Brrr!

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Dear Gaylord,

I still hate you. I will never get over you taking Opryland away from me. When I think of all the fun my kids and I could be having every summer, I am filled with rage at your corporation. That being said…I really enjoyed Ice!, Snow! and the Rockettes. Normally we would have had to win the lottery to attend these productions but my beloved children’s minister, Amy Buttrey, gave me an insane coupon code back in October. I would tell you how cheap the Rockettes tickets were but it would just make you mad. But I assure you, it has to be a good deal to get all 9 of us plus Dylan’s girlfriend tickets to ANYTHING.

Christmas Frivolity

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Interesting facts about our family.

1 – We will use any excuse to go eat at Demos’.

2 – We will pay ten bucks to see a pretty good Christmas light display if it is in Lebanon because there is a Demos’ there.

3 – Not one of us knows the complete lyrics to any Christmas carol. It’s pitiful.

4 – All of us know the complete lyrics to “Tonight the DJ got Us Fallin In Love Again” by Usher.

Just for me

More from the ‘Deeper Still Conference’.

Kay Arthur was the first to speak on Friday night. She began in Matthew Chapter 1. The intent and purpose of her teaching that evening was to discuss ‘Emmanuel- God with us’. Seems pretty clear cut, right? She preached for about 2 hours. It seemed like about 12 minutes. She started at Matthew 1 and went straight through to Matthew 28. It was actually pretty amazing. But I want to tell you what happened about halfway through. She looks up and says “You need to simplify your life. Do you really need more stuff? Do you really need one more thing to sit on a shelf?” I think I may have stopped breathing at that point. It was such a sudden statement. So completely unrelated to her intended topic and so obviously meant for me.

Hear me out on this. I’m sure there were many women at that conference who need to simplify their lives. But I knew that message was for me. I am not an arrogant person but I am fully persuaded that God is crazy in love with me. (He feels the same about you. We’ve been all through this.) That being said, God also knows that sometimes I am in need of a spiritual sledgehammer begfore I really ‘get’ what he is trying to say to me. Before the weekend was over, that hammer would fall two more times.

Here’s the backstory. In the week prior to the conference, my friend Jen wrote this blog post. I simply could not get it out of my mind. Day after day I just kept thinking about it. Her statement about margins in our lives just rocked my world. I realized basically that I don’t have any margins. Not in one single area of my life. Reading Jen’s words made me realize how much I wanted them.

Kevin and I talked about it for a couple of days and both of us kept coming back to the fact that the word ‘margin’ was such a great explanation for what we needed to create. Neither of us had ever heard that word used in that context before. But thinking about that clean, white space around the edge of a piece of paper created a perfect picture for what I needed in my life. The embarrassing part of this story is that during this week leading up to the conference at the same time that I was ruminating on Jen’s admonishment to ‘simplify’, I was in a desperate search for plastic candy canes to decorate my mailbox. Let me tell you something. Nobody NEEDS plastic candy canes on their mailbox. This would be become a pretty good metaphor for how I was wasting my time and treasure.

Back to the conference.

Priscilla Shirer was the first to speak on Saturday morning. The point of her teaching was about having ‘an empty quiver’. Basically she was encouraging us to use all we have and trust God to replenish it. She talked about how we all want to keep a little back as a safety net. She was speaking about lots of areas, emotionally, financially, etc. At some point, she says “And you don’t have any margins in your life.” I don’t know what she said after that because I’m pretty sure I lost consciousness for a second. Margins…she actually said margins.

Saturday afternoon, Beth Moore presented her session. She was teaching from Luke. She was talking about several passages where Luke says that Mary ‘treasured or pondered’ something in her heart. She said that our society doesn’t really value that kind of behavior. We don’t allow ourselves time to meditate, think, pray, whatever. We just rush through the day hoping to survive. Then she said we don’t have any God margins in our life. No place that we set aside to be with Him or think about His Word. You should know,at this point, that I was caught between the ugly cry and hysterical laughter. It wasn’t pretty. Then Beth said “It’s so funny that Priscilla used the word ‘margins’ this morning because we don’t compare teaching before we present it.” I knew it wasn’t ‘funny’ and I also knew it was no coincidence.

So the question I am posing to myself now is this. How messed up is my life that God would compel my four favorite Bible teachers to speak to me about this one specific thing? And how can I possibly fail to respond?

Deeper Still 2010

I have a love/dislike relationship with the idea of the ‘women’s Bible conference’.

Let me get the dislike part out of the way first. I find myself in head shaking amazement at the sheer numbers of women who attend these things. (Full disclosure: I have only attended 3 or 4 of these conferences. My experience may not be true of the genre as a whole.) I wonder what the world would be like if these same women, myself included, could maintain the same kind of passion and intensity for Jesus outside of these few weekends sprinkled through the year. What kind of impact could we have just in our own families? Other than that, my main problem is that, as in all situations, people who claim to be Christians don’t act like I want them to much of the time. For example, there is no biblical edict that says “Thou shalt pick up your trash before you leave the arena.” But I just feel like people should do that. Even godless heathens ought to pick up after themselves. In their defense, I’m sure that lots of these gals pick up after people 24/7. Maybe they go for one of these weekends and just determine that they ain’t gonna lift a finger to do anything. I understand and commiserate with that situation but it’s still tacky. My other pet peeve is with Lifeway’s general seating policy. If you sell 15 thousand tickets and yet guarantee no one a seat, mayhem will ensue. Trust me here. If the conference begins at 7PM and the arena doors open at 5:30, you can expect 12 thousand people to be pressed up to the doors by 4:45. These people act worse than Black Friday shoppers. And nobody believes ‘the last shall be first’ when it comes down to making sure that the Pineville Baptist Women’s group gets 67 seats all together. It’s just not a nice scene and I dread it every time.

Now for the stuff I love.

First, I am so blessed to have Savannah. She is such a spiritually mature kid. This is the 2nd conference we have attended together. I’m not sure many other 12 year old kids could sit through 2 full days of Bible teaching. She assured me that she loved it and is even bugging me to go to another one next summer.

Friday night the conference began with Kay Arthur. I love her more than peanut butter. She wrote the first Bible study I ever did and so she feels like my spiritual grandmother. Kay and I both became Christian at the age of 29 so I look to her as an example of what’s possible for a gal who cam to Jesus a little later than others. Saturday speakers included Beth Moore and Priscilla Shirer. I’ll have more to say later about their specific messages. (Ain’t you excited?)

But I attend these things for one main reason – the music. One of the biggest adjustments in moving from a Baptist to a Methodist church is…well…basically the Methodists suck at music. They are good at lots of other stuff but praise and worship is just not their area of emphasis. When I am at a conference, I sing those hymns at the top of my terrible voice and it is, without a doubt, some of the most precious moments of my life. When you stand among that many people singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” I think you have just a litte taste of what heaven may be like. I’m assuming I will have a beautiful voice at that point but I can’t support that with one speck of scripture.

Quoted

“Complete weakness and dependence will always be the occasion for the Spirit of God to manifest His power.”

Oswald Chambers