my thanksgiving offering

At the beginning of this year, I wrote here that my goal for 2018 was to live in a state of thanksgiving, such that none of God’s grace to me would go unnoticed, and none of the days He gave to me would go half-lived.

I did not know that task would be so difficult, but at the same time so life-giving.

I had no idea what I would be asked to endure.

How does one bring a grain offering to the Lord when there are no grits of new growth, no early ripened things, no fresh heads of grain and no unleavened bread to offer? What do I bring Him when my hands are empty and the year is famine?

But there is an element of the grain offering (also known as the thanksgiving offering) that doesn’t depend on my situation or the state of my harvest. It doesn’t need the rains to come at the right time and it doesn’t rest on whether I’m faithful and honest enough to see it and bring it before God. It’s something entirely outside of my control - something I didn’t grow or earn or create.

Every grain offering of yours, moreover, you shall season with salt, so that the salt of the covenant of your God shall not be lacking from your grain offering; with all your offerings you shall offer salt.

Leviticus 2:13

Even when I come to the altar with nothing, there’s still something in my hands. There is still something to offer back to God with a heart of thanksgiving.

Salt.

“The salt of the covenant of your God.”

In ancient Hebrew culture, salt symbolized loyalty, faithfulness, and commitment. Even today in Arab cultures there is a saying when a friendship, marriage, or contract is sealed: “There is salt between us.” And when God chose to enter into relationship with the people of Israel, and later with His Church through Jesus, He made a covenant with us.

The salt sprinkled over the grain offering is a reminder that He is faithful to that covenant, to His Word, to His character.

It is nothing of my own, nothing I cultivated, nothing I deserve. But even when everything else is dead and empty, I have this to thank God for - the salt of His covenant with me, the reality of His everlasting faithfulness to me, and the love that will never let me go.

When my circumstances are not what I hoped or planned or expected, God is still who He said He is, still where He said He would be, and still doing what He said He would do.

If this year has taught me anything, it’s that there is never an excuse to not give thanks. Things are never bad enough to negate the goodness of God. Living for Him is never “too hard” - not in light of what He suffered for me.

O come, let us sing for joy to the Lord,
Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation.
Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving,
Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms.
For the Lord is a great God
And a great King above all gods,
In whose hand are the depths of the earth,
The peaks of the mountains are His also.
The sea is His, for it was He who made it,
And His hands formed the dry land.

Psalm 95:1-5

this is why I write

It's always a little strange when God uses my own words from months past to speak to me all over again. I was just reading this post, and in some ways I think I needed that message now even more than I needed it then.

But maybe they aren't just "my words" as much as my way of processing the words He whispers to my heart, and protecting and preserving those interactions in the best way I know how.

Many believers keep prayer journals or faith journals to keep track of God's work in their lives. I don't think I noticed until today that so do I - only mine is public.

This realization comes in the midst of a battle I've been fighting in my mind, trying to figure out why I write, why I blog, why I've been at this for the past eight years. That's a third of my life and almost an eternity in Internet years. Sometimes I sit down at this desk feeling pressured to say something brilliant because I know there are people watching; other times I sit down at this desk and cry as I type, because I've completely forgotten there are people watching.

Sometimes it feels silly to spend so much money and time to upkeep my own website when it doesn't generate me a dime. Sometimes it's discouraging to read new statistics about shrinking attention spans, or to notice how the posts that get the most traffic are often the short, superficial, bullet-pointed ones. Sometimes I get tired of designing Pinterest-worthy graphics and sharing my thoughts to be picked apart by the masses. 

It's all those times that bring me to this place of fighting with the question, why?

But then I go back, like I did tonight, into the archives of this faith-journal I have made, and am reminded that God is still using those long-ago whispers to speak to me. And if I hadn't written out all that was pressing on me that day about the call of Peter, I probably would have forgotten that interaction with the Holy Spirit had ever happened.

In the end, selfish as it sounds, this is why I write: to process my inmost thoughts, to pursue the Truth, and to better understand the beauty of who God is. I write because I can't not write.

And hopefully, every now and then, a bit of it is helpful to someone else.

I admit that it doesn't always come out especially clickable, Pinterest-worthy, or bullet-pointed, but whether there are zero people watching or a million, my job is just to keep listening for the Voice that says, "Follow Me."

follow me: a testimony

Today it's been six years since what I now look back on as the moment I dropped my fishing nets and set off, empty-handed, in pursuit of the Man who said, "Follow Me."

Someone recently asked me to share this story, and the sixth anniversary of the day seemed like as good a time as any. It's the story of a terribly young, terribly afraid 18-year-old girl who dropped her whole familiar life to obey the summons of Christ and enter into discipleship with Him.

I had spent my entire life on the same piece of Eastern Washington ground until then. And I loved it. I put down deep roots there, roots like the lone ponderosa pine tree in the middle of the front hayfield—isolated, perhaps, but strong, beautiful, contented. This was my bubble, my world. I knew those ninety-two acres like the back of my hand and I explored them voraciously, with my horse, my sister, my bike, my camera, or my own two feet in a pair of rubber boots. I could forecast the weather by the feel of the wind or the look of the clouds around Mt. Adams; I could have drawn every hill and tree and shape on the western horizon from memory, having stared at those mountain sunsets for all of my life. I could tell you the season, even the exact month, by smell alone—smells of fresh apple skins in September, crisp yellow leaves in October, or frosty horse breath in November.

And there, I met Jesus at a very early age. I gladly walked with Him in blind childlike faith until at last He called out, "Follow Me" - and only then did it occur to me that I had a choice: I could stay with the familiar, mending my nets day in and day out, or I could drop it all and run after Him. It was a division in time, the parting of the Jordan, the choice to obey or disobey—to believe or not believe. It was then that I stood as face-to-face with Christ as perhaps I ever have, when He offered me a cross to bear in exchange for knowing Him more, when I stood in the TSA security line at PDX and made the final decision to fall hard and hope that faith would catch me.

---

I remember sitting aboard my flight from Portland to Denver early that morning, the morning of August 16, 2012 - so alone, trying to blink back tears so I could see Mt. Adams, Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Hood for as long as possible. Our ascent took us almost directly over Mt. Hood, so close that I could see every rock and glacier, every crack and crevice, even the paths across the snowfields heavily trodden by climbers’ crampons. It gave me flashbacks to my Mt. Adams climb just two weeks before, that long cold night of putting one foot in front of the other across the steep and seemingly endless snow-covered mountain face, watching the sunrise cast a mountain-shaped shadow over the western horizon and in awe that God made anything this big.

That long, slow, dogged-determination night must have been good practice, though, because while Florida was the flattest place I had ever seen, the mountain I saw looming ahead of me when my plane touched the runway in Orlando might as well have been Everest.

Alone. That word ran round and round in my head, taunting me, reminding me minute by minute of the three thousand miles of North American soil I had just put between myself and everything I knew, everyone I loved.

I settled into my dorm room at Great Commission Bible Institute, all my worldly goods taking up about two dresser drawers and a short hanging rod. I made my bed - top bunk, like I always had at home - and set my laptop on my desk. My new Bible, perfectly crisp and clean, was waiting for me in anticipation of my first day of class on Tuesday. I sent pictures to my mom so she could envision where I would be living for the next ten months of my life.

And I cried myself to sleep - that night and the next. (The only thing that stopped me the third night was my roommate's arrival from Pennsylvania, and I don't often cry in company.)

I will tell you that the year I invested at GCBI to learn the Bible from front to back is still one of the hardest years I've ever endured.

I will also tell you that it's still one of the best.

And the impact it had on me to obey the summons of Jesus and make the choice to truly become His disciple - even though I had already known Him almost all my life - is everlasting. Every day, my thoughts, my choices, my purposes, and my vision are what they are because of that decision.

I encountered my God that year. I grew and flourished in His character even while I was harshly pruned by His love. I learned how to study His Word on my own, with total confidence that I can know Him deeper every day through its contents. Because of this, I am still growing - still flourishing - still being pruned. And I am still bearing the fruit of it.

When Jesus says to you, "Follow Me" (and He will) - it is worth it to obey. Whatever the cost.

And once you do, He'll call you again - and again - and again, ever higher and deeper into His love, ever further into His story, ever closer to His heart.

But don't just take my word for it. The Bible is bursting with stories that proved this truth thousands of years before you or I ever breathed. Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Ruth, Hannah, Samuel, David, Esther, Daniel - and I have not even begun to name the disciples who followed Jesus' literal call to lay down their nets and follow Him!

I thank God for inviting me to join Him on this hard, beautiful road six years ago. Along the way, He has showed me who He is, and who He is truly changes everything.