forgetting who He is September 5, 2010

every morning i eat breakfast. i don’t start the day without it. i can’t function – i tire out and get hungry mid-morning if i don’t eat when i first get up. i also shower every day. i didn’t used to (ask megh. or lindsay. we all pretty much found showering overrated. but now when i get home from spending an entire day with teenagers i just feel nasty and sweaty – not just because they’re nasty and sweaty, thats part of it, but also because standing up and walking around and talking all day makes you sweaty and nasty. not to mention i somehow manage to get chalk all. over. me. you’d think that would change when i started using dry erase markers. nope. i had it on my nose the other day. a student had to tell me. i told him that how you can tell how rigorous the class was going to be for the day. if he comes in and i have marker on my nose, he better get ready. it’s going to be a rough day.), but now i find that i have to either take one in the morning to wake me up or at night so i can sleep better. i talk to my husband every day. i sleep every day. i drink water every day. i try to make it a priority to exercise a few times a week.

all these things in my life are non-negotiables.

i was talking to my friend cherrie the other night and telling her how i’d been so swamped with lesson planning, and TFA, and credentialing classes that i haven’t had a lot of time to spend with Jesus. that sometime i’ll go days at a time without hardly talking to him. she said she’d been having the same problem, and then she told one of her friends at home about it. her friend replied:

“i dont know what made you think that jesus is something you work into your schedule. He is what you work everything else around. just like you shower and you eat and you sleep everything, you spend time with him. because the truth is, you need him even more than you need to shower or eat or sleep.”

i’ve thought about that a lot since friday night, and then, today at church, i realized again why it’s so important to abide in Him daily.

today the message was on God’s justice, and how justice belongs to Him, not us, and that is why we are free to love our enemies. we can love our enemies because God will avenge them rightly – He knows the best way to do that, not us. we are called only to love. in the service, the pastor referred to the passage where Jesus flips over the tables at the temple when people were using it as a place to steal other’s money rather than a place to worship the Lord. He gets angry, he reacts to the evil he sees, he imposes his justice. he is not meek, he does not let evil go unpunished.

and the whole time i was listening to that i was thinking “oh my gosh Jesus was so awesome – look how powerful and courageous he was. and look how much he cares about his people and how much he cares that they are treated fairly. look how much he despises evil and how willing he is to risk his own reputation to restrain evil.” i was thinking all of these things as if it were the first time i’d heard them. and then, i realized. when i don’t spend time with him daily, i begin to forget who he really is.

i forget what he’s done for me. i forget that he has saved me. i forget how great the debt he paid for me. i forget how magnificent his love. i forget how strong he is, how powerful he is- i forget aspects of his personality.

and that affects everything in my life. when i forget that he is God, it makes me think that i have control over my life. when i forget that He saved me, it makes me think i have the right to judge others. when i forget all the he forgave me, it makes me think i have a right to withhold my forgiveness from others. when i forget that he conquered sin and death, it makes me live like there is no hope, no escape from the sin that is innate – it makes me feel like i can never win.

and it blows my mind that we could ever forget these things. how can we forget the One who SAVED us?

when we don’t spend time with him daily – when we don’t just sit in his presence, when we don’t meditate on his word, when we don’t spend time in worship – we lose sight of the magnitude of what He has done for us, of who He is.

we can’t afford to live like that – forgetting who He is. spending time with him daily should be a non-negotiable, something that is essential to our ability to live.

i’m making this a priority. over TFA, over my classes, over my lesson plans, over my exercise, even over my kids and my marriage. because nothing else can be right in my life if my relationship with Him is not.

and i can’t even imagine how different our lives would like – how different MY life would look – if i lived every minute in the true understanding of who He is and who i am in relationship to Him.

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