it seems to me, is the quintessential tough-love moment.

I don’t know about you, but God’s tough-love teaching is not my preferred method. I think it’s fair to say we’d all much prefer that God reveal himself to us straight up, exactly when and exactly how we need him.

But God doesn’t always work that way.

True, it would have been easier and gentler for Jesus to reveal his identity immediately in that moment on the dusty road to Emmaus. But consider this:

Might Jesus’ immediate revelation have inhibited the opportunity for greater, deeper spiritual growth in the men? Might an immediate revelation have inhibited some of the hard internal heart work that needed to take place?

Sometimes I think God intentionally blinds us to his presence, not so he can see into our hearts (after all, as an omniscient God, he already knows our innermost thoughts), but so that we might glimpse the state of our own hearts.

After all, if God is obviously present, would we do the hard work of looking into the depths of our own hearts to uncover our weakness, our lack of trust, our unbelief?

If God is immediately and palpably present, might we skip happily along, blissfully ignorant of our spiritual deficits?

Jesus understood that Cleopas and his friend simply could not get past the obvious facts of Jesus’ crucifixion. In the telling and retelling of that story, they could not move past their shock and unbelief. They forgot what Jesus had told them again and again: that his death was not the end, that all hope was not lost.

In obscuring his identity as the risen Messiah, Jesus forced the Emmaus travelers to look hard inside their own hearts in order to face their lack of trust and faith.

Like I said, it’s tough love. Jesus doesn’t always give us the easy answer. His goal isn’t always to make us comfortable or offer us the easy way out.

Sometimes Jesus prods us to do the hard work of looking inward, digging into the detritus of our hearts and resowing our spiritual soil, so that ultimately we are able to enjoy a deeper, more authentic relationship with him.

How to Open Your Eyes and Really See

September 10, 2014 By Michelle 18 Comments

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As a kid my sister thought the priest was God. It was his ornate robes that misled her – his “uniform” gave him such an aura of authority and power, she assumed he was the Big Man himself.

I wasn’t much better off. While I knew enough to realize the priest wasn’t God, I still acted like he was. I was so focused on following the rules to perfection, I missed the point of faith entirely. I worshipped the law and the man in the fancy robes, and missed God.

Early on in the Book of Mark, the Pharisees — who were the ultra-religious rule-followers of the day — criticized Jesus for forgiving the sins of a paralyzed man who had come to hear him preach.

“‘Only God can forgive sins!’” the Pharisees claimed, appalled by Jesus’ bold proclamation and his gall. (Mark 2:7)

They missed the irony in their own statement, of course. They couldn’t see that it was God himself standing right before their very eyes.

The Pharisees had a very clear expectation of what God should look like and how he should act. The fact that Jesus was born in a barn in Nazareth, dressed like a wandering shepherd and kept company with the lowlifes of society simply did not jibe with their definition of God. They expected a mighty ruler, someone who established authority instead of subverting it.

The Pharisees didn’t recognize God because they expected him to look like someone else. They expected him to look more like them.

I get that. Sometimes I mock the Pharisees for their obvious flaws, but the truth is, I am a Pharisee. I miss God when he’s standing right before my very eyes. I miss God because he doesn’t look like I think he should.

I don’t see God in the man on the corner, holding a tattered cardboard sign in the sweltering heat. But I see him easily in the people I admire and the people I want to emulate. I see God in the people I want to like me.

I don’t always see God in the person who practices faith differently than I do. But I recognize him easily in the people who sit next to me in the pew each week.

I don’t see God in the people who live by standards I consider less-than or flawed. But I recognize him in the people who seem to live exactly like I do.

Turns out, I see God in the pretty places, where everything and everyone look good and wholesome and right; where the rules are followed and standards are upheld.

I see God where I am comfortable and in the people who put me at ease.

I see God where you might expect to find him — in stained glass, in blossoms and birds and spectacular sunsets, in people who look and think just like me.

Like a Pharisee, I see God where I want to see him, not where he really is.

The beautiful truth is that God is in every place and in every person. And what the crowd exclaimed the day the paralyzed man stood up and walked home with his mat in hand is true for me and many others, too:

“We’ve never seen anything like this before!” (Mark 2:12) we exclaim in awe. Because we’ve never really opened our eyes to see.

{This post originally ran in the Lincoln Journal Star.}

Sharing with Jennifer’s Tell His Story community:

When You’re Looking for an Endorsement

November 20, 2013 By Michelle 32 Comments

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been emailing Christian authors to ask if they would consider reading an advance copy of Spiritual Misfit to offer a possible endorsement. [endorsements are those snappy statements praising a book, usually on the front and back covers, and usually by other authors and leaders. Truthfully, I think the only people who read endorsements are other writers.]

Can I just tell you how humbling and awkward this feels to me?

Granted, some of the people I’m asking I know well, so that’s all fine and comfortable. But then there are the ones I call the “reach asks.”

These are authors I read and admire but don’t know personally – people who I think might find something that resonates in Spiritual Misfit and therefore be willing to say a kind word about it; people who are a little more well-known than the crowd I typically run with (that crowd being my Moby Dick-loving husband, two boys and a pet lizard). This process is a little like cold-calling in the olden days – except now you do it by email. You craft what you hope is a well-worded compelling email about the book, you shoot it into cyberspace, and then you wait. And sometimes wait and wait and wait.

Awk. Ward.

Some people accept (and you do a cartwheel in your living room). Some people decline graciously (and you understand but somehow still feel snubbed). And some people don’t respond at all. And those are the ones who keep you up at night. Because you wonder. Do they think I’m an annoying schmuck? Do they think my theology is all whacked out? (I don’t have a theology, just in case you’re wondering). Did they peek at my blog and think, ho hum, whatevs, no thanks, I’d rather get a bikini wax than read that?

You can drive yourself crazy with the wondering.

Until you read this:

“Are we like others, who need to bring you letters of recommendation, or who ask you to write such letters on their behalf? Surely not! The only recommendation we need is you yourselves. Your letters are written in our hearts; everyone can read it and recognize our good work among you. This ‘letter’ is written not with pen and ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. It is not carved on tablets of stone, but on human hearts.” (2 Corinthians 3:-1-3, NLT)

I understand why it’s necessary for me to get endorsers for my book; I get the nature of the process and how publishing works. But I also know these endorsements really don’t matter in the end.

What matters isn’t the pithy praise or awesome accolades someone else might offer about my book, but my life itself – what I say, how I act, how I love, how I encourage, what I do in the name of God. What matters in the end is what my living, breathing, everyday, ordinary life says about God. My own life is the praise. My own life is the accolade.

Because the thing is, friends, your whole life, and mine too, is an endorsement of God’s holy power. Your whole life is an endorsement of God’s love, hope and redemption. You and I are endorsed by God, have been from the get-go, from before the beginning of time. And this endorsement, this “letter” as Paul says, is not written in pen and ink or pixels, but with the Spirit of the living God. It’s not carved on tablets of stone or penned onto fancy embossed paper or shot into cyberspace, but emblazoned on our hearts, on your heart and on mine.

A changed life is the only endorsement we really need, and let me tell you, once and for all, my life has been changed by God. My life is a living endorsement of the power of God to change one lost, wayward, hopeless, desperate soul into a woman on fire for God.

And just the fact that I wrote that sentence and didn’t flinch is one loud, bold, living testament to the fact that God transforms people in big, bold, beautiful ways.

God transforms us, he endorses us, and we, in turn, with our very own lives, endorse God. Our lives are a testament, an endorsement, of his mighty, mysterious, life-altering, wild power to transform. That’s it, the be-all and end-all of endorsements: the way I live, the way you live.

Let me give you one little piece of advice, because you know I always learn this God-stuff the hard way, right? This is what I learned these last two weeks:

When you go looking for endorsements, look no further than God, your own self and the people around you. Look at what he has done in you, and look at how that has impacted others. And then you’ll know, without any single shred of doubt:

A holy endorsement is the only one you’ll ever need.

Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday: Get Your Heart and Mind Put Right

November 3, 2013 By Michelle 28 Comments

Last week was a difficult one for me spiritually. At a conference I came face-to-face with my greatest temptation – to be known, valued and deemed important by the people I admire – and I succumbed to that temptation. Again. It was painful and disheartening, and I left the conference not only questioning whether I was capable of living out my calling as a Christian writer, but also unable to hear God. I felt like a dried-out husk, empty, brittle and alone.

That’s why I was particularly surprised when I awoke the next morning and suddenly began to see God everywhere. In the rising sun illuminating the elm leaves in my backyard a brilliant gold. In a boy wrapped in a fleece blanket and cocooned against my side on the couch. In a man and his dog jogging jauntily past me on the path.

At first I thought it was simply that the noise of the conference – the people and the speakers and the worship music – had dissipated, allowing a more contemplative gratitude to slide into place. And that was part of it for sure. But later, after I read our lesson for today, I realized it was something more.

I like to read The Message version of the Bible, particularly for a passage I’ve heard over and over again, like the Beatitudes. When I read today’s lesson – “God blesses those whose hearts are pure, for they will see God” – in my usual translation (New Living), I didn’t come away with much. I struggled to dig beneath the language that was as familiar and comfortable as my favorite sweater.

But then I opened The Message and read this:

“You’re blessed when you get your inside world – your mind and heart – put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.” (Matthew 5:8)

The Message infused the familiar verse with a new, fresh and more personal meaning. Suddenly I understood what a “pure heart” meant – not simply unblemished and unflawed, but transformed, realigned and made right again.

In the airport between connections and on the flight home from the conference, I’d had a heart-to-heart with God. In that process, he began to untangle the threads of sin that had wrapped themselves so tightly around my heart. God did some hard work in my heart and mind during those hours in transit, work which ultimately helped clear the path back to him.

I didn’t realize it at the time – that’s often the way it is when God is working hard in me – but by the next morning, my heart and mind, my inside world, were put right: realigned with and focused on God. And with my inside world put right, I was finally able to see God in the outside world again.

Questions for Reflection:
Can you think of a time when you had to get your heart and mind put right in order to really see God? What impediments in your life right now might be blocking your ability to see him?

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Authentic You: Trusting into Openness {day 15}

October 17, 2013 By Michelle 14 Comments

A while back I wrote a post called 4 Steps to Living a Spacious Life. It was about an epiphany I’d had after I attended the Jumping Tandem Retreat. When I came home from that exhilarating, inspiring, exhausting weekend, I read these verses in 2 Corinthians:

“I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life…The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way…Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively.”(2 Corinthians 6:11-13)

I knew right then, that was my dream, my goal: to enter the wide-open, spacious life and to live openly and expansively.

I tend to live small. I live inward, as I wrote in that blog post — a cramped existence, crumpled into myself, in a place crowded with expectations and insecurities, a place fraught with comparison and fear. But I haven’t let go of that dream or those words since I first read them last April. I believe they hold the key to living authentically.

I believe God wants each of us to live in that wide-open spacious place. I believe he desires that carefree, liberated, unburdened existence for us. But in order to get there, in order to move from that cramped, inwardly focused place into wildly abundant spaciousness, we have to trust.

Last Saturday I received a complimentary and kind email from an agent. He’d read a bit of my blog, he said, and simply wanted to encourage me to keep up the good work. I sat stunned as I read his short email, which began, “You don’t know me but…”

It wasn’t true. I did know him.

Four years ago I had queried this same agent for the memoir I’d written, and four years ago he had rejected my pitch. He had given a number of reasons (which, I should add, was more than I received from most queries), and I had cried for days, because that’s what I always did when I received a rejection.

Four years ago I would have have given my left arm for the email I received from him out of the blue this past Saturday. It would have been nothing short of a miracle to receive an unsolicited email from an agent, and I would have interpreted it as a very, very good sign.

I laughed when I told Brad about the email. Well, I laughed and I kvetched a little bit, too. He knows what an email like that would have meant to me four years ago. But, as I told Brad — and I believe this deep down in my heart — “2009 wasn’t the time.” The time for this book wasn’t back in 2009, no matter how hard I pushed and pulled and tried to wrestle it into being, because God wanted 2014. If only I had known that then. If only I had listened and trusted.

You see, I can’t live carefree and liberated, I can’t step into that wide-open spacious life unless I trust God and hand every last bit of myself and my dreams and my goals over to him. Choosing to live tyrannized by my wants and expectations means I live small and defeated, afraid and weak and angry. Choosing to trust means I live in wild, carefree abundance, free to pursue what God wants from me, rather than what I want, in that moment instead.

The smallness you feel comes from within, Paul says – not from her or him or them. Not from your job, your family, your past, your present circumstances or even your life as a whole, but from yourself, from within you. Want to live freely and authentically as who God made you to be? Then turn outward and upward, away from yourself. Look out and up at God and step boldly into openness.

**Email Subscribers** — I apologize for the email snafu that resulted in some missed posts over the last few days. I think the problem is now fixed – thank you for your patience! If you want to catch up on missed posts, click here here for Monday, here for Tuesday and here for Wednesday.

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