There Are Some Things You Should Know About Jesus

QT from Tandem

This was one of those days when I decided to be productive and open my email to check my daily qt. This just hit me. I reflect back on what I’ve been doing and where I’ve been …nothing crazy, but am I moving forward? Am I living my life without regrets? 

There are some things you should know about Jesus.

He might want you to shave your head and wear oversized white t-shirts for six months, just so you forget how good-looking you are. 

He might want you to give your Wii to your neighbor’s kids.  He might ask you to quit your rock band, just when you’re finally getting popular and have a slight chance of being girlfriended (ok, that was me).

Jesus wants to turn over your tables—throw your valuables across the floor (John 2:13-16).  There are a thousand things between your need and his love and he will tear every one of them away if you give him even half a chance.

Jesus wants to love you like a man loves a woman (Ephesians 5:31-32).  He wants to run to you with his robes pulled up over his knobby little knees (Luke 15:11-32).

Jesus calls you to be crucified on that cross next to him.  He wants to see what happens when the crowds dwindle and you can’t breathe.

Jesus wants to see you today in Paradise. 

He’s going to drag you there, he’s going to wash your feet, he’s going to throw a party. 

He’s going to make you shine like morning.

And if you’re confused by this, so am I.  Christ’s teachings are drastic, caustic even.  He doesn’t give many general rules for good behavior; instead he calls us to living out our calling in specific, challenging, crazy ways.

This is the orientation speech Jesus gave to his disciples:

“If you love your father or mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me, you are not worthy of being mine.  If you refuse to take up your cross and follow me, you are not worthy of being mine.  If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it.” (Matthew 10:37-39).

I don’t know what Jesus wants, but I think it’s everything. 

-Sam 

San Juan 3:16

Porque de tal manera amó Dios al mundo, que dió a su Hijo unigénito, para que todo aquel que cree en él, no pierda, mas tenga vida eterna.

I love flowers. They capture just one of the countless beauties of God

The Future is Now

God is consistently challenging me to grow with these passages As a student studying for finals, to “rest” for summer, to get into Pharmacy school in order to create a “more comfortable life” to please my parents, to glorify God, ….the list goes on….

We are consistently looking forward in life, which is good, but we need to stop and smell the flowers. Noticing the peace that God gave me after taking my Anatomy final, seeing how beautiful Stockton is in the summer…

Using a complex system of imaginary rules and arbitrary numbers (a system inspired by money markets) I have determined that the average American lives fifteen minutes ahead of themselves.

How did we achieve the impossible? Time travel? Did daylight savings finally throw off the yoke of big government? Is the moon the only real source of cheese, and have all our years of snack plates and dinner parties, supplied with cheese mined from the dark side of the moon, finally caused a shift in gravity that threw us forward in the space-time continuum?

No.

The truth is, we do this to ourselves. We are busy. We are crazed and raccoon-eyed from lack of sleep.

We are always looking ahead. Sometimes it is two hours, to a Chinese take-out lunch. Sometimes the meeting in ten minutes we are unprepared for. Sometimes the weekend, sometimes we are whole months ahead of ourselves, waiting for summer or for our family camping trip to Lake Erie where Aunt Sue (the one with the twitch) will hand out “fun-lists” and compose spreadsheets that dictate mealtimes. 

We are always casting ourselves out into the mundane and unknowable intricacies of our world fifteen minutes from now. We live like shadows of our future selves.

This is not the way things are supposed to be. Running this hard, trying to catch time, it isn’t going to work.

Today, stop. Go sit on your roof deck or in the park or out in the concrete thing that city planners dare call a plaza and don’t do anything.  Don’t think forward, think now.  Notice the veins in your hands and the space between your eyes where these thoughts bubble. Catch yourself. Rub your hands together slowly and mark the sky and your place beneath it.

You’ll feel better, I promise.

“Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out, before a single day had passed” (Psalm 139:16).

Silas

berniewong:

scelestious:

urban-w-h-o-r-e:

woah I didn’t know this :O

more like WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

(it auto-reblogs) :o

Prayer

“Life is war. That’s not all it is. But it is always that. Our weakness in prayer is owing largely to our neglect of this truth. Prayer is primarily a wartime walkie-talkie for the mission of the church as it advances against the powers of darkness and unbelief. It is not surprising that prayer malfunctions when we try to make it a domestic intercom to call upstairs for more comforts in the den. God has given us prayer as a wartime walkie-talkie so that we can call headquarters for everything we need as the kingdom of Christ advances in the world. Prayer gives us the significance of frontline forces and gives God the glory of a limitless Provider. The one who gives the power gets the glory. Thus, prayer safeguards the supremacy of God in missions while linking us with endless grace for every need.”

“The Supremacy of God in Missions: Let the Nations be Glad” (3rd ed.) by John Piper

So I read this and it just hit me. Prayer is powerful. and we’re in war.

It’s Good to Wait :)

christianwords:

by Candice Watters

Recently a local church e-mailed me with an invitation to speak about waiting on God for a husband. I wondered if they had the right person.

With a book title like Get Married: What Women Can Do to Help it Happen, I’m not exactly known for messages about waiting. Having spent so much of the past few years writing about all the ways we can delay marriage — to our disappointment and frustration — I wasn’t sure I had much to say about waiting in a positive light. Is there anything good about waiting for marriage?

At first I didn’t think so. Especially in our culture where the waiting is often a painful consequence of someone’s bad decisions. But Steve encouraged me to accept the invitation. So I did. And we started reading the waiting passages in Scripture. Which left me wondering, in my campaign against intentional delay have I diminished godly waiting?

Because we inhabit time with a past and a future, we’re always waiting forsomething. For Christian women especially, when it comes to marriage, there will inevitably be a wait. It will be longer for some, but because women aren’t charged with finding a husband, nor expected to get down on our knee, at some point (even in the rare whirlwind romance) we must wait. The relational brokenness of our culture only intensifies that.

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omy goodness, totally had this moment at Target today….awks

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Tumblr is so strange! omg…what the heck is this?

the-absolute-best-posts:

once i scraped my knee in 3rd grade and a weird girl who was obsessed with horses was like “hold on” then she started crying and dropped tears on my knee then she was like “pegasus tears heal wounds”

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I just lol-ed. repeated it like 20 times…hhaah

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