Regina 
The light is pouring in the front window bathing the floor in its golden hues. Beauty. There is this thin flimsy spider web of yesterday floating about in the breeze and a few birds still singing their song. And every life sings a different song too, all of them with the good potential to be just as beautiful and altogether unique. Sometimes people hit notes that sound different than our own song and we can dislike them for it; we can judge them for it and disdain each other, or we can learn to love the harmony. The brilliant blend of lives hitting different notes is what makes the Body of Christ sing the Gospel song so clearly. The whole earth is full of His glory, and we can get to declare it?! What pure grace. What joy is mine!
If I were to use three words to describe my song they might be… Bold, Beauty, Bow. Are those strange words, perhaps (warm smile)? Bold… I am always going to be a truth sharer. The breathing Word of God, that is life to me, and forever I seek to share Him. Beauty… I color life pretty, every square inch of it… even when the day is a miserable gray and it’s muddy and there’s really nothing redeemable about it, I will paint it as glorious. There’s glory in the face of rain too. If it is, I will seek to find its beauty. BOW, because I desire humility. I am not humble (who is?), but I desire Christ and He is the perfect expression, the essence of it, so I BOW to receive humility from Him.
Today I want to BOW.
It can be hard to know someone through a blog or facebook or social media outlets whatever the sort. There are all sorts of angles that you cannot see screen to screen that would become visible were we face to face. My favorite thing is eye to eye sharing life, testimony to beautiful testimony, extolling Christ together. So many things get in the way: schedules, agendas, expectations, sin, general differences, on and on.
Really, it’s just this fallen broken state we’re in that presses against what in Christ our hearts most want…communion.
As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight.
Psalm 16:3
You don’t see my tear-soaked pillow mourning death. You can’t hug me, and I can’t hug you. You can’t see me lose it with my kids, bend low, and tell them I am sorry in the same breath, because I love them so. You can’t fully get how much I don’t want to cook dinner sometimes (laughing smile), or maybe you can. You can’t see me repent of sin and bow my knees before God. There’s all this stuff in life the screen veils. Relationships are meant to be flesh and blood, messy life to messy life. There’s no substitute for the unedited life of a friend that you see IN REAL LIFE in the steady rhythm of everydayness. I am telling you this, because I love you. I am telling you this because never in a million trillion years would I want you to think I’ve got life sorted. No…
The only thing remotely sorted in my life is that faith in Christ is the singular way you & I are going to make it.
I am thankful for YOU, even if I don’t know you by name. You have been prayed for in some measure, loved, and appreciated deeply. Here you are reading my inherently fallible words but by some miracle of God possibly, maybe, prayerfully graced through them? I do not underestimate the potential to speak and minister life and grace and truth to one another through these social media venues, but I don’t want them to replace the face to face, life to life, heart to heart experience of communion. We are hungry for it; we are looking for it. We don’t realize how happy are hearts can be in each other, when our hearts our satisfied and filled with Christ. That’s the end of criticism, judgment, and gossipy blows…you know the ones that hit you right in the gut and leave a mark. The end of all insecurity, immorality, insignificance is Christ, because He cares for all of us. He sees beyond the screen and carefully edits and brightens our lives. We need only to come to Him, to bare all before Him.
It seems like an utter contradiction, but I am very private person (as in, it even makes me nervous to tell you that, warm smile). I love people like crazy, but the deeply personal I keep between the Lord, my husband, and the closest of my friends. The Lord stretches me here in this space to share, and I’m thankful for the challenge. Thankful for YOU. I am this sparkly, cheery, glass always half-full girl, and truly what you see is what you get, but you can’t see all of me. And it makes my stomach kind of churn to think that you might be impressed by me at all; no Bible study teacher/writer, blogger, or public-type figure ought ever be exalted, only Christ, only Christ. Yet I am pretty sure we’ve all been swept away by someone else’s pretty pictures and glossy words?
The gloss is this screen that shields too much of our humanity. The words though I deeply pray are words of grace and refreshment to you…
The fact that we can give grace to each other astounds to me, but behind this screen is not a perfect life nor do I desire to suggest such. Behind the screen, there’s me. Raw me. Seeking after God, repenting, growing, changing, struggling with hard and fragile stuff of life. You know that right? I know you do, but I wanted to tell you again, especially you faithful readers who send so much undeserved encouragement my way. We’re all in this together… Wishing we didn’t ever yell at the kids, get mad at the husband…wishing we could fold all the laundry (just once, right?), get the house clean and it stay that way (somebody help me!)…. Yeah, I am here too, in the real thick of it, AND there’s BEAUTY here in this life. So let’s highlight it, let’s highlight His grace, freeze frame and actually remember the goodness of God. Yes, I believe I will see His goodness while I am in the land of the living and to all who would hear me, I declare, our God is GREAT! Oh magnify the Lord with me, let us exalt HIS name together, because…