The Beauty of Surrender

Last week, a dear friend of mine made the decision to be baptized. This decision was not come upon hastily, nor did it come without a barrage of questions and an uncomfortable look at her heart. You see, she grew up the child of a pastor in a loving home and came to Christ at the age of nine, at which time she was baptized. Years later feeling the knock of God on her heart she started to feel a prompting to be baptized but it simply didn't make since to her she had already been baptized. It wasn't as if she believed that her baptism as a child was illegitimate or anything of that sort. She couldn't figure out what the feeling was all about and the knocking and prodding at her heart wouldn't cease no matter how much she researched the matter and no matter how much she prayed about it. After months of wrestling she came to the conclusion that God wanted more from her. He wanted ALL of her. He wanted her to humbly submit to His will no matter how what the cost. And so, she was baptized again, simply because God wanted her to.

I write about this because being witness to it has been a special thing for me. There is nothing more beautiful and more convicting than watching God work so intimately in the life of someone you love. Watching this story unfold has caused me to closely examine my walk with Christ on not only a deeper level, but from a different angle. Flipping the autopilot switch with regards to life has sadly become a commonplace among Americans these days, even with devout well-meaning Christians. Have you ever left your house to drive somewhere and found yourself arriving at your destination only to realize you don't consciously remember ANY of your journey from point A to point B? Scary, right? Today we have people who will make our coffee (thanks Starbucks), our meals (whether it be from a restaurant or pre-made grocery meals), buses to take our children to school, maid services, lawn services, you name it we can make a call someone and have it done for us. Life in our country has changed so much in just 50 short years. Wives used to stay home to raise the children, families sat down together at night to a home cooked meal together and (gasp) they talked about the events of their day. Family life revolved around the home and, for many, church. But today we are becoming increasingly "too busy" to live. Go ahead, google it and you will discover that Americans find themselves too busy to eat lunch, to take vacations, to vote, get adequate sleep, and our children are too busy for Sunday school (seriously? Our children's calendars are too booked for God, it's appalling). It has become easy to float through life without thinking about important things because we are "too busy".

Taking all of this into account, I am determined not to live my life on autopilot. God created us as living, breathing, feeling beings and that is how I want to live. Doing so will require sacrifice and pain, but the reward in the end is not measurable by human standards. If witnessing the work of God in a friend is such a thing of beauty, imagine what it would be like to be acutely aware of the work God is doing in your own life. I need God to break down any walls I have built and bring me to a place of complete surrender where I rely on Him alone. A place so close to Him that I can hear His whisper in my heart. I want to submit to Him wholly and trust Him with every area of my life, not just the comfortable ones. I want God to direct my path and I want to be coherent as I travel it, knowing that even when the path becomes rocky and curves in a direction I am not so comfortable with I can walk on in peace with confidence that the work He is doing in my life has beauty beyond what I can fathom in my humanness.

Shuffled To Blessings

You know those moments when you are minding your own business just trying to get through your busy day as efficiently as possible and you have your iPod on shuffle to drown out the thoughts that keep bombarding you and you realize you are no longer listening to something safe like a song from your Eagles' Greatest Hits album, Jack Johnson (banana pancakes, anyone?) or some old (and by old I mean OLD, like 20 years before I was born OLD, don't laugh, I happen to love that musical generation!) country song but your iPod has shuffled you to a song that causes you to freeze. So now, you are standing frozen in the middle of your kitchen, broom in mid-stroke (thankful you are home alone with no one to witness your apparent sudden paralyzation) and a knot forms in your throat and you feel your eyes filling with tears. And you can do nothing but listen while salty tears cascade down your cheeks:


If I find in myself
desires nothing in this world can satisfy,
I can only conclude
that I, I was not made for here
If the flesh that I fight is at best
only light and momentary,
then of course I'll feel nude
when to where I'm destined I'm compared

Speak to me in the light of the dawn
Mercy comes with the morning
I will sigh and with all creation groan
as I wait for hope to come for me

Am I lost or just less found?
On the straight or on the roundabout
of the wrong way?
Is this a soul that stirs in me
is it breaking free, wanting to come alive?
'Cos my comfort would prefer for me to be numb
And avoid the impending birth
of who I was born to become

Speak to me in the light of the dawn
Mercy comes with the morning
I will sigh and with all creation groan
as I wait for hope to come for me

For we, we are not long here
Our time is but a breath,
so we better breathe it
And I, I was made to live
I was made to love
I was made to know you
Hope is coming for me
Hope, He's coming for me
Hope is coming for me
Hope, He's coming

Speak to me in the light of the dawn
Mercy comes with the morning
I will sigh and with all creation groan
as I wait for hope to come for me
For me, for me, for me

("C.S. Lewis Song" By: Brooke Fraser)


It is in moments like these, when God makes His presence so undeniable, so unable to be ignored that I yearn for so much more of Him. He knows the heartaches of our flesh and hears the cries of our heart, though unspoken, as we parade around with a phony smile etched on our face. There is beauty in knowing that God will give you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it regardless of what plans we have for our life. Too often we get so caught up in what we want, in what we have planned, in what we need to do that we put on our cozy ear muffs and tell God we will get to what He wants when it is convenient for us. And yet He loves us enough to give us what we need, complete brokenness. The inability to even attempt to rely on anything but Him, the not-so-subtle reminder that we are absolutely nothing without Him. I am so thankful that God loves me enough to give me what my pride won't let me ask for. It is through this blessing of brokenness, through vision clouded with tears that I see my God, my Savior the most clearly and reflect on His words, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me" (Matthew 16:24) remembering that the cross we are to pick up daily isn't meant to be an instrument of burden, but an instrument of death. And so, it is my prayer that God humbles me daily when I pick up my cross and die to self, as I anxiously await His return.

Journey of Faith...

So, I finally caved in and joined the blogging community. It is something I have considered and reconsidered over the past year or so. And here I am, preparing to chronicle the day to day happenings in my life; sharing my thoughts, my prayers, my joys, and the stirrings of my heart with you. Some of you I know, some of you I've never met but know you through a mutual friend, some of you may have found this blog by accident, or maybe it wasn't an accident, maybe God landed you here for some reason. Whomever you are and however you found yourself reading this, it is my prayer that you will be blessed by the contents of this page and that the words you read here bring glory to God.