Roses of Grace

Jesus once described sin as an illness: "And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”" (Luke 5:31-32)  Sin is an illness that pervades every aspect of our being. Our actions, yes, but also our viewpoints, our emotions, and even our physical health. After all, death didn't enter the world until after the Fall.  And what do you do when you're sick? You go to the doctor—Jesus, in this illustration—and he gives you something to fix it.  Usually, that's medicine. Something to take that'll make you get better.  Here's a question: what do you do to get that medicine?  You ask.  Though, the medicine does need to be paid for. You can't just expect the doctor to give it away free.    Better illustration: Imagine a father caring for a sick child. The boy is so weak that he can hardly get out of bed. This is a struggle this boy has dealt wit...

My Bible reading plan has me in the middle of Leviticus at the moment. Leviticus is the stereotypical "difficult" book of the Bible—it's where God describes all the laws that the Israelites are to follow, and the process for atoning for sin.  Leviticus also deals with the laws of cleanliness. Cleanliness is important to God, and many of the laws show that. Touching dead bodies makes you unclean, disease makes you unclean, and certain animals are unclean, and if you're unclean then whoever you touch becomes unclean too.  It does seem difficult to study these laws, but they actually show us a whole lot about the mercy and grace of Jesus Christ—and about his power.    "If a woman has a discharge of blood for many days ... all the days of the discharge, she shall continue in uncleanness." (Leviticus 15:25)  This verse isn't one that you find on greeting cards. Framed against the sunset, perhaps with the silhouette of a couple with raised hands on the beach—i...

When I look at the wonderful ladies in my church, I am struck by how amazing they are.  Always offering a kind word to someone who needs it. Working hard to provide for college lunches. Ministering faithfully to the youth. Submitting cheerfully to their husbands, and loving them with a selfless love that's hard for me to imagine.  And when I look at the men, I see the same thing. They live moral, upright lives, and they work to minister to those around them. They love their wives and children. They speak patiently, and their speech is always graceful, seasoned with salt.  In short, these brothers and sisters don't seem to mess up as often as me.  I know that's not true. I don't expect them to be perfect, because I know that the Bible says "none is righteous, no, not one." (Romans 3:10) I'm not putting them on a pedestal of idolatry, and I know that only Jesus lived a sinless life.  Still. They're doing the commandments of the Lord way better than I a...

Where is the Lord leading you? If you were to ask me that question, I'd have two answers: first, "I have no earthly clue," and second, "wherever he chooses."  Discerning God's will for our lives isn't easy. A lot of the time, it can feel impossible—how am I supposed to know the mind of God, after all? No man can do that.  But when we're at a crossroads, there are some things we do know. We know that God is powerful, that we are helpless, and that God works for the benefit of his children.    "He's got the whole world in his hands," goes the popular Sunday School song.  It's true. The Earth, in all its rocky glory and splendor, is held by the hands of God. It's a big weight to hold—the circumference of the Earth is roughly 25,000 miles, and it weighs 6.6 x 10 21 tons. I find it difficult to wrap my mind around that measurement, but I know one thing: it's heavy .  But God's more than strong enough to carry the Earth. He...

"Maybe it's a better thing, a better thing To be more than merely innocent But to be broken, and redeemed by love." - Andrew Peterson, Don't You Want to Thank Someone For This The Japanese art of kintsugi is a way of mending broken pottery that draws attention to the cracks in the dish, often highlighting them in gold or silver.  Kintsugi pottery is beautiful. The shining lines spider through the bowl, standing out from the porcelain or clay. Many have spoken of this art as being a metaphor—how instead of hiding the cracks, the potter draws attention to them, and the bowl is made more beautiful for it.  It's easy to think of our scars as evidence that we're weak. And we are. But the conclusion we often draw is that we're worthless—and we're not .  Mistakes do not mean that we're worthless.  And highlighting the mistakes can make God's work in us more beautiful.   It's tempting to hide your failure, whenever it inevitably occurs.  Sin is ug...

Stories have been a part of my life ever since I was born.  When I was too young to read, my parents read them too me. Once they taught me how to do it myself, I began to seek out every book I could find and devour it as hungrily as a piece of candy.  I was "that kid" who brought her Kindle to class and read during breaks. I'd sit by the night-light for hours when I should have been asleep, turning pages. The stories consumed me. I'd lie awake, imagining myself in the place of the characters I'd grown to love, long into the night.  That love for stories hasn't left me. Though I've read less than usual in recent months, due to the increased responsibilities that come with growing older, I still read some. And whenever I can, I relish the opportunity.  Now that I'm older, I'm more aware of the books I read. And that awareness leads me to wonder: how do the stories I consume affect me?  I've noticed a few things about myself. One is that I look up...

When you're thinking about discerning truth from lies, you'd think the best approach would be to study truth and lies. That the more time you spend on the lies, the better equipped you'll be to catch them.  That approach has merit. If we research something that turns out to be false, we haven't wasted our time—in fact, we now know that's not true, and will be able to remember that if it ever comes up in conversation.  But while it might be valuable to study false things to learn why they're false, it also can be dangerous. Because the more we think about things of the world, the more we'll be influenced them. You become what you behold, and if you fill your mind with things not of Christ, that isn't going to help you.  In order to find truth, Christians should study the truth. Fill your mind with good and beautiful things, not lies that the world gives.  Because it's by studying the truth that we'll be able to find out the lies.    Bank tellers...

From the title of this article, you might expect me to talk about the top five things I do to make myself feel better. A hot drink. Netflix. Face masks, and not the Covid kind.  That's not what I'm going to talk about.  All those things are geared towards making you feel good. That's great—I'm not one to preach a life of asceticism and denial, and I enjoy a nice relaxing afternoon just like everyone else. But self-care isn't the point today, because it revolves around your body and your feelings, and doesn't consider the bigger picture.  If you're a Christian, you don't just have one body. You actually have two—your physical body, and the body of Christ.  You might be a finger. You might be a bone. You might be a brain cell, or a neuron, but whatever you are, you're a part of Christ's body here on earth.  And you have a few distinct responsibilities as a member of Christ's body. Primarily: take care of it, just like you would your own.    ...

I was talking with a classmate recently, and he said something that struck me. Fire needs three things in order to thrive: fuel, heat, and oxygen.  Coupled with James 3:6, which reads,  "And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness," I wonder what kinds of fuel, heat, and oxygen we have that keep our fiery tongues burning healthily.   Fuel Fuel for a campfire is firewood. Sometimes people use coal, but no matter what substance you use, they all have one thing in common: without the fuel, the fire can't exist.  For the fire of the tongue, fuel is a sinful heart. All our words stem from our heart. Matthew 15:18 reads, "what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person."  What we say shows us what we believe. Especially when we don't have very much control over what we're saying, and aren't trying to put on a front. So, if our heart is bad, our words will be bad—and if our heart is good, our words will reflect that. ...

  Last time, we talked about persisting in doing things that pay off . But what about things that don't?  My primary example in the article linked above was that of mountaineers climbing Everest. For them, there's an easy metric: whether or not you succeed in the climb. And with my other example, writing a book, it's even easier to track progress—just keep a spreadsheet of your word count, and then you can have pretty graphs. But what about things that are less measurable? What about things that ultimately aren't under our control?  There are some areas in my life that are a constant struggle for me, and that I need to persist in. One main one involves praying for people. It's hard to pray if you don't see any fruit, especially over longer periods of time. Often, I'm tempted to wonder if it does any good at all. If it isn't in God's plan, it's not going to happen—no matter how long I pray. And it feels like a waste of years and years of whispere...

According to a Google search I did today, it takes over 40,000 steps to climb Mount Everest.  That's a lot of steps. If you can manage 10,000 a day, you're doing pretty well—odds are you're a decently healthy person. But four times that?  I'm no mountaineer, but I'd bet that the people who attempt Everest's summit don't show up when it's time to climb expecting to walk 40,000 steps in one day. It takes a while to reach the top, time enough so that the climbers don't slip and fall to their deaths on the treacherous hike.  Similarly, they don't show up unprepared. Climbing a mountain of that difficulty isn't an easy endeavor, and the climbers know that; most practice and prepare for years in advance. For them, Everest is the summit in more ways then one—it's the culmination of all their hard work and training.  And all that hard work started when they decided to take a small step in the mountain's direction.  We have this idea of a vict...

I've noticed that I don't think about how healthy I am until I stop being healthy—I only think about wellness if I'm sick. Which gets annoying, because then I'm hardly ever grateful for the blessing of health that God has given me.  It also has the side effect of making me never think about how healthy I'm behaving. Which is also a problem, because then I don't eat good things or get enough sleep or exercise, and then I start to feel pretty miserable.  I wonder if we do the same things with our spiritual lives as well. Do we try to keep our souls in shape? What does that even look like?  Staying spiritually healthy is equally as important as staying physically healthy, and it's a responsibility that we often overlook.    Monitor your diet I'm sure we're all familiar with a famous novelist's words on the subject of food: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a man eats exclusively Kraft macaroni and honeybuns, and drinks only Red Bu...

"It takes a soldier who knows his orders / to walk the walk I'm supposed to walk."  - Fix My Eyes by For King and Country   Right now, we are at war.  Yeah, you probably don't see troops marching in the streets at the moment, and your house probably isn't being bombed—most of us aren't dealing with that situation at the moment, and we can be grateful for that while praying for those who are. But that's not the kind of warfare I'm talking about.  No, I mean the kind that Paul wrote of when he said, "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." (Ephesians 6:12.)  We're at war with the devil, and if we're abiding in him, we're soldiers for Christ. I mean that in the most literal sense possible. I am a soldier—a girl who's taken an oath to defend Christ's cause,...