My One Word: Meekness

Some of you may be avid K-love listeners like myself and have heard of the "My One Word" ministry, but for those of you that haven't...

My one word is a ministry that encourages people to pick a word or phrase to encompass their goal or mission for the year 2010. Instead of coming up with a list of dos and don'ts they suggest picking one word that would transform the way you think and that would seep into every aspect of your life. I really like this idea because it goes along with my new goal of simplifying my life. So I encouraged my small group to do the same thing. We each came up with one word that we wanted to live by for 2010 and a few weeks ago we spent time sharing our words.

I spent a lot of time thinking about my word. I tossed around lots of different words (contentment, purpose, diligence etc) and did lots of research on the website and in my bible concordance. But like all good things, my word just fell into my lap one day when I wasn't even looking for it. For the past few months I have been reading the book The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer (those of you who know the book know it isn't very long, and shouldn't take several months to read, but I kept forgetting about it and losing it in my night stand under all the other books I was reading). One day, just before our small group meeting about our words, I read the chapter Meekness and Rest. Now, I must be honest, before I read the chapter I didn't really understand what the word meek means. The most common reference of meekness I could think of is in Matthew 5 "The meek will inherit the earth," and I always use to think "well I am glad the meek get something!" But Tozer opened my eyes!

The other reference Jesus makes to meekness comes in Matthew 11 "Come to me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and lean on me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden s light" (KJV) In this verse Jesus links the idea of being meek to having rest. Now meekness is hard to wrap your head around, but I can sure understand rest, and that is something that I want!

Tozer goes on to talk about how having an attitude of meekness helps us to give up our burdens. The burdens that prevent us so often from rest are pride, pretense and artificiality. Tozer goes on to explain each of these (check out the book if you are interested, chapter 9). The premise of the chapter is that meekness allows you to stop caring about what the world thinks of you and realize that "In myself nothing, in God everything." Meekness does not mean being overly humble and lowly, and acting like you are worthless. Quite the contrary. Meekness makes you bold and courageous in Christ, because you have let go of the biggest burden, Pride. Tozer says it best

"The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. Rather, he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has accepted God's estimate of his own life. He knows he is as week and helpless as God has declared him to be, but paradoxically, he knows at the same time that he is, in the sight of God, more important than angels. In himself, nothing, in God everything."

So this year I am striving to take on meekness. It is an unbelievably huge goal, and I know that at the end of the year, I will still have so much work ahead of me. But I am going to take it one day at a time, try to give up the burden of pride and pretense and take on the easy yoke of Christ. I will try to be bold in my faith realizing that my worth is in Christ alone. Hopefully this will help me find rest in Christ in the midst of my busy life.

Winter Wonderland

We finally got a decent snow.. although to be honest I would have been okay with now snow at all. Like most of the rest of the country east of Indiana, it started during the day Friday and continued on through the night. By Saturday morning we had about 6 inches of heavy snow on the ground and trees. Daniel and I took a walk late this morning to enjoy the snow. I realized that since we moved here we haven't really 'interacted' with the snow at all. Partly because it doesn't snow that much, and partly because we live in an apartment and don't have to shovel and there really isn't any sledding around here (too flat!). We took some pictures of the 'winter wonderland,' and thought you might want to see what our 'neighborhood' looks like.