Bare Feet and Walled Up Hearts

I don't know how many people have made this comparison before, but walking bare footed and living a life of love are very similar. I say this because as I was walking barefoot outside today, I remembered how good it feels to walk without shoes on. Sometimes, the ground feels soft and nice, and other times its hard and rocky. You will step on sticks, you might bleed, your feet will get dirty, but you will feel. You feel the ground as your foot slowly lands on it, and you notice that every footstep. You don't notice that when you are wearing shoes, you take it for granted and you go on without noticing the intricate parts of life, like why we were given feeling at the bottom of our feet to begin with.
The reason I compare this with a heart and love is because we do the same thing to our heart as we do to our feet. We put shoes on it, we cover it up. Deep down we know that we enjoy that feeling of love and of loving. But too often do we feel pain, rejection, cuts, and heartache, so we decide to not feel anymore. The reason I'm saying this is that I want us, particularly as Christians, but everyone in general, to love without the fear of pain lurking in the back of our minds. I understand that it will hurt, bad at times, but when the time comes when your loving and the ground is soft beneath your feet, it will be a brilliant type of love, and it will bring freedom to your soul.

Complacency Killed the Cat

Complacency is something that all people fall into at one point or another, and too often do people realize it, or do anything about it. Have you ever heard that if you put a frog into a pan of cold water, and heat it on an oven slowly the frog will eventually burn to death because it is cold blooded and doesn't notice how hot it gets. That is us as humans. Precisely us. As Casting Crowns once put it, "It's a slow fade." We keep falling and falling down into all this crap, but it happens slowly so we don't notice it. Then one day, you'll look up and finally realize that your at the bottom of a pit and you don't know how to get out. It happens with a lot of things. But recently to me its been complacency. I will go on with my not super exciting life and just go with the flow. Never really challenging myself, not getting out of my bubble of comfort. And I'll slowly lose my grip on my faith, and other things around me. It will start with staying up late and not getting enough sleep. Then I'll be tired the next night so I will say that I don't have time to get into God's word because I need sleep. Then I will stop encouraging, and witnessing, and letting God's light shine to the world through me. All the while I am just going through life because I don't notice that the water is getting hot around me. It's a slippery slope. One other thing is that it's hard to notice that your life is full of complacency until you hit rock bottom.
That's what has been happening to me in these last few months. And I didn't notice it. Then today someone keyed my car in the school parking lot and I became really frustrated and upset. I was trying not to show it on the outside but it was there in the back of my mind. Then when I got home a song came on and I just started singing out at the top of my lungs, and paying attention to the words. I don't remember the exact words but for some reason they were able to sneak through the defenses around my heart and whisper in, "Everything is not well, open your eyes." And I broke down and started praying. I realized that I was caring too much about my image, and my car and just other unimportant things more than I was caring about God.
I had also become complacent because I was just fine where I was at and I wasn't willing to challenge myself anymore than I had too. I was just scraping by.
I don't know where that is going to go from here though. I just want to give my heart over to God again because I know that I don't have the strength to do anything on my own, I had just tried that and it led me into a dungeon. What I do know, is that I need to stay into my bible, and be constantly in prayer and making use of fellowship. And pray that I don't become complacent. Because as the say, complacency killed the cat.

Broken Love

Two months ago, I drove to Steak 'n Shake and sat at a table by myself. The waiter seated me where I was facing an empty seat and a wall. I pictured someone sitting across from me and that all was well. But in truth it was not and I had went out to eat to get some solace and some time to think. So as I was thinking through my own issues, I looked at the window and saw something that changed my perspective on life a little bit. I saw a mother dropping off her son so that he could spend the weekend with his father. Through the glass window I could not hear their words, but their expressions on their faces showed it all. The mother embracing her son and not letting him go, not wanting to lose him even for a few days. On her face showed the pain that she had faced so many times with this man she was letting her son go with and those cracks were showing through. I saw the father's attempt to show his son that he cares through a gentle pat on the shoulder. He loves his son but he doesn't know how to get through to him because all the while the 10 year old boy was going through the motions. His expressionless face showed that he had done this many times before, and that there was anger and bitterness walled up inside his heart that would not be easily cured. He's been through this before, so he puts on the show that he knows his parents want. But he's tainted, to him love was never shown. He is another casualty of selfishness, and of sin. How much of this could have been avoided if the parents had just tried a little harder? 

To tell you the truth, I don't know how much of that is true only because I was only watching through the window, and I don't know their stories. But in this culture divorce is so commonplace that men and women struggling in marriages view it as an easy way out. Because in truth, divorce seems so much easier on the surface than healing a broken marriage. Struggling couples should try to mend that break, and those cracks though, because if they have children, it is not themselves they are hurting the most, but their kids. And what more does Satan want than to deny children a good example of a father, so that when Jesus comes in and says that God is his father and we who believe that Jesus is the only way are his children, those kids will turn away. Because the only thing they've seen of a father, is that man who left that family for his selfish desires, and left a young woman to run a household by herself. What's left is only broken relationships, broken hearts and a broken women crying in her room alone because there is no one there to help her. Think before you act rashly, because your actions will affect not just you, but those around you. Don't create another 10 year old boy who is lost in this world because his parents were never there to show him what love truly was. 

Palm Sunday

^"8 A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. ⁹ The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,

“Hosanna^[b] to the Son of David!”

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”^[c]

“Hosanna^[d] in the highest heaven!”

¹⁰ When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, “Who is this?”

¹¹ The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.”" - Matthew 21:8-11 

Today is Palm Sunday, and as much of a celebration it is of Jesus and the praise he ordained, it is a warning and an example of the hypocrisy and fair weathered-ness that us humans are capable of. The reason I say this, is because less than one week from this day, the people, the same people who praised his entry into the city, were crying out "Crucify him." How often do we as modern day Christians go from worshiping God on Sundays at church, to saying "crucify him" by the way we live our lives? To me, Palm Sunday this year should be a time of reflection of the way we our living our lives and how we could change that to reflect praise for Christ. 

Also, the section immediately after Jesus enters the city, says that he went to the temple. Jesus, for the second or third time, ran out all those who were selling doves and changing money. He then quoted both Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11. "¹³ “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’^[e] but you are making it ‘a den of robbers."" When I saw this I immediately thought of the Church. Too often do Christians try to make really expensive churches with neat stuff and cool looking designs to draw in non-believers. They see it as "outreach." But shouldn't our outreach be concerned with prayer like Jesus says here? I mean, its cool to try to reach out to non-believers but the way we do it should not be bought with money, but done by the people living lives reflecting Christ. I am trying not to be confusing because it's late and I may not be writing as clearly as it is in my head. 

What I am just trying to say out of this, is that I do not want our worship to be done one day out of the week, or even just two. It should be done the entire week. I'll leave you with this, if Jesus walked into your church, would he call it a den of robbers or a house of prayer?