Happy New Year---May You Really Live!

Happy New Year from Snowy Seattle

We made it over sleety streets to a tiny town near the foot of Mount Rainier. Spent a seventy-degree Christmas in Allen, Texas with my sister and her fam. The morning after Christmas, we put Britt on a chartered bus in Austin with his high school basketball team (about 50 favorite buddies) traveling to Disneyworld for a basketball tournament in Florida. Didn’t have the money to follow him and God gave a peace in missing it. We have hardly missed anything our children have been a part of, ever, but had to let this one slip through our fingers. Bob and I hopped on a last-minute flight to visit his 92-year-old dad who invited us up to the Northwest. He lives alone in a quaint northern town. No internet, just frost everywhere. I’m frozen! With nine decades of life, he has a span of stories having lived through wars and recessions and crises and inventions.

Lots of time to reflect on the goodness of our God this past year. “The nearness of God has been our good.” Psalm 73:28. Have caught up on lots of reading. This morning one quote just jumped out at me: “The place where I am most deeply hurt is what I am always trying to get, to collect---to get people to like us, to be in charge, to serve, to applaud, to get someone to take care of me. There is an anger at that point in us where we feel so small.” What do we do with those places? Is my repentance too shallow? I have believed lies in my life that have ended with demands that people come through for me and that I’ll have to arrange it if God doesn’t come through. How foolish. Phil 3:19 calls it a god: “Their god is their appetite.” Exploring and deepening my thirst for God will release in me deep repentance or I’ll keep my friends and my God “in court” in my mind examining the evidence that I am not loved, not cared for. Not true at all! If we don’t repent and relate to Him in such a way that HE frees me to love openly and receive love freely, then I’ll just control my world and arrange it to get what I want. People don’t have to respond in certain ways anymore for life to be okay. I want to live with no demands to fill the hollow spaces within that ultimately only God can fill. St. John of the Cross wrote: God cannot pass an empty life without filling it with Himself. That’s if we are empty---are we empty of ourselves and this world?

Happy New Year to each of you. Do you remember the quote in Braveheart: “All men die, but only a few men really live.” My wish for you this coming year of 2009 is that you learn more deeply what it means for you to really live. You were made to matter. You were made to make a difference. You were made for HIM. Psalm 73:24-28--- May HE guide you with His counsel and receive your words. May you desire nothing else on earth but HIM. “It is good to be near to God.” Draw near. He’s waiting.