With all my heart...

All of my life I have professed to be a Christian. Most of my life this didn't really mean much. Except for times of tragedy or great stress it didn't really have any place in my life. Had no effect on my day to day. My tv shows were of higher priority than my faith. Actually everything had more priority, because my faith had none. Except for an obligatory church service here and there, my life was really no different than an atheist or an agnostic's.

I professed with my mouth the 'beliefs' I had been raised with, but I didn't really believe IN it with my heart.

I was missing the second part:

Romans 10:9
That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," AND believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

There is great love and light and power and joy and peace and salvation (and on and on) to be found in Christianity when we let it into our hearts and it becomes a living part our lives.

But when that is not the place it occupies, it doesn't do us much good, and it offers absolutely no hope to others. 

Jesus said:

"Therefore go and make disciples of all nations..."

Matthew 28:18 

"...and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Acts 1:8

But why would anyone outside of Christianity want anything to do with it if the people they know who have it don't seem to really need it? If it has no effect on their lives, if they're no different from them in any way? 

Would you want to buy a car that just sat in your yard but didn't take you anywhere? 

Christianity probably looks pretty powerless, weak, ineffective, useless, and many times hypocritical to a lot of people. Especially when we are professing beliefs, professing selective laws and commands, yet not displaying the two most important ones:

Luke 10:27...'Love the Lord your God with ALL your heart and with ALL your soul and with ALL your strength and with ALL your mind; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself."

If we were doing these two things, our faith would more often than not be attractive to other people! 

Ghandi said: "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ."

I was blessed by unfortunate circumstances in my life. Blessed to come to a place where I wasn't comfortable anymore, where my heart was empty, and I sought God and he filled it. He became REAL and alive to me. And it made me want to be more like Him. As a little sister wants to be like her big brother. Or a little boy wants to emulate his favorite sports hero, I want to display the qualities of my 'superhero' Jesus. Loving, forgiving, compassionate, selfless, and on and on. I often mess up and suck at it, but try, try again, right?

Around the time that I was just beginning to truly seek Him, I wrote this in my bible:

June 2006 - My alarm clock went off this morning and it was on some staticky Christian station. What the man was saying really convicted me.  I grabbed a piece of paper and half-awake wrote down what I heard. It was this:

We must make God's truth take root in our lives. When we lightly live it, it doesn't take hold in us and it dies. Please God, help us learn to fully live and embrace your truth, even when everything in our experience fights against it. Please help us fully realize that the people and things of this world will all fall away, and only you will be left in the end. 

Amen.

And amen, amen, amen.

If you don't love God with all of your heart, don't love him more than your favorite tv show or hobby, ask him to help you to. To show you how. 

I sure never did, until I hit the bottom. It is easy when all is comfortable in life to not really need him. To keep him on standby. 

But things don't stay comfortable forever. We all feel pretty immortal, don't we? Death. Seems sooooo far off. The greatest part of Christianity is that Jesus already stood in our place and paid the penalty for my sins and yours that we may inherit eternal life.

I honestly don't think that far into the future all the time though. Right now we are here. And here can be pretty rough sometimes! Filled with wants and needs and hurts and regrets and MONDAYS.

The storms still come. The mondays still come. A stinky monday after a long vacation is what I'm living today. We'll still have bad days and crappy things happen. 

But life is SO much fuller and bearable and BEAUTIFUL with God IN it. 

IN your heart. 

In my happy heart.

♥!

(my church did a great talk on this subject this past weekend, http://www.northridgechurch.com/Default.aspx?tabid=298)