Make me up! July 21, 2008

Make up.  It confuses me greatly.  Did God intend for us to wear it?  Did He intend for us to “cover up” our true faces with it?  Did He intend for us to put just a little on to draw out our good features?  As a teenage girl, these thoughts have run through my head quite often.  God says that we should take care of our bodies, make them worthy temples for His Spirit.  Does painting our faces to make them prettier and cover up their faults make our bodies temples? 

This is a discussion post–if you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them!  I really don’t know what to think about this subject, so I’d love to read other opinions.

Thank You Lord for…fleas??!!! July 17, 2008

This afternoon I did something I thought I’d never do.

I thanked God for my splitting headache.

And here I had you thinking I was going to talk about fleas! Well, I am. Here goes…

I just finished reading through The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom (it tells the story of the ten Boom family’s life before and during WW2, as well as Corrie and her older sister’s inprisonment during the war).
  In one chapter near the end, when Corrie and her older sister Betsie first arrive at the concentration camp (the final prison they are held in), they are issued into their dormitory and shown their beds. As they were both very tired (not to mention Betsie was very sick, and I’m sure Corrie was sick as well), they laid down to wait while the rest of the new arrivals flocked in and found their places about the room. Within seconds they both jumped up: the bed was infested with fleas!

Corrie began to cry, and lamented about what kind of place they’d been brought to, when Betsie reminded her of the scripture they had read just that very morning. It came from 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, the key verse being number 18. In the King James Version, it says:

“In everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”

Betsie, whose faith I greatly admire now, began to pray aloud: thanking the Lord for this new facility to witness of Christs’ love, the fact the two sisters were still together, and, to Corrie’s shock and horror, for the fleas.
  Betsie’s prayer had started to comfort and convict Corrie, but when Betsie thanked Him for those pesky, awful fleas (and, coming from this girl who has had a battle with those horrid insects before, I can totally understand her shock at her sister’s prayer! :/), she stopped her. Why on earth would you be thankful for fleas?! What good can possibly come from an infestation of a blood-sucking insect?!
  Betsie simply replied, “‘In everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.’ That includes the fleas, Corrie. I don’t know why I should be thankful for them, but God says to thank Him for everything, so we’ll thank Him for those too.”
  Corrie conceded, but she still thought her sister was crazy.

Awhile later (I’m not sure if it was days, weeks, or months…I don’t remember how much time had elapsed), Corrie and Betsie were knitting socks in their dormitory room with the other ladies who had been found unfit for hard labor. They spent these times, and all their other free times, sharing the love of Christ with the other ladies, and worshiping Him with them. Unlike all the other rooms, which had guards supervising them nearly all the time, their dorm room rarely had a guard enter (and never did they have supervision), so they could do it much more freely than if they’d been assigned elsewhere. On this afternoon, because of a disagreement over sock sizes, they found out why.

The fleas.

The guards didn’t want to get infested with the insects, so they left the dorm full of women alone unless it was absolutely necessary. Because of those little insects, Betsie and Corrie had been able to minister to other women, and refresh themselves spiritually, without much fear of endangering the other women, or being caught! This fact dawned on both the sisters almost at the same moment, and Corrie realized aloud that Betsie had been right to thank the Lord, even for the fleas.

 With that story fresh in my mind, this afternoon as I was praying for the Lord to take away the headache that had gotten worse as the day went on, for some reason that story came to my mind, and I felt like I should thank God for this headache. As crazy as it sounded, I did it.

No, the headache didn’t go away. In fact, I still have it. *rubs throbbing temples* *rubs them harder after having ear talked off by a phone conversation with Dad*

About an hour later, Mom was on the phone with the mom of a girl I know from the church we used to go to (which is the reason we’re sort of homechurching now). I would say she’s my friend, but I can hardly call her an acquaintance I know so little about her. She’s one of those girls who likes to get together with you all the time, and every time you talk to her she says “We should do something sometime”, giving little thought to whether or not you even want to do something with her. I try to be a friend to her (she’s only got three brothers, so I can understand why she wants to spend time with other girls), but I just can’t handle spending SO much time with her. I’m not that social, so it’s a stretch of my patience! Recently, she’s been bugging me more often to spend time with her, and, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve taken to lying to her that “I’m not feeling well” when I don’t have something else that I can give as an excuse for not spending time with her (such as Driver’s Ed, a shopping trip with Mom, babysitting…). I felt bad for having done it (and am thinking about apologizing to her), but I kept justifying it to myself.
  About a week ago, she emailed me asking if I could come to her birthday party (a sleepover, as always) this week. I totally forgot to reply to her, and even forgot she’d emailed me about the party. At the time, though, I remember whispering a prayer with a groan, “Oh Lord please let me have a real excuse to get out of going to her party!”
 Well, He did. In the form of a headache…which caused me to cry, and I still had “tears” in my voice when Mom handed me the phone saying that the girl wanted to talk to me herself. I told her the truth, and even though she was disappointed, she at least could tell I was telling the truth, not to mention I felt so much better having not lied to her-again!

So, because of this, I was thankful for a headache today.

What are you thankful for?

::Side note:: I hope this has encouraged you to pick up The Hiding Place! It’s a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it for those 14 or 15 and older.