Auditions

My daughter has been through a grueling audition process for graduate school. She is a classical musician, which stress-wise is sort of like choosing to be an air-traffic controller where everyone watches her land the plane successfully then critiques her perfection. Splitting the hairs of perfection is the marketable imprisonment of a free market. It’s also the tyrannical decisions handed down from a not-so-free market, and it seems we spend most of our network time listening to pundits arguing for the  necessity of the prison of our own choosing, and sometimes those pundits are standing in our pulpits arguing for those distinctions we can buy under the guise of the distinction that was bought for us with the life of a Saviour. This is how we forget all about freedom, even  in a free world where God has supplied an abundance of Grace.

     Let’s split hairs for a moment between perfection and being made perfect because one is Biblical and the other is not. Perfection in and of itself is impossible and in our heads we all realize this, don’t we?  Perfection requires noise and being made perfect creates quiet and peace. Perfection is all about a relentless pursuit with delayed gratification. When this happens, then I will find peace. When I have earned enough money, raised perfect children, developed the ability to perfectly —fill in the blank—then peace with myself will be my prize at the end of the journey and oh, by the way, it will be a perfect peace.  On the off-chance it doesn’t feel perfect to me when I get there, I will simply discard it like last year’s fashion for yoga pants and the beat goes on. This pursuit requires me to believe in a God who has a bucket full of Grace that He could pour at any moment He deems me worthy of it based on my performance and it would be like taking a bath in a mudless Mississippi river. This makes perfect sense if salvation is based on the model of Henry Ford.
     John Piper says it like this, to paraphrase…Piper says that to market religion to a free market society we must promote  the power to escape from weakness through leisure, but that the Biblical truth is we must seek the power to endure weakness in love.
    This is what God spoke to the Apostle Paul: But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you,  for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.–2 Cor. 12:9.
    Today I rejoice in missed measures, in burned steak, in all the unfinished cross-stitch projects, in my messy closet, in the race I run with injury, in my less-than-perfect testimony, and I rejoice in my hastily uttered and random prayer language. I rejoice in the mud of the river which clouds my vision to the bottom, a mud which Christ will take and turn into the balm for blind eyes.
    We spend so much time perfecting ourselves instead of giving to God the reality of our weaknesses when He is the only one who can create order out of the chaos and beauty from the ruins. Perfection seems like an acceptable sin, but the price is dangerously high. The price is peace.
-submitted by Kerri Snell

Subtle Differences

There is a subtle difference between responding to the will of God while content to wait within that will and thrashing out on one’s own as the pioneer of re-creation. In the case of the first, I am a small yet integral part of the complete circumference of an all-powerful, perfect God. I move within movement, and sometimes I rest. Sometimes inaction is my action. Sometimes admitting “I just don’t know” is what I know.


In the latter case, the teetering universe seems to be hanging on the thread of my thought processes, or worse yet, my feelings. There is drama and melancholy and frustration because there are so many walls to climb over, so many barriers because I am the only one whose movement, whose architecture I am ever aware of. I am a selfish instigator loaded with zeal and fueled by hunger. In this scenario, God can only go where I choose to go. When I accidentally land myself in the whale’s belly, I spend my days trying to light the candle in my pocket so that I can repeat the same world I just magically escaped from. Then I experience the most humbling of revelations to date….not even the whale wants me.

Remember, God is infinitely bigger than my most profound insight into Him. He is bigger than my most insurmountable problem. He is bigger than my wildest dreams. He is bigger than my Christian lifestyle. God is bigger than my life. I can do my best in the “situation room” of holiness, encountering one triviality at a time, one emergency at a time, limiting the Creator of the Universe to only those questions I know that I have the answer to, or I can begin to move through stillness into His magnificent solutions for every issue, every conflict, every one of us. I can participate with gratitude that “little, insignificant Me” gets to be a part of God’s wonderous plans. Those plans are perfect and they will always work out for the best.

It’s a subtle difference like the difference between deep, rhythmic breathing and momentary gasping.  

Be still and know that I am God.–Psalm 46:10

-submitted by Kerri Snell

Presto Chango

I have my moments. Those who follow this blog would testify, hands on the Bible, about just this fact. So would my siblings and my children…and the Hubby…except I would remind him of the ring on his fourth finger, and he would be persuaded to take the fifth.

Sometimes, usually when I am walking or jogging or gardening in the Great Outdoors of wherever I am, my moments surprise me in an exciting and beautiful way. Sometimes, after weeks or months or even years muddled in the complexities of my attempts to apply Biblical truth to my oh-so-real life, a little songbird comes to rest within my mind. It’s not really an epiphany in the “turn on the lights, the party’s starting” sort of way, it’s more of a gentle reflection upon still waters, a life-changing whisper. It’s that moment when a glimpse of the truth is completely satisfying to me. I don’t want to ask for more. I don’t wish for less.

How often do I spend all of my energies attempting to run from truth? How often is this decision followed by a complete lack of elegance? Followed by defensive posturing. Followed by wallowing in self-defeat. These aren’t pretty moments.


There was a day in my life…I can’t tell you exactly when the day was because it was indeed just a moment. It was a moment when I felt a knot release within myself physically. It was a moment which I can trace back to myself at age eleven and my decision to ask to be baptized, for the Old Me to be washed in the water and the blood of Christ. It was many years later, and by many years I mean some twenty or so years later….it was the moment that my journey took a new turn because my understanding of grace pulled into the forefront of my own priorities. It was a day that my own to-do list became a source of humor to me…as if doing can bring us to any kind of wholeness in and of itself.


It was the moment I tried on a new set of clothes which had been hanging in my closet for the entirety of my life. Elegant and intelligent in its design, this New Me was waiting for me to come to this moment, this revelation of self through much hard work and failure and prayer and silence and conviction and confusion.


It was the moment I realized that salvation via Christ’s death and resurrection is more than a successful system within which to transfer guilt. In other words, there comes a point where new birth means more than handling guilt and sin and others’ heaping piles of judgement into the hamper of my life story. There comes a time when the old garments get obviously tattered and torn and as outdated as an 80′s wedding dress, a time when a new “do” is in order.


I had this idea that baptism cleansed me of my former sin (and any little sin of omission which might have occurred as I sat on the front pew awaiting my turn in the dunk tank), and from that point on, the New Creation was the Holy Spirit dwelling mysteriously within me somewhere ready to take on my heaps of guilt and sin as they continued to occur within my life. I thought salvation was like a large-capacity washing machine where the water always had to be hot and the laundress had better never be luke-warm.


Do you ever wonder where all the mates to your odd socks are? Do you ever wonder what kind of IKEA shelving system exists with which God organizes the wrongs in your life? Do you ever put on a dress right before a party that is hiding in the chaos of your daily outfits, a dress you thought you might never wear, a dress that you bought on an ill-timed whim just because it was on sale or because you dreamed of one day fitting into a garment two-sizes smaller than you had ever in your adult life been?


You slip on that dress and it looks so beautiful and it just feels so right, so you. You wear it to the party and you dance and you have the time of your life. Then the next day, you put on your sweats and running shirt and you look pensively into the mirror again, and magically, still, you look radiant. You look the same. You look like the New You because you are the New You because you feel like the New You because you miraculously and wonderfully are. One day there is a moment when you simply can’t ever take the dress off.


Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here! 2 Cor. 5:17.

Submitted by Kerri Snell