Love Story Week 3: Identity theft

"Robber" by Elliott Worley

Last week I discovered that I might be the victim of identity theft.  We had to engage a credit monitoring service, which will watchdog activity for awhile.  We were glad to learn there had been no fraudulent activity so far, but it was sobering to look at their report.  I mean, there was everything in my public record and my credit history.  My whole identity laid out on a page, summed up in columns of transactions.  Is that who I am?

If you've ever had to fill out a college application or a job application or create a resume, you know that feeling:  trying to sum up your whole identity by a list of achievements and credentials.  It's why I don't write an annual Christmas letter.  I can tell you where we went on vacation this year, what our kids achieved, whether we renovated our kitchen—but that doesn't really tell you who I am after living this year.

I felt vulnerable, knowing that someone could change who that report says I am. Just by adding a bunch of transactions, the thief could change who the world thinks I am.  They could wreak such havoc on my opportunities, my credentials, my relationships.

So, I'm saddened to come to this week's Bible story and find that I actually have been the victim of an identity thief.  

Now the snake was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.

- Genesis 3:1

There was Eve in the garden, so completely innocent.  I can picture what it looked like: it looked like my children playing alone in the back yard, completely lost in their play, completely without any hubris.  Completely unguarded.

Most of the childhood that I remember was spent in Dallas, Texas.  My family moved to Shreveport, Louisiana for two years, when I was in the fifth and sixth grade.  Fifth grade was the year I got glasses; sixth grade was the year I encountered Ginger and Shelly.  Ginger had red hair and Shelly had blonde hair, and they ran the sixth grade at Creswell Elementary School.  I was the new girl, and I was desperate for Ginger and Shelly to like me.  And pretty much, people had always liked me.  

Across the street from Creswell Elementary School, there was a drug store with a soda fountain.  (I am not making this up. I did not grow up in Back to the Future, but it was the sixties in a small town.) Every day after school, as we were walking home, we stopped at the drug store, where you could get a little tiny glass of Cherry Coke in one of those old-fashioned Coke glasses.  And every afternoon, Ginger and Shelly would pull me over in the cotton ball aisle to tell me "for my own good" what dorky thing I had done that day which meant I could not be accepted in their circle of friends.

That was not the year I stopped being a child, but that was when I became a guarded child.

Ever since then, if you say to me, "I need to talk to you about something," I am nervous as a cat; I'm right back in the cotton ball aisle.

There are grown up Gingers and Shellys roaming about, even in the church. (They also like the PTA, or whatever it's called now.) I ran up against a few of them on a church committee, on which I served many months of misery.  I came home crying most of the time.  One day my sweet and spunky friend Cindy Sterling rang my front door bell.  I opened the door and found that Cindy had left me a package of those round cosmetic pads you use to remove makeup.  The note on them said, "No more cotton balls!"  I quit the committee.

He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, 

‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” 

And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ” 

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 

For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, 

and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

- Genesis 3:1b-5

Oh, Eve.  What if you had replied differently?  What if you had said, "I am like God.  He made me in His image.  I don't need to know what He knows. I trust Him."  Life would have been so different.

But:  what if I responded differently?  

Satan is always hauling me from the garden into the cotton ball aisle, telling me about the one thing that would make me more acceptable/special/happy/fulfilled/good-as-everybody-else.  He's always showing me everyone's Pinterest feed and their Facebook pages, with their fabulous vacations and gorgeous dinners and kitchen renovations.  What if—this afternoon, tonight, tomorrow morning—when he comes at me, I said, "I'm already acceptable/special/happy/fulfilled/good-as-everybody-else?"  Why do I keep letting him steal my identity?  Why does God keep having to come find me, hiding behind my unrenovated kitchen cabinets, asking, "Who told you you were naked?"

"It was the snake!  He tricked me, and I ate!"

- Gen 3:12

Yes, that is what he does.  While he is pick-pocketing your identity, he distracts you by pointing in the direction of something-God-is-surely-withholding-from-you-and-you-need-to-get-for-yourself.  He lures.  He entices.  

I'm not letting Eve off the hook.  She chose. Poorly.  She chose to look.  She chose to doubt.  She chose to desire.  She chose to do something about it.  That's how it works. "Then desire, when it is conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown, brings forth death." (James 1:15)

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. 

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

- John 10:10

When Jesus says, "I came that they might have life," it is the Greek word  zōḗ , which means "life as God has it."  Jesus came to give us back the life that God created in the beginning.  When John writes in his Gospel about seeing Jesus up close and personal, he says, "In him was  zōḗ ."  (John 1:4)   Jesus understood that's what he had come for.  Long, long ago, when God had settled on us as the focus of his love, at the center of his long-range plan was the fact that he would deliver this  zōḗ  life through the hand of his beloved Son.  (Ephesians 1:4-6 MSG)

It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for.

Ephesians 1:11 MSG

Every day we have Eve's choice: to listen to the identity thief or listen to the author of life. 

Here's how your identity was stolen, so you can recognize the thief 

when he comes for you.

Who will you tell this story to?

Love Story: In the beginning

The first few days of January, we went to Texas to celebrate Dennis' mom's 90th birthday.  Our gift to her was that we flew our kids & grandkids there, most importantly 3 1/2 month-old Olivia Ruth Worley, who was named after Alice Ruth.

We had a family party. Just our immediate family, with all the generations of kids and cousins, is a big crowd.  So it took a long dining room table plus card tables & card tables & card tables, extending all the way across the house!  Alice Ruth had assigned where we should sit, with all the Texas and Tennessee cousins mixed up together so they would talk and get to know one another.  We hadn't been sitting at the table for very long before Dennis' cousin Nanda started telling stories, and then the avalanche of stories began, up and down the table, each generation having different memories to share and laughing at each other so hard we couldn't eat.

If I'd said to my kids, "We are going to Texas and for Grammer's party, I want you to prepare a speech about what it means to be a Worley and share a memory you have with Grammer," they would've dreaded it.  We would've presented our speeches and sat down and still been divided into Texas and Tennessee.  We wouldn't have laughed.  We wouldn't have felt like family.  We wouldn't have gone home knowing more about who we are and the family we come from.

We need to know who we are and where we come from.  It's part of knowing why we are here and where we're going.  Stories tell us this, so it's important that we know them and tell them.  

And it's possible to be living a story that isn't at all true.  

When I was growing up, my family's cousins would all gather on the family farm in Arkansas—my grandmother and her sisters and their kids and their grandkids.  My cousin Marcy and I were the youngest girls; my cousins Janie and Susan were teenagers.  Marcy and I thought they were the definition of cool.  We spied on them all the time.  My great-grandmother's farm house had those old walk-through closets;  the doors had the old-fashioned great big key holes.  Janie and Susan were in the front room.  Marcy and I could sneak through the closet connecting our room to theirs and peek through the key hole into the secret life of teenaged girls, which included bras and finger nail polish and rock'n'roll on the radio.  

This is what I remember from those summer days on the farm:  My grandmother had five sisters, and one of them, Aunt Helen, was never at these gatherings.  She was never talked about. My grandmother and her sisters would fill their days cooking from morning til night in the kitchen til it was hotter than August in Arkansas in there.  We were sent outside to play, and whenever we went outside, someone would yell, "Stay away from the well!"  Of course this meant we were irresistibly drawn to the well, til Janie and Susan told us, "You'd better stay away from that well.  Aunt Helen went crazy and threw herself down there.  If you go near it, she'll snatch you down it."  

I believed that Aunt Helen went crazy and threw herself down the well until I was a grown woman and mentioned it at a family reunion.  Everybody stopped talking and someone said, "Where on earth did you get that idea?" and I pointed my finger at Janie and Susan, snickering in the corner.  What really happened was that Aunt Helen got sick and had to go into what they used to call "a sanitarium."  She never recovered.  I learned in later years that there was a fair amount of history of depression in my family, a fact I needed to know when I dealt with depression.  The women I come from were teachers and mothers and farm wives and gardeners and poets, and some dealt with depression, but no one threw herself down a well, and this is helpful to know, so you don't spend your life afraid of the wrong things.

So, this week in our Wednesday Bible study, we go back to the very beginning of God's story, which is the beginning of each of our stories.  The story of creation tells us enormous things about God, about the world, but especially about our place in it and our unique part in God's love story.  None of us have ever experienced the world as it was when God created it, but we get glimpses, and our longings confirm that we were indeed made for it.  Most of all, the creation story tell us we were made for God;  we were, unlike anything else in creation, patterned in his likeness.  We were made to know him and play a huge part in his story.

God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. 

He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him.

- Romans 8:29-30 The Message

Where you came from:  it makes all the difference in where you're going and how you get there.

Here's the story of how it all began.

Who will you tell this story to?  

Love Story Week 1: Rahab

Every Wednesday morning I teach a women's Bible study.  We've been meeting together for 2 years.  This week, we begin our winter/spring study for 2014.  I'm calling it "Love Story."  I'm so excited about this study!

If you're like me, your holidays were spent making everything special—the most special it could be for the people you love.  How special is special enough?  I've been thinking about that for several months, and I've begun to think that we really wrestle with the need to feel special.  We are pressured by everyone else's pictures on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. What a fabulous time they're having!  What an incredible recipe they just made!  What a fantastic new makeover they just gave their living room!  Look at their new boyfriend!  Their engagement ring!  Their wedding pictures!  Their kids!  Their new job!  Their vacation!  

We can begin to feel that we must go out and make the same magical things happen, get those things for ourselves, or we aren't special enough.  

Paul tells us in Ephesians 1 that we are indeed very special, chosen and loved by God and destined for an incredible purpose:

Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ. (What pleasure he took in planning this!) He wanted us to enter into the celebration of his lavish gift-giving by the hand of his beloved Son.)

Later in Ephesians 3, we learn that God is able to do far more for us than we could ever think up on our own or dare to ask for.  And certainly more than we could get for ourselves.

We cannot make ourselves special enough.  But God already has. He has set his heart on us.  He has a present and future to bring us that is part of eveything he's been doing since the creation of the world.  And he delights to bring us that life.  That's the good news we call The Gospel.  That's the story of the Bible.

I noticed two things in our Bible study last fall:  

First, I'm not sure we believe this about ourselves.   Second, I'm pretty sure we're afraid we don't know how to tell it to others.  I feel that way!  So I'm very excited about tackling those two problems together in our next Bible study, and here's how we're going to do it, in a fun but challenging new way:  

We're going to learn to tell Bible stories.

We're going to learn 18 Bible stories together, stories that tell us about the long-range plan God has for us, the very special role we play in his story, and the way he delivers that life to us.  We'll learn about women like Rahab, who jumped at the chance to have that kind of life; Sarah, who doubted that God could deliver on his special promise and schemed a way to get it herself; the Israelites, who doubted that God could take them into their promised life and so wandered in the wilderness for 40 years; and the Samaritan woman at the well, who didn't believe she was included in the promise, but wound up telling everyone in her village about Jesus, the one who knew everything about her and offered her a new life.  Each week, we'll learn a new story, and each week we'll practice telling it.

Yep, telling it.  Because I'm betting that we're not the only ones who wonder if we are special enough, who feel the need to go out and achieve a "special enough life" for themselves.  We're surrounded by neighbors and friends and family members who feel the same way.  We can tell them a story that could set them free of that.

In learning these stories, we're going to deal with lots of things:  shame, fear, worthiness, belonging, grace, identity, purpose, faith, receiving.

For this study, I'm going to be posting a recording of me telling the story.  (Mostly to encourage you.  If I tell the story this badly, surely you can do better!)  Listen to the story.  And then practice telling it yourself.

I'm also going to post the homework hand out each week, so you can download it and keep up with us, even if you don't make it to the class.  The homework has some questions for you to consider and journal about.  But the most important question is this:

Who will you tell the story to this week?  

This is good news;  it's meant to be shared.  Pray about it and watch for the opportunity you'll have to say, "Have you heard the story about….?"

So here we go:  

Ready to learn how we get written into God's love story? 

Here's the story of Rahab. 

Who did you tell this story to?  I'd love to hear about it. 

25 Things for Christmas and One for the New Year

This year, Arley Worley gave me the most wonderful Christmas gift:  a giant box of 25 Things to Open.  The box arrived on December 1, with a little package for each day til Christmas.

                                    

25 Things:

the most excellent potato masher
mashed potatoes=love

back scratcher

Sundance gift card!

perfect little sauce bowl

cozy throw in my fav blue

basil mint hand salts

thermal pack - make it hot or cold!

cool rolling pin

happy apron for Christmas cooking

delicious bath salts

boot socks in perfect orange/red/brown knit

W is for Worleys!

funny answers to text questions

gel booties for tired feet

Abe Lincoln boot socks!

over the knee black boot socks!

spa gift certificate!

Santa napkins

shiny silver orb

Starbucks!

apple ornament

Q-tip dispenser with BLUE Q-tips

book shopping!

"made with love" cookie press

Arley knows that blue is my favorite color, that I can't get enough books or coffee, that mashed potatoes and massages are special treats I dole out when I really need to de-stress, that I long for everything in the Sundance catalog and I have a thing for Christmas napkins and shiny orbs, that I love aprons and cooking gadgets, that boot socks make me ridiculously happy, I like alphabet letter do-dads and funny quirky books and soaking in the tub, that my shoulders get tight when I'm tense and there is an itchy spot in the middle of my back that drives me crazy.

She remembered every one of these things.  She went out and found them and wrapped them.  That blew me away, every day.

At Christmas, I am the one who does all the shopping and wrapping and stocking-stuffing.  I'm the one who plans the surprises and treats, and this job makes me happy.  Dennis is busy planning wonderful treats for the people who will come to church at Christmas, sights and sounds and moments they will never forget.  I take care of the home front.  Because of this, I'm rarely surprised at Christmas.

That's not because DW falls down on the job, mind you.  I get every single thing my heart desires at Christmas.  Because when I am shopping for others, I have this habit of shopping for myself.  "Oh, this is awesome!  One for you, one for me."  I could show you pictures of the 25 Things I Bought for Myself, but that's not the point.  This is:  How much fun it was every day to unwrap a gift that said, "I know you, and I love to delight you."

I love the things I bought for myself (with DW's blessing), but I treasure the things I was given.  Arls gave me a much bigger gift than a Box of Things.  She gave me the lesson that it is more fun to receive than to get for yourself.

I'm thinking of this today as I'm working on the Bible study I'll be teaching January through May on Wednesdays.  Ephesians 1 tells us about the incredible identity and destiny God designed for us from the beginning of time, and how he planned with so much love to give it to us:

Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ. (What pleasure he took in planning this!) He wanted us to enter into the celebration of his lavish gift-giving by the hand of his beloved Son.

Ephesians 1:4-6 The Message

I am, most days, not so different than I am at Christmas:  I'm so busy going out and getting the things, achievements, attention, affection that I think I need to create a special enough life that I miss the incredibly lavish gift-giving that God is up to.  He is bringing me a life more special that I could ever dream up or provide. He knows me, and he loves to delight me.  The question of faith is:  Do I trust God to bring me the best life I could ever have, or do I feel I need to go out and get it for myself?

This winter and spring on Wednesday mornings, we'll be learning 18 Bible stories of people who could or couldn't wait for God to bring them the life he had promised.  I hope we'll learn to answer the anxious questions, "What makes me special?"  I hope we'll learn that it is so much more fun to receive this life than it is to try to acquire it for ourselves.  Anyway, that's the challenge for me in the new year, and the lesson Arls began teaching me on December 1.

P.S.  #25 was the best gift of all:  these fantastic five, in person.  Also like God:  The best gift of all is his presence.

God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!  - Ephesians 3:20 MSG

Happy New Year!  My wish for you and me in 2014 is that we believe the promise of Ephesians 3:20 and receive the life God brings us.  Each day comes bearing its own gifts.  Untie the ribbons.

Hap

Fear, Faith & Dreams that Kill Us

There is a scene in Jurassic Park where we learn how raptors hunt.  The raptor you see is not the one who'll eat you.  While you're standing very still, looking him in his beady eye, the others have snuck up on you from the sides and come in for the kill.

So it was last week that all my focus was on Matt, on getting him on that plane to Cape Town.  On doing it with grace and faith and joy, leaping with no fear.  So for a minute I forgot that I gave birth to two other sons, and I didn't see it coming, the thought that ate me alive, that came out of left field and tore me to shreds :

What if my other boys move away?

Other people's kids have done it.  Dennis and I did it.  Apparently you can survive it.  But for a few days last week, fear told me, "You can't."

In "Life Together", Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes about the danger of "wish dreams."  He is writing about life in the community of believers, but it speaks loudly to me about life in a family:

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both.

A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse.

Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly.

He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for what He has done for us. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by His call, by His forgiveness, and His promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what He does give us daily.

I realize that I have a wish dream of my own, a vision of my family.  And I am at the center of it.  My wish dream is to have them all here, all doing things together, all coming in and out of the house, all satellites around us.  In my vision, this is a full life.  This is enough.

My wish dream could wreck my family, if I cling to it.  And make me miserable in the process.  Which is why God, in his grace, must shatter my illusion.  She who loves her dream most does not love her children enough.  Worse, does not love her God enough.

You don't have to be a Mom to have this fear.  You might be clinging to a wish dream about your job, or your church, or what kind of house you live in.  I'm not the only one going through this, and I know it from the conversations I'm having.  In my Wednesday morning Bible study yesterday, we talked about faith & fear, and we shook in our boots as we read these words from Hebrews 10:

So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded.

36 You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. 37 For,

“In just a little while,

he who is coming will come

and will not delay.”

38 And,

“But my righteous one will live by faith.

And I take no pleasure

in the one who shrinks back.”

39 But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved.

Faith, Hebrews 11 goes on to tell us, is what the ancients were commended for.  In the list of those commended for their faith, there are wish-dreamers and schemers.  If you go back and read their stories, God had to say to every one of them, "Do not fear."  Numerous times.  Their wish dreams ended in devastating consequences.  Their schemes failed them.  Their God never did.  They aren't commended for how perfectly they followed Him, but for the fact that they did.  They chose following over fear.  

You cannot stay where you are and go with God. 

- Henry Blackaby, Experiencing God: Knowing & Doing the Will of God

Ok.  Let's go.

The Big Adventure

Wednesday night before last I sat in a storytelling training session with IMB missionary Stephen Stringer.  We learned to tell the story of the rich young ruler.  We chose that story because it speaks to our affinity group, middle class wealthy achievers in Williamson County.  

Jesus says to the young man, "Sell everything you have, take the money and give it to the poor."  And the young man walked away sad, because he was not willing to.

Those were powerfully ringing in my heart last weekend as I watched Matt sell everything he has, and as we unloaded our closets and cabinets, along with friends and family, to have a huge garage sale for him.  It was not sad to part with any of that stuff, because  of what we were working toward.  But it was convicting to watch strangers show up in the dark with trailers to buy all that stuff and haul it home.  Such a contrast: they were acquiring, loading, hoarding, as we were all divesting, unloading, giving away.

I looked in Matt's room last Tuesday and there was all he has left:  two crates with t-shirts, pants, shoes, socks, books all rolled up and packed, a back pack, a computer, a guitar.  Nothing else.  He was camped out here in the room he grew up as a boy, and this weekend he was sleeping on an air mattress in London at Matt & Jamie Hoppe's.  Tomorrow, when he arrives in Cape Town, he'll be camping out in a room at the Team House until he finds a home of his own.  And he's perfectly happy.

I came across these words in Luke 9:

⁵⁷ As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”

⁵⁸ Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

⁵⁹ He said to another man, “Follow me.”

But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

⁶⁰ Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

⁶¹ Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.”

⁶² Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."

Matt was lying on the floor of my study the day before he left and I read him that Luke passage.  Then I told him the rich young ruler story.  But I stopped at vs.  27, where Jesus says it is impossible to do eternal things without God, but with God all things are possible.  Matt took my Bible from me and read verses 28-30:

28 Then Peter spoke up, “We have left everything to follow you!”

29 “Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel 30 will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.

"Those are my motivational verses," he said. 

We are not looking back.  We are not sad.  We are ready for his adventure to begin.   Matt is so ready to go.  He is all in.

As I watch what God is doing in my son, I know He is beginning something in me.  He is teaching me how to live the next part of my adventure, which includes two other sons who are having adventures of their own.  There will be more giving up, letting go, stepping out.  There will be more change, every one a challenge to trust and follow into the future God has for all of us, a future we can never dare to ask or imagine.  I could beg to stay right here, but I would miss it all.  

Thank you, Matt, for blazing a trail of faith.  As you follow Jesus into your adventure, I am coming right behind.

Follow Matt on his big adventure and read his story about how it began.  And pray for us!

The Resistance

There is rebellion afoot,
a Resistance
to our gunning engines,
ticking clocks,
our lists, alarms, appointments. 

The green forces -
lemon balm, mint, basil,
the pepper and tomato,
Virginia creeper -
whisper, "Look! I grew
while you were not looking!"

Our children grew, too -
one, four, twelve -
chubby foot soldiers with crayon banners
shouting "Look what I made you!"
while you were making lists.

The campaign of birds
sing, "It is good
to sit for hours on a branch
and glory in the golden morning!"

Every leaf, blade, 
every drop of rain
join forces
in nonviolent protest
against Hurry. 

We are surrounded.
Surrender.