No room for jealousy, or is it envy?

You would think that by listening to how people make small talk and how people interact with each other on social media that jealousy is something cute and harmless.  We banter about the phrases, “OMG I’m so jealous!” and “look what I’m doing, are you jealous?”  I think we’ve numbed ourselves to how cutting and dangerous jealousy really is.  If you don’t believe me, just try being genuinely happy for someone who has succeeded in life.  Hard, isn’t it.

Deuteronomy 5:21 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. You shall not set your desire on your neighbor’s house or land, his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Jealousy has a sister named Envy.  I actually had to google the differences between these two words because in our culture, they are often interchangeable.  However, they are indeed different, according to one of my favorite nerdy websites “Grammar Girl.”  Jealousy is usually a relationship type of word meaning “apprehensive or vengeful out of fear of being replaced.”  Jealousy is the emotion you feel when you fear that you will lose someone you love to another.  Envy, on the other hand, means “to bear a grudge towards someone due to coveting what someone has or enjoys.”  Envy is the emotion you have when you want what someone else has.  So grammatically speaking, it is more accurate to say, “OMG I’m so envious!”

BEEN THERE DONE THAT

However, both jealousy and envy will tear you apart if you let them.  It is highly possible that you have looked longingly at the details of someone else’s life and envied them.  Perhaps you’ve envied their status or their possessions.  Perhaps you’ve envied their physical appearance or their lifestyle.  I’ve been there myself.  Honestly!  I had a Facebook friend that I hardly knew, but her photos showed such a perfect, carefree lifestyle that she made me pea green with envy!  I had to hide her posts or I’d have to repent every time I logged on.  (Turns out her husband was professional photographer who retouched all her picts before she posted them.  So that made me feel a little better.)  So I know Envy, personally!

But here’s my point, when you envy someone, you never see the whole picture.  Your mind zooms in on the detail that you are fixating on, and you don’t see the negatives at all.  You don’t see the price that the other person has paid to get that rock hard body.  You don’t see the pain that they have endured in failed relationships crushed by climbing the corporate ladder.  You don’t see the sacrifices they have made to get where they are.

NOT WILLING TO COUNT THE COST

As a missionary, yes, I could talk all day long about how wonderful it is to live in the tropics.  And you may envy me the life I live.  But you have the luxury of asking your parents to babysit your kids while you go on a date night with your spouse.  My parents live 3,000 miles away.  You have the potential to own your own house while I will borrow used furniture to fill a rental house for a year when I come home on itineration next spring.   I don’t own a house.  We have one car which belongs to the mission.  And this morning when I made my breakfast I found ants in my French Press… AGAIN.  You don’t see all that when you envy a missionary.

You also don’t see the hours spent standing in lines in government offices.  You don’t see the “tips” paid to police officers to ensure that they don’t syphon gas out of your car at night.  (Yes, police officers.)  You don’t see the mounds of trash that pile up in the streets or the stray dogs that tear into the bags and spread it all over your driveway.  You never give a second thought to flushing your toilet paper.  You don’t think to thank God for a hot shower.  And you’ve never had to use a bigger shoe than the one you were wearing to kill a cockroach.

So yeah, you may envy the pretty pictures of nature that the missionary posts, but unless you’re ready to live in that nature as if you were camping in your own house, you better just look around you and appreciate all that you do have.  Don’t zoom in on one detail of the missionary’s life while ignoring the high price he’s paid.  Walk a mile in a missionary’s shoes and you probably won’t covet what he has.  Envy isn’t a good thing.  Be thankful for what you have and don’t try to take what others have.  That’s healthy living 101.

Psalm 16:6   “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.”

 

Fingerprints all over the place

The Book of Esther in the Bible is a fascinating story about a Jewish girl who won a royal beauty pageant and was chosen to be queen.  She became aware of a plot to wipe out the Jews, and she determined to beg the King for mercy for her people at the risk of her own life.  The most famous verse in Esther is where her uncle is counseling her in how to proceed and spurring her on to courage. He tells her, “And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?”  It is an inspirational story that is still celebrated in the Jewish holiday of Purim and in the commencement speeches of Christian schools all across America.  But the astounding thing about the Book of Esther is that the name of God is not mentioned once.  Not Once!

Photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography / Foter / CC BY

Even with the lack of direct mention, no one can doubt that this book belongs in the Bible because we see God’s fingerprints all over the arranging of events and lining up of “coincidences”.  In the olden days they would have called that “Providence”.  In modern Christianese we call these “God moments” or “Divine appointments”.  It doesn’t really matter what you call it.  There are just times when God reaches down into the space-time continuum and gets involved in human lives or in history on a grand scale.  God is not a far off, distanced ruler.  He is intimate.  Another name for God is Emmanuel which literally means “God with Us”.

I love those moments when you look back and see that God was guiding the details of your life.  I love finding God’s fingerprints all over the place, evidence that He is God with Us.  Part of my responsibilities as Vice Principal include beating the bushes for new teachers.  This year nearly our entire staff changed.  Some of the positions were filled from connections that other teachers had.  Some of them came directly from my circle of acquaintances.  And some of them were Divine appointments- pure God.

For example, we had filled the 4th and 5th grade positions with relative ease.  But the 6th grade class was still vacant.  We interviewed several people, and nothing was fitting together right.  Both the principal and I decided to pray specifically that God would lead us to the right person.  I felt that God was saying to me, “This person is not going to come from YOUR resources.”  So I had no idea what God had in mind!  OK, God, surprise me.

One day the Assistant to the Principal and I were the only two in the office.  In walked a young lady who simply asked, “Do you have any teaching positions available for September?  I’ve been taking classes at the language school this summer and I’ve decided that I want to stay in Costa Rica.”  The Assistant and I exchanged big-eyed looks.  I interviewed her on the spot, exchanged email addresses with her, and that was that.  A miracle literally just walked in the door.

Photo credit: Jack Spades / Foter / CC BY

Then this week, another miracle was handed to us directly by God.  As you know, our second grade teacher quit just 2 weeks before the first day of school… 8 days before teacher orientation.  That day I spent a lot of time in prayer, asking the Lord to provide the right person that He had in mind.  I posted the plea for teachers on Facebook, and over a dozen of my friends reposted my status or forwarded it to friends of theirs.  A friend of a friend connected me with the name of a girl and I sent her a message.  I explained the job and asked if she would be interested.  She told me that she had been specifically praying for a teaching position in Costa Rica for this school year!  And she could be here in a week!   “And who knows that you have come here for such a time as this?”  I am totally flabbergasted at how God pulled that one off.

I was at the end of my resources.  I had already asked every teacher I knew in Costa Rica during the previous teacher search.  I had exhausted all of my connections in every direction.  So when this need came up, I was empty handed.  I went to the Lord as a pauper, a beggar.  And I am astounded at His extravagance.  Divine appointment or God Moment… whatever… God was in the House and His fingerprints are all over the place.

I’m supposed to be on Vacation!

I’m supposed to be on vacation for one week before the week of Teacher Orientation.  One week.  We are done with teams for the year.  We have no more traveling planned for this week.  I only wanted to brush up on my Spanish subjunctive tense, devour a few books on my Kindle, and knock off a few Sudokus a day.  I’m supposed to be on vacation.

Photo credit: BrittneyBush / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

So if you read my blog yesterday, you will know that I started my day with bad news.  Now that it’s official, I can tell you that our 2nd grade teacher quit… two weeks before the first day of school.  I’m the Vice Principal, so of course she sent the email to me.  I saw a month’s worth of work unravel before my eyes.  I’m supposed to be on vacation.  I’m not supposed to be madly searching for a new teacher just days before the school year starts.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time in prayer and a lot of time hovering around my cell phone, email, and Facebook just communicating with those who needed to know and those who could help get the word out.  I could do nothing else.  It’s not like there are a bunch of American teachers just waiting around in Costa Rica, longing to be hired.  And anyone that we hire needs to move to a foreign country basically by the end of the week, two weeks at the latest.  How many of YOU could do that?  I certainly could not.  So you can see how limited my pool of teacher choices is.  So much for being on vacation.

Eight Facebook friends reposted my desperate plea for a new teacher.  And I posted the need on a prayer group board for our home church.  A friend of a friend of a friend connected me to a name.  My parents both wrote with a recommendation of their own.  Another teacher offered to ask a friend of hers if she was interested.  One of our sweet newly graduated students wrote offering to substitute until we found another teacher.  We were all beating the bushes simultaneously.

At dinner time I did a quick phone interview with one potential candidate and received a resume from another.  In the morning (today) I will have a meeting with our Head Director the Principal and myself.  We will discuss the situation and read the resume together.  They will probably want to do a Skype interview right on the spot.  None of us are supposed to be in the office this week.  We are all on vacation.

How will this drama end?  I’ll be sure to let you know when I come to the end of the story.  I am sure that God has a plan.  I am confident that God has the right person in place for this job.  I am totally convinced that we are seeing a miracle unfold even as I write these words.  It’s just excrutiatingly stressful to see the birth of something new even though it didn’t take God by surprise and neither is He stressed out by this contraction of my best laid plans.  I just have to remember to keep breathing.  Breathe, breathe, breathe and think about vacation.

Why do I even bother?

I wrote this blog last September and I just stuck it in my “drafts” folder.  I don’t even remember why I wrote it, but the emotion of the moment has passed.  Obviously I am much less heated now which is why I feel it’s safe to post this now.  Just consider this a “rant” against immaturity in the public arena.  I have learned my lesson.  

Why do I even bother to get involved?

This is a question that I ask myself so often, specifically concerning Facebook.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to console someone who has posted something sad or depressing, or tried to give advice to someone who complained about a problem, or tried to help someone who really just wants to play the martyr only to have all my best intentions flung back in my face with a pious huff.  “Why do I even bother?”  I ask myself after the conversation turns sour.  I should know better by now.

I should just make a policy to never comment on someone else’s status unless I’m making a joke.

It just seems logical to me that if you air your dirty laundry on Facebook you are opening your life up to comments and observations and criticisms and advice that might be wholly unwanted or completely contrary to your feelings at the moment.  But, hey, you invited the whole world to your personal pity-party, so why should you be surprised when others feel free to comment about your life?

It used to be called “minding your own business,” but what are the new social rules concerning personal broadcasts into the public arena?  No one really knows.  Do we have social networking etiquette now?

I think there’s a proverb in the Bible about this.  It goes something like this If you correct a fool, he’ll just turn on you and beat you up.  I want to shout, “Hey!  I’m not the enemy here.  I’m trying to help you… you fool!”

Sigh, I should just keep to myself more and let the vocal ones all clamor around each other, howling their individual complaints.  It does make me think long and hard about just closing my Facebook account completely.

But then I think about all the fun things that social media has to offer.  I can “talk” to my family every single day either in messages or with video chat.  I can share pictures of exciting things that happen in my little world.  I can quickly contact people that I do business with and pass along information with amazing speed.  And I can keep in touch with missionary friends all over the world.

Then I also think about how positively social media affected our past Itineration (or Deputation or Home Leave, depending on your organizational vocabulary).  We spent a year back home to reconnect with our supporting churches and raise funds for the next 4 year cycle on the field.  I was shocked at how people had followed us on Facebook for the last few years.  People that I hadn’t remembered ever meeting in person would approach me in a church lobby and talk to me like we were old friends!  I was shocked at their warm feelings for our family.  I was pleased at the way so many churches treated us like we were part of their family because they all knew so many details of our lives from Facebook.  It was a dramatically different experience from Itineration pre-social media.

So when I get my feathers ruffled about someone else’s emotional disfunction, I go back to all the reasons why I’m still on Facebook and I’m still blogging and I’m still doing what my mother always told me never to do.  I’m talking to strangers.  But we really aren’t strangers when I know all your problems, are we.  🙂

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Teaching Prostitution to 5th graders

I knew that title would catch your attention.  OK, I know that several of you readers are also my Facebook friends, so you might recognize today’s story and tomorrow’s.  I am building up to a really good post on Thursday, so if you are bored with rereading my stories, come back on Thursday for a new one.  Thanks Friends!

So I made a teacher mistake the other day.

When we talked about the Bible story of Joshua and the city of Jericho, I deliberately did not say the spies hid at the house of RAHAB THE PROSTITUTE because I didn’t want to explain prostitution to 5th graders. I just called her Rahab. But I forgot when we got to the story of Ruth and Boaz. I told them that Rahab the Prostitute was Boaz’s mother.

This was the following conversation:
“What’s a prostitute?”

“Um, someone who sells themselves” (as I try to move on as quickly as possible.)

“You mean like sells their hair or donates blood?”

“Not quite. Someone who takes money to sleep with someone for one night… like a husband and wife sleep together.”
Blank looks on their faces.

“Why would someone PAY MONEY for THAT?”

“Well, people pay money for all kinds of crazy things.”

Then one boy bursts out in revelation, “OHHHH Now I understand Jack the Ripper!”

Now the Bible lesson was down the toilet. I gave up.  I pulled out my computer and we started watching NASA youtube videos.  I was totally up for a distraction at that point.  Hey kids, look what happens to a wet washcloth in space!  I can’t believe I haven’t gotten any phone calls from horrified parents yet.  If they do call, I’m going to refer them to the family that taught their kid about Jack the Ripper!!  Yeesh!

I want Roots AND Wings

Today is one of those days when I literally ACHE to have my own home.  For years and years we have lived as nomads, changing rental locations every few months or years.  This is just the lifestyle of missionaries.  I joke that moving frequently keeps you clean.  When I look at pretty things in stores I resist the urge to buy by thinking about having to sell it or pack it or move it in a few months.  Yuck, suddenly “pretties” lose their attraction.

I really do love my life.  I am doing exactly what I have always wanted to do.  I am proud of us as a family for thriving in another culture.  I am fulfilled and happy in my life and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  I have wings to fly and no weights holding me bound to this earth!

But there are days when wings don’t feel like enough.  There are times when I think I would like roots instead of wings.  When I see friends on Facebook posting pictures of their new houses, I feel jealous.  When I see others making pretty Pintrest crafts to adorn their newly remodeled kids’ bedrooms, I feel jealous.  Then I remind myself that Pintrest is a gateway drug to hoarding, and I shut off the Internet.

I feel like a 2 year old, spiritually speaking.  “I want what I have AND what you have.”  On these petulant days, I have to be deliberate in my thankfulness or I will start feeling sorry for myself.  I pull myself out of my rumination and look around for something to trigger the avalanche of thankfulness that I am sure is hovering over my head in the spirit realm.  I seize upon the parrots swooping noisily over my yard and I am thankful.  I feel the tropical breeze cooling my rental house and I am thankful that it is 75* and not -10*.  I notice the paint peeling off the side of our house and I am thankful, in a perverse way, because I don’t have the responsibility to scrape and paint that wall.  I watch my children run around our yard, and I know that we are blessed by Costa Rican standards to have such a large yard.  I look at the high wall surrounding our house.  It is topped with electrical fencing and razor wire.  I feel safe living here, and that is something else to be thankful for.

Does the bird complain about the weight of wings?  Never.  She blissfully rises into the sky without a thought of what she might be missing down below.  The bird is content with her fragile, little nest because most of the time she is soaring above the clouds instead of puttering around indoors.

I bend my thoughts to the sky.  I pull my mind out of the dirt where it is trying to suck water from the dry ground.  I stretch my soul towards the heavens and rise on the warm thermal drafts of thankfulness.  Up and up, higher and higher I fly.  I have wings, for what do I need roots?  Today I declare in faith, “I am content to fly.”

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“Frienemies”

“My companion attacks his friends; he violates his covenant.  His speech is smooth as butter, yet war is in his heart; his words are more soothing than oil, yet they are drawn swords.” Psalm 55:20-21

We tend to think that Frienemies- Enemies disguised as friends- are a new thing come with the arrival of Facebook and text messaging.  But the problem of friends who stab you in the back is as old as dust!  Jesus had his Judas.  David had his Saul.  Moses had his Aaron and Miriam… family.

We expect attacks to come from our known enemies.  But when an attack comes from the person at your side, it’s bitter.  When someone who is supposed to be your ally, your family, your team member attacks you, it’s shocking.  You just don’t expect a blind-side.

The betrayal is even harder to accept when it comes from someone whom you have loved, someone who has been the recipient of the kindness of your heart.  When someone accepts your kindness with a smile and then spits in your face, it’s awful.   It makes you heart-sick.

Rather than jumping right up to defend yourself, pause for a moment.  Remind yourself that when a person complains or accuses another it is usually a smoke screen to hid that they are struggling with that very same thing in their own heart.  If they accuse you of rejecting them, it’s because they fear being rejected.  If they accuse you of hypocrisy, it’s usually they who are the hypocrites.  If they complain that you are intolerant, it is their own rigid beliefs they are trying to conceal.  It’s not you.  It’s them.  You are just the easiest target or the nearest warm body to take a stab at.

Once you realize that you probably are not the real target of this attack, it’s easier to let go of your right to defend yourself.  As a Christian, we are not supposed to seek our own revenge.  We are supposed to let God fight our battles.  Sometimes we see God vindicating us, and sometimes we don’t actually get to see it.  But if we give our hurt heart to God, He will be our hero.  He will fight for us.  And in time, that stab wound in your back will begin to heal.  Rise above the pain and walk on the high road.

Did Jesus say, “Change your neighbor as yourself”?

A Friend of mine posted this on her Facebook page as her status update one day:

“I have quite a diverse group of friends on my Facebook….many of whom believe and behave very differently than me. I have friends who are adulterers, at least one murderer, a rapist, an assorted atheist or two, a whole slew of gossips and slanderers, several liars, a couple exotic dancers, porno models and porno readers, gun lovers and gun haters, gays and lesbians, and more whiners than I can count.

Someone recently chastised me a little about this.

As gently as I could I pointed out that Jesus didn’t say “Change your neighbor as yourself.” He said “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

My job is to love people….it’s God’s job to change people. He’s welcome to start with me because I have my place in that list, too. How am I going to love someone if I will not learn how to be their friend…even on something as simple as facebook?

Here’s something I’ve learned from reading the status updates from all my friends no matter where they are in life: we all have emotions, we all get sick, we have jobs that make us a little crazy, we long for relationships, we have families we are trying to figure out, and we want a better future. I’d say we have enough in common to be able to get along and love each other.

May God help me to love the people that He loves…and, yes, to be friends. And I pray that I can love people enough that they feel safe to ask me the hard questions of life and that maybe, together, we can search out those answers that might lead to the change process that only HE can do.”

Did I mention that she’s a pastor’s wife?

I admit that my list of Facebook friends is a little more sterile than hers.  But I admire her heart and spirit and spunk.  She says strong things in a loving way.  This is a lesson that I am constantly trying to learn for myself.  I think this is the core of Grace.

Complaining is a SIN?? You’ve got to be kidding.

“Magnify the Lord with Thankfulness.” (Ps. 69:30)

What does it mean to Magnify something?  Think about those old machines called “overhead projectors”  (I’m sorry if you just had a flash back from high school algebra class).  An overhead makes things LOOK bigger than they really are.  I could put my hand on the overhead and the shadow would look HUGE on the wall behind me.  Is my hand really that big?  No.  But this machine makes it look bigger by magnifying it.

The Bible says we are to MAGNIFY the Lord.  Can we really make God bigger?  No, neither can we put God on the overhead and make his shadow bigger.  But what we can do is to make our VIEW of him bigger.  Sometimes we have very little ideas about God.  We think that he can’t help us or he can’t hear us or he can’t heal us.  But the Bible says that God holds the whole UNIVERSE in his hands.  That means he can do whatever he wants to do.  We need to have a bigger view of God.  We need to “zoom in” on God and let him fill our view finder.

How do we expand our view of God?  Through Thanksgiving.  Well, that sounds kind of weird.  Why would giving thanks make God look bigger?  Let’s think about the opposite of Thanksgiving.  The opposite of Thanksgiving is complaining.  Have you ever complained about anything before?  Raise your hand, be honest.  If you have a Facebook account you have probably complained about something before- it seems that half of Facebook is people complaining about something… the other half is pictures of bacon.  Just kidding.  So we all agree that we have complained before.

Did you know that complaining is a SIN?!?  Well it IS!  The Bible says that we are to do all things without complaining.  That means when we complain, we are disobeying God.  Now, can you think of any stories in the Bible where someone complained?  I can.  The Children of Israel complained for 40 years while wandering around in the desert.  “There’s sand in my shoes.  It’s hot out here.  I have to go to the bathroom.  Are we there yet?”  God did AMAZING miracles right in front of their eyes EVERY SINGLE DAY and they barely saw them.  They were too busy focusing on their complaints to notice.

God parted the Red Sea right in front of them, gave them water from a rock, lead them with a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, healed them from snake bites and saved them from their enemies, but all they could think about was the “comforts” of their slavery back in Egypt.  They complained that they missed the Egyptian food.  They complained that it was hot and dry and sandy in the desert.  They complained that they wanted a god that they could see like the Egyptian idols.  And this really made God angry.

They were so focused on what made them UNHAPPY that they couldn’t see their blessings.   Whatever you focus on gets magnified.  Whatever you magnify, fills you.  God cannot fill you if you are already full of yourself and your own complaints.  Focusing on the little blessings in your life and thinking of each one as a gift from God will make your life feel full of gifts.  With you hands full of gifts from God, you will feel loved by him and you won’t be able to stop praising him with your thankful heart.

Through Thanksgiving, we zoom in and focus on God and he begins to fill our vision until He is all we see.  We make our view of him bigger by giving him thanks and not focusing on our complaints.  We magnify God in our own vision by giving thanks to him for the millions of blessings he’s given to us.  In that way, God gets bigger in our sight and instead of our mouths filling with complaints, our conversations overflow with gratitude.  The people around us will notice our gratitude and will expand THEIR view of God as well.

Why I deleted my Pinterest Account

If you don’t know what Pinterest is, then you are either a man or have been living under a rock for the last 6 months.  Either is fine, it just means you won’t have much interest in my Pinterest drama (did you like my pretty little play on words?).

This morning I deleted my Pinterest account because of one thing:  pornography.  Up until this point, I had seen a few images of scantily clad women floating around the site, and I had naively assumed they were posted by misguided girls who believed that sexy and pretty were the same thing.  Oh well, I thought, I just won’t browse through the clothing category.  It occurred to me that there might be real nudity out there, but I again assumed that my filters on my computer would block that and warn me if I clicked on anything “adult”.  I was wrong.

The other day I innocently clicked on something that said nothing about clothing or lack there of and up popped what I can only assume was an image intended for homosexual pornography- because it made this heterosexual girl disgusted!  I searched around the margins of the picture for a “report” button and found none.  So I headed to the “helps” tab to find out how to report an image.  It turns out that you have to click on the picture to expand it to full screen in order to see a “report” button.

I then went to the Policy page to see what the “rules” are.  It said that though Pinterest doesn’t permit nudity, it relies on it’s users to report it when they find it.  Well, that’s a fine kettle of fish!  That’s called “not taking responsibility” in my world.  And in my world, when you rely on the goodness of human nature too much, you are destined for disappointment.  This required an email.

I quickly fired off an email to their customer service center to present my complaint and to ask if there was a better way to filter out bad things.  I got a reply back fairly quickly.  They said that they are currently understaffed and only have the time to reply to log-in problems.  They kindly (hear the sarcasm) sent me links to their policy pages that I had just read and said that maybe someday they would have enough staff to answer every email personally.  Boo-hoo, they can’t be held responsible because they are understaffed.  So my next step was clear.

I deleted my account.

The thing that I just don’t understand about pornography is how predatory it is.  Maybe it’s because I’ve never, ever felt the inclination to take my clothes off in public that I’m just not seeing the allure (again sarcasm).  I’m much more inclined towards leniency and tolerance for what you do in the privacy of your own home.  But once what you do in your home invades my home- then I get vicious.  I get angry.  Mamma Bear rises up!  Keep your private parts to yourself please!

Why would anyone want to put those kinds of pictures on a neutral website frequented mostly by women… or worse, a website for children!  If I wanted to see that kind of junk, I would go looking for it.  But since I’m not looking for it, I don’t want it shoved in my face!  It’s like what a Facebook friend of mine commented, “The wolves are out there.”  So true.

So because I want to protect my children, I have deleted my Pinterest Account.  To honor my husband who is faithful to me in mind and body, I have deleted my Pinterest Account.  And I will probably get several more books read this year without having that black hole of time suckage sitting in my desk top tabs.  Good bye Pinterest.  I probably won’t even miss you.