July 2013 - Pragmatic Compendium

parallel lessons.

Posted on July 15, 2013October 11, 2016 by Julie Stiles Mills

PinkGirl is at call backs for The Little Mermaid. Ya know she dreams of being cast as Ariel. This was her instagram graphic and request yesterday:

“Hey guys tomorrow is the first rehearsal for Little Mermaid and it’s when I find out what part I get. Please Pray for me not to get the role I want but to get the role that God wants me to have and for me to accept that that role is the role God meant for me to have. I’m very nervous and I need to put total trust and faith in God. So please pray for me. Thank You.”

This is very different than where she was over a month ago, when she asked me to do something for her.

PinkGirl: “Mom, I want you to tell me every day that I won’t get it.”

Me: “No. I won’t do that. I would rather you be passionate about your dream and be heartbroken if it doesn’t come true than not be passionate about it. I won’t help you kill your dream to help you protect yourself from getting hurt. Joy and heartbreak are better than never being passionate about your dreams.”

And then she and I started growing in parallel. We both couldn’t help but notice the similarities in our situations. I’ll drill it down.

It was July 30th of last year when I made the first of many decisions that steadily led me to put my passion for leading worship ahead of my passion for God. 10 months later and I could clearly see that I was putting the art before the artist. Took another week to act on that knowledge and in the end, the only action I could bring myself to take was to pray: “Lord, I can’t give this up on my own. Please take it away.”

And He did.

I led worship for the last time on June 30th.

PinkGirl felt how hard it was for me. Throughout her short 12 years, I’ve seen her deep capacity for empathy wreck her again and again. In this case, it’s hitting very, very close to home.

My daughter watched me let go of my passion in order to put God first in my life.

But she also knows that I didn’t do it by force of will or strength of character or any other noble ability.

I was honest with her. I confessed to her that I wasn’t able to do it on my own and asked God to help me. To intervene in my life. To take away the things that separated me from Him. To comfort me. To help me find joy in Him.

That’s when she started praying for God to give her the role He wants her to have – whether it breaks her heart or not. She’s praying for His will, her ability to accept it, for Him to comfort her if He says no and for her to find joy in Him.

She’ll tell you she flip flops between moments of peace and fear and hope and resignation. Sometimes all within the time it takes to draw a single breath.

Solidarity, babe.

She’s faced this kind of heartbreak before. When she was cast as Grace Farrell, she knew she had lost her last chance to be cast as Annie. She was much too tall. When she was cast as The Wardrobe in Beauty and the Beast, she experienced a crisis of faith that rocked her, but thankfully, turned out to be a pivot point in her spiritual growth and her relationship with Christ.

Today has the potential to deal her one of the happiest memories in her young life – or one of the greatest disappointments.

Either way, she and I are both learning the same lesson:

God is enough. Passion for God is better than passion for ANYthing in this world.

Last night, during bedtime prayers, after asking God to give her the part HE wants her to have, she prayed:

“God, please bless my voice – but I know it’s not mine. I know you’re just lending it to me while I’m here on earth.”

Amen.

[CLICK HERE to see a listing of all the blog posts in this series “the search for Joy.”]

four minutes with God: 2 Chronicles 5:13-14

Posted on July 10, 2013October 11, 2016 by Julie Stiles Mills

a Quote:
“…what I testify to is the power of visual art, and especially music…They have the potential to awaken the mind and heart to aspects of God’s glory that were not perceived before. Paintings or photographs of mountains and streams can call forth a sense of wonder and peace. If we are willing to “look along” (not just “at”) these pictures, as Lewis taught us, our eyes will run up the beams to the Original Glory, and the wonder and peace will rest finally in the wonderful and peaceful mountains and streams of God’s power and mercy.

…We must make it our aim that the joy awakened by music be joy in God…Then the effort to delight in God through music will involve a prior shaping of the mind by the Word…Then the effort to delight in God through music will also involve a thoughtful testing after the music has already awakened joy. Is this joy…stirring my desires to know Christ better and love him more and show him to others at the cost of my own comfort? So before and after music has its immediate effect, we pursue the goal that music make us more glad in the glory of God.”
When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy
by John Piper

my Prayer:
Lord, thank you for using praise music and my worship through that music to awaken my mind and heart to aspects of Your Glory I had never perceived before. Thank You for the joy it brought and the delight I found in You because of WHO YOU ARE. Thank You for the overwhelming and undeniable awareness of Your presence in those moments. Thank You for helping me to completely forget myself and for moving me into deeper praise, no longer centered in gratitude for Your temporal blessings, but grounded and focused on eternal things: Your Sovereignty, Your Holiness, Your stubborn love for me and my desperate and relentless need for You.

Even though the lesson was one of the hardest I’ve ever faced, thank you for teaching me that finding worship through music wasn’t enough, that it only took me part way. It limited true praise to those brief moments. Thank you for showing me that my dependance on music was quenching Your Spirit. It prevented me from finding joy and delight in WHO YOU ARE in the ordinary, everyday moments of my life. Thank You for the understanding that I can’t find that joy and delight on my own, through my own striving, depending on anything in this world to facilitate it.

Holy Spirit, please bless me with joy and delight, so I won’t be tempted to settle for less by depending on anything or anybody but Christ.

the Word:
“The trumpeters and musicians joined in unison to give praise and thanks to the Lord. Accompanied by trumpets, cymbals and other instruments, the singers raised their voices in praise to the Lord and sang:

“He is good; his love endures forever.”

Then the temple of the Lord was filled with the cloud, and the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God”
2 Chronicles 5:13-14 (NIV)

the lyric.
“Come thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace
Streams of mercy never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise
Teach me some melodious sonnet. Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the Mount I’m fixed upon it, mount of Thy redeeming love

Here I raise my Ebenezer. Hither by Thy help I come.
Oh, and I hope by Thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home”
sung by Kings Kaleidoscope

[CLICK HERE to see a listing of all the blog posts in this series “the search for Joy.”]

ordering my environment.

Posted on July 8, 2013October 18, 2016 by Julie Stiles Mills

I wrote a few weeks ago that when my head is a mess, I am compelled to order my environment. In practical application, this means three things: cleaning. purging. painting.

and I guess decorating. If you count framing stuff I’ve been meaning to frame for…ever. and putting new flooring in downstairs. and getting rid of useless decorative items that just take up space in my house.

Like a bowl of rocks.

seriously.

at one point in my life, I PAID for a bowl of rocks and put them on a flat surface in my house. To hold candles. Candles that are – to this day – still wrapped in plastic.

purging. This particular purge isn’t so bad. The biggest purge I’ve done was after my hysterectomy in 2009. That was bad. My house and it’s contents suffered nearly two years of female neglect because of chronic anemia and limited activity, followed by another 6 months of recovery after the surgery.

This purge is deeper.

A stripping down to basics purge.

On May 31st, I said I wanted “I want every superfluous thing in my house gone. GONE.” I’m looking at EVERYTHING in my house as if I were moving. Would I want to pack it? or get rid of it?

I’ve thrown away and shredded so. much. paper. We’ve already made one trip to the dump. I’ve completely emptied every bathroom cabinet and only put back the things we need. I’ve gotten rid of pointless dust collecting decorations, including the bowl of rocks. I’ve even gotten rid of over 100 books.

I’ve been posting some of my progress on my public facebook page. You don’t even need to have a facebook account to see it.

Yesterday’s facebook post:
An entire pick-up truck load of furniture and multiple boxes of books, clothing, appliances, and pointless decorative dust collectors – all now in the FUMCO Whale of a Sale storage POD. I have zero dining room chairs and I do not care. I didn’t love them and they took up too much space, so they had to go. Based on that criteria, all members of my family will be staying. I suppose the cats can stay too. Tomorrow? The linen closet purge. I have to make room for the single tablecloth and the single set of placemats I’m keeping after giving away my buffet. ‎#pruning ‎#purging

Today’s facebook posts:
11:57am – Can’t decide what to do today. So I’m going to do everything. 5 minutes at a time. & fb/tweet my progress for accountability & motivation.

12:15pm – 1st micro-action of the day: Weeding the rose bed. Took 10 minutes. Love it when a huge bunch of weeds turns out to be a lot of runners.

12:23pm – How many fridge shelves can I clean in 5 minutes? Three. & I cooled off enough to go back outside. I’m gonna need shoes. ‎#microactions

1:15pm – Prune long neglected roses-10 minutes, put roses in vase, download & learn photo editing app-15 min. ‎#microactions (click any of the photos to enlarge)

3:06pm – An hour deep cleaning the kitchen, including the window, the front of the cabinets, the wall, the prints and my cobalt. More dust collecting decorations to get rid of. ‎#microactions

3:13pm – This is going to be hideous. & hot. But tomorrow is yard waste day. Any guesses how long it will take? ‎#microactions

4:06pm – If you do it fast enough, weeding is cardio. (posted “before” pic earlier) ‎#microactions

4:56pm – 20 minutes to make this mess. But my view is much clearer. Gotta bind all this up after I pick PinkGirl up.‎#microactions

9:28pm – Got on a roll. FavoriteSon and I mowed and he whacked weeds while I bound up what seemed to equate to a small forest. I ran out of daylight. And I may have discovered a new smell. A cross between sunscreen, bug spray, gasoline and sweat. ‎#pruning ‎#purging