A friend and I talked today over a chocolate-cappuccino muffin and a crossword puzzle. We talked about those things, vices really, which hold us back from fully entering into those who we're called to be. We talked about the things which haunt us and hinder us from living life completely focused on the Lord. We talked about the difficulty of surrendering and the joy at relinquishing, but how that joy isn't enough to push us to surrendering all the more quickly. It only looks easy from hindsight.

I've made a few monuments in my life, piles of sins that look like relationships, music, character, habits, and books. I've piled the stones of "look what God has done" and I've stood on that pile and known Christ more with each addition. But sometimes I have to take one stone out of that erected pillar and dust it off. I have to remember what the problem was and remember how good the Lord is to me. I have to testify again of my own aversion to its absence in my life and how it's as tasteless to me now as the stone I'm holding. Sometimes that testimony hurts. Maybe it hurts because it's a shameful past, or a recent one; maybe it hurts because it's transparency and seeing through things means really seeing it all.

I shared something painful last Sunday with some girls at my church. I confessed something that few knew and it felt good to let them know. Not because I felt its pressing need to be told, but because those monumental pillars in our lives are testimonies of the cleansing power in transparency and, which is more, the testimony of God's full goodness to us.

I took some of those stones out today and I'll probably take out a few more in the next couple years -- opportunities to share are many and my calling is no less than to tell.

Oh that You would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at Your presence. . . when You did awesome things which we did not expect. You came down and the mountains quaked at Your presence. . . You meet him who rejoices in doing righteousness, who remembers You in Your ways! Isaiah 64.1,3,5