Category Archives: Julia Hare

Rebuilding

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Lanie| 4 Comments

By Julia Hare

Around this time a couple years ago, God was taking me through a painful process of tearing down old patterns of thinking and rebuilding the protective forces in my mind and heart. I had been walking past this wall everyday on my morning walks with Chloe (my German Shepherd) and knew that God wanted to speak to me through it. After weeks of trying to figure out what He was trying to say, one Sunday morning it came to me during a preaching. One of my pastors was talking about how sometimes we allow enemies (thoughts/temptations) to come over the walls of our minds without any check.  Immediately I knew God was saying to me that the mechanism for protecting my mind was faulty. I had seen this wall with those ornate holes where things can get in and out. Immediately when he said that, I knew that God was showing me a picture of my mind by taking me past this wall.

At first I thought, ‘Ok, that’s easy, we’ll just fill in the holes’. About the time I thought that, a good friend said, ‘You know, you can’t just fill in the holes, you have to tear it down and rebuild it.’ ‘Dangit… that’s going to hurt…’ is what I thought!

I was already feeling like my skin had been taken off and everything vital was exposed, vulnerable. But that’s what He had to do in order to build it right. He was showing me that those holes represented strongholds in my mind or patterns of thinking that needed to change. It is so encouraging to look back from today and see how much He has done.  Through obedience and patient endurance, the wall has been rebuilt and I actually hardly felt a thing. One foot in front of the other, one day at a time, following the lead of the Holy Spirit and suddenly it’s a year, then two and I am stronger than I was before… girded up… fortified.

“For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled.”

2Corinthians 10:4-6(NKJ)

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Always seems to come back to this

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Abby| 6 Comments

By Julia Hare

I thought I would have learned these lessons by now, but I’m realizing that trusting is a life long journey, at least for me.

Personally, I’m not thrilled at the thought of throwing my body through mid-air and hoping someone catches me.  Trusting God and more so, trusting other people, tends to feel that way for me at times.  It takes a lot of courage to throw the deepest parts of your heart out into mid-air and trust that this person isn’t going to let those fragile things crash to the ground and shatter.  Fortunately, God is the ultimate safety net.  I’ve come to an understanding that the more I trust Him, the easier it is for me to trust others.

I was reminded recently of a chapter in Hinds Feet on High Places where the Shepherd is leading Much Afraid down a path that doesn’t look like the right way to her.  “Much-Afraid is horrified that she will have to give up all of her progress and walk even lower than the place where she began. For the first time on the journey, Much-Afraid begins to seriously consider giving up. She feels angry and resentful that she has worked so hard only to be sent down into a deep valley, farther away from the High Places than ever. For a few moments, Much-Afraid ponders the option of turning her back on the Shepherd…” (summary from bookrags.com).  The thought of living without His Love terrifies her to the point that she makes a firm decision to follow Him no matter what and trust that He knows what’s best. 

As I was writing this, I thought of the scene from Finding Nemo when Marlin and Dory are inside the whale.  Instead of just enjoying the ride and trusting that the whale was helping them, Marlin fought and resisted the very thing that he needed at just the right time.  Dory tells Marlin, “He (the whale) says it’s time to let go.”  Marlin says, “How do you know something bad isn’t going to happen.” to which Dory replies, “I don’t!”  This is a great scene with good lessons on trust and a good laugh listening to Dory (Ellen) ‘speak whale.’

For the past 9 months I have had a crash course in motherhood, fostering two children.  Letting go seems to be a theme of becoming a mother.  For those of us who are perfectionists and perhaps a little obsessive, it’s particularly challenging.  Kids interrupt and change the order of things.  They teach you what’s most important in life.  If you embrace it, you learn to let go of so many things that really don’t matter.  Beyond that, you have to learn to let go of them and trust that God will guide and protect them.  Whether that’s when you drop them off at school or when they enter the big world as their own person.  Releasing something precious to us into the care of another… that’s what trust is all about.  

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Deeper Goes the Dying

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Abby| 13 Comments

By Julia Hare

This is a letter that I wrote to some friends when I was living in Zambia in 2007/2008.  I pulled it out recently and felt these words piercing my heart:

“…any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:33

I am learning valuable lessons here, some that I have learned before, but the cost is greater now and so the revelation is going deeper. In the past, these lessons have mostly come to me through circumstances out of my control – hardships, losses. Now it is a choosing.  A choice to let everything go; not in theory, but in reality, to give it all up. It’s so easy to talk about these things, much more difficult when you are actually faced with the choice to live comfortably or to walk on a path of sacrifice. I assure you that no matter how well prepared you think you are, no matter how willing you think you are it is a challenge and a test. Even those of us who are inclined to a simple lifestyle, who live minimally, are challenged to resign to having nothing. I don’t just mean in terms of material possessions, but independence, friendship, identity. There is a choice to be made. We can prop ourselves up with things and people that will make life easier, or we can give in to the opportunity to die.

“Christ has already given us everything by giving us Himself. He asks for everything in return – there must be no reserved corners, no secret disclaimers, no insistence on individual rights, no escape clauses. The bride, in the old ceremony, promises not only to have, hold, love, and cherish, but also to obey. Obedience is a part of love’s burden – for the disciple as for the wife.” Elisabeth Elliot

“Deeper and deeper must be the dying, for wider and fuller is the lifetide that it is to liberate – no longer limited by the narrow range of our own being, but with endless powers of multiplying in other souls. Death must reach the very springs of our nature to set it free; it is not this thing or that thing that must go now: it is blindly, helplessly, recklessly, our very selves. A dying must come upon all that would hinder God’s working through us – all interests, all impulses, all energies that are ‘born of the flesh’ – all that is merely human and apart from His Spirit.” Lilias Trotter

It is easy to say that He is everything to us and all we need until He actually is all that we have.  When there is literally no other option. When He, in all reality, is the only one and the only thing you’ve got, then you know if you are committed. What most of us really mean is that He is everything to us, as long as we have certain possessions, freedoms, people, position. Imagine a life where all of that is stripped from you. Now in that stripped down state, without anything to lean on other than Him, imagine whether you would still choose the way of the cross.

“Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” – Luke 14:27

 

 

Each Wednesday we consider ways of being Completely Devoted to Jesus, body, soul and spirit.

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Posted in Body, Soul, Spirit, Julia Hare, Kingdom of God, Soul

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Handing Out Courage

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Abby| Leave a comment

By Julia Hare

“The people who are lifting the world onward and upward are those who encourage more than they criticize.”  Elizabeth Harrison

One day last week, my foster son came home from school with a weight on his heart that I could see, but I was pretty busy with all that I needed to do in order to get to home group on time that evening.  Everything was going according to plan and I had my bag on my shoulder, ready to walk out the door on time.  I had told J that I wanted him to put his video game away before I left just to make sure bedtime went smoothly while I was gone.  Right as I was about to leave, he started to cry.  Instead of telling him that he shouldn’t be crying about a video game and rushing out the door, I felt the Spirit tell me to pause.  So I put my bag down and took a moment.

As I waited, I was able to pick up on the fact that he wasn’t crying about not being able to play the game.  I asked him what was really upsetting him and he just let go of what he was holding back.

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Posted in Focus Fridays, Julia Hare, Taming Your Tongue

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Promises

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Abby| 11 Comments

By Julia Hare

In 2005, after a string of events that caused me to wonder about my purpose in life and where God was in all of it, I cried out to Him.  I said, ‘where are all these things you’ve promised, because I’m just not seeing it’.  He answered with Deut. 8:2-9:

“Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.  He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.  Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years.  Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the LORD your God disciplines you.  Observe the commands of the LORD your God, walking in his ways and revering him.  For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land—a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; 8 a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills.”

About a year later after some devastating personal losses, God reminded again of the ‘good land’ that He had promised.  As a result of a book I was reading (‘Coming Up For Air’ by Margaret Becker), I went through a process which led me to being able to believe and trust God again for the fulfillment of the desires He had put in my heart.  I wrote in my journal…

“Before going to sleep last night, I read a chapter from MB’s book.  There was a line that stood out:  ‘I have made the costly journey from fear to pursuit when it comes to change’.  Immediately my heart sunk and I knew – ‘I have been making the costly journey from pursuit to fear when it comes to change’.  I woke up at 1:30am with this thought in my mind, ‘I have come to live my life within the careful lines of what people will understand and accept’.  How did I get here?  I began to trace back and find the culprits…a string of disappointments followed by a couple of key moments in which I conceded when I should have stood my ground.”

Six months after reading that book and taking steps toward new trust in Him, I was still dealing with amazing amounts of doubt and fear.  I have found that God is gently ruthless with the things in us that keep us from His fullness.  He just keeps peeling back the layers, gently, one at a time, until He gets to the core of the issue.  He got to that core with me at a ladies retreat I went to around this time.  The speaker began by challenging us to identify one thing that holds us back from our full potential in God.  I knew instantly, for me it was doubt.  She read a passage of scripture, Jeremiah 15:19, from the Amplified version:

‘Therefore thus says the Lord [to Jeremiah]: If you return [and give up this mistaken tone of distrust and despair], then I will give you again a settled place of quiet and safety, and you will be My minister; and if you separate the precious from the vile [cleansing your own heart from unworthy and unwarranted suspicions concerning God's faithfulness], you shall be My mouthpiece.’

I went to my friend who was speaking that day and told her that I had realized that I don’t believe that God will keep His word and I’m not sure how to get out of that place.  She said, ‘you need to repent.’   I had gotten to this point because of events that had taken place that left me questioning His faithfulness.  Things were residing in my heart that would eventually turn into bitterness if they were not rooted out.  We have to be honest when circumstances arise that cause us to doubt Him, bring it to the light and tell the truth about what is happening in our hearts. As I knelt down that day to repent, I realized that there was anger in my heart that I didn’t even know was there.  As I released all of that to Him and asked Him to forgive me for not believing Him and for being angry, I felt a burden lift from my heart.  The result was an increase in faith, a release from fear, and a trust in Him that I never had before.  I am seeing now that those promises are fulfilled when I trust and obey Him.

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Posted in Healing, Julia Hare, Power to change, Seeking God, Trusting God

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It’s not what you think

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Abby| 19 Comments

By Julia Hare

I have always been a dreamer, but my dreams don’t tend to fit the norm.  My big heart dreams up ways to save the world and rescue everyone in need.  When I was 20, I spent 2 months in a place that ruined me for dreaming of anything less.  Children thrown out like garbage and a country destroyed by an evil dictator.  I would never be able to live for myself after that.

The thing we often don’t account for when He speaks to us, or gives us vision for something, is that His word is a seed and seeds don’t become plants overnight.  We have lost something in our society, especially here in the good ole USA, called WAITING.  I call it the age of the microwave.  Everything is faster and takes less effort than it did when I was a kid.  I am so grateful for the example of my parents and grandparents for whom everything did not come quick and easy.

This process of waiting has been excruciating at times for me.  I’ve gone through years of doubting that He was even there, much less had any thought to fulfill the desires of my heart.  So easily discouraged.  I had to come to a decision that I was going to settle in to what was right in front of me… my job… ministering to the students who came in and out of my classroom year after year.  Not fair to call it a job when I can see now that it is a gift and the way He has chosen to minister through me.

Seeds take a lot of care in order to become mature plants and each plant is different.  The Gardener is the one who knows what’s best for each seed to reach its full potential.  God has had to consistently remind me that I’m not the gardener.  My only job is to make sure my heart and life are good soil; the rest of it is up to Him.  Recently I heard someone preaching on trust and he was describing the worst kind of backseat driver.  He said what many of us do is allow God to drive, but then we want to tell him the best way to get there or we sit there terrified of what is up ahead and around the corner.

I have come to realize that the fulfillment of the things He has put in my heart doesn’t look like the grandeur in my mind.  It looks like small steps and the grit of the day to day pouring out of my life for people in need.  I can stand staring at the big picture for the rest of my life and accomplish nothing or I can start somewhere, right where I am.  For the first time in my life, I am not looking ahead for what’s next, but considering how I can make sure today I have given my very best with all of my heart.

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