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<p>I have learned in so many ways just not to care; to turn off the emotion out of helpless frustration to disengage for the sake of my own sanity. I know the end of the story. I know things get real bad before they get better. Evil seems to win for a time, and then…</p>
<p>We stood in the garage of one neighbor’s house at 5:50 this morning and watched the other neighbor’s house burn down. The family – two parents, three kids, and one very traumatized beagle – stood lined up across the front of the garage peering through the rain, watching as all their accumulated earthly wealth burned. It gave new meaning to the scriptures. It all burns. These are the castles we build while we’re here. These are the efforts that drive our days and haunt our nights. This. This, that smolders even now hours later as we look out the windows from our comfortable home across the street and think about having no silverware. No shoes. No keys to start the car with. No charger for our phones. It all seems so important, so vital to our existence. And you know what… it is. For now. But this is not our home.</p>
<p>My husband is the only person I know who uses a lint roller on the insides of his pockets. I caught him doing it this morning. It just troubles him to have all that build-up in there. He asked me with his face wrinkled in disgust, “What is it? And where does it come from?”</p>
<p>Nothing, absolutely nothing, enters our lives without the express permission of God for the purpose of making us more like His son. That is a gift worth appreciating.</p>
<p>As I’ve watched my son struggle with how to respond to recent painful experiences and wondered how this will affect his walk with Christ, I’ve had an uncanny experience. I can’t pray for him. It isn’t that I can’t think of words to say, requests to make, hopes to lift up, but rather, when I pray it’s as if I’m in a Teflon pot with the lid on. I know you all have heard the expression that your prayers are bouncing off the ceiling. This is not that.</p>
<p>There is a saying that we find grace to be unfair until we are the ones who need it. In learning to offer forgiveness we must first remember that our own betrayal has been forgiven. On either side of the coin that is forgiveness – offering it or receiving it – is simply God inviting us to experience Him more fully.</p>
<p>Have you ever been forgiven? Like, you absolutely knew that you were gum on the bottom of God’s shoe and someone dismissed your sin with a wave of their hand? There are no words to describe that. The sudden lightness. The healing. The restoration. The humility.</p>
<p>I won’t begin to pretend that I like it when I get…feedback. Who does? It means we’ve been caught red-handed and we have to account for something inexplicable and stupid, some complete lack of judgment or flat out self-justified rebellion. And we have to make corrections. Sigh.</p>
<p>Love and wrath. You can’t understand the one while being blind to the other. You can’t fully know how much God loves you except from under the weight of a well-deserved but stayed execution.</p>
<p>I write from the edge of my pit, not from successful experience, and yet...I am battling back with the truth.</p>