a little transparency.

I've grown up always knowing who Jesus was. Ever since I can remember our weeks revolved around what was going on at the church, bible studies, revivals on the weekends, etc. So why is it that I still struggle with such an integral aspect of my faith: prayer. I even get incredibly embarrassed that I struggle so badly with it. Ask me to pray over a friend going through a difficult time, I'm good. I can do that. Same for praying in front of a crowd before a service starts or before dinner. Those are topics. I can always take a topic & talk...that's never been an issue. 

But prayer is way more than that. Prayer is about being transparent. In fact, it's about completely taking away even the transparency & opening your heart completely [something I've never been able to do]. It's about admitting the ugly & accepting the consequences. It's about finally being real with what eats at you & tears aways at your soul. And it's about having open communication & dialogue with the Creator of the universe, the one true God. 

I struggle with doing this regularly. I use busyness as an excuse. I get lazy. And even worse, I pray about it once, flippantly, and use that as reason to not bring it up again. And as terrible as that sounds, it's not so I can just check it off my "I prayed for this" list, it's because I don't want to continue "bothering" God with it. 

It's like I don't even know the God I pray to.

He never tires of hearing our voices or requests. We are told to "continue steadfastly in prayer" (Col. 4:2). We must never grow weary in being open & bringing repeated needs to Him. 

Even though this is most definitely a struggle of mine, there's yet another that I still grapple with. One that I can't seem to find a balance for. It's praying for what I actually want. Doesn't sound too difficult right? But it is my biggest struggle in my prayer life. Asking God to supply my needs is one thing, but to ask an omnipotent, sovereign king to give me what I want just seems almost disrespectful. I'll start laying out my prayers before Him & catch myself as I start being open about certain aspects of my life. I find myself stopping & instead saying "Thy will be done". Now, I know there is nothing wrong with this & it sounds like I'm not making any sense, but I think I've almost hindered myself from being completely open & broken before my God. I try & ignore the desires of my heart & the things I want because (and this is totally the Calvinist in me) I know He is in control & what He wills to happen will happen, no matter what my wants & desires are. And I know I truly want His will to be done in my life. I know without a shadow of a doubt that His ways are always better than mine. My issue is not one of what's going to happen in my life, but it's an issue of thinking my transparency is too petty for Him to hear. I literally put a road block on that aspect of my life; letting myself not really be honest or make excuses for what I feel, & try to push it away. 

There are things in my life that I really do want to happen. For instance, (and I can't believe I'm saying this, but we're giving this transparency thing a try, right?) I can't think of anything I want more than to be a wife & a mother. And my reasons for wanting them are not even your typical ones. In a marriage, I want to experience a relationship that completely reflects Christ & His love for the Church. I want to see that played out in a human relationship for myself. And for kids, I want to adopt. I want to experience yet another beautiful example of what Christ does for us when we are called into His family. I want to give someone a second chance, or a chance they never had to begin with. I want all this to play out in my life to reflect Christ & to experience more fully what He does for us. Now, I want this a little down the road of course (or whenever the Lord wills it) but this is the biggest thing I struggle with bringing before God. Because what if it isn't in the cards or His plan for my life? I hate praying for that as my future if it might not happen. I feel like me asking for it makes me sound like I know what's better for me more than He does.

I, above all else, just want His will for my life. But I must also learn to be more open with a God who gave me these desires. He knows my heart because He created it. And He knows how much I over think everything because He made me that way.

I should never be ashamed of that. 

Here's to me trying to let down just one of the many walls I have up. A little transparency.

But the temporary pain of the demolition is worth it because He makes beautiful things out of the dust.

"This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us- whatever we ask- we know that we have what we asked of him." 1 John 5:14-15

simple things.

As I sit down in a Nashville coffee shop with my headphones in and pen ready, I think my thoughts are headed towards my usual prayer-type journaling. That's all that seems to come out when I write anymore. Not that it's a bad thing; it had just been awhile since the "inspiration bug" hit me to really journal again. It was a line in a song by Elevation Worship that gave me the itch.

"Show the world that Mercy is alive."

How incredible is it that we worship & praise our God by using seemingly simple nouns...?
Sounds silly when put that way, but how many songs do we sing that regard Him as "love", "mercy", etc. These words, these nouns that we use on a daily basis, are not ones that we use without meaning. We use them because what they stand for, what they mean, fully encompass who He is.

I can't count how many times I've been in situations where I've written off someone's actions as "Oh, that's just ___________." There's no telling how many times my friends have had to explain my choices, my weirdness, and my outspokenness as "Well, that's just Katie." My name encompasses my personality, my actions, my thought processes...everything about me. Now, think about how we were using those "simple" words interchangeably with the name of our God.

It doesn't belittle Him into some easy-to-understand, one-word version of God that we can pick out of our pocket when we need said "love", "mercy", "grace". We would be completely missing the point; misunderstanding the God we claim to know & forming Him into a slightly more holy version of ourselves due to our understandings & definitions of these words. Worse yet, we would depreciate the Almighty Creator of the universe by placing Him in our selfish lives when we deem it convenient, instead of understanding that He needs nothing from us. And never has.

Plainly said, "This is His world, [& strictly by His grace alone] we are just living in it."

We use these words to speak His name because He is the epitome of each of them. His true & unchanging character gives them their definition; not the other way around. That is, if we can separate the world's standards of these words from what He claims. We must use Him as the plumb line to define what these four & five letter words mean. Words that have themselves been belittled in our culture when we claim to "love coffee" (which I most definitely do on a daily basis). But now, in order to understand in full our Father, we must look to His character, His actions, & His promises. We must dig deep into His word so that it reveals who He is in relation to our misconstrued version of Him we see in our world. All of the things we as humans crave in this world: love, hope, refuge, grace, & even the physical like water, bread, shelter; it's not a coincidence that these are all names that even He gives to Himself.

He knows our needs. He sees our struggles.

...and He wants us. Seek & you shall find Him. He promises that.

And praise God that His promises can be trusted.

the chase.

God will bring us back in countless ways to the same point over and over again. And He never tires of bringing us back to that one point until we learn the lesson, because His purpose is to produce the finished product. It may be a problem arising from our impulsive nature, but again and again, with the most persistent patience, God has brought us back to that one particular point. Or the problem may be our idle and wandering thinking, or our independent nature and self-interest. Through this process, God is trying to impress upon us the one thing that is not entirely right in our lives. -Oswald Chambers

I've always wandered why I seem to go in this ridiculous, never ending cycle of being completely complacent and insanely thirty for the Word. I let my own self-interest and laziness get in the way, and fall so far behind in my walk that it's almost like I'm walking backwards. Then other times, I look around and realize that my surroundings and I look so much alike that I can't tell where one ends and the other begins. So, I start running. Hard. Sprinting into territory where His love is blatant and unhindered by my feelings of being too sinful to handle. But then, a few days, months, weeks later...I am a chamelion again.

The greatest thing is...He never tires of chasing after me. He is infinitely patient and infinitely loving. He wants me, and even though I am horrible at showing it...I want Him too. Even though I am so insanely scared of actually getting what I ask for, I want to live a life that is according to His plan. What that will be...only He knows, and only He is in control.