We are never broken...

I was driving back to my hometown this morning for a family Christmas gathering and I just happened to have some old CD’s in my car. So I pulled one out and started listening to the songs from my childhood days. After listening to a few CD’s, I came across one made by a friend. The 10^th song on the disc was one of my favorite songs in middle school. As I started to sing along, remembering all of the words although I hadn't heard the song in years, the lyrics hit me like a train running at full speed.

I, along with many others across the nation, have been reflecting on the tragic events that occurred on Friday morning in Connecticut. What happened that day, along with many other recent events, have left me questioning what has happened to the world in which we live. How broken and evil can this place be that someone can walk in to a school and gun down twenty innocent, precious little children?

The song title is “Hands” by Jewel and the lyrics below dug into the pit of my stomach as I began singing along.

“I won’t be made useless. I won’t be idle with despair.

I will gather myself around my faith for light does the darkness most fear.

We will fight, not out of spite. For someone must stand up for what’s right. Cause where there’s a man who has no voice, there ours shall go singing…

In the end, only kindness matter.

I will get down on my knees, and I will pray.

…We are never broken.”

So although there are many questions, many pains, many heartbreaks in many people around the world and especially in the lives of the parents who lost their children that day, we are never broken.

The only encouragement we have is that this place in which we live in is only temporary and all of this evil, hostility, horror, and wickedness will one day be gone. And we, along with those beautiful little children, will be in a magnificent place forevermore where evil will never win again!

Pray for Newton, Connecticut and especially for those families as they try to piece their lives back together.

How did we get here?

There has been something bothering me for some time now. I used to think that it was just me, but the more I look around the more I realize it is a much bigger problem. The thing that I have noticed is that we, as a society of believers, are becoming very static in our faith. We believe in God, and we believe in Jesus Christ as our Savior, but where do we go from there? The sad part is that many of us just simply stop there. No challenging. No digging deeper. We just accept the facts and move on. But the problem with this is that we don't allow our faith in Christ to be displayed in our lives. We tend to walk around with this belief that the world owes us something, that we deserve better than what society is giving us. We don't push each other to think or to actually sacrifice something, but instead we sit back and do absolutely nothing and become incredibly selfish. Our mindset has shifted and now in our relationships with Christ, we search for areas in which He can bless us. The tragic part is that through this lens of selfishness, we have lost all recollection of what our faith is really about. We no longer live a life that shows Christ's love to others and we are actually living a life that goes against everything that He died for.

When did it become all about us?
When did we lose sight of the cross?
Can we ever get back to the root of our faith and live that life that points others to Christ and His love for them?

Lucky for us, our God is a God of forgiveness, grace, and second chances.

"Oh Your cross, it changes everything. There my world begins again with You.
Oh Your cross, it's where my hope restarts...a second chance is Heaven's heart."

Accepting Grace

When I first actually became a Christian, between the summer of my sophomore and junior year of high school, I struggled a lot with forgiveness. I had done some pretty messed up stuff and I was living in a world of guilt and shame because of it. This started affecting every area of my life - my relationships, my school work, and ultimately my view of myself. I couldn't get beyond the guilt. I thought of myself as an unclean person, someone that didn't deserve forgiveness or love from anyone, especially not from God. I felt like I had let my Father down and I felt unworthy of His grace.


In his book, Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller writes about a similar story of his struggles to accept grace. He writes:

"I would hear about grace, read about grace, and even sing about grace, but accepting grace is an action that I could not understand. It seemed wrong to me not to have to pay for my sin, not to feel guilty about it or kick myself around."

After a youth group service one night, I laid my heart out to my small group leader. I told her all about this inability to love myself, to accept the forgiveness that I had been longing for, and to move on with my life. After talking for a while, she simply looked up at me and said, "Courtney, God has already forgiven you more than you could imagine. Why can't you just forgive yourself?" Suddenly, it hit me. I was putting myself above God. I was being entirely selfish by thinking that I had more power to forgive than He did. Since that time, I have been able to open my heart and mind up to something bigger than my own selfishness and accept God's wonderful grace. I can now live a life confident of His unending love and full of His wonderful mercy.


"The ability to accept God's unconditional grace and ferocious love is all the fuel we need to obey Him in return. Accepting God's kindness and free love is something the devil does not want us to do. If we hear, in our inner ear, a voice saying we are failures, we are losers, we will never amount to anything, this is the voice of Satan trying to convince the bride that the groom does not love her. This is not the voice of God. God woos us with kindness, He changes our character with the passion of His love."
          - Donald Miller

My Lent Plans

I’ve never really been fond of society’s typical perspective of Lent. You often here of Christians giving up Facebook or TV or some other habit that they have, in order to force themselves to spend more time with God. Because of this, I have never really “observed” Lent in any way. I never understood why someone had to pick something during these 40 days to give up in order to spend time forming a stronger relationship with God. After all, shouldn’t we – as Christians – be willing to “force ourselves” daily to grow in the love and mercy of our Father and not just for forty days out of the year?

But, this year is different for me…way different. I am choosing to participate in Lent by doing something that I have never even thought about doing before. I am doing the Daniel Fast (www.daniel-fast.com) and I am basically giving up eating anything besides fruits and vegetables for the entire season of Lent. So for 46 days, I am going to be giving up all of the foods that I really enjoy and that give me the strength and energy that I need and I am going to be relying on God to provide that source of strength for me.

When this idea was first mentioned to me, I thought to myself, “Yeah right. There is absolutely no way I could ever do this nor would I ever want to.” No meat, no sugar, and the biggest sacrifice for me - no coffee or caffeine. But as I began to think about it more, my reasoning was quickly challenged. The past few months I have talked about growing closer to God and becoming dependent only on Him, and what better way to quickly grow that dependency than by fasting and focusing on His power.

I know that the next 46 days are going to be extremely tough. There are going to be weeks when I am working 50+ hours a week, completing homework assignments and turning in projects that I am going to desperately need some coffee. I love fruit and vegetables, but eating only that for 46 days is going to take a lot of hard work, prayer, and focus.

As I became more and more open to this, God quickly reinforced the knowledge of His provision to me. For the past week, every devotional, every song, every Bible verse has referenced the greatness and amazing power of our Savior. Our weaknesses are made great by His power and this is what I am leaning on. I know there will be many days that I am going to be incredibly weak, but I know without a doubt that He is a much greater source of strength than anything this world could ever give me.

My devotional this morning, two days away from the start date, summed it up perfectly:

“You need to remember who I am in all My Power and Glory. Then, humbly bring Me your prayers and petitions. Your problems will pale when you view them in the Light of My Presence. You can learn to be joyful in Me, your Savior, even in the midst of adverse circumstances. Rely on Me, your Strength; I make your feet like the feet of a deer, enabling you to go on the heights.”

So, as I journey through the next forty-six days, I ask that you please pray for me and for the rest of us that are doing this fast or any other types of things during Lent. Pray that no matter what, we will search for strength in God and grow closer to Him as our sole supplier of everything that we need.

Full life in the emptiest of places...

“I will always show you where to go. I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places – firm muscles, strong bones. You’ll be like a well-watered garden, a gurgling spring that never runs dry.” – Isaiah 58:1 (The Message)

It’s been a month now since I moved away from home. And to be quite honest, it has probably been the hardest four weeks of my life. When I decided to take the offer and move north, I made a decision that I was going to trust God. I had no idea why I was moving away, other than for my internship. And for the first couple of weeks here, I was pretty bitter about it. I tried going in to the internship with an open mind and being okay with the fact that anything familiar to me was now at least a two-hour drive away but I was failing miserably at it.

A few weekends ago, my housemate had gone home and I was all by myself. I spent most of the day on Saturday contemplating what I was really doing. I was questioning whether I had made the right decision because it had been almost three weeks since I moved and I was still searching for the reason why. I cried several times that day, missing my family and my friends. I just sat in the house and was angry at God because He had led me here and I was all alone.  

Then, the following day I went to church. I was supposed to meet up with a friend of mine from IWU and some of his friends that live in the area, but the weather was bad and my friend couldn’t make it. So, I went anyways and met up with his friends. After the service had ended and we were walking out, one of the guys invited me to a dinner that night at his campus ministry pastor’s house. I went that night and also found out about a weekly Bible study that this group has. Since that dinner, I have gone to a couple of different things with this group and I am finally starting to meet people and form relationships. It really does amaze me how perfect and intentional God’s timing is. One day, I was sitting at home thinking of a way to get out of the internship and move back and the very next day, God starting placing people in my life to help me get connected.

I’m beginning to think that the real reason God guided me to move away was so that I would become more dependent on Him. The last couple of years I have just been comfortable going through the motions of being a Christian but I have been longing for something more. I want that renewed passion that I had when I first started that intimate relationship with Christ. God has a purpose, and no matter how unplanned and random we think it may be, He really has had it planned all along. I’m starting to see the purpose for why I am here and what God’s plan is.

…“I will always show you where to go.”

My Life: The Untold Story

Everyone has a story to tell. A history of their lives, of things that they have gone through along the way that has led them to where they are now. As Christians, we like to call this story a testimony. We talk about it all the time, on what we would say if we had a little amount of time to tell someone how the love of Jesus has changed our lives. This story has played over and over again in my head, but I have never been able to tell anyone exactly what my story was. Sometimes it was out of fear, sometimes out of stubbornness, sometimes out of guilt or shame. But the one thing that I have learned throughout the past four years is that sometimes the things that keep us from sharing the most are really the exact things that make our stories so unique and so personal.

So, bear with me through this. But…here is my story:

Growing up in the house that I was raised in wasn’t the easiest all the time. I am the youngest of four children and the only girl, so my parents had been married for quite a while when I finally came along. I can confidently say that both of my parents believe in God and believe in Jesus, I was just never really shown what this relationship with God was like as a kid. Sure, we went to church every now and then but a lot of the time it was on a “religious holiday”. You know, those days when it seems like everyone is at church that day. I know that my parents loved each other growing up, they just had a funny way of showing their love to each other most of the time. I remember their fights as a kid, at dinner or on the way to visit someone. Sometimes it could be really scary and sometimes I wondered why they were still married because it seemed like they would be much happier away from each other. As the only girl in the family, I had this habit of always sticking up for my mom when my parents were fighting. I never saw my dad’s side, I just saw him as this really angry man that wasn’t very nice. So, needless to say, my dad and I’s relationship was very much affected by this. We just didn’t get along. He would say something to my mom and the arguing would start, and then I would throw my opinions in. I think he always just saw me as a smart-aleck brat, and quite honestly, I was. Most of my friends had this wonderful relationship with their dads and they would talk about it during sleepovers or hanging out and I didn’t have that. I was really jealous for one thing, but I was also missing that “father-daughter” relationship that every little girl dreams of. Every girl wants to be loved and adored by the man that she knows the most in her life, her dad. And I just never really felt like he loved me. 

So because of this, in middle school I began to fill this void with other things: sports, school, friends, boys. And this trend continued for a very long time. It seemed like I always had a boyfriend for as long as I can remember. Sure there were a few times that I thought that I was in “love” with the guy, but if I’m being honest, I think most of the times I just liked getting attention from guys because I never felt like my dad was giving me that attention. My life continued like this for quite a while, trying to fill that void in my heart with everything else but the One thing that could totally fill that void. My friends had started to become pretty involved with a youth group, Youth With a Vision, and they started inviting me to events like overnight lock-ins and other things with the youth group. I went to them and had a blast, but I never really understood the whole point. It wasn’t until probably late into my freshman year of high school when things finally started changing. I had been dating this one guy for a few years and things were really serious with him. And it seems like overnight, my whole life changed. He broke up with me and I was broken. I had no idea what had happened, all I knew was that I was feeling even emptier than before and I knew that something needed to change. My brother, Kyle, had started going to that same youth group with some friends of his and he started taking me along with him. I started going on a regular basis and ended up going to that youth group’s church camp the following summer. It was at this camp that my life started to change. I had been baptized before and I believed that Christ died for my sins but I most certainly did not live a Christ-like lifestyle. So at church camp that summer, I gave my life back to Christ and began pursuing a more intimate relationship with my Savior. At the same time that all of this was happening, a met a guy at camp. He went to another school but he was feeling called to ministry after high school and he seemed like a really great, Christian, guy. I remember the night we had our first “serious” talk. It was after the evening chapel service and we walked around camp in the rain telling each other about our lives. I told him all about my past and vice versa and I remember the moment when he looked at me and promised me that he would never hurt me like any of the other guys in my life had. And I wholeheartedly believed him because after all, he was at a church camp and he was going to be a youth pastor someday. Well, my relationship with Christ started forming along with my relationship with this guy. Things became more serious as we got closer to graduating from high school and the relationship started becoming unhealthy. After our freshmen year of college, we broke up and I was left with this void again. I was completely broken and I felt like I had no identity. I knew that the next year at school was going to be tough because we had the same group of friends during that first year and I knew that I was going to have to find new friends.

(I promise this story is almost over and it has a happy ending so keep reading!)

As I began my second year of college, I knew that things would be different. Everything that was familiar to me was gone and I had to start over. But God has used these past three years to mold and shape me into exactly who He wants me to be. I have learned throughout these years that it is perfectly okay to make big mistakes because even though you don’t think you could ever be forgiven, Christ has already made that sacrifice and you are entirely forgiven. I have learned through all of this that God really does have a purpose for every trial, every pain, and every heartbreak that you go through in life. Our wonderful Creator has a way of taking the broken and shattered pieces of our lives and forming it in to a beautiful piece of art. So, my story is that I am completely messed up. I have done some really stupid things in my life. But I have been transformed into something beautiful and I hope that my story is simply a path that God can use to help write another person’s story.

You love me anyway...

There’s a song that came out somewhat recently on the radio and it is just wonderful. It talks about how God loves us through it all. Although we’re broken, sinful, prideful, He looks at us as though we have never done anything wrong. The song is called You Love Me Anyway by Sidewalk Prophets. Here are a few lines…

I am the thorn in Your crown but You love me anyway. 

I am the sweat from Your brow but You love me anyway. 

I am the nail in Your wrist but You love me anyway.

I am Judas’ kiss but You love me anyway. 

See now, I am the man who yelled out from the crowd for Your blood to be spilled on this earth shaking ground. 

Yes then, I turned away with a smile on my face with this sin in my heart tried to bury Your grace. 

And then alone in the night, I still called out for You. 

So ashamed of my life, but You love me anyway.

It is such pure amazement that somebody could love someone so much. That although our sins, our problems, our mess-ups crucified the Son of God, our Father still has an unmeasurable amount of love for us.

I am so thankful that nothing I do could ever separate me one bit from the unconditional love of my Heavenly Father. That even though I screw up, He loves me anyway and He will always be there right beside me to pick me back up when I fall.

Here’s the full song in case you want to listen. I encourage you to check it out. It’s a very powerful song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8BBCYFAYRI&ob=av2e