Rethinking Everything
Living and enjoying NOW
is the fulfillment!
Waiting on another event,
another revelation,
another time or another place,
another advancement or
another location,
puts your hope in “another.”
It is now, not another!
It is found in the I Am, not the other.
Do you believe it?
Wynema Clark – 5/9/2019
There are so many things that I want to tell young people. That time in life when you are searching for meaning, looking for your place, trying to fit in. If you will give me your ear, I promise I will not judge. Here are a few suggestions that may make the journey a little less painful.
1. Pain is normal. Everyone feels it. Don’t run from pain, lean into it and allow yourself to take shape. Life is a series of ups and downs, without the downs you wouldn’t appreciate the ups and it’s the ride that will color your life and make you strong. This idea that you are the only one feeling what your feeling is common. Those feelings are very real and in some cases frightening, it’s ok. You are not in this fight alone. It is in these times that you reach beyond yourself, beyond your reasoning and your age to something higher. It’s now that you begin to lean on and trust your creator. God equipped you with everything you need and even when you can’t see it or feel it, trust Him. He has got you, just trust Him. Tell Him you trust Him, give the pain to Him, give the confusion, the heartache, the fear to Him and trust that He has you.
2. You will make mistakes, it’s a part of the growing process. No one on the planet can do it all right. Be willing to acknowledge your need for help. There is nothing shameful or weak in needing help with things. Anyone that tells you that you shouldn’t ask questions and get help is doing damage, don’t listen, don’t be a part of the lie. It is this very willingness to admit your weakness that brings you your greatest strength. When you are weak He is strong. God isn’t afraid of your weakness, He knows you are imperfect, He is cool with that. He made you so you will trust Him, not so you will do it all yourself. Trust Him and at the same time allow others to be used by Him to help you.
3. Your identity is not found in labels. No matter what label you have been given, whether good or bad, whether positive or negative. You may be gifted and talented, you may have ADHD, you may be athletic, you may be musical, and you may have no idea at all what you are. These things do not identify you. What identifies you comes from where you get your life. As a believer your life is not music, athletics, sexuality, diagnosis, these are not your life. These are things your life deals with, but who you are is who Christ is. Who you are is loved, forgiven, new and right, just to name a few. In fact, Christ is your life. Recognize that, acknowledge that and the labels and the diagnosis are just a part of your journey. Enjoy the journey, but don’t mistake those things for your life. Someday the athletics will end, the talent will fade, the diagnosis will not be such a burden, but Christ will always be your life, allow Him to live through you.
4. If you are in a situation and something doesn’t feel right, listen to that and act on it. Trust your heart. Listen to the still small voice in your heart and allow it to guide you. It will save you from mistakes, hurt and disappointment. Listen to those who have had this journey already, people like your grandparents. Respect their knowledge and their years. They may have different views than you, but try and see the world through their eyes. You don’t have to agree, but listen, respect and give them your time. Theirs is limited.
5. Finally, when you are laying in your bed at night with the lights out and your eyes closed, think about Christ life moving through your hormones and your veins. See His light transforming you, see yourself swimming around in it. Drink it in. Try and imagine the depth of the love that He has for you, with no regard for faults, or labels. Accept that love, see yourself running in a wide-open field of it. Then wake up knowing that His life is your life, His strength is your strength, His peace is your peace, His mind is your mind and go conquer the day!
Wynema I Clark – 4/24/2017
It is in my alone-ness that God and I communicate the best. In the quiet of my evening, when my day has unfolded and my concerns or request are raw and laid bare. As I finish up my day, we talk all while I clean the kitchen or wash my face.
I also like to walk either alone or with my pups in tow. No music or podcast or sermons. Nothing to place my concentration on or distract me from where my thoughts are. Maybe family concerns or things happening with my friends and we talk about it. Even my own personal anxieties or feelings of inadequacy I notice in the quiet. Those I share with Him and He often reminds me of the truth or highlights a lie that I’ve allowed in.
In the quiet I can really focus on where my thoughts and feelings are settling. If I am emotional in certain thoughts and why that particular thought elicits such emotion, the Holy Spirit gently and quietly points out the truth and where it fits or doesn’t fit with who I am.
Sometimes my feelings are strictly based on lack of sleep or hormones. In these I am given grace. Those are physical and may not be based on a lie, but physiology. I remember the difference between eternal and temporary and I am thankful for the temporary and I allow myself to feel it and then let go.
Sometimes I even embrace the highs and lows for a time, to enjoy the range of emotions associated with being alive. It allows me a healthy, honest physiological experience in the moment.
I am thankful for a full range of emotions. I am thankful to my Father for being a woman.
Wynema I Clark
When you know Jesus, as He is, and how complete His work actually was, and that His life is present within you, then confidence and security are natural. You do not fear science, you do not fear intellectual thought, you do not fear cultural change. Because your hope is in Christ, your security is in something that is eternal. Where there is security in Christ there is confidence and out of confidence is progress!
Do not mistake the term “know Christ” as being saved. You can be fully and completely saved and loved and headed to Heaven and not fully know what happened at the cross and the reality of his life within you. You can be a Christian and very, very insecure. That was me most of my life. My dad used to say that we start our Christian walk at the finish line. I thought I knew what he meant but it wasn’t till I was in my forties that I even began to understand it. In fact, I’m still getting a grasp of it today.
What I see as the central key to an inward grasping of the person and work of Christ, is the cross. It was the single moment in time when God took upon himself, the death of us all. He became for us the sin and took the wages of it, which was death, that we all were destined for. He fulfilled the requirements of a law that, within humanity, could not be fulfilled, and nailed it all to the cross. He died the death of all humanity. God poured out his love on this world by receiving the consequences of something we had not even been born into yet and He did it so completely that we never have to question its validity. We never have to question the scope of its power. He was raised because it was finished, he was raised because you were justified, He was raised because the job was done. We just simply have to believe it. And by believing, we enter into it. His history becomes ours.
When you believe it, the adventure truly begins. When you believe, you get it all. He took our old life and we get to live from His life. You actually begin the journey with everything you will ever need for life and Godliness. The process is understanding it. It is renewing our mind to the totality of it. It is exercising faith in the reality of it everyday. Putting our hope in it, our confidence in it and out of that is a security so relevant that rest in it, produces progress. Where else can progress be made from resting?
That life within you becomes your reference point in times of fear, that life within you becomes your mental stability in circumstances that are beyond your control. His work so complete and His life so present that greater is He that is within you than what is in this world. It’s not something we have to make true by our faith it is something that already is true so we just put our faith in it. It’s just that simple!
Wynema I Clark
From Adam to Christ
From death to life
From old to new
From darkness to light
From works to rest
From law to grace
From judgment to righteousness
From exhausted to seated
From me to Him
From busy to content
From do to done
From anxiety to peace
From religion to relationship
From “what’s next” to “what’s finished”
From “have to” to “want to”
From temporal to eternal
From glory to glory to glory
Wynema Clark 5/26/15
Walking in the spirit doesn’t mean doing churchy things. Doing churchy things can and often is very very fleshy. You know as well as I that the more you do the more you feel you have to do. If you pray an hour you feel two is better. If you give there is always more needed and if you go to classes there is always another class to take. Then have you ever tried to step away from these things? Yikes watch out because forget what you have done it’s a perpetual state of do do and give me, give me, give me. This is the life of your everyday enthusiastic church goer. This life is exhausting!
When your churchy actions are done to gain something from God or even keep something bad from happening then you are depending on what you do and that is walking in the flesh. By definition walking in the flesh is dependance on you and your actions and walking in the spirit is dependence on Christ, who He is and what He has already done.
Walking in the spirit is very simply resting in the finished work of Christ that has already been given to you when you believe. That includes righteousness, favor and blessing. All of this in Christ now, today without doing a single churchy thing. It is faith and rest “in Him” and what He already accomplished. See “you” died with Christ (Colossians 2:20, Romans 6:8, 2 Corinthians 5:14) and then Galatians 2:20 says he gave us Christ life and it’s out of His life that we live. Do you think God is counting how many times Christ is going to church or taking communion? No way, Jose! And His life is your life. That is the life of grace instead of law.
This isn’t laziness or doing nothing, this is the capacity to actually be more productive doing what you were put on this planet to do. It’s the most natural way to live (as a spirit being) and it is all from a place of rest.
Now before you run to FB to set me straight, think of the story of Rachel and Leah. Jacob fell in love with Rachel and worked for seven long hard years to have her. In Hebrew Rachel means “ewe or lamb”. So Jacob worked for the lamb (see the picture). Only when you work to gain the lamb you wake up with Leah. What! After seven years of hard labor Jacob woke up on the wedding night with Leah. Leah in Hebrew means “weary”. That is a dirty rotten trick, but it happened. And that is what you get when you work for the lamb you get weary. After that Laban gives Rachel to Jacob and Jacob works seven years because he has her. So you can work to get and end up weary or you can work because you have and end up at rest. God’s plan is good!
This story illustrates to us that when you work to get you will end up weary. Or you can realize that the lamb is yours, that He loves you already and gave His life as you and for you and to you. The truth is you will get more done from love than from fear and obligation. It isn’t about your churchiness but about His life in you.
Not feeling all that poetic
But having much to say
From a passion rising briskly
Like the ocean to the bay
Is the love of Christ my Savior
As my eyes are opened wide
To His mercy and His kindness
And the life He does provide
So complete is His provision
So entire is His being
That it feels the nooks and crannies
And awakens me to seeing
Even with my body weakened
And on earth I live today
His life is like the ocean
And my life is like the bay
It will never be depleted
It will never cease to be
It’s a life that lives forever
It’s His life that lives in me.
So I rest in this knowing
I am righteous, I am pure
I am ever in His pleasure
And poetically secure.
I sigh from relief
Now my mind can rest
The work is complete
Give me a spiritual blood test.
Cause I’ve been re-gene-arated
That old man Is dead.
That old way of doing things
That depended on me
Was cut out, extracted, and hung on a tree.
And what came alive the day I believed
Was a life so perfect so connected with God
That people either applaud or call it a fraud.
But I know the truth, I’m confident and sure
That the life I’ve been given it’s like haute couture
It’s like a direct line from Heaven
Like peace undefined,
Like organic and holy like a branch and a vine.
So don’t worry, or doubt but rest in this fact
That the mysteries been solved,
the code has been cracked
Your not whack, So stand up put your shoulders back
You’re the righteousness of God, so walk like a boss
Cause it’s all about Jesus and what he finished at the cross!
Wynema Clark
June 18, 2014
Life Without Definition 