There is a verse in the Bible that becomes more and more real as I watch my children grow into adulthood. In 3 John 1:4, John writes that he has no greater joy than to see that his children are walking in the truth. As a parent the stages that life takes you through are like a rollercoaster ride with its tunnels, twists, and turns. There are times when you wonder what in the world you are doing and there are times when you feel like everything you did do was in vain. Then there are moments when God lets you see that what He promised remains steadfast and true.

Our sixteen year old is attending college as a dual-enrollment student. Yesterday she shared with us about how one of her class discussion times turned toward the subject of homosexuality and the LGBT movement. Here she is the youngest in the class and she willing stepped up and became the only voice that spoke from a Biblical worldview. However, what she shared that made this Momma’s heart so very full of joy is HOW she shared our worldview. She was shocked that the class was shocked that she could hold the view that she does and yet still be kind.

She had the opportunity to share that she could completely disagree with the choices that someone was making and the lifestyle they were living and yet still choose to love that person and treat them as the human being they indeed remained to be. There is never an excuse to not be kind. As long as there is breath there is hope that the Spirit of God will break through into someone’s heart. How sad it would be for us to be a reason that a wall is built instead of a reason that a wall was weakened.

Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?

Romans 2:4

Our youngest was sharing with me not long ago about how there was a young girl that was visiting church around her age. Several of the students shared with her that the girl was trouble and was involved with a rough crowd and advised her to stay away from her. Our youngest looked at them and said, “Well then she NEEDS to be here and she needs to make new friends and she won’t do that if she does not feel welcome here.” My daughter then proceeded to grab some more friends that felt the way she did and they went and joined the young girl and chose to sit with her. Our daughter continues to meet her with open arms every time she walks in the door.

This is the kind of children I prayed that I would be faithful to raise. Children that knew how to be IN the world, but NOT OF the world.

And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.

Mark 16:15

My husband and I chose to trust that our Father God would do exactly what His Son asked Him to do when He prayed for us in John 17 right before He was arrested and went to the cross for us.

⁶ “I have manifested Your name to the men whom You gave Me out of the world; they were Yours and You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word. ⁷ Now they have come to know that everything You have given Me is from You; ⁸ for the words which You gave Me I have given to them; and they received them and truly understood that I came forth from You, and they believed that You sent Me. ⁹ I ask on their behalf; I do not ask on behalf of the world, but of those whom You have given Me; for they are Yours; ¹⁰ and all things that are Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine; and I have been glorified in them. ¹¹ I am no longer in the world; and yet they themselves are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep them in Your name, the name which You have given Me, that they may be one even as We are. ¹² While I was with them, I was keeping them in Your name which You have given Me; and I guarded them and not one of them perished but the son of perdition, so that the Scripture would be fulfilled. ¹³ But now I come to You; and these things I speak in the world so that they may have My joy made full in themselves. ¹⁴ I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. ¹⁵ I do not ask You to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. ¹⁶ They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.¹⁷ Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth. ¹⁸ As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world. ¹⁹ For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth. ²⁰ “I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word; ²¹ that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.

My husband and I attended a ministry celebration of some dear new friends, Pastor Daryl and Annette Little. As they shared at the end of the dinner Pastor Little made a very profound statement. I wish I had written it down or could recall it word for word, but he shared how this is the time that we have been given, this is the people that we share this time with, and we need to stop and realize that we are all spending this life together.

This is the time that the sovereign hand of God chose to appoint to us. He purposely and specifically chose for us to live in this day of technology, in this day of global marketing, in this day of climate change politics, in this day of division, in this day of sexual perversion, in this day of media manipulation, in this day of false gospel and self promotion. He chose us for today.

God isn’t shocked by the world. Nothing has happened or will happen that He is not fully aware of and has not fully equipped His people to thrive in, so let us thrive.

Let us choose to walk in the truth in love with bold authentic kindness. Let us make eye contact. Let us use our words and our deeds to proclaim the gospel of God (James 2:18). Let us choose to put on Jesus every single day (Colossians 3:1-17). Let us choose to say no to words and actions that do not portray the One who died to give us life.

This is our time. May we make the most of it.

I am a forty-one year old woman who has been faithfully serving the Lord for over sixteen years. For over sixteen years I have spent at least five hours a day in the Word of God every day. That’s not counting praying and seeking Him through His Word for wisdom in specific situations throughout the day, and that’s not including church attendance a minimum of three times a week. This is at the very least twenty-nine thousand two hundred hours spent with the Lord one on one.

So here I am in this place of supposed stability in my relationship with the Lord and my surety of His faithfulness and His promises, and yet still people who profess to know Him and claim to love me can still throw me off guard.  In this stunned state,  I find that I will lower my shield of faith just enough to momentarily receive a hit from the serpent of old’s arrow of doubt and all these hours of investment in God and His Word seem in that moment to be in vain.

This is why the song “Come Thou Fount” is my very favorite hymn… that line, “prone to wander Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love” is my heart crying to God in utter thankfulness that He has indeed sealed my heart. He holds me tightly to His chest while my fist pummel against Him and I can hear His small, still, sweet voice whispering His “sssshhhhhh, it will be okay, just trust Me” through my cries of why. His love holds us to Him because He knows there will always be times this side of eternity that is just to painful for us to hold ourselves to Him.

I am one of those girls that doesn’t let people in easily. I don’t know why, I just know that I have never been someone who trusted the sincerity of others easily. I am usually looking for their angle. I am usually wondering if their words will match the actions… and sadly more often than not in my life the words have not matched the actions.

I suppose the thing that makes it so hard is that I am also a hopeless optimist. I usually give someone the benefit of the doubt in the beginning. I step in cautious but still always hope and expect them to be who they claim to be right at the first. I share little things, I open cracks in windows so I can fully control what goes in and out… then slowly I’ll test the thought of opening the front door. I’ll leave them on the porch, but the door is wide open.

Then if they show themselves to be otherwise, that door shuts, and well, it’s just hard to come back from that reality check.  So I step back inside, close the windows, prop my shield of faith up with a sling of skepticism, and begin to build a wall around the perimeter of the house. I think “building a wall” is the same as the term “Compartmentalize.” According to wikipedia compartmentalization is an unconscious psychological defense mechanism used to avoid cognitive dissonance, or the mental discomfort and anxiety caused by a person’s having conflicting values, cognitions, emotions, beliefs, etc. within themselves.

This conflict within ourselves as believers is often between the command of God to love unconditionally and the reality that it can hurt like hell when we do.

So we step back.

We make distance.

We build a firewall.

We’ve been burned and we have to heal. (Or perhaps, this is just me)

In this repetitive process, I’ve learned to take the time to examine myself. Our God wastes no hurt, no pain, so if I have experienced it I know He needs me to learn from it. My own hurt reminds me of how important it is for Christians to be true and trustworthy. Therefore, I try to get to the place where I can stop and say “God this hurt, please help me to not hurt others the way I have been hurt”, as quickly as I can.

Through my own hurt I am always reminded of how important it is for me to make sure that I am intentional to love others with sincerity (1 Peter 1:22).  It’s so easy to slip into a pattern of flippant answers, quick replies, and fake smiles… and our world needs the sincere. Our world needs the genuine. Our world needs the real.

I realize how important it is to love with sincerity because, whether we like it or not, God has chosen to use PEOPLE as His instruments of the message of His salvation through Christ. This is how He has chosen for His gospel to go forth. He didn’t choose blogs, podcasts, books, tweets, or even online sermons… He chose PEOPLE.  So how we treat people matters.

If how I am treated by others can cause me, sixteen years faithfully walking with God, to be hit by the arrows of doubt by the enemy of our souls, then how much greater is the wound of the heart that is hit by the attack of these arrows that has no shield of faith at all to protect or deflect?

We can choose to be used by the enemy of our souls to wound people over and over and over again or we can choose to take up our own cross and be wounded so that others might live (2 Corinthians 4:11-12). Which means that after you have had time to heal… you must put your heart back out there to be hurt again. One thing that I have learned is that your heart will be hurt again.

I wish that I could get through to all of us who profess to love the Lord and yet condemn their brothers and sisters for things that don’t make a hill of beans of difference in the light of eternity. We often seem to spend more time looking for reasons and ways to destroy each others ministry and witness than the devil does. We too often are concerned with the actions of others that are only wrong because we simply don’t agree with them. We pick our argument and we gather around us our group of opinion agreerers and then we begin to slowly erode, divide, and destroy unity.

This is nothing new in the life of the church. In 2 Corinthians 2, Paul is writing to the church in Corinth and he shares, ³ This is the very thing I wrote you, so that when I came, I would not have sorrow from those who ought to make me rejoice; having confidence in you all that my joy would be the joy of you all. ⁴ For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears; not so that you would be made sorrowful, but that you might know the love which I have especially for you.

When those we expect to make us rejoice cause us sorrow it can seem to wound with an incurable wound. These hits cause arms to go limp in stunned shock and many drop their cross at their feet and walk away dejected and defeated. They expected to take lashes from those who hated their Lord and His Word, but the blindsided wounds of those who were supposed to be their brethren… it’s often too much to take.

Then there usually comes the shallow offering of consolation with the excuse that the ones that hurt them are only human or just sinners too… can we just not. According to Ephesians 4, Colossians 3, 1 Peter 4, and more, in Christ we are not only human or just sinners. We are filled with the Spirit of Christ. We are holy priests and saints, and we are to be held to a much higher standard than that… so could we just own it.

Owning it, however, works both ways.

In 2 Corinthians 2 Paul went on to say, ⁵ But if any has caused sorrow, he has caused sorrow not to me, but in some degree—in order not to say too much—to all of you. ⁶ Sufficient for such a one is this punishment which was inflicted by the majority, ⁷ so that on the contrary you should rather forgive and comfort him, otherwise such a one might be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. ⁸ Wherefore I urge you to reaffirm your love for him. ⁹ For to this end also I wrote, so that I might put you to the test, whether you are obedient in all things. ¹⁰ But one whom you forgive anything, I forgive also; for indeed what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, I did it for your sakes in the presence of Christ, ¹¹ so that no advantage would be taken of us by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his schemes.

Owning it means admitting that how you treat others as a professing believer matters and it also means that how you forgive others as a professing believer matters. Building walls does as much to destroy unity in the body as the ones we are building our walls to protect ourselves from. Jesus came to tear down dividing walls (Ephesians 2:14). When people make you doubt God and that serpent’s arrow hits it’s target, don’t doubt Him… run to Him. Bury your head in His chest and let His Word whisper to the depths of your hurt and heal it… and let us do our very best to not be guilty of trying to build back up what Jesus died to tear down.

The world is watching how believers treat each other. The world is watching how believers treat others period. They are looking to us to see if this Jesus we claim to love and that we claim loves them is real, genuine, sincere. We have to always be ready to ask ourselves, what will they see when they watch me?

Dear Public School Teacher,  I want to let you know that there was a time when I struggled with having respect for you. I struggled because I had chosen to allow a few to define the whole. I struggled because I felt I needed to stand against you in order to validate to the world my right and ability to teach my own children at home. I had a hard line drawn and wore glasses shaded in jade because I disliked school myself as a kid and had a few issues with the system with my own children the short time they were there.

Then the Lord placed some teachers in my life that allowed me to see that there were still LOTS of great teachers out there. There were still lots of teachers that loved teaching and loved their students and recognized the influence they had over the lives of those they taught. They also respected my choice and ability to school my own children at home.

The Lord was also doing a work in my heart in many other areas. Through the course of my own life’s circumstances He was teaching me to “relax” about some things that were really just nothing to get fired up about. He was teaching me how to extract and separate the precious out of things and situations that could be considered worthless. He was teaching me the difference between being right and actually being righteous. He was teaching me about mercy, love, and abundant grace.

Then the Lord called me to ministry through the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. In this ministry I was allowed to have conversations with many of you about your struggles and I had the opportunity to meet many more of you who truly love the kids you teach and just want to see them excel in life. The Lord also used my own struggles of frustration from feeling like I was “beating dead horses” to help me see that you were quite possibly in that similar place, experiencing that similar feeling, and simply needing to be encouraged.

So dear public school teacher, be encouraged! Please know that I am praying for you. I am praying that you will remember why you wanted to become a teacher. Yes, I know many think it might have been for the summer’s off and because you would have the same schedule as your kids… but I know that deep down you had a hope that you would be used to make a huge difference in someone’s life. Summers off and work schedules simply are not enough internal drive to get someone through college. The desire that your life could make a difference in someone’s world, however, is exactly enough.

You see I believe in you. I believe that you have the ability to look past a child’s behavior and see the heart and the hurt behind the actions. I believe that you are making impact in the hearts and minds of the kids you teach that far supersede their ability to conjugate and calculate. I believe that you have placed before you an opportunity to change a kid’s life and the life of their children and their children’s children. I believe in you and I am praying for you.

I am praying that you remember that you are the “grown up”.

In everything I showed you that by working hard in this manner you must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that He Himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” (Acts 20:34-36)

I am praying that you remember who you were when you were their age and how thankful you are for those who chose to teach you and lead you instead of condemn you and I pray you choose to be like them.

It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all. ¹⁶ Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life. ¹⁷ Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. (1 Timothy 1:15-17)

so that we confidently say, “The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid. What will man do to me?” ⁷ Remember those who led you, who spoke the word of God to you; and considering the result of their conduct, imitate their faith. ⁸ Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. (Hebrews 13:6-8)

I pray that you remember that you are called to a higher purpose than leading kids to higher education. You are called to lead them to the Most High.

³⁵ But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. ³⁶ Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. (Luke 6:35-36)

I pray that you remember that today might be the last day in that child’s life. Today might be the only chance that you get to show them that there is a hope and a future in Christ.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” ¹⁴ Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. (James 4:13-14)

While you have the Light, believe in the Light, so that you may become sons of Light.” These things Jesus spoke, and He went away and hid Himself from them. (John 12:36)

I pray that you remember the big picture. I am praying that you remember who you are because of Whose you are…

¹² So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; ¹³ bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. ¹⁴ Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. ¹⁵ Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body; and be thankful. ¹⁶ Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. ¹⁷ Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father… ²³ Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men, ²⁴ knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve.  (Colossians 3:12-17, 23-24)

I pray that you are not swayed from expecting excellence from your students. Raise the bar and demand they reach it. I pray that you won’t allow mediocrity in your class but will command they rise to their very best by showing them how through your own example.

I pray that you will surround yourself with teachers that have a vision for more and you will not be drug down by naysayers or doomsdayers. I pray that when others talk down students you will choose to talk them up. I pray that when labels are placed on kids you will tear them off.

I pray that you will choose to find a group of teachers in your school that are willing to see your school for what it really is… a battlefield and a mission field. You are a warrior for the Light in the midst of the kingdom of darkness and these kids eternity is at stake. You need to gather your army and you need to prepare for battle so that you may wield your sword with efficiency, accuracy, and purpose. I pray that you will not fight alone. Seek out your fellow soldiers and prepare your hearts together. There is power in your prayers and your study of His Word, use it.

I believe in you… and I am praying for you. This is a new day and new year with new students. Today is a new beginning… and I am praying that when “today” grows tired and the last days are in sight that you will still remember today.

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:9)