I am a singer, songwriter, wife, mother, Jesus follower. I send out a 2-minute read every Tuesday about Jesus and life in God.
The Checklist
|
Hi Friends, I wrote these words several years ago, and my heart is circling back to them today. I wanted to share them here. In bold below is a chorus I sang about this, and below that are a few thoughts. I can see the fire in Your eyes I have this problem. And since misery loves company, I am lumping you all together and sticking you squarely in the same boat with me. Here’s our problem: we have an inner-Pharisee. It’s unsettling to me that I could stare at Scripture for years on end, memorize it, know it, sing it, and the Lord could say my heart is far from His. The Pharisees spent their days memorizing the law. Their mouths said, “yes, yes” to the words, and their hands moved quickly to comply. Tithes from the mint, check. Tithes from the dill, check. Don’t miss a spice, don’t want to steal. Pray, check. Did it loudly. Be a good example for people watching, check. Don’t want the people to get sloppy in obedience. I imagine that the Pharisees began with sincerity. I imagine they started with the desire to be pleasing and do what’s right. Maybe I imagine this because when my inner-Pharisee has taken center-stage, I usually started with good intentions. So how then did I get here? For me, I think it starts with the search for a check-list. How many times have I felt stuck, unsure which direction to go, and I throw up my hands to the sky and say, “just tell me what to do and I’ll do it!” This is not the plea of someone looking mostly for connection. This is the plea of someone looking mostly for answers. And so the check-list search begins. Do this, do this, do this. Got it. Check, check, check, and I’m on my Pharisee way. But there’s nothing pleasing to God about the Pharisee way. And when I wake up enough to evaluate my heart, there’s nothing pleasurable about it for me either. I want to come to the Scripture not looking for a check-list, but looking for His eyes behind the lines. I want to search these Words, listening intently for the inflection in His voice. I want my hands to be quick to comply. And I want my heart to be talking with Him, interacting, alive, all the while. That every act and intent to obey would come from real relationship with Him. There’s a Man behind these pages. He is where the search begins. — Anna |
Anna Blanc
I am a singer, songwriter, wife, mother, Jesus follower. I send out a 2-minute read every Tuesday about Jesus and life in God.
Hi Friends, Last week we talked about finding every last bit of our ordinary lives in the grand storyline of God. This week, let’s look at how we help one another do just that. When Eugene Peterson counseled pastors on how to help their parishioners find themselves in God’s story, he said, “Listening is the first step. It is the precondition for… making the transition from what a person perceives as alienation and experiences as a jumble of unrelated irrelevancies to a sense of coherence and...
Hi Friends, Sometimes we do this thing when we read the stories of people in the Bible. We wake up early to read Scripture, and we see the epic work of God in and through the lives of men and women. Then we put down the book and head to the kitchen to clean up the sea of Crispix a sleepy kid spilled across the floor. Back to normal life. But I want to alert you to something real happening in your life. As real as the cereal you crushed under foot and now have to find the hand broom to sweep...
Hi Friends, It’s been a healing Advent season for me, looking into the birth of Christ with the unique lens of Him lifting off spiritual anxiety. I have loved hearing about some of your stories and the unique ways the Lord is meeting you and bringing you healing as well. This is the last letter in this Advent series, and the message is this: You don’t have to move on from the manger just yet. God lived among us — a newborn baby, a child, a young man simply working with his hands, studying,...