Diary of an Underachieving Churchgirl

"The LORD's instruction is perfect, reviving one's very being. The LORD's laws are faithful, making naïve people wise. The LORD's regulations are right, gladdening the heart. The LORD's commands are pure, giving light to the eyes. Honoring the LORD is correct, lasting forever. The LORD's judgements are true. All of these are righteous! They are more desirable than gold-- than tons of pure gold! They are sweeter than honey-- even dripping off the honeycomb! No doubt about it: Your servant is enlightened by them; There is great reward in keeping them." Psalm 19:7-11 When we worship God, do we include God's instruction, His laws, His regulations, and His commands on our list of things we praise and honor Him for? What about His judgements? Do we love them like great treasures of gold or like honey dripping from the comb? When we open up the scriptures, do we rejoice to discover we will read Deuteronomy, where thousan...

Isolation sets in fast. The former Sunday morning habit now feels like gearing up for a job interview. There is nothing to wear. Do I have to put on makeup? It's exhausting. But the call of corporate worship beckons like a distant angels' song. I long to grasp my fellow Christian's hand as we join with billions around the world in prayer, to sing alongside brothers and sisters in joyful worship, to laugh together at the teacher's jokes while he opens up the Word of God and fills us with our daily bread, to sit together in happy fellowship with our Lord, our Friend, Jesus, there with us, in our very midst. What has brought me to this place of longing is a forsaking. In truth, I was not loved, I was not cared for, I was not shepherded in my former church, as I had thought I was. My pastor and his elders turned from the truth and together, with help from others sneaking down the shadowy path of alternative theology, chose to form a new gospel. I wasn't the only o...

I made a point of seeing the movie 13 Hours this week, because I want to encourage Hollywood to fill our theaters with great films that honor real heroes, and because spending $8.50 on a ticket to this movie was my own small way of telling those guys “thank you” for their fight on that September night three years ago in a city until now none of us had heard of, in a country few of us ever thought about. If you haven’t made a point of seeing this film, you should. It gives the account of a handful of American soldiers, holding their ground against innumerable enemy attackers, wave after wave of them, for 13 hours in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. This is how it is now. It’s a handful of us, it seems, unequipped, unprepared, and unsupported, against a horde of hate-filled extremists, ready to kill and willing to die, who won’t just go away, who won’t just stop, who won’t “see the light,” no matter how much we pray for our enemies.   The world is ...

In my town's local newspaper, a Sunday columnist named Katie Coombs recently published a lovely letter written to her children. In it, she addressed the recent conversation about removing the Confederate flag from government buildings, as well as the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage in June. It really was a very nice letter, and Mrs. Coombs, I am sure, is a very nice woman. But it troubled me. Here are my thoughts: I enjoyed reading Katie Coombs’ letter to her children published in the Reno Gazette Journal on Sunday, July 5th, 2015, but I found her point of view to be quite secular, leaving out a large segment of the American population:   namely, Christians. Mrs. Coombs’ letter is an example of the kind of rejection, misunderstanding, intolerance, and thinly-veiled contempt the Christian people of this nation face on a daily basis now, even from very nice people. In spite of what you may have heard, Christian people know beyond a shadow of a doubt...

I walk around my house with my hand over my heart. How is it that You have changed my very heart? Not my circumstances. I wept alone in the kitchen yesterday for the hurts that hurt so deeply, the piercing wounds caused by too many days saying too many unkind things. I felt reduced. Reduced to a lonely child with her head on her knees in a corner, crying for someone to love her. Someone to nurture her. Someone to lift up her head and say “I’m here for you, always.” Many years of marriage sometimes reduces us to children. And I just let God have it right there in the kitchen as I chopped up onions and carrots and bell pepper and celery and potato, huge wet glops of tears falling on the kitchen floor when I scooped to pick up a stray vegetable peeling, as I angrily scrubbed pots and dishes in the hot soapy sink, hot wet ugly tears, the sleeve of my t-shirt drenched with snot: I got honest, I got down and dirty with God with all the hurt, all the rage, all the pain, t...

Dysfunction. It runs through every human endeavor. Whether it be dysfunction among friends beginning with unresolved hurt, or dysfunction within families stemming from addiction or abuse… There’s dysfunction in our government, in our churches, dysfunction in our school board meetings, dysfunction in the check-out line at Walmart, dysfunction between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, and especially dysfunction in our own relationships with our selves, and with God, our Father. We are a disabled people, incapable of functioning in a healthy, thriving way with each other, with ourselves, and with our Maker. The schisms and inaccuracies and false doctrines and bad advice and lack of understanding and prejudices and beliefs and over and over again wounds run deep. We are like a deaf man, straining to hear the truth with his ears. We are blind, groping about in the dark to find each other and the flourishing in relationship we long for, only to fall flat on our faces. He...