As a followup to yesterday’s post entitled Extravagant Love, here is a wonderful, simple song by Casting Crowns.

“Your Love Is Extravagant” 1

Your love is extravagant
Your friendship, it is intimate
I feel like moving to the rhythm of Your grace
Your fragrance is intoxicating in our secret place
Your love is extravagant

Spread wide in the arms of Christ is the love that covers sin
No greater love have I ever known You considered me a friend
Capture my heart again

Spread wide in the arms of Christ is the love that covers sin
No greater love have I ever known; You considered me a friend

Todd Hunter’s Our Favorite Sins: The Sins We Commit & How You Can Quit

Diving into Hunter’s book gives us freedom to acknowledge our struggles…

“Beating temptation requires struggle because it always involves sorting out rightly ordered desires for good and godly things from our disordered desires for wrong things. We often experience these disordered desires as our most powerful and deeply rooted desires. Uprooting disordered desires involves personal, psychological, and spiritual suffering.”

…struggles that don’t come easy and temptations that don’t fall willingly…

I grew up in suburban Chicago with my Mom and Dad, and sister, Kristie.

Looking for Faith

Our family has Lutheran roots, but we were not regular church attendees.

When I was seven years old I was invited by my neighbors to Grace Community Church. 

John Schulmeister was the first person I remember hearing say, “Jesus Christ died for your sins.” That night I asked Jesus to forgive my sins.

I remember it seemed like an obvious decision. I knew that I had sinned. I trusted that Jesus was willing to forgive my sins, and asked him to do so.

Shame Lays In The Shadows  

Shame waits.  Watching.  Looking for an opportunity; to pounce!

Shame, researcher Brene Brown explains, “is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection.”  That “there [is] something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won’t be worthy of connection.”

Shame tells us we will, and should, be rejected by others.

Brown goes on to explain that the “only people who don’t experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection…we all know that feeling: ‘I’m not blank enough. I’m not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough.’ ” 1

We’ve had a garage sale at our house this week.

I’ve noticed two things that disturb me. 

First, far too many of the things in our house arrived in our house because of my greed. 

Second, I am not alone.  Many of our customers bought with greedy abandon.

“For the LOVE of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And some people, craving money, have … pierced themselves with many sorrows…

so run

from all these evil things.” *

Greed is enticing.
Greed is deceitful.
Greed is deceptive.
Greed is a trap.