He Took a Nail For Me

For me, the most horrifying part of the crucifixion is the nails. The very thought of nails going through his hands and feet makes me cringe in pain. When I watch reenactments that have the sound of the hammer and nails, it always brings tears to my eyes. My daughter hates to see blood or pain being inflicted on anyone, and today as we watched an Easter program she hid her eyes. When they were hammering the nails, she said "that doesn't sound like fun." I assured her that it wasn't fun.

It is very humbling to think that Jesus took a nail for me. It wasn't fun, pleasant or the least bit enjoyable. He endured incredible pain, and He did it for me. We have had this week to remember His death and sacrifice. Tomorrow, we can celebrate the victory. Death has died and we are alive because He rose again!

Why is Disability Really on the Rise?

Social Security has been a hot button issue for at least the past two major elections.  It does not matter if you are passionately for it or passionately against it; this government benefit likely affects us all.  This American Life, a radio program of Chicago Public Radio, recently aired a program called “Trends with Benefits” which discussed Social Security disability benefits and how the number has nearly doubled over the last 15 years.  Planet Money’s Chana Joffe-Walt spent six months investigating disability and focused on this one town in Hale County, Alabama, where 1 in 4 of the population are receiving Social Security disability benefits. Despite her in-depth study, it still seems she failed to glean one very important benefit of Social Security disability: the fact that it provides medical insurance. 

My husband is a lawyer and has been representing clients in their appeals for Social Security Disability for over 30 years.  I have worked with him for 20 years and have seen hundreds of cases of disability ranging from the severe to the not so severe.  Yes, there have been a very few people who obtained their disability, and I was not completely convinced that they were completely disabled, but many, many more failed to obtain benefits when they really should have won.  I talk with these people multiple times throughout this process, help in obtaining their medical records, help fill out paperwork and file their appeals online.  Through the years, I have come to realize several problems with the entire disability process.  The next few posts will be about Social Security disability from my viewpoint of 20 years experience working with these types of cases.  

What I have discovered that Joffe-Walt did not is that healthcare reform is absolutely necessary in order to change the future of Social Security disability.  I feel it is the key to reducing applications, reducing payments, and shortening the payout of current payments.  I have seen many people who have been forced to file for disability instead of working in order to obtain medical insurance.  Claimants are forced to remain on disability and not return to work, because of medical insurance.  Without healthcare reform, the number of applications and amount of money spent on disability benefits will only get worse. 

In the next four posts, I plan to answer the following questions:  What is disability? Why is healthcare and medical insurance so important? What causes disabilities? Why do disability benefits seem to be permanent? 

Mirror, Mirror

By: Terry P. Diggs

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
   Who's the fairest of them all?

When the queen asked her mirror that question every morning, the mirror always answered that she was the fairest--until one day when a different answer was returned. That response started a long series of attempts to kill Snow White.

How do we answer that question about ourselves? Most of us put on a veneer of humility, but deep down inside, we think we are better or more deserving of praise than others. "Pride," the Scripture says, "goeth before a fall." I don’t know about you, but the battle against pride and its effects is continuous for me.

Pride interferes with our Christian witness. If we think we, and others, are good, how can we tell others that they are sinners in need of Jesus? If we are better than others, how can we stoop to minister to lower beings? How can we do it effectively?

Pride is really the great sin: it is the sin of thinking we are like God. It is the original sin of Satan. Pride provoked the Jewish leaders to put a contract on the head of Jesus. "The fairest of them all" is never us: it is always Jesus, and we must constantly keep that in mind.

Center of His Will

Many analogies have been made of the potter and clay to Jesus and His creations.  It may seem old and worn out to you, but it came alive to me recently. Hannah bought a little child’s pottery wheel with some of her birthday money, and we were trying to learn how to operate it. We discovered that everything has to be just right in order for the clay to actually become a vessel.  One very important step is for the clay to be in the center of the wheel. If it is off to the side, it won’t work right; it must be in the very center. I thought about us and how we must be in the very center of God’s Will in order for our lives to turn out right. It seems like I surrender and tell God, I want to be like that Godly vessel and I crawl right in the center of His will and then once it gets to spinning, I start crawling back off. 

Another thing we learned was that the clay had to be the right consistency and have the correct amount of moisture,  If it was too wet, it  would slide off.  If it was too dry, it wouldn’t stick to the wheel. If we are properly soaked in God’s Word and have an open communication line with Him, we will be stuck to the center of His Will and when the world gets to spinning crazily, it won’t move us. The devil is good at stealing our time and distracting us, so that we can’t stay focused and fail to study our Bible and pray.  Sometimes the noise of our lives keep us from hearing God's directions. 

What Hinders Your Yes?

"He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." Matthew 10: 36-37

What a weighty scripture!  When I read this, I thought, "how many times have I failed to do what God wanted because of family?" I remember one time answering a question in a Bible Study discussion saying I couldn’t be a missionary in a foreign country because I had a small child, and that I was teaching her about God, which was the most important. My teaching her is of utmost importance, but later I recognized the lunacy of the statement. God brought to mind many missionaries that I have met who have children and are working on the field.  It seems that many of the excuses I use for not doing the work of God are usually connected to my family.  I am very impressed when I see women, men, and children serve God without their wives or husbands or parents. It takes a lot of commitment to stay faithful to God when your spouse or your parents are unbelievers.

 

I think about myself.  I always want to make sure my family is taken care of before I move on to the needs of others.  Yet, I think that God sometimes wants us to sacrifice our comfort for the good of someone else.  I am reminded of the story from my favorite book by Louisa May Alcott, Little Women where Marmee takes their Christmas dinner to the poor family who has nothing.  Many of us would not think of making our own families do without.  We will give so long as we have enough for us first. 

 

Take a moment and think of something God may have been impressing you to do, but you keep saying no. What is holding you back? What is your excuse? He will provide the ability, the courage, and the resources to do it. He will be there with you to protect you and your family as you work for Him, and should you lose your life on this earth, you will have gained an eternal reward that cannot be touched by human hands. The eternal life that Christ has given us will be so much sweeter than this life full of sin, pain, and suffering. Matthew 10:39 says, "He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." Don’t let family hinder you in your service to God.

Your Clothes Can't Save You

Children, for the most part, grow up not knowing that their family unit is not like the other families of the world. From my very earliest memories, I cannot remember ever feeling like I was strange or unlike everyone around me, though I was. I grew up in a fairly rigid religion. I was raised in the Oneness Pentecostal faith, and there was a strict dress code and a lot of other things we did not do. The girls wore dresses to the knees or below, we did not cut our hair or wear make up or jewelry. We did not own a television, go to the movies, or go to sporting events. The list of things I could not do was innumerable, and I could very quickly tell you if it was permitted, but nowhere could you find an actual list. In fact, each church had a different unwritten list and it depended on the desires of the pastor.

My first memory of feeling humiliated because of my religion was in 7th grade. I had attended a Christian school during 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. In 7th grade, I went back to public school, and the very first day I had P.E. The teacher told us we would “dress out” every day in shorts or sweats. I got sick to my stomach because I knew I couldn’t wear those clothes. I went to the teacher and told her that because of my religion, I couldn’t dress out. She wasn’t very happy about it and asked if I could wear shorts under my skirt or culottes. So my mom made me a very unflattering pair of culottes, and I began the torture of P.E. Every day some kid would laugh at my clothes, and they always asked why I didn’t wear shorts or sweats and why I always wore a dress. In high school, kids notice everything about everyone, and there is lots of peer pressure. The fact that I did nothing like everyone else drew constant questions. I really didn’t want to answer them. My faith was all about being different because of how I dressed, and nothing about being different because of my love for Jesus.

The school bus was another place that was horrific for me. Kids made fun of me for being naive and bullied me as much as possible. The most humiliating stuff was saved for the school bus. They would tell people so that I could hear, “don’t hang out with her, they play with snakes,” or “I heard someone went to her church and they got locked in a closet with snakes.” For the record, there were never any snakes at our church, and if we ever saw snakes at home it was after they were dead.

In 11th grade, I was feeling much braver, and most of the kids were used to my religion at this point. I loved to sing, and I was in the choir, but there was a special ensemble, and you had to try out in order to join. I desperately wanted to be a member, so I asked the teacher if I could try out. I immediately sensed that she did not like me. She said, “I guess.” I started singing, and she said with surprise and grudging approval, “you have a nice voice.” So she said I could be a member. For as far back as I could remember, the ensemble had always dressed with the girls in long, black dresses and the boys in tuxedos. On the first day of class, the teacher brought out a catalog and said, “Girls, I think that this year we need to wear pant suits,” and she showed the one she had picked out. The girls all went ga ga over it. I was flabbergasted and again sick to my stomach. After class, I went up to her and told her I could not wear pants because of my religion. I knew that she already knew this, but she said, “okay,” and nothing else.

The next day I was called to the principal’s office. I was terrified, because I never got called into the office. The principal said that Ms. Pat had told him that all the girls wanted these particular pant suits and that I couldn’t wear them. She felt that it wouldn’t look right for me to be wearing something different and wanted me to drop out. I was devastated, but I was so meek and humiliated by the fact that I was different that I just quietly dropped out and never spoke of it to anyone. I am not sure if my parents even knew. Nobody went to school to demand my rights; I just went away. To this day, I get a bad taste in my mouth when I remember this episode.

For so many years, I failed to really share who Jesus was to me because I was so embarrassed by how I looked. I believe that it hampered my witness more than it helped. The dress code was one of the most important parts of my faith. It was a sign of whether I was saved or lost. If you saw a Pentecostal lady in pants or with a haircut, then you would say that they were backslidden and pray that Jesus didn’t come back before they repented. There was no freedom in Jesus–just lots of legalistic rules.

When I was about twenty-three years old, I quit adhering to the dress code of my church. I had married a Baptist man, and started attending church with him. I still felt guilty, though, and was afraid that God might be displeased. Sometime in 1998, I was sitting in my bedroom folding clothes when the song Mercy Said No by Greg Long came on the radio. It was a “light bulb” moment for me. The words struck me, and it absolutely changed my whole theology in a single instant.

Chorus
Mercy said no
I'm not gonna let you go
I'm not gonna let you slip away
You don't have to be afraid
Mercy said no
Sin will never take control
Life and death stood face to face
Darkness tried to steal my heart away
Thank you Jesus
Mercy said no
Bridge
And now when heaven looks at me
It's through the blood of Jesus
Reminding me of one day long ago

The bridge part of the song really clinched it for me. I realized He cannot see my sins, because they are covered by His blood. It just became abundantly clear–Jesus loves me with such a great and massive love. He loves me no matter what. I don’t have to dress a certain way to win His approval. I don’t have to do just the right number of “good” things in order to get to Heaven. If I do something and royally mess up, He isn’t going to give up on me; he isn’t going to let me go. Fifteen years have passed since that day, and I now cannot understand the theology of “losing your salvation.” It is just as foreign to me as eternal security or “once saved, always saved” used to be. I am now truly free from condemnation and shame, because I know I have the forever love of Jesus.

Jesus Loves You!

I was reading a magazine several years ago and there was testimonial from a woman who was saved later in life. She started out by saying “My husband and I were in our 40’s when we went to a marriage seminar and learned that Jesus loved us and we were saved.” My heart was pierced, because this lady had lived in the United States of America for over 40 years before she heard Jesus loved her. I thought about how I have known about and felt the love of God all of my life. I can’t remember when I learned Jesus loved me; I have just known from the womb. I grew up singing about it, hearing about, and reading about, and my daughter has been bestowed with that very same blessing.

When we think about evangelism, we sometimes think we have to get into deep theological discussions with people. We sometimes shy away from witnessing because we might not “have all the answers.” I challenge you to not forget to simply tell them “Jesus loves you”. It seems so simple that it couldn’t possibly work, but what if they have never been told? What if the concept of anyone loving them is so foreign that it would rock their world. Everyone, at their very core, needs the love of Jesus. We need Jesus’ love more than we need money, food, air, or water. He is our Savior!

Winning Is More Fun

Hannah Diggs is the blonde in the middle

My daughter started a new school last year and was able to join the Quizbowl team.  Last year the team didn't do very well and they didn't win any trophies.   This year they have two new members and have also become more acustomed to the pressure of the game.  So far this year they have played in two tournaments and placed 4th out of 16 teams both times.  Hannah has been so ecstatic that they won a trophy--it didn't matter that it was 4th place--they got a trophy.  When the team is winning, it makes me want to stand up and cheer and scream.  Which is not acceptable at a Quizbowl tournament, and really stinks.  The other day Hannah and I realized something--Quizbowl is more fun when you win.  There is something innately competitive within us.  We like to win, and nobody plays to lose.  The cool thing about being a Jesus follower is that you can always be a winner.  It may not mean you will get a cool trophy or blue ribbons, but you will always be a winner with Jesus.  So if you want to have more fun in life--follow Jesus.

Who Owns You?

I saw this poem on Facebook and was immediately struck in the heart, because I do not believe that I can claim my life as my own.  I believe that I gave my life to God many years ago and He owns me and He has all rights to do as He wishes with my life.  I have seen this saying before, always posted by Christians and it really bothers me.  I have decided to rewrite the poem to be more accurate. 

"The best day of my life is the one where I decided that my life was not my own.  No apologies or excuses, only God to lean on, rely on, and praise.  The gift of life He gave me, and it is an amazing journey.  He alone is responsible for the quanity and quality of it.  The day I gave Him my life is the day my life really began!"

Can You Hear God?

For thus saith the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel; In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: Isaiah 30:15

I have been thinking a lot lately about silence. I have discovered that I am addicted to noise and having my brain engaged and focused on something at all times. God has been trying to speak to me about listening. We can’t hear if we aren’t silent. It really isn’t a conversation when we do all the talking or we are focused on something else. I think we spend much of our relationship with Christ just talking to Him and never listening to Him. We tell him what we want Him to do; we tell Him what He needs to do; sometimes we ask him what He wants us to do, and then we get up and turn on the television or look at our phone. Maybe He wants us to just sit in silence and listen.

How do you listen to God? Are you like Samuel, who didn’t know who was calling out to him? Are you like Jonah, who ran away when he heard God’s plan? Are you like Peter–in denial? Are you like Sarah, who laughed at God's plan and came up with her own alternative plan? Or are you like Abraham when he offered Isaac–immediately obedient? I know for me, I always second guess the voice of God.  Was it His voice or was it the crazy loon in my head?  Surely God doesn't want me to do that.  How do we know if it is really God and not some harebrained scheme of our own creation? 

In the past two weeks, I keep reading and hearing things about the hungry people of the world. Everywhere I turn, it seems that I am being bombarded with doing something about the hungry.  I am feeling so convicted and guilty about the amount of food I have and I just can no longer ignore that there are literally hundreds of millions of people going hungry everyday.   One way we can know it is God's voice is its repetitiveness.  In the Bible, when God is trying to make a point, he repeats things.  When you seem to hear, see, and run into something at every turn and it also agrees with the word of God, then maybe you should pay attention.

Another way we can judge if it's God's voice is that it will always agree with His Word.  God will never ask you to do something contrary to His Word.  He is the same yesterday, today and forever it says in Hebrews 13:8.  A good sign is if it is something that Jesus was passionate about. Jesus was passionate about feeding people. There are two different miracles in the Bible that speak of feeding multitudes with a small amount. In the Lord's prayer He says "Give us this day our daily bread". He knows that we must have food to live, and he cares about the needs of his people. Why am I so blessed, and others are not? I believe it is so that I can bless those who have not.

Jesus was passionate about loving people especially the needy people.  This world has taught us to take care of ourselves and not bother others, but that is not what God had in mind.  He wanted us to all take care of each other.  Sometimes a person will pop into my head and I will stop and pray for them, and then I may even call them, send them a card, or contact them in some form.  Stop right now and ask God to speak to you, to lead and guide you into what He wants you to do.  Afterwards, make a point to listen and then trust that you heard from God.  Let's be obedient to the words He speaks to our hearts.