Beauty Heals Broken Hearts

In my last post (skip the video and the book review) I talked about how God's desire is for us to behave in a way that attracts people to His goodness.  That should trump any beauty regiment or product sales.

On May 3, LifeChurch.tv did baptisms. I stood in the sanctuary and jumped and danced and lifted my arms in worship, and cried and cried and cried.  I had an ecclesiastical epiphany.  I knew on a deep level that everything in the world: every task, every product, every relationship is utterly meaningless until someone's life is changed in a way that leads them to the cross of Christ and the realization that those who find God find the life for which we were created.

"And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace."

That afternoon, I posted this status to Facebook:

"I've never posted anything like this before. But it feels right, so I'm gonna go with that. 

My spirit just said "You are going to feel like your life is in shambles (with brief, sporadic spots of hope and peace) until you have allowed the Lord to create a full-time ministry through you."

So. There it is. Anyone who knows about ministry jobs, or who wants to pay my bills so I can quit my job, hit me up."

10 people were so gracious as to respond thoughtfully and compassionately.  The prayer team at LifeChurch gave me a ton of support.  I had two really meaningful and important conversations with women of God who I have always looked up to.

In six weeks, I have learned two indescribably important lessons:

1. God speaks clearly. Always. 
• Problems arise when we are not properly positioned to hear and understand what He is saying.  I was moved by God's love for us, by His investment in returning us to our place of ruling the earth as extensions of Him.  I was also overwhelmed and disappointed at school. I was in pain that I was trying to rationalize away.  I was guilty of not allowing Him to be my strength and my joy and my help. That last statement about ministry jobs was my flesh denying God's ability and willingness to redeem my current and past ministry roles and callings.  There's an old LifeChurch sermon about how when some people landscape, they do it slowly section-by-section. Others raze the whole property and start over from scratch.  You can guess which category I'm in.
2. You can often discern God's voice because He is telling you what you don't want to hear (but what lines up with His word and what is right). 
• At the beginning of last school year, the Lord provided me with Bible verses to guide me, as well as a prayer team that supported me and gave me words of wisdom.  A guiding scripture for my teaching career has always been "those the Lord calls he also equips." But I was not letting Him equip me. I was not utilizing prayers and the anointing, or group accountability to do the job the Lord had assigned me.  Some of the pain was to purify me and some was self-inflicted.  God did not want to abandon His process by validating my weakness and lack of trust.  I am a teacher.  At least for now. 

The Lord was very clear when He spoke to me. "...until you have allowed the Lord to create a full-time ministry through you."  What He did not say was "...until you quit teaching." What He did not say was "...until you work at a church or in the mission field." He told me to allow Him to lead and to allow Him to hold the paintbrush.

Teaching is a ministry, I just have to be willing to serve.

But I also was placed in the path of a servant who loves the Lord and wants to free His daughters from sexual abuse and slavery.  I was so inspired by his compassion and simplicity (sometimes it's simple - if not easy: find safe houses, rescue women and girls) and determination (to put a permanent end to sex trafficking worldwide).  His project, Broken Hearts, is in the very beginning stages, but he planted a seed in me and I know will continue to do so for others.

Through a conversation with my sweet friend Ericka, a makeup artist and manager for MAC, about her passion for the company's philanthropy, I was reminded about Younique's dedication to domestic violence awareness (DVA) and support for victims.  This is not my first time working for DVA.  For three years of college, my sorority made a large effort to promote awareness.

I also remembered that my friend Maria has transitioned her mission to save souls in Haiti to include helping Haitian women rise up from their discrimination and high rate of violent and sexual victimization and empower them to create better lives for themselves and their children.  Her Jasper House will open this year.

In the USA, Christians spend a lot of time talking about how women hurt themselves by the relationships they choose, clothes they wear, friends they model.  We talk about our petty and catty tendencies.  We talk about working versus nurturing our family and about church leadership or back-row seats.  But we ignore the enemy's darker and more violent attack on our femininity and our ability to see, embody, maintain, and exude the beauty God had in mind for us from the beginning.  We don't talk about violence and sexual assault.

And we definitely don't ask ourselves enough if we can help.

In September, it will be a year since I focused my creative energies around three words: Truth. Beauty. Inspiration. Through my recent revelations and the lens through which I now see so many things (advertising, pornography, the premature and exaggerated sexualization of young women), I will be narrowing that focus down even further.

The Truth is Yeshua, the Messiah, the Savior, the soon returning and reigning King. "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to [humans] by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). He is also the Word, our logos - the reason we do anything (John 14).

Beauty is everywhere and IN EVERY ONE OF US, especially women of God.

We are called to use that beauty to Inspire others towards the greatness inside them, whether our husbands, our students, our best friends, our church family or the world.

I am working on a plan and system by which I dedicate my Younique sales, book sales, and performance payments first, to paying off my credit cards so that I can reallocate my salary toward an apartment and then house of my own so that I can be hospitable to others. Secondly, and more importantly, to donate and undergird the missions of Broken Hearts and the Jasper House.

Until (and even after) I have generated the funds to be able to allocate and reallocate them, my makeup photos will take on a more focused connection to the beauty in us already and the healing and empowerment God desires for us.

This post is plenty long enough, but there will be more and more and more on this topic in the future. Thank you to my Bold, Brave and Pretty sisters who helped me get here!

What can you do to help?
Buy makeup!
Buy my poetry book! Contact me for instructions.
Pray for me!

#TrueBeautyInspires

A New Thing

I'm doing a new thing in 2015! Who's in?

Spoken Word of God

Last week, I outlined ways to know if the words you're taking in are from God or not.  I focused on the written word - the Bible and other texts that proclaim the gospel of salvation through Divine Intervention. This week I will focus on the spoken word.

There are three main sources of the spoken word of God:

• Pastors, preachers, prophets, teachers, conference speakers - all one group
• Spiritual family, counselors, mentors, teachers, wise advisors - all one group
• God Himself

To be very honest, many of us only ever listen to people in category two, spiritual family.  This is a very natural place to start, but a dangerous place to end.  My sweet, faithful, strong in the Word grandmother is sometimes just too close to me or too insistent on her personal styles to be the only one I listen to.  Your mentor is a human being. No matter how much she loves God, is filled with the Holy Spirit, she is still human with her biases and places of hurt and confusion.  To only listen and take advice from your spiritual family is to shut out the revelation God is giving to the rest of the world.

God is bigger than our imagination and wondrously multifaceted. God is not limited to the perspectives of people we know.

The next problem we have, especially in the United States, is our aversion to pastors and church people.  And I promise you, despite my current attachment to the church, I have struggled with this before as well. 2 Chronicles 20:20 says, "Have faith in the Lord your God and you will be upheld; have faith in his prophets and you will be successful." Also in Paul's second letter to the church at Corinth, he says, "God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased...and God has appointed these in the church: first apostles, second prophets, third teachers..." (12:18 and 28).  He goes on to list several other spiritual gifts in hierarchical order.  Apostles can be defined as "those who are sent" (based on the translation of the Greek word) to speak God's word or to do God's work. I don't have them listed above simply because apostles tend to be doers - church planters, missionaries, healers - where the speakers are more referred to as prophets.

Some in church culture refer to prophets as anyone who speaks on behalf of God, or gives a message from God. This encompasses pastors, preachers, teachers (of the Word, not necessarily academics), and conference speakers (conferences centered around God's word and growing in faith). I like this scripture reference: "When there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams. This is not true of my servant Moses; he is faithful in all my house. With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles; he sees the form of the Lord" (Numbers 12:8).  That's big. We see that prophets get visions and dreams that have meaning for our lives as followers of God. We also see that a person who is faithful to God might see God "face to face" and might hear things from God "clearly." Any human is fallible. Moses had his issues. But God continues revealing Himself to certain people "face to face." He continues speaking to certain people clearly and He does so even today (because He never changes - Hebrews 13:8).

The practical application is this: When someone says, "The Lord spoke to me and said..."

1. Look for that trend in scripture.  You probably won't find the exact words, but you can find the concept. Remember to balance the Old Testament with the new. If a self-proclaimed prophet says, "God wants us to stone all adulterers," yes you will find that precedent in the Old Testament, but you will find a very different precedent set by Jesus in the New Testament. Chances are very great that person didn't hear from God. 
2. See if what they claim God told them proves true. "You will know them by their fruit," or by what they do (Matthew 7:16). The catch is always timing.  God exists outside of time and historically gives people glimpses into the very distant future. Very rarely does God give a message with a timestamp on it.  The nice thing about this is it's easy to test out.  "Prophet" So-and-So says this will happen before the end of the year. You don't have to wait very long to see if they were true or false.  
3. Do NOT try to decide whether they are really speaking God's word based on their mistakes or past failures.  Moses killed a guy and then disobeyed God and was left out of the Promised Land. That didn't stop God from using him to write the Torah. Paul used to murder Christians, that didn't stop God from using him to write all those letters to the churches. God is in the business of saving people and using them for His glory. Salvation is a process and God uses people while He's still saving them. Sometimes people make huge mistakes after God has spoken through them. This does not invalidate the message.

When taking in God's spoken word, we must temper our faith in God's hierarchy with wisdom of God's written word. "Study to show yourself approved" (2 Timothy 2:15). Listen with a discerning ear and react in love and submission.

I will write more on submission and hearing from God Himself* next week.
#iLoveWords

*I struggled to put Himself rather than Herself or Him/Herself. God does not have gender. That's a different argument for a different day. But know, that I believe firmly and whole-heartedly that God fully encompasses both genders. 

Say What? Word?

In my last post, I used the premise of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love to give some guidelines for having a fulfilled life: pray, "eat," and live. As promised, in this post I am going to discuss my theory of "eating" a bit more.

I already mentioned "[hu]man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4).

What are God's words? The easy answer is: the Bible. The educated answer is: God's words are those which proclaim the Gospel, the good news, of salvation through Divine intervention.

Let me clarify: The only reason I did not leave my declaration at "the Bible - period" is because I believe, like Tommy Tenney (author of the famous Christian text The God Chasers), that God has not stopped speaking to His people since he gave John the Revelation and since Paul wrote his inspired epistles to the early churches. "God is the same yesterday, today, and forever" (Hebrews 13:8), so it doesn’t make sense that He would stop giving us prophets, relevant and timely instruction, and revelation.

I think there are dozens of books out there written by people who listen just as closely to God as Matthew and Amos and Moses listened to God. And I think their words are just as relevant to living a godly life as those in the canonized Bible. These authors’ books typically include biblical cross-references along their original revelations.

I will not name specific other books of scripture in this post, but I will say this: Christianity hinges on the revelation (not the intellectual knowledge) that Jesus, the Christ, who was both God and man allowed himself to be killed in order to "pay for" human sinfulness (Phil. 2:5-8). All religions I have studied acknowledge that humans are inclined toward wrong doing more than right doing. Most theism (or “belief in God”) acknowledges that God is "holier," better, stronger than humans. As a Christian, I believe that Jesus's death paid (past tense) the price for my sin. It happened immediately in the instant of his death, and now only has to be accepted.

I am going to disagree with some theologians here, though, and say: I don't think Jesus came to earth, lived, was tortured, died, and rose again (that's the difference; martyrs are a dime a dozen) primarily to save us from hell. Why not? Because I don't believe that the people who attempted to be faithful to God before Jesus's earth tour went to hell. I believe Jesus's death and resurrection were ordained by God to give us a chance at a better life on earth, an opportunity for the life God wanted when He created humans in the first place. Now THAT’S GOOD NEWS!

Christianity is about being saved from the effects of sin in our lives on earth more so than the after-life result of rejecting God's sovereignty. We are saved and able to engage in the process of becoming more whole, and therefore becoming holier and happier.

So, how do we measure if it is God’s word or not? In my prayerful, researched opinion, God's word is this:

• It DOES constantly require you to do better. 
• It DOES constantly remind you that you cannot do better without God. 
• It DOES come from a place of love. 
• It DOES NOT allow you to remain complacent. 
• It DOES NOT convince you that your next level is all about gritting your teeth and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps (none of that “they sleep, we grind” mentality). 
• It DOES NOT come from a place of judgment. 

Despite many Christians’ aversion to everything that hints at another religion, in Liz Gilbert's book her first act on her spiritual journey was to cry out to a God she wasn't sure she believed in and ask for help. Even she prayed first. And when God spoke; she listened and obeyed.

#iLoveWords

 For some information on other ways God speaks, check out Soul Medicine next week.

Nothing But the Truth

Spoken word poet Alysia Harris embodies the art of telling the ugly truth in a beautiful way.  She speaks with her whole face, her whole body, she loses her voice and makes herself cry 90% of the time.  This is how you know what she's saying is true.  If you can write it, edit it, memorize and rehearse it and have it still bring you to tears, you're onto something.

She tweeted this quote years ago:

The best example I have of this truth is me and my bestie, Jess.  She and I have been making best friendship work for almost 8 years.  Over the last 6 months, we have been really committed to deepening our friendship by talking more regularly even though she lives in Germany (remember last week's post? Make it work. We use the Voxer app) and praying with and for each other.  We give each other updates on all the big stuff and all the little stuff several times a week.  When we disagree, we figure out why we disagreed. When we get frustrated we tell each other, we apologize, and we attempt to not make the same mistake again. We still sometimes make each other cry.

Any time you talk to someone this often, you will need a set of principles to guide you.

Here are the three things that work for us:

God - If Jess and I did not each (not one or the other, or one on behalf of the other) have a firm commitment to a God who never gives up on His relationship with us, we would probably have given up on our friendship with each other.  In fact, when we were both weaker in our faith, it was much harder and we made more and harsher mistakes.

Also, if we did not each understand a God who forgives endlessly and gives more grace than we could ever give or deserve, we would not have an example of how to treat each other with grace and forgiveness.

Love - Jess and I have spent countless hours discussing the different facets of that four-letter word.  We always use the Bible as our guide - 1 Corinthians 13, 1 John 4:7-11, Ephesians 3:17-19 (she asked me to read this at her wedding, even after I'd been really mean to her - that's love), and countless other scriptures.

We take what we read and we attempt to apply it literally.  The Bible is a book of instructions given to a beloved group of people from a Father who only wants what's best for them. And we know "Love...rejoices in the truth" (1 Cor. 13:6).

So, when Jesus says, "turn the other cheek," it literally means that in a fight when a person hits you, love would guide you not to hit them back. For real. This is only figurative in that it can apply to non-physical fights.  If someone calls you a dirty name or cusses you out, you are not to retaliate.  Love stands down, takes the hit, extends forgiveness (without being asked) and does not hold a grudge. Look at Jesus on the day of his crucifixion. Whoa. We don't like this because we see "being a doormat" as enabling the other person's bad behavior.  But somehow Jesus didn't see it that way, and I can't presume to be smarter than him.

Honesty - You have to tell the truth. We make the mistake of believing that others are not smart enough, stable enough, or loving enough to handle our truths or treat us well in the face of our truths. That's where we have to be patient, loving, and forgiving and give them time, space, and resources to understand us.

Jess and my friendship finally became smoother when we learned how to disagree with each other and still be loving and supportive. Aristotle is attributed as saying, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." As friends, we have to entertain each other's thoughts, feelings, ideas, plans, goals, and potential relationships.  We must entertain them, and if they need re-sculpting, be honest and loving enough to tell our friend why and offer support for how.

It is as simple as 1, 2, 3 and as incredibly difficult.  True communication, true friendship, true love, requires honesty to make us better people.  Someone has to tell you that you are spending too much time at the club to really make your business successful.  Someone has to tell you that the way you speak to people discourages collaboration.  The only way I've seen to be honest without ruining your rapport with people is to always temper your honesty with love.  The only way I know to be dedicated to love is to follow God's example, especially in Jesus Christ.

#iLoveTruth