oh, hi

it's been awhile since i've visited this here blog. i've been caught up in a whirlwind of last-minute wedding planning and it's only getting more last-minute.


here are some of the things that have happened recently, or just things that have been on my mind...

• andrew peterson, dancing in the minefields. yes, brett posted it already and i know there's a lot of overlap in readers, but it deserves another shout out.
• i have been hanging out in 1 peter in my quiet times lately, and 1 peter 2:16 has been on my mind. haven't quite figured out why, or even figured it out... so i'll just keep hanging out there.
• i was baptized on sunday.
• brett and i had engagement pictures taken (yeah, most people get engagement pictures taken right around when they get engaged... we got ours done 2 months before we got married. :) no harm done, right?) you can view them by visiting this website, click "wedding", click "proofing", and use the password "Wendle".
• starbucks started offering free wi-fi.
• i'm coming up on my last week of work. this means two things: 1. i'll have a lot more time to devote to wedding details and packing(!) and 2. we are getting really close to the wedding!
• this is just fun.
  

hopefully my next post will actually have a point and be somewhat significant. until then, i hope this was, at the very least, entertaining. :)


edit: if i had waited just one more day to post, it would have been a full month... i'm not sure how i feel about missing it by one day.

Titus 3:4-7

Sometimes... since Titus 2 is such a big deal... I think I forget that there is a Titus 3.


Today was a good reminder. :)

"But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life."

a fleeting, yet significant, moment.

Driving my car this morning, I had a moment. I mean, for a second, I just...got what "being made new" in Jesus means. Not that I totally grasped every aspect of the concept, or that I will ever be able to articulate the understanding to anyone again, but I just had a moment.

Have you ever had one of those? When everything about what is happening aligns perfectly... the song you're listening to, the activity you're doing... it's all perfect so that God can use it to help you just... get something.

Well this morning, I was driving my car--

this is the first thing that set the stage for the moment.

I crashed my car two and a half weeks ago.

The front end was almost unrecognizable... crunched metal,

broken plastic, parts jostled around under the hood, pieces leaking...

it was a mess.

But here I was this morning, driving a car that looked like nothing had happened.

Brand new headlights, all the parts were where they were supposed to be,

with a shiny, fresh coat of paint.

I was driving a car that had been made new.

So this morning, I was driving my car to school, listening to Andrew Peterson's song, "All Things New"--

here's the second part of the moment.

If you really want to feel like you were there,

you can click on this and hear the song.

But the main thing is that

"My Jesus makes all things new"

is repeated throughout this song.

So this morning, I was driving my car to school, listening to Andrew Peterson's song, "All Things New". I had been thinking about re-creation and redemption... and then the combination of hearing "My Jesus makes all things new" repeated while driving my car that had been made new just made things click. I had a tangible example of something being made new, something that had been re-created.

In that same way, Jesus takes us as we are broken and makes us new. We can be as broken, crushed, and useless as my car after I had crashed it... but Jesus still takes us. He can mend what's broken, fix what's wrong, replace what's missing... and He'll set us back on course with a new hope, a right thinking, forgiven sin, a Lord that we can trust.

"And He who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I am making all things new." -Revelation 21:5a

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." -2 Corinthians 5:17

remembering this today.

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not your life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Matthew 6:25-32 (emphasis mine)

Hebrews

So I'm (slowly) studying Hebrews.

One of my favorite things about studying through a book of the Bible is noticing patterns. So far in studying Hebrews I've noticed the "Jesus is better than..." pattern, which is pretty awesome. Jesus is superior than the angels, He is greater than Moses, etc. Pretty sweet.

But another thing I've started noticing is that the author of Hebrews seems to be emphasizing the idea of doing in order to not do.

One place I see it is in 2:1: "Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it." The author is urging the readers to give special attention and concern to the gospel message that they have heard, more than simply acknowledging this. Otherwise, they will drift away from the gospel. They cannot be passive; they must do something ["pay much closer attention"] in order to not do something ["drift away from (the gospel)"].

And again, in 3:12-14: "Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called "today," that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin."

Reading the author's train of thought, I picture this in my head:

sin --> hardened believer --> evil, unbelieving heart --> fall away from God

But he offers exhorting one another every day as the preventative for being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin... it cuts this whole thing off at the start. Exhorting one another daily seems to only happen in fellowship and community with other believers, an open and honest kind of community. So in this instruction, the author is urging his readers to be in fellowship with and exhort one another (do) in order to not get deceived by sin which (in time) leads to falling away from God (not do).

So often I'm tempted to think that it's to just not do things. "Well of course I'm not going to forget the gospel." "Fall away from God? That won't happen." I take a passive approach. But it's exactly that passive approach that is the danger. It's by getting lazy in our Christian walks that will lead us down the wrong path. The author of Hebrews sets up as an active, offensive approach that we must take. By being passive, these things [sin, forgetting the gospel, hardened hearts, etc.] will happen, so we must be on the offense... we must be actively pursuing the opposite of these things, in order to not do them. We must pursue fellowship, we must be in community and be exhorting one another, we must be paying close attention--studying the message, understanding the message, letting it change us.

We must do in order to not do.

Justin Taylor's Holy Week series

Last week, Justin Taylor did a series on week leading up to Jesus' death and resurrection. He arranged all the accounts of Holy Week in a day-by-day format. I thought it was really helpful, and I know that Easter was last week... but it's never a bad time to reflect on what happened that week--that Jesus died for our sins and rose again.

Here are the links to the blog posts:

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Sunday

wedding & marriage planning.

Chocolate brown dresses + black tuxes = an unhappy bride.

This is the current dilemma in my wedding planning life... and with the amount of hours i have spent thinking about this (more than i'd like to admit!) it has migrated from the "wedding planning only" portion of my brain to a more prominent spot. Ugh.

Last week, it was something else. And next week, i'm sure, it will be something new. I spend hours and hours of my life planning tiny little--some may say petty--details about a wedding. a wedding--the means by which I get married.

I feel like I should be spending hours and hours of my life planning all the details of how I'm going to be married. That seems like a way bigger deal to me. Married?? How the heck do i do that? I don't know how to be a wife!

Ephesians 5:22-34 tells me:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives submit in everything to their husbands.

The passage continues talking about marriage, using the image of Christ and the Church. Whether the relationship of Christ and the Church is supposed to the example for how marriage should function, or if marriage should point to the relationship between Christ and the Church, (actually, it's probably both) all I know is that it's a pretty tall order.

And I feel like I should be spending wayyyy more time planning for that than I am the wedding. I want to focus my time planning to be married rather than to get married. And maybe the potential color clashing should be a significantly lower priority. :)

putting all of my eggs in one basket

"What kind of demeanor/character would you expect to see in someone who has fully yielded to Christ's lordship? How will this affect, for example, a person's happiness? His ambitiousness? Her peacefulness? What will this kind of person be like? What will be the effect on others?"

This was one of the application questions asked of this past Sunday's sermon preached on Matthew 12:1-14.

First of all, if you know me well, you know that I'm not a big fan of questions. I'm even less of a fan of questions that I think are "cheesy". But... I think questions (even cheesy ones) are an important part of growing spiritually--they make me think, and reflect, and even humble myself to respond with cheesy answers--so I'm trying to get better at enjoying questions.

This brings me to Monday, when I had printed out the sermon application questions, and was working through them in my quiet time. I came to this one. I deemed it "cheesy", decided to answer it quickly, and move on. But in processing the answer, I decided it was not a cheesy question at all, but rather an important one.

I started writing what I thought was a picture of a person fully yielded to Christ, and I ended up using the using the phrase "placing all of their eggs in one basket". At first I laughed a little (who the heck writes that?!) but then I thought about it, and realized it was actually pretty acturate, and actually beautiful.

A person fully yielded to Christ is placing all of themself in Christ. They are placing their hopes, desires, weaknesses, future, plans, etc. into Christ's hands, and trusting HIM with them. They are not saying "I'll hang out with Christ, and together we'll work towards my goal of becoming successful." They're saying "All I want is Christ, and He alone is in charge of my life. What He wills is what becomes." They are putting everything into His hands; trusting Him with everything.

Normally, "placing all your eggs in one basket" is considered bad advice; it's risky. But here, in this context, it's the least risky thing. It's freeing, even. You are putting everything into the hands of the only stable One in the universe. Essentially, you are putting all of your eggs into the only basket that won't break. And you are surrendering all of your worry about those eggs.

What's more freeing than that?