Nakedness

At my 16^th birthday party one of my very good friends and mentors blessed me with a devotional book entitled “My Utmost for His Highest,” written by Oswald Chambers (The Updated Edition). Now I have not exactly been faithful to reading this devotional, but every now and again I feel the need to reconnect with God so I pick it back up and turn to the current date.

My mother and I were reading, “My Utmost for His Highest,” devotion at the beginning of our “Porch Time.” On July 22 we read a devotional on Sanctification. Chambers asked “Am I willing and determined to hand over my simple naked self to God?”

That question suddenly became pertinent to me today as I sat on my porch alone and picked up a book, “Freedom from Fear, Overcoming Worry and Anxiety,” by Neil T. Anderson and Rich Miller. I turned the book open to the Foreword (Just started the book today J) and was struck immediately by the magnitude of how it began.

“But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ He answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’” (Genesis 3:9-10 NIV)

Since the beginning of human sin we have been ashamed of our nakedness. We’ve been afraid that God would see us and our sin and hate us. We are scared of what it means to be naked in front of God. He’ll see it all, the burns and scars, wrinkles and age spots, and we’re afraid that He won’t see any good in us because when we are naked we can’t see the good. We so easily forget that God made us naked, already seeing everything we have to offer.

So we clothe ourselves, we hide from God (which is impossible to say the least). When we’re finally ready to let God into our lives, when the good news finally clicks and the enormity of being saved hits us, when it should be so easy to say “God, Here I Am! I’m a sinner, fix me!” the enormity of our sin also hits us, and it hurts, and we know that for God to “fix me,” it will hurt even more. So we let God come in and fix us a little, we give up some, but we are still scared for Him to venture further into our hearts and see what we know is there.

My mother explained it two ways to me.

Our hearts are like houses, and we allow God to fix up the front room so that He can come in and visit in the pretty, so that we can invite others into the clean, but we stop Him, as well as others from coming in farther than that, because we don’t want the worst seen. So when someone needs something to drink we run back to the kitchen and clean up a glass real quick to bring it back without anyone seeing the mess we’ve made. We’re so afraid of letting God open doors in our hearts and cleaning it all out. But my mother also said this, “When God’s reaching under a bed and pulling stuff out, it’ll hurt and you’ll be scared but He might just pull out a teddy bear, and you will have been afraid for nothing. But maybe He does pull out something bad, like that moldy, rotten, stinky, 3 month old pizza that you forgot about. It’s still going to hurt and you’ll still be scared, but if you don’t let Him pull it from under the bed and throw its nastiness away, it’ll just get moldier and more rotten; it’ll just smell worse with all the time you invest in hiding it. Think of how much better you’ll feel, how much prettier the room will be with it gone.”

Analogy numero dos; we are flowering plants. “How do think plants feel when we prune them Amanda? It can’t feel good. But look at how much prettier the plant is, a new bud grows in after the dead one is gone.” It’s the same way with us, God prunes us, He cuts away the dead parts, the ugly parts, the parts we don’t want to show people anyway, and then something prettier grows back.”

It’s humbling to see all of the dead, the moldy and rotten on yourself; it’s humbling to go to God with nothing but our nakedness, just ourselves.

“Am I willing to reduce myself down to simply “me”? Am I determined enough to strip myself of all that my friends think of me, and all that I think of myself? Am I willing and determined to hand over my simple naked self to God?” That is what Oswald Chambers says we must ask ourselves. He goes on to say that “Once I am, He (God) will immediately sanctify me completely.”

When Adam and Eve came to God in their nakedness, do you remember what He did? “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” (Genesis 3:21 NIV)

~Amanda~

Cruelty

     This is a word that should have never needed to exist.  There should never have been, not even one time in the entirety of history, a need for the word cruel, or vindictive, or brutal, nasty, pitiless, hurtful, atrocious, wicked, evil, unkind, mean, spiteful, vile, malicious.  No person should have had to go through something that would merit the invention of these words to describe someone else. But it happened.  Look at how many, and there are more.   Do you realize what those words existing mean?  It means that one action can have you labeled, one, one action that you may not even think of.

      What gives us the right to be cruel?  What gives us the right to practise cruelty?  I ask this because dear friends of mine have been hurt, and I don’t know how it happened, or what happened, or what was said, but I do know that there was pain involved.  And at first I didn’t think of it, but now I realize…for those friends to feel the pain they felt, they had to have experienced some type of cruelty.

      What makes us, anyone, so wonderful that they have the right to degrade someone?  What?  Race?  Color?  Nationality?  Religion?  WHAT!?!  Daily people kill themselves because someone, or people are so cruel to them that they feel that everyone in this world must feel the same way.  Daily people turn to vises to deal with the cruelty they suffer.  Why should they have to? 

     Growing up I have heard that people, more specifically kids, are cruel.  I was one of the ones made fun of in elementary school–luckily I am one of the strong ones that can learn from it, and choose, now, to ignore it.  But what kind of excuse is that to a child facing Hell on Earth?  “Oh, you might as well get used to it, People ARE Cruel…”

    Even I can be cruel, we all can be, we all have been.  Isn’t that horrible, isn’t it horrible that I can look at myself and see that black mark?  How about you, really look pass your own fictitious purity and perfection and see where you have caused pain.  Maybe you haven’t, maybe you are really one of those people that despite everything, despite anger and jealousy, and annoyance and can honestly look at someone and not treat them unkindly.  Bless you if you are.  But if you have even said one unkind word, reflect on that.  Maybe you ruined someones day. Maybe you added to the pain of a lost soul.  Maybe you are the last straw before the drugs, the alcohol, the sex, or suicide invade someones life. 

    One cruel, one malicious, one unkind word is all it takes to break a person; to take the innocence from a child, to harm a pure soul.  Do you want to be the one to say that word?  Have you been the one to say that word?

     There are many words synonomus to cruelty, and thus many words to describe cruel people.  You and I have the choice to adopt one of these adjectives, or to take a word that means kind.  Choose.

~Amanda~