Are you a good student?

When I finished student teaching my students gave me gifts.  (I think they were just glad to see me go.)  I got cute little apple decorations of all kinds.  Ever since then, when the kids go to school the first day I put out the apples, which have grown in number since those first gifts in 1991. 

I have always loved school and books and new notebooks with nothing written in them yet.  I love to learn. 

In college I was the one front and center.  Sitting with my book open before class started.  Waiting for the teacher.  (Picture my husband rolling his eyes.)

I went straight from the first day of class and took my syllabus to the library, checking out every book I would need for the big research paper.   

Call me a nerd of all nerds if you want, but Proverbs 4:7 says, “Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom.  Though it cost all you have, get understanding.” 

Let me tell you, with a kid going to college, all we’ve talked about the last two years is the cost of getting understanding.  It’s high.  Ramen noodles high.   

I always want to be a learner.  I want to open my Bible and read the hard stuff and go do it.  Teachable. 

Wisdom means you’re skilled at doing what you know.  I know the Bible.  It’s the skilled part I’m working on.   

Read it.  Do it.  Read it.  Do it. 

We send our kids off to school after an assault of lectures:  Sit toward the front.  Take good notes.  Make good use of class time.  Ask questions.  No TV after school.  Be ready to start homework at 4:00.  Matt told Caleb last night, School is your job this year. 

When it comes to the Bible, what kind of student are you?  Back row slacker or front row nerd?

Bring your need to the music.

I grew up in church.  Played the piano for church from sixth grade until I was in my late 30s.  So I’ve done a lot of singing about God.

Several years ago, God put it on my heart to go on a two-week trip to teach the Bible in Africa, which scared the snot out of me (yes –the snot right out of me.)  I said, Okay, I’ll go.  But I don’t want to, and the whole idea makes me want to throw up. 

After the decision to go to Africa was made firm, I started what I call THE YEAR OF FEAR.  Every night I cried before I went to bed and told my husband, I can’t do this, and he patiently, every night for a year, listened to me list off everything about the trip that was scary.  On the top of the list was being hot.  (Uganda is on the equator.)  I don’t do heat very well.  Next on the list were insignificant things, like civil unrest, diseases of a third world country, and dying in a plane crash over the ocean. 

I started walking in to church every week as a desperate woman.  I had never walked into church desperate before. 

We started singing the same songs as always, but they were all new to me.  Because now I needed them.  I would sing a verse about who God is, and I would look God straight in the eye and say, with steel in my voice, You had better mean this.  I’m going to Africa, and you had better be what I’m singing about right now, or I’m going to die. 

On this side of Africa (let me point out that I did not die), I now know that desperation is good.  It makes me needy.  And when I am needy I find God IS what I sing about. 

If you’re afraid, anxious, desperate, I say GREAT!  You’re in the perfect position to look God in the eye as you sing and say, You had better be who you say you are. 

And find out He is.

Getting your heart where your body is.

Here’s the problem. 

We love people deeply.  Friends and family.  And then often God calls us to leave the friends and family we love so we can serve Him someplace else. 

So there’s this love for God that makes our mouths say, Yes, I’ll go, Lord.  The suitcases get packed.  The feet head out for a new place. 

But while the suitcases get unpacked in the new place, the heart commits a heinous mutiny and longs for the people in the old place. 

I remember when we moved to Kalispell, Montana from Texas where we had lived for seven years.  Matt and I fell in love in Texas, had our first child there.  The friendships were family-deep. 

When we moved here I held a secret distain for the new people.  I didn’t want them.  I couldn’t love them.  Give me the old people back.  The comfortable Texas people.  The ones who know me.  

Yet here I am 17 years later, and I do believe many of you reading this blog post today are the new people.  The Kalispell people.  Now my heart is tied so tightly with yours that I can’t imagine life without you. 

It’s sure hard to love new people, though.  To get to a new place and work to make friends.  To make mistakes and wonder if these new people will show grace to you the way the old ones did. 

It’s easy to pack a suitcase for your clothes and transport them, but it’s not so easy to pack up your heart and bring it along to the new place.  It weighs more, and it’s hard to carry.  It’s that last box that gets unpacked. 

Colossians 3:23 (NIV) says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.” 

All your heart. 

We can’t start a new something for the Lord in a new place and not bring our hearts along. 

Today I’m praying for each of you who is in the new place.  Praying God will give you the strength to let your heart (not just your body) settle there.

What you're looking for.

My 15-year-old son wants a Camaro.  A yellow one.  With stripes. 

I know because he has told me this 500,000 times.  Every time we drive past the car dealership he says, There’s my Camaro.  Except I want a yellow one.  No one is more focused and passionate about looking at cars than a 15-year-old boy who is two weeks away from taking driver’s ed.  

We just took a long road trip, and he pointed out every single Camaro on the highway.  There are a lot of Camaro’s, he said.   

The truth is, when you start looking for something you begin to see a lot of it.  All of a sudden every corner has a Camaro, but there aren’t more now than there were before. 

Only the seeing has changed. 

The same is true when it comes to looking for God’s goodness.  When we start looking for it, it’s everywhere. 

“The Lord is good...”  Psalm 100:5. 

I had the experience of walking with two different women as their husbands threw them aside in divorce.  One woman, through her tears, could not stop speaking of the goodness of God.  The other, through her tears, could not stop speaking of her bitterness.       

There’s a lot of goodness out there.  We just have to start looking for it with 15-year-old-boy passion.

Class number six.

$400 later and she has a stack of books for her first semester of college.  As a book nerd I pick up the stack of textbooks and flip through them, resisting the urge to open them up and stick my nose in the binding. 

New book smell.  Why don’t they make that as a car air freshener? 

My first days of college rush back to me, and I say to her, I love to learn.  A feeling of jealousy comes up in my throat.  You get to read new things and learn new stuff. 

Five books sit on her desk.  World music.  Music foundations.  Intro to business.  Intro to economics (scary!).  Biology. 

There’s a sixth. 

I feel it as I lay in our hotel room anxiously anticipating saying goodbye to her.  Seeing in her eyes the panic of coming loneliness. 

The sixth textbook.  Learning to rely on Jesus. 

It should be on the schedule and come with a syllabus.  It should require tuition and a ridiculously expensive textbook.  It should be listed as a core requirement to get a degree.  It should have a learning lab on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  It should have tutorial support available. 

It’s the hidden class.  The one you don’t sign up for but get enrolled in anyway.  The one that comes with starting a new job or having a new baby or experiencing a new illness, loss, or grief.  It’s the class you take when you’re a mom alone all day with little people who can’t talk yet or when you plant your family in India or Africa to be missionaries. 

John 13:25 (NIV) says of Peter, “Leaning back against Jesus, he asked him…”  That’s the class –learning to lean back against Jesus 101.  Learning to sit close.  To ask the hard questions of the One who can answer them.  To let Jesus’ love and His companionship be enough. 

This old hymn comes to my mind as I think about learning to lean on Jesus.  Care to sing it with me today? 

What a fellowship, what a joy divine,
Leaning on the everlasting arms;
What a blessedness, what a peace is mine,
Leaning on the everlasting arms. 

Refrain:
Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms.
Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms. 

Oh, how sweet to walk in this pilgrim way,
Leaning on the everlasting arms;
Oh, how bright the path grows from day to day,
Leaning on the everlasting arms. 

What have I to dread, what have I to fear,
Leaning on the everlasting arms?
I have blessed peace with my Lord so near,
Leaning on the everlasting arms.