Jana Spicka and Women Getting Real Ministries
General
There's a Bigger Picture You Can't See
Jul 26th
I was praying in the early morning during that half awake, half asleep time. Praying for people and issues, questions and concerns, needs and desires. I ended my time with, “Lord I really need to hear from You. I need to know what You have to say about all these things.”
I rolled over in the bed and heard this line from a song:
“There’s a bigger picture you can’t see
You don’t have to change the world
Just trust in me…”
I was fully awake, instantly.
Here I was mulling and turning over my plans. Could I — should I —how will I? And God was talking about His plan followed by one instruction: Just trust in Me.
I thought I was. I would have told you I was. But hearing that one phrase in light of all my murmurings made me question myself. Am I really trusting Him? Are you?
When I got out of bed, I went and found the song that had “magically” popped into my head. Then I listened to this song over and over for several days. It retells the old, old story of people just like me and you. People to whom God said, “Me and you are gonna do big things.” And the people responded just like us — with excuses and but-but-but. Here is my favorite part of the song. Each person laid out their objections of why God’s plan won’t work and questioned Him on how He was going to use them with all their limitations.
“It’s not your problem, God replied. And the rest is history.”
If you go back through the Bible, go back through history, you see His mighty hand doing things that don’t make sense to us. Achieving and completing great works that don’t add up to us. That part is not your problem. His ask of them was the same as His ask of us, “Just trust in Me.” That is your problem. Work on the ‘trust in Me’ part.
You can’t trust your plan until it is His plan. You can’t trust Him until you see, understand and relent the notion that somehow you can do it. Jesus said, “Apart from Me, you can do nothing.” Funny how we spend so much time trying to disprove that comment.
Go listen to “I AM” by Ginny Owens. You will love the beauty of His big picture. Our trust in Him does change the world.
“There’s a bigger picture you can’t see
You don’t have to change the world
Just trust in me…
I am your Creator
I am working out My plan
Through you, I will show them
I AM.”
Pennies from Heaven
Jul 23rd
I had this great God encounter the other day. Charis and I were at the pool and she wanted money for the snack bar. So I handed her a handful of change and she looked at the amount mounded in her hand and declared, “This is plenty.” When I asked her to count it, she didn’t see the point because there were so many coins in her hands. “But some of those are pennies,” I said.
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” she said with a wave of her free hand. (You know your kids were raised in the South when f-i-n-e is a three syllable word. It’s beautiful to hear.)
Anyway, we separated the coins into like piles and I helped her add up the quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. Once she heard the magic number of $1.25, which is the exact cost of a frozen Swiss Miss Chocolate Bar, she scraped all the change into her hand and was off. Contented and provided for.
Five minutes later, I am talking to Beth who is preparing to go BACK to Zimbabwe for six months this time to serve at the youth camp. We were working on her financial needs, listing out the room fee, phone, airfare, etc. Her magic amount was a bit more than $1.25.
That’s when the God encounter happened.
“Beth, think about it. When Charis came to me asking for money, she was never one time concerned about whether I had enough money. Her only concern was a yes or no answer from me. And once my answer was yes, it was on me to make it happen,” I said.
“Don’t miss this. She didn’t even care about the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. To her, it was more about Mom’s got it taken care of. Sure for you, it’s not pennies and quarters but it’s $100s, $200s, $1000s. But to God it is the same. It’s all pocket change to Him. ”
He said yes. It’s on Him to provide the change. And that is what it is. Pocket change from our Dad. A day at the snack bar with His kids.
Ask Big. You have a Big, Big, Dad.
Safe or Brave?
Jul 22nd
In Just Courage, Gary Haugen asked, “Do you want to be safe or brave?” And then ever so subtly, he asked, “What do you think God wants for you? Safety or bravery?”
These are disturbing questions if you examine them. Let me combine some of Haugen’s thoughts with some ideas of my own that have surfaced. Safety is about control. Safety is about doing life “just so” so that we can predict and determine the outcomes of our lives, our jobs, our families. The desire for safety for the Christian is like the boiling pot for the proverbial frog. It will be the spiritual death of us because it calculates and manipulates all the Life out of us.
We resign ourselves to these small endeavors that are easily managed by our own efforts and rarely tap into the need for an Almighty God. We call this spiritual success because we have planned and prepared, avoided and outmaneuvered any real threat to our well being. We are, deep sigh, safe. We pacify our hunger for more by applauding ourselves with being “responsible.”
Yet all through scripture the only place of safety is in God Himself. Do you think Jesus was calling the disciples to safety or bravery? He said simply, “Follow Me.” Was that responsible? Did they hit the safety wall while following Jesus? You bet. But they also got to experience life beyond the grocery store and ATM. The feeding of the 5,000. The taxes in a fish’s mouth. You don’t need faith and miracles if you have everything under control.
So then is bravery a reckless abandon, without care or thought of future? Not at all. Bravery is following God where God is working and knowing that apart from God, you cannot possibly make it happen. Bravery is laying aside the comforts of life for the compassion of God. Bravery is dependence on God born of a desperate heart. It is the deep understanding that the attempted work is so much beyond the individual, that only God could pull it off. Yet the insanity is, being in His presence doing what only He could accomplish is beyond any man-made satisfaction. Talk about exhilarating.
You know the disciples were scared, but you also know they were blown away by what they saw and experienced of God. Sure it was hard, but our desire for “easy” is an American curse.
To make matters worse, Haugen asked, “How are you raising your children? To be safe or brave?” Safe in the cocoon of don’t-get-too-close-to-the-dirty-world because it might rub off? Or brave so that they are equipped and desirous of charging the gates of hell in the name of Jesus?
Assess your life. Ask hard questions and let God answer them. Do you want your lattes? Or do you want to see His Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven?
“I run in the path of Your commands for You have set my heart free.” Psalm 119:32
We got trouble: right here in River City
Jul 21st
Does anyone even remember this line from the musical, The Music Man? All my life I have heard this when bigger-than-life problems hit closer to home than we imagined. That’s what happened when I read last Saturday’s newspaper headline about sex trafficking.
Sex trafficking? You mean women who choose prostitution as a job? No. Sex slavery. These are predators who steal or buy children then force them to have sex with grown men up to 12-20 times a day. I’m talking 5-12 year old children. These are predators who ship women across country borders with the promise of a better job. But in reality they steal these women’s passports, take them to places where they don’t know the language, and then beat or rape them into submission. They are sex slaves. Forced to do whatever their oppressors demand.
Now put all this horror right here in little ole Knoxville. Or Atlanta. Or Los Angeles. Or Thailand. When it is your daughter, or son, does it matter what city you live in?
I have been reading like a fiend and meeting people who are making a huge difference in this battle. Let me recommend you read: Just Courage, by Gary Haugen. He asks haunting questions when calling us out of the shadows of Christian apathy and comfort.
Do you want to be safe or brave?
We love, and are made in the image of, the God of justice. We rarely talk about Him like this, but He talks about it all the time.
He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the LORD require of you
But to do justly,
To love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God?” Micah 6:8
1 million.
That’s how many children are trafficked for sex each year. That doesn’t include the helpless, defenseless women.
I want to just start the conversation. I want to ring the alarm. I want to ask you to ask God to show you what justice means in His opinion. Ask, watch and listen for His answers. Then ask Him what He has put in you to help bring justice to the world. If you are alive and you are free, then you have a mission.
Evil triumphs when good men and women do nothing.
Good Man Answer #462
Jul 20th
You know, I love men. In fact, I am married to one. Still. And they never cease to make me laugh — especially my man when we are in a snit. So we had been having a few tense days. (You know the ones I mean…) In attempts to kind of break the ice instead of each other, we decided to go get coffee. No problem, it’s public, it’s safe.
Well several minutes into our “Awkward-trying-to-connect” conversation an attractive woman walked by and her perfume left this small cloud as she passed. I said off-handedly, “I think I know that woman and I definitely still smell her.”
Chuck says innocently, “I like it.”
Stop the film. Now this is from a man who has stopped most scented products in our house because of his sensitivities to smells. We move at church and movies because of perfume wafts that irritate his sinuses. I have abandoned my favorite cologne because he can’t endure it.
And he says of the green fog, as only a man can say it, “I like it.”
I just look at him. Blankly. Trying to decide if this is when I kill him or do I wait until we are in the car. He must have sensed the possible danger because he added ever so carefully,
“It reminds me… of something…you used to wear.”
We busted out laughing. I gave him a High Five and told him that was one of the best saves I had heard in a long time. I told him that he should write a book called “Good Answer Manual” and put that as entry # 462, under the CYA chapter.
I tell all my young brides the same thing. With men there are only two choices: Eat them with a spoon or hack them with an axe.