More of You; Less of Me: A guest post by my daughter

* This is a guest post written by my beautiful middle kid. Yesterday we went to lunch and I was fighting back tears as she shared all of this with me.  As parents, we can see struggles and sin patterns in them that are difficult to witness without jumping in to rescue them. God limits us on many things that we can "fix". This year has felt like a perpetual "Winter" for our girl and all we have wanted to do is to make all the hard things go away (full disclosure:  some of that was supremely selfish because I just wanted some of the complaining to stop). It has been slow. Too slow for my liking, but I have witnessed something beautiful happen in her that I could have never accomplished by myself. I am thankful that God kept me unable to help. He is teaching me valuable lessons in all of this too (because he doesn't waste anything). He is teaching me again and again that He "parents" my children so much better than I every could. She wrote this today to mark the start of Lent and I asked her if I could share it on here. This blessed and challenged me today! ~A

   Today is Ash Wednesday. Today is the day Christians all over the world reflect on our sin and our need for a Saviour. It is the first day of Lent.

“A day to acknowledge our need for repentance and our need for the love and forgiveness shown to us in Jesus Christ” *A Liturgy from the Reformed Church in America.

  This season of my life has felt as if it is forced fast. The things that God has asked me to give up hasn't been things that I have willingly given up because honestly, I would never have wanted to.  God has stripped away some things in my life that had I deemed valuable, and almost essential to my happiness, and He has replaced them with the only thing in my life that should be valuable: Him. He has replaced my dependence on other people and other idols, to be on Him. This process has not been a pretty one. I have kicked, scratched, and screamed and cried the whole way through. But even through my fighting, God has been faithful. He has softened my heart to be able to see through His eyes instead of my own. I am finally able to see the "big picture".

 I have been reading two different books right now, One is  "Free of me" by Sharon Hodde Miller, and the other is "Uninvited" by Lysa TerKeurst. Yesterday for my devotions I read a chapter in "Free of Me" titled, “When you make your church about you”. I read about not being satisfied with your church because of your own expectations and desires. So many times I have gone to church and left discouraged because I felt that I was not seen or appreciated. My focus was on what I was getting out of church instead on what I could give. After reading this chapter I went on to my next book, "Uninvited", and read about expectations yet again! In her chapter she talked about being in a room full of people and still feeling alone. She said so many times we go into a social event thinking “ who is going to minister to me, who is going to make MY night amazing”, instead of “ who can I minister to and encourage tonight”. After reading these two chapters I looked back and thought how many Sunday morning services, how many social get togethers have I ruined for myself and others because I could not stop thinking about me and what I wanted? After reading these two books something in my mind just clicked. Our lives are not for ourselves! I know, this sounds absurd, but trust me, it is true. I have been living my life so caught up in who is going to make me happy, who is going to fill my cup, instead of remembering Christ fills my cup, He gives me the joy I need. Now that I realize this in myself, I thought how Ash Wednesday is a great place to start to not only subtract from my life things that are idols, but to add a pursuit of Christ-likeness, which looks like serving others and looking for the person in the room who might feel as I did, and show them the love of Christ. I have come to see that my expectations of other people is a sin. People are not capable of making me truly happy, that comes from Christ. That is the sin of idolatry and I am so thankful God showed this area of hidden sin.

Lent is not just fasting from the thing I need less of, it is adding to my life things that may be more like Christ. One of the themes of this is “ more of you, less of me”, and my mom has displayed this in our kitchen for the 40 days of Lent. She read this quote to me this morning:

“When our right to fair treatment begins to permeate our attitudes and opinions, an alarm should go off inside our heads, warning us that our expectations have disconnected us from Christ’s presents and love.

As the Spirit awakens us to our condition, we know where to go for help. Jesus has already provided the sacrifice for our sins. He wants us to experience His mercy so that He can fill us with the grace we need to say no to our selfish expectations and the unrealistic expectations of those around us. His grace comforts us and makes us brave enough to step into a world of sinners, even as broken sinners ourselves.”.

                                       

“ Remember How the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these 40 years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep His commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that come from the mouth of the Lord. “

(Deuteronomy 8:2-3)