Susan Cottrell's Blog, page 64

Just How Vulnerable Are We?

Four days ago, my daughter Annie’s apartment building in Brooklyn was decimated by Sandy.  She was safely at a friend’s, and her stuff was safely in her fourth floor apartment. But her building and the surrounding area may be uninhabitable for quite some time.

Two days ago, my daughter Hannah underwent surgery to repair her torn ACL. Surgery is always a risk, especially with general anesthesia, so I was relieved that everything went beautifully and she is now recuperating at home.

Three days ago, the day between those two events, I wept countless tears, grieving. My heart was tenderized by all of it. The devastation of Sandy and New Yorkers whose lives it disrupted or displaced. The risk to rescue workers in the line of duty. The job ahead of the cleanup crews. I cried for what might have been for Annie, and for what still lay ahead for Hannah.

Life is fragile. Our lives, lived in fleshly, human bodies, are vulnerable. Don’t we live our daily lives unaware of the sheer veil that separates us from tragedy-? Yet, one rip turns our lives inside-out. If Annie had been caught in that storm, or if Hannah’s doctors had slipped up, our lives would very different right now. But God’s still, small voice echoed in my heart.

Do not be afraid but have faith! Susan, you have a Savior! Whew. Thank You, Jesus. These events only point up the lack of control I already had. I’m handing all the pieces back to you, Jesus, to carry in Your arms… and, here, I’ll climb back up there, too.

 

* If you missed my Halloween blog (Torture: The Heart of Man), please read below. I posted around midnight, so you may missed it.

 

Filed under: Abiding In Christ

Torture: The Heart of Man

It’s Halloween. Time for Hannibal Lecter and the guy in the hockey mask from Friday the 13th. Ax murderers. Serial killers. Torturers. Where in the world do these crazies come from? From real life, from real people perpetrating evils against real people.

I don’t like to admit the depth of man’s depravity. I’d prefer it weren’t so. I visited a torture exhibit in California—a brutal study of man’s inhumanity to man. Hanging a victim upside down and slowly sawing him in half. Cutting off body parts. Burning alive. Skewering. Unspeakably violent “ethnic cleansing.” Mass, torturous genocide. If someone can think of it, someone has done it to someone else.

Inhuman, we call it. But as Clay Jones, D.Min, pointed out at our church’s recent Reasons conference, “Is this inhuman? No, that’s what humans do! Let each person ask himself, ‘If my life had turned out differently, might I too be such an executioner?’ It’s a terrible question if one answers it honestly. You have two choices. If your life had turned out differently, if you hadn’t become a Christian, if you’d been raised in a country with a genocide atmosphere… could you have been a part of genocide? If your life had turned out differently, could you have been a guard in Auschwitz? There’re only two possible answers to that: it’s either yes or no. If the answer is, ‘Yes, I could have been a guard in Auschwitz if my life had turned out differently,’ then you know that there’s something innately wrong with humankind, that we could all become mass murderers. If someone says, no, they couldn’t, that they were born innately better than the millions of people who have condoned genocide throughout the centuries, I have two things to say about that. The first is, on what basis would they say they were innately better than other people? There’s no basis for that. Then I would make an observation: believing that you were born innately better than other people is always the father of genocide.”

Whoa.

Whoa, whoa.

Didn’t see that coming. As much as any of us want to believe we could never light that match, never pull that trigger, we really can’t say it, can we? It is the heart of man.

How grateful I am for a Savior willing to redeem (buy back and replace) that defective depraved heart. Thank You, Jesus.

Filed under: Abiding In Christ

It’s Here, It’s Here!

Just a quick word to all my blog followers…  the new book is in! It’s here, it’s here. Yea! You can order it just by clicking on the photo of the book. Thanks to everyone!

“From a sea of parenting advice emerges How Not to Lose Your Teen, a breakthrough, intelligent look at parents and teens. Intimate and relatable, Susan shows parents how to decrease their teens’ dependence on them and increase their dependence on Christ. You will be relieved and encouraged as you walk this entertaining and heart-rending journey with Susan.” – Amazon.com

Filed under: Parenting

Character Matters

“We are people who believe that love can triumph over hate, creativity over destruction, and hope over despair. And that is why so many millions hunger for God’s good news. I’ve always believed that we were, each of us, put here for a reason, that there is a divine plan somehow for all of us. I know now that whatever days are left to me belong to him.” President Ronald Reagan

“No matter where we live, we have a promise that can make all the difference — a promise from Jesus too soothe our sorrows, heal our hearts and drive away our fears. He promised that there will never be a dark night that does not end. Our weeping may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning. He promised if our hearts are true his love will be as sure as sunlight. And by dying for us he showed us how far our love should be ready to go. All the way.” President Ronald Reagan

“We’ll never find every answer, solve every problem, or heal every wound. But we can do a lot if we walk down that one path that we know provides real hope. The morality and values such faith implies are deeply embedded in our national character. Our country embraces those values by design and we abandon them to our peril.” President Ronald Reagan

Character matters. Faith matters. God matters. Love matters. Hope matters.

Filed under: Abiding In Christ

Disappearing Sin

We have valet trash where we live. I’m never lived anywhere that you just put your trash outside the door and it disappears! How easy is that?  This magic happens three days a week, and I had just put the trash out when I said to Rob, “I love how the trash just disappears. We put it out and it’s gone!”

He said, “It’s the same way with our sin. It just disappears.” Hm, didn’t think of that! Psalm 103:12 tells us, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” Sigh. What a relief. Imagine having to wallow in our transgressions, with nowhere to turn. It’s like our kitchen trash piling up and we have nowhere to take it. In no time, you’re up to your neck, and you feel disgusting. Our sin would make us feel disgusting too, except that He does indeed remove it. In fact, we can feel disgusting from our sin, just because we don’t really believe He has removed it. That’s the worst of all. That’s like having a houseful of trash only because we don’t know that we can just set it outside the door and it will disappear.

Thank you, Jesus, for cleaning us from our sin, permanently. As far as the east is from the west, that is how far our dirtiness is from us. I am permanently… relieved.

Filed under: Abiding In Christ

Get to Know Me!

“Before you knew Me, you expressed your longing for Me in hurtful ways. You were ever so vulnerable…” Jesus Calling by Sarah Young

Oh my gosh, how true this is. Like an infant who screams to be fed, we seek out many ways to meet our own needs… even after we come to Him, if we are not abiding in Him. Jesus has been exposing the depth of my own hurtful ways — my self-effort, self-focus, selfishness. Oh Lord, help me! I often go into new situations talking, to show that I have value, that I am worth getting to know. Instead, it repels people. Like a kid in a new school who pulls out all his latest gadgets to impress people, I soon find I am pushing them away.

God has given me strengths of wisdom and exhortation. When I am abiding in Him, He uses all that to a beautiful end. But I have developed a habit of relying on my abilities — knowing the answers, giving advice — and in my own strength, those things bring death. Insight does not substitute for humility. Wisdom does not fill in for kindness. And nothing replaces love.

God has shown me how badly I want to belong. I want a place where I fit and they miss me when I’m gone. I deeply long to be known to the very heart. (Weren’t we designed to be known?) But showing off my abilities only hides the real me, the vulnerable me that is the most attractive, the me most worth knowing. “Intimacy” means “into-me-see.” It will come from setting everything down and letting people just see me. No bells, no whistles, just me. Whew. Ready, set, deep breath… “Here-I-am!”

Filed under: Abiding In Christ

Focus Hocus-Pocus

“What gets your focus gets you.” Mike Wells      http://abidinglife.com/2009/

Mike Wells, a beautiful servant of Christ, died one year ago today. Mike taught me what it means to abide in Christ. He illuminated Colossians 1:27: “Christ in you, the hope of glory!” He lived his ministry tagline: “There’s nothing the nearness of Christ cannot overcome.” Mike taught me so much in the twelve years I knew him, directly and in his books and teachings. “Focus on sin increases sin.” “Christian life is not struggling to attain, it is recognizing what you have.” “Christian life is not a life of imitating Jesus, it is a life of recognizing Him.”

Once I talked to Mike when I had been badly hurt by a friend, someone I was always there for, but she was not there for me. “I care more than other people do,” I lamented to Mike. “Maybe I need to care less.” He said something I’ve never forgotten. “God made you to care. If you care less because you were hurt, you become a distortion of who you were meant to be.” That was so true, and applies in so many areas of my life. He never knew the full impact he had on people around the world. Perhaps God prefers it that way… helps facilitate focus on God instead of ourselves.

This morning, my friend Shelley emailed me: “Mike always said, ‘What gets your focus gets you.’ Well, Jesus got him!”

Yes indeed, Jesus got him. And because he chose to be see-through, we all saw Jesus more clearly.

Filed under: Abiding In Christ

Psycho

When Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho came out, it was a shocker! I was in college the first time I saw it, and I screamed! Anthony Perkins appears as his dead mother, “carrying out her wishes” to please her. But it was all in his head.

What kind of a sicko—or psycho—is this? Well, that is the point. He is a psycho. He’s “responding” to the wishes and desires of someone who’s long since dead. We are shocked because we see it for the sickness it is.

Similarly shocking are Paul’s words that when we are in Christ, our husband (the Law) is dead. He was saying something huge: we are no longer under the law. Not only that, but to try to appease the law is a sick thing. As sick as Anthony Perkins trying to appease his mother when she’s a skeleton in the corner. To try to please God by keeping the law makes us psycho.

Galatians 3:24 says: “Therefore, the law has become our schoolmaster, or our tutor, to lead us to Christ, that we may be justified by faith.” Once we’ve come to faith, the law will only divert our attention.

Filed under: Abiding In Christ

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Filed under: Abiding In Christ

Dance the Night Away

Robbie and I have been dancing. I say this because we never dance. I never did learned to dance well, and in Rob’s early years, he was always in the band instead of on the dance floor.

But we are having a little time away, just the two of us, and we have been dancing. Oh! Something inside of me has been set free on the dance floor. So sweet.

Sometimes I am far too analytical for my own good. But this is not a time for analysis. This is a time for dancing. This is a time to be whisked away. And I am loving every second of it!

Filed under: Marriage