All Things Are Yours

I heard a sermon with this title, and it's come back to me time and time again. It goes along with all of my thoughts with the Nirvana song, which are still swirling in my head.

Warning: this will be long and rambling, and probably won't make much sense, and could be way off base, but so is the rest of my life, so there.

I let things sit, because sometimes I jump way ahead of God on things. I find something that might be a message from the Spirit, and jump right into a "it must be a sign...it must mean this..." mentality. And it isn't always a sign. It doesn't always have a grander meaning, and I tend up over-thinking it. So, as of late, I've had to let things sit, in order not to over-think them, and let the Spirit get the message into my head when He's ready for me to hear it.

Which is what's happened with the Nirvana song "Come As You Are." I've been letting it sit in my mind, bouncing that and "Just As I Am." Then, I get an email asking me to put together a devotional for something...long story. But the short part of the story is that this devotional is for teenagers, and I really think this song is it. This song helps me get across the message I want to get across to them.

One of the things I struggle with is a formal quiet time. I don't have a sit down with the Bible every morning, which I guess I should. I try to a lot at night, but I'm rarely successful. But I talk to God all day, every day. And most importantly, I look for him. Everywhere. I try to connect with him constantly. More often than not, I find Him and connect with Him in song. I hear a snippet, hear a word, hear a line, hear a lyric, and I get to thinking. It's then that I go to my Bible, to make sense of it all.

I hang out with a group of freshman girls on Sunday nights for what we call Growth Groups. Our student minister is very careful not to call them accountability groups, and I think she's very wise in doing so. Anyways, I also used to have a group of girls my age at my house every Tuesday night, and other various nights of the week as the need or whimsy struck us all. The major frustration that I get/got from both groups is that they didn't see God or hear from Him. Ever.

I've never understood that. I can't say that I always "saw" God, because I didn't always look for Him. He is and was and always will be, so it's clearly me that had the problem. I am not able to go days or minutes or seconds without hearing from God or seeing Him or getting together with Him. But, see...I know where to look, and I know where to listen. And it's not KLTY.

I really think that my teenagers think that the only place you can find God is heavily emmersed in the Christian culture, and yes, you can see Him there, but my life is not heavily emmersed in the Christian culture, nor is theirs, which is why I think they don't necessarily look for Him, and thus, don't listen for Him and find Him. Let me stop now and say that I could totally be wrong, and God and Jesus could be upstairs having a hearty laugh at me, which I suspect they do quite often.

See, there's bad stuff out there. Bad movies, bad songs, bad stuff. But there's good stuff out there too. And just because it doesn't come in a pretty pink package with the words "From God" on it, via KLTY or Focus on the Family, we're afraid of it, and can't think it to be of any worth. But it is! 1 Corinthians 3:21 says that "everything belongs to you." It was written to a church that was getting in arguments over whose preacher was better. Paul says "it doesn't matter! Truth is truth, no matter who says it!" And he's right. Truth is Truth, no matter what. And if we find Truth in a Nirvana song, it's not any more or less truthful than if we find it in a hymn written 8 million 7 years ago.

So back to the devotional part of the thing. I want my girls to know that they can find God anywhere, and that any time that they connect with Him and feel close to Him is a quiet time. Any sit down with the Bible is good, but that's not the only way to connect with God. And, you don't have to be Sally Spiritual Sunshine to have a sit down with God. You can be doused in mud or soaked in bleach, or any of the other things Nirvana says.

1 Corinthians 3:21-23 (NLT)
"So don’t boast about following a particular human leader. For everything belongs to you—whether Paul or Apollos or Peter, or the world, or life and death, or the present and the future. Everything belongs to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God."