My family and I participate in Tae Kwon Do together. It started with a friend of my boys encouraging them to come; then David kicked in (pun intended) to have a father-son type thing going. Then Morgan and David’s mom wanted to get involved. I was the last holdout. But I’ve been with them for a year now, through David’s rehab from ACL surgery and Grandma’s deciding it wasn’t something she could whole-heartedly do.

Breaking through a concrete block

A couple of weeks ago, I earned my green belt (that’s four up from white, for the uninitiated–white, yellow, gold, orange, green). The weekend before that, we participated in a board-breaking seminar. Rather, a board- and concrete-breaking seminar. Yes, we broke blocks of concrete with our bare hands. I had the bruise to prove it. It wasn’t easy. It really was mind over matter. If I thought about it too much, no way was I going to be able to do it. I just had to concentrate on technique, and push beyond the block. My target was the floor below. Success felt good.

It’s that way in my spiritual walk. What barriers do I come up against that I think are just too hard to break through?

Complacency? Laziness? Self-doubt? Worthlessness? Comparison? Lack of faith?

The list really could go on. But just as I could focus and break both boards and concrete, I can break these barriers with the help of the Holy Spirit. “I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.”

What does that look like on a day-to-day basis? Well, I get out of bed and I DO something. That would break the barrier of laziness. Hiya!

Not letting the standards of the world worm their way into my thinking would help break the barrier of worthlessness. Hiya!

Looking only to Christ as my mirror would help me to break the barrier of comparison. Hiya!

That would be from the concrete

It’s so not easy. Sometimes it leaves bruises. But the satisfaction of success takes away some of the pain (that and a bag of ice held on it). Every time I get out and get on my bike; every time I look in the mirror and see myself the way Christ sees me; every time I look at my family and my career and see all that God has allowed me to accomplish through Him, the barriers splinter like so many boards at a board-breaking seminar.

Don’t mess with me. I’m a green belt. And I’ve got the bruises to prove it.

The other night, David and I watched the movie “City of Angels” with Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan. Nicholas played an angel named Seth who escorted people to heaven when it was their time to go. Meg played a heart surgeon, Maggie, who had just lost a patient. This is how Seth first sees Maggie. And falls in love with her.

Come to find out that angels are able to “fall,” or become mortal if they want to. And Seth wants to once he falls in love with Maggie. Somehow, I think because he wants her to, Maggie is able to see and talk to Seth, thus they are able to form a relationship. And Maggie also has a heart patient who is a former angel, but now lives a gluttonous and irreverent life filled with earthly pleasures, but no sense of God. He’s the one that lets Seth know that he can be with Maggie on earth.

How sad I thought this movie was. It seemed apparent that no God-fearing person worked on this film. I don’t see how they could. It’s preposterous to think that any angel now would want to “fall.” They’d surely remember what happened to Lucifer. Or maybe I’m wrong. I’ve never studied it theologically. Maybe more demons are created every day from the ranks of fallen angels.

One of the premises of the movie was that things on earth are so much brighter and clearer when you’re no longer an angelic being. To really experience beauty and love on earth, you need to be human. While I agree that earth has much beauty for humans to enjoy, the idea that earthly beauty is better than heavenly beauty is just flat out wrong. To be in the presence of God and walk on streets of gold, to have no more pain or suffering, to know fully just as we are fully known; that will be paradise.

Spoiler alert: if you want to see this movie, don’t read this next line, because I’m giving away the ending.

Maggie dies in the end. Just a day after Seth makes his choice to “fall,” Maggie gets killed in a bike versus logging truck accident. Seth is devastated. But as he’s talking to one of his angel friends, he says, in effect, I’d rather have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.

Human love is so much less vital and pure and fulfilling than the love of God. How an angel, who has spent time in the presence of God, could think less is, again, preposterous.

So, needless to say, I don’t recommend this movie. It shows us nothing of the true character of God. I’m very grateful that, though I am loved by people on this earth and enjoy the beauty of God’s creation as much as the next person, I know without a doubt that the best is yet to come. For eternity.

At the Women of Faith conference I just attended, speaker Patsy Clairmont told us a story about her son Marty who was recently deathly ill. After he’d been in an induced coma for 20 days, his lead doctor wanted to move him to a different floor. Patsy was not thrilled with that decision, to say the least, but a thought came from the back of her head to the front: Change can be good. Long story short, the move to another floor put him in the care of a new set of doctors, one of whom started out changing Marty’s medication. That change saved Marty’s life.

Change can be good. That change certainly was. I’m wanting to make some changes, but am under no false illusions that this change will be easy. I want to back off a little from my stance that all work needs to be done first before one can play. I want to treasure every moment with my kids. I want to be second. Second to God. Second to my family. I want to do more than simply tell my kids I’m sorry when I do something wrong; I want to ask them to forgive me. I want to be more transparent, more proactive, more emotional (or at least show that emotion more). I want to be openhearted. That would be a change. I’ve had a wall around my heart for many years now. Breaking it down is not going to be easy.

But change can be good. In 1st Corinthians 5:17, Paul says, “¹⁷Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” That sounds like change to me. I became a new creature 34 years ago, you’d think you’d see change by now. That’s not exactly fair to myself, I guess. I have definitely changed. But not as much as I want to.

Sometimes change is a decision, sometimes it is forced upon us. Sometimes it is foreseen, sometimes it takes us by surprise. It takes us by surprise, but it doesn’t take God by surprise, thankfully.

Embrace the change. That’s what I want my theme to be. Embrace the change that’s in my life. Embrace the change God wants to make in me. Embrace the change, and let God embrace me.

As I was teaching my second graders today, I had to clean off the whiteboard, which had gotten covered with math meeting stuff, in order to do some other math stuff (learning to count money with quarters, woo hoo). Anyway, as I got a damp paper towel and washed away the vestiges of the other words, that sometimes don’t come off so easily depending on the age of the marker, I thought to myself, This is what my heart looks like after Jesus covers it with His blood. Whiter than snow.

How good and pure and perfect it looked–until the next time I got it dirty again with more writing. Praise be to God that my heart is always covered with His blood. Nothing can separate me from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus my Lord. Not my pride, not my covetousness, not my impatience or anger or laziness. I’m whiter than snow in the eyes of Jesus. Just like that whiteboard needs to be washed off every time something gets written on it, my heart becomes clean every time I confess my sin.

“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. Hallelujah.