Seven Bed Sojourners

What makes you feel like you’re home? Your bed? Your kitchen? The old, comfy recliner where you take naps and watch TV? Or is it the smell?

We’ve been thinking about all these things as we’ve been moving around all over during this transition time. What we thought was going to be a short stay at each parents’ houses before we left for India has turned into sleeping in 7 different beds in 3 months. (Talk about messing up your sleep cycle).

The word “sojourners” has been bold-printed in mind for the last few weeks. Officially, this word means “to stay or reside temporarily.” Our journey to India has led us to be sojourners in our parents’, grandparents’, and friends’ homes.

I used to think I was really resilient and not superficial at all (what a good Christian I thought I was), but God started telling me something different right before our wedding. As Grayson and I were preparing to get married and made the decision to accept monetary gifts instead of a typical place settings (etc.) as gifts, believe it or not, I definitely had one or two good cry sessions. Some girls dream about their dress or their wedding venue or the honeymoon, but I always looked forward to holding that little Target gun in my hand and shooting all the neat house items I’d want to decorate my house with! Phase 1 of God tearing down idols in my heart.

Phase 2 came as we were traveling around visiting with people. I had read in a book that when one woman traveled with her family she always had a few homey items like some pictures and some cups that they took every where they went.  When we first started out moving everywhere, I had my candle, my decorative cloth, and a picture frame that I had in mind and carried them with us and pulled them out at every new bedroom.

However, as we traveled (with all our belongings now down to one car I might add), we gradually let go of more and more things. My (once) “go-to homey items” soon got ditched, and the bondage of materialism was broken even more.

I didn’t ask God to break this sin in my life, but as I’ve been seeking Him more and asking to know Him more, He points out bondage I’m still in that is keeping me from knowing Him more fully, and in His power, He breaks strongholds in my life.

Through our transition period as sojourners, the Lord is teaching me that my home is not here; there is another kingdom I am a part of and every time I try to live more and more in and dig my roots deeper and deeper into the kingdom of this world, the farther outside His will I find myself and the harder it is to be transformed by the renewing of my mind (Romans 12:1-2).

Though you may not find yourself as stuck in wanting stuff and finding joy in the things you have, maybe you struggle with another area of world-living (instead of kingdom-living). Which kingdom does your life reflect that you’re living in?

We can sometimes tell by the way we treat “stuff” and how dependent we are on it. We can see it in the use of our time, the stewardship of our finances, the things we talk about, etc.

Life has been hard always feeling like we don’t have a place to call our own, our own kitchen to cook meals, our own comfortable bed, but God, in His graciousness, has given us endurance and strength and made this time a lot easier than it could be.

We are grateful for the lessons we have learned through it so far: that eternally, this world is not our final destination, that there is a kingdom that we can live in now, that we are just in transition, living the life He has called us to and looking forward to our BETTER and FINAL bed, kitchen, and recliner.

Let’s not forget it.

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(Disclaimer: 1. I think that receiving wedding gifts is a beautiful time of marriage and family and friends supporting the new couple. 2. Though sojourning has provided lessons learned, I’m totally pumped to have a home to ourselves where we can fully function in the life God has called us to live. So promise, there’s no doggin’ from me on people who own homes. 3. I’m not really one to say whether there’s gonna be recliners in our new heaven and new earth, but it’d be nice right?)

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What Is FAITH?

   One of the things that the Lord has been teaching me as we are preparing to leave and patiently waiting on the Lord’s provision is about Faith. Most of us say we have Faith in something but the Lord has been revealing to me a much fuller understanding of the word. Much of it was summed up in the main verse from a church service a few weeks ago.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.  

Hebrews 11:1

   As I have been meditating upon this verse it has brought together two facets of Faith. One of them is obedience to authority (most importantly Divine authority), the Lord has taught me a lot about this through John Bevere’s book, Under Cover. The other facet is God capturing our complete attention, the Lord has taught me a lot about this through A.W. Tozer’s book, The Pursuit of God. Both of these have married this passage in Hebrews.

   The first thing that He began to teach me was that obedience to authority is of utmost importance to God. Throughout the Bible the faithfulness of people hinged upon whether they were obedient to the things that God called them to, and more importantly than that is their submission to the complete authority that God has in all of our lives. The whole chapter following to the verse above talks about Men (and Women) of Faith in the Bible, and in all of them it was because of obedience to the things God had called them to not just a belief in God. In the book Bevere also talks about the blessings for being obedient and also the serious consequences for being disobedient. We live in a culture where rebellion is celebrated, almost to the point where it is just expected. We must break this rebellious spirit in us if we are going to truly say we have faith in God.

   The other part of Faith that the Lord has been teaching me about is what Tozer calls “the gaze of the soul”. He says it is very similar to the story in Numbers 21 where the Israelites, after being bitten by poisonous snakes, must look to the bronze serpent that God told Moses to make to be saved. Tozer describes faith as a turning of the eyes of our soul from focusing on ourselves to focusing on God. “Faith is the least self-regarding of the virtues. It is by its very nature scarcely conscious of its own existence. Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. While looking at God we do not see ourselves - blessed riddance.”

   Now back to the definition of faith given in Hebrews. It seems to me that this definition perfectly sums up the two parts of Faith that I have been learning:

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for - Obedience and submission are being sure that the plan God has for us is the best one and walking in obedience to that plan knowing that God will bring it to fruition. What do any of us as Christians hope for besides to please our Heavenly Father? We can be sure of fulfilling our hopes if we are obedient to Him.

..and the certainty(or conviction) of things not seen. - As we set the gaze of our souls on the invisible God we become more and more intimately acquainted with Him that is unseen and reality of the spiritual world that is going on all around us. And the more that we focus on Him the more that we begin to realize that our God is far more than an idea or concept. He is far more real than you or I or anything we could see with these physical eyes.

   I know that this is only the beginning of the Lord teaching me about Faith, but as I continue to seek to walk out this new, fuller understanding of Faith, I am sure the Lord will continue to teach me more.

I will leave you with this challenge to walk these ideas out, also from the book of Hebrews:

..let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us (OBEDIENCE),  looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith (FOCUS), who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross (OBEDIENCE),  despising the shame , and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God (FOCUS).

Hebrews 12:1-2

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