Midnight Moments

Discouragement. It’s a feeling those in ministry know all too well and too often. I knew to expect this when I entered into ministry, but something I wasn’t quite as prepared for was rejection. Feeling rejected when those who were supposed to support you in ministry are suddenly nowhere to be found. Feeling rejected when people who had started coming to church or bible study and getting plugged in suddenly decide to stop coming. Feeling rejected when the ministry you knew for sure God was calling you to isn’t succeeding as fast or as well as you had envisioned, or maybe not even at all. These are the thoughts and feelings spinning in my head and heart as I drove home from lunch today. A great lunch with great friends that followed an equally amazing church service. An amazing church service that I was overwhelmed and discouraged about the day before that God completely showed up at even without a sound system or really much of a congregation. The enemy is so good at distorting g...

It wasn’t your typical staff meeting. There was some discussion on what was going on with the residents we ministered to, but the focus of this meeting was edifying the staff. Our director started off discussing how there are various seasons in our life. There are some seasons where God must cut things out of our lives and when there has to be death; these seasons are often painful and confusing. We’ve all walked through these seasons when God seemed to be weeding out everything in our lives. In these times, it is often difficult to see the purpose. It can often feel lonely and like God is abandoning or punishing us. But then follows seasons of growth and life; times when He lovingly replaces the things he cut away with newness, hope, and joy. Most often, we see these seasons manifest through our relationships. It’s common as we grow up and move on in our lives to naturally grow apart from childhood friends and maybe even family. But there are more painful moments when people in ou...

It’s all over Facebook and the news: transgenders in our bathrooms. I’ve seen countless rants from Christians and parents threatening to boycott businesses like Target, stating that their kids are no longer safe using public restrooms. I have a newsflash for everyone: your kids were never safe using public restrooms. Please take note, that I am not associating transgender individuals with pedophiles. I may not understand or relate to their personal struggle, but I fully accept that it is one that is real to them. My personal feelings, opinions, and morals aside: that is their reality. The issue with businesses declaring access for transgenders to use the gender bathroom that they identify with isn’t the issue. The flood gate that has been opened with this whole policy proposal is that individuals with ulterior motives are now given a free pass to victimize under the guise of transgender freedom. Yes, it is true that sexual predators don’t always necessary just victimize those ...

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, do not depend on your own understanding." Proverbs 3:5 "But I am not ashamed of it [the Gospel], for I know the One in whom I trust, and I am sure that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him until the day of His return." - The apostle Paul from prison, 2 Timothy 1:12 For anyone growing up in a Christian context, Proverbs 3:5 is a well quoted verse. In my own life, I often find myself quoting it to give myself comfort in frustrating and uncertain circumstances or find others in my life quoting it to me for the same intention. Honestly, however, very rarely does it give me true comfort nor do I find myself truly focusing on letting the meaning of it sink it. In the Christian community it has almost become a cliche; a pat answer Christians give others and themselves when they are facing a trying situation they can't make sense of. But I do not believe this was God's intention in giving us this truth in Hi...

It’s a running joke among my co-workers that I never stay in town on weekends I’m not working. I guess it’s not so much a joke as it is reality. The truth is: I love to travel and get restless staying in one place very long. I was pondering this on a recent trip back from visiting my parents in Mississippi for Thanksgiving. Since leaving New York to attend college in Indiana, I’ve struggled with settling anywhere and really making a place “home”. This especially became difficult most recently when I moved from Lexington, Kentucky, where I had really established a great church family—to move to Macon, Georgia responding to the call God has placed on my life. I remember having some very emotional moments with Jesus in the midst of the move and shortly after. It seems like every time I get comfortable somewhere God shakes things up and moves me somewhere new. God revealed something to me on my drive back from Mississippi about this; Christians are not supposed to get comfortable....

It's an unfortunate reality that not only does politics divide our country, it divides Christ's church. In this blog, I'm not going to try to persuade which candidate to vote for, but rather I am going to attempt to urge any and all professing believers to vote responsibly. If you are voting (and I hope that you are) I encourage you to prayerfully consider your decision. I encourage you to use divine discernment in which candidate you mark your ballot for. Please, do not simply vote for the candidate that most benefits what your itching ears want to hear, but rather prayerfully invest in the candidate that will uphold God's standards in his leadership of this nation. Like Israel, the Christian community in America has fallen into the trap of relying on political structures to provide for our needs and even our desires. In 1 Samuel 8, we find that Israel has grown tired of the Judges and Priests that God has given to advise them and demands that they have a king. Sam...

It started as what was supposed to be a relaxing, restful day. I was finally redeeming the gift certificate for a massage my cheerleaders had given me the Christmas before and afterwards decided it was the perfect day to do some shopping. Actually cooking dinner seemed to be illogical given the rest of my day, so on the way home from the mall I decided to stop at Domino's and order a (gluten-free) pizza- extra cheese and mushroom. While I was sitting, waiting on my pizza to be ready, a tall, tattooed, white gentlemen in basketball shorts and a t-shirt walked in complaining about how difficult it was to find the place. As soon as he walked in the door, I felt sick to my core. He put in his pizza orders and sat down next to me. On most occasions I would offer a friendly hello and start a light conversation, but it was as if God wouldn't let me engage in conversation with this particular man for some reason. That reason would soon make itself clear and he, instead, began conversin...

I love one on one conversations. It's very fueling and inspiring for me. I find, very often, that it is during such interactions with others that God speaks to me. Today I had one of those encounters during a conversation with a good friend from church. We were discussing the issue of grace and sin and whether or not someone can still be identified with his or her sin after coming to Christ. For example, can someone who is a recovering alcoholic or who has same-sex attraction sincerely be a follower of Jesus Christ? Well, I posited the explanation that Scripturally, someone cannot accept Christ as their Redeemer and continue in a life of sin. Paul is emphatic about this throughout Romans 6 (for instance, verses 1-2  Well then, shall we go on sinning so that grace may abound? Absolutely not! We died to sin, how can we continue to live in?). It is a mockery of Christ's sacrifice to free us from the bondage of sin to continue in it. Galatians 5: 1 declares that "it is for fre...

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, candle light vigils were held in honor of the victims. Facebook hate groups were also established directed at Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter who killed 32 people before joining his victims. In 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris targeted and killed 12 students and 1 teacher, along with wounding 21 others and fnally taking their own lives at Columbine High School in Colorado. Just after midnight on July 20th, 2012, movie goers viewing the opening screening of the Dark Knight rises in a theater outside of Denver, Colorado, fled in terror as a lone gunman open fired killing at least 12 people and injuring nearly 60 others. The tragedy and heartache of these events cannot be fully expressed in words on a page. As I caught wind of the news of this shooting, my heart broke not simply for those directly affected but for the world as a whole. We are so quick to point the finger of blame in this instances: after Columbine, attacks on the mus...

There were a few other people in Starbucks that day. I couldn’t tell you what those other people looked like or even where they were sitting. I couldn’t even tell you what songs played on the radio that morning. What I do remember is the joyful glow on her face. I remember the exuberance she talked with as she told her story and how God had redeemed her out of a life of prostitution, drugs, abuse, and a feeling of having no self-worth. I closed out our interview by asking her what the Church could do to more directly help sexually exploited individuals. With no hesitation she told me, “Love, don’t judge.  Accept them for their hardships. Know they’re not going to be perfect. Even if they want to give up, it’s not an easy road. Cultivate relationships; discover where people are on their journey. Don’t make assumptions, positive or negative.” Don’t make assumptions, positive or negative. How often have we done damage in relationship because we were too quick to make assumption...

It’s rare to find anything positive or encouraging in the news these days. Stories of murder, war, rape, genocide, sex trafficking, domestic violence, custody battles, kidnapping, celebrity divorce, and the like don’t exactly leave us with feelings of peaceful happiness. Rather, they leave us with feelings of anger, fear, and despair. For many, these images and stories just reinforce a belief that God cannot exist, and if He does He is a menacing tyrant with no love for humanity.  But I see a very different world. I see a world where there exists a God who loves way beyond what humanity deserves. A world with a God who despite our hatred and maliciousness towards not only one another, but ourselves and the Creator-God who made us, chose to pay the penalty for our rebellious and destructive actions. Somehow in the midst of the destruction, hatred, selfishness, and depravity, God is quietly whispering, “While you were dead in your sins, I died for you” (Romans 5:8). And because...

Winter has finally arrived, a few months late. As I drove behind the lone salt truck in my county yesterday afternoon before the storm hit, I started thinking about Jesus' words in the gospels during His Sermon on the Mount: "You are the salt of the earth, but if salt loses its saltiness how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot." Matthew 5: 13 So often throughout my life when I've heard this verse discussed, the speaker or writer has analyzed the usefulness of salt as a preservative and something to add flavor.  They often use it as a way to illustrate believers in relation to a sinful world. But as I drove on the clear, ice-less roads earlier today, after the salt trucks had done their job, I realized that salt can also be used to keep people from slipping.  Perhaps this could be put under the category of being a preservative, in that (in the context of salting icy roads) it protects peop...

As we ring in a New Year, I'm sure most of us have resolutions we've made and goals we've set to achieve in 2012.  As we evaluate the year that has passed I challenge you to not just celebrate the blessings and achievements, but do some serious spiritual inventory and see where you need to surrender to God.  Is it control over finances or circumstances?  Is it bad attitudes or bitterness? Is is stubbornness or pride?  What is it that's keeping you from experiencing God in an incredible way this coming year?  What is it that's holding you back from impacting the world for the Kingdom of Heaven? Something I've noticed more profoundly in recent days, in myself and believers around me, is a sense of entitlement.  Too many Christians have fallen prey to the American ideal that individuals are "entitled" to anything that makes them happy.  Now, I'm not saying God doesn't want us to be happy, but that is not his ultimate purpose for us.  I believe G...

Spending Christmas back with my family in New York is always an interesting experience after four years of college in Indiana and living the last 3 years in Kentucky.  Saying Merry Christmas is apparently taboo. Even telling sales clerks "Merry Christmas" you're bound to get a dry "Happy Holidays" in response.  And the act of Christmas shopping in general is a bit audacious in lieu of the real purpose of Christmas: to celebrate the birth of Christ.  Sure, historically He most likely wasn't born in December, but December 25th is the traditional day chosen by the Church universal to remember the occasion.  And how do we celebrate it?  By storming down old ladies to get Tickle-Me-Elmo's and training kids from the age of 1 to be materialistic and self centered. Now, this is clearly an overstatement, but I think most of you get the gist of my argument.  Christ has been lost from Christmas.  It's become about marketing and materialism.  And even for tho...

Hypocrisy is always a big reason, or excuse, that people give for why they don't go to church.  Now, I'm not going to try to defend the Christian Church and say that we aren't riddled with hypocrisy because I won't win that arguement.  Reality is unfortunately that Christians don't always practice what they preach.  Another reality is that hypocrisy is not unique to the Church or Christians.  It is unique, however, to humanity.  And that's what this blog is specifically about. So, you won't set foot in the door of a church because of hypocrites.  What about the hypocrites in the workplace?  What about the hypocrites in your family?  What about the hypocrites in public office?  What about the hypocrites in the media and Hollywood?  What is it about the Church that people are so quick to jump on their hypocrisy, but much more willing to ignore the hypocrisy in other arenas to a lesser degree? To those who call themselves Christians, an...

In Luke 2: 21-38, Mary and Joseph take their 8 day old son Jesus to the temple to be circumcised.  Among those at the temple are Simeon and Anna. Simeon and Anna (who was a prophetess) had been waiting their whole lives for the Messiah. Both were near the end of their lives, but God had promised them they would live to see the Messiah.  When they saw the tiny baby Jesus, they both instantly knew who He was and worshiped Him.  The Scriptures tell us, starting with verse 25: "Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.  It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord's Christ. Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts. When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the Law required, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God saying: 'Sovereign Lord, as you have promi...

11  My son, do not despise the LORD’s discipline,     and do not resent his rebuke,  12  because the LORD disciplines those he loves,     as a father the son he delights in Proverbs 3: 11-12 There's a large, plastic play castle on the smaller of the two playgrounds of the daycare where I work.  One wall of the castle that connects to the wall where a small orange slide comes down has been unattached for some time. The reason being, the kids constantly open this side to make an extra door to run through while chasing and hiding from each other. The thick plastic of the play castle is stable enough that it still stands on the ground, but the children make it a habit to climb up onto the side of the wall and sit on the broken side and rock it back and forth. Images of small three year old tumbling head first into the middle of the castle flood my mind as I watch this, but no matter how many times I warn them to get down or t...

I just spent the weekend in Fishers, IN at the Wesleyan World Headquarters for the 10th Annual Indy Christian Writer's Conference. During the summers I'm much more prone to blogging than I am during the school year. The most obvious reasoning this being time and availability of brain cells. I sometimes forget when I'm not writing that I'm CALLED to writing. I often sit at these Writer's Conferences amidst many published authors and creative thinkers and to be quite honest, I feel like I'm not cut out to be a writer. I grew up writing. My mom is a teacher so I learned to read when I was very young and my first novel of choice was Nancy Drew. I read her, pretended to be her, and wrote mock stories in the Nancy Drew sleuth fashion. This led to writing creative sci-fi stories (of course modeled after Star Wars and Star Trek) and eventually I took a stab at historical fiction. I finished my first novel about a family in the slave south and their escape to freedom w...

I’ve recently come to realized that I’ve lived my life predominantly as a Wesleyan, more so than as a Christian.  I was raised the daughter of a Wesleyan minister, and the grand-daughter of a Wesleyan minister and two Wesleyan missionaries.  I spent every Sunday in a Wesleyan church.  I spent my summers at a Wesleyan camp.  I attended a Wesleyan University.  And I’m now attending a Methodist seminary.  While I believe it’s important to align yourself with a denomination for the doctrinal structure and discipleship, as well as for the close-knit community, I’ve found that I’ve both alienated and prejudiced myself in regards to other Christian denominations.  Rather than seeing myself as a believer among various and equally Christian denominations, I’ve elevated my denomination (which I do hold in high regards for its emphasis on social justice and personal holiness) above all others.  I’ve allowed myself to see only the weaknesses in others denomin...

Have you ever noticed that on commercials for prescription medication, the side effects for a cold medicine are more severe than the actual symptoms of the cold?   Take for example the side-effects of Cymbalta, a common medication to treat the symptoms of depression and generalized anxiety: “Constipation; decreased sexual desire or ability; diarrhea; dizziness; drowsiness; dry mouth; headache; increased sweating; loss of appetite; nausea; sore throat; tiredness; trouble sleeping; vomiting; weakness.” If you’ve ever dealt with either depression or anxiety, a few of the side-effects are equal to or greater than the symptoms one would deal with NOT taking Cymbalta and just facing the normal issues that come with the problem being treated! Have you ever noticed that side-effects of sin are a lot like this as well? Most sinful actions are in response to the void of God in an individual’s life and are therefore nothing more than coping, or medicating the deeper problem.   While ...