Devotions

Today I feel like I stepped on some toes. But I've been feeling like that a LOT lately, so it's causing me to wonder if  this "just keeps happening" or if it's me. I think I'm leaning toward the latter.  The issues all seem to stem from me wanting justice, equity, and fairness, especially for those who have been historically robbed of these things. And if I see something happening that I perceive to be a result of someone underserved being... well... underserved (NOTE: the word is under-served, not  un-deserved), then I feel as if it's my duty to call the wrong-doer out on it. Or at least get to the bottom of where the ball got dropped in the first place. I somehow always feel this urge to take it upon myself to find the broken cog in the machine... to find out what in the process could be improved so that the injustice never happens again.  And like I said -- it's this compulsion I feel. It's not something I choose to think about or care about, bu...

Our church is doing something really unique that I've never seen done before: we're praying for a Revival in our country and we're actually expecting God to show up.  In keeping with the historic precedents of revivals, we're having a whole weekend dedicated to worship, prayer, and community outside under a big tent and we're even calling it "Revival."  "Are you going to Revival?" we ask each other.  "What time are you getting there?" "Are you camping overnight at Revival?" And as I pack up our camping gear and run through the list of all the to-dos I still need to do before Revival, it struck me: A real, genuine spiritual awakening should never be slotted in my brain in the same category as a camping trip. I should prepare differently for a Revival than I prepare for a night under the stars cooking hotdogs.  Yes, I still need to bring a cooler and an air mattress and find someone to let out the dog while we're away for th...

That's right - did you know the Bible likens followers of God to donkeys? These verses really stuck out to me recently and I've been noodling on them for a while now... These are God's words, speaking to Job in his distress: "Who let the wild donkey go free? Who untied its ropes? I gave it the wasteland as its home, the salt flats as its habitat. It laughs at the commotion in the town; it does not hear a driver’s shout. It ranges the hills for its pasture and searches for any green thing." -Job 39: 5-8 I feel like the donkey in this passage is me - or what I aspire to be, anyway. God has already freed her from ropes and given her a home where she can "laugh at the commotion in town" and drown out the shouts of a driver. It's this beautiful picture of God's creature being freed from physical bondage but also freed from worry and concern for those that used to control her- she is free to range the hills and search for the good (green) things around...

 Here I sit, months after blogging about how I need to learn how to rest... with pneumonia. Forced to "rest" at home for about a week now, too weak to get out and do anything. I haven't been to work in 6 days, and I haven't had this awesome, rejuvenating period of rest, either. I just feel light-headed and nauseous and I have this annoying, gargling fluid in my lungs. It's not been any sort of "break" or "rest" from work, but instead, a forced period of doing nothing because I physically can't do anything. Walking up stairs feels like I ran four miles. And I'm not a runner. All of this is to say that if God wanted to force me to rest, He's accomplished that. I get the message. If I won't prioritize rest for myself, then rest was going to come and find me. I get the message. I must admit, all of this is coming at a rather strange time in my life. I've felt for several months now that I'm at a "crossroads" in my ...

  God, I don't even know how to title this post.  And when I say "God," I'm not using it as an exaggeratory phrase. I'm talking to you, Jesus. That's right -- the Creator of the universe who for some reason chooses to have a relationship with little old me. Wow. That sheds some perspective.  Here's the thing, though-- I'm still feeling super directionless at the moment. You told me to rest and I still don't know how. I know from past experience what it feels like to be chasing after a calling You've placed on my life, and I don't feel like I'm really doing that right now. Especially because you told me to rest . How can that be my "calling?" You're always challenging your children to grow, and MAN does it feel like a challenge for me to stop doing things. To stop running hard. To sit down. To rest.  I heard very clearly from You about the need to rest, and so I tried to be obedient. I cut out a few things from my crazy sch...

If you know me, you know I'm not the best at pivoting from "the plan." I wanted to title this post "Go with the Flow," but it felt too weird for me to write. Unnatural. I'll get to the "dancing" bit in a minute... The phrase "go with the flow" has just been stuck on the brain and felt the need to start out that way. As I'm learning to trust God more, the more I'm finding that His ways are not only better for me, but stronger than mine... He's going to get His way regardless. His good and perfect way. And since I'm still stuck on this whole "calling" thing (thanks, John Mark Comer's  Garden City ), I've been meeting with trusted friends and mentors to speak some truth over next steps in my career. I'm excited to share that after countless coffees, phone calls, texts, and root beers, I think I've found the answer! Are you ready?  Are you sure? The answer is: just go with the flow. ... ...WHAT?! Th...

When I was 12 years old, I learned how to do a round-off back hand-spring. It took me months of private lessons at the local YMCA and many, many awkward moments of trying to do a standing back hand-spring with my instructor "spotting me," only for me to chicken out at the last minute and come crashing into her... the full weight of my body... plummeting onto her as I apologized and said, "I'm sorry... I just can't do it!" It was so embarrassing-- with her holding her hand under my back and supporting my awkward pre-teen body while I continuously failed, over and over, somewhere between 10-15 times a lesson. Nevertheless, I persisted. I was able to do the thing eventually - literally once - all by myself. For a panel of cheerleading coaches during 7th-grade try-outs. And once I didn't make the team, I never did it again. You may be asking, " Why did you do that, Carly? Why did you try so hard at something you never even kept up with? Wasn't tha...

The air smells like rain. It rained much earlier today, but ironically, in the heat of summer, the air seems frozen in time. It is warm, but not hot. Evening. On a Tuesday... my last Tuesday of summer break.  Something was drawing me outside tonight... the way the sun's rays were entering our home and dancing on the piano made me wonder what the sky must look like from our front porch. I caught glimpses of what I had imagined it must look like outside... on our now-pink tinted walls, through warm, orange cracks in the curtains. I had to see what the sky looked like, in all of its full glory. The tiny glimpses I caught through the glass pieces in our door just weren't cutting it. And so, I opened the door, breathed in the rain-air, and stepped outside.  I've been sitting out here for about twenty minutes now, and it's already dark. I caught the last look at the orange-pink sky setting behind the houses across the street. There's heat lightening flashing across the ne...

Well, it's that time of year again. The sun is high in the summer sky, the chicken kabobs are outside grilling, and the smell of sunscreen and chlorine are floating off my skin as I smell my armpits to check if I need to shower or not. And I am craving juice. So, a few hours ago I trotted down the cool basement stairs to find my favorite $6 Salvation Army find: a Hamilton Beach home juicer (by far the best ever "AS IS" thrift store gamble that I've ever made). I washed it off, turned it on, and started making some fresh juice. Three hours later, I think I should be good on juice for... basically forever, actually.  But as it turns out, after three hours of being home alone on a Friday night, dancing around your kitchen to OneRepublic and telling your speaker, "Alexa, VOLUME UP!", you tend to get pretty introspective. I think it's because the repetitive motion of chopping apples and shoving them into the top hole of the juicer brings back all the memori...

 I logged on to write today and then I read my last post from back in November. I actually laughed out loud. If you didn't read it, it's actually not ground-breaking or even inspiring, really... it's just a rant about how busy I am and how hurried my life is under the yoke of never-ending to-do lists. I laughed because upon reading it today, the day I finished The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer, it seemed pretty ironic, don't you think? It was almost as if God were smiling on me and saying, "I see you, Carly. I see how you showed up to be with me today, on your Sabbath. I am with you and I want to breathe life into you."  And boy, do I need some life . Spring is coming and I'm eagerly awaiting the new beginnings it can bring-- it seems like this winter has been a long one. It's been cold and I've been in this constant state of fatigue for the past four months or so. It's been a slow-moving winter but somehow it also feels so ...

 Friends, life has been absolutely crazy lately. Like, busy, wild, jam-packed, stressful, tiresome, busy, and did I mention… busy? I don’t know why I pack my schedule so tightly, or why I insist on adding more things to my plate even when I am already drowning in to-dos. It’s all too much, and yet when I survey the work of my hands at the end of the day, I feel I’m not enough.  I replay the failures I had, the frustrations I unleashed, and the impatient impulses that drove me to paralysis. I recount all the times I responded to someone in anger, or judged someone with hurtful thoughts, or even worse, hurtful speech. Somehow, it doesn’t matter how hard I try to “do it all…” As long as I’m doing it all as poorly as I have been, then what’s the point? And I’m not writing this for sympathy. I don’t want any words of encouragement. I need a wake-up call, and for the Holy Spirit to speak truth into me when I need it most. I don’t need another human’s words or actions to comfort me. ...

  Father , I want a lot of things. I want the Reds to play well this season. I want to be a better cook. I want my plants to grow and explode with life in my garden. I want these cicadas to just hurry up and die already. I want chocolate. I want to have a marriage that lacks nothing. I want my family to all live long, healthy lives with their eyes fixed on You. I want my friends to come to know Jesus as their Savior. I want answers to hard questions. I want things to be immediate because I hate waiting. I want to be firm in my identity and stop seeking it in futile places.  I'm starting to feel a little like Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. "Daddy, I want a pony!" In all seriousness, though, I have a lot of wants and desires, Jesus. I take tremendous peace in knowing that You already know my thoughts. Your Word says that you know my words before they're even spoken... every thought inside my brain (...and You still love me enough to die for me? ...

 Spoiler alert: life can be just downright terrible sometimes. There can be terrible, awful, terrible things that happen all around us and it's so, so hard to see "the good." But we search desperately for it anyway. Cancer, famine, war, orphans... in no particular order, we all can name more things than we'd like that just plain suck . And I hear a lot of people struggle to justify "how God could let this happen" or ask, "If there's a God, then why is there _____" and I'm not going to be belittling these wresting questions, nor do I claim to have the answers to them. I think they're rational questions to ask, especially for those of us who have met this AWESOME, life-changing God who is the Maker of all things good and perfect. Because when things are terrible and we lose a loved one, or we don't get the job, or we get our hearts broken, I think a natural response is to ask this good God: "Why?"  Or even more pressing, ...

 " Don't ever miss out on a woman with a guarded heart . She's usually protecting the deepest most caring soul you'll ever know"  -Sylvester McNutt I don't know who Sylvester McNutt is, nor do I think this particular quote says anything radical or life-changing. I posted it because when I Googled "guard your heart," there were a slew of random quotes and bad (like, really bad) stock images to choose from, and it made me wonder what the phrase even means .  Does it mean to be guarded, like as a person? Private? Skeptical? Shy?  Does it mean to save yourself for your future husband / wife? Does it mean to protect your heart and all your fragile feelings? Let's get down to it.  The passage I read today is Proverbs 4... specifically verse 23, but we'll get into that later. Proverbs 4 is, like most passages in the book of Proverbs, about wisdom and what it means to "get wisdom" and "be wise." This specific Proverb is titled ...

 Well, in my "Phonics and Literacy" course yesterday, we focused completely on spelling and writing, and why kids stop loving to write... how we write, hold our pencils, etc. I saw it as a little nudge from my Father, yet again, for me to keep on writing... so here I sit.  I've been reflecting on a few posts ago... about be being a "try-hard" and how I wish I weren't "so much" all the time. A book I was reading yesterday said that amazingly, most women feel they are both "too much" and "not enough" at the same time, which is hard to conceptualize I'm sure for men. But I'd venture to say that most women get it. Because with every "too much," there's a corresponding "not enough." It's like a double-whammy.  I wish I weren't so talkative. I'm not quiet enough. I wish I weren't so hyperactive. I'm not peaceful enough.  I wish I weren't so judgmental. I'm not gracious enough...

Warning: this post is not going inspire you. I'll be lucky if it even makes sense. But there's something inside me telling me to write again... you can call it a calling, if you want.  I feel that my Father wants to connect with me and this is oftentimes how I think is best for me to do that-- which, when you think about it, is INSANE.  The God of the universe wants to connect to ME. He sees ME and sees how I best communicate Him, and since He wants intimacy with me, He's been slowly and quietly nudging me to get back into the blogging game. So, here I sit.  I'm going to force myself to write something - even if it's a short prayer of apology for not making enough time to write something profound - every day this week. I even took off work this morning... not to write, specifically, but to have a little time of rest before a busy week.  I woke up with a big headache after crying last night- something that doesn't happen too often, but when it does, I'm wreck...