Sweetly Broken

Do you ever have those moments when you say to God, “I need to meet with you tonight. I cannot leave here without experiencing you. I need to know you’re there.” I found myself in that position tonight at church. I had been going through a rough patch the past couple of days and I had brought a lot of baggage with me to service.  My spirit was heavy and I needed a good worship service desperately. While there, I was reminded of this song and scripture:

Isaiah 61:3- To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified.

At the cross You beckon me
You draw me gently to my knees, and I am
Lost for words, so lost in love, I’m
sweetly broken, wholly surrendered

It wasn’t until I allowed myself to fully worship God that I experienced the release I needed.  It was then that he gave the ”garment of praise” in place of my “spirit of heaviness.”

Is that a rooster I hear or just my dad with a cold?

 

 One of my favorite things about the holiday season is hearing the different traditions families use to celebrate Christmas. It’s amazing to hear some the stories families have regarding their holiday traditions. I think some of you might find my family’s story pretty amusing.

My immediate family came from pretty humble beginnings. I am one of five kids, three boys and two girls. When I was a child, my dad didn’t have the best paying job and my mom worked just to help pay for the kid’s tuition. Needless to say, money was a little bit tight, forcing us to make due with the bare minimum sometimes (ex: powdered milk instead of regular milk…soup and rice for dinner 4 times a week) and appreciate even the smallest things. During Christmas time the reality of money rang even more true, forcing us to compensate for what we didn’t have by using what we did. I remember waking up one Christmas morning only to find my mom’s panty hose hanging on the wall in place of the Christmas stockings. My parents couldn’t afford to get us real stockings so they used my mom’s “stockings” instead. Most people would be appalled at the sight of their mom’s stockings hanging from the wall. I would have been, but those stockings can really stretch so that meant we got a lot more stuff in them. Unfortunately, a lot of times the stuff we got wasn’t always that great. While some families help stuff stockings with fruit and nuts my family couldn’t afford those luxuries. Not wanting to leave our stockings empty, my mom and dad created a “vegetable of the year.” Imagine the look on your kids faces when they pull a potato out of their stockings on Christmas morning (that was our first vegetable of the year.) When it came time for opening presents our family savored every moment. We had a rule that everyone opened one present at a time while everyone else watched. This helped extend the experience and make up for getting less presents than normal. Other great Johnson family traditions include:

1) Choosing the sex of the Christmas tree (Is it going to be Mr or Mrs Tree this year?)

2) The name of the tree (my sister always named the tree after her current boyfriend)

3) Putting the angel on the top of the tree (dad would always hold up one of the little ones so they could do it)

4) Getting presents from “Daddy Clause.”

 5) Waking up very early in the morning to the sound of my dad crowing like a rooster to wake up the kids.

6) Going back to sleep after opening presents and eating breakfast. My mom and dad usually spent Christmas Eve night wrapping all the presents and setting up the living room. As a result, they wouldn’t get to bed until the wee hours of the morning. The kids woke up sometime between 5-7 out of anticipation for present opening which meant my mom and dad only got a couple hours of sleep.

 I wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything. This morning I was probably the only kid in the world happy to see his mom’s panty hose hanging on the wall and find a beet in his stocking.

Don’t Touch Me!

Last week I found myself in a position many college students would find themselves in at three o’clock in the morning, on my knees in front of the toilet, puking my guts out. It was an experience fairly new to me. I hadn’t been sick to the point of throwing up since I got the flu in high school and I have never partied or drank while in college. As I knelt on the cold linoleum, with my head spinning and body trembling, there must have been a hundred thoughts flying through my head . ”This is more painful than I remember.” “Is that spaghetti I taste? I ate that yesterday!” ”Is my appendix going to explode?” ”Oh, I wish mom were here.  She would know what to do.” After all, momma knows best. Three hours later, however, when I arrived home, I wasn’t greeted by mom with a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a vile containing the cure to tummy pain. I was greeted by my dad. What’s the first thing he does? He doesn’t run to the cupboard and grab a bottle of Pepto. He walks over to the side of my bed and places his hands on my head and prays for me. Now most people would squirm at the thought of this. When your sick the last thing you want is to be touched. A cold cloth. Good. Pepto. Good. Dad laying hands on me. What?

But I have to ask, why is the idea of my dad laying his hands on me and praying for me so weird, especially to a Christian like myself? Doesn’t Jesus tells us in Mark 16:18 that we would “lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” During Paul’s conversion weren’t the scales from his eyes removed through Ananias laying his hands on him and praying for him? Acts 28 tells a wonderful story of healing through Paul’s laying on of hands: 

 7)There was an estate nearby that belonged to Publius, the chief official of the island. He welcomed us to his home and for three days entertained us hospitably. 8 ) His father was sick in bed, suffering from fever and dysentery. Paul went in to see him and, after prayer, placed his hands on him and healed him. 9)When this had happened, the rest of the sick on the island came and were cured.

 The entire island was healed! How amazing! All throughout the gospels we see instances of Jesus healing people through the laying on of hands too. In Mark 5:23 a man pleads with Jesus, ”My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” Why did Jairus insist that Jesus place his hands on his daughter and pray for her? There must have been something to it. Am I saying that anytime we want to pray for someone we should put our hands on them? Of course not. Paul said in 1 Timothy 5:22 “not to be hasty in the laying on of hands.” I’m just wondering why don’t we do it more? Is it because we’re afraid? Do we not want to make people uncomfortable? Maybe we don’t truly believe in the power behind the laying on of hands. I know that if I had to choose between making someone uncomfortable for a few moments or God healing them, there would be no debate. Maybe the problem is that deep down inside I believe there is a greater chance of me making someone uncomfortable than of God healing them.

Time is going to take my mind

I’ve got more time on my hands than a worker at a mint manufacturing facility. (You see what I just did there? I just made a pun with the words time and thyme.) I have all the time in the world yet little motivation to accomplish anything.

Here’s what a typical day looks like for me:

1 pm- Wake up…I am actually being generous to myself. The past couple of days I haven’t woken up until 2.

1pm-4am- Watch tv. Stare at my computer screen blankly anticpating a post on Facebook or an email. Read ESPN. Play basketball. Play Madden. Read 3 pages in a book then play some more Madden.

4 am- Revisit the same websites I have already visited ten times today.

4:45 am- Join Alice in Wonderland.

There is this little obstacle I face called “effort”. Everyone is good at doing at least one thing effortlessly. Some people can play an instrument with hardly any effort. Others can write 10 pages and 50 emails like it’s a walk in the park. I try to find something I can do effortlessly but even that requires too much effort. As a matter of fact, these past 50 words have really winded me. I might need to take a Hot Pocket break…hmmm, directions: Open Hot Pocket package. Insert into toilet. Yum.

Unfortunately for me, sleeping is effortless. If I get much more beauty sleep, though, I’m gonna have to start modeling for Abercrombie. What I need is a good motivational tool. What does it take to get motivated? What can I do to get the ball rolling, inertia started, the chips falling? What do highly successful people like Donald Trump (ha) do? Oh what I would do for the motivation and discipline to consistently wake up every morning at 5 am instead of going to bed at 5 am.