Ahhh.  Hometown tranquility.

We’re at my parents’ house for the weekend. 

I love coming back to my hometown.  Just like everyone else, I have both good and hard memories from this place. 

I always go straight for the photo albums when we come.  (And why not?  With grandparents around, parenting is taken care of!  I actually may not even see my children much this weekend.  Grin.)

Pictures have such a way of taking me emotionally back in time.  I don’t just remember things, I revisit them in my feelings.  It can be powerful.

My heart has been tender to anyone who read my post about the work Dan and I have done in our marriage who also may have marriage struggles. 

Marriage is hard.  It takes so much more work than lots of people let on.  Namely people who write romantic comedy movies.  But as we – along with so many people who have gone before us and who are walking alongside us – have learned, it is so so worth it.

I was thinking about generational sin on the drive here.  And how in Exodus 20:5 God says, “…I, the LORD you God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me…”

I heard someone teach on this verse.  The word translated in NIV for “punishing” in Hebrew is paqadh, meaning like a census.  They interpreted it to mean how God can review or take census of the times the parent’s sins are seen in the next generations.

The speaker went on to say that it is more like those same sins visit the descendants and affect their lives more than it is that they are being punished for something their ancestors did.  (Because as we see in Ezekial 18:14-18, a son does not die for what his father did.)

So yes.  We have a choice.  But there are also sins that will visit us based on generations past.

Unless someone breaks the cycle.

The next verse in Exodus 20 is the beautiful promise for such a person:

“…but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

Oh, praise You, Yahweh!  What a promise!

Right now I’m kicking myself for not bringing Breaking Free with me here.  But that’s okay.  If you will be patient with my memory of the following story and not stress about footnotes, we’ll be all good.

Beth Moore quotes a story by Gilda Radner about a dog she used to own.  Goes something like this:

My parents had a dog who once got run over by a lawn mower, severing her back two legs.  She was otherwise fine and found a new way to walk:  She would take a step forward with each paw, then flip her tail end up to scooch forward.  Then take another two steps and flip her tail up to scooch some more.

One day my parents found out she was pregnant.  The vet said there shouldn’t be any reason the mama dog couldn’t carry and deliver perfectly healthy puppies.  Sure enough, she had 8 beautiful puppies.  All in perfect health with all four legs.

And when they learned to walk, they walked just like their mother.




No, the puppies were just fine.  But some things are learned.  And there is a spiritual side to all this as well that we’re blinded to.  Who do you think would have a vested interest in making sure certain sins visit on down the generations?  (And please know I’m not looking for the enemy around every corner over here.  I’ve just done enough battle in the warfare of the mind to recognize some of his ugly lies and how to combat them and feel compelled to share.)

Bethie continues on with examples.  How a mother and two daughters could be abused and abandoned by a father.  Then those daughters could have daughters of their own.  And even though they’d never met their grandfather or been mistreated in any way, they will more than likely struggle with a mistrust and fear of men they can’t understand, let alone explain.

Dan and I both came into marriage with some baggage.  I have his permission to be candid about this, because we’ve both had some healing and continue to heal.  And if we can’t share the compassion we’ve been shown, what good are our struggles anyway?

Anyway, when Caden was born, certain generational tendencies reared their ugly heads in our marriage more so than they had before.  Patterns of relating emerged.  I was incredibly, incredibly insecure in my ability to trust my own intuition and parent my child.  So I handed that over to Dan.  I essentially put him in charge of telling me what to do in an area that, if I had listened to God and my own judgment, I would’ve been fine.

Well, this little action backfired.  And bled into other areas in our marriage.  It turned into a parent-child relationship much more than an adult-to-adult marriage.

From here it just spiraled.  Certain tendencies in Dan’s lineage came out (please know he had a wonderful father and currently has an amazing mother…this is never about pointing fingers). 

We were driven to our knees.

Anyway, I think that’s good.  It’s a great place to be if you want to heal.

I read a book during this time that was so good for me.  Not everyone can read a theory and then apply it to their life, but for some reason God has given me the ability to do that.  I’m so grateful because, as good as behavior modification and habit training can be, we needed something much, much deeper.

I learned in the book that people have 4 needs:

1.  To attach to others without fear

2.  To be a separate individual even in that attachment

3.  I forgot this one

4.  And to be an adult emotionally – to submit to leadership when appropriate, but to be in charge as an adult of their own emotions, desires, will, etc.

I needed that adult one!  I needed permission to say, “No, Dan.  As one of the people in charge of our son all day, I saw fit for this to be the right way to handle this situation.  It may not be perfect or what you would’ve done, but it is not wrong and I won’t listen to criticism about it.”

Please know, this is entirely different than rebellion or resisting Biblical submission.  This was reclaiming a healthy marriage.  I had a counselor tell me once that relationships in families are like a children’s mobile.  When one person begins to change it is like someone tugging on just one little dangly part of the mobile.  You’re only pulling that one piece, but the whole mobile starts to adjust to the movement, too. 

In a family, if one person starts to shift – good or bad – the whole family has to make adjustments.  That’s just how God designed it.  We are interdependent. 

Anyway, I knew that if I started becoming more of an emotional adult it would affect my husband in a positive way.  And it did.  He himself will say he had a bit of a hissy fit at first, but as I stood my ground and reclaimed my right to have our marriage be an adult-to-adult one, he came to see how that was healthier for him, too. 

In the temperament language of our church, my man is from Control Country.  He sees things outside of himself and is driven to have order and closure in those things.  This is a very good gift, but one that can run people over if not kept in check.

Because of some of my own wounds, I have a foot in Control Country. 

Can you see some problems here??

When I started to reclaim my emotional adulthood, I went to the other extreme: I’m from Control Country now, too, and let’s just butt heads on all things, everything, all the time.

Not. good.

Especially considering how from 13 years old on, after his Dad died suddenly, Dan was raised by a strong, independent, Control Country Mother (who I would like to add for the record is the most rock star mama-in-law on the planet!).  So there was a part of him that was like, cool.  You be in charge and lead and mother me.

God said, Nuh Uh.  Get your roles straight, Children.

I’m happy to report we’re getting there.  As I mentioned we’re so far from perfect that that is laughable.  But we are stable.  We are in love.  We are two separate, but attached, souls that try to reflect our individuality even as we are one.

God is so good.  He walked us every step to get us to where we are in our journey.

I heard this song on the radio yesterday and it reminded me of the miracle He has done for us.  Hope you enjoy the lyrics as well.

Nobody’s growing old together, we’ve made it easy just to quit

 Love has become a negative percentage, why do we bother to commit?

 We’ve got a long list of excuses, ways we try to justify

 Well, I propose to you the truth is, marriage does not have to die

 I know you’re feeling like it’s falling apart and it can’t go on anymore

 But God is a God who knows how to heal so just give it up to the Lord

 And He will restore

 He said with this ring “I promise,” and with “I do” she said forever

 But right now if they’re being honest, they don’t know if they’ll stay together

 Let’s fast forward to the future after struggling on their own

 They finally figured out they needed Jesus in the middle

 Now I’m watching God rebuild their home

 The enemy tries to come and divide

 Trying to get us to give up the fight

 But darkness will always lose out to light

 ‘Cause we’ve got the power of Christ on our side!

 I see you growing old together

 I pray I find a love like yours

 So if you’re feeling like it’s falling apart and it can’t go on anymore

 God is a God who knows how to heal so just give it up to the Lord

 And He will restore

 Like it was before

 You may have strayed off course

 But He will restore

Chris August, “Restore”

https://www.intentionalkingdomliving.com/502/

“If you find the godless world is hating you, remember it got its start hating me. If you lived on the world’s terms, the world would love you as one of its own. But since I picked you to live on God’s terms and no longer on the world’s terms, the world is going to hate you.

²⁰ “When that happens, remember this: Servants don’t get better treatment than their masters. If they beat on me, they will certainly beat on you. If they did what I told them, they will do what you tell them.


^21-25 “They are going to do all these things to you because of the way they treated me, because they don’t know the One who sent me. If I hadn’t come and told them all this in plain language, it wouldn’t be so bad. As it is, they have no excuse. Hate me, hate my Father—it’s all the same.

If I hadn’t done what I have done among them, works no one has ever done, they wouldn’t be to blame. But they saw the God-signs and hated anyway, both me and my Father. Interesting—they have verified the truth of their own Scriptures where it is written, ‘They hated me for no good reason.’


^26-27 “When the Friend I plan to send you from the Father comes—the Spirit of Truth issuing from the Father—he will confirm everything about me. You, too, from your side must give your confirming evidence, since you are in this with me from the start.”

John 15:18-27 The Message

https://www.intentionalkingdomliving.com/503/

A good warning from Tim Keller:

“Gifts are abilities God gives us to meet the needs of others in Christ’s name:

speaking, encouraging, serving, evangelizing, teaching, leading, administering, counseling, discipling, organizing.

Graces, often called spiritual fruit, are beauties of character:

love, joy, peace, humility, gentleness, self-control.

Spiritual gifts are what we do; spiritual fruit is what we are.

Unless you understand the greater importance of grace and gospel-character for ministry effectiveness, the discernment and use of spiritual gifts may actually become a liability in your ministry. The terrible danger is that we can look to our ministry activity as evidence that God is with us or as a way to earn God’s favor and prove ourselves.

If our hearts remember the gospel and are rejoicing in our justification and adoption, then our ministry is done as a sacrifice of thanksgiving—and the result will be that our ministry is done in love, humility, patience, and tenderness.

But if our hearts are seeking self-justification and desiring to control God and others by proving our worth through our ministry performance, we will identify too closely with our ministry and make it an extension of ourselves.

The telltale signs of impatience, irritability, pride, hurt feelings, jealousy, and boasting will appear. We will be driven, scared, and either too timid or too brash. These signs reveal that ministry as a performance is exhausting us and serves as a cover for pride in either one of its two forms, self-aggrandizement or self-hatred.”

This sounds a lot like the things I’ve learned the past 5 years in our church. 

https://www.intentionalkingdomliving.com/504/

I am the True Vine, and my Father is the Gardener.  He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.

John 15:1&2

https://www.intentionalkingdomliving.com/505/

“One reason we can hardly bear to remain silent is that is makes us feel so helpless.  We are so accustomed to relying on words to manage and control others.  If we are silent, who will take control?  God will take control, but we will never let him take control until we trust him.  Silence is ultimately related to trust.

The tongue is our most powerful weapon of manipulation.  A frantic stream of words flows from us because we are in a constant process of adjusting our public image.  We fear so deeply what we think other people see in us that we talk in order to straighten out their understanding. If I have done some wrong thing (or even some right thing that I think you may misunderstand) and discover that you know about it, I will be very tempted to help you understand my action!  Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification.

One of the fruits of silence is the freedom to let God be our justifier.  We don’t need to straighten others out.  There is a story of a medieval monk who was being unjustly accused of certain offenses.  One day he looked out his window and saw a dog biting and tearing on a rug that had been hung out to dry.  As he watched, the Lord spoke to him saying,

“That is what is happening to your reputation.  But if you will trust Me, I will care for you – reputation and all.”

Perhaps more than anything else, silence brings us to believe that God can care for us – ‘reputation and all.’

Foster, The Discipline of Solitude, The Celebration of Discipline pages 100-101

https://www.intentionalkingdomliving.com/507/

^1-4 “Don’t let this throw you. You trust God, don’t you? Trust me. There is plenty of room for you in my Father’s home. If that weren’t so, would I have told you that I’m on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live. And you already know the road I’m taking.”

⁵ Thomas said, “Master, we have no idea where you’re going. How do you expect us to know the road?”


^6-7 Jesus said, “I am the Road, also the Truth, also the Life. No one gets to the Father apart from me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him. You’ve even seen him!”


⁸ Philip said, “Master, show us the Father; then we’ll be content.”

^9-10 “You’ve been with me all this time, Philip, and you still don’t understand? To see me is to see the Father. So how can you ask, ‘Where is the Father?’ Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you aren’t mere words. I don’t just make them up on my own. The Father who resides in me crafts each word into a divine act.


^11-14 “Believe me: I am in my Father and my Father is in me. If you can’t believe that, believe what you see—these works. The person who trusts me will not only do what I’m doing but even greater things, because I, on my way to the Father, am giving you the same work to do that I’ve been doing. You can count on it. From now on, whatever you request along the lines of who I am and what I am doing, I’ll do it. That’s how the Father will be seen for who he is in the Son. I mean it. Whatever you request in this way, I’ll do.

 

 

^18-20 “I will not leave you orphaned. I’m coming back. In just a little while the world will no longer see me, but you’re going to see me because I am alive and you’re about to come alive. At that moment you will know absolutely that I’m in my Father, and you’re in me, and I’m in you.


²¹ “The person who knows my commandments and keeps them, that’s who loves me. And the person who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and make myself plain to him.”


²² Judas (not Iscariot) said, “Master, why is it that you are about to make yourself plain to us but not to the world?”


^23-24 “Because a loveless world,” said Jesus, “is a sightless world. If anyone loves me, he will carefully keep my word and my Father will love him—we’ll move right into the neighborhood! Not loving me means not keeping my words. The message you are hearing isn’t mine. It’s the message of the Father who sent me.


^25-27 “I’m telling you these things while I’m still living with you. The Friend, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send at my request, will make everything plain to you. He will remind you of all the things I have told you. I’m leaving you well and whole. That’s my parting gift to you. Peace. I don’t leave you the way you’re used to being left—feeling abandoned, bereft. So don’t be upset. Don’t be distraught.


²⁸ “You’ve heard me tell you, ‘I’m going away, and I’m coming back.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I’m on my way to the Father because the Father is the goal and purpose of my life.


^29-31 “I’ve told you this ahead of time, before it happens, so that when it does happen, the confirmation will deepen your belief in me. I’ll not be talking with you much more like this because the chief of this godless world is about to attack. But don’t worry—he has nothing on me, no claim on me. But so the world might know how thoroughly I love the Father, I am carrying out my Father’s instructions right down to the last detail.


“Get up. Let’s go. It’s time to leave here.”


John 14 via www.biblegateway.com

https://www.intentionalkingdomliving.com/508/

“As we move along, God will lead us into the third stage, in which our attention becomes more and more drawn to the divine Center.  ‘It begins to consider God more often than it considers self, and insensibly it tends to forget self in order to become more concerned with God with a love devoid of self-interest.’

Please understand, this is not the destruction of self or the loss of individuality in some sort of ‘cosmic consciousness.’  This is the discovery of the self achieved by focusing our attention on the Creator of the self.  It is losing the self in order to find it.  Only in this way can the true self blossom and flourish.

This third stage is a marvelous virtue, something sublime.  It is the natural charm and unpretentious exuberance of simplicity.  We admire people who walk in this way, and enjoy their company.  Gone is the forced behavior and sticky righteousness.

Do you know the wonderful new freedom this simplicity brings?  No longer is there the stifling preoccupation with ourselves.  Now there are new liberating graces to care deeply for the needs of others.  And most wonderful of all, we can lay down the crushing burden of the opinions of others.  Fenelon witnessed, ‘With this purity of heart, we are no longer troubled by what others think of us, except that in charity we avoid scandalizing them.’  We do not have to be liked.  We do not have to succeed.  We can enjoy obscurity as easily as fame.

We have also a curious liberty to speak about ourselves not excessively but naturally.  I say ‘curious’ because most people assume that those who are truly unself-conscious would never talk about themselves.  That approach belongs to an earlier period in which, out of false modesty, we try to quell any rise of pride.  We are afraid that maybe we have said too much.  We slip an example or word about ourselves into the conversation and immediately worry that it was inspired by vanity.  We determine that we will never speak of ourselves, neither our accomplishments nor our failures, lest in either case we become the center of attention.  At many points this is indeed good counsel, but it is a strained humility and contrary to simplicity.  In time, however, we begin to relax, and are enabled to speak of ourselves with the same candor as we do of others.  ‘Simplicity consists of not having any wrong shame, or false modesty,’ writes Fenelon.

The Apostle Paul knew this freedom to an amazing degree.  He could assert his Roman citizenship and his Hebrew lineage when it was needed.  He could boast of his many sufferings for Christ’s cause…He received his apostleship and teaching from Christ alone, and even opposed Peter for his cultural Jewish Christianity (Gal 1,2).  He was so free and unpretentious that he could boldly urge believers, ‘Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.’

Here is language that most of us would not dare utter.  On our lips it would seem like the height of arrogance, and probably that is exactly what it would be.  But Paul was beyond such petty self-admiration.  He had passed through all that long ago.  The hidden preparation through which God had put this man had changed him.  We cannot understand the things that Paul said and the life that Paul lived until we see that he had given up on all the little human systems of self-aggrandizement.  Without exaggeration he could call it all ‘dung,’ because he was living in a greater Power.”

Foster, pages 116-117

https://www.intentionalkingdomliving.com/509/

It was just before the Passover Feast.  Jesus knew that the time had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father.  Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love.

The evening meal was being served, and the devil had already prompted Judas Iscariot, son of Simon, to betray Jesus.  Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God, so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist.  After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him…

When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place.

“Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them.  “You call me Teacher and Lord, and rightly so, for that is what I am.  Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. 

I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.  I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him.

Now that you know these things, you will be blessed [makarios – being marked by God’s favor and fullness] if you do them.

John 13:1-5, 12-17

https://www.intentionalkingdomliving.com/510/

Always danger.  I feel it after every blog post.  The other side of the equation that wasn’t mentioned.

If posts from yesterday leave you with the impression that my life is perfect or ideal, I should delete them. 

If you think my marriage is perfect or the boundaries we set and try to maintain within it are perfect…whoops.  Anyone close to us could tell you that isn’t true. 

If you think my community is perfect or the way I behave within that community is always ideal…whoops.  (Guys, you know I think you’re perfect!)

I heard someone say something once along these lines:

“When people tell me I’m too showy in my love for God, I just want to tell them, ‘If you only knew what He and I have been through to get to this point…'”

If you only knew.

Good phrase. 

If you only knew the hard, hard work Dan & I have done separately and together in our marriage just to make it stable…not perfect.

If you only knew the hard lessons and field trips God has taken me on to learn to trust people enough in community to give not just performance or what I think is expected, but what they and I need.

If you only knew how hard it is for me still to do that.  Particularly with people outside of my little trust circle.

If you only knew how deep my selfishness and pride run – and how dependent on Him I am each day just to look outside myself.

If you only knew how I wish I could make up for past mistakes.

We’re not supposed to know each other’s everything.  Only a few heart friends can handle some of the things…and the rest only the Most High God can handle.  He is never repelled by our deep, cavernous need.

So, no.  Not perfect over here in our little corner. 

But so, so grateful.

https://www.intentionalkingdomliving.com/511/