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Daughter of the King

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Daughter of the King

Tag Archives: Jesus

Love Is…

22 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

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Christian, hypocrisy, Jesus, life, love, real, reality, tangible, thoughts

I want so deeply to be a lover, not just a collection of holy words in sandals or sneakers. I want to be real to people of all kinds. I want to change the way people receive the word “Christian” because of having known me. Positively.

I want to speak without arrogance and learn new things with passion, without agenda.  I hope to share boldly about belief and the few things I know, but keep quiet more often and hear all the things I’ve never heard.  Can I learn to ask questions with grace and sincerity, seeking to explore the layers beneath the person we are usually comfortable knowing?  This is love.

I find myself regularly agreeing with my friend and peer, Andy Marin, and his thoughts on what love–at its core–actually is. What is this love that God gives to us and expects to see holding us together, the lines between people? Take the time to read Andy’s thought here.

Faith like a Mustard Seed

15 Tuesday Feb 2011

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Bible, faith, farming, gardening, God, growth, Jesus, kingdom of God, Mark 4:30-32, Matthew 13:31-32, mustard seed, parable, patience, seeds

For a belated version of Christmas which included a brittle-needled, albeit cute, evergreen with candy cane ornaments, I received a tiny sterling silver necklace with a shadow box charm hanging from the end. Inside the charm was the smallest seed you’ve ever seen. A little mustard seed. It looked like a floating, inconsequential crumb casting a pin-dot of a shadow. Had I seen it on the arm of the couch, I’d have brushed it to the floor. Were it stuck to the fur of the cat kneading my chest, I’d have never noticed.

Sometimes, in the morning, when I’m throwing on my teacher-clothes in layers because I’ll sweat while lecturing in my classroom but have frostbite on my fingers while discipling in the library, I see the mustard seed hanging in a crooked smile, notched on my collarbone. It is the smallest seed, Jesus said, but it will grow to be the largest of all the trees in the garden…with branches so huge that birds will perch in its shade. Have a little faith, Jesus says. Which is what I’m doing. The kingdom of God is like this, he tells his disciples and the throngs of people hanging on his every word.

We’re so limited in what can see, what we can understand. I get that. And I’m the worst when I get an idea and start jumping to supposed conclusions, too. I’m so excitable sometimes! So there I am standing in the mirror, silly business casual pants and a sweater, wondering if I’m living it right. Am I having the faith that one thing or all things can come from some thing by the power of God? I want to be taking steps that show how I can’t make this life turn the way I want it to, but because God can, my emboldened words, my patient waiting, are both in faith. Expectant faith.

The mustard seed necklace doesn’t match what I’m wearing most days, but I wear it anyway most days. Often, it’s covered by some convoluted wrap of a scarf around my neck, hanging down my chest, but it peeks out when I shift this way or that and I think about the faith I’m standing on. I need to make sure my faith is active in actions. No fear of the future. Expectant faith because the kingdom of God is in this impossibly small seed.

Jesus uses this parable of the smallest seed, with a farming and gardening community, to help them understand that from something small and inconsequential, something that seems to be useless, something that doesn’t appear to have this power or potential—something else: huge and useful and great can come. From the mustard seed, there grows the greatest tree in the garden. All the birds use it for shade in a country where all of my visiting friends have been scorched by the sun. It’s a different place over there. When he says shade he doesn’t just mean, they’d like a popsicle; he means it as a resource to their waning bodies.

Resources come tumbling richly out of that seed that I would brush off the couch arm like a crumb. It could just take some time.

Just Tradition?

03 Friday Dec 2010

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

agenda, atheist, believer, Christ, Christian, Christmas, confusion, history, holiday, Jesus, meaning, season, tradition, unbeliever, winter

I have to ask honestly. I’m not bringing the agenda that you think I have. Not even the agenda that I might actually have. No agendas here. Not even calendars or planners, just to make everyone feel entirely comfortable.

I’m coming with nothing but my most sincere wonderings. Just a fistful of curiosity, hours of pondering, and yet no answers, no resolve. I just can’t figure why.

I understand that we have cultural status quos and traditions of all shapes and sounds. I get, too, that some days it’s all we can do to just roll with the punches. Maybe it’s just that simple. I guess I’m looking for more. My unsatisfied self, meandering around in the garden of the I don’t knows. I’m always looking for more, digging deeper, trying to get to the bottom of things, when–in fact–I may already be there. So, pardon my ignorance.

I celebrate Christmas because I find that Christmas marks a day, commemorates a birth, that I believe actually happened. Yep, in the real, chronological account of history.  This earth.  Our past.  Real life.  I believe it mattered when Christ was born. Not only do I think it was real, and historical, but I think it changed the way the world functions and it offers us a space to respond.

Now, remember, I didn’t bring the agenda you think I have. I didn’t used to be this girl.  Didn’t believe any of this for years. I ignorantly, arrogantly, ignored it all and played like I knew better. I truly thought I knew so much better. But in the long, twisted story of it all, I searched for answers and made a choice, which Christmas paves the way for. I find Christmas a holiday that matters and makes a difference. We celebrate things, naturally, that matter and make a difference.

I just can’t wrap my still-learing, still-eager, always-seeking mind around it. You don’t think it matters, Jesus slipping into skin and living here two-thousand years ago. You don’t think he even did, or maybe that he did and that he was just a messed up fool like the rest of us. It’s nothing to you but a time to work hard in the industry or a few days away from the office, a break from school and homework, a time to book a flight and visit Mom. None of it makes any sense to me. How can you celebrate something you don’t believe in?  What makes you sing the songs or buy the gifts, don red and green and drink champagne at the holiday parties? 

My King is not your king, why are you celebrating His birth with me?

All Hearts

18 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Brad, Central Park, chalk, fall, hearts, irony, Jesus, love, mocking, New York City, NYC

New York Sidewalk

It’s somewhere in New York City, where you took your life when you ran from me.  Maybe Central Park where the leaves crunch under your Keds in the Fall, or Brooklyn, near the bridge before it turns to dusk and the corners are dark in a different kind of way, like South Chicago.

The chalk in the photo is drawn in all kinds of colors, big block letters and a heart in place of the word love.  It says Jesus heart you.  And there’s you, right next to the word you.  Jesus heart Brad is what I think when I look, linger.  When I linger and stall with an image from season ago.  When I look at it, I think, yes.  Jesus does heart Brad.  I heart Brad.  This whole mess is just a matter of Brad hearting back.  Brad hearts me, but he doesn’t heart Jesus and the intersection of Brad unhearting Jesus and hearting me is the heart of the problem.  It always has been. 

I await the day when I can look at some anonymous little girl’s chalk masterpiece and the man I’ve fallen in love with who kneels ironically, poetically beside and fall asleep in confidence that all hearts are clear.  Today, all hearts are not clear.

Betrothed

13 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

betrothal, crown, Daughter of the King, Jesus, love, marriage, Savior, tattoo, wedding ring

I’ve had a tattoo around my wrist for about a year. It says “Daughter of the King” in script with a drop shadow. I also have a crown on what your typical Westerner would call the “ring finger” on my left hand. I know, gasp!  The concept behind my tattoos has to do with making clear my priorities. It has to do with asserting my betrothal to Christ, my Savior and King. He has redeemed me, claimed me, saved me. I am His.

I am His before I am the wife of any man. Before I am anything to anyone. Historically, it’s been most difficult for me to apply this truth to dating and men. But a little bit of ink under my skin says that I will wake up every morning and love first, my Lord. First, before I go about my day, before I dole out my affections elsewhere, even if it is to a godly man, even if to a husband. First, to my King.

And reminding me of this today was a story from a friend of the understanding that her two-year-old has of how Christ takes us as His bride. Read this precious dialogue between Mom and daughter.

All Together

29 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

adult, change, college, friends, friendship, graduation, group, growth, Jesus, marriage, Michigan, youth

The last time we were all together was when one of us, the only one of us, got married.

Kristin's Getting Married!

There’s been some redemption since. Some efforts towards healthy interaction, yes. But mostly there’s been destruction and chasm. And one of us is gone entirely, as far as anyone can tell. She doesn’t mind being so far, but everyone always makes comment about her absence. It’s the saddest sort of equation.

You see, years ago I gave a name to this crew of friends I had. No one agreed with me. Even these friends though I was silly for being so semiformal and so I stood alone. I thought I was being intentional, thought I was drawing us closer together and facilitating the relationships we were building. I see now that it may have been a bit much. It’s possible, I suppose, that I grew somewhat overzealous about creating us this little team of friend-making. But there we were, willing or otherwise, a group of gals with a label.

In keeping with the fact that I thought the idea, the people, the plan were all fabulous, when I referred to the crew, I called them the Fab Five. There were five of us, of course. We all lived in Michigan at the time, in various parts of the state. We had met years before through a youth camp where we all served as young adult staff members. We had Jesus in common at the most basic level, a love for Him, surely. Beyond that, we had visions and dreams of all kinds yet we still dared to dream together. We dreamed big dreams, too. Dreams that knew no boundaries. Dreams which didn’t consider destruction.

Now with college there’s graduation and with growing up, parting ways. With moving up, moving on and so forth. So, pretty soon Michigan had lost the core of this crew. The easy answers are in the telephone calls as the day winds down, the emails with pictures attached, even the hand-written letters and the packages bursting at the corners, waiting to be torn open and indulged. But when the weeks go by with conversations only between one party and the voicemail and nary voice to voice, the phone calls start to space out. When the emails and the letters go out, but space and silence are sent back, no postage necessary, the incentive grows dim. The cords between us grew thin as time passed by.

And eventually, I started to see the spaces in the world we’d built together. We hadn’t quite considered the pull that change would have, we didn’t commit like I thought we had. And still, of the five of us, only I ever use the label that I gave us. We’ve been living apart for years now, our dreams abandoned in limbo, empty, uninhabited. The last time we were all together might have been the last time we’ll ever all be together.

Plus the Bride makes Fab Five

Sin is always a distortion of something good.

10 Tuesday Aug 2010

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

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creation, cross, evil, fall, good, grace, healing, Jesus, redemption, salvation, Satan, shame, sin

Donovan L. Graham says, in the book I’m reading (Teaching Redemptively) in order to be considered a trustworthy and legitimate teacher in the near future:

“It’s extremely important to realize that while sin distorted the creation, it did not destroy it or turn it into something evil. Sin neither abolishes nor becomes identified with creation. Sin is of a different order. It lives as a parasite on creation, able to exist only as an agent that twists what is good. Satan, a renegade, has no legitimate kingdom and lives under God’s rule. The only thing he has to work with is God’s good creation, and his so-called kingdom could not even exist without creation. Therefore, we must see that prostitution and promiscuity do not make sex bad. They can only exist as a distortion of human sexuality, God’s good creation. Hatred is only a distortion of the human emotion of love, another of God’s good creations. Every sinful, distorted image embodies a good image created by God. A hurtful relationship is still a relationship, a godless school is still a school, a corrupt government is still a government, idol worship is still worship. Thus sin must not be seen as something that has an existence of its own. If it did not attach itself to the good of God’s creation, it could not exist.”

And so I’m left thinking about how we are not inherently good, like so many naively believe.  No.  But, neither are we altogether wired up for evil, like we sometimes mistakenly assume.  We are made to be good; we are called good by the Creator before we fall.  It is just that we have been turned away from that goodness towards evil, sin, and shame.  And, though provided with a Savior and called righteous even when we are not, we are still diseased by the heaviness of that shame.

Sin cannot create.  It is handicapped and unable to produce ex nihilo.  It can only twist and ruin things that already are.  Things that, at their core, are good.

Good Morning, Gorgeous

16 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

beauty, Jesus, love, makeup, mistakes, morning, natural, relationship, Savior, truth

You woke me with a message, Good morning, gorgeous. I was too sleepy for the turns and twists you’d already started in my stomach. I’d slept comfortably without this nervousness for hours. And, now it’s back. I sighed and buried my flushed face in my pillow. I was alone in my room, you were miles from me, maybe in yours, or dancing like a fool in the apartment below yours to nineties music with your brothers, our friends. There was no reason to be embarrassed.

It’s like every morning when I wake and my Savior loves me like this. Good morning, gorgeous, He says. He’s ready for me and all my mistakes, teeth unbrushed, hair all a mess. He wants me a part of His day just like that. And so while I eat breakfast, I try to accept that love and say okay. And live the day.

I haven’t worn makeup for weeks, now. When I wash my face, I put on lotion so my skin doesn’t dry up, so it doesn’t itch. But I haven’t been dabbing concealer under my tired eyes or bronzer over my cheeks so my smile looks smiley-er. When I met you, I had just gotten out of the shower and thrown on jeans and a t-shirt. It’s been the same these past two weeks. So, it’s a little strange the way you called me beautiful today, and last night.  And the way you will again next week.  But it’s the same as how my King wakes me up and takes my hand and runs through the day with me as I fall and trip and make the same damn mistakes.

High [CNF]

07 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

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drugs, experience, high, high school, Jesus, kids, life, marijuana, pot, smoking, weed

I didn’t always love Jesus.

But I always have loved being high. Always, since the first time I knew what it felt like. Since the party at L__ S______’s house with my neighbor who I don’t think I was dating yet but who I had the world’s largest crush on. I didn’t lie to my mom this day, didn’t have to. Mrs. S______ was my substitute teacher in junior high; Mom knew her from Parent-Teacher something or other. I said her name and it worked like a magic buzz word. I was in the clear, and Mrs. S______ wasn’t even home.

We laid around in the basement, piles of people on couches and chairs and each other. Most everyone was drinking. Everyone was underage. No one was doing anything worth writing home about. I don’t remember what I was doing. C____ was my neighbor, one of two twins, a year younger than me. My family had moved in something like a year ago from the neighborhood just east of this one. First, I liked his brother, the more popular, sporty, outgoing one of the pair. Then, I just switched my affinity. I was like that back then.

C____ took my hand and the rest of me outside. We sat in a car with too many people. I was on his lap in the front passenger’s seat, all the windows up. I didn’t know anything: the language, the paraphernalia, the patterns. I just sort of fit in. I wasn’t scared. C____ was a pretty well-known smoker, I suppose. I thought he was just a cute boy; a little jaded to the kind of drug circles I would see him run in.

It burned my throat the first time they passed the hitter to me. It looked like a big glass blown art project, the bowl did. I didn’t know how to light it and no one expected me to know a thing. C____ lit the leaves and motioned for me to inhale. I always had been pretty good at following directions.

It wasn’t like smoking a cigarette, although I hadn’t done that either, only been educated by the media and spontaneous modeling. The drag was a long drag, as much breath as I could suck in, which I soon found to be abbreviated because of the fire effect of the smoke inside of me. It was sharp and it hit the walls of my throat with a startling jolt, sitting uncomfortably in the crevices of my esophagus like embers. When I opened my mouth to speak, to ask for a water bottle to cool the flames, I found my vocal chords charred from their proximity to the heat and coughed instead, which hurt worse.

Soon, the inside of the car was filled with the haze of our exhale anyway. None of C____’s friends could see my watering eyes from my itchy throat. The hitter was making its way back around to the front seat and, again, to me. You would think, what with my first experience, I would politely decline but between pressure and youth, the decision was made. And so, against all of my honors student labels, in this clam-baked car with boys I hardly knew, the only question in the form of a weed-packed bowl handed my direction, I gripped it and raised it to my mouth even when all signs pointed to no.

When we got out of the car, I felt fine. The water bottle was empty, and I hadn’t shared. My throat still felt a bit raw from the whole smoke-of-burning-embers feeling. I even think Mrs. S______ was home by the time we went inside. The evidence was already inside of us, but I still didn’t feel a thing. Not until we drove home.

C____ drove me home, even dropped me off in the driveway, which was funny because he lived next door. Sitting in the passenger seat, I got my first feeling of being high. We were about halfway home from L__’s and I spun around in the seat with a sense of urgency, emergency. “What’s wrong?” C____ asked me from the driver’s seat. He was slowing down to make a left hand turn at a busy three-way intersection in our city, just past the church my parents took me to, nominally, when I was a kid. With failing words, I tried to explain the feeling that time has just passed in fast forward, that something had quickly happened but I’d missed it, that the present had folded and overlapped the past, that the last thirty seconds of our lives had been—deleted. Maybe we’d lost five minutes. Maybe more. How long had we been in the car?

He laughed and turned left at the light, unconcerned. He knew I was high knew it was for the first time. Up and down my amusement park high I worried about his driving, which is just like me, the stone straight sober variety. His driving was fine, or I don’t remember how it was, but we got home alright and he’d done this whole runaround hundreds of times. By my hundredth hit, I was bored sometimes; it wasn’t the same kind of high. But the first dozen or howevermany tens of times were like this just the same and I never wanted it to end.

I wanted to live in the gray forever. Once the smoke had faded into sky, disappeared into the air, the gray remained inside making fuzzy the lines between reality and something less or more. The game to find what was real exhilarated the curious little girl in me and I held tightly to the present which was often deleted minutes from the past, hanging inbetween a place I was and a place I shouldn’t have to be or shouldn’t have been, or just shouldn’t.

The whole world didn’t get high for the first time in L__ S______’s car, like catching their breath at the tops of ninety-mile per hour drops and hanging upside down without a harness. They weren’t driving home, crushing on their attractive neighbor at the height of teenage hormones, highly influential in a thousand ways. I know. We were kids, hiding our habits from overprotective upper-middle class parents in gated communities. We smoked in the basements, with wet towels stuffed in the spaces between doors and floors, incense burning like a séance, and fans at every window. Usually we smoked in the cold—airflow erased the evidence. All of it made a thin slice of this world gray with confusion and epic indecision. Responsibility lifted from my shoulders and I floated without care, laughing and alert, waiting for some kind of surprise.

I always have loved feeling high. Floating free in time, suspended between the now and the just was, guessing and grabbing playfully at what might be real—playing games with truth and life. But that was then.

I didn’t always love Jesus. But I love Him now. And playing with truth isn’t the same anymore. Some things are just better to sacrifice.

Perspective

04 Friday Jun 2010

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

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Tags

cell phone, electronics, forgiveness, friends, friendship, healing, Jesus, love, midwest, past, road trip, technology, texting

I understand where you’re coming from, I just can’t see her perspective, one of my closest friends says.  We’re talking over text message, my most despised form of communication but one I’ve succumbed to in this race to the finish of increasingly speedy and impossibly small technologies.  S. and I are in the initial effort stages (again) of being friends.  She doesn’t even like the word friend, S. doesn’t, but she’s trying to be such a thing with me.  Who knows how paradoxes like that work themselves out.  The history of us and surrounding casualties is relatively long and mostly boring to anyone but us.  We were kids, really.  Kids in a dramatic friendship, trying to act like adults and failing miserably.  We were dealing with things that folks twice our age hardly ever have to touch with rubber gloves and a breathing mask.  None of it was easy; much of it caused division.  But years have passed since all of that and S. and I are doing what we think is alright. 

Help me understand, S. says.  I mean, she texts.  There’s always more to the story.  This more is a gal who I’ve been driving around the Midwest with this week.  C. and I are visiting friends, too many names to keep in short order.  C. and I, we’re friends of the close variety, but we’ve lost a thing or twelve along the way.  There’s a lot of love and a tourist map full of points of interest, but a big Jesus-sized piece missing between us.  We’ll talk pop media until our tongues are numb and we’ve twice almost lost the dice to the game we’re playing as a tool for our fidgety hands, but the thing we used to have in common, the only thing that’s sure, is on the rocks, and we both know.  Don’t misunderstand, even with our piece-less puzzle, C. and I are on this trip because of love. 

And the story goes on.  S. wants to know C. (again), years after the wreckage.  And the pulse of that heartbeat beats the other way, too.  She’s trying to find somewhere to put her brick in this bridge we’re building across the chasm between us all.  It’ll take more than a text message, more than the simple one-syllable words that fit on this screen, to craft a new kind of trust that will right things overturned and heal things once all sliced up.  S. knows this about text messages, but she sends them still, slow to call.  The past is a thing C. grips tightly, remembers when.  S. knows this, too, forgets. 

After a handful of minutes, messages, and having created a melody of button-clicking in my own ear from my qwerty keyboard, I remember that I can’t build these bridges in radio waves and cell phone signals so I sign off with everything all unresolved.  With yet two friends, but with a chasm still between us all.

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