13 | Be Love

What happens when we fill up on God's love?

We overflow.

Thankfully, it's not the toilet-running-over, QUICK-run-for-the-PLUNGER!! overflow. Nor is it the #coffeegroundsinmycuppajoe #couldthismondaygetanyworse variety.  

When God's love fills us up to overflowing, it's a radiant, let-your-light-shine feeling of fine and dandy.  It's bursting with sunbeams and fuzzy puppies and squeezy hugs.

cakeandcotton.blogspot.com

It's a "This God-given life is so good I've got to share it" kind of kindness contagion.

When we make time to drink up God's love, when we soak up all the goodness tucked into the corners of our days, we can become God's love in the world.

Hopefully after yesterday's post (a love letter from God) you are sensing God's love.

Maybe it feels a bit like this...

spokojnastudio via Flickr.com

...or this...

Looking for Love by IrenaS on Flickr

...or even this?

blerica.tumbler.com

And now that you're thinking about God's love, feeling all tingly and radiant, hopefully you are ready to go out into the world and spread it.

lovelindseyblog.com

Wait a minute!  This is supposed to be a time to sit and be still, not run (or walk) out and do stuff.

Oh, yes.  That's right.  

So... Let's be still and ask God to establish in us a mindset that will empower us to be God's love in the world as we go about our daily business.

Lord, 

You have filled me up to the point of overflowing with your love.  As I spill your gentleness forth on those people you have placed in my midst, I trust in the amazing truth that your love never runs dry.  Thank you for this endless supply of your love. Help me to be generous in sharing that love with others.

I confess that sometimes I am reluctant to extend love.  I might feel threadbare and used up.  I might be holding a grudge or harboring anger.  I might have suspicions and doubts about how loving others makes me vulnerable.  Where I feel reluctance, please reveal my hangups.  Where I am slow to love, please speed up your healing in my heart.  Make me an instrument of your peace and a bearer of your blessings.

Sometimes I turn being your love in the world into a list of "To Do"s.  Lord, please throw a big ol' stop sign in my path when that happens.  Help me to make a U-turn. Guide me toward the mindset that being your love — serving as your hands and feet and eyes and ears and heart — is a privilege, not a chore.

29blackstreet via Etsy.com

Sometimes times I look far and wide for difficult, challenging cases that need your care.  I forget that you specifically put people in my daily path to receive and return my love.  As I quiet my voice, help me to see who needs my love today.  Write their names on my heart.  Write their needs into my prayers.

theredsojourner.tumblr.com

Lord, help me to see where my passions and talents meet other peoples' needs. Show me how I can use the gifts you have granted me in a way that blesses others. And as I joyfully do the things I love, help me to focus on glorifying you and sharing your love with the world.

As I pour out your love, I am in awe of how caring for others helps me to see them through your eyes, and how it brings me to a better understanding of how you love. I rejoice in the knowledge that loving others brings me closer to you.

TriciaGoyer.com

Thank you for the gift of your Holy Spirit working in me, leading me in your loving kindness.  Thank you for encouraging and sustaining me in this time of stillness, so that I can go forth and be myself, be your love, and simply be.

Amen

Inspired to spread some love?  I'm loooooooving these ideas.

  

thehowtomommy.com

justbesplendid.tumblr.com

recipebyphoto.com

GoodHousekeeping.com

Sins Swallowed Up (and a chance to win your own Repentence Box!)

This is the second in a series of ideas for Lenten devotions and activities.  Whatever you do (or don't do) during Lent, I pray your journey to the Jesus' sacrifice on the cross is filled with the love, peace, and amazing grace of God.

Sometimes, when you are a random abstract person, you come across a great idea, seize it and hug it and love the fuzz off of it, and then — when you want to share it with the masses or at least a handful of friends — you can't find the original source for all the searching in the world and it's enough to make you scream or slay dust bunnies or cross your eyes and foam at the mouth and lay in a frumpy heap on the floor in the middle of the slaughtered dust bunnies.  Can you tell I'm in a bit of a tizzy about this?  Today this random abstract source-seeking person is me, and the English teacher in me is none too happy about potential plagiarism.  My legal-minded Mister wouldn't be happy either.  Intellectual property and all.

That said, this is NOT my idea.  And if you know where it comes from and whom I can credit, please do share and assuage my guilt.

There.  I've laid my plagiarism sin bare.  I promise to try and track sources better from here on out.  And I beg forgiveness from the originator of... The Magical Sin Swallowing Box.

Okay, that's not what it was originally called.  I'll take credit for the name.  But that's as far as I can go.

As we journey through Lent and look to Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, the biggest thing I want my kids to realize is how big, how powerful, how cleansing Jesus' loving forgiveness is.   

We are all sinners, stuck in mistakes (plagiarism and worse), lost on our own.  Jesus knows that.  He loves us in spite of that.  And that love — God's love — carried him through his darkest hours of crucifixion.  And because he gave his life for us, we get a clean slate every time we repent and return to God.  Every time.  

We get to cuddle in close to God even when we're dirty and stained and streaked with tears.  He doesn't say, "Hey, not so close to the shining white robes," or give us a scolding look.  He looks over at Jesus, they shrug their shoulders and smile at one another in knowing fashion, and then God pulls us in close and cleans away our dirty sins with a heavenly hankie: the grace of Jesus' sacrifice. 

It takes a bit of imagination and a lot of faith to trust in that forgiveness and salvation.  My kiddos — a lot of people — benefit from a visual aid to reinforce the idea.

And that's where the Magical Sin Swallowing Box comes in.

During Lent, we...

1. Write our sins on dirty gray hearts. 
2. We confess our mistakes and offer up our hurting hearts to God, asking him to forgive us and renew us as only he can.  
3. Then we slip those scraps of sin into a shoebox.  
4. As we let the paper go, we ask God to help us truly let the sin go, to erase the hurt and the guilt and the distance from God in our hearts, our heads, our souls, to help us embrace his forgiveness and grace.
5. And then we repeat.  Often.  

Forty days of sins released fills up our box.  Then on Easter morning, we open the sealed box.  And where one might expect to see dozens of gray hearts, scribbled with sin, what God gives us is this...

A box of clean, white hearts.  Clean slates.  Do-overs.  Invitations to come to him pure and clean and forgiven.  God doesn't just forgive our sins.  He forgets them.  All we have to do is repent and believe.

 
You are wondering what happened to the gray, sin-filled hearts.  This is where the magic comes in.  That shoe box has been outfitted with a hidden compartment.  The sin-filled hearts are trapped in a 1/2" deep cardboard tray glued inside the lid of the box.  Sneaky, eh?  (I am mildly afraid that this is the year my kids will figure it out.  If that happens, I'll turn it into a lesson on dimensions and measurement...)

Here's how you make the box.

1. Procure a good, old-fashioned shoe box. 
2. Measure the inside length and width of the lid.  Add 1" to both measurements (this will give you an extra 1/2" on each side to fold up and glue to the lid, making a 1/2" secret compartment).
3. Cut a rectangle of cardboard (an empty cereal box works nicely) according to your original lid measurement + 1" ( this becomes your secret compartment bottom).
   
4. Draw a line 1/2" inside each edge.
5. Cut away a 1/2" square from each corner.
6. Go over the 1/2" lines with a boning knife (or a ball point pen) to create a narrow groove which will make it easier to fold the cardboard.
7. Fold the 1/2" cardboard edges up at a 90° angle.
8. Cut a cross-shaped slit in the center of the box lid and the secret compartment bottom.  An Exacto knife or box cutter makes easy work of this step.  Make the slit about 1/8" wide, at the most.  If it's too wide, the secret compartment might be obvious.
9. Wrap the box and the lid in wrapping paper.  
10. Warm up your glue gun or get out some rubber cement or tacky glue.  You want an adhesive that will set quickly and securely.  Apply a line of glue on the inside of the lid, along the sides about 1/4" away from the top.



You can print this for free.  Wheeee!

11. Slide the secret compartment into place and hold until the glue sets.
12. Once the secret compartment is in place, you can have the kiddos decorate the Swallowing Sin Box.  We just put a simple Bible verse on ours, but Easter stickers, crosses, or pictures of Jesus would all be snazzy.
13. Cut hearts from gray paper.  We do 40 hearts for each family member, enough for one a day if we're diligent and consistent.  We use a paper punch for this, which makes the heart cutting go MUCH faster.
14. In secret, well after the kids are asleep, cut out the white hearts.
15. Put the white hearts in the box and seal it.  You can break out the glue gun again for this step.  Wheeee!

And if that strikes you as too much fuss, know that there are other Repentance Box ideas out there.  Such as decorating a box, writing down sins, and then burning the notes on Easter day.  Or this... one of many inspiring ideas from Ann Voskamp at A Holy Experience.

Family Repentance Box

Much simpler.  But no hot glue guns are involved.  And I do love my hot glue gun.

How ever you encourage your family to name, claim, and surrender their sins, may you and your loved ones know that saving power of God's forgiveness and grace this Lenten season.

P.S.  
Leave a comment about this post and you will be in the running for one 4 3/4" x 7 3/8" Magical Sin Swallowing Box made by yours truly, complete with secret compartment, 160 dirty gray hearts, and 160 clean white hearts.  I will ship said box to you, the randomly chosen winner, a.s.a.p.  My posts typically average 0.03 responses, so this shouldn't be too tough.  Best of luck!

Christmas Past, Christmas Present

Happy New Year!

I'm off to a frenzied, purging organizing start to 2013.  Last week I tackled the laundry/craft room and the storage room.  (That's where we stuff our stuff to the rafters until my mister is saying, "Where does all this stuffing stuff come from?!!"  Except his version doesn't sound so tame.)  Then I spent the weekend packing up Christmas: putting away presents, boxing up decorations, winding up lights, writing down "thank you"s and memories.



So now the house is bare, in a nakedly new and promising way.  I'm on a new page in a new calendar.  There is physical and mental space to breathe in winter's rest.

Christmas is over.  Done.  We put a fork in it, and it tasted so good.

Christmas, once again, passed by in a flash.  But is it in the past?  

No.

Ask several of my neighbors, whom I cheered this morning for still having their Christmas trees up, protesting the calendar, defying the dry winter air, holding on to the Christmas spirit.  Ask our dog, who "watered" our own Christmas tree, naked but still green, standing in a snowbank at the end of the drive, pointing to heaven proudly.  It seems to live on.

Christmas lives on.

Emmanuel.  God with us – he is still present.  The humble babe in the manger.  The humble king who conquered death on the cross.  These are presents we receive each and every day.

Christmas can't be contained in a calendar, in one day or one season sandwiched between Thanksgiving and New Years.  (That might explain why I'm still eating Christmas cookies.)  God didn't give Jesus once, crossing it off his list and retiring afterward.  Jesus lives.  Christmas keeps giving.

And as much as I like the releasing the physical and social clutter of Christmas, I rejoice at this.  Yahoo!  God's greatest gift keeps giving!
  
Jesus has come into the world and into our hearts.  To stay.  To live.  To change us.  To love us.

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.

1 John 4:9 (NIV) 

I don't want to lose that focus on the gift of Jesus even though I am focusing on a new year.

But I know myself.  I'm an out-of-sight-out-of-mind kind of gal.  

Can you relate?

How do we keep the truest present of Christmas present?  Living?  Ongoing?  Alive and well in our hearts, for always?  How do we remember the miraculous birth in Bethlehem now that the brouhaha has ended and the baubles have been boxed up?

Here is what the Spirit sang into my heart this morning...  Do you know the hymn?

 
Turn your eyes upon Jesus...
Turn to the Living Word, that was present in the beginning and became present on earth that night in the manger.  Our relationship with Jesus lives and grows each time we seek him in the written word.  

I, for one, am sticking my Bible right smack in the middle of the coffee table in the middle of the living room.  I may be de-cluttering everywhere else in the house, but God's love letter – big and bound and full of boundless grace – that is going to prominantly grace our home and our hearts.

Look full in his wonderful face...
Where do we see Jesus' face?  Well, if you've seen "Les Mis" on the silver screen (or Broadway, or read the book...), you know that "to love another person is to see the face of God."  I'm reminding myself to see the Christ child in my loved ones and in strangers.  (Especially when that is not so easy... this morning's sticky spilt cranberry juice, sibling squabbles, and slow-motion, aisle-clogging grocery shoppers come to mind.)

When it's hard to see Jesus in the faces around me, I lean into the promise that his face – his whole body – is alive and well in church.  As we congregate and worship and serve, as we praise and confess and glorify, we are his body.  We feel his wondrous presence and become his presence in the world.

And the things of earth will grow strangely dim...
Whenever we feed the hungry, clothe the poor, nurse the sick, console the broken-hearted, or include the lonely, we feed and clothe and love Jesus.  When we work to DIMinish earthly angst – hunger and hurt, want and wandering – we keep the Christmas gift alive.  We embrace Jesus' humble arrival on earth, we give the gift of his presence to others.  Like the little drummer boy, we play our best for him by sharing our talents to celebrate and glorify God.

In the light of his glory and grace.
This is how his light and his love shines.  The star of Bethlehem beckons.  Someone sings Noel.  A gift is given, in a small and simple package, but with a significance beyond measure. 

We can be that gift.  We can sing that tune.  We can spread that light.  We can keep the Christmas spirit and hope and joy in our hearts and in our corners of the world, even if the calendar insists it is January.

May you find a moment to fill yourself up with the fullness of Christ today, to look full in his wonderful face.  And may you pour out his love and grace and gift to others, so that Christmas stays in the present.