Several months ago I had the privilege of hanging out with an up and coming pastor from Seattle named Mark Driscoll (and by “hanging out” I mean that my pastor was meeting with him and I got to sit in the same room). Although Driscoll has a great deal of wisdom and is an incredibly godly man, he’s also not afraid to speak his mind bluntly, especially concerning the Emerging Church movement, so he’s become a lightning rod for criticism.

Knowing this about Driscoll, my pastor asked him how he coped with the the slander, betrayals, and overall critiques. Driscoll explained that he has used those hardships to make himself stronger. Each hit was like having a brick thrown at him, but instead of letting those bricks destroy him, he chose to take the bricks and lay them down as a foundation on which he could stand, stronger and more sure.

To be perfectly honest, this analogy made little sense to me at the time. Was this just a manly way of saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade?” Ie. “when life gives you bricks, build a house?” Whatever, Driscoll….

Well it wasn’t until I recently had a proverbial “brick” thrown in my face that I realized just what Driscoll was talking about. He wasn’t simply advising that we make the most of a bad situation. Instead, we should aim for more than survival. There is a way to take those bricks and actually strengthen ourselves with them.

In case this analogy doesn’t connect with you either, here is how Driscoll’s illustration makes sense in my mind….

Imagine for a moment that you are an 8th grade boy. One day you get in a fight with some scrappy kid at school, and the whole affair plays out somewhat innocently until, all of a sudden, the little punk picks up a brick and throws it at your face.

Now at first, you’re gonna be in some pretty major pain, and your face is gonna be a mess. You’re probably knocked off your feet, you’ve got a broken nose, there’s blood everywhere, and on top it all you’re humiliated. You may lay on the ground for quite awhile moaning and groaning. You might even cry.

But eventually you get back up, you go to the doctor, your face heals, and you move on. Your face is still sore for awhile, and you may even have a scar from it, but you know what? You are now the kid who had a brick thrown in his face but lived to tell the tale! You are the man!

Now you are stronger and braver than you were before. Why? Because the next time you get in a fight with a kid, his puny little middle schooler fist is gonna look like a marshmallow compared to that brick. Nothing can scare you now because not even a brick in your face was able to conquer you.

And in that way, the brick in your face becomes a point of strength. In fact, it is a landmark in your life that you can stand on. If you can recover from a brick in your face, then you can overcome anything!

Plus, people will know that about you. They’ll know you as the kid that wasn’t slowed down by a broken face. You could bleed all over the ground but still come to school with your head held high, and they’ll respect you for it. You’ve got street cred. The 8th grade girls will be all over you.

That brick is now a part of who you are, and because of that brick, you are better and stronger than you were before.

It is the same with the proverbial bricks. If someone throws a brick in your face by betraying you, lying to you, or hurting you, it’s gonna hurt at first. You might lie on the ground for awhile in pain and shame. But if you can get up, if you can heal and move on, then that brick can become a point of strength. You can look back on that time in your life and remember, “That really really hurt, but it did not overcome me. I am still standing, and I am still moving forward. And if I could overcome that, then I can overcome anything.”

In this way, you can use those bricks to build a strong foundation for your life. You can look back on your life, look at all those bricks that were thrown your way, and rejoice in the knowledge that you are still standing. God was faithful, and you got through it.

Those bricks are therefore a reminder that when we are weakest, God is strongest. When we think that we can do little more than survive, God makes us into more than conquerors. So the next time that life throws a brick in your face, just remember that, while it might hurt right now and you may be tempted to scream a few choice swear words, you can use those bricks to build a firm foundation for the future. As Kanye West wisely rapped, what doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger.

Last night I went to a CD release party for a new Blues artist named Toby Bonar. He’s a very talented musician so I had a great time, but what I enjoyed most about the concert was the stories behind his songs. Toby is not only a musician, but he’s also a Christian, so some of his music reflected his faith, and I was truly blessed by it.

In particular, Toby introduced one of his songs by talking about the healing process. He explained that whenever we get hurt, we always want the wound to be healed quickly. That is not, however, what we see in nature. If someone breaks their arm, a doctor can immediately set it back in place, but it will take weeks before the arm is actually healed. And if a fire ravages a forest, it will be decades before the trees grow back to their original verdancy.

And it is the same with the heart. Whenever someone wounds us, we want to feel better right away, but that is not the way God designed us. In fact, when we do seek instant gratification healing, we are oftentimes not experiencing healing at all. Rather, we are finding ways to temporarily ignore the wound or cover it up, thereby allowing the wound to secretly fester.

In reality, healing takes time, not because God is unable to heal us instantly, but because there is much to be learned in the healing. For one, our hurt compels us to run back to Him. It reminds us of our own insufficiency, and our desperate needs for His love, grace and strength.

The healing process also forces us to work on other areas of our lives. When someone breaks a leg, then the rest of their body must work twice as hard to make up for it. In doing so, their other leg, arms and back grow stronger while they allow the injured limb to heal. Similarly, when your heart is wounded, you are faced with an excellent opportunity to discipline your thought life. You can either dwell on the pain, the loneliness, or the insecurity, and allow those thoughts to wound your heart all the more, or you can exercise Scripture’s command to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ,” (2 Cor. 10:5). In this way, a wounded heart becomes an opportunity to master your thought life. But only if you seize that opportunity.

And so I challenge you and encourage you–if you are hurt or wounded right now, don’t run from it. Don’t seek instant gratification healing. Instead, embrace the woundedness and all that God has to teach you through it. The healing process may be long and grueling, but God is not a God of waste, so you can trust that there are treasures waiting for you, even now. You may not see or feel Him, but God still is at work.

As a lot of you know, this has been a tough summer for me. My life has not unfolded as nicely and neatly as I imagined it would. One of the biggest points of frustration has been looking for a job–it’s been far more difficult and humbling than I ever imagined it being.

Amidst my discouragement, I was telling someone the other day about the journey I have taken this summer, and at the end of the conversation he offered to pray for me. During the prayer, he said something that startled me. He thanked God for not providing me with a job.

Ironically, I wasn’t startled by the obvious weirdness of his prayer. It didn’t make me mad that he essentially undermined the very prayer I had been praying all summer. Instead, I was more startled by how eerily similar his prayer sounded to the Scripture I had read earlier that morning. I had just been reading 1 Thessalonians 5:18 which instructs us to “give thanks in all circumstances.” After reading this verse, I had spent some time meditating on its implications because “all circumstances” means that we must give thanks for the good things AND the bad things that happens. That is indeed a hard teaching.

Fortunately, my friend’s prayer later that day shed some light on the verse. In the past, when I read 1 Thessalonias 5:18 I assumed we are to give thanks “in all circumstances” because it is in our hardships that God grows and refines us. Both of those are good works for which we should be grateful.

However, there is more to the picture than that. When I ask God for something, and He does not provide, it’s not always because He is disciplining me. At times He may be protecting me, or even allowing me a wonderful experience that I would have missed had I received what I asked for.

All of that to say, I needed to be thankful that God had yet to provide me with a job, not simply because He’s used this as a time to prune me, but because He is saving something better for me. I needed to be thankful that I didn’t have a job yet, because it meant that my desires were far too small, and God was doing more than I could possibly imagine.

So I challenge you–whatever it is that you’ve been asking God for, whether it is a job, a spouse, or some other opportunity, thank God that He has withheld it. But don’t thank Him simply because that is the Christian thing to do, and we are supposed to rejoice in harship and refinement regardless of whether or not we feel like it. Thank Him because He is protecting you, as well as granting you extra blessings in the mean time. Thank Him because the life He has granted you at this moment is, in reality, the very best life you can have. Your present circumstances are, in fact, the greatest blessing He can give you. God is an extremely intentional God, so His timing is precise and perfect. If He hasn’t provided yet, it’s for a reason that is far greater than we can ever conceive, and for that we should be grateful.

And by the way, the day after reading that Scripture and praying with my friend, I got a job.

As you could probably tell from my last post, I’m not exactly flying high right now. I’m not at a point in my life where I can look around me and think, “This is what I worked so hard for!” After laboring for 7 years at higher education, I can’t pay someone to give me a job. My parents are starting to wonder why they spent so much money for me to go to Duke. And I can tell you they’ll really start to scratch their heads when it comes time for me to get a job at the mall: “Why did we have to pay a small fortune for you to work at the Gap?” No, I am not living the dream, and this is not the life I had imagined for myself.

Fortunately, I had a small revelation today that really encouraged me and now I’m not feeling quite so bad about life. The revelation occured today when I happened to hear a reading of the Gettysburg Address (don’t ask…long story). As I listened to the words of Abraham Lincoln written 250 years ago, something dawned on me that I’d never thought of before: Abraham Lincoln must have thought he was a total failure!

Now, I’m sure we’ve all heard the story about how President Lincoln ran for all these different political offices and lost the elections over and over and over again. In fact, these constant failures went on for a gut-wrenching 28 years. But then, because of his diligent perseverence, he was eventually elected to be President of the United States. A wonderful story for us all! That story is not, however, the failure I was referring to.

You see, I’d always thought that Abe’s hardship and failure ended once he was elected as the President, but I was wrong. As I listened to the Gettysburg Address, the following words opened my eyes to the reality of how difficult his Presidency must have been: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Think about this for a moment. Abraham Lincoln battles for 28 long years before finally getting elected as President. Then, when he finally does succeed, the country goes into a civil war. I mean, as the President of the U.S. you pretty much have one job–to run the country. So if you are the President, and it is your job to run the country, and then during your presidency the first civil war in your nation’s history breaks out, you’re probably not feeling like you’re fulfilling your Presidential duties. You’re supposed to keep the country together, not let it fall apart. If I had been Lincoln at that point in my career, I would have seriously considered the possibility that politics was not for me. He barely got himself elected, and when he did the country almost fell apart. Not a good track record.

For that reason I would not be at all surprised if Abraham Lincoln had some serious self-confidence issues. He must have felt like a terrible leader since he couldn’t even keep his own country together. Just about the whole of his career, even his successes, were marked by hardship and failure.

Yet we don’t remember him that way. Today, we only remember him for his greatness. Even though President Lincoln seemed to be the Charlie Brown of U.S. politics, we remember him as one of the greatest leaders our country has ever known. I wonder if he ever knew he would be remembered that way.

So as I feel discouraged about my life and I listen to the 100th person tell me that God works all things for good and that He is merely teaching me patience and humility and perseverance, and that my recent frustrations don’t mean that God isn’t actually at work, I can take comfort in the life of Abraham Lincoln. His life reminds me that, while the advice I am receiving does get old, it is nevertheless true. God does work things for good, He is in control, and God is teaching me to persevere. Sometimes it’s hard to embrace that truth when you’re learning it from the lives of Biblical characters who died thousands of years ago, so Abraham Lincoln’s life is a more modern reminder that, from an eternal perspective, failure doesn’t always mean failure. I may not be able to see God’s triumph in the near future, or even ever, but that doesn’t mean He’s not at work. He is a redeemer God who can use a political failure to lead one of the greatest, most necessary battles our country has ever known, and He can also redeem my seemingly loser-ish life, perhaps using me to bless others and expand His Kingdom, if I should be so lucky. I must simply hold on to that eternal perspective–just because another day went by does not mean my journey is over.

One of my favorite verses in all of Scripture is Hebrews 11:8. It goes like this:

By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.

The reason I love this verse is that it so frequently reflects where I am in life. Every now and then, (kind of like right now!) I feel like I’m just floating along through life with no particular direction. Do you ever have those times? There doesn’t even have to be something specifically bad going on in your life–it’s just that you feel kind of blah about it all. There’s nothing really driving you because you don’t feel that strongly about anything that you’re doing with your life, whether it be your job, school, or even your faith. Now I may be the only one who ever feels that way, but I feel like that a lot, actually.

It’s really hard to move forward when you don’t know where you’re going. It’s hard to get excited about life when there’s nothing really substantive about which you can get excited. For some of you, the idea of getting up every morning at 6am to go to a lame job where you hate the people you work with for 8 hours each day can suck the life out of you. For others, you may absolutely hate school, and you are counting down the days until you graduate. And then for some it’s more of a spiritual battle. Your faith doesn’t have the same newness and excitement it had when you first became a Christian. I can’t tell you how many times I have sat in church thinking, “What am I doing here? Is this for real, or am I kidding myself and I’m merely singing to the sky because there’s nobody up there who is actually listening?”

Whatever your wilderness is, and no matter how it plays out, it always feels harshly bleak. It’s tough to keep going, and it’s hard to be excited about the life that you’ve been given since you question every aspect of it. But how do we push through such a season, especially when it feels interminably long?

Well it is here that my man, Abraham, really encourages me. One of the neat things about Genesis is that we’re given no introduction to Abraham. He just shows up in chapter 12, and for all we know he is a complete loser. There is nothing special about him that led God to chose Him; He simply did.

So here is Abraham, probably tending sheep or something and living the good life, when God comes to him out of nowhere and tells him to leave. And does Abram protest, or say he’s scared and that he doesn’t want to wander off into the wilderness? No, Abram simply goes, even though he doesn’t know where he is going. And even though Abraham didn’t complain at the time, I bet you he was pretty worried about the security of his future, if not completely terrified. Who wouldn’t be?

But as we trace the path of Abraham in the chapters following Genesis 12, we see that God not only directed Abraham’s path each step of the way, but he used Abraham to bless the entire earth. Generations of humanity would look back to him as one of the greatest leaders in all of Scripture. Abraham didn’t know where He was going, but God clearly did.

God used Abraham greatly, but it all started out by bringing him into the wilderness. And this is wonderful news for us, because sooner or later God will call us into the wilderness as well. There will be times when our lives seem devoid of hope or promise, but we need to follow Abraham’s example and just keep walking forward. Whether that means hanging in there with a crappy job, going to those dreaded classes and doing our best, or persevering in going to church and worshipping God even when we can’t feel Him, we still have hope. By remembering God’s faithfulness to Abraham, we can trust that He will be faithful to us as well. We may not know where we’re going but God does, and if my ending is half as good as Abraham’s, then I don’t even have to think twice–that is a path I definitely want to be on.

A couple Sundays ago my pastor quoted a Catholic theologian named Peter Kreeft, and the content of the quote has penetrated me to the core. I can’t stop thinking about it. Here’s what it said…

“God often withholds from us the grace to avoid a lesser sin because we are in danger of a greater sin. To avoid pride, he sometimes lets us fall into lust, since lust is usually obvious, undisguised, and temporary, while pride is not. So, to conquer lust, we should focus less on lust and more on pride. Only when we are truly humble does God give us the grace to conquer lust.” (Back to Virtue, 168)

This quote came as a huge relief to me, because it can be applied to just about any overt sin with which a person struggles.The funny thing is that it’s actually little more than a paraphrase of Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 12:7: “To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.” But there’s just something about Kreeft’s words that get me every time I read it.

To explain why I love this quote so much, there are two aspects of it that fill me with great comfort. The first is that there are certain sins in my life that I just can’t seem to kick no matter how hard I try, and I often feel totally hopeless about it, like God must think me an especially bad Christian, or that my entire faith is a sham. This quote, however, reminds me that God is still in control, and actually has a purpose for my struggles. Contrary to how I feel, my situation is not hopeless. By allowing me one sin, God is actually working on another, and that is encouraging news!

The second reason I love this quote is that it gives me a more tangible way to fight the thorns in my side. After fighting and fighting and fighting, I have realized that my methods are greatly lacking. Fortunately, this quote provides me with a different battle tactic. All along I have been relying on myself and my determination to conquer my sins, but this quote reminds me that that is the exact thing that God is trying to fix! Instead of depending on my own efforts to fight sin, I must do exactly what Paul did and declare,

“Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Cor. 12:9-10)

That is the ultimate purpose of these thorns. In weakening us, they actually conquer our pride. They force us to realize that sanctification is not a matter of will-power, and that we are in desperate need of grace. Rather than trust in our own goodness to defeat the sin in our lives, God drives us to our knees with failure in order to accomplish in us what He wants to do.

I hope that comforts you the way it comforts me. If there is a thorn in your side, an unbeatable sin that you just can’t seem to overcome, rest in the knowledge that God is at work doing more than we can even imagine, and He plans to do much greater things in you than merely keeping you from lusting, gossiping, over-dieting, etc. Instead, He could very well be breaking down your pride, since that is perhaps the greatest wall that stands between us and intimacy with Him. In that light, the thorn that you hate so much may actually be quite a blessing, even a *gift* from God!

Tonight I walked into the movie theater a confident and content single woman. Two hours later, I walked out of the theater feeling lonely, slightly less content, and somewhat unattractive. Now you’re probably thinking that the movie I saw was a chick flick, and that I felt this way because I spent all that time watching a drop-dead gorgeous actress get swept off her feet by the man of her dreams, thus causing me to compare myself to her in every way, and falling miserably short. This is not, however, the case. (although that has been known to happen before…) Instead, the movie that I saw was Ocean’s 13, which is by no means a movie about romance. It’s about a group of men who rig a casino to ruin its owner. Not exactly a plot designed to make you swoon. Why, then, did this movie cause me to lose some of my confidence and contentment?

The reason is that during those two hours, I spent the whole time falling in love with devastatingly attractive men who are brilliant, funny, focused, strong, loyal and amazing dressers. The movie is designed to make every guy want to be like them, and every girl want to date them. And I took the bait, hook, line and sinker. As the movie came to a close and Brad Pitt flashed one last electric smile, I found myself going weak in the knees. I was ready to marry that guy.

Unfortunately, as I walked back out of the theater I had a startling realization–I don’t know any guys like that. And even if I did, they are certainly not lining up to date me. That is when the disappointment set in. As I drove home I began to feel more and more discontent with the life I have now and the guys I am friends with because they’re simply not that charming, perfect, or well-dressed, always knowing when to say the right thing at the right time. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve even met anyone like that in my life. So I spent the rest of the night feeling a little sorry for myself, and a little less satisfied with the life I had been so happy with earlier that day.

I think this happens a lot to women. One minute, we are completely content with the life that we have. But then something catches our eye, causes us to believe the grass is greener on the other side, and suddenly our happy lives seem mundane and unacceptable. This not only happens after watching movies that sell us an impossible standard for love and for the opposite sex, but it happens every time we slip into thinking we need a better version of life than the one God has given us. Another frequent source of this thinking comes from dating relationships. The times at which I have had the hardest time being single have been immediately following a broken relationship. Prior to the relationship, I was generally happy with my single life, but then a guy comes along and you get used to being a couple, having someone to do things with, and plan things with. You have a future together, and you have dreams. So when that relationship ends, you have to readjust to being alone again, and compared to the starry-eyed, love-struck feeling of being someone’s girlfriend, the single life just doesn’t seem as good anymore. You want your future back, the one you were supposed to have…not this second-rate one you’ve been stuck with.

For me, this lack of contentment is a great indicator as to where my happiness truly lies. We want to echo Paul’s sentiment that he is content in *all* circumstances, but oftentimes we are merely pretending to be content. By that I mean that it’s not enough to convince yourself you are content. You need to know if you are content for the right reason. Oftentimes our contenment does not come from resting in Christ, but rather by justifying our lives to ourselves. This justification frequently manifests itself in the form of comparison with others: “I’m happy being single because it means I’m not making myself vulnerable to others,” or “I’m happy being single because my married friends are so annoyingly exclusive that I would never want to be like that” or “I’m happy being married because at least I’m not single.” If we can just find a way to prove that our lives are better than those around us, then we can be content with just about anything.

But that is not true contentment, and the false nature of that feigned contentment will shine through when something better comes along. For instance, you might say you’re single and content, but then a guy starts pursuing you who you probably shouldn’t be dating, and because the prospect of being in a relationship seems much better, you date him anyway. Or perhaps if you go to the movies and soak in visions of a more glamorous, romantic life, then your single lifestyle suddenly seems less satisfying. And if you’re married, you might meet a man who seems to understand you better than your husband, who better fits that picture of a husband you always had for yourself.

This can play out In other ways as well. The job you have may seem great until you talk to your friend who’s making six figures doing what they love. Or the church you attend may seem wonderful until someone brags about how much their church is growing or how awesome the music is. In all of these situations, the contentment we thought that we had is revealed to be based upon circumstances, rather than Christ. As long as Christ is not the source of your contentment, then you will never be fully content if someone has a better life than you do, so contentment will forever elude you.

So as much as it stinks to feel slightly mopey after watching Ocean’s 13, my emotional response is a great heart check, because it reveals the source of my true contentment. Clearly, it is not Christ, or at least not fully. But it is also a reminder to invest in the life I already have. There is no perfect person, marriage, job, etc., so we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking we would be happy “if only…” As a friend of mine says, the grass isn’t greener on the other side; the grass is greener where you fertilize and water it. If we work hard on the life we have been given instead of pining away after an unrealistic dream, then our contentment will truly take root. But it is definitely something we must work for daily, if not fight for.