God

Dancing Beyond the Fire

by Tammy

in The God Who Sees You

When I look back over my own life, I’m astounded by the way God has used my gifts, my talents, my decisions, my life circumstances, even my mistakes to put me exactly where He wanted. . . . Your story will be different from mine—constructed by God from the raw materials of your own life and your response to God’s calling.

But you can be confident that when God looks at you,

He sees you dancing beyond your circumstances, whatever they are—

-living the life He has already prepared for you.

He will put you where you need to be … if you pay attention and obey His call.

But what if you don’t obey? What if you rebel or lose your nerve or just don’t understand what He’s trying to do?

I know there have been times in my life when I have done all three. And while I don’t understand all the ways God works, I have come to believe these things with all my heart:

Nothing can happen to us that the Father is not aware of.

Nothing can happen to us that He can’t use to further His kingdom.

We can pull away from God. We can try to hide from Him. We can even make choices that separate us from Him forever.

But none of this stops God from looking at us through the eyes of love. And none of it will delay the coming of His kingdom.

I believe that God has a plan for your life, a specific place for you in His future. But I also believe that the specific unfolding of God’s plan is fluid and subject to change. God, like a master Artist, adjusts His plan as we make our choices in life. When we smudge the painting, He works our smudge into the master design, using even our sins and our mistakes for His purposes.

If you keep your focus on God, He will put you exactly where you need to be. But even if you lose focus, if you’re disobedient and lose your way, you can turn back to Him and still trust Him to use all your pain and mistakes to put you where you need to be.

God is infinitely creative, infinitely willing to go to whatever lengths to help you dance beyond your circumstances into His future.

And He does it because of the way He sees you. Because … you’re worth it.

This to me is the heart of the gospel, the heart of what God sees in you. When the God of the universe looks at you, He sees someone who is infinitely worth all His love and time and trouble. Someone who is:

• worth trying again and again to reach.

• worth teaching, even when you’re stubborn or rebellious or don’t get it.

• worth disciplining, even when you resist.

• worth waiting faithfully for—as the Father waited for the prodigal son.

• worth seeking out—as the shepherd searched for his lost sheep.

• worth the trouble of redeeming.

• worth forgiving, again and again.

• worth dying for.

Because He really does see you—your past, your present, your possibilities. He is painfully aware of your sins and your failures but also rejoices over your hidden good deeds and your best intents. He cherishes your true self—the spark of divine in you—and delights in your human particularity. He sees you accurately, from the inside out. And you are enough for Him, just as you are.

If you have trouble believing that, look at the facts:

As the Father, He made you and adopted you into his family.

As the Son, He thought you were worth dying for.

As the Spirit, He chooses to lives within you.

As the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, He sees for you a role in His ever-unfolding story.

 

Adapted from The God Who Sees You by Tammy Maltby (with Anne Christian Buchanan). Copyright 2012 David C. Cook. Used with permission. Permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved.

 

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Releasing the life we planned to embrace the life that is waiting for us.

by Tammy

in Lifegiving Devotionals, The God Who Sees You

The Truth of Restoration

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We all want our hearts to be healed.

But once you’ve been traumatized you just can’t bear the thought that it could happen again. Everything in you tells you to hunker down, to cut your losses, to settle for a little bit of happiness. That’s when you need to act counter-intuitively, pick up your life again and move on down the road.

You need to choose the work of restoration.

There are times when I’d rather do almost anything other than the hard work of restoration and recovery. And what is that work? It’s the equivalent of ordering timber and bricks and starting to build the walls of hope again in our lives.

It means being willing to release the life we planned to embrace the life that is waiting for us.

Here are just a few things it has entailed in my life:

  • The work of hope—which means being willing to say you need restoration and actually asking for the help you need.
  • The work of waiting on the Lord—quieting down my life so I can hear…trusting his timing…staying in curiosity and out of judgment as to what God is doing.
  • The work of honesty and transparency. In the aftermath of trauma, that could mean shouting at God and telling him how you feel. It can mean refusing to put on a happy face and insisting that everything is all right. There are certainly times when you need to control your feelings for the sake of others. But your restoration absolutely depends on finding a place to confess your honest thoughts and feelings—at very least, in prayer, in a journal, or with a few friends who are close to you.
  • The work of “controlling the wild horses.” I love the way my friend Emily describes this. She’s referring to that tendency we all have, but trauma victims have more than most, to let our “vain imaginations” run away with us. If we give in just a little to fear, panic and worry, those emotions can quickly take control of our lives. So while we need to be honest with our feelings, we also need to be alert to the ways our thoughts can run away with us and learn to short-circuit the runaway thoughts. In the process, as the apostle Paul describes, we move toward being ‘transformed by the renewing of our minds.’
  • The work of obedience instead of instinct. Our instincts can serve us well in the early moments of trauma. A “fight or flight” response could actually save our lives in an accident. But as we move from survival toward restoration, our instincts can being to get in the way of what God wants to do with our lives. Your instinct may be to pull away and withdraw when you need to press in to relationships…or to hang on too tightly when you need to let people make their own mistakes. I tend to rush in to ‘fix’ things instead of waiting on God’s timing. But I’m learning obedience sometimes has to trump instinct in this too. We have to act on the light we’re given, do what we know to do. And all this takes both courage and discipline.
  • The work of forgiveness. Bill Ritter sums this up beautifully: “Sooner or later, you will have to forgive what you can’t understand. For you may never figure it out. Or even if you do, the conclusions you reach in your head may not necessarily heal what you feel in your heart. The only way out of your pain may be to start splashing forgiveness in every direction…forgiving the one who [caused the trauma]…forgiving yourself for anything you did or didn’t do, just before it happened…forgiving God for allowing it, or not stopping it…and even forgiving circumstances for being so damn hard and weighted against you.” [1]
  • The work of gratitude. This is simply looking for signs of God’s presence in our lives and resolving, by choosing to “give thanks in all things.”
  • The work of modeling faith and integrity. This does not mean faking a faith, covering up our doubts, or sacrificing our integrity to our witness. In fact, it means the exact opposite. As God walks us toward restoration, it’s good to realize that others—our children especially—are watching the way we walk, and how we live into our own restoration can have a powerful impact on their relationship to God. The more honestly and trustingly we can walk, the more integrity we manage, the more we confess our mistakes but accept forgiveness…the more others will be blessed and helped.

I cannot tell you how the work of restoration will look in your life. Or how God will grow you though your times of sorrow or loss. But I know He will…He will grow you into healing…He will grow you into wholeness…and He will use your hard work of recovery to bring forth his (amazing mighI say) grace.


Adapted from The God Who Sees You by Tammy Maltby (with Anne Christian Buchanan). Copyright 2012 David C. Cook. Used with permission. Permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved.

[1] Bill Ritter, Take the Dimness of My Soul Away: Healing After a Loved One’s Suicide (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2004), 49.

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Why We Long for God to See Us

by Tammy

in The God Who Sees You

Not long ago, I accompanied a friend to the hospital for surgery.

After she was wheeled away, I began talking with one of the nurses. Somehow the conversation came around to the nurse’s brother, who had been killed in an accident three years earlier. Like most untimely losses, the brother’s death had dramatically disrupted this woman’s family. Her mother still struggled with bitterness. Her parents’ marriage had faltered. Her baby son, born two weeks after her brother’s death, would never know his uncle.

 

Soon my new friend was pouring out her heart to me. And at some point I shared with her something I had been thinking about a lot.

“Do you understand that God sees you in all this?” I said. “He really sees—”

I hadn’t even finished the sentence before she started to weep. She cried so hard that another nurse walked over to see if she was okay. She was completely undone at the thought that God saw her pain, her fear, her broken heart. She kept saying through deep sobs, “He sees me? He really sees my reality?”

That was just one simple encounter, one more reminder that the message of the God who sees you is one that needs to be shared again and again—with those who don’t know the Lord and with those who do. There’s a reason we hunger to be recognized, acknowledged, appreciated, and cared for. There’s a reason our hide-and-seek life—yearning to be found by God, yet fearing it at the same time—leaves us feeling so bruised and unsatisfied. It’s because God has intentionally and wonderfully created us to see and be seen, to live in intimate and joyful relationship with Him and with others.

More important, He put that need in us because He wants to meet it. He’s put the longing there to draw us closer to His heart.

We hunger to be seen—because He really does see us.

The challenge is to really believe it … to live in the confidence that we are recognized and accepted and included and, most of all, loved.

Can you do that? Can I?

I’ll admit I’ve had my struggles, but I can honestly say I believe it with all my heart. Here’s why.

First, the Bible tells me so, and the Bible has proven a reliable guide in my life. The whole sweep of the Bible can be understood as the story of a God who saw His people, even when they couldn’t see Him. A God who came to earth and paid special attention to the unnoticed—the meek and the mourning, the children everyone turned away, the powerless rather than the ones on top. A God who cared so much about what He saw that He came to earth in human form, turning hide-and-seek into the ultimate show-and-tell.

But I also believe because God has shown me, again and again, in the circumstances of my life. He has shown me through the whisper of His Holy Spirit, through the timing of my experiences, through the love and example of other people and the mysterious provision of what I have needed most.

I’ve seen too much evidence not to believe God sees me. I’ve been loved too much not to make it the story of my life.

I want it to be the story of your life as well. I want it to change everything, including the way you look at God and yourself and other people. I want you to live in confidence that when God looks at you, He sees beauty. He sees value. He sees hope. And even when you’re hiding, even when you’re so beaten down you can’t see anything clearly, He’s still hard at work, crafting a beautiful future of relationship with Him and with others. . . .

That’s . . . my personal witness as someone who at times has felt forgotten, uncared for, unloved, invisible. I truly believe I have a word from God for those lonely, aching times in your life.

The message is this: Regardless of how you may feel, God does see you.

He knows your name, and He loves you—passionately and tenderly.

He sees your needs, and He yearns to fill them.

At any given moment, even when you feel most alone, He is working all things together for your good.

Adapted from The God Who Sees You by Tammy Maltby (with Anne Christian Buchanan). Copyright 2012 David C. Cook. Used with permission. Permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved.

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What God Sees in You

by admin

in The God Who Sees You, Weblogs

There’s a scene in the movie The Joy Luck Club that I have always found very moving. Based on a novel by Amy Tan, this film tells the story of four Chinese-born women and their American-born daughters.

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One of the daughters, June, has always felt she’s a disappointment to her mother, Suyuan, who suffered greatly as a young woman in China and made many sacrifices to give her daughter every advantage. June feels especially uncomfortable when compared to Waverly, the brilliant, confident, and highly successful daughter of Suyuan’s best friend.

These feelings come to a head one evening at a dinner party where Suyuan serves her famous steamed crab dish. During the dinner, Waverly openly belittles June, and Suyuan fails to come to her daughter’s defense. Later, when June and her mother are cleaning up in the kitchen, June finally blurts out her pain: “I’m just sorry that you got stuck with such a loser, that I’ve always been so disappointing…. My grades, my job. Not getting married. Everything you expected of me.”

“Not expect anything,” her mother answers. “Only hoping best for you. That’s not wrong, to hope.”

Then June’s pain just overflows. “Well, it hurts. Because every time you hoped for something I couldn’t deliver, it hurt. It hurt me, Mommy. And no matter what you hoped for, I’ll never be more than what I am. And you never see that, what I really am.”

Her mother just looks at her for a long minute, then removes a jade pendant from around her neck and hands it to her daughter. “June, since your baby time, I wear this next to my heart. Now you wear next to yours. It will help you know: I see you. I see you.”

Then she goes on to talk about the dinner they just enjoyed: “That bad crab. Only you tried to take it. Everybody else want best quality. You, you thinking different. Waverly took best-quality crab. You took worst. Because you have best-quality heart. You have style no one can teach. Must be born this way.”

She looks deep into her daughter’s eyes and repeats: “I see you.”

And by that point, any mother would be weeping, any daughter moved—because that scene so beautifully depicts the transformative power of being seen. You can see it on June’s face—the powerful internal shift as she begins to see herself and her relationships differently.

There’s something about being seen, really seen, that changes everything, because it changes the way we see ourselves—just as knowing we are seen by God makes all the difference … unless we, like June, get the wrong idea about how our heavenly Parent looks at us.

It’s so easy to do. We get mistaken ideas and feelings about what God expects of us and about the way we measure up to those expectations. And those mistaken ideas and feelings hurt us. We feel forgotten, or worthless, or like failures. We’re sure we don’t measure up, that we’re not enough for God or anyone else. We may know we’re loved and forgiven, but we still feel like a disappointment to God.

That’s why we need the powerful message of how our heavenly Father really sees us. We need to open our eyes and hearts to the person God sees when He looks at us. Because the more we come to see ourselves through God’s eyes, the closer we’ll move toward becoming who we were really meant to be.

 

Coming soon…to be released April 1 2010! Adapted from The God Who Sees You by Tammy Maltby with Anne Christian Buchanan. Copyright 2012 David C. Cook. Used with permission. Permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved.

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When evil is spoken of you

by admin

in The God Who Sees You

Learning to live beyond the pain.

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I had a dear friend share with me today how brokenhearted she is over someone's lies and divisive schemes. She is struggling with how to practically walk this out as a Christian…

Here is my simple response. I would love to hear yours.

Proverbs 6:16-19, "These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren."

Well if God says he HATES these things foolish is the person that believes they are above God's law and awareness. He' not kidding around with this kind of stuff.

Let me just encourage you with this. I have lived under the lies of a foolish but persuasive person for years…public words of profound character assassination….deception…misrepresentation….a person deviseth wicked imaginations…a false witness that speaketh lies…someone that was actually trying to destroy me as a person. Crazy as it sounds they talk God talk…profess to be a Christ follower…and generally use spiritual words to manipulate and control others.

One day God said to me…"Your weakest position is defending yourself. What you birth in the flesh you will need to keep alive in the flesh…what you allow me to birth in the Spirit I will keep alive in the Spirit. Trust me with your reputation."

I needed to stop being a man pleaser and start fearing the truth of what God has said.

Not an easy undertaking and very difficult at best. But God has proven this to be true and oh the freedom it produces. A person's true intentions will always be revealed. Time will be the test. The reality of one's heart will always come forth…that is why God has told us He will not be mocked.

For someone to attempt to deceive others they themselves must be deceived.

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him." Proverbs

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