The Best White Elephant Gift Ever

I'm not a very hard person to surprise because #1) I'm generally rather skeptical and/or #2) I don't like to spoil surprises so I don't believe what I hear or I purposely forget clues that I see. So if someone had walked up to me and said, on December 8, 2010, before 7:00, "Nate's going to propose to you tonight," I would not have believed them. Nate and I have been talking about our plans for a while, but I wasn't expecting a ring on my finger until after Christmas, for various reasons.

The church Christmas party started out very normally. We walked in, started saying hi and hanging out with the people we love. Mary Ellen showed us her package right away and said, "You guys should pick my gift. It's the best." To which we both replied sarcastically, "Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Whatever." (There's generally only one reason people tell you to pick their gift at a white elephant party, and that's because it's the lamest one possible.) Well, then we drew our numbers and Nate got #1. He whined about it dramatically, because if he got something extra dumb, he'd have to be stuck with it the whole time, and couldn't trade with anyone. He joked with someone about trading it, etc. So, everything was normal.

Then we were all there, and got started with the gift exchanging. Since Nate was #1, all eyes were on him, and he made sure that everyone knew he was picking his gift. (He had asked me just before, "Do you think I should pick Mary Ellen's?" She has kept bugging us to pick her's and I was convinced she was actually serious, so I said, "Yeah, I think you'd better.") Nate is 6'8" and when he makes an announcement with his hands in the air most people don't miss it. So he sat down with ME's gift and started unwrapping it. It was a box inside of a box, inside of a box. We were all laughing and it still seemed incredibly normal.

Then he pulled out a ring box. My initial thought was "What a horrible joke!" Nate got down on his knee in front of me and I thought, "And Nate's going along with it!"

"Stop, Nate," I begged him. But then he opened the box. I saw three things: It was a Kay box. It was a real ring. It was just the kind of ring I sort-of specified to him. My mind immediately concluded: This is real!

Everyone was REALLY laughing and cheering now. Then Nate started talking and it got quiet.
"Liz, you got me. I never expected to be in this place with you, but here we are. You've helped me go from being a kid to being a man. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?"

I could barely gasp out "YES!"

And the rest is history. :) Best White Elephant gift ever. Best proposal ever, to me. :)

Here are a few pictures.

The Shack, a review

*Note * This is rather long for a blog entry, but it's something I worked on this summer and just thought I'd pass it on for anyone interested in reading.



The Shack, William P. Young
A review

“The real underlying flaw in your live, Mackenzie, is that you don’t think that I am good. If you knew I was good and that everything – the means, the ends, and all the processes of individual lives – is all covered by my goodness, then while you might not always understand what I am doing, you would trust me” (126).

Quotes such as this, where Young tackles the principles behind trusting God in the middle of trials and key aspects of the Christian’s relationship with God, have stimulated Christians who were drawn to read this controversial work, The Shack. Sometimes Young hits the nail on the head with comments like this one. However, what makes this book such a controversy, and are the good points enough to overcome the negative elements within it?

The book is a modern-day allegory of a man whose daughter was kidnapped and murdered while on a family camping trip. Mack struggles for years with anger and bitterness toward the murderer and God and guilt within himself. When he gets a letter from God inviting him to return to the shack where his daughter was found, for the weekend, he accepts the invitation and goes to the shack, where he encounters all three persons of the trinity: Papa, or God the Father, Jesus, and Sarayu, or the Holy Spirit. Through conversations with them and his experiences that weekend, his life is changed and he finds peace with God and himself.

Searching for answers to the problem of pain and evil, The Shack explores what relationship with God truly means for the individual, and includes many excellent principles. Trust is based on relationship, Papa tells Mack. “Because you do not know that I love you, you cannot trust me,” she says to him (126). God is personal – not an angry, spiteful being who is unknowable or vengeful. This is the overall message of the book, and Young does a good job tackling the concept.

In addition, there is a good section in the book that addresses the legalistic approach to salvation. Sarayu tells Mack that rules and principles aren’t the way to know God, and that the law is only a mirror to show man his sin (198, 202). This is a Biblical truth. She addresses the fact that humans turn everything into rules and principles so that they can follow them and hold them up as a standard by which to judge others. People in a relationship have expectancies of each other, but once those are turned into expectations, the relationship deteriorates.

However, blended into the book, with its many conversations between Mack and each person of the Godhead, are many false doctrines and Scriptural errors. Young borrows from many age-old theories and beliefs that have been refuted over and over again by scripturally orthodox Christians.

For example, Papa blatantly contradicts scripture when she says that Jesus was not forsaken on the cross, but that she was there with him all along. Later, she refers to the scars from the cross on herself. This is a heresy known as “patripassionism,” which says that God the Father died with God the Son on the cross. The Bible gives no support for this. On the contrary, it is clear from God’s Word that Jesus was forsaken on the cross as he bore the punishment for man’s sin.
Christ’s death is not seen as atoning, because punishment for sin is overlooked as a necessity: “I don’t need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment” (96). Christ’s death, rather, is never clearly defined in the book. Young seems to skirt around the issue. At the end of chapter 12, he even comes close to saying, through the character of Jesus, that a person can adhere to any religion and still know God. He does not say that all roads lead to God, but he leaves the reader hanging concerning that issue.

Additionally, Sophia, or an impersonation of wisdom, contradicts the belief that God condemns people to hell. “You believe he will condemn most to an eternity of torment, away from His presence and apart from His love. Is that not true?” (162). This hints at the belief that there is no hell, or punishment for sin. God is too kind and too loving to condemn men to hell.

Another overwhelming theme in the book is God’s sovereignty, which is excessively downplayed, and man’s freedom, which is almost considered sovereign over God’s will. Jesus says that, in essence, God is submitted to man’s will. The Father is submitted to Jesus and the Spirit as much as either of them are to the Father (145, 122). 1 Corinthians 11, as well as passages in the gospels, clearly contradict this when they say that Jesus was submitted to his Father’s will, but never that the Father was submitted to Jesus.

Evil is not portrayed in the book as being part of God’s plan. “Papa has never needed evil to accomplish his good purposes” Sophia says (165). Also, Papa says, “Don’t ever assume that my using something means I caused it or that I need it to accomplish my purposes” (185). However, God says in his word that he chooses to use evil to accomplish his purposes. In fact, in Isaiah 45:7, God says, “I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things.” This statement of God’s also contradicts the definition of sin that is given in The Shack, which is “the absence of Good, just as we use the word darkness to describe the absence of Light...Both evil and darkness can only be understood in relation to Light and Good; they do not have any actual existence” (136).

“’To force my will on you,’ Jesus replied, ‘is exactly what love does not do’” (145). God’s sovereignty is not held in bondage by his love. God is free to do as he chooses to do, and of course, because he is love, everything is for the good of his children and for his glory. However, our human definition of love is not substantial enough to judge when something God does is acted in love or not. This is a contradiction of Young’s basic premise in the book: that we cannot judge God. Who is man to say that for God to work everything out according to his will is not love? “I don’t want slaves to my will,” Jesus says in the book, making submission to God as sovereign Lord seem like something completely wrong because it takes away man’s freedom and control of his own life. God is sovereign and is not subject to man’s free choices.

Another theme is the egalitarianism that infiltrates the book, in numerous references to man’s stupidity and woman’s superior ability to have relationship with God, along with the lack of a need for role differences or authority structures. Jesus actually says, “The world, in many ways, would be a much calmer and gentler place if women ruled” (147-48). According to Young, God doesn’t want men and women to have separate roles, but “to be counterparts, face-to-face equals, each unique and different, distinctive in gender but complementary,” without any structure of roles, especially with any trace of hierarchy (148). Feminism traces its way throughout the conversations in the book.

One of the first things that attracts attention in the book is the fact that God the Father, or Papa, and the Holy Spirit, Sarayu, are both portrayed as women. This is, as explained in the book, because Mack had no good father role to remember, so God portrayed himself as a woman to help soften the lessons he was teaching Mack. Many people threw a fit, myself included, when they read or heard about this element in the book. However, while being clearly feministic in this, the bigger problem is not that God is portrayed as a woman, but that he is portrayed as a human at all. God clearly states in the Bible that no one is to make an image of him, and that no one has seen God at any time. Jesus is the manifestation of God to man and it is idolatry to try to portray God the Father or the Spirit as a human being. Men should refrain from imagining what God is like other than how the Bible clearly shows him to us.

The most dangerous lies are those that are mixed with an element of truth. In an age where people are experimenting with everything they believe and how they can best explain away things that are hard to understand, Young does a superb job of making God much more likeable by talking away his sovereignty over man’s freewill, his just judgment on sin, his sacrifice of his son to pay for the sins of man, and the authority structure he has established, among other things.

Knowing God is not just about the “warm fuzzies” of a nice relationship; our relationship with God has a more complex foundation than that. God did have to punish sin, and he did send his Son to die for man. God does condemn men to hell for their sin, and man is responsible for his response to God. God does set up institutions as well as relationships, although he is more interested in relationship with people than in rules and regulations we impose on ourselves. God is personal, indeed, and far more personal than most people today believe, but he is also greater and more complex than we will ever understand, and he should command our fear and reverence as well as our trust and enjoyment.

Christians should read this book with care, conceding the truth, but constantly comparing it all to the word of God and being ready to refute the error in it.

Sharing Truth

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who was praying for my ESL classes today. I got to share the gospel with both morning and evening classes. It went really well. I didn't particularly use my classroom as a platform for the gospel all summer, even though I could have been free to say/do as much as I wanted. I felt like I should use the time to teach my students English to the best of my ability and not try to use the time they paid for learning English to try to teach them spiritual things. However I asked the Lord for the chance to talk with them at some point about the gospel, and He gave me this idea. I ordered these gospel tracts:
May I Ask You a Question?

During the last 20-25 minutes of class this morning and evening, we read through the tracts together and talked about the vocabulary and concepts used in them. We had good discussions both times about sin and sin's penalty and what trust means. Three of the ladies in the evening class are believers, and it was lovely to go through the gospel with them because I knew they understood and they helped define things and were agreeing with me as I shared. Two of the ladies in the evening class are Chinese, and had never even seen or heard of a Bible before. That kind of rocked me. Wow. It was overwhelming to them to take in all the information about the gospel. Pray for them! The students who were from Peru or Mexico or Thailand just accepted the information, somewhat interestedly, and I could see it making sense to them at some points.

The church also orders Jesus films and booklets called Ultimate Questions in the students' languages to give to them. Thursday is our last class. We'll work for an hour and then have a potluck party and hand out certificates and the gifts. Wow, one more day of teaching. It's so hard to believe. I have a lot to reflect on and sort through. I'm so thankful that God gave me this opportunity. Thanks again, so much, for praying!

Reactive Airway Disease, aka Asthma

So, I've been unofficially diagnosed with asthma by about 4 different doctors in the past two years, and this fall I'm going to do something about it. It's not fun to cough for hours after rigorously exercising, or be sick for months because you're just not clearing up, or to experience pain and tightness in your chest and throat when you exercise outside for any length of time. You know it's a bad sign when you're halfway through an easy-ish walk with 15 lbs of books on your back and you gasp, "Ugh, I hate breathing!" I was laughing at myself after I said that, but it's true. I tend to despise breathing when I exercise. Then, I was looking up breathing exercises online for asthma and I saw this article that began by saying,

"In the normal breathing pattern the diaphragm moves downward when the person inhales and moves upward when the person exhales. An asthma patient breathes in an unnatural way by using only the upper portion of the chest. This is very unnatural for the system as the full chest is not used in this way."

Oops. I thought that was the normal way to breathe. I never use my stomach or diaphragm to breathe, only when I remember to do it. A lot of times when I exercise, I actually forget to breathe at all, and find I've been taking super shallow breaths with my mouth, not even using my nose.

So this is the most random blog entry in the world, possibly, but I was just thinking about it this evening. Mostly why I'm posting this is because I'm wondering if anyone knows anyone who treats asthma naturally and/or has any good breathing exercises to do to help develop in that area. I'm not a big fan of pumping my body full of steroids to "control" my asthma, especially since it's mostly exercise-induced and doesn't bother me regularly (unless I'm sick). I particularly could use a nutritionist in the Dubuque, Iowa, area. Ideas, anyone?

In other news...lol...I'm doing really well in Colorado. God is blessing me so richly with His grace and goodness. Only two more weeks of working and teaching! Wow. :) Thanks for praying! I'll write more soon.

Giving Back

“Hey kids, come look at this.” My mom held out a check for $100. “God provided for our grocery shopping this week.” I grew up seeing God provide regularly for my family. We were a big family growing up on a small farm. Every farmer knows that he has no control over how his crops fare. He is dependent on the Lord, completely. And quite frankly, our farm income was never enough. But it honestly never concerned me, growing up, because I was taught, and saw daily, that God would provide.

I began to realize as I grew older that God used His people as the principle means of providing for each other, whether that was my grandparents giving us money one month or my parents giving my grandparents money the next, or a church unexpectedly giving us their old 12-passenger van when we had twins and outgrew our station wagon. Another thing I realized after becoming an adult was that God’s family takes care of each other socially, emotionally, and spiritually, too. We can’t make it on our own – we are created to need each other.

A beautiful verse about the New Testament era church is Acts 4:34: “There was not a needy person among them.” Of all the people in the world, those who are part of the body of Christ should be the ones who never have need of anything.

We have so many needs as human beings. Sometimes those are financial, such as in the case of the college graduate who doesn’t have a job yet and is struggling to meet his payments. Other times, those are social, like the young couple who haven’t had a night out in weeks because they don’t have anyone willing to watch their six-month-old baby, or the lonely single or widowed woman who doesn’t have a companion at home. Then there are emotional needs, like those of the teenagers who need older friends to love and listen to them, people who have already experienced that hard time in life. And people have real spiritual needs, like the man who is held in bondage with the sin of pornography and needs to be taught and held accountable as he deals with it.

Why are these needs being unmet? Why is anyone in the church struggling alone in any of these areas, or others? What is our excuse for not taking care of each other?

First, I would offer that we just don’t know each other well enough to know what needs we have. “Love one another as I have loved you,” Jesus said. Real love is sacrificial, like God’s love for us. It gives up one’s own time to spend with others in the body of Christ. It is willing to be both vulnerable with its own heart and bold to ask hard questions about how others are doing. For instance, it takes asking questions like “How are things going spiritually for you?” instead of a more simple “How are you doing?” This takes sacrifice, for some more than for others, but that doesn’t make it any less important for those who are less naturally social than others.

Then, the culture of the United States has trained our already self-centered hearts to focus even more on our own individual needs and the needs of our families exclusively. Paul wrote, “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” Our lives are busy, so we have got to be intentional about looking out for each other. A single person should never be alone at home on a Friday night, lonely and discouraged, while a couple with kids are tired and frazzled and wishing for time alone together on the same night. That is inexcusable. The couple should reach out to the single person by asking them to spend quality time with their precious kids (not to mention the quality of the relationship built with between the adults in the situation) and the single person should be giving their time and heart to the family by offering to love the kids and the parents for the evening. Serving has got to stop being a duty and needs to become the desire and joy of our hearts, to the point where the first thing we think of is “How can I serve?” not “What can I do to relax?” Furthermore, often we don’t even plan or think ahead, and being intentional means asking on Tuesday or Wednesday what we can do on the weekend instead of letting time slip by until it’s Sunday morning and we’ve wasted our Friday night and Saturday on ourselves without a purpose at all.

And finally, we are just stingy as a people. God commanded the children of Israel in the law to give, remembering how God had always taken care of them in the past. The problem is that we are faithless. If we truly believed God’s promises connected with giving, such as Luke 6:38: “Give and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you” (envision a basket full of grain), we would give more and more all the time. If we give our last $20 to a woman in the church who has no money for groceries, we’re not going to be left without a way to pay our other bills. If we give up our weekend for the family who is moving and needs our time to help them, God will take care of the study time we have given up for our test on Monday morning. We may “suffer” a little poverty in money, time, and energy when we give to others (like getting a B on the test because we didn’t study as much as we might have, or not being able to get our usual Starbucks), but there is nothing wrong with that. God is able and eager to pay back in His way and time everything we give up for Him and His people.

I grew up being provided for by God’s family. As an adult, I’ve been privileged to be part of churches whom God has used to provide for me in many different facets. Am I giving back? Are you giving to God? Are our eyes open? Are we active and alert, every day looking out for the needs of the people around us? As the church of Jesus Christ, we have got to be this way. Otherwise, we are just like the world. We should never, without exception, be aware of the needs of others and ignore them or let them slide to the side because we forget about them in our business. When we act like this, John asks, “How does God’s love abide in [us]?”

“Freely you have received, freely give.” Let’s not deceive ourselves into believing that because we smiled and exchanged “how are you’s” with our brothers and sisters on Sunday and prayed for each others’ great uncle on Wednesday that we are really giving. Our God gave Himself completely to meet our greatest need of salvation and eternal life. What are we giving to meet the needs of others around us?

Blessings

In my morning ESL classes I have four ladies who love to laugh. This morning we were all extremely tired for one reason or another, but we still had a good time because we laughed a lot. We were working on past continuous tense, which was in our book, and it was a lot for them to take in at their level, so we did it very slowly. In an hour we covered the basics of it. But the rest of the time we worked on extremely practical things. They were confusing prepositions a lot (it's a common error with Spanish speakers), so we worked on what they meant.
I walked TO the park.
We played AT the park.
There is a swingset IN the park.
My boy was ON the swing.
He got OFF OF the swing.
They loved that, because they take their kids to the park. They also learned the new vocabulary word "swingset." :)
We were talking about our families, then, and our ages, and whether or not I had a boyfriend, and we spent a lot of time laughing, which was lovely.

Then, today, I was blessed with a foot-tall stack of English textbooks from Valery and Arnaud, our Belgian foreign exchange students. They are leaving for Belgium Saturday, and don't want to bring their textbooks with them, so they generously gave them to me. There are about 15 of them, and some that were even on my list of books to get for future reference! Probably about $600 worth of textbooks here! Praise God!

Another blessing was that one of my students, who is from Thailand, who is in my classes, and I also tutor her, asked me if I would play ping pong with her. She goes to a church gym close by here where there are tables set up. So I spent an hour playing table tennis with her. Such fun. :) Her English is very low intermediate, so it's hard to converse (our tutoring times are a challenge), but we laughed a lot and she taught me some things about ping pong. Watch out, family, I might beat you all on Christmas Eve in our annual tournament. I'm going to get pretty good at this. :)

Sometimes the most important things in life aren't on a to-do list...

...but sometimes they are.

I am just fascinated to serve a God who knows exactly what I need. It's been a bit of an ups-and-downsy week, one in which I have been learning to pray this prayer:
Give me greater capacities to suffer and to carry
This cross on my back as I walk to my personal Calvary.
(from a song by Flame)
I am learning what it means to be obedient and faithful to not complain even though I want to more than anything.

So today started out pretty rough: not a ton of sleep, landscaping day ahead of me, certain emotional struggles, etc. I had an hour before work and was miserable. One of the things that has been really hard lately is continually making to-do lists of things like:
Clean room
Write so-n-so
Call so-n-so
Review Greek
Read this
etc.
and I've thrown at least two of them away without accomplishing anything on them. There are not many things in everyday life that frustrate me more than not accomplishing goals, especially if there are no really good reasons for not getting them done, other than general business.

Well, back to this morning, it occurred to me that the day before had included breakfast, but not really lunch or dinner, other than chocolate cake for Arnaud's birthday party (he's a Belgian foreign exchange student living here). So I took time to cook a hearty breakfast of eggs with cheese and toast and milk to drink and thankfully no one else was up yet so I had a quiet meal, which was great.

Then, I just started working on my to-do list, mostly just by cleaning my horribly messy room, but also balancing my checkbook, and other things. It was ridiculous how much better I felt. When I drove to work, even though I hadn't read my Bible before leaving (not something I recommend regularly, but it worked this day), I felt so refreshed and ready for the day. Then I got to string trim instead of rake and haul leaves and branches, so the variation was great. I was introduced by one of my co-workers to a couple new guys as "the best worker we have, when Barney's not here." One of these times I'm going to figure out how to NOT be taken by surprise when a co-worker or employer says that, and point it back to Christ, but so far I'm always just a little stunned and don't know what to say.

The rest of my day, after work, consisted of scratching more things off my list, including a good time of reading and prayer with the Lord (although that wasn't on my list this time :).

God really takes good care of us. I'm very thankful for Him and just knowing that He knows my needs more than I could ever express to Him.