Posts Tagged With: life

Made to Fly!

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Tamar

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” 2 Corinthians 5:17

I was born on October 25, 1979 as Tyra Tamar Bosworth. For as long as I can remember I have been a Christian. I’ve always gone to church regularly, Vacation Bible School, I even went to church camp in the summers, you name it, I did it. In the fifth or sixth grade I was baptized and have since then grown up following Christ. And I really honestly thought I knew Him. In high school and college when life got tough I always pulled out my Bible to seek comfort. I was never much into praying that often to be honest, but occasionally I would. After I had our youngest child and we decided it was best for me to stay home with the kids full-time I started attending Bible studies. And honestly that’s when things really started changing for me. I started seeking a relationship with the God of my religion, taking Him off the shelf of my life and turning Him into the shelf on which everything else in my life now sits.

There were several big milestone moments along the way that really changed me. The first was when I made the realization that God is in control. (1 Peter 3:21b-22) There are no such things as coincidences in the life of a believer, because Jesus has complete authority! Well, this really changed my perspective on life a LOT. No coincidences in my life means that everything that has ever happened to me or ever will happen to me has a purpose. Everything! Which made me start thinking back… everything Lord? Everything? Hmmmmm…..

Then there was the day that changed my life forever and I’ll never forget it as long as I live. The day God spoke to me. ME! Well, more accurately, it was the day that I recognized my Shepherd’s voice for what it was. I was sitting at my dining room table doing my Bible study and I couldn’t get my friend Jill out of my head. She had, at the time, three rowdy boys and she was in a state of frustration with them, she needed a break! So I started praying for her and crying out for God to send someone to lighten her load for a while. And I kid you not, clear as day I heard (not with my ears, but with my heart in my head) “Well, YOU could take her kids for her!” I prayed something like “Hey, yeah, I COULD do that… wait a minute! Who said that???” It was then, in that moment that God finally came to life for me. You see, He’d always been there, had always been active, had always been talking to me, but I wasn’t listening for His voice and He wasn’t REAL to me. He was some guy up in heaven unreachable on His throne. Someone I could send messages to and read about, but know Him, like I know my husband? No, that wasn’t the God I had learned about my entire life. But that day, I realized that all those things I’ve read about in the Bible, they’re real too! They’re not just stories, they’re the Truth. And the things that God was willing to do for all of them… He’s willing to do for me too! For YOU! Yaweh sent Jesus so that we could have LIFE, and LIFE lived out to the fullest through a relationship with Him – made possible by the Holy Spirit. It’s through the Holy Spirit that two-way communication with God is possible. The Holy Spirit can only speak what Yaweh tells Him – He is the internet cable between God and humanity.

About a year ago I was baptized in the Holy Spirit and I now speak in a language that my brain doesn’t know. Yet my spirit, my tongue and the rest of my body sure do. I was having trouble writing that morning and a friend of mine came by to drop off some note cards she had for me. She asked if she could pray for me and the book. So I sat down at my desk and she laid her hands on my shoulders to pray, but she couldn’t think of any words to say. She didn’t know what to pray. So she asked if I would mind if she prayed in tongues. Now, up to that very moment I thought that was something reserved for Bible times, I had no idea it was even still possible today! I said “sure” in absolute amazement and she started praying. The most beautiful sounds just poured out of her lips like a gentle rain, quiet and peaceful and a little like bells. It was a language my ears had never heard before, but my spirit sure had and it responded! It knew and understood every word she spoke even though neither one of us had any clue what she was saying! When she finished, my whole person felt tingle-y and peaceful, like I’d been touched by an angel or something it was amazing. A little later that day she called me about some off the wall thing and the conversation turned to her prayer and how awesome it was to hear her pray in the Spirit (Romans 8:26-27 “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.”) And she said “You know, you can pray like that too.” “WHAT!?! Really? How?” “You just ask Him.” (Luke 11:13 “If then you, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”)

You see, everything God gave the apostles, He wants to give to us too. The apostles needed the Baptism of the Holy Spirit to tell the world (including those who spoke other languages) about the good news that an intimate relationship with God Almighty is possible! You see, it’s not ALL about heaven. Sure that’s a big part, but it’s not everything, there’s MORE! God doesn’t just want to talk to us when we get to heaven, He wants to talk to us NOW! He wants a relationship with us NOW! When Jesus died on the cross, He “gave up His Spirit” (Matthew 27:50) essentially releasing the Holy Spirit to come and dwell literally within our bodies. But only when we desperately want Him to. God doesn’t force us to have a relationship with Him, it’s all up to us. When you’re baptized in the Holy Spirit it’s like going from a dial-up internet connection to high-speed! It’s not really all about the speaking in a different language, that’s just simply giving the Spirit a voice. No, being Baptized in the Holy Spirit is a whole new level of complete-surrender and intimacy. You become much more sensitive to God’s gentle nudging and to His voice. And with practice listening and obeying it just keeps getting louder.

I didn’t just want to be Baptized in the Holy Spirit, I needed to be! As someone called to public ministry, I needed to surrender my mouth (especially) and my whole body to God. But I couldn’t reach my promised land by crawling on the ground like a caterpillar. No, just like a caterpillar isn’t made to roam on the ground his entire life, I, just like every other human on earth, was made to fly! We can only get to our promised calling by surrendering our lives and our bodies to the One who made them in the first place. So just like a caterpillar wraps itself up into a cocoon I asked the Holy Spirit to come and wrap me up in His love. To change me from the inside out and make me into what He intended me to be. And when I started to emerge from His tender hands, I just wasn’t the same anymore. Just like the caterpillar, my transformation took a lifetime, 31 years to be exact. 31 years of learning and growing until the time came when God called and said “You’ve been a caterpillar bound to the ground your entire life… How would you like for me to teach you how to fly?”

Siiiiiiigh….. and now, I am!

— Tamar Knochel: The Butterfly 🙂

“I will give you a new heart and put a new Spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” Ezekiel 36:26-27

“You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” Ephesians 4:22

“I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Matthew 3:11

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Life Happens

Posted on August 13, 2011 by Tamar

“So Boaz said to Ruth, “My daughter, listen to me. Don’t go and glean in another field and don’t go away from here. Stay here with my servant girls. Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the girls. I have told the men not to touch you. And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.” At this, she bowed down with her face to the ground. She exclaimed, “why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me – a foreigner?” Boaz replied, “I’ve been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband – how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with a people you did not know before. May the LORD repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.” Ruth 2:8-12

When God blew the breath of life into Adam He was giving him LIFE. Not just a physical temporary life but a LIFE that was intended, created, fashioned specifically for an intimate, one-on-one spiritual relationship with its Creator. We are not humans with a spirit, we are spirit with a temporary body! From day ONE, God created LIFE for humanity as a gift to us. But Eve’s bite from the fruit spoiled that gift. Hallelujah that’s the beginning of the story and not the end! God, crushed at the thought of losing that intimate friendship with humanity sought to resolve the situation. Jesus threw Himself at the Father’s feet and begged to take the punishment we deserve so that the relationship could be restored and life could become a gift again instead of the curse sin had turned it into. Today, when we choose to have a relationship with Christ, we are choosing LIFE.

So many times we say things like “well, that’s life” as if to mean that bad things happen, or, well, that life isn’t a gift.  Every time we say something negative about life itself or any of the things or people within the creation that God gave us as a gift we are literally rejecting His gift to us, shoving it back in His face and telling Him it’s not good enough.

Lord, I don’t know how many times I personally have done this to you, but I know it’s a lot! Lord, I am so sorry, please forgive me for pushing your gift of life back across the table to You. I didn’t mean it! But Lord, the cursed life that I’ve been living, I do reject that. I know that it is not Your intent for us to live in bondage to sin, shame, fear addiction, prejudice, or malice. And instead, through the perfect blood of the Lamb, I claim the LIFE You made me for. The LIFE filled with hope, happiness, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control! The LIFE where I am filled with YOU! Lord, I know that I am a sinner, I am not perfect, but with Your help I can be closer to it. Please Lord Jesus, come and fill me with Your Spirit, please come and fill me with Your fire so that I may know You more. Lord, I want that intimate relationship with You, where I am Your bride and You are my beloved husband. The relationship where I can walk every step of my life in confidence because You are walking with me, through me! Lord, I don’t want to take another single step without You holding my hand and growing old with me, because the best is yet to be! Lord, the best part of getting and being married is knowing this person is going to walk with me for the rest of my life, that they are going to be with me, not just for the big moments when celebrations are in order, but for the everyday moments. For the stolen kisses in the kitchen when no-one is looking. For the moments when the kids are just being cute and you look at each other just to smile and laugh together. Lord, I want THAT kind of intimacy with You. I want those moments where I see a smiley-face in the soap bubbles of a soaking dish and know that it’s You smiling at me. I want those moments where I see a beautiful landscape and can feel You squeezing my hand as I look at it, as if to say, “I made this for you Baby”. I want that with YOU! I want to laugh with You over the silly things that I see in the world around me. I want to enjoy mourning, knowing that this is the only time in my eternal life that I will be doing it, because once we get back home that emotion won’t exist anymore. So I will “take joy” in it now while it lasts, but I promise not to linger in it. So please help me know how long is too long. Lord thank You for such a range of human emotion and how quickly we can swing from one to the next and experience everything in-between! Our human bodies are amazing and I thank You for mine because I am fearfully and wonderfully made!

Oh God how I love You! Thank You for being my LIFE partner and being here with me through it all. The joy and the pain, it truly is all a gift… even if it might not feel like it at the time. Yaweh, I praise Your holy name.

AMEN!

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Life: Stacia’s Story

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Tamar

“A thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy. I have come that they may have life and have it in abundance.” John 10:10 KJV

I have to say that this is one of my FAVORITE verses, right now, because it reminds us that Jesus didn’t die JUST to make sure that we could spend eternity in heaven with Him, which is huge! But He came to give us LIFE! This weekend I fell in love… with a dog. His name is Rumpke – like the dumpster company. Well, as I was perusing the Hamilton County Humane Society website to try and find more information on him I came across the story of another dog. Her name is Stacia. Please take a minute and click here to watch the video of her story.

If you can’t get the link to work, this is Stacia’s story: Stacia, a pit bull, was left at the shelter by her original family, adopted and then shortly thereafter her new family came home one day to find her paralyzed from the waist down. They didn’t have the money to get her treated so they took her back to the Humane Society of Noblesville (a no-kill shelter) where they immediately rushed her over to the vet who did emergency surgery on her ruptured disk. She is currently recovering and undergoing water therapy to try and get the feeling back into her legs and paws so that she’ll be able to walk on all fours again, instead of two legs and two wheels!

In the video, the shelter representative explains how some people have questioned, why spend so much money (aprox. $3,500) on a dog in a shelter? A pit bull in a shelter no less? The first time I watched the video, I didn’t get to hear her response, because I was tearfully responding for her, “BECAUSE IT’S A LIFE!!!!” To so many people, Stacia is just a dog, but to God she’s a LIFE, part of His beautiful creation, and He loves her! Luke 12:6-7 says so: “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” Yet not one of them is forgotten by God, He doesn’t forget the animals. Watching that video really said so much to me about us as humans and the lengths that some of us are willing to go to help someone or something that could never repay us for our kindnesses. Luke 14:12-14 tells us “Then Jesus said to His host, ‘When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.'” The kindness that all the people at the Humane Society (and her previous owners by surrendering her instead of just giving up on her and letting her die) showed Stacia tremendous kindness, kindnesses that she will never be able to repay to them. But God can! Do everything in love, no matter who, or what, it’s for because God sees what is done in secret as well as what is done in public view and has the ability to bless you greatly for it. Take these people as an example! If they are willing to go to such great lengths to give a pit bull in a shelter a second chance at life, then aren’t we just as able to give our fellow human beings a second chance of any kind? God does it for us everyday!

P.S. More good news! Stacia has just been adopted!!!!!!! 😀

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Seeking Him

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Tamar

“Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:33-34)

It’s been a rough week for me; a struggle simply getting back into writing daily. I’ve managed to remember how much I enjoy it and that this is a huge part of what God made me to do. But I was doing it out of a “have-to” attitude which wasn’t working. I’ve learned along life’s path that it’s always best to do the things that God has called you to do (like publishing daily). But I was coming at it from the totally wrong angle! You see God HAS created me to write, but He has not forced me to write. Just like He has created all women to have children, but He never forces them to actually have them (or keep them for that matter). I choose if I want to live out what I have been created to do. I get to choose if I want to be who I was created to be.

I was created to be, among other things, a wife, mother, teacher and writer. And there ARE times when I can manage to successfully do all four at the same time, but it’s not easy. There are times when one of my “hats” has to get taken off and put on a shelf for a while. It doesn’t mean that I don’t still bring my experiences from one area of my life into the others though. In fact, it’s quite the opposite! No, when I put down my pen and pick up a pan I don’t stop being the writer, the thinker, or the lover of Christ. It’s still a critical part of who I am. And when I put down the pans and pick the pen and Bible back up I don’t stop being the mother of my children or the lover of my husband. I’m simply changing my function while still being wholly and completely me. To completely set aside my family to write would be to deny half of myself, and vice versa. It would be impossible for Tamar to exist, because I would then become someone else entirely.

This week my struggle has been finding a good balance between the two halves of myself. And it’s been HARD. I have felt the pressure of the Potter’s hands this week and have tried my hardest to yield willingly to it… sort of. All summer long I’ve been forsaking my God-given gift of writing, as occupation, therapy and relationship with My Lord. I’ve been focusing on my kids and enjoying the summer with them. Which is fine, to a point. But God made it clear to me, that starting August 1st, it was time to stop playing and get back to “work”. And I have… begrudgingly. Like I said, I was coming at it all from the wrong angle; a grumpy and untrusting one.

The first few days I stayed up until REALLY late in the night to write. Then I would end up sleeping half the day away. With two kids at home, that wasn’t working. And then the Holy Spirit stepped in and made me realize that I was staying up late to write because I wasn’t trusting myself or God to A) help me get up early enough to write long enough to get something “worthy” of sending out into cyberspace. B) Or that I was ABLE to even write still – it’s been almost a year since I’ve written anything for others to read. (Remember the pool story from Monday? That was part of it! A fear of writing again.) c) I wasn’t trusting God to watch over my kids while I write. Despite the fact that I normally write while they’re sleeping because that’s when it’s the quietest and I can think.

So, with God’s help I got through all those things and could move on to my next set of issues… my attitude while I was writing. Or rather, I suppose, who I was writing for. I had been writing with the mentality “they’re counting on me to do this.” As if, for some reason your world would stop turning if I failed to get this devotional into your hands first thing in the morning. I have no idea where THAT concept came from! But it probably came from my pride which is rooted in my insecurity. My writing was no longer a gift or an honor; it was my job, my work. And that’s never how God intended our callings to be! Yes, He created us to do work, but not for it to be work. We’re to do everything as if we were doing it for Him. It should never be that we HAVE to work, but rather that we GET to work. (Right Beth?) We don’t HAVE to be parents, we GET to be parents! I don’t have to be a writer, I get to be a writer – EVERY DAY!

But even after all that, my trajectory was still a little off. And the way that God pointed it out to me really got my attention. I have a friend on Facebook that I have never met in person. But in many ways I’m just as close to her as many of the people I see all the time. Simply, because she is my sister-in-Christ and that in itself is an unbreakable bond. One of the things she said recently really struck me. She has been fasting, not to seek God’s will, or His favor or even to repent but to seek HIM.  And it made me question, what is THAT? What IS seeking Him? What do you do? What do you say? How do you go about seeking HIM? And when I prayed about it, that’s when it hit me! THAT’S what TODAY is all about! Not me writing for myself, not me writing for you, but me writing for HIM! Writing down the things that I question and discover along my journey of seeking HIM! FINALLY my trajectory is correct! Or… at least close enough to it to move on.

So, I guess I wrote all that (partially) to tell you this. I am a visual learner and writing things out helps me think because then I can see them. Also, the best way to really learn something is to teach it. So, TODAY is really just my ramblings to try to understand and get to know God more fully, all while you get to read about where God is taking me and what He is teaching me and saying to me. And if you benefit from it, great! And if not, then so be it. From my perspective right now, you all are my accountability group for seeking Him while it is called TODAY (Hebrews 3:13)! J I love you all so desperately! Thank you for allowing God to use you to keep me on track!

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