This morning, I decided it’s time to write a blog post because I am DUE, but I didn’t feel the way I usually do when I write a blog post – which is that I have something to say…..I simply didn’t! So I spent the 20 minutes I had in the car driving (good think time for me), to see where my mind was leading me for today’s post.

Just two days ago, on the very first day of the new year, I had snapped two photos that I thought I might use for this blog post, even though I had no idea what the post would be about, as I said. So that was my starting point as I let my mind wander while driving, hoping to pinpoint why exactly I took those photos – where I was going with it. The two photos are below. One shows a beautifully decorated gingerbread tree that my kids had made the week before Christmas, now in the trash, and the other photo is of our once-decorated and lit tree that was subsequently bare and dry on the curb for the garbage men to take.

So I started pondering….what bigger idea was in my subconscious here, that led me to document this moment? Because I can tell you, I hadn’t given much thought as to why I was pulling out my phone to capture the scene, nor was I even feeling emotional or deep at the time. And even that statement alone is deep! Bear with me……

As I began thinking about it, I realized I had been documenting the strange existence of the passing of time, and how fleeting our emotions and our days are. Looking ahead to this moment a month ago would have been heart-wrenching! I would have gasped at this photo and wondered if the girl on the other side of that camera is okay?! Because my present self taking that photo knew how much my past self was looking forward to Christmas, and all that comes with the holiday season. I love it! I love….buying gifts for people I cherish, all the songs and decor, the daily advent devotionals and advent rituals we have created as a family, and anticipating several days on end spent entirely with my immediate and extended family on both sides. And this Christmas, even with the high expectations I always place on it, did deliver! It was a wonderful Christmas.

But why I took a photo of the aftermath was, I came to realize, because I was FINE, I was mentally and emotionally content and still joyful taking it all down and moving onto the next season of life. The subconscious reel that was playing in my mind when I took the pics was this reminder that in every season of life, there can be joy. And this reminder that for there TO be joy, we have to have our hearts in the right place chasing after the right things, or else we WILL be let down when the anticipated excitement ends. We have to be grounded in what each and every day holds and what we need to be prioritizing, and not let ourselves live beyond the moment.

And in the same vein, this also serves as a reminder that just as it can be hard when good things come to an end, it’s also hard / even harder when bad things come…yet even then, God is with us and gives us what we need at each and every turn our life takes. I read a quote recently: “God didn’t remove the Red Sea. He parted it.” I was being dramatic when I called it “heart-wrenching” for Christmas to be over, because in fact, we DO experience these ACTUALLY heart-wrenching moments in our lives. There are people of faith around me who are living absolute nightmares. And just like I was documenting this fast-forward moment of the fun being over, I can recall the times I thought to myself: “Wow, if I had known this moment was coming, I wouldn’t have even been able to get out of bed in the days leading up to this.” It is a gift not to know what lies ahead. It is a gift to have to rely on God each and every day to give us what we need, to rely on God to give us what HE KNOWS we need. It is a gift to not be the one in control. To take control is to hand back this gift to God and say “no thank you,” which leads to striving and striving and ultimately failing.

So what broader theme or challenge am I being led to, I asked myself, as I neared the end of my drive and the beginning of my time to write? Being present. Surrendering control to the One who actually has it, the One who created it. God created control, and He created it for Him to have, not for us to have. I looked up synonyms of “control” to fact check myself, and I stand by what I said as I read the list of synonyms: jurisdiction, power, authority, command, dominance, mastery, leadership, sovereignty, supremacy. All of these things belong to God and if we say or act otherwise, we will fall, we will fail, we will be continually chasing after something we can’t get ahold of or conquer.

Maybe you never thought of this idea of being present and in the moment as an act of worship, an act of acknowledging the Lord reigns supreme. And that can be true in that I know several people who aim to achieve inner peace and presence of mind who do not declare Lord as He who reigns. However, I don’t believe true and utmost inner peace and presence of mind can exist apart from this notion that God is in control and that it is in our best interest to seek His will for our life with this awareness that He created us, and He knows us and our life path best. That is the belief I am operating from within this blog post.

Being present and experiencing inner joy – is that not the challenge of the day, the week, the month, the year, the decade, the century, scratch that, throughout all of time? Being present is as ever-present and as absolute of a struggle as God himself since the moment humanity fell! The moment Adam and Eve ate the fruit – oh, how we want to take control and not rest in the moment God created for us with the knowledge He has given us in that moment and in that moment alone! We tend to get ahead of the moment, and it’s often only subtle ways we get ahead of ourselves, but think of two parallel lines and how doomed the whole setup is if one line gets off by just a hair.

A.W. Tozer writes this:

“If you forget that God is and think of man just as being here, somehow, without any thought of his origin, then you have at least a dozen major problems on your hands. And the attempt to solve one upsets another. If you try to solve a social problem, you get yourself into a political problem and political problem upsets a labor problem, and labor problem creates an industrial problem. And so we go on mixing ourselves up because we’re thinking of ourselves apart from out origin. If we realize that God made us and made us in His image, and that our first responsibility is to Him. Then, if we went on through the truth revealed to us and settled that responsibility or met it, we’d settle our theological problems and automatically, the other problems fall into place. It wouldn’t mean there wouldn’t be something to do, but it would mean that we had hold of the heart of it and that we could solve it without disrupting something else.”

What came to mind next for me was a sermon from this past summer, given by Northway Dormont’s Paul Hunter entitled “Faith Beyond the Fence,” in which he spoke about this idea that we get ourselves in trouble when we straddle the fence between what God says and what the world says, and often times, it’s not even a drastic or conscious tension between the two, but it’s where the devil wants us to be to begin doing damage. He said “No family wakes up and says, ‘you know, I just think I want to go from good to bad to just plain worse today.’” His sermon was based on Joshua 24: 14-15, which was a “valiant and definitive challenge to the Jewish people”:

14 “Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. 15 And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

He essentially says, pick a side. “Joshua realizes he’s kind of got to outline for them what it is that they’re actually supposed to be striving for. What is it that the Lord wants from them in their lives if they’re ever to remain a pure and a blessed nation? Verse 14 tells them that “we are called to be completely and purely earnest in our decisions and our actions. But not just that, he says to put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the river. So he’s telling the children of Israel, hey friends, you need to fear God, you need to live earnest lives, but guys we cannot negotiate with who our one and only true and living god is. Never negotiate. He’s telling them we can’t go back to worshipping those false gods that they did all those years ago before. The people had gotten away from God and replaced the one and only true living god with fake imitations. And they had negotiated their way into bondage. Friends, we need families that will stand up in today’s culture and time, that will stand against the tug of war for our affections, and our attentions, and never negotiate on where we stand with the Lord. How does a family negotiate? We negotiate by becoming inoculated to the ways of God. And everything under the sun becomes the priority in life besides the main thing which is God’s mission for our lives. We would never negotiate for ourselves intentionally a bad business deal. Yet we often times, and most always, if we get into a battle with the devil, we will negotiate spiritually with the devil and put ourselves in a worse position than we were before.”

Hunter said his purpose in the sermon was to get us to “evaluate the choices that we’re making in light of the Bible. In light of what the Bible says to ensure that we are living in the center of God’s will and the confines of God’s will because again, most folks never intended to straddle the fence. But they’re right where the enemy wants them to be….ineffective, and torn up on the inside, and small choices had led us to a dangerous place.” If you’ve ever read C.S. Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters,” you’d know that whole book is a demonstration of the subtle ways the devil works his way into our lives to destroy.

So as we begin a new year, I challenge you to think about the ways you might be straddling the fence…..reflect on the moments where you start to feel peace exiting your body, when you start to feel your priorities shifting, what brings out the temptation to take control. God wants our full attention and our full affection, and when we have that in order, all else falls into perfect place.