Small Belle Speaks

The Wonders of His Love

2011-12-20T10:43:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas dearly loved family and friends,

I was talking to a friend the other day who had had a conversation with someone who was kind of anti-Christmas letter and cards. To her they seem pretentious and say, "hey look at us and our perfect family." Part of me understands, because we mostly all send pictures standing close, happy and smiling with the glossy print shimmering off the pages. My friend simply responded that she liked getting them and sending them because she looked forward to seeing pictures of her family and friends, whom she loves and enjoys. I liked her simple answer to why we like to send them. Enjoying one another. And though I know that some send cards and updates without a thought, and some even send them to put their best on display, others send them with a tenderhearted intent to cheer and send their Merry Christmas greetings to those they truly hope enjoy the joy of the season. I believe that is our intent and as I write on behalf of our family in order to give testimony to our lives and also give our thanks to the Lord, who has graciously led our rambuncious clan another year with his kindness. So with that thought, I write on about the lives of five people who have lived and breathed and laughed and struggled through and embraced another 365 days of the gift of life.

Jason and I have the great honor of knowing, enjoying, and parenting Kanah, Grace and Salem. In the Bible, the apostle Paul refers to people in the church as "my joy and my crown, my glorious ones in whom is all my delight." God has given us these little people to love and steward and lead and we are to lay our lives down for them. Taking care of them IS our joy, our reward, our delight. They are that special. And on days I totally forget that, the Lord is gracious to eventually remind me again and bring me back to gratitude for them and all He gets to teach me because they exist. I never knew that more than just being thankful to the Lord for what I am learning by being a parent, that I would also be thankful TO my children, for how I get to grow and who I am becoming through the refinement of each and every day. We can either live in such a way as to embrace this change the Lord purposes, or else we can just sort of get through it and avoid the painful, intrusive growth. By his grace we are learning, and there is so much joy in that.

I heard a song by Ed Cash the other day that reminded me of Salem so much called Firecracker Boy. Here's a piece:

He was a fire cracker boy. Dreaming about all his new toys
And the love his family had
A fire cracker boy
Surrounded by tremendous joy
Shining eyes were in this lad

When our kids go to bed at night, we're so tired. But then minutes later we're talking about them and soon we're peeking in on them and staring at their sleeping, wondrous faces. Salem is so full of life and energy and muscle :). We do not think he knows how to walk; he can only run and dart and spin. He is so silly and funny and goofy even at 2 1/2, making the girls laugh and mommy shake her head continually. Jason hopes one day that the kids will want to climb mountains with him, but I am pretty sure by 3, Salem could dart up a moutain side with just his milk sippy cup tucked in the back of his pants and some goldfish in his pockets. His naps are long gone now and so apparently he was made for long days of fun and playtime, because he has not looked back to his baby days. He thinks he is a triplet with Kanah and Grace (and because he's gaining on them in height, I have actually been asked that multiple times). He surprises us because he also loves coloring every detail of a page and doing puzzles, often requesting help to do difficult ones with my help even though they are way over his head. He is confident and fearless. He is Salem the brave. Jason and I pray for Salem, that the Lord would use him as one who leads in humility and truth and love. We love our firecracker boy and he is a glorious instrument in our lives to keep us young and passionate for life and off the couch in general.

When the girls were babies I could barely envision them being two, much less having long legs and hair down their backs and putting clothes too small for them in boxes that I never thought they would be big enough for in the first place. The other day Jason called me from Target double checking what size Christmas dresses he should get, and I realized he was shopping in the girls' section, and not in the toddler section. I was dumbfounded when he got home and they actually were the right size. They are 4 1/2 and they can wrap their legs around my back and seem long when I snuggle them and do many things on their own. They take their dishes to the sink, they wash their hands, they help clean up, they fold and put away their own clothes before bed (I am wondering how long they will ask to do that...) and Kanah even helped me put all the address labels on the back of our Christmas card envelopes. They remind me of things and help me find things and help their little brother get his shoes on and cross the street. Young Girls. We have girls who are speaking like we do, they are learning to write, playing elaborate pretend, socializing, and are participating in conversations over meals with us. And now they are in school. They have so enjoyed their class, crafts, music, chapel, and gymnastics. My little darlings are not early risers so on preschool days when I have to awaken them at 7:15, they are just completely OUT, but they have not once said that they do not want to go to school as I move them along to get ready. They love learning, love their teachers and enjoy community. A memorable moment this year was the first week of preschool, when Grace said to me from the back seat "I have a friend at school!" (Enter the feeling of the sweet heart pains of a mother's heart) and then the next week to seem shyly greet their new friends at school while they hid by my side. We enjoy the fellowship of these little creations who are no longer babes in any sense.

Grace is as lovely as ever. I still feel that the Lord knew that her name was perfectly suited to her and we would never have been able to guess "who" was Kanah (whose name reminds us of Jesus' miracles, as is she, and the word itself means 'of a humble place') and "who" was Grace (whose name means 'undeserved gift'), but the Lord enabled us to name them as he made them. She is so kind and gentle and out of all of us, she BEST teaches the rest of us in the family how to be gracious, patient and loving. I learn from her quietness, the way she allows others their turn, and how she is aware of their needs. She is usually the first to run get the blanket and stuffed animal of a sibling crying from falling down. She's helpful, running this and that upstairs for me, and responds with only a gentle rebuke because her heart is pierced easily. We have learned to be different with her, to meet her with a softer tone, and to keep our ears open for her voice over all the noise and commotion. Her preschool teacher told us at the conference that when Grace talks she has learned to listen, because when she does choose to speak up she has something important to say and you need to stop and listen to her. This is true. And speaking of her voice, she just has the most precious little voice and Jason and I just treasure up her little girl way of saying everything and I mourn the day already when she doesn't sound like this anymore. You will generally find our lovely Grace trying on dress up clothes, dancing, stealing away to play pretend with a small stash of tiny ponies or critters, or coloring princess pages for hours at a time. She prances around the house and is forever asking you to draw her something in her sketchbook. Grace is a delight and we feel honored to not only know her, but that we get to be the ones whom she looks to for all of her love and affection.

When I think of Kanah, I hear Jason singing his song to her in my head. "Amazing Kanah, my sweet little girl. Amazing Kanah, my sweet little bug..." I love that Jason has come up with songs for each of our little ones and they love the songs so much that I find them singing them to themselves sometimes. Last night Jason and I were talking to Kanah on the phone, since she was spending the night at her grandparents' house, and she Jason and I could not stop looking at each other, laughing, because she was responding to us like a 15 year old. "Hi dad...Yeah...Uh huh..." She is such a little love, and at the same time gives us flashes all the time of her going from 4 to 14 in a blink and all we can do is laugh and gobble her up while we can. Kanah is truly amazing and gifted. She puts forth a confidence that I myself pray to possess about what she thinks she can do. She just loves with a ferociousness in the same way that when she squeezes her lamby lovingly, I think the stuffed animal is going to burst into a thousand pieces. She is just so passionate! I love how when she is trying to respond to Salem's 87th request of "Kanah, look!" she just says, "That's cool Salem" and goes on with what she is doing, sometimes not even looking at him. I love how she leads, herding all of them into games and pretend playlands and into running games around the house. She is anxious to help Salem with his puzzles and to show him how to do things. I actually even enjoy her darling face when she cries (no, I am not cruel :P) because she just looks gorgeous even then and it also reminds me so much of her face when she cried as a baby girl. She is most precious lately to us when she is singing songs or when she is praying. All the kids are learning to talk to God with Jason at night and also with me at breakfast, as we have a calendar with tiny pictures of our friends' and families' faces so that we can remember them daily. Her little voice and things she says to the Lord are so sweet and she and Grace both make me tear up often, just listening. Kanah is our snuggle girl and we just are so blessed to have her precious presence in our arms and our lives.

On motherhood, I could write about 10 more pages. But I will spare you and just mention that I read a great book this year called Loving the Little Years and came away with a verse that has motivated me to write a mission statement as a mom. It's Ecclesiastes 5:19-20

"Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil - this is the gift of God. For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart."

I read this verse so slowly. This truly is a verse to etch onto my memory, to write on the tablet of my heart, to feed upon as my daily bread. God has given me great wealth. A faithful, godly husband. A job for my husband that literally provides all of our needs as well as a future. A little Cowan clan of three who are terribly adorable and intimate in relationship with me. And a home in which to carry out my dignified job of wife, mommy, and homemaker. This is great, great wealth. And God also gives the power to enjoy this wealth as I do two things: Accept my lot. This must mean that I am not just given this life, but I also wrap my arms around it. I open the package. I receive it. I accept my lot, even and especially the parts that I don’t feel like opening. And two: Rejoice in my toil. Rejoicing in Scripture is something we choose to do. It is a chosen heart response. Accepting my lot and rejoicing in my toil actually feels impossible on some knarly, head knocking, back arching-tantrum days. But thankfully my eyes rested in the words, “this is the gift of God.” The POWER to enjoy my lot is the gift of God. So through his grace I am able to accept my lot and rejoice in my toil. This has been a vision, a word, to me this year...and also a relief.

Jason and I had our 10th anniversary this summer. He sent me a cute, almost check the box type email, sometime beforehand with some choices about what I wanted do together. I love doing many things with Jason but my favorite thing to do with him is backpack and be outside, away from the noises and busyness of life. We realized we had not been back to the amazing and majestic Olympic National Peninsula in years so we took a trip there and just needed to be together, alone :), and enjoy our marriage. We are both shocked and very not surprised, all at once, that it has been 10 years. We've got quite a testimony from all that time but it also is a blink and we know that life ticks and ticks and you've got to wrap your arms around the moments because as a whole it just keeps speeding on. I know we both would say that this has been a year of rejoicing in some changes the Lord is making in our hearts toward one another and I just love that with Jesus, there are always redemptive surprises: ways you can grow and change and love even more than you expected. And I think that is the blessing of this year between us, that even though we are imperfect and fail each other, God is making all things new. We feel the newness. We are not puffed up by it. We are humbled and thankful and, again, just trying to enjoy that goodness. And also just keep laughing and becoming greater friends. On that note, we have great anticipation about the Real Marriage series coming at Mars Hill in mid-January to further encourage our walk together. Listen on line if you would like!

In a recent sermon, our pastor was talking about the difference between a biography and a testimony. A biography is about you and all you have accomplished. A testimony is about God and all he has done. There is a powerful verse Jason and I clung to before girls were born, when everything felt out of control as I lay on hospital bedrest for three weeks. It was Isaiah 26:12

"Lord you establish peace for us; all we have accomplished, you have done for us."

That is what I mean to say in this letter. I see his work all around us, in each of our lives. But it is not a biography about us and our greatness and what tremendous citizens and and human beings we are. It is a testimony of God's grace to us, his mess of a group, and of his ongoing redemptive work in us, making us into new creations for the praise of His great glory. I have enjoyed chewing on Christmas carols this year. Letting a line linger here and there. And Joy to the World repeats THE WONDERS OF HIS LOVE again and again. I was just kind of thinking about what that means. The wonders of his love are all the graces he gives us. And they are a wonder because we don't deserve them, didn't ask for them, we didn't ask to be pursued, but in our ill deserving state, in our ignorance and even our indifference, Jesus came for us. He knows our greatness needs, to our weakness he is no stranger. This season is about beholding the wonders of the most humble of Kings who is jealous for our hearts and who delights in us. This is very good news and the best testimony, which gives life and joy and meaning to our smaller testimony. Merry Christmas.

Love,
Jason, Kelly, Kanah, Grace and Salem

Break

2011-01-14T14:07:00.001-08:00

Feeling compelled to take a blogging break and just do some writing on my own...will see where the Lord leads my heart and thoughts and writing. Love to you all.

Punch Buggy Hope

2011-01-13T14:12:00.000-08:00

I had a question come into my head the other day at church. We have many questions, but this one felt like a sincere question that came to me and I did not seem to create myself. It represented a reflection of the state of how I have been doing as I have continued each day to put on my boxing gloves with my enemy whose full name is Anxiety And Fear. It came to me as our pastor was teaching on Isaiah nine, about the people walking around in darkness seeing a great light. Lord, are you Emmanuel? Are you really WITH me?

Jesus has continued to work on me in regards to this enemy who seems to enjoy hounding me lately. It has been six plus months of building tension and yet the Lord has faithfully spoken to me clearly most consistently through two ways: Scripture and prayer.

I happened upon a book that has been on my shelf for a long time recently by Beth Moore called Praying God’s Word. In the intro she says, “A stronghold is anything that exalts itself in our minds, ‘pretending’ to be bigger or more powerful than our God. It steals much of our focus and causes us to feel overpowered. Controlled. Mastered…God has handed us two sticks of dynamite with which to demolish our strongholds: His Word and prayer.”

Annie and I switch off leading bible study and I had just been feeling compelled for us to do a week of worship and prayer. We had been doing Proverbs for a while, which had gone really well, but it never seemed like we got to the end of our goal, which was to actually talk to the Lord himself about all our thankfulness and revelations and confessions and convictions. We got to talk to each other, but is that the end? It always left us lacking and wanting and something felt incomplete. We were just going to sing and pray for an hour and a half and see what would happen if we let our time be filled that way instead of squeezing it in if there was room for it. Now the talking would be squeezed in, and women can always find a way to do that!

As we went into a time of praying about our personal walks with the Lord, I found myself digging through Scripture that he had given me concerning fear, trying to think through what exactly I needed to say to him that day about it. I already knew what I wanted to pray about but just felt like a big mess of thoughts about it so I needed to think for a minute.

The first was from James 4:13-16 “¹³ Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” ¹⁴ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” First of all, very specifically I have had fear from going to Seattle to Charlotte in a couple of weeks. From one CITY to another. He states what I fear – I do not know what will happen tomorrow. I don’t want to not know! I want to know I will be okay. I want to know I will be preserved, that my life in his hands means that I will be safe and sound. It is so hard to trust what his actual promises are – that he has plans for me, to give me a hope and a future, but that does not mean that nothing bad will ever happen to me. The issue for me, which actually is really annoying because it feels so female and cliché, is that I want to control what I can hope in. It’s humbling, like most things God takes us through to come to the bug conclusion that is stated by a million women daily: I want to be in control. (Sigh). How I wish I were an above that, different sort of woman. I imagine a carefree woman but it’s less that, because that’s more ignorance or naivity (depending), and more a trusting woman. Well, confession gets me on my way.

Another friend began to pray as I jotted the James verses down and continued to flip through the Word. I landed in Luke 24:37-39 at the story of Jesus appearing after the resurrection to the disciples. “³⁷ They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. ³⁸ He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? ³⁹ Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” It matters not whether these verses move you at this particular time, because what is powerful about the Word is that it is living and active, sharper than any double edged sword. And it comes to pierce with very specific intention. And this particular day, these were the chosen words of the Spirit to thrust right through the core of my wound up life. And I crumbled without wince at the blow. Crumbled into a makeup running, doubled over mess. Daughter, Why are you troubled? It is I, MYSELF.

From my pile of flesh on the floor, my heart did a familiar race and as my friend finished her words, I erupted into a desperate sounding cry to the Lord in the presence of my friends, new and old. I didn’t care. Let’s not pretend like I am that awesome: sometimes I do care. But this time I did not. I didn’t care if they thought I was trying to be spiritual. Or if they thought I had finally lost my mind and should step down from leading our group anymore. What I cared about was getting out my shrieks. On my knees and raw from barely spoken revelation to my heart, I needed to talk to him with all the sincerity that I could allow myself to reveal in a group of ten women.

And I’ll tell you, the combination of all that happened in those moments was so good, so healthy for me. Maybe healthy doesn’t mean much to you right now where you’re at, but if I can think of one meaningful word for me lately, it’s “healthy”. Because my body and my mind have felt so sick and crippled this year, so needy and fragile and dependent. I know when I am 80 I’ll be like, Oh Lord, come on honey. But for a 32 year old, Biggest Loser would probably add 10 years to my life on whatever chart they have that determines at what age your body is actually functioning. Anyway, it felt healthy. And honest. And I need honest words from the Lord, even if they are the same encouragement, I don’t care. I just need to hear from him and for my heart to be genuinely lifted up. And you can’t force encouragement. When it comes just right, with just the right word that not even you could have scribbled out onto a piece of paper, and even better at just the moment you asked for it, it’s almost more than you can ask for.

You know how you used to play “punch buggy”? Like two hundred cars go by you in a glaze and they’re not what you’re searching for at all. But after you’ve stared and searched and sat on the edge of your seat you finally see one and you yell “punch buggy!” with all your arrogant might and deck someone next to you and you feel so great for like five amazing competitive seconds and then you’re back to hoping that maybe after seeing a few hundred more cars you’ll see one again.

The handful times God has really met me lately have totally felt like punch buggy for me. Except it’s not just about feeling good, it’s about breathing and having the muscles to get up off the floor again. I’m telling you, He’s given me just enough punch buggies around every corner to keep me hoping. I’ve just been wandering in fear and boughts of depression and anxiety like I have never known it, both for known reasons at times and others just completely inexplicable. And I have felt just at a loss to even help myself. Yet the best part for me that I am realizing right this second, is that in those exact moments of seeing Who I had been grasping for out my “windows”, I wasn’t afraid. And if I can even be capable of being not afraid in a tiny handful of moments, I think I can keep growing the hope to believe that the fears might cease. Punch Buggy.

Emmanuel

2010-12-21T14:50:00.000-08:00

We are ten years in to the new millennium and in that time Jason and I have gotten married, moved across country, lived in two different cities, had three children and countless other “worth mentionings” on the timeline. If you zoom in on our life in 2010 you will see that after a few years of hunkering down for baby life, we are all – including Salem – very much on the move as we run a family household of three zooming, playful toddlers. As all three of them on different levels are becoming more independent, this season has felt so much more about nurturing, guiding, instructing, training, encouraging and reconciling. This age has brought us to bended knees frequently as we see this age is about reaching down into their conversations, their frustrations, their concerns, their joys, and most importantly, their hearts. God has been gracious to teach us as we learn how to be individuals who abide in Him, as well as a married couple who takes care of each other well, while also being parents who know exactly where our children are right now.

The very lovely and oh so sweet Grace Cowan (3 ½). Grace has turned into such a dancer. She loves to perform for us, which is always such a treasured gift from her when she offers it, because she tends to shy away from the spotlight so often. She makes up her own routines, moving her feet, leaping about, and using such graceful arms. Grace has such a gentle spirit, bringing a peacemaker quality to play with her brother and sister. Grace says really adorable things like when we are passing by something and we say, "Look, Grace!" and after we've gotten past it, then she will say, "Mommy/Daddy, did I see it?" Out of the endless moments of joy she brings us is the sound of her laugh when she is most delighted!

The beautiful and full of life Kanah Cowan (3 ½). Kanah has been entertaining us this season with her renditions of Frosty the Snowman, Jesus Loves Me, Rudolph and Away in the Manger. She loves to sing, quite loudly actually, and if we’ve got our ears perked up to her voice, especially from the very back seat, we get that treat of her live performance very often. She has also become quite a bit more social this year, enjoying little friends and knowing to ask on Tuesdays, “when are 'the friends' coming?” Kanah brings us so much happiness and she just seems to be made for close relationship, as she is always pursuing hugs and snuggles and smiling two inches from your face.

The manly, the brave, and the fast Salem Cowan (1 ½). Now that Salem is closer to being two than being a one year old, he has decided he’s going to start speaking English in two and three word phrases, adding “mommy” or “daddy” to just about everything he says. Little Man is so expressive and loud lately that one of his most endearing expressions is when he simply whispers “k” in response to everything. It is quite often that Jason and I look at each other and shake our heads as we watch him play, saying the same thing again and again, that we cannot believe how much we love our son.

All three of the kids had a great time this year at gymnastics. By the end of the year, the girls took their first ever non-parent gymnastics classes and laughed and tumbled their way through every 45 minute session, while across the room I hung with little man’s class as he went wild on bars and trampoline and breaking all the gym rules he could. A big highlight for the girls this year definitely had to be their at-home co-op preschool with two of their little lady friends. Learning about God and his creation, doing crafts, and singing songs became a great way to start every Monday.

Jason and I have been really blessed this year to enjoy a getaway backpacking trip to Ingles Peak as well as a couple days down to Canon beach, our favorite yearly destination on the west coast. And before the year is up we are so thrilled to head back to the bed and breakfast that I used to work at in Blowing Rock, NC called the Inn at Ragged Gardens to have our Christmas date. We love our life with the kids but getting away just the two of us is always a gift – and we have both sets of parents to thank! We have continued to enjoy having our community group come to our home every Tuesday, as well as enjoy relationship with men and women, respectively, in our bible studies. And we could never part from a few very important individuals in our lives who are far away but whom God keeps close to the deepest places in our hearts. We are thankful for this, as I in particular, have been learning from the Lord a lot this year about leaning on Him by leaning on his people, who are gifted to encourage, lead, and counsel me. The Lord has been faithful to keep leading our hearts, counsel our marriage, and meet us where we’re at individually. I’m just so thankful to know Jesus and I don’t know where I would be or how I would see life without him.

For just a fun little tidbit on our day to day life, we have been working on remembering the verse I have pictured at the top of this blog. And the kids, including Salem, like to sign this one. For "from the fullness" we blow up our cheeks and make our arms round like a big belly. For "of his grace" we make a sign like we are sprinkling something over our head. For "we have all recieved" we have our arms extended and then pull them tight to our chest. And for "one blessing after another" we pat our heads as we say each word. I am thankful there is a fun way to teach toddlers Bible verses and it's one of the main way I have remembered too! :)

These two verses below are the ones we put into the bags for the homeless that we made with the kids. We all have a shared struggle of poverty in our hearts and Christ offers us riches beyond riches by his generous hand. We struggle in this physical life in various forms but all of us share the struggle of inner depravity and hopelessness without the gift of God. That is what these verses express together and that is our hope, for all of us, this Christmas. That hope came into the world in the most humble of ways. And this season, as a mother, I have felt an even closer association with how humble our Jesus must have been because as moms we are constantly being lied to that spending time at home with our children, our babies, isn't worthy. Yet what a worthy call, what a dignified gift God gave Mary to ask her to take a knee and give her life to love the baby Jesus who would save the world.

2 Corinthians 8:9 “For you know the generosity of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, he became poor so that you through his poverty might become rich.”

Ephesians 2:4-5 “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved.”

Oh come, Oh come, Emmanuel...

Is he even a doctor?

2010-12-12T15:16:00.000-08:00

I have such a weird doctor. I swear, is he even a doctor? The last time I was there, when the nurse was done and was about to leave the room while I waited for him to come in, she turned around at the last second and added, “Have you met with Dr ‘Fill in the Blank’ before?” “Yep,” I said. “Okay good,” she laughed, “So you know he’s a quick fix and you’re done.” “Yep,” I said again, “That’s why I’m here.” Which is actually true, for my normal day to day cold stuff. Let’s face it, I have three toddlers I am carting around and what I don’t want is a long doctor’s appointment with someone maxed out on patients because they’re amazing. I don’t need amazing. I need DRUGS. J (By the way, today I realized I would really like to buy one of those rope things that preschool classes hang onto. Why don’t I have one by now? They could all be attached with little caribeaners. It would be fantastic. Target?)

Anyway, then today at the same doctor’s office I show up for a walk in appointment b/c I happened to be in the building without the kids. My ear infection was feeling like it wasn’t going away – shocker. I already went to an ENT a couple of times earlier this year. So before I can even describe my symptoms, he’s whipped out the prescription book and is ready to sign the magic dotted line. But this time, minus kids of course, I’d kind of like to talk concerns. Like, “Hey I already did 10 days of meds and then I’ve been on some other antibiotics for another illness more often than I’d like to recount and I’m kind of feeling like I am taking an antibiotic every single day of 2010. I’m worried about that. What do you think?” What did he say?

“Oh don’t worry, we’ve got all kinds of things you can take.” And laughs, going ahead with the prescription.

Yep. Changing my primary.

I like that he’s sarcastic. I think it’s kind of funny that we talk about golf more than my condition. I like how he thinks that me having three kids is like a hundred kids (cause it kind of is and I like the credit). I like that he feels like a grandpa at Thanksgiving. I like that he’ll write me prescriptions when I’m at home, not wanting to come in with the little people who are likely to give me a whole ‘nother medical issue on the way over. I like that he’ll just give me the DRUGS! But. He’s not doing me any favors, for goodness sakes, besides that convenience card and with how terribly often I have been sick in the past year, he’s gotta go.

I feel this way with a lot of things right now. Like with prayer, I’m not good with a nice wrap-it-up prayer time and we all smile and mingle and leave. I need to cry it out. I need to call out to God. I need to PRAY. Not to be a Pharisee. But because if prayer really is touching the ears of God, I’ve got to get there! And with Christian community. I really don’t just need to hang out for filling up the calendar’s sake. I need conversation. I need true encouragement that God supplies through his people himself. I need questions, hard ones, and someone to shovel all these thoughts out of my brain and to plant some good ones.

I think in some seasons, kind of like with my primary, I am floating on by and I just need an occasional fix and I’m good to go. But right now is when I see that I am more than needing bandaids. I need the most real, the most truthful, the most soul-baring, exposing and painfully refining HELP I can get. Both for my body and spirit. And this requires a different sort of care…all around.

Sidekick servants

2010-11-18T14:43:00.000-08:00

I don’t seem to notice the rain this time of year or the fact that it will probably be wet the next sixty days. I just expect to put on my rain boots and get on with it. (Kind of a small miracle, mind you, if you read previous posts I write around Oct). There’s something really special about the anticipation around the birth of Christ that has a powerful presence over the air in all of November and December. I get unusually happy about planning our usual traditions, thinking about how we will serve and then especially this year, enjoying looking into my children’s eyes as we are able to have fairly thoughtful exchanges about what this is all about.

Though lately I have been struck by how even though I love Jesus with all that I am as his daughter, I find myself tetering internally sometimes between staying focused on the glory of God and how good it would feel to make a fun list of what I would like for Christmas (since people are asking, after all!) Yet I feel an intense drawing, a tide that is bigger than me, moving me towards learning more and more to completely let go of the anticipation that has to do with me. And a joy accompanying the steps I make in that direction that assure me of what is right.

I wrote a few months ago that I had one word ringing in my head that I couldn’t shake and I didn’t know what to do with it: SERVE. One snippet of that blog said:

I do not know what I am supposed to do with this word. And honestly I think it’s pretty gracious that he’s just given me A word and not a twelve page document charting out an undertaking that might take the breath out of my chest like I might die if I have to go through with it. It’s like he’s working the value of this word deep into my core. And reminding me that this is what Jesus came to do. This is what form his love took for the world. I want my children more and more with age and maturity to also learn that life is about giving our lives away like Jesus did. I want them to get their hands in that truth too.

So I don’t know where this is headed. And that’s okay. It’s not like I have an empty day every day and I need to run out and fill up all my hours. I’m already maxed with loving on my three little ones and somehow, slowly, graciously, accompanied by a growing heart burden, I see him kneeding in a new piece of our lives that he wants to make part of how we live.

All I know is that if I keep listening I bet the Spirit will keep talking about this. Because that is what he does. And my heart is perking up. And my ears are being awakened morning by morning. And I am like one being taught.

I recently posted a question on facebook about how I could serve with three kids three and under. Seems daunting. But I can’t shake the tide, so I’m compelled to figure it out (darn it, we can’t be in a cave forever!!! He he). My main realization from that exchange was that I’m not crazy for thinking it’s a daunting idea to figure out serving with toddlers. They can’t do much and they mostly keep my hands busy, and not to mention most people would kind of vote for us to stay at home instead of coming to “help” them – ha ha. So there are simple ways to overcome these hurtles.

I realize my heart as the mom, the rudder on the ship of our day, is the most important factor. Am I thinking about how we will give our lives away? Is my heart showing itself to be gracious when someone drops their groceries in front of us and my kids see me help them? Did they see me stop to talk to a woman outside the store whose name happened to be the same as mine but who was forced to live a very different life? Am I providing them the opportunities? Are we having those simple conversations about the children who live in the world without mommies and daddies? My heart steers my thoughtlife which steers our talk life, which gets them moving towards Jesus and his compassion on this world, which leads to: serving with sincerity.

So, with a simple “agenda” on the horizon, me, Jason, and our sidekick helpers seek to serve this season (and beyond). Here’s what we’re up to, with small hands and feet in tote:

This is the first year the girls are learning to serve ONE ANOTHER, which actually has been the most powerful and relationship transforming idea to affect my children. They are learning that serving one another “honors God” and that this is a joyful gift to give to one another. I talked in a previous blog about how I am learning to CELEBRATE with my family when they honor God and I kind of go crazy with hugs and kisses when they allow God to give them a servant’s heart in tiny ways that really add up and matter. Throughout the summer and fall they have practiced this in small ways by sharing toys, giving up a turn, holding the door, practicing hospitality for friends coming over, etc. And this season they are doing extra chores to earn coins in little jars so that they will be able to participate in buying a small gift for their two siblings. This has helped us to an extent to keep the conversations about Christmas off what they want and on what they will give.

Our family date this year will be heading to a Target to gather supplies to make bags for the homeless that would be a blessing to them: warm socks, $5 giftcard to get something to eat, some homemade goodies, and a note from us. We’ll go home and make them together and keep them in our car, waiting on the Lord for who he would have us to give them to.

We have a special foster girl who is now 14, but who I used to work with through a foster care agency when she was 7 and 8. She now lives far away, still does not have a “forever family” and likely never will. She lives in a group home for orphans and we keep in touch with her especially on her birthday and holidays. She only has two families, including ours, who pursue her in any regard. We will be making a care package for her with the girls and mailing it off and give her a call as well. I would like to be more faithful to this girl as I cannot imagine living in such a fragile time of life without the security of a home or family or even a bed to consistently call your own. Maybe the Lord will open a door one day for us to bring an orphan into our family. In the meantime I cannot imagine why every believer would not in some way, shape or form – even if only, and most importantly prayer – let their hearts grow and break for these children.

Last year and this year the girls have been my sidekick helpers with cooking. If it weren’t for a climbing, curious little Salem boy, I would probably have them help me with dinner every night. They are looking forward to making goodies again with me this year for the holidays and packing them up in bags to deliver around to our neighbors in the wagon. It’s such a fun time and I can’t wait to take all three of them this year.

I think one of our favorite traditions is our Christmas craft party for kids that we have done for kids around the girls’ age. Everyone comes over for a couple of stories, maybe a song, and then gather around a bunch kids tables to do all kinds of crafts with one another. It’s great fun and it’s also fun to invite older kids in families we know to SERVE the younger children by offering a hand to moms with multiple kids. Last year all the moms brought a plate of cookies so that before they left with their crafts, they could make treat bags for their neighbors, etc. I am praying and thinking about maybe offering another way to add the element of SERVE to this fun day together so that our hearts are celebrating but also turned out to teach our kids about giving their lives away. We’ll see what idea surfaces. I'm asking God to speak up and let me know if He's got something on his heart for us. I'm listening.

So this is what we’re anticipating and planning. But sometimes it’s the “here let me give you a hand” surprising moments in serving that are the most intimate and joyful. And for me, 98% of the time, that’s directed towards three little human beings who are daily in my care, who clearly have been entrusted to me. And just like any foster child or homeless person or widow or slave, they are made in the image and likeness of God and desperately need to meet him. So if my hands and feet aren’t first willing to selflessly serve them, then what does that say about my heart to serve in general? That’s exposing.

I’m thankful Jesus turning my heart towards this one word. It is surely a word he is all about. And I just wonder if it might be my most joyful Christmas ever if I will let the current of this conviction carry me through.

Matthew 20:28 “Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave – just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Like a Schedule with No Script

2010-10-30T15:25:00.000-07:00

(written earlier this week...)

I think when I start my day circling my family room and kitchen with a coffee cup and prayer, somewhere in me I think it guarantees a perfect day. Because 4:00 p.m. comes around every single day and somehow either I have dementia or else I am in denial, because when my kids have their 19th tantrum, I am somehow shocked that all of this was possible. I mean I got UP and had my quiet time!

Yesterday was actually horrid. Have those horrid days? It’s actually worse when you wake up all Snow White like, as I did yesterday, waltzing around with your coffee, convinced today is going to glisten and glow. It has more potential to send you straight into the forest, like she did, terrified of all the evil in the world that she had no idea existed. That’s probably why it ended so badly. Yesterday I kind of forgot that evil existed. I kind of forgot that that included the evil that lurks in my kids and me. And that even if you have yourself ready before they wake up and a nicely gift wrapped schedule for the day, the script is not yet written for the emotions, the interactions, the fights, the words, and generally for all of the capacities of sin that flow from the heart. There is no script yet. The Director hands you that as you go, which is just not fair.

I hate improv. And that’s kind of what we are doing everyday here, know what I mean? My kids throw me a new manipulative request and the spotlight is on me – act! Respond! Say something! And it better be good! Life is more than unjust in this department for introverts. Come on! We were made to stare at life and respond later. But if I did that I would literally have no friends and my kids would run the house like little bandits, tying me up in chairs and stuff. It would be cool in heaven if conversations were kind of floating or paused, like in that teen witch show, and I can just ponder every response for a long, delayed while, while you...I don’t know, drift somewhere in a waiting room.

Having hope in your schedule with no script is just like what happens sometimes when my husband and I have our date night. It doesn’t matter what you plan, how good the ideas are or how fancy the food – if I don’t prepare my heart before we go – it ain’t gonna be pretty. I am going to have skyscraper expectations, dump all my junk on him, get my feelings hurt if he even waits two seconds to ask me how I am doing, and the date will be over before we leave the neighborhood. It’s just that crazy of a season, so it takes a little more of a fight with my inner wild woman to appear…well, a little normal ;). (Incidentally, the name Kelly actually means “warrior woman”, so you know I was probably born with more fierce issues than most). Maybe one day normal will not feel so unattainable, but these days, it’s quite a feat! So it’s much better if I focus a little on my side of our date script ahead of time J.

So back to yesterday’s script. On the paper of my mind, the day read:

Bible verse/signs with kids at breakfast

Playdate with friends at our house

Kids help “serve” our community group with little chores (oddly and thankfully they think it’s like a game)

Naptime

Playdoh and beads while I cook

Dinner

Community group

What happened looked more like:

Kids not eating

Tantrum followed by a bigger tantrum

Salem stealing backpacks, Gracie throwing wild uncontrollable fits, Kanah screaming

Playdate – (actually good and should have had her stay all day)

Only one of my kids serving, the other rebelling in timeout – again

Short nap for one and no naps for other two

Needed six hands to help them with a terribly needy, envious round of playdoh

Salem fussing (infinitely til bedtime)

Sheer miracle to get simple tacos on plates for last minute dinner.

20 people show up for community group (kicker: I do the childcare with friend – great humorous ending of script for the day)

I don’t even know how to write this one into the list, but somewhere later in the day I noticed an odd feeling an pulled my shirt forward to find the shelf of my camisole full of crushed cookies. The worst, most confusingly laughable part is that I do not remember any incidents that would land me swimming in cookie crumbs, nor do I even recall giving them cookies that day…hm. That’s kind of a good word picture for the whole entire day.

So when I woke up the next morning I instantly faced a sinking feeling that today would be exactly the same. There was no chance it would be good. I was going to fail miserably, my kids would drive me crazy, and I was not sure why starting my day the same way with a quiet time would even matter at all. I mean, look at my day yesterday!!! So I snoozed til 6:30 and finally felt motivated enough to crawl out of bed and get the coffee going.

I started reading Proverbs, like usual, and Jason came down to say goodbye and pray for me before he headed off before work to his accountability group. I got up from my quiet time, prayed with him and mumbled two or three grumbling comments about the day ahead and gruffily went back to my reading with a stubborn attitude of who cares. So instead of reading on, I got up to start circling my kitchen and family room, praying outloud with urgency and near anger. I just decided to be honest, because that’s all I had and it went something like:

“Lord I do not understand! I really am struggling to see how this matters! My day was horrible yesterday. It was nothing like I wanted to be. I am getting early in the morning. I am reading. I am praying. What else am I supposed to do? Lord I want to trust you but all I feel is oozing cynicism. I am overwhelmed by it. This isn’t working.”

That sort of helped. Sometimes if I am feeling cynical I stop reading or I just don’t even get to prayer, with a rolled eye sort of mentality and move along to getting ready or breakfast. But this is what the whole “crying out to the Lord” thing in Psalms and Proverbs is about. So I am circling, crying out, and then: He speaks. He spoke so quickly, before I could make another lap, that it surprised me.

I do a verse a week with my kids when I am on track with them. I have the ones we did the first half of the year listed on Word and now, so as to help them hide it in their heart even more deeply, instead of doing new ones we are just randomly going back over the old ones. So I literally just picked a verse and wrote it up on our board a few days ago.

So I’m walking, panting my prayers, and I look up and see:

“Jesus helps those who are being tempted.” It’s Hebrews 2:18 and the whole verse in the exact wording reads “Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” And I can’t explain to you the influence, other than the Holy Spirit is powerful, why sometimes we read the Bible and it’s like skimming a book and other times it’s like you get knocked down by an evangelist on a stage. But I stopped dead in my tracks and I promise you I felt something a lot stronger than my cynicism at that moment. I felt BELIEF and GRATITUDE fill my heart in that exact moment I read that verse. His power flooded the words on my board and he gifted me with FAITH in them and the cynical chains from that morning were broken.

I heard him in my head say: This is true. Believe it for yourself.

With an unrecognizable heart to who I was moments before, I hurried back to sit down and look up the Scripture which immediately struck a cord with another Scripture that, for a second time, rebuked me and poured life into me all at once:

James 1:5-8 “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.”

I have read this chapter soooo many times. I have rarely memorized chapters but this one I actually have. And it doesn’t matter because God makes things come alive that seem old sometimes. He is powerful like that. And all I could hear, as if I had never heard it in my whole life was, “Kelly you MUST believe and NOT doubt. You MUST BELIEVE.” The wisdom he desired to impart to me about my circumstance was that I was allowing the “faith,” if you will, of doubt to consume my belief system. Otherwise you will be like a woman who is unstable, which is exactly how I felt that morning without my belief securely written on my heart. I felt floundering and lost and bitter and frustrated and mad. And certainly: unstable. I think the wording is so interesting, so compelling, so commanding: You MUST believe.

I suffer in my own forms of temptation. I live sacrificially as a mom daily, sometimes laying my life down willingly and other days by force because I don’t want to do anything except love myself. But this is my road of sanctification. This is how Jesus is making me mature and complete. And on this road I suffer very particular kinds of temptation: unrighteous anger, impatience, selfishness, comparison, self-pity, despair, depression, isolation, and bitterness. I feel these evils lurk around me on their own schedule, using our family’s scenarios, dialogues and scripts to tempt my own heart.

And the reason these verse so touched me was not because it promised me we were going to have a great day. Not because it promised me my kids would behave a certain way. But because my deepest need in that day of chaos was that I would be able to be strong and this verse declared to me: in your every moment battle of your heart, I am more than able to help you in your temptation and you must thrust all of your belief on that and choose with all of your strength to overcome doubt.

Nothing else is promised. But what is promised is that I will be given the strength and the way out of my temptations and even the lines to say. And in the unscripted improv of my life, that is enough.

Friend of the Earth?

2010-10-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

When I was like ten I subscribed to Friends of the Earth magazine. I think it was cool at the time with my other little friends to read about endangered species. Those were maybe some of my first conversations that actually had a hint of seriousness about them and a small sense of justice rose up in me. I liked to look at the animals, I felt sorry for the ones that suffered and began to notice people’s bummer stickers, particularly the “save the manatee” ones.

I didn’t like my own dog though. Poppy (well maybe I liked Poppy because I was very young and much nicer to animals then), then Molly and then (and still) Pepper. If my dog even licked me once or jumped up on the couch with me, I’d push her off of me, make a wretched face even I wouldn’t want to see, and whinily call for mom to get that gross animal away from me. I still kind of feel the same way to be honest. Smelly, yucky, needy – no thanks. I also hated and despised every single insect that ruins my idealistic thoughts of living in the south. Those dreaded, crunchy, quick moving grasshoppers, cockroaches and beetles make me cringe and hug my nearly bug-free existence tighter here in the northwest. Even in my Friends of the Earth days I was all about extinction of the humidity-loving creepy crawling things. Ew.

My family recycled in three different containers. But we also threw away about half of our house every single week. Let’s just say my step-dad likes paper towels. A lot. If you asked him that deserted island question, I could answer for him right this second. Paper towels. No need to think about it. I can see him creating a paper towel bed right now on which he would sleep in a tightly spun paper towel cocoon, under a large palm tree and then napping happily. (Wait, he is the least resting person I know – so no nap, but he could make paper towel walking shoes as he scurries around collecting coconuts. That’s a more truthful image.) Growing up, he would spread out a paper towel under each of our place settings and fold up one under our forks and if I spilled my milk (quite the common occurance – such a clutz), he’d spin those suckers off the stand til he had twenty little clean up crew members to take care of my half cup mess. It’s a miracle we haven’t been held responsible for any landfill issues our city might have had. We certainly contributed more than the share of our block. :)

Sometime after those shallow rooted days of flipping through a kids environmental magazine, I not only didn’t care but got kind of bitter about it. I still recycled, but who didn’t. It was a habit, not a conviction. A behavior, not a heart issue. People annoyed me who talked about it. It felt more like a club they belonged to and felt like talking about it merited them respect and a higher standing. Maybe it was just the people I encountered so I’m not spreading a big blanket here, but pride kind of oozed out of these conversations. It wasn’t humble, it wasn’t pure-hearted – it just felt plain annoying and like they’d found an elite membership. You might as well have put a gold bricked club house around them and given them a martini to take on their walk out to the putting green. It felt just that snobby.

I also happen to have some other family members who are uber-opinionated about politics in general and who end up falling in the “I don’t believe any one or any party” category. So of course this influenced me as well. There were even little classes held in a relative’s house about why all the environmental push was a scam and a lie. So how can I escape that influence as well? No use going into the details and how I stand on everything discussed. I was young so all I can conclude at this point is the simple statement: Don’t believe the exaggerated propaganda. I still have a bit of that in me for certain. The skeptic was born, with a rushing and eager delivery.

So I stopped reading, stopped caring. Questioned most everything on the news or on posters, besides Jesus. Just recycled. And sometimes didn’t. And didn’t notice. Once you become a skeptic, even if you want to believe someone, you just can’t find it in yourself. Humanity isn’t truthful to you anymore. It’s hard to throw yourself on that identity of mankind.

So this also correlated with a time in my life around my late teens and early to mid twenties where I had strong convictions about certain other things. Things like wanting to read books by men and women I trusted in the faith. Things like learning how to be a part of a community of believers and how to love our neighbors. Things like how to not be defensive and judgmental as a Christian, but to learn how to love and be like Jesus even with people who completely disagree. Things like how to love a city that feels really dark and lost and lonely (Boone, NC and then Berkeley, CA). Things like seeing, really seeing, people who are all alone – some of them all alone from an obvious perspective and others all alone though they stand in those circles of people at all times. It was a time of faith. A time of letting my heart get burdened by a great God who loves people, his very creations made in his image. A time of learning a pinch of what it means to lose your life so that you can gain it. It was a season that had to come first. A season that got to the heart of the matter. And I certainly changed.

And graciously, God let me begin there. With the heart. With seeing Him. With seeing myself with both the light and the mirror he gave me for a gift those years. And with seeing other people, as Jesus did as he looked out on the crowds. It says in the gospel that he looked out on them with compassion. I feel like it took me about six years to look out on the crowds to even begin to form that compassion and burdened, shepherd heart. With lots of other immaturities and imperfections still permeating my lifestyle and behaviors and day to day choices, he graciously started there. At the heart of me and the heart of what he is most concerned about – his people of his very own, his most treasured of creations on earth…his children.

Then he slowly began to work on my weaker convictions. I don’t know how else to describe them. So though my heart was growing in the spirit and in my mindset and in my world view of people and community and life…there were very intangling roots in my physical life. I don’t mean my physical body, though I am not excluding that. I am talking about my good friends named laziness, selfishness, and ignorance in my day to day life.

It’s kind of like those people who give their whole lives to a big important world-shifting type job but then go home to an unkept, unsanitary house and eat out of take out containers. Something just doesn’t add up there in the healthy department. I wanted people to wake up each day to know God the way I was getting to known him, but somehow I could not get myself out of bed in the mornings and my snooze button was getting worn. I prayed for people to come to church with me, just to experience the Lord as I had, but I misused my own free time with distractions and selfish ambitions. I didn’t want people to waste their years on meaningless pursuits and empty idols of success and wealth, yet I had my own versions of waste with things like stewardship and money.

(I guess to some degree no matter how much we’ve grown or believe something, we are always hypocrites. And it’s just good to admit it upfront, that you’re not out to sell something because you’re the super star who got cured. But Jesus is all about making me like him and I just have to keep admitting that any change for the good in me isn’t my own righteousness or hard work – it’s been bought with a price and is a gracious gift. A gift that keeps springing up in me, so that I can’t even come full circle with this blog b/c it’s still coming round.)

So the Lord continued his work in my spirit, but began to connect my meaning of “spirituality” to my physical world. He wanted my head on the pillow to understand it was connected to my heart, to my devotion to him. He wanted my hands that commited themselves to distracted interests to understand that they were not my own, they were created for glory in how I served others. He wanted my feet that were set in a spacious place with lots of freedom to choose what to do, to understand that the Lord made me as an instrument of his righteousness, created to do good works. And lately he’s even showing me that the very ground I walk on is not just randomly existent under my feet - it is his land and he made it for us to live and move and have our being.

Do you remember doing those brainstorming webs for English class and you draw a circle with three main lines coming off of it and then off each main point you can draw a bunch of sub point ideas that connect or support? Well, off of this time in my life (the past five years of pregnancy and motherhood) I feel like you could draw like a trillion of those little shoots with things that the Lord has shown me about myself, what he has a heart for, what he’s growing in me, who He is, what he loves, etc. And one of those little lines is actually what I am getting at in this blog. But I could write a ton of shoots off this one, or maybe that’s what I have been doing all along (hmm…).

I mean to say in all of this that one tiny area of conviction, like how we feel about this place called home, called Earth, called our environment, called whatever you call it, can take years and years of building of conviction and belief around it. And I think that as someone who began at having no interest in such a topic so many years ago, finds it interesting that the Lord would make that area one of many such death-to-life building blocks. It’s one area for certain, that has surprised me, that he has said – Kelly, I care about this. You are my daughter and I have set you and my other children over all of what I have made. It is your home, it is your creation to enjoy and have dominion over and to protect. It is in your hands. Treasure it with your actions, enjoy it with your life, and use it to point to who I am.

(More to come on this topic…)

Compassion for the Struggle

2010-10-08T07:01:00.000-07:00

Thoughts from Sacred Marriage chapter 4

Well summer hit Seattle for six weeks or so J and I guess my blog got the boot. That’s fine. I think watching ponytails fly in the sun and my kids actually put on bathing suits and my own skin feeling warm is much more valuable than a bunch of introspection anyway J. But now it’s winter again (another J) and I’m back.

I don’t think I hit chapter three from Sacred Marriage yet but all I can think about is what happened to me recently when I re-read for the third time chapter four, so here goes.

Can you think of a moment when your heart has been significantly softened for your spouse? When the walls on the room you used to leave for grace for him just got pushed back? That is what it felt like when I read the end of this chapter again. I had actually underlined a ton of great stuff in the beginning of the chapter about dealing with contempt for your spouse – very convicting truths actually. And as I re-read the chapter my heart turned to mush for my husband on a totally different segment.

Gary Thomas had a portion of the chapter entitled “Remember the effects of the Fall.” Allow me to quote a bit of it for you on p.67-8…

“We need to understand how profoundly broken this world is. Sin has radically scarred our existence. As a result of the Fall, I will labor with difficulty and angst (Gen 3:17-19). Lisa will mother our children and enter into relationships with mixed motives and frustrated aims (Gen 3:16). Even an unusually good marriage is not able to erase the effects of sin’s curse on individuals and society…

“The problem is that even though we can’t go back to the idyllic existence prior to the Fall, we were created with an understanding of what pre-Fall days were like – in other words, we know what relationships should be like, but we are incapable of making them perfectly in tune with that ideal: ‘Our souls are wired for what we will never enjoy until Eden is restored in the new heaven and earth. We are built with a distant memory of Eden.’

“This calls me to extend a gentleness and tolerance toward my wife. I want her to become all that Jesus calls her to become, and I hope with all my heart that I will be a positive factor in her pursuit of that aim. But she will never fully get there this side of heaven, so I must love and accept her in the reality of our lives in a sin-stained world.

“Accepting the fallenness of this world – with its bitter disappointments, physical limitations, and myriad demands – helps me to understand how difficult life is for Lisa, which helps me in turn to have contempt for contempt.”

It’s so important for me to understand as my husband’s wife that there’s a whole backdrop to what is going on in our relationship. It’s not like his life is roses and then we have a disagreement and it’s a complete surprise. The backdrop for my husband is first the fallen world around him, filled with sinners who sin continually, so he struggles in the world. He navigates broken conversations, filled with selfish gain. He works in an environment focused on pleasing man and performance, while internally struggling in the spirit towards being a man who only strives to please God. And then backdrop of his heart personally is that he lives his whole life with a sin nature, with which he struggles and fights in the spiritual realm to be transformed by Jesus from now until he leaves this earth. On the outside it may look like day to day work and mowing the grass and vacations and “what do you want to do today’s” but deeper and weaved into every interaction is a life-long struggle in the spirit.

So without me even evaluating who is at fault or who should apologize first or before I start building up contempt for this person who I feel has burst my beneficial relationship bubble…I really feel compelled and convicted to see his struggle.

Jesus himself tells us that “In this world you will have trouble.” He is talking to his disciples about how he will be leaving the world soon and that they will be scattered, but there will be a day when they will be able to be with him again, and no one will take away their joy at that time. If I read that as Jesus speaking that personally to my husband, I can hear him telling Jason, my husband, “Jason in this world you will have trouble…” and a great compassion falls over me.

I think in the moments I feel misunderstood or sinned against or wronged, I am completely walled off to this difficult state of struggle that we are in as human beings, and more specifically the life of struggle that my husband will have, until he goes to that joy everlasting with the Lord. But when I let those hard words sink in, that my dearest companion lives in a fallen world, in fallen relationships, and lives in a battle with a fallen nature, that breaks my hard heartedness and self-absorbtion towards him in our more difficult moments.

In just the next chapter, John 17:15-19, as Jesus prays to the Father, he ministers to me concerning this struggle he has allowed us to remain in.

“My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.”

It is the Lord’s will that for now we remain here, in a fallen world. But the remaining is for a purpose. That he might sanctify us by the truth. This is the HOPE that I must, must, must couple with my deeply compassionate seeing of my husband’s struggle. I must couple his struggle with the hope that Jesus has left us here for a time to transform us. He finishes his statement from earlier, “In this world you will have trouble…” with “but take heart, for I have overcome the world.” Jesus has overcome the struggle! He has overcome this fallen world. He has overcome the fall of sin.

And he has overcome our fallen hearts.

I used to think that the word “praise” was old and kind of silly to say outloud here in 2010. It’s still sometimes an prideful, awkward struggle for me to respond to a friend’s answer to prayer with a heartfelt “Praise God!” But all I can say to the truth that I am to take heart, because Jesus has overcome all of this fallenness is, I PRAISE HIM!

I am so thankful that he has not only given me the difficult, yet Christlike, compassion to see clearly and deeply my husband’s struggle, but also he has encouraged me towards the rest of the story: that he has overcome this world and its fallenness.

Jesus is so gracious. I have to include his final words of that prayer. These are the words of God himself, before he left us here on earth in this struggle with fallenness. “Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

Our struggle is not ours alone. “Praise be to the Lord, to God our Savior, who daily bears our burdens.” (Psalm 68:19)

JJ Heller’s – Your hands

I have unanswered prayers

I have trouble I wish wasn’t there

And I have asked a thousand ways

That you would take my pain away

I am trying to understand

How to walk this weary land

Make straight the path that crooked lie

Oh Lord before these feet of mine

When my world is shaking

Heaven stands

When my heart is breaking

I never leave your hands

When you walked upon the earth

You healed the broken, lost and hurt

I know you hate to see me cry

One day you will set all things right

When my world is shaking

Heaven stands

When my heart is breaking

I never leave your hands

Don't Exasperate: In Practice

2010-10-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

The little couch in the front living room is starting to get a lot of wear. It used to be so empty and deserted in that part of the house. And then it became our spot for timeouts. Now we spend a good part of the day there.

The other day I was not in a terrific place. The kids were being wild and taking turns being disobedient. And I was getting annoyed. Very annoyed. To the point of just not making clear decisions about discipline. I wish I could remember the details of the incident, but generally the three kids started to look like a mob making protest in all kinds of obnoxious ways and Grace got blamed. She was a target in the midst of a chaotic moment. I think it was true, she was whining or something, but my behavior in response was so out of place that it was extremely inappropriate to scold her and discipline her so sharply when my sin in the moment trumped hers by tenfold. I did not use wisdom to "use words with restraint" or to be "even-tempered" (prov 17:27) but instead proceeded to exasperate my daughter in an ungodly reaction.

I sent her off, crying, into the front living room. And three minutes later, in the twenty steps it took to get to her, I felt a sharp rebuke in the pit of my stomache from the Lord.

You need to repent to your daughter.

An enormous amount of compassion swept over me for her as I approached her. In my place of authority I had misused my role and had missed the mark of justice by a mile. Although I was still terribly frustrated with the general behavior of my children and downcast about our snowball of sinful behavior, this particular act of discipline was not for her, but for me. I sat down by her and she gazed up at me all teary and when she saw my soft face towards her, she sat up by me.

Gracie, do you know what? God is my authority just like I am your authority and he just told me that I need to tell you I am sorry for being harsh with you. And that I need to obey him by repenting to you and asking for your forgiveness. I am so sorry sweet girl, and I would like for you to forgive me. She smiled sweetly at me and told me she forgave me and I gave her a huge bear hug, so delighted in that moment of my obedience and the softness it created in me.

There is something incredibly beautiful and joyful about the humble act of repenting of your own misbehavior to a little child. And then to have them speak forgiveness over you. I just so badly want to be that parent that instructs their child faithfully in teachable moments, disciplines faithfully in moments of correction, and confesses faithfully when I am the one who’s got it all wrong. It’s just kind of an unheard of part of parenting to take a knee, repent of your own faults with a sincere apology on your lips, and genuinely seek the forgiveness of a small child. I so badly want my daughter to not remember me as perfect, but as faithful, and to know that I need the gospel of forgiveness and grace just like she does.

It’s something from God and I just pray that I will continue to see myself as God’s child, just as Grace is mine, and listen to his discipline for me, especially in moments like these when God asks me to be the one to take a seat on the couch for a few minutes.

Don't exasperate them.

2010-10-01T08:53:00.000-07:00

My girls are three and a half next month. I have had a very clear realization that this is going to be an incredibly important year at home with them. This is the last year I will have all three kids in my care every single day. Suddenly I feel like this is a mini version of their senior year of high school and everything I encounter feels like I am about to say goodbye.

I flipped through a magazine the other day looking for luggage for the kids and saw preschool backpacks looking all grown up on the page next to the elementary kid ones. Then there’s the buses. We rode the bus up in Whistler last week to get down to the village from the condo and the girls thought they were on cloud nine. They marched down to the bus stop, and once they got on they were all wide-eyed and gitty excited about their adventure. Grace thought it was cool to sit in the back of the bus, while Daddy taught Kanah how to pull the wire to request a stop. They are learning the difference between spotting a city bus and a school bus. Then another reminder is our library time. I keep finding little books like Maisy Goes to Preschool etc about what classes are like and what it’s like to have a teacher. And encountering pictures of backpacks, driving by city buses and looking at library books (among other things) are sparking little senior year mom missings in me. (I don’t think that’s a word, but I like it, so now it is!). Missings that make me feel excited to have them close in my care this year, excited to be doing this little preschool co-op at home with two other mommy friends.

In thinking about where my girls are at, it has suddenly occurred to me lately that they are in a very sweetly packaged and protected season of childhood and that I do not know for certain how much longer this exact stage of innocence may last. I know that it is not promised that nothing will go wrong or that a circumstance or trial may arise that would be difficult for them, but generally speaking – acknowledging that we live in a fallen world – this is a precious window of childhood.

I was thinking recently through my own struggle with anxiety, fears and control in the last few months and how hard that has been on me mentally. And what a literal battle it is for my mind and heart, so that I can even get to enjoyment of life and time with family and conversations over coffee, etc. And I thought back over my span of 32 years of life, seeing that my struggle internally has seemed to increase over time. And I see it happening with others around me. Around age 28 and up I have struggled through anxieties around children, how to parent, how enjoying marriage while dealing with increased responsibilities, and how to battle some of my own personality and ways I think about things. The five or so years before that introduced struggles of missing my family from long distance, living in a new city, figuring out how to do life without close friendships, and learning how to navigate the work world. Before that, how to handle the college burden of thinking about your future and understanding what you were made to do with your life, while struggling in comparing myself to others. In junior high and high school my stresses revolved around performance in school, people pleasing, rejection in friendships, acceptance of how God made my body and navigating relationships with peers. Even in elementary school I remember little stresses and struggles around friendships and disappointing teachers/parents, and certain social interactions.

All this to say, I am not sure when it begins, but over the course of life, we struggle. And I would say too that we struggle increasingly. That even with Christ and his bounty of blessings in my lap, he is helping me, counseling me through the struggle of life as it comes in waves. Peter would say (in 1 Peter 4:12) to not be surprised at the painful trials I am suffering as though something strange were happening to me. Struggles are not strange – they are familiar and frequent.

Yet my children now at age 3 and a half (and Salem at one and a half) are enjoying something completely unique and wonderful for them. And it’s not that I was totally clueless to their childlike happiness or to the fact that children generally don’t have much stress. (I feel like I learn that everyday when we’re trying to get out the door and they are bouncing on pillows and taking their time eating their cereal!) But for me personally, as their mom, and looking specifically at their time and stage of life, the Lord seemed to reveal to me in a more illuminating, and in some senses heart-breaking, way that they are in a special season of ENJOYMENT of life.

He revealed this precious truth to me alongside of a growing conviction for me as a mother around Ephesians 6:4 which says, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”

If any of you have read Shepherding a Child’s Heart of Instructing a Child’s Heart, you immediately recognize this verse. Parenting is about instruction, which is teaching my children about godly truths in both planned as well as (mostly) spontaneous times as we do life together. Parenting is also about training/disciplining as the “folly bound up in their hearts” is exposed in their disobedience and we need to take time to correct. That is not the focus of my point here, but worth noting first. So, we are after those two things as parents to our kids for certain. But right before that there is a clear opposing idea about parenting: exasperating our children. It is specifically written to fathers, perhaps because the Lord knows that men struggle more with anger tendencies generally, and also it is because he is first entrusting the instruction and discipline to the fathers since they lead the families. And he is pointing out that the opposite of that way is to just randomly and emotionally exasperate our kids. So though the Lord addressed the fathers with that, that also happens to be an issue I deal with inside. I mean, I exasperate myself for goodness sakes! . When I am not carefully, wisely leading my children with my words, I easily think my impatience, anger, carelessness, raised voice etc. could all fall under the overarching category of “exasperating.”

Exasperate: to irritate or provoke to a high degree, annoy extremely, increase intensity. (Synonyms: incense, anger, inflame, irritate). The origin has roots in the words “rough” and “harsh.”

Convicting.

The Lord has very appropriately put this verse and specifically that one word on my heart: Kelly, do not exasperate your little children. Instead grow them up in my ways.

We have a chalk board in our kitchen just for bible verses and usually I put a new one every week but recently when it came time to change the weekly verse, I realized I needed to keep one at the bottom permanently for me and then to keep giving the children new ones.

Mine is from Proverbs 17:27 “A man of knowledge uses word with restraint, and a man of understanding is even-tempered.”

This is what I sense him pairing with his encouragement from Ephesians 6:4. But alllll of this good instruction and encouragement from the Lord is not just a big DON’T. The Lord has also graciously, because of his Fatherly love for the children he has entrusted to my care, shown me that precious innocence that they dance in right now. He has shown me the length of my years alongside of the increasing closeness between he and I as I have experienced more and more life of struggles. And with that he has also shown me the care-free joy my little creations are gifted to experience for such a short time. Such a short season!

And finally he has whispered to me…

Don’t steal that from them by exasperating them! Be faithful to grow them in my instruction and discipline because you love them, but never provoke them. As far as it is up to you, let them dance in this sweetness of life without leaving them frustrated. I will enable you to hold all of the cares in their world, so that they may be without regard for the tangles of life. Rejoice with them, for this is what it will be like to be in the Kingdom.

Aaaaanxious.

2010-09-01T18:15:00.001-07:00

I have had a series of very anxiety filled weeks. My body even began to respond to the stress and I became ill, with one thing after another. Some of the stress was self-induced, in that I had committed to more than I could bite off. But then as the commitments passed on, the anxiety did not. This was not a month void of quiet times or prayer through out the day. In fact I had just followed through in my dreaded 6:00a.m. commitment to wake up before my family to get that alone time for my heart. I do not have an answer for why my quiet times and prayer were not enough. It has reminded me of the psalms where the guys are asking things like Lord how long will you leave me here? My couch is flooded with tears all day long. That type stuff. Ditto button. It seemed that there was something deeper bound up in me. A distrust. A wavering. An underlying self-reliance. I have no idea. Just tense. Suuuper tense.

I felt the Lord brings two words to me recently.

One was that I needed to submit myself to my community in the body of Christ and have them intercede for me when I am in a place when I am feeling bound. The Lord asks us so carry one another’s burdens and in this way we fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2). I often view my relationship with the Lord as “my” personal relationship. And this is true and also not true. I do have a relationship with him but I am part of the bride of Christ, and it is the Lord’s desire that we all become built up in him and attain fullness in Christ in that way (Eph 4:13). These are the exact type circumstances when I need to stop wrestling with my boot straps and experience what the body of Christ is meant to do for one another. I very often come to friends, my bible study, my community group aaaafter the fact. Like after the train wreck a few weeks later I come stumbling up telling them what happened, showing them my wounds and telling them that I eventually got out of it okay. Bizarre. Why do I not ask for help in the middle of my crisis?

A ridiculous desperate attempt for this as a mom of three who was doing a playdate with my sweet mommy friend, Mariah, mom of three was to pray over each other right before me and my crew left to go home. All six kiddos were doing flips on furniture in like three different rooms of the house with leotards and tutus flying and some of them being silly with chanting and clapping. I sat my rear right beside my friend's and with laughter we determined that we would pray until we were done, "come @#!*% or high water" as the saying goes. And I am pretty sure both of those came while we were praying, but hey I did the unusual thing of asking for prayer and the unusual thing of insisting we do it right then. And you know what? So glad we did. Loved that. I will keep pushing more for good time like that, even when all common sense is saying, hey maybe you should peel that five year old off the roof (of the play house, not to worry). :)

The other word came after I talked to my mom on the phone after a week or so of this. She said it reminded her of when I lived in Berkeley. I was kind of taken aback with the comparison, remembering that anxiety-wise, it was a paralyzing time for me. At that time I was totally isolated from community and family, in the midst of navigating the newness of marriage. I was also spiritually attacked quite often at night when I woke from sleep and also I experienced panic attacks around flying on airplanes.

It’s hard to describe to others who find a plane flight so relaxing and fiction book worthy how I suffered from horrible tormenting mental images of myself dangling from the sky in my seat, as I bent over in Jason’s lap in sheer terror. I know that in some light this is the same root of anxiety that flares up in me when I have a rough week with my feet on the ground, running in a thousand directions. If you were to ask me what was really going on, I would say that I don’t trust man. And some man, or rather group of men, designed, built and pieced together this metal contraption. And add to that another team of men, who are very underpaid (I say this not to degrade but from insider info since someone in my family had this job) checking certain simple, but essential, mechanics of the plane last minute before it takes off like a rocket into the air. I am 100% certain that man is fallible. So how can I close my eyes for a doze or allow myself to get caught up in fiction fantasy when my LIFE is dangling in the sky, locked inside a heavy piece of machinery?

So. On to my word before I forget why I started writing this and cancel our family’s vacation to North Carolina at Christmas.

I was very randomly reading Job. Can’t even remember why, and apparently that’s not why anyway, so it doesn’t matter. What matters is this verse:

Job 26:7 “He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; HE SUSPENDS THE EARTH OVER NOTHING.”

Okay so when I read that I LAUGHED outloud. That is seriously the BEST verse to give someone struggling with anxiety. Usually I would say verses like “God is my refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” would be the best verse. But for me…This. Is. It. I mean, it’s backwards in it’s encouragement because now part of me is panicked about the ground I stand on being suspended over the black endless nothingness that is the universe. Of course I would worry. I am bent to create all kinds of fears in my head. BUT it is also perfect. Because here I am in my everyday life with two feet on the dirt, trusting God with my life and my being and my ways. And simultaneously God himself is daily holding the earth up above the abyss of NOTHING. These two situations ARE the same! And in both situations I have a Sovereign Provider and Creator. As I mentioned in a recent blog, Matthew 10:29 says that not one sparrow falls to the ground apart from the will of the Father. And then it says “Do not be afraid” because I am worth more than a sparrow.

I have no idea what is going on inside of me. Why this anxiety is persisting. I feel the Father telling me to "test the spirits" because I feel something evil compelling me to just lay down, duck out, give up and believe things that are utterly false about me, my family, and my circumstances. Obviously that is demonic. The other Voice I am compelled to listen to is telling me that Psalm 68 says that the Lord daily carries my burdens. He tells me that in Exodus 16 the Lord instructs the people to collect the manna that they will need for that day and John 6 tells me that my Daily Bread is another name for Jesus himself. He tells me that somehow I should rejoice in my suffering because he intends it to produce something...perseverence, character and hope. And that I will not be disappointed. I feel the Spirit prodding me. Compelling me towards leaning on the prayers of others, toward repenting more quickly than ever, toward purity of thought and deed, and BELIEF.

The same way I have to intentionally, with a determined and set mind have to trust God while I am flying at 30,000 feet I have to practice that same intentionality here on the ground. It's funny to say it that way b/c I never saw that anxiety in me on the ground like I do now, but that fear and tenseness I feel when I'm that high is what I've got going on here now. Yet the Lord says that in both places I am dangling, vulnerable, weak...and provided for. In both places my life is suspended in his hands and my feet dangle from the heights, but I have a place to put the trust in my heart. I have to believe that they are the same. And that there is a Creator who is suspending my life over all my days. I hang by his strength and He is the one that I am to hold fast to, because there's no sense in clutching so tightly these "arm rests" that I am gripping at my sides.

Lord give me more grace.

A Verse

2010-08-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

Proverbs 17:27
"A man of knowledge uses WORDS with RESTRAINT,
and a man of understanding is
EVEN-TEMPERED."

Nudges and Shoves

2010-08-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

Do you ever get those little nudges? You know, you feel compelled to do or not to do something. To ask someone how they’re doing with sincerity even though they seem just fine and their face changes and a whole story unloads. Or to stay at home this time and it turns out that one of your kids really needed you. Or to go ahead and text so and so even if you have nothing to say but, “Thinking of you for no reason at all” and it turns out they really needed you in that moment.

And then there’s those enormous convictions that more feel like a friendly shove. Like when you need to speak up to encourage. Or do the courageous act of embracing someone who is totally broken even if you just met them. Or talking to a stranger who just might be completely desperate for a friend. Or actually being the change you want to see in this crazy world by living a different kind of life by the divine power that’s bigger than you.

I get those nudges and shoves. Daily. Probably hourly. Even right now, writing this, I am compelled by something…other…as I write this. And I can only describe it as a heart pumping nudge, keeping me awake and aware to a particular leading, a particular compelling goal. And I must follow, I want to follow, in my deepest desire.

I’m starting to really believe, and not just glaze over, the fact that I’ve got a Counselor following me around. And it’s not just him when I get my heart shoved. It’s also a lot of the little nudges. They’re not just happenstance. Many of them are him. Like everything, I am a tainted girl. I’ve got my sinful lenses and I’ve got my spirit lenses so I am not perfect at discerning what is him, what is common sense, what is just a random idea and what my pastor would say was the burrito I ate the night before. But all I know is that he created me. I am a creation. Who is known. He has searched me and known me. He knows when I sit and when I rise. He perceives my thoughts from way out in my mind. He discerns my going out and when I lie down. He is familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue, he knows it completely (psalm 139). And since he created me and knows me, everything that I do that pleases him has been set about by his work, because I am his workmanship. So I need to give all credit to him for the good counsel that pops in my mind, even in the little things.

You see lately I have been feeling a little tug. And for a long time I’ve thought, this is ridiculous. This is so silly that I keep feeling like I need to listen to this minute meaningless unimportant conviction. And even writing this I am a nervous wreck that someone is actually going to hold me accountable since I actually have a community of godly people out there. But I have had some health issues lately and I keep feeling very clear conviction, as I have for a looong time, to not drink so much coffee and other beverages outside of just dousing my body with water. And I would really like to think that this is a silly idea and go on with my absolutely satisfying morning addiction…however, I have had interesting little guilty thoughts before and during that sweet cup of bliss that have felt super similar to other moments when I choose to think thoughts or go through with actions that I am sure are unpleasing to the Lord. I know this is him. In a nudge. Helping me.

In fact, in all honesty and ridiculousness of the moment, I am actually DRINKING COFFEE RIGHT NOW. Okay it’s confessed. I am a hypocrite. It’s true and it feels completely helpful to say it in writing. But truly I had decided to start my fast tomorrow and enjoy my last cup right now before I go through my painful one week of detox. I know he is nudging me, helping me in this area and I need to YIELD, finally!

I had similar strange food convictions all during my pregnancy with the girls. I cannot even capture on paper how challenging and frustrating those 21 weeks of pregnancy were, trying to eat something…anything. I could not keep food down. I’m not the best at reading every book on the block when it comes to “how to” or __ for dummies, etc. I just ask other people and look up things here and there on the internet and kind of wing it. And I found the Holy Spirit himself in those times giving me random nudges that helped me and then later I would come across some reading or hear from another woman that you should avoid x food or try to eat x and I was so grateful. I felt like someone had counseled me on something I didn’t know to discern on my own.

Not ironically, I literally just stopped writing this post because an old friend from church was here in the coffee shop and got up to leave so I saw her. We got to talking and the nudge to my heart was to ask her about community. Seemed harmless and easy so I responded to the “idea” and it hit a button with her that took us through a long conversation about missing home and the risks involved with giving yourself away to messy community. And we had a great talk and at the end she said this was just what she needed to hear. Now, I can count that as credit to my amazing capability to pinpoint someone’s heart…(ha!) or I can count it as a good gift of the faithful Counselor, who is always directing my steps, bringing himself into every interaction in my life for his glory. I count that conversation as a sweet gift to my day and hers, thanking God for that little nudge to ask such a little thing. Because it led to big things.

I got an email from a friend the other day and her statement sparked my brain on this post and got me going down the tracks. She was writing our bible study about her “evidence of God’s grace” for the week (as we all do weekly, as we pay attention to the work God is doing in our lives). She was looking for an important document and had already been through one pile of papers and was about to shred them when she really felt compelled to look once more. She found what she really needed and was so thankful for that nudge and counted it an evidence of God’s grace.

I know some people count it as luck or count it to their wisdom, but should we be so quick to discount a counselor, a designer, a Spirit just because it’s a little thing?

Maybe some people think this is all ridiculous. That’s fine. I’ve been learning to not demand people learn exactly what I am learning at exactly the same time. But as for me, I feel like that sparrow in Matthew 10. God says there that not one sparrow will fall to the ground apart from his will. And then says, “So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”

The little things are not silly. He is here even in these things. He is for me. He is the Great Shepherd who carries me forever (Psalm 28:9).

And I am worth more than a sparrow to him.

Favorite posts on Small Belle Speaks #6

2010-08-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

Post title: The Hardest Thing (posted 12-8-08)

When it’s all over and we all stand up, I know what my heart is supposed to be doing. There is just a lot going on to keep me sitting lazy. Lines form in the rows as one at a time sliced bread is dipped into either wine or juice. Children enter the room twirling and doing knee bounces to the music. I look over at my love. Head bowed. Hand on my knee. Other hand on his forehead. I turn my head down and start blocking. My to do list thoughts. My chair being knocked by the family behind me. The singing that has started around me. Though it is my favorite song, I have much to say to the Lord. I need to say it. I need to lean in. My thoughts resist. Even trite thoughts and make believe prayers fill my mind. I end them to start real life ones. The conversation feels hard. But I need to do the right thing in this moment even though it is a hard thing.

Last Tuesday as the usual group lit into a conversation about raising children, what she said struck a bell with me. Sometimes it takes up her whole morning to discipline one thing and those hours are gone, but she didn’t let the thing – whatever it was – slide. She let it take up her morning to deal with it. This was her love for her child.

I had already been thinking about this lately. That the right thing to do in my life is very often the hardest thing for me to do. Rarely does doing the right thing or the obedient thing or the selfless thing feel easy. It’s a pulling and a fighting and a submission hold of the flesh.

My daughter didn’t want to eat lunch today, like most days. Her boney legs dangled from her booster seat. She ate some after doddling a while and then finally got a bite too big and threw up the entire meal. At dinner we did all we knew to do to get her to eat. Act like ridiculous ADHD cheerleaders for every single bite. Probably like twenty seven of them. And every bite was followed by our bright eyes, as we wildly slapped her hands over and over and threw her arms up in the air multiple times. You could see she thought of quitting numerous times. But then she’d see my eyes start to light up. She’d prep her lips, clear out her mouth – as is her usual habit before each bite – and open up wide, looking at us expectantly. She finished that container. Bite by bite. Cheer by cheer. And we wanted to collapse at the end of that darn meal. But she’d eaten. One container of yogurt. And our hearts triumphed. It wasn’t the easy thing. But it was the right thing. And I knew it was how we could love her through her stressful trial of mealtime.

I feel this pushing to do the right thing all the time. And it feels awful, how difficult it seems to choose that, but nonetheless the challenge towards it comes again and again. When I am writing a friend an email reply and know they don’t need to just hear “I’m praying” but instead need to know if there is any encouragement or counsel from my heart. When my husband and I cannot seem to get our thoughts to overlap in harmony and it takes hours of talking to wind our hearts together. When the girls disobey for the thirtieth time that day and I choose not to ignore but again and again go to teach and discipline so that their hearts understand what is right and good. When I have wronged someone and I feel that maybe they would just overlook it or maybe they have even already forgotten it, but I know in my heart of hearts that I am called to confess and reconcile with them. When someone insults me, to overlook their words and do the work of seeing their pain and misery under the conversation so that I can absorb the blows. When I would rather “get something done” but little beauty girl is saying “up” and handing me books.

I don’t want to do the lazy thing. As I “sit there” and all of the distractions and wills of life call around me for my attention, I know it will be difficult to bend my knee and bow my head to die to myself. To block the thoughts that becon me to be about myself. And to say and do the things that the Spirit in me is requiring me to do. In those moments, I want to put my will in a submission hold until it passes out and does the right thing. Even though usually it’s the hardest thing.

Favorite posts on Small Belle Speaks #5

2010-07-30T11:13:00.000-07:00

Post title: All my kids are adopted (posted 2-2-09)

i never had a close friend growing up who was adopted. i did have one cousin who was, but because no one ever harped on it, it felt just the same to me. i think the first time adoption came close to a personal meaning for me was when i was getting married. i was trying to figure out how to honor my stepdad andy at the wedding. as it turns out i think i didn't give him the honor he deserved. dad walked me down the aisle and then i stopped at the end, andy stepped out to kiss me, and then he went back to his pew. that didn't show him justice. though i had a dad, andy really raised me and chose to be in my life for every single day of it. when he met my mom, i was the extra paragraph in small print that was going to make their marriage totally different. he married her, quite able to read small fonts. and he liked the deal. i didn't realize it was like i had been adopted until later, like twenty years later. and i really have a crazy respect now for men who marry single moms.

as jason and i looked towards having kids i went through a lot of phases. the first being "no way. i am not ready. i don't think i want to stay at home. and i really can't see myself with kids. but i really want to do all that later." then (thanks to our church) it looked more like, "i would like to be ready. being a mom and raising kids is a beautiful honor, like a crown on a woman's life." then it changed to, "is it now? do i have a heart for this? lord, where is my heart? can i see myself as a mom?" then finally, "please lord, this is my desire: for children and to be at home with them." it's totally wacky and surprising how the first and last quote are both from me.

even when i mentally finally caught up with my husband (because of the Holy Spirit, my faithful counselor), who had patiently endured a couple years of waiting, my thoughts around natural and adopted kids were totally different. and i think most people don't move from what i am about to describe. somewhere in my head i wanted to adopt. but it was kind of a last resort, a nice faraway goal, an eventual decision and an afterthought of our own childrearing of blood born children. but interestingly trying for our own child was very much in the forefront and preferred, i guess is the right word. now i should mention something at this moment. i don't think it's wrong to want your own kids and to have a desire for them. don't hear that. i just think it is interesting how we all think they are so different from adopted kids. the sidenote big picture being that we are called to all things, whether "our own" kids or "adopted" kids or to not get to have kids at all. so it's important to be prayerful. yet the heart for "our own" kids from "adopted" kids can be so so not the same. and mine was for sure.

when did this change? well, jason and i did want both. we wanted to try for our own, like most couples. and down the road we've always felt like we would adopt one. when we got pregnant with the girls i began to understand that the whole "our own" and "adopted" mentalities were actually...not far from being the same at all. when the girls were in the womb i could not see them. i could feel their movements. i could sense them physically. i could pray for them. but i did not know them. i couldn't see them or cuddle them. i didn't know what they would look like or act like or what our relationship with them would be like.

and the day they were born...was not their first day of life. they had already been living for nine months, just smaller. they were already around. i had just not met them yet and officially said, "hi i'm your mama." and one day, what we would call their birthday, i got to meet them. it actually felt like adoption. it felt like jason brought a crying kanah (she was first) over to my face and said "this will be your daughter." and i looked over at her, crying, like, who are you little one? you are such a beautiful creation? i wanted to know all about the girls in those moments but it felt like a rushed introduction to who they were. and they were such a mystery to me. some moms have said to me that you will just feel that instant connection. i partly agree with them. there is that moment of awe when you see your own child after birth and you just can't believe they are yours but somehow you know they are yours. but is this because they came out of my body? or because God gave me a huge heart for them? i think the latter myself. because i have never met this person!

but really, more than this instant connection thing, i really really really kind of "got" the whole "our own" kids sort of is the same as "adopted" kids during this time, at the very beginning of being a mom to kanah and grace. these two little beings literally felt like they showed up into my life and i had to get to know everything about them. they were kind of little strangers to me.

there's another evidence to me of this. and i don't know about other moms, but even though i was in awe of the girls from the beginning and certainly loved them, i cannot even compare the love i had then for them to the love i have now for them. i certainly loved them, but now i am love them more fiercely and madly. it reminds me of the verse that we had read at our wedding. 1 Thessalonians 3:12 "may the Lord make your love increase and overflow for one another." i really feel like what began as root and foundational love for my daughters, established by the heart of God, became an increasing and overflowing love for them because God keeps growing my heart for them. it's insanely beautiful and cool. i remember when i was in the "can i see myself as a mom?" stage of pre-motherhood, i didn't know if i would love my children enough. i think the Lord takes care of this for us. there was evidence of this for me with the birth of my daughters and i believe there is the same evidence of this for adopting parents, so i won't fear the day we adopt a child.

regarding the title of this post, and to wrap this up for now, i really do believe that all of my kids both present and future are adopted. i really really believe God has evened out in my heart any differences i saw in my "own" kids verses our "adopted" kids. they are all adopted. they are/will all be given over to our care. we are their caretakers and they belong to God. and God made them (psalm 139). he loves them way more than me - which i can't get my head around - and i honor him by loving his kids. he lets me call them "mine" and entrusts them to me. i am so thankful God has worked on my brain with this because i do want to adopt and pray with all my heart that the Lord will move many families around us to do the same - since all these kids - "ours" and the "adopted" are the same. God this is so cool. and i want to keep understanding your heart.

"but when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of woman, born of the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. and because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!'" galatians 4.

Favorite posts on Small Belle Speaks #4

2010-07-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

Post Title: Biggest Loser in Me (posted 1-19-10)

Another season of Biggest Loser has begun. They say it’s the biggest, heaviest group ever. And this year trainers Bob and Jillian joke that they feel like they say that every year, but seriously it’s true and the heaviest guy came in at 526 pounds at his first weigh in. I don’t love everything about the show and much prefer to watch it in the slowest fast forward setting since they drag it out so long, but last season something very unlikely happened in me as I was watching the finale.

I swear the Lord comes to me in the strangest times. Toilet. Stoplight. Head on the pillow. Brushing teeth. Browsing pantry. And, apparently, watching Biggest Loser.

To show everyone what had been accomplished on the final episode, the finalists came bursting through a paper image of their old selves, as if in a victory lap, and with hands raised and audience wildly cheering as they rejoiced in their new bodies. It was literally a miracle seeing who they were before and who they had become. They were clearly not the same people. They had accomplished something that literally felt completely impossible to them. But there they were, changed in a drastic and wonderful way and my heart was so happy that they had physically found freedom from their old bodies. I actually found myself in tears as the Lord gave me a word from him for my life.

You see, I have been on about a three year journey through a sin tendency in my life that has clung to me like static. I have tried to shake it and peel it off and shoo it away and fight it and wrestle it and relinquish it and defeat it with small victories but mainly a lot of frustration that it’s still around. I have seen my sin vaguely on a “oh, who are you?” level and then more familiarly on a “oh, you’re still around?” level and then a couple years into it, it was more like a, “are you kidding me? GO AWAY!” level.

If I could display it in a physical sense I guess it wouldn’t look much different than an overweight person dealing with gluttony. They eat well for a meal and then have got to have that package of oreos and then they work out a couple days and then find themselves doing other things. Back and forth. Back and forth. Ups and downs. Blah blahh blahhhhhh.

Romans puts it perfectly. “For I DO NOT UNDERSTAND MY OWN ACTIONS. (I know!!! Seriously!!!) For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. (I know!!!!) For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man am I! Who will deliver me from this body of death? THANKS BE TO GOD THROUGH JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD!”

I do not understand my actions. True. True. True. This is craziness at times. It is true I literally have in my head who I want to be in certain circumstances. I even pray just before the rocky circumstances or conversations happen, as I usually anticipate them. Then in that terrible moment of testing, I just BAIL on what I really really want! I go for the bait, as my pastor said during Sunday’s sermon. I go for the tempting thing. For the shallow desires in my heart that linger and lay out their tasty bait for me because they know I always go for it.

For me, that would be expectations (what I set as a standard for another), self-justification (really wanting justice for myself and to be treated with absolute fairness) and self-preservation (all about reputation and being right and being on top) and being understood (though it is never promised to us that we will be perfectly understood). Those are my likely baits and they are so alluring. They are certainly something I want, but as the Romans verses say, my heart DOES want to obey God IN MY INNER BEING. Pastor Mark has talked about this before, that my deepest desires are from the Spirit as a Christian. That is what I really really want to do, want to obey, want to carry out. But I just cannot, cannot, cannot seem to carry it out.

The Lord has revealed so much to me over three years about these sin patterns in my life. I have been learning, growing, changing at a turtles pace but thankfully changing non-the-less. Losing my two pounds a week of my “flesh”. Though like a 526 pound human being, the two pounds a week is so torturous and frustrating.

I remember a testimony from a couple of years ago at a women’s retreat. She was telling her dark story and as God would enter the story she would say, “But God.” This part of my testimony has felt dark and grim and low for some time. But lately I feel a turning. And I am sensing that my story is seeing the corner where I will be able to say “But God…” Ephesians 2 has a passage like this. Read this:

“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience – among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. BUT GOD, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ…”

I am sensing a BUT GOD in my story. I am sensing that I am going to be made able to carry out what I actually want to be and do. You can’t possible imagine how many exclamation points I want to put behind that because I’ve hated who I have been!!!!!! I am so thankful for this turning.

But it’s not like it’s God’s fault and I’ve just been waiting for him to show up. I think he’s just speaking up lately about what this change will take. What kind of obedience it will require. What I will have to lay on the alter. Namely, my baits I mentioned above.

And as my pastor talked about in Sunday’s sermon, God is faithful to provide a way out of our temptation. I can take the door or take the bait. And many times I just have not chosen to go with the Spirit. And even now, it’s only been a week since I have felt all of this changing in me, but I am going with it. And going with it tangibly looks like really really rough, abandoned, scary, selfless obedience in each moment. And I don’t want to do it! But I do want to do it! The me that doesn’t want to do it is the one that would rather preserve self and be treated fairly and given justice and experience perfect understanding and basically sacrifice everything else, especially humility in order to achieve those pleasures. The me that wants to do it is the NEW CREATION in me. The me that God created me to be. She’s the girl that I take joy in being because she’s God’s daughter who delights in Him and in Him being enough for her. When I let her come out, I am free.

I am reading Sacred Marriage, which is all about what I am writing about, but now in addition I am also reading Pursuit of Holiness. I got stuck on like page four and I’m frozen there because God showed me something very important about HIS PRESENCE in my sinful cycles. I know this but I didn’t knooooooow this in my heart in each moment of temptation. The author says about those having trouble defeating sin, “Our first problem is that our attitude toward sin is more self-centered than God-centered. We are more concerned about our own ‘victory’ over sin than we are about the fact that our sins grieve the heart of God. We cannot tolerate failure in our struggle with sin chiefly because we are success-oriented, not because we know it is offensive to God…God wants us to walk in obedience, not victory. Obedience is oriented toward God; victory is oriented toward self. This may seem to be merely splitting hairs over semantics, but there is a subtle, self-centered attitude at the root of many of our difficulties with sin. Until we face this attitude and deal with it we will not consistently walk in holiness. This is not to say God doesn’t want us to experience victory, but rather to emphasize that victory is a by-product of obedience.”

So. How this theology becomes practical is that in my moment of temptation, I need to see that me treating this other person (namely my spouse) the way that I am called to love them is OBEDIENCE to God. If I can see God present in the scenario I am in and find obeying him my highest joy, then I find myself in a whole different ball park. I am less likely to be run by my emotions, led by my instincts, reacting to my spouse’s behaviors and tempted by my baits. I need to see real life in light of what is going on spiritually, with Jesus present in that very room, believing that my obedience or disobedience is something I am doing to him.

So all of this to say that I’m sitting there watching Biggest Loser’s finale from last season and I’m on the couch crying because the Lord is piercing my heart that what happened to those people physically is what He will accomplish in me IN THE SPIRIT. He is going to tear away my flesh, enable me to carry out my deepest desires of the Spirit so that I become unrecognizable from who I was before. And all I could see was my sweet husband sitting in the front row, looking at me like – Who is this wife of mine? Who has she become? And he will rejoice over the new creation in me! Lord let it be as you have shown me. Make me new. Let me come forth in 2010 as someone I would not recognize from last year. I can see her in my mind and I want to see her in the mirror. Can this change come? Yes! “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ my Lord!”

Favorite Posts on Small Belle Speaks #3

2010-07-28T10:20:00.000-07:00

Post title: Ready. (posted 3-3-10)

I love sleep. Sleep is my friend. If I could cuddle with sleep I would. I mean I love it. Jason likes to stay up late and I pretty much would cut off my pinkie (well, my left one) if he would promise to go to bed every night at 10:30 with me. Oh, just realized I wouldn't be able to type. Well maybe my (doing a look over here)...okay I don't want to give up any body parts :) but you get the picture. I reeeally like to go to bed and I reeeeally like to wake up naturally in the morning with the light, without any screaming type noises or little cries at my bedroom door or anything disturbing like that. I like it when I'm laying there until my feet get a little antsy and announce "That's enough!" and I roll out of bed all happy.

So to even write that paragraph I had to dig deep into my memory chasm to remember what that's like. My husband and I have started switching off Saturday mornings to sleep in, but I'm still asking you to feel sorry for me on my sleep in mornings because downstairs all three munchkins keep me lying there with my eyes bugged open because I hear little crashes and tantrums and dress up shoes and tools banging the coffee table until I finally give in. And this is in a house where there is a sound machine cranked up in every room. I don't even get how some families have no noise makers. I'm baffled.

So for a kind of long stretch of time I have known that naptime is not exactly the best time for getting my heart ready for the day, otherwise known as a "quiet time." Right now, as I attempt to write this, for example, Salem is screaming his head off in his crib. I've turned off the monitor, have the food network turned on softly for background noise, and I still have a knot of anxiety in my shoulders. Also, the kids all go down for naps but it's now been pushed back to about 1:30. Not really a good time to get my heart READY for the day, since my heart will not really be tested until about 3:30, which leaves only two hours of mommy time until daddy saves the day :).

I've dreaded the growing conviction that I need to get up at 6ish. But the conviction has finally swallowed me whole and it's inescapable that that's what the Lord has asked of me. Sometimes I think we kind of wait on the Lord to make sure he's really asking something and I laugh at myself thinking about how long I've been avoiding his request of me and saying, Yeah I think naptime is fine. It's sort of working. And on days it's not, it's not my fault. So I tried but it didn't work for today. And I can just do one tonight (though at least for me it's not really helpful nearly as much as the day of). So, now when Jason's alarm starts going off (he sets it early so he can snooze a couple of times) I need to get up. I have been doing a snooze with him, but then it's time. And it's kind of rough, but I have to say that I must have FORGOTTEN that like five seconds ago I was being tortured all night long by sleeplessness with Sa Sa, who thought sleep was overrated. And I must have forgotten completely life with twooooo preemie babies who were not even allowed to sleep through the night until 6 mths because of their underweight issues. Must have forgotten about that. Because when Salem started sleeping until 5, I remember feeling like doing happy dances every morning. I felt like I'd arrived. And now here I am just acting like 6 something for TIME FOR MEEEEE is somehow torturous. No Kelly. You're delirious.

And yes let's talk about how it's TIME FOR MEEEEEE. Time to wake up to the morning light and casually make a cup of coffee and break open my Bible and write in my journal and do my prayer walk around the family room and kitchen and have the Lord prepare my heart for the day. That's amazing time for me. And it prepares me to be a totally different me - the me that I want to be walking in step with the Spirit.

This morning I got up. Salem happened to be up too so I went in and changed him, fed him, and let him play in his crib, which he happily does for about 1/2 an hour. I knew Jason would shortly be in to let him visit with him while he got ready for work. The girls slept peacefully, which they usually do until around 7:30. I headed downstairs to a quiet kitchen to make coffee and cut up a grapefruit and this morning I just felt compelled to pray. So I did. If you know me, you know that prayer for me means outloud and walking. That's my favorite way. I kind of circle the family room and living room and always start with my husband, then my kids, then whoever else the Lord burdens me for. Today was a sweet time over my husband and kids mainly. By the time Jason walked downstairs lugging Salem, I felt ready, excited to see Sa Man, and ready to start my day.

My day. Yes. Well, I even took a few moments to prepare a nice little schedule for the day b/c this was the only day of the week with no plans. I was happy to lavish time on the kids, not worrying about cleaning or cooking or anything. Just time at home today. I had decided to go for a messy project - PAINTING. It was great fun. We used all kinds of brushes and animal and fun shaped sponges and even little sponge rollers with little shapes on them like stars and hands. It was great fun and a great mess but with Salem napping soundly, I loved my time with the little ladies.

From there things got a little testy. The girls just took turns throwing tantrums, getting jealous, fighting, whining, you name it. But. Yes, BUT. I have to say I felt ready. I felt prepared for them as their mommy, their counselor, their mediator, their trainer in righteousness. I cannot say this about everyday. But I can say it about today. And even though their hearts didn't change instantly and we continued and persisted in discipline and correction and sitting down together face to face to walk through what happened yet again, it was okay. Because my heart was okay. Because I do have to say when it gets all "crazy land" (which is what I like to exclaim when who knows what has gone down), it is usually because the mama is crazy inside. Not so uncommon, I will confess publicly to all of you. BUT God is good. And His gospel is real. Which means, when I tell the Lord - I need you to be my Strength today. That is what you promise me and I need that today. Please help me. When I confess that and submit myself to him, He is familiar to me in the moments of crisis and He establishes peace for me. And in that I can avoid crazy land and find myself still being who I am called to be.

A little less sleep? It's worth it.

Favorite posts on Small Belle Speaks #2

2010-07-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

Post Title: Wet Cuffs (posted 10-4-08)

i wasn't so sure about it
was even a little angry about it
i was ready to trade it all in for roaches and mosquitos
and heat meant only for steam rooms
and just leave without my bags
i could get all new stuff and
some scavenger would move into our abandoned abode
it kept me bitter and mentally estranged
for about four weeks,
coming before it's welcome and all
poor august wasn't so appreciative
to have it's studly reputation ruined
i mean, did it have to be such a little mouch
when it had so much attention every year already?
reminds me of my girls swooping in on each other's toys
and dashing off, gleefully holding their victory
up over their heads
just as this weather has held it's victory clouds up over
our summer clothes and laughed a little at us
i guess it's fall
because elias and i stomped the crunch out of fallen leaves today
with his smiling green smiling rainboots
while my girls toddled about in pink sweaters and
wispy curls tossed by the wind
i looked out on wavering evergreens today,
rustling in the feel of the new season
the hastas were bowing down
in submission to a damp earth
and i felt cold
from the wet cuffs of my jeans sticking to my bare ankles
which won't dry now until july
i knew i was going to be okay with it though
a couple of weeks ago
in one single day it was decided for me by two blessings
i had lost my favorite sweater
losing things - not strange for me
i've lost many things, the most recent one being
my birth certificate
along with my entire
"important documents folder"
yikes
anyhow
the silly beloved little thing popped out from under
a pile of scrapbooking supplies one day
imagine that
(i claim to be organized by the way)
and later that day i found myself ordering at starbucks
a sign in orange announced the return of the glorious pumpkin spice latte
laaaaaa!
my heart was changed
i knew i could do it
wet cuffs and all i felt a renewed okay-ness
maybe it was bribery
maybe i had been outwitted by fall's finest gameplay
but by my choice or manipulation
here i am actually looking forward to what comes down to
really really bad weather for a really really long time ;)
i can almost feel the mush of pumpkin seeds on my fingertips
and the fireplace blazing a burn onto my back
and our huddled bodies keeping warm as we walk streets together
fall is here
and after quite a relational battle,
i think we're reconciled with our differences and
i have somehow, miraculously, come to feel that i like it again

Favorite Posts on Small Belle Speaks #1

2010-07-26T07:15:00.000-07:00

Doing a series this week of my favorite posts since I have started this blog. Not sure what got me thinking about doing it but whatever it is, I thank "it" because I enjoyed reading over a good chunk of my last year and a half of thoughts. Thought I might post a few that meant the most to me and some that did the best job of hitting exactly what I was trying to say. I'll post one each day this week...

Title: I go cave woman. (posted 6-18-08)

“If everyone in the world was like me we would still be living in a caveman society.” This is what I told Jason as we were driving the other day. He’s not surprised when I say random things like that because I am perpetually random, but he wanted to know what I meant. Here’s what I meant.

We had been in Seattle, coming back from dinner at Purple Café and Wine Bar, incidentally my new favorite, and we were winding through the streets of downtown. I was noticing the complicated bridge structures and in the blip of just like two seconds it hit me that I would be too overwhelmed and too completely lazy to actually think up, and never mind build, this sort of road system. I don’t even think I could have come up making a long straight road over the course of my lifetime. I’m really serious.

I’m smiling right now just thinking about this button in my brain. It’s the “I’m too tired to think about this” button and I hit it like five times a day and when I do my brain just shuts off. I might still be listening to you but I’m gazing right through you and getting a crunched eyebrow look. I might still be reading that book but really my eyes are running down the page without computing one word. When something gets too hard for me to think about I can feel that limit, literally, and I can either decide that I care enough to go through it or I push the button. I really like that button, by the way. I’m kind of glad it’s there but I feel like I need a nurse to tell me I have a limit on it, like when I had a morphine drip on hospital bed rest.

The times I choose not to push the button are usually people oriented. That’s good for all of you reading who might feel slighted by my button pushing. Yes, it’s true, I usually actually hate the button when it comes to thinking about our hearts. I want to get to the bottom of what is going on in you and me and sally smith. Recently me and two gals were talking and one of them was trying to figure out what to do with an obstacle in her life. And even with one of us in the room being an actual counselor by profession, it was difficult to get to the root of what was going on so that she could walk in freedom. This sort of thinking gets me really excited and sometimes it’s nice because you can use other people’s brains to sort of lily pad jump through ideas and it may take you to some thoughts or conclusions you may not have come to without sort of a group think mentality. Without the lily pads, I might have pushed the button, masked by a “I’ll pray for you” sort of thing.

I always tease Jason about being smarter than me. “Okay, Northwestern,” I say if he gets something that I don’t. Whenever the girls do something really brilliant I tell him they have his brain. I actually really like that his brain works better than mine. I don’t know what it would be like the other way around – having a spouse like me, but he seems to like the way I think and what I say…so I think we’re good. He’s just so good at figuring things out. I think it’s a temptation though for me to get lazy because our married life has access to his brain and so I rely on him to get things done that make my head hurt. Like a little thing – we have two kids’ gates downstairs so the girls have to stay in the living room/kitchen area with me. A bunch of times people (mostly other kids) have plowed through the gate accidentally and it falls down. My response is like – Jason will fix it. But if Jason wasn’t around, I might actually have to figure it out. Is anyone relating?? Other button pushing moments: using the grill, handling our budget and bills, fixing issues w/ the computer (big one!), anything involving something called a “tool,” setting up TIVO (but I overcame that one and now I record my own shows – ha ha!), hanging pictures, etc. You get the picture. I go cavewoman.

The issue though is that I check out when life gets hard for me. The heat comes and I wither and push my button instead of being that tree planted by streams of water that Isaiah and Psalms talks about. I think this whole thing was brought home most to me when I got pregnant. Literally brought home. Terribly ill twelve weeks and on bedrest another twelve. It was the first time, in such an obvious everyday kind of way, that I felt like I couldn’t push the button. If my body was getting in the way and I wanted to escape it, I couldn’t. If it was hard to understand nutrition because I had always just eaten what I wanted, I couldn’t avoid it because with a twin pregnancy I needed double the good stuff. If I wanted to go do something for myself during weeks 22-34, even just run an errand, I had to push through the temptation and keep flat on the couch. And when all the crazy anxious thoughts came about what might happen if the girls came at 27 weeks and how their lungs might not work and my body might have an impossible time recovering because it had been stretched to the limits…I couldn’t check out. It wasn’t enough. I had to pray and take captive those thoughts to Christ. The Lord wouldn’t let me go cavewoman. The button didn’t work.

So now the button kind of works again. Granted Kanah and Grace keep the button hidden from me most of the time, those little mama-mouchers ;). Being a mama means dealing with life the moment it is there. So that has been good for me. But there are times when I see an opportunity to check out…and I take it a lot of the time because when it comes down to it…I do what I want to do. We all do. We take only what we have to take and deal with what we have to deal with and we let a lot slide otherwise. At least that is what I do.

I’ve gone cavewoman like four times since starting this entry early today. That is really hilarious! At some point when I was writing this I was like – it’s just not making sense or coming together. I think I might just shorten it or not figure out what the full circle is. Too much thinking. And then the Lord kept me tuned in long enough to reveal how he put children into my life to deal with this cavewoman side of me. To show me that sometimes I need to work it out with him instead of escaping. And that in other times it is okay to just be really grateful for my smart, helpful husband Jason and all my lily pad partners when it comes to working through things in my life.

Now that I am seeing all that though, my “witching hour” (Jason’s term) is approaching. 10:00 is sixteen minutes away. And about this time of day when all my responsibilities are done, the girls are in bed and life isn’t throwing anything my way, it is finally appropriate to go crawl into my cave. Goodnight everyone.

I'm a Character - Part 2

2010-07-23T20:22:00.000-07:00

(Part 2 of some thoughts on Donald Miller's book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.)

Remember the day that you met your spouse, collided into that stranger, or you suddenly lost your job?

Those are what Miller would call “inciting incidents.” I am connecting quotes from a longer segment but this is the short of what he says: “An inciting incident is an event that forces your character to move; it’s the thing that throws your character into the story...It’s how you get them to do something and the doorway through which they can’t return…otherwise the story never happens.”

I thought this idea of forcing the character to move to be very interesting. Maybe because it’s a bit offensive. I mean, we would all like to think that we are motivated and self-assured and we can do what we want in life whenever we want to and that we are not lazy or living meaninglessly. But alas I think for most human beings, we must be forced to move, to change. Even the will power for the goals we have spent time scribbling meticulously is weak and must be renewed daily or else we forget and they fade away.

And when he says forced, he means going through the door of an unexpected circumstance. Something comes into our lives – a person, an issue, a trial, a choice, a change – and we must now react and live out a response or change direction. We might not have chosen it. It might appear good or bad; we might call it a blessing or a curse. But it’s a circumstance and the purpose is to change us. It’s meant to force. Meant to move us. Meant to propel us off the internal and external couches in our lives.

I just smiled because when I wrote that I had a visual in my head of like a beat up frat house or something, with a couch randomly hanging out in the front yard. We’ve got internal couches in our hearts that we sit on and don’t deal with our thoughts or convictions or beliefs and we just sit there. And we’ve got external couches which are like the times we do nothing when we clearly should act and when we take the sidelines when God has said to go and be courageous.

I hate my worn couches in my house and my raggedy couches in my yard.

I hate that they have those indentions that make them sag in the middle. I need to ask the Lord what I have been sitting on, in my heart and in my life. What does he need to change in my heart and in my living?

I need to pay attention to the inciting incidents in our lives right now, trying to force me to move. To grow. To see the Lord. To become more like him. Do I let the incident totally throw off my “quiet time” and I stop praying and go all wild inside with worry and anxiety? Or do I allow this incident to move me to trust? Move me to believe upon who God is? Move me to a courageous faith that God can take this mysterious, unknown, scary circumstance and use it to mold our story into something new, something for his glory and our good – good as he define it.

These are the circumstances the Lord has allowed. The inciting incidents that in some cases he has allowed and in some cases he has written. He is sovereign. Whether they are sufferings or blessings, He is fully aware they have come into our lives and His purpose is to incite, to create, to propel his pure desire of redemption.

These are the very opportunities that give the Holy Spirit a chance to move some furniture.

Sacred Marriage Ch. 2

2010-07-16T06:45:00.000-07:00

For Jason: Know that it’s my hope that God will have his way with me. Thanks for your grace.

There’s so much value in knowing how to communicate. In learning how to respond to your spouse. In tweaking the tone in your voice and the body language you wear. In thinking, gosh, even a split second before speaking. And in not throwing things across the room to make a point – I definitely think it was beneficial to learn that I was just looking for some negative attention there :). There are books and books out there on all that marriage stuff that I truly believe are helpful.

But more than helpful is one truth that is the most powerful for my marriage if I just daily wrapped my whole mind, body and spirit around it. I just wish I could breathe it in with a spiritual oxygen mask so I am sustained with truth, and not lies, as I breathe in and exhale out with only a renewed mind.

God gives us a gospel picture of marriage in that he calls himself our husband. He entered into a marriage, a covenant, just like we have. Except the bride he picked looked a liiiiitle different than how we planned of and dreamed of our own spouse. He pursues a whorish, adulterous, stubborn, faithless, rebellious, rejecting, straying, ignorant, careless, wicked people…his Bride. Interesting choice, if you think about it.

This is depicted in most of Scripture through the covenant he made with Israel. Some people often bring up the point that God was showing favoritism when he made Israel his “chosen people.” But it’s clear in Scripture that Israel just made one big fool of herself over and over and over and I’m kind of glad I wasn’t the one that he chose to help the whole world understand that no one is faithful except him. I don’t think it’s much to puff up your chest about. And I can’t puff up my chest either because it’s kind of the point that I am supposed to realize the depth of my rebellion when I read about Israel and I am supposed to see the lengths God goes to to restore our relationship no matter what I do to him.

Hosea is a man God calls to “Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness” and the entire book of the Bible is a story of her straying from the marriage and him faithfully remaining. It’s a picture of our relationship with the Lord. (Poor Hosea). We didn’t start out pure on our wedding day with Jesus either. We came down the aisle adulterers in our hearts. And God put his righteousness on us, just like we put on a white wedding gown.

Derek Webb describes us this way:
i am a @#!*% i do confess
but i put you on just like a wedding dress
and i run down the aisle
I’m a prodigal with no way home
but i put you on just like a ring of gold
and i run down the aisle to you

so could you love this child
though i don’t trust you to provide
with one hand in a pot of gold
and with the other in your side
i am so easily satisfied
by the call of lovers less wild
that i would take a little cash
over your very flesh and blood

So God marries us, his bride. He takes our sick hearts and gives us new ones (which Ezekiel describes as him taking our heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh). And he leads and pulls and draws out our relationship with him. He does EVERYTHING in our marriage with him. Even the good that comes out of my heart for him, for his glory, is because he put a new heart in me, gave me a Holy Spirit to show me how to respond to him and then literally gave me the strength to carry out what pleases him. Talk about a one sided relationship.

I literally want to CRY. This is so lovely that it pains me. As a side note right now as I squint at my screen here at Starbucks, how do people not want that to be their story? Who would not want that to be true? I mean, the only thing I can think is that people might feel insulted by that description of who they are. But come on, we all know it’s true.

Anyway, just thinking of that extreme picture of a one-sided relationship I have a couple thoughts. One (and please know that Jason actually doesn’t do this, thank goodness), wouldn’t it be annoying if you carried your marriage with all your efforts and continual forgiveness and constant confessions of your own sins (and on and on) and your spouse never did any of that and thought they were so great? That would be beyond frustrating. I have to chill out just thinking of it. That seems like it would be the hardest marriage.

Well, that’s us. We (Christians) kind of get the idea that we’re amazing and we’re busy being the “bride” of Christ pretty well. And we puff up when we pray a lot or know a verse before anyone else or fill in the blank at the end of your pastor’s sentence. Gross. Ugg. Barf. NO. He. Does. Eeeeeeverything. Without him we can do nothing (John 15). Paul says, “What a wretch am I. Who will rescue me from this body of death? But thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

So think about your marriage right now. Think about what things you think you contribute and what you wish your spouse would. Now think about what I just wrote here about your covenant with Jesus. He does everything. You do nothing. Now how RIDICULOUS is it when we get @#!*% off about our spouses not pulling their load? (Just think about what question generally without thinking specifically, especially if it’s something major or detrimental because Scripture does speak to those things differently). On average, our gripes are things that I am sure the Lord is going, “Seriously?” Because he could have a gripe list from the North Pole to the South. But he forgave the list from one iceberg to the other. And my list the size of my hand is growing roots of bitterness in me like no other. IT. IS RIDICULOUS.

When we do that we do NOT understand our marriage to Christ. We just don’t. And even though right now I am writing about this and I get it and the Holy Spirit has revealed these spiritual truths to me and they dwell richly in me, I am still a sinner who bends in my thinking on days I am not alert. And I grow my gripe list and I let my bitter roots grow and I withhold love and it’s all just RIDICULOUS. And on those days I have forgotten. Just like the Israelites. Hosea 13:6 says, “When I fed them, they were satisfied; when they were satisfied, they became proud; then they forgot me.”

Ephesians 5:25-27 says “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…”

I John 3:16 says, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.”

Being totally absolutely planted, rooted, and watered in the truth that my relationship with God looks like him being completely sacrificial should change 3 things:

1. It should change how I view obeying him. He did everything for me. He gave everything up. He died for me. So in view of his mercy, I should be willing to be a living sacrifice as well. In view of who he is and what he has done for us, “we make it our goal to please him.” (2 Co 5:9) And he is faithful to show us how. Because he’s already done it.
2. It should change how I view my relationships with other people. Jesus just gave his life away. In him, I shouldn’t just see the world and the people in it as for me, but I should see my life as for them, as a light and a depiction of Christ’s workmanship in my heart.
3. It should absolutely change the way I see my marriage and my husband. 2 Co 5:15 says “Those who lives should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.” I was dead and now I am alive and I owe it all to Jesus. And it pleases him for me to now take my life and lay it down for others, especially and foremost in my marriage. And in this way my life and our marriage becomes this light that points a sinful world to a reconciling Creator.

So on a practical level. When Jason doesn’t apologize first, I should still step out humbly and recognize my own crap. And ask his forgiveness. And if he doesn’t recognize his junk drawer of sins, I should be patient pray for him so that his heart can experience the freedom that mine does by getting it out. And when I sin against him I don’t justify it or ignore it or make it small. I need to have sober judgement and consider how my sin affects him. And take that to him. And reconcile. And when my list of expectations a mile long of “who my husband should be” is haunting my mind, I must recognize that God is gracious with us, abounding in love and compassion. I must recognize that God has been crazy patient with me and my slow progress to respond to his Spirit. And that God is my God and not my husband. I must recognize that being in this marriage is not about absorbing from my husband all that I need for life, but using my marriage as an avenue to lean on God and learn who He is for me.

And I’m not saying you never communicate or care for each other or ever ever talking about any of your needs down to the little things like needing a date night. I’m not saying something black and white that turns you into a doormat or a silent spouse who doesn’t work through things.

But I am saying that almost for certain most of us don’t view our marriage for grounds to give ourselves away, like Jesus demonstrated for us. I’m pretty sure that living the gospel first with our spouse is the hardest city on a hill ministry we’ve got. It’s easy to love the Sally Janes down the street because we’re not looking to them for what we think we need. But giving away our lives selflessly to our spouses? That’s when we know if this Jesus stuff is real. And if we really have experienced the transforming truth that he gave away his life for us and we’re forever changed by his grace.

Thomas says, “If my marriage contradicts my message, I have sabotaged the goal of my life: to be pleasing to Christ and to faithfully fulfill the ministry of reconciliation.”

I am desperate to live this. I am desperate to scatter the lies that laugh at this. And I know as I die to making it all about me, I gain life. This. Is. True. And beyond lovely.

I'm a character - Part 1

2010-07-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

I’m reading another book. I milked Cold Tangerines for like five months because I pretty much love exactly that kind of book and can’t find many of them. The kind of non-fiction book where each chapter is basically an essay on a particular story in the author’s life where through connecting events and conversations they learned something new, and who they are was tweaked by what eventually came full circle. The chapters were like four pages long and that’s all I would allow myself to read and then put it down until I wanted to read the next time.

Then Jason gave me A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, by Donald Miller. Thank you, Jason. I didn’t discipline my reading quota this time and gorged myself on his scrumptious little chapters until I found myself on like page 170 and wanted to cry because it would end on page 250. My girls get a piece of candy from something I called the “treat train” every time they go potty with dry underwear (can you hear me chanting “chugga chugga chugga chugga TREAT TRAIN!!” from the bathroom floor?) And about once a day I feel deserving of my own version of having dry undies and devour a reesy cup. I would really like to eat the entire train because I actually probably deserve all of that plus like 500 mommy medals. But I eat one a day. It’s kind of like that. Now I am back to just taking in a daily treat of uno capitulo and putting it down until the next time.

So the gist of the book is that these movie guys approach Miller to make a movie about his life and as they are piecing it all together he basically has all of these realizations about what a story actually is and how his life lacks them. And I’m not done with the book, but along the way his life goes less from being stories in his head to stories happening in his life. So I found some takeaways that have me thinking. And more than just thinking, I hope, since that is kind of the whole point of his realizations anyway. My posts always end up being too long so I might post my thoughts over a couple of posts.

Here’s one of the first quotes I underlined and appreciated enough to re-type for you. “In nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He’s a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn’t change, the story hasn’t happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just a condensed version of life, then life itself may be designed to change us, so that we evolve from one kind of person to another.”

So, I am a character who has been written into life. And Miller says, and I agree, that evidence of being in a story (a good story I guess) is that my character is changing. Kelly is changing. I am evolving internally, from one kind of person to another. It’s helpful for me to think of the “not” version of that. I guess a character who goes through situations and incidents and happenings but stubbornly or perhaps fearfully or perhaps selfishly refuses to allow themselves to change. Maybe that looks like me fighting my own story. I am a wife and a mom and right now I don’t have a job, but actually I am so busy with purpose that it’s crazy overwhelming. And in the midst of what I am called to be doing, maybe I just complain about it or fight it or avoid it. If I do that, I will not evolve inside. I will not be changed by God. I will not really be living a story. I’ll be spitting on it. I really cannot change some of the big storylines of my life right now (you know, wife, mom, staying at home to raise my kiddos). Not that I want to! But what I mean is that sometimes huge parts of our stories are written and we cannot change them but we can let them change us. That’s the part we can resist or let happen. And then there are smaller storylines that I can step out into, like relationships and conversations and pursuits and smaller callings. So I want to see the written stories and the ones I have freedom to “write” in my life as things God means to use for God, to change me, make me different, to make me go from jerk to something redeemed, coward to one who can even help others “fear not”.

Part 2 thoughts to come and for those reading/following Sacred Marriage with me, my chapter 2 post is coming Friday and I intend to be more faithful with posting once a week.

Like one being taught

2010-07-11T22:23:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you get something stuck in your head and like a recurring dream, your mind just keeps settling back on it. This doesn’t mean it’s always necessarily good or bad. I guess sometimes we get obsessed with an idea. Sometimes we’re distracted in an anxious way. Sometimes we’ve got gluttony issues with really wanting to steal from the potty training treats (maybe that’s just me). And sometimes it’s something more. Like someone is trying to tell you something. Because it doesn’t feel like you are the one talking in your head.

I just happened to be reading 1 Corinthians 2 today. There’s an entire section in there about wisdom from the Spirit. In it, I saw three purposes of the Holy Spirit and for sure there are many more.

The Spirit is how God reveals himself to us.
The Spirit comprehends the thoughts of God.
We have the Spirit so that we “might understand the things freely given us by God.”

The Spirit is always with me. Teaching me. Talking to me. Reminding me. Almost everytime I read a verse about the Spirit, it’s about me listening and him communicating.

I came across a verse in Isaiah 50:4 the other day that strengthened me about how to continue to be a supportive wife and friend by God’s grace and exactly what that looks like. “The sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught.” This is what the Lord can do, and does. He can give us abilities and motivations we do not have and he does this over a daily process where we are students of his teaching.

I AM LIKE ONE BEING TAUGHT. Do you see yourself there too? Are you like one being taught? Do you feel like someone is wakening your ear to listen?

On a practical level I feel like the Spirit is always communicating a number of things to me but there’s a new one in the mix. He keeps saying one word to me over and over and I haven’t exactly responded to it yet, so maybe that’s why, for now, it’s just one word.

SERVE.

I cannot get it out of my head. I cannot stop thinking about it throughout my week. When I see people’s faces. When I am in community with believers especially. When I think about what I am going to do with my kids that week.

I do not know what I am supposed to do with this word. And honestly I think it’s pretty gracious that he’s just given me A word and not a twelve page document charting out an undertaking that might take the breath out of my chest like I might die if I have to go through with it. It’s like he’s working the value of this word deep into my core. And reminding me that this is what Jesus came to do. This is what form his love took for the world.

Matthew 20:28 “the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

The only other thoughts that have begun to formulate in my mind around this the past few days are that my life as a stay at home mom who loves Jesus should look different. It’s not all about my lovely little schedule and it’s not even all about my kids. I mean, in one light, it is…because God has first called me to give my life away to Him by giving my life away to my husband and kids at home in this season. But I think we can get stuck in that bubble and it can become a bit like we’re knitting an idealistic world at home. What I mean is that I want my children more and more with age and maturity to also learn that life is about giving our lives away like Jesus did. I want them to get their hands in that truth too.

So I don’t know where this is headed. And that’s okay. It’s not like I have an empty day every day and I need to run out and fill up all my hours. I’m already maxed with loving on my three little ones and somehow, slowly, graciously, accompanied by a growing heart burden, I see him kneeding in a new piece of our lives that he wants to make part of how we live.

All I know is that if I keep listening I bet the Spirit will keep talking about this. Because that is what he does. And my heart is perking up. And my ears are being awakened morning by morning. And I am like one being taught.

Sacred Marriage Ch. 1

2010-07-02T17:04:00.000-07:00

I used to think it happened to people when they were literally on a mountaintop. With blue skies and the grand view kind of spinning around them in a 360. With a journal below them with written page after written page. I used to think it happened because of lots of time alone, space from whatever or whomever, like a lot of the greats have been known for. I used to think it was because of sitting. Because of how long they read. Because of how long they prayed the change would happen to them.

How do people change with the Lord? How do our spiritual hearts inside of us get transformed, looking more and more like Jesus, if we will let him?

Change does happen on mountaintops. And in coffee shops over a three hour quiet time. And on trips to Africa. And on a retreat all alone. And over time.

But that's kind of where I stopped in my belief about how people change years ago. I saw jobs and being a stay at home mom and even relationships, even a marriage as possible obstacles from becoming who I thought God wanted me to become inside.

In chapter one of Sacred Marriage, Gary Thomas made a really interesting point that resonated with me about marriage, when we think of this idea of how people change to become more like Jesus. He said "Most of the Christian classics were written by monks and nuns for munks and nuns. The married could at best feebly try to simulate a single pursuit of God; the thought of pursuing God through marriage wasn't really given serious consideration; instead, the emphasis was largely on pursuing God in spite of marriage."

I think part of me used to think about lots of things this way. That I didn't want things to "get in the way" of what I was supposed to do for the Lord. I saw myself less as someone who needed to be broken over and over again and more as an instrument that the Lord would use for great things and the world (and not necessarily my neighborhood) was my oyster. The Lord uses us for his exact purposes, yes, but the subtle difference I am exposing is my view of self. Am I great…or is he great?

Thomas goes on to say that he was talking to his brother about marriage and he said, "If you want to be free to serve Jesus, there's no question - stay single. Marriage takes a lot of time. But if you want to become more like Jesus, I can't imagine any better thing to do than to get married. Being married forces you to face some character issues you'd never have to face otherwise."

I can say for sure that ten years ago when Jason and I started dated my thinking was not exactly in this box. And if I said, "yeah I believe that," I pretty much had no idea what I was talking about. Because if I really think about it I think I believed much more that my change came about by burying my face in a three hour quiet time and then wandering through my days and relationships as I wished with a light heart.

And lest I am completely, totally misunderstood here, I am not saying not to do a quiet time or that the Word of God is not the most life-changing thing you will ever encounter. It is. I am saying that I did not see the Word the same before marriage because I did not see myself. I did not see how much I needed the Word. I did not read it the same, I did not need it the same, I did not beg God for it to be true the same way. I was in a different season, a different place. There are many days now that I look back and wonder, Was I more serious about my faith then? Because I did not experience these same inner struggles and did not see my sin come tumbling out like I do these days. I just think I am finding out a glimpse of what has been way down within me all along. God says in Romans 3 that there is no one righteous, not even one. Maybe my sin wasn’t as obvious ten years ago to me, but I also didn’t believe that verse as much as I do now, and praise God as passionately that grace exists.

There’s a pressing nature of marriage that pushes on a nerve that’s always been there. We’ve always been damaged, but the pressing exposes the need for Jesus and the gratitude as he daily heals that place. There’s something about not being able to escape from yourself and all of your tendencies because of an ever-present refining circumstance (like marriage) that forces us to see our need for the gospel. This is why marriage is so exposing. This is why we either change in marriage or else we become what we never thought we could hate more. I see this is my marriage and every other marriage around me. We are either changing with Jesus into something more like him, or we are pushing it away and becoming what makes us sick inside.

A devotional I did recently called How People Change described it as “heat” coming into our life through either blessings or trials and depending on whether or not our hearts went to the cross to respond to that circumstance, we either produce thorns or fruit in our life.

A last quote from Thomas I will include here says, “Any situation that causes me to confront my selfishness has enormous spiritual value, and I slowly began to understand that the real purpose of marriage may not be happiness as much as it is holiness.”

I just had my thirty second birthday and what did I do with it? With my busy, demanding life with three tiny children, I just asked for a day to myself. I wanted a break. I was dying inside for that mountain. For that place I could go and not hear anyone and not have to respond to any needs or worry about anyone. I wanted quiet and to not be known or recognized. And I wanted to write. And drink a gallon of coffee. And to just open my Bible and let it fall over me. And for certain it was helpful and spiritually encouraging and rejuvenating. There was change with the Lord there.

But I am not promised that kind of escape. That’s one day in like 200 that I got to be alone all day like that and pretend like I am nun in a quiet convent. But in marriage there are constant conversations, subtle differences in insights and perceptions, there are responses and needs and expectations. And it is a constant reminder that I cannot escape how I am bent, in the sense that I can’t stop the inner battle. But I can escape, in a different sense, by living moment by moment, conversation by conversation, in the Spirit’s guidance.

I was talking to my friend the other day who loves Jesus with all her heart and is an introvert off the charts. She has two very small children and her words were something like I just can’t get that alone time. It’s very hard to find that time in the Word at this stage but…we must. We must. And when it is actually hilariously impossible with the kids waking up at 5 or 6 and crazy circumstances throughout the day and no naps…we still must. We must practice the presence of the Lord. It is then that HE IS ABLE TO CHANGE US, as our flesh rises up and threatens to take over our very being and we CALL OUT to Jesus, who is mighty to save, and he fights our fight for us, as we lay down our will. There have been days that I have longed for that three hour walk with the Lord to give over all my burdens and instead it was this conversation throughout the day, with three toddlers huddling around me, and the Word of God on my tongue.

Marriage (as well as motherhood for certain) has the potential to be the most life changing thing I ever give myself to. All that happens on the “mountain” or in the coffee shop or on a long walk or early in the morning or just away matters greatly because my heart is encouraged. But I know if my heart is being changed by the Lord when the conversations and differences and demands for selflessness come up in my home all the day long. This is when flesh rises up to defend itself against the spirit. And in that heated clash of wills within me, I learn what is deep within the wellspring of my heart and what ground God is getting in me. So I praise God for the change on mountains and I praise him for the change in heat like marriage because of the brokenness. Because of the victories, though painful as they may be. And because of the change.

Following a Ghost

2010-06-30T09:03:00.000-07:00

Marriage is the most upfront, continual, ever-present tool God uses to change me. I'm sure the same for you, if you're married. It actually boggles my heart to understand how I could be anything similar to who I am now without having marriage to refine me, build me up, expose me, and bless me. I read most of Sacred Marriage recently with my sweet new sister in law and I didn't finish it but I keep coming across it when I look in my stack of books, when I am talking with other women and when I think about our Bible study ladies. If something is haunting me, it could possibly be the Holy "Ghost" and in this case I'm sure it is. Sacred Marriage, by Gary Thomas, has been the most significantly revealing marriage book for me in this season of my marriage to help me understand my expectations and how to continually let the Lord turn my eyes back on him as well as my own sin. I'm going to study one chapter a week and post my thoughts on here. Probably on Fridays just to keep it consistent. Follow along. Read along. Post your comments. Or just skim if it's boring. But with the "Ghost" on my heels, I'm seeking the Father, yet again, on what he would have me learn through my marriage.

Moms it's Monday #3

2010-06-28T22:01:00.000-07:00

Most of the time it’s those chill stay-at-home days with the kids that are the most challenging. For certain, we have days that are much to busy with driving around and going here or there. But the stay at home days reveal what is really going on with me, the kids, and the relationships between all four of us. It’s on those days that I feel focused on just our family, just my parenting, and just being a mom. And when I am in a right spirited place it’s okay with me to be about that one thing. And when I am not, I am wishing for better plans, cursing the weather or scheduling our next week to look busier than a bride the week of her wedding.

In her chapter of Cold Tangerines called “ladybugs,” Shauna Niequist talks about being amazing at multi-tasking at her job prior to staying home with her son. But then talking about the difference when just spending time with her son, she says, “All of a sudden, what’s valuable is not the multitasking, but the single task – being with him, only him, and doing nothing else.”

Even those of us that aren’t great multi-taskers are also not great at just focusing on one thing when it comes down to it. We make lots of plans, our calendars are full, we’re on the phone, we’re checking such and such site or email multiple times a day, we’re fixing this, cleaning that, reading this, stopping by here or there. We’re all multi-tasking…or at least continually-tasking, even if it’s one thing at a time, it’s a long list of tasks. We pop in on relationships and we’re gone for another week. We stop by and we’re gone. We are so in and out of everything in our lives, from errands all the way to grieving with people. And I not saying everyone is wrong who isn’t doing just one single thing, the same thing, every day of their lives. But I guess I am suggesting that maybe sometimes God does ask that we do that, and we wriggle, and try to pry ourselves out, because that might make us feel stuck or trapped, which is probably the worst word an American in our generation would like to feel.

What Shauna is getting across in this chapter has been one of my TOP revelations of the past four years of my life. And it took a lot of wriggling to accept it and rejoice in it. This is the truth that I can do the one thing that God has asked me to do and that doing that one thing might just be how he intends to carry out a multitude of changes and blessings in my heart and life, if only I will press in. And if only I will believe him that that one thing I put my hands to daily is very valuable to him.

Today as I was getting my heart ready for my day, as my kids were upstairs with Jason, as they always are when he’s getting ready, I felt compelled again to 1 Peter. It says to “prepare your minds for action” and I was praying that God would ready in my heart and mind what I would need in order to carry out the right behaviors as a wife and mom that day. And a verse or two later it said, “so, be holy in all that you do.” And that resonates clearly with what we are talking about now, that no matter what I am putting my hands to, there is still a calling on it. One might read that verse and feel a religious expectation from it, as if God is always having a watchful, condemning eye on me. Or maybe what it means is that if I am doing something, anything, God is placing VALUE on that circumstance, conversation, or happening, as small as it may seem. And he is saying that it is important to him, valuable to him that I see this small life as an endless and infinitely important grounds for growing the capacity of my heart and changing others lives simultaneously, all for his glory.

The last sentence that caught my eye more than any other in the chapter was when Shauna was comparing focusing on doing the one thing of being a stay at home mom with Henry to being a writer because in both of those things what was important was not getting carried away but instead to be devoted to a single thing. She said, “Writing is about choosing the one narrow thing and following it as far as it will take me, instead of chasing all the snaps and crackles in my head.”

I. love. that.

The “as far as it will take me” line gives me precise wording to something I have been feeling the Lord say to me for a long time. It’s been like a vague, understood encouragement from him to be obedient, persistent, determined in the same direction because he was still working on me, still changing me, still using this one role in my life to make me new. And it’s like he’s been asking me to walk in this calling as far as He desires to take me. We have these moments in Christianity when we say things like, ‘Now I totally understand __’ or ‘I used to think __ but now God showed me __’ as if we now have the full mind of Christ about one particular thing. But God is so huge and we are so silly. If He does grace us with a revelation or clarity to understand how he sees things, it is such a minute fraction of the full picture that it boggles my mind that any of us claim to be done learning about something of Him. Motherhood has been a really specific, vivid example to me of this idea that I need to walk with the Lord through this very particular journey as far as it will take me, through many lessons, many revelations, many humbling circumstances, many trials and many victories. How far does the Lord want to take me in this to accomplish his purposes? I just need to keep going to find out.

The snaps and crackles remind me of those maddening thoughts that flood a woman’s mind like, ‘what are you doing with your life?’ and ‘this isn’t enough’ (as if a regular job is – ha ha!’, and ‘you could really do this calling plus something else so that you’re still using all of your talents.’ The snaps and crackles are endless and sometimes they even come in the simple form of trying to make too many playdates or checking our email and facebook so many times we haven’t even planned good time with our kids or getting our kids into too many activities and classes so as to avoid that bare living room experience that sometimes makes our brains feel like mush. Snaps and crackles is a great way of describing those random little thoughts or ideas or accusations or pursuits or lies or false dreams that pop in without warning and simply are just trying to get us to do something else.

My life right now is about choosing the one narrow thing God has ordained for me to do in nurturing and caretaking for three little ones. And I want to follow that calling as far as it will take me, instead of chasing all the snaps and crackles in my head. Yes. Wow.

Crazy Natives!

2010-06-24T10:52:00.001-07:00

I waited to post this on a sunny day so we could CELEBRATE that the sun does in fact return every year around this time, though I won’t stop believing it’s real until the second week of July. (At which point I will be delightfully silly and happy and forget that this isn’t the whole world, for about eight weeks). I capped CELEBRATE because for some peculiar reason, some people I have run into need reminding that the sun is something we welcome, though it be a stranger a good part of the time.

So I had a very humorous run-in with some Seattle natives recently on one of our first beautiful sunny Seattle days. The fam was having lunch at Qdoba. The pick-two menu and email coupons have apparently been the key marketing to keep us coming back. Sa man and J had gone in to order and me and the girls waited outside at a table in the sun. They were entertained by a “dittle dawdy” (little doggy) at the table next door and I just soaked it all up. Me in the sunshine. My girls sitting with me. Food on the way. Jason with us. Ahh.

Next thing I hear is the couple next to us beginning to mumble about the sunshine in their eyes and before I know it I’m with the Israelites in the desert, complaining about the manna coming down. Seriously, people? I’ve got my own manna I complain about but…the sunshine?? These must be natives.

I say that because my daughter Grace is a native to this area (as you know) and fairly often I hear her say “It’s toooo suuuuuunny!” which I laugh at and poke at her about. It’s just crazy nonsense and sends me rolling my eyes every time. Goodness, me. (How she survived the south is plain mystery).

So the Israelites spotted a table shaded with an umbrella, moved all of their belongings under it’s protection from the sun’s harsh, unwanted rays, and life got a lot more delightful for them. With my back to them, I just smiled and in my head was already writing this blog. But along came two more reasons to write this.

Another guy was sitting outside, obviously waiting for someone, and soon his friend came halfway out the door and said, “Hey, we found a table inside!” I had to put on my “don’t burst out yet” emergency filter and as soon as he popped up and as he went inside I let out a “what??” It’s not weird to want to eat inside. We all have to do that. But when it’s one of the first nice days in, oh, 250 days, who would want to? And not only that, but prefer it? He “found” a table inside…which means there were lots more people (crazy natives) inside who also “found” a table too. Meanwhile only me and the Israelites ate outside in the scalding hot 75 degree sun. Hmm. So by now I am looking for a pen to write about the delirious natives who’ve obviously sold their souls to the rainclouds and now have allergic reactions to vitamen D.

So I’m starting to feel like I am on a sitcom b/c all these little vinettes are just happening one after the other, leading up to my favorite one that I will now tell you. Just as the two guys who had the luck of scoring an indoor table went inside, two teenage boys started towards me on the sidewalk. I could hear them from quite a few steps away talking about the weather and as they passed me one of them said, “I know man, it’s just so humid.” HUMID????????? By now my emergency filter just broke, I’m laughing outloud, and I see Jason’s finally walking towards me with the food. Because he’s not a native like those people are natives, you know, crazy natives, I get the joy of telling him about my three act play that just took place, hopefully quietly enough that the Israelites don’t get wind of my entertainment.

I cannot believe this place! People moan and groan all year long, and when the sun comes out, everybody’s emails and facebook status’ are all about how the SUN IS OUT! yet I run into a zillion of these people who’ve got hats and sunglasses and umbrellas out and who’d like to have a seat in the shade. Okay Seattle, let’s just brave it up, face the unknown, enjoy our summer, ask our hostesses for a table outside, and get out there people!

Those Old Weekends

2010-06-21T20:21:00.000-07:00

The parks department must have fixed the trail because every day that is remotely nice there are cars packed in the parking lot and running down the street in a long line. I glance over every time we’re headed to the store or a playdate or bible study. It always makes me think about the people who have the time to be there. They have nothing to do just moments after work is over. Nothing to do on Saturday mornings and, some of them, nothing to do at 10:00 on a workday. I could give them something to do :).

A number of times recently driving by, particularly this morning, I was thinking about the weekends Jason and I used to have together before we had kids. Oh my goodness. I literally laughed outloud in the car, making myself go into a coughing frenzy since I have a lovely sore throat. This is crazy, but I actually used to feel stress out about free time. (I would take a moment to mock myself with uncontrollable laughter right now, in a released moment of parenthood criticism….but I am surrounded by nice normal people in a Barnes and Noble so I’ll just peer around cooly and let the madness form in my head). Why would I stress out, you might ask? Well. I didn’t want to waste my weekends. Yes, that’s good. But I just felt like I didn’t have a lot of time and I had so many things I wanted to do. Now, I still relate to that. But now I’ve got like two hours a week to myself so if I stress myself out over that time I am screwed and it’s over and then I’ve got another week to patient for more of that. So although I do recognize that uptight girl, oh yeah I do, it’s just not over a free weekend anymore. I cannot imagine what it would feel like to have a free weekend, at home. Even now, when we have a free weekend, we run off to another city. I literally just took a sec to text Jason to tell him that next time we get weekend babysitting I’d really rather stay home and relax and go on hikes and stuff. I’d like to have a weekend like we used to have.

We would always sleep in. 9:00 is when I would start feeling guilty. We’d mess around a couple of hours with breakfast and reading and this or that and then we’d go run errands or go on a hike or meet up with a friend. So easy. Head out to dinner that night. Watch a movie at home or out, whichever sounded better, and go to bed late knowing we could go to whatever church service we wanted to that day. A nap always made it’s way into the schedule, as well as some gardening and phonecalls here and there. And then Monday would come and I would feel all gypped and cheated out of my time.

He he he.

This season can be really hard for me and Jason. Hard on our marriage. Hard on our insides. Hard on our sanctification. Hard on our schedule. My nights end with putting Salem to bed around 6:30 and then I usually spend until 8:30 or 9:00 cleaning up the kitchen and doing various other chores around the house so that I can crash and not have a ton of things hanging over my head. Jason usually takes the girls from 6:30 on and does a sweet bedtime routine with them that lasts forever, but that’s what makes it sweet, and is usually done with them and tinkering around with this and that by 9:00 as well. We watch about one show and have a short “how are you” before I’m toast and head upstairs alone.

What made me laugh and also kind of cry a little inside thinking about those old weekends is that I have always been feisty and argumentative and hard on my husband. (Sorry baby. At least it's being confessed and hopefully becoming less and less and less). I am passionate. We have a great time and then we have some low times, often when I do not give the Spirit the reigns on my emotions. I very often feel a little bipolar and it doesn't give me much peace to know it runs in the family :(. Sometimes I feel like, okay, if we can get through this pressure cooker of a season, we will be fine. But then I have memories like I did today where I remember, oh crap, we weren’t in a pressure cooker then and I was still exhibiting some of those same qualities. Uh oh. So a new season isn't the answer.

That’s why I know the Holy Spirit’s message to us in this season is NOT, “Hey just make it through this season and then it will be easier.” Ha. That is not his way. His way is to change us IN the pressure cooker. He’s got a huge purpose for us. And it’s not to get us out of there or even just to sustain us while we’re in there. He sees it more like a crock pot. I went in there raw and he wants to make me into something like what I was supposed to be. This is not a waiting room, a get through it trial. Are they ever? I don’t ever think we’re just waiting. I think we’re changing. The pressure is heat that, with the gospel of Christ, is going to do something miraculous to us.

So I see those trails day to day and I miss. I miss the early days of our relationship, the time we had for each other, the freedom to just stop the car and go get on that trail even if I had been on my way to go do something else. But. We were also different people then. So I’m hoping in twenty years when this treasured season with children sadly comes to an end, that our weekends actually won’t look the same as they did. I think we’re going to be different. We’re going to be healthier. We’re going to look different than we did when we got into this crockpot. And just as I read in Romans 12 today, I am “joyful in hope” for us, because of Jesus.

Thirty Two

2010-06-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

Written last Wednesday on my thirty second birthday.

I’m 32 today. It’s such an odd day. I have my feet up on a table in a coffee shop on Alki beach, where I have already been for a few hours. But my heart is far away, way over on that island I see across the sound. My friend had a tragic loss yesterday and I cannot stop this crushing chest pain I have for them. I cannot just steal away to do my birthday or go to dessert with friends. Maybe that’s fitting since I have struggled since probably my 30th birthday with special days that are supposed to celebrate me. I made feeling special too important. I prepared my heart a little better for my birthday this year and prepared myself to battle my expectations that buzz around my heart like knats, declaring that it’s not enough.

So with sober perspective with the news from my friend, the knats just dropped to the floor. The buzzing expectations were silenced, as they should be. I am blessed to be alive, so I need to stop being all about me and learn to live to serve others in love. That’s why Jesus wants me to be here anyway.

I guess what I am trying to write about is what this year has been all about. My thirty second year. What has it looked like. Who was I. As daughter, woman, wife, mom, friend, sister, on and on. What was different. How did I grow. How do I look different now than when I was 22. Or even 31.

Some things weren’t different. My shoes are still the same. (Because I still hate shoe shopping, no matter how out of style I get. Actually I did get a compliment on my light brown shin high boots the other day and I laughed b/c they are like six years old and somehow back in style). My addictions to coffee and being alone and gardening and good good friends are the same. I still like to write incessantly, except no one would know that because it’s mostly a collection of things on Word and not my blog. I have gotten back into good ol journaling with the introduction of the moleskin and it’s gloriously floppy pages. I can’t think of any other reason why “floppy” would make me so happy but when it comes to journals it makes my insides take a deep breath of delight. I still like a light rain when I am reading or a heavy rain that lasts for three minutes. A good dose of a garden nursery will put me on cloud nine for at least an hour, which is a long time to be joyful for a melancholic ;). I still really need dates with my husband and now really need dates with each of my kids too. I still have long long hair and don’t plan on cutting it anytime soon because I think I have finally learned how to fix it, which is maybe my biggest miracle of my thirties so far. I still don’t exercise (oops) and the only type I miss is hiking, which I am hoping will change this summer. I still go to bed at 10:30 and sort of can’t function except to blink my eyes and have minimal brain function after nine o’clock pm.

Silly little different things. I am getting up early and though it’s painful the first few minutes and I have almost crazy schitzophrenic conversations wildly dancing in my head about why I should or should not get up, in the end I do enjoy being up before everyone else. Go figure, Proverbs 31. Maybe I did something right this year after all ;). I have started to eat much healthier and actually have enjoyed the food network, reading cookbooks, looking at ingredient labels, and trying out new recipes to help our family stay healthier. (But confession – I still think we all deserve treats fairly frequently and for my birthday I bought myself a big slice of chocolate cake with a container of mint chocolate cookie icecream. No guilt whatsoever and it was delicious). I am back to my five year old days of perferring pink and purple. But mostly pink. Any shade. Anyway, lots of things have changed, but let’s get on to the real change. You know me :).

One year ago I was…not doing well. I mean, I was blessed beyond belief with a new son and surprised by the gift of his life. But I did not handle the blessing well. I floundered with my overwhelming responsibilities and life with three little children age two and under. I needed a lot of help and a lot of perspective. I also needed a lot of grace that even though my life with the girls had changed, and I could grieve that, we would all grow together now into something different and good. I remember after eight weeks of having some sort of help every single day, there finally came the first day I had to do it on my own. Instead of doing that, I asked like five moms to come on over, with all of their kids. And they did, and it was a zoo, but I needed the company. Somehow a zoo felt more desirable than the four of us. I was just scared. And then when I tried my “first day” at home with the kids for a second time, I did it and I was okay…but it was hard and it took a while to adjust. But eventually I got the hang of having three, with lots of grace.

One of my biggest appreciations last year (and actually the year prior too) was my accountability group. We focused only on confession as well as what God was teaching us. It kept me close to something I have needed to cling to: repentance. Jason and I have described parenthood as a pressure cooker and I feel like last year I learned a crucial part to coming out of this season a different person, rather the same with lots of ugly and that’s just that I need to stay in humble confession of my sins. I have been learning (and it’s not over) to be more genuinely saying I’m sorry for ___ and asking a lot, a lot, a lot more sincerely for forgiveness. And stopping there. Just dealing with my side. Having peace with God that I am being faithful to respond to his Spirit about ME and then STOPPING. I am still working on this but I feel fruit forming. And it feels like maybe the most right thing I have done in a while. My husband would account that I have a lot more to learn in this area, and I surely do. Lord take me further.

One of my biggest revelations in motherhood is that I am teaching my kids what the Lord is always teaching me. We do one bible verse per week and then lots of instruction and discipline in between from loving your brother and sister, to sincerely apologizing, to asking for forgiveness, to forgiving, to rejoicing with one another, to grieving when we’ve hurt one another, to obeying, to being kind and compassionate, to being completely humble and gentle, to being willing to share. I have not perfected one thing I am teaching them. I am a child in the spirit too. I have a Father who is raising me. He is parenting me with his Spirit daily, moment by moment. And I MUST STAY HUMBLE with my children, revealing to them when I am wrong and when I sin against them and when I am not obeying God. I know I am the worst, most disobedient children out of all of us, so I cannot lord over them in their sin. I must confess my own when it is against them. And staying low helps me to not “punish” and demean and roll my eyes at them, but it keeps me burdened for them to grow and change and “get it” and be saved by Jesus one day.

A recent blessing is that our bible study group took a spiritual gifts test and I was really surprised by the results. It’s probably been ten years since I took one and although my “old” strengths were the same (discernment and prophesy), they were not #1, 2 or even 3. They were like four and five out of like 15 different giftings. They still scored super high but I had new highs. #1 was shepherding. #2 was encouragement and #3 was exhortation. The definitions really really helped me. Shepherding is “the capacity to guide and nurture an individual or group to grow in faith.” Encouragement is “the capacity to give reassurance and support.” Exhortation is “the capacity to stimulate faith and promote Christian maturity in others.” When I finished the test and saw my results, I was shocked at first but then felt really at peace. Yes, discernment and prophesy are in me. Nobody who knows me would doubt that :). Yes, teaching is in me; it’s a heartbeat of mine. But this shepherding thing is always always always on my mind. How can I guide x person. How can I nurture growth in x situation. How can I guide x group to maturity about x. Now that I have learned x, how can I be patient to wait for that in others. It’s forever on my mind and heart and in my words and conversations. I cannot cannot cannot escape that this is part of me, compelling me, moving me forward in relationships and in groups. And it feels good and to see it on paper makes me feel not crazy or controlling but just that as I abide in Christ, this is a Spirit thing. And it feels right to walk in it.

In that I will say that I have thought a lot this year about how I am “bent”…both spiritually and also how I bend when I am seeing life sinfully. I have really appreciated how Kalle and Annie have described me recently b/c it has helped me to have better understanding of what tends to be a more melancholic side of me. K says that I see the world (or a person) how it (or they) were intended to be, and how things should be. So instead of just saying I am a downer about things or generally kind of despairing or seeming to never stop with my expectations, it truly is a lot deeper than just having trouble being joyful. I have Kingdom eyes. I long for what we should be, how I should be, how it would have all been without sin. And I guess I long for…heaven! For our glorified selves. And I long for what Christ can accomplish in us while we are still here. It burdens me greatly and when I use this gifting rightly, I am very prayerful, hopeful, discerning, shepherding, careful with my words, counseling, and intentional. When I use this lense but with sinful eyes, I get super disappointed and tired and emotionally unsteady and untrusting and disgusted and hopeless and despairing. Quite a difference. It has helped me immensely to have my friends help me to define what is going on there. For them to help me see a spiritual gifting there and to also help me see how I can be bent sinfully when I am not abiding in Christ.

If you looked at my relationship with the Lord this year I can say confidently it has looked very different than other years. Something definitely turned a corner in my heart this year. Quiet times were not these little sweet devotions. They were not irrelevant studies that I had a hard time making practical by the time I got to the application question. “Quiet times” this year, if you can call them that, were intensely desperate for me. It is interesting to me that the longer I know Jesus the more I need to connect with him during the day to feel like I can get through the day. I have desperately, desperately needed, wanted, prayed that his Scripture was REAL this year. That they were not just words or even distant truths but if they were real and living and active, sharp enough to divide my soul and spirit, that he would use them to change my life. If 1 Co 1:9 says that He who called me into fellowship with his Son is faithful, then I have been desperate to experience and grasp and exist with a peace of his faithfulness. If Romans 4 says that God is the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist, then when I look at my dead heart that is so selfish in my marriage with Jason, then I am desperate to know that he can call into existence a selflessness and gracious spirit into my life. When Romans 15:13 says that the God of all hope can give me joy and peace as I trust in him so that I may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit, it doesn’t just sound nice to me…I WANT that desperately and I feel my insides clawing for it if I am indeed able to have that. I feel myself looking at God’s promises especially the second half of this year, not with doubt or irritation or distance, but with a great hope and request and expectation in my spirit, that He who wrote the Scriptures will indeed make them come alive in my heart and in my behavior and my life. I am looking constantly to have my mind renewed, one small piece of Scripture at a time. I find myself sloooowing down. Reading less verses, meditating more. Praying verses more. Asking for the gift of faith more. Landing on life verses like Romans 15:13 and praying them often. And lately the closest one to me is being prayerful for JOY and HOPE.

So I’d say that carrying over into my thirty third year I am expectant for some fruit of this new time with the Lord for certain. I am hoping that next year I will be writing more about a promise carried out from Romans 15:13, that the God of all hope would give me joy and peace as I trust in him, so that I would overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. I am praying that I would overflow with hope. That as I see into relationships and my marriage and my children’s eyes and my friends’ lives, that even as I see how we need to grow and change and lean into Jesus, that I would simultaneously be quicker to light up with an expectant hope about what Jesus is capable of doing. He gave me this heart but he also gives me this hope. Here’s to 32 and a joyful hope to come.

Moms, it's Monday #2

2010-05-31T15:10:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday we got back from a long trip to North Carolina. My mom helped with the…interesting…(we’ll keep it at that) journey back across the country with the three little ones. She left Wednesday morning for a conference in Vancouver and I had planned to do nothing but get adjusted back to our life in Seattle and just vegetate for a day at home. Since they seemed to miss their toys, that was lovely for about two hours. We did a trip to the store, which actually was more than decent considering my cart full of children, and then headed home for …an unfortunate downhill journey.

I’m not sure why exactly. All I know is that suddenly it felt like we had been in the house ninety days straight and that daylight was thirty nine hours long. I was beginning to feel like naptime was going to be kind of crucial and don’t you know when you’re counting on something it doesn’t happen. For whatever reason, Salem would absolutely not sleep and seemed terrified for me to leave him in his room. I couldn’t figure out why but after some trying and crying it out and the usual tricks, he was awake with me again. The afternoon involved some nice moments but mostly some toddler craziness and keeping Salem up to see daddy before bedtime turned into a full time attention commitment. I remember around five just letting myself drift into a daze. And by 6:00 I am not sure I was even responding to my children anymore. Hmm. Anybody been there? I was jetlagged, somehow already had cabin fever after less than 24 hours in my house, and when Jason got home I am not even sure I looked up. I just shifted into okay-somebody-else-has-it gear and kind of shut it all down. I put Salem to bed and climbed into bed sensing that a good dose of bible reading was what I needed. I finished my day at 8:00pm, falling asleep with my clothes on and the lights on, reading I’m not sure what in my bible. I remember thinking before I went to sleep, I cannot have a day like this tomorrow. It was one of those thoughts that felt a little bit like giving up, like if another day like that had to happen I didn’t want to do it anymore. Just being honest. It’s a low you hit when you’re just drained of all you can be. And I thought, I have to get up in the morning and have a quiet time, I just have to.

So the next morning two out of three of my children woke up at FIVE A.M. That is not fair or right or JUST. That is just evil. Jason, who loves sleep more than me, has no mercy for jet lag and carried Kanah back to bed telling her to go back to sleep believing a hundred percent that she would do so, which sort of worked for another hour, at which time I put on Cinderella for her in the playroom. I went in Salem’s room at 5, changed him in the dark, gave him some milk, and hoped that he would sense that what I was trying to get across was, “you are up too early, so go back to bed” which was the routine I did with him waaaaay back when, when we could not get over that 5:00 hump of sleeping through the night. He obliged for about an hour an a half and got up at 6:30, which made me happy b/c I had already showered and begun my quiet time. Jason took over around that time, since he likes to have the kiddos around when he gets ready, so I got back to some serious prayer and bible time.

On a morning like that, it’s not a nice little quiet time. It’s not, let’s just read some verses over and say some sweet little prayers and jot down a casual journal entry about how I am feeling today. I have been telling some of my friends lately that on days like this, the truth about whether God really really exists is seriously important to me and matters immensely in a moment where I feel like I absolutely hands down cannot do something if He does not show up and become real to me.

So that morning my bible reading wasn’t a long chapter. It was four verses. Here they are (not word for word exactly, because I don’t have a Bible nearby, but close enough to semi-quote):

Ephesians 4:2 Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.

Ephesians 4:32 Be kind and compassionate to one another and forgive one another just as in Christ, God forgave you.

Colossians 1:11 May you be strengthened with all power according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience, with joy, giving thanks to the Father…”

2 Samuel 22:23 “It is God who arms me with strength.”

I read them slowly and deliberately, absorbing their truths, and then I got up with my coffee cup and slowly circled my downstairs. I like to pray and let words flow off of my tongue and just kind of get lost in talking to God about my life and our family and just letting him know my heart and trying to understand his. But that was not one of these days. It was a day of desperation for him to answer very specific prayers. Prayers that are according to his Word and according to promises he has for me.

The two Ephesians verses are commands and they feel totally beyond my capability. Be completely humble and gentle? Be patient? Be kind? Be compassionate? Not easy. Add the next two verses to the mix and then I can be hopeful about achieving the first two.

So I prayed the Ephesians verses from my viewpoint over each of my children, that with his strength and by the power of his glorious might, I might be able to be completely humble and gentle and patient, bearing with Kanah…and Grace…and Salem…in love. And that I would be kind and compassionate, forgiving Kanah…and Grace…and Salem…because God has forgiven me. These were my slow, deliberate, meditative prayers this morning at the foot of the throne of God that morning.

I am only scratching the surface to this whole idea of meditating on Scripture and particularly on the promises of God. I am beginning to respond to the Spirit as he has been guiding me lately into reading less, sitting longer, and dwelling more on what he really wants me to hear and what response I should have with my own lips.

I’m not saying some miracle happened that morning. I don’t know, maybe God would call any heart change a miracle. But what I am saying is that He compelled me to that time with him, he led me to specific instrumental Scripture both to instruct me as well as empower me, and he used the time in prayer to change my heart and to prepare me for the day ahead. A friend just gave me a verse in 1 Peter the other day about how we need to prepare our minds for action. Our actions, our behaviors, our words, our interactions begin in our minds. And that is where the Lord wanted to begin with me. And the day wasn’t perfect, but the Lord had increased something of himself in me that sustained me and convicted me when I need to be and…kind of carried me. So at the end of this day, my heart feels like doing the second half of Col 1:11, and I want to joyfully give thanks to the Father. And I want to get up again tomorrow. Because his truths are real. And prayer time does matter. And heart change does happen. And God really really exists and this matters to me immensely.

Moms, it's Monday

2010-05-17T07:42:00.000-07:00

Lately I have felt a lot of conviction around being prepared for Mondays. When I am not ready for Monday and it arrives knocking and I am all surprised that I have a visitor, it’s just silliness. I shouldn’t be surprised that Monday has arrived. I should be ready. I just need to admit to myself that I am not a fly by the seat of my pants type girl and that going to the Lord to submit my week to him and to ask what He would have for me and my children, is wise and essential.

Proverbs 14:1 says that a wise woman builds her house and a foolish one tears hers down with her own hands. When Monday surprises me, I find me and my kids stumbling through the week with my only agenda a playdate here or there and then all else is makeshift and random and survival. This is foolish for me and I find myself tearing my house down, so to say. I am “tearing down” instruction and discipline and relationships that I have spent much purpose building up. So I have felt conviction to not just have general convictions about building my house in theory and how I want to raise my kids, but to have specific plans each week to carry out the greater vision. I could go into detail, and maybe I will later, but for I just want to focus on the idea that on Mondays, us mamas need to not be surprised by the calendar.

I feel like the Lord gave me two encouragements recently to give me the grace I needed to get through the day. I felt like sharing them, so I will write them out here. And if God sees fit, I had the thought that maybe every Monday I should post a “Moms, it’s Monday” encouragement, as the Lord leads. We’ll see, because I’m certainly not as great as other blogs about remembering what day it is to do a certain kind of post, just like I often forget that it's Monday altogether!

1. Psalm 84:5-7 “Blessed are those whose strength is in you, who have set their hearts on pilgrimage. As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs; the autumn rains also cover it with pools. They go from strength to strength til each appears before God in Zion.”

It was a number of years ago when I first read this verse. I think it was actually the year I was pregnant with the girls and I was really battling the ability to get through strict hospital bed rest. I am absolutely spurred on by the words “who have set their hearts on pilgrimage.” Being a Christian is not about this moment or how I feel right this second or how easy something is. I see my circumstance with an eternal perspective, knowing that from the day that Christ saved me until He redeems me, I am ON PILGRIMAGE. This is a long obedience in the same direction. I am walking with Christ not just for thirty minutes of exercise today. I am walking, walking, walking forever with him. My pilgrimage does not take a break or slumber or cease to exist at times. I am always on pilgrimage with Christ. I am in a continual, perpetual, unceasing season of refinement to look more and more like Jesus himself. We are encouraged in this verse to SET our hearts on pilgrimage. We may not see it that way now, but we are being asked to turn our hearts that way and to keep setting them in that direction.

Secondly. We go from strength to strength. I don’t know why but that makes me tear up right now. I need to hear this. It is a bit of a word picture for me feels completely like how it practically seems to work spiritually. I don’t just become a super Christian over time and one day when I am really mature I am just strong in Jesus all the time. I think it’s more like this verse. I GO FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH. Each time I am weak, I go to Jesus. He strengthens me for that purpose, just like when I eat a meal, I am made stronger. Jesus asks us to FEED ON HIM as our daily bread like the manna that came down for the Israelites in John chapter 6. We accept him as our Bread of Life when we are saved, and then he asks us to see him as our daily bread, continually. We go from strength to strength.

2. Isaiah 40:30-31 “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

I just wrote in a recent blog post about “popular verses” and how when I come across one I sometimes do a little “yeah yeah” song in my head and quickly scan them, looking for some fresh ideas. Ohh. That’s a no no. Lots of conviction the past few years on that one. As I mentioned, popular Bible verses are popular because they are amazing, not because lots of people like them. Only pride would keep me from reading them slowly and with great gratitude in my heart. So I came across ol Isaiah 40:30-31 recently in a quiet time as I was on my way to something else and I stopped. And let the Spirit minister to me. And reading these truths slowly, with hope in what the Lord does in us, I was encouraged. Again because of that word strength. My job is to keep hoping in the Lord. I need to keep believing him, who He is, what His promises to me are, and what He is able to do. That is my job. In that, He is renewing my strength.

Also what struck me about these verses is that word “run.” I joke with close friends that my nightmare is being stuck forever running on a treadmill. When I was younger my gymnastic coaches would make us run for conditioning and almost always I would end up weezing myself into the locker room, searching my red gym bag for my inhaler. These days I could probably just visualize running and end up on one of those rolling oxygen tanks. He he. However, when I see people running, especially people who look like they are in real agony, counting the tenths of the mile, everything in me wants to roll down my window and cheer and holler for them because I think they are amazing. I think runners are superheroes a little bit.

So anyway, I read that part about running and not growing weary and I thought not of those of you who run for fun and it feels good to have all those endorphins flowing through your muscle loaded bodies. That verse for the people in that category might seem easy to overlook. No, I thought of this body that runs only ten feet at a time for a runaway toddler in danger and whose muscles from those gymnastics days have softened into a cushy material. :) This body and running combined with the words “not weary” perplex me and make me curious. I can envision myself doing certain things I do not or cannot do now, but running is never on the list. So I’m reading this verse thinking about how impossible that sounds and I feel the full impact of this verse, that God says that spiritually I can run through my days and not grow weary. I can go through a day that feels impossible and hard and like it’s wrecking me inside and I’m counting the seconds that get me through the minutes that get me through the hours – you know those days I am talking about I think – and God says that the place He desires to get me to is being able to “run” like that and not grow weary. Haven’t you met these souls? The humble people of the faith who seem to just be going through the wringer and they do not complain or give up or have enormous mommy meltdowns and they just cling to Jesus and even support others in their wringers? Lord it feels far away, but let your words come true for me. I want to run through my days and not grow weary. You can do this for me.

Mom, it’s Monday. It’s the beginning of the week. And I’m feeling compelled to start it with promises, with encouragement in my mind, with the Spirit at my side. And to let what He says in His Scripture begin to be true, as I do my work: “hope in the Lord.”

Second half of the List

2010-05-06T20:07:00.000-07:00

This is the second half of my list of things that have been "renewed" in my mind since coming to know Jesus twenty years ago. Read the last two entries for the whole story...

Motherhood. Somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind I knew I wanted children. Jason and I got married. Never thought about it. Jason was open to kids from the beginning, but was never pushy and always open to how I was feeling convicted. One, two, three years went by and nothing changed. Neither here nor there, but mostly not on the radar and had to remind myself that at any moment it could happen to me. At some point around year four I felt compelled to really start praying about it. If you know me, you know I am incredibly intentional, a lot of times to a fault. But with decisions like this, it’s super handy! My kids will never ever wonder if they were wanted :). I like to journal so I started a new one that I called my “mom journal” and I only wrote in there when I felt the Lord teach me something new about growing my heart towards being a mom. Sometimes it was one line. Sometimes I got distracted and just wrote baby names. Sometimes after spending time with a mommy friend I would notice something about her heart and jot it down. Sometimes I avoided it. Sometimes I just prayed in it, asking God to grow my heart and help me believe Scripture’s thoughts about children. I spent one year visiting my mom journal. After that year I was totally transformed. I’m not trying to pull a testimony on you that sounds like something out of a get-saved-gospel-tent. I’m really serious. It was not overnight. It was one year. But just the same, my mind was utterly convinced. And not at my own convincing. Just by sitting with the Lord on a very specific question, He completely ministered to me and GAVE ME HIS HEART FOR BEING A MOM. It was incredible. I was no longer on the fence. It was no longer miles away. No longer in the recesses of my mind. It was a burden, a desire of my heart, and I agreed with Scripture in the most sincere way when it said things like “children are a reward.” We got pregnant quickly. And had a miscarriage. We mourned greatly for a number of months and it took about nine for us to get pregnant again. I grieve for women now who suffer infertility because those nine months were the darkest of my life and I know that many women wait for much, much longer than that, and sometimes never see another pregnancy again. God had more for me to learn, more for me to gain through suffering and loss, for his glory. And I didn’t deserve them, but then he gave us two babies at once. Sweet Kanah and Grace. And although it was a horrific pregnancy, as Jason always reminds me, I was at war for life for their lives until they came into the world. I never thought I would be “ready” for children, and I think it’s silly that any of us ever assume the superhero thought that we are “ready” for anything because we all are weak and need Jesus at every moment and turn. But HE readied me, daily. And where I began as a mother from day one was something I could have never imagined accomplishing on my own. But He so prepared me, in the Spirit.

Vocation. It took me a long time to even accept that a homemaker and stay at home mom was even a vocational calling. And the best calling for me, at that! Prior to having kids, I definitely was torn about whether or not I would go back to work. I didn’t see what the big deal was about doing one or the other. The decision more came down to whether I wanted to do it, not whether God was asking me to. I still do not see this in a black and white way and I will not get into all of my thoughts and convictions about this but generally for ME it came down to a conviction that I did not see being at home as valuable, purposeful or as a good of a use of my giftings as accomplishing something in the world. It wasn’t about money. For some women it is, and you have to work to be able to get food on the table, so I am not talking about that. We didn’t need the money from my job. For me it was about accomplishment and gifting. Maybe some women relate, because even many Christians who really love Jesus get hung up much more on having our giftings used than we do on the possibility that God might be calling us to something much more humble than saving the world. Maybe that sounds harsh, but maybe it’s that ugly for a lot of us. I really felt God grace me with an ability to SEE Proverbs 14:1 with new eyes. “The wise woman builds her house.” It took a couple of years but through many conversations, prayers, observations, sermons and just divine appointments I began to see my home and my children as having infinite value and purpose. My children are little BEINGS with SPIRITS! They have been created by God in his image and in love they have been made to be individually gifted and pursued by Him. It is an HONOR to be with them daily, to love on them, to create a home around them, to point them continually moment by moment to Truth and to both instruct and discipline them in the ways of God. It is an honor. This doesn’t mean it’s easy or that everyday feels like a gift or that I see this amazing supernatural fruit and my children are growing up to behave perfectly and that by age 2 they were Christians. Not at all. I’m saying my heart has changed. I’m saying I see God’s view of my kids, as much as my heart is able at this point. (and I hope for that to keep deepening). I’m saying I love my job. At home. With my kids. I used to say, I’m neither here nor there about it. Now I say, I can’t believe I have this honor for this brief, crucial, ever-important season in my life. I love being home to build our home, serve my husband and raise my children. It’s crazy great, no matter what kind of day it is.

My responsibility. I hate being misunderstood. It’s my biggest button. You hit that button and I start to scramble. It’s looked different over the years, for certain. Marriage has been the biggest E on the eye chart with this issue. I really like resolution. I really like to feel good at the end of a conversation. I really like to end it with a feeling of, okay they heard me, they know me a little better, and that was good. It’s very difficult for me to feel that distance, or that disagreement, or maybe even that affirmation that what I am saying resonates with the other person too. The affirmation often came up when I wanted to get something, mostly Truth, across into someone’s life. Not affirmation that my directions to the store were right or that other simple things. It was usually about something I had a conviction about. And I do think that mostly those convictions where right, if I still were to evaluate them with the discernement given me. It was just that I wanted, needed, desired too much that affirmation from another. If someone had a question or a doubt or felt stuck understanding something about the Lord or something spiritual, I felt this interesting responsibility to clarify it for them. To give them the mind of Christ. Though it was not mine to give. The Spirit teaches, counsels, gives wisdom. I obey with my words and relinquish. That was hard for me to accept. I wanted a selfish, satisfied result. Somehow I wanted that heavy responsibility. And along the way, the Spirit taught me(and still teaches me in the moment) an interesting balance between being used as an instrument for his righteousness in that moment, to whatever degree He sees fit, and then not having that urge to fix the other person. I began to have this open handed feeling with people. It felt light. It felt like…trust. I began to believe in God FOR that person. He loved them more than me, He was able to open their eyes, He could translate my broken words about His Truth and make it have total sense for them. It was up to Him to make their scales fall. I obey and relinquish. And rest in this strangely trusting, satisfied, grateful place that God wants them to get it more than me. It also helped me a lot a couple of years ago to read in some book (so much for citing the author) that Jesus was more misunderstood than any of us and that is an extreme understatement and hardly worth comparing. Jesus was never understood, never really saw for who He was, and walked with that disconnect – in every relationship – daily, his whole life and to death. And still even those of us who know Him, and I speak for myself here but assume for most all of us, we always kind of think we understand His heart. But there’s always more. Who has understood the mind of the Lord, asks Job and Isaiah. We are but dust. He gives us the mind of Christ, and enables us to understand spiritual things, but we are just on the brink of the canyon of God. He is so wide and deep and vast and awe-inspiring. We just admire from the shore and understand the ocean by the waves crashing into our lives. Jesus being so infinitely misunderstood by believers and non helped me accept that sense of being misunderstood myself. And to trust that HE KNEW ME. And that that was enough.

The Gospel. I grew up hearing lots of people saying that you need to preach the gospel to yourself everyday. That is so awesome. That is so true. And I so didn’t get that at all. I am sure I even said it a lot. But I am pretty sure I had no idea what I was talking about! I think I still mostly thought the gospel was about salvation. I mostly thought it was for non-believers and that I already accepted the gospel, so now I moved on to looking like a Christian. But it turns out that it’s impossible to look like Jesus without the gospel daily preached to my heart, so it mostly didn’t go over well and looked Pharisaical most of the time. Yes, the gospel is about salvation. If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved. Romans 10:9-10. Amen. Beautiful gospel. I did that, I confessed that at age 12 at Ocean Isle Beach in North Carolina. So what’s the gospel after that? It’s what Jesus has accomplished for me, working itself out over and over and over with grace upon grace upon grace, for me a sinner from the time I am scooped up and saved until I go to be with him in glory. Everyday preaching myself the gospel just means acknowledging that I am going to mess it all up, every moment, without Jesus. I need Him. I need the Holy Spirit’s counsel, guidance, empowerment and strength to live and move and have my being. And as I mess up and sin and hurt others and think thought that are not pure and loving, there is GRACE in the forgiveness of Christ. “If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 2:1-3). This sounds like an active relationship with him, that is under a security of what has already been accomplished and under promises of how God WILL receive us daily, as we come to Him. All of the Bible shows us glimpses of this active daily relationship with Jesus and who this God is who continually seeks relationship with us, because he created us for himself, for his glory and his delight. I am bent to sin. When I abide in the gospel of grace, he bends me towards his glory, toward what I am made for, toward enjoyment of Him and what he made me for. His gospel for me now, as a Christian of twenty years, is about abiding in His truths, abiding in His love, abiding in constant grace. I’m so thankful for the gospel of Jesus. It will never bore me.

The List - Part 1

2010-05-04T07:24:00.000-07:00

If you didn't read my last post, it's an introduction to what this list is all about, so you'll be caught up...

So here’s my list, the good, the bad and mostly the ugly…I have attempted to order them on kind of a timeline but for the most part they are in no particular order…

Bible heroes. I used to look at Noah and David and Abraham and all those guys as if they were the ones that really had found favor with God. They were the mature Christians, the ones everyone looked up to, and because they were so righteous, God loved them and lifted them up. I overlooked all of their grave mistakes, including drunkenness, murder and adultery to name a few, just concerning the three men above. I failed to see that Jesus was the only hero of the Bible and none of us are picked because of the righteousness we have made for ourselves, but because of the righteousness Jesus has placed on us. 2 Co 5:21 says that He who knew no sin became sin so that He could place His righteousness on us. The problem with this thinking, as it personally affected me, was that I tended to see myself with a good hat and everyone else not as “good” with a bad hat. I saw all of us on a scale and it caused me to depend on a RELIGIOSITY rather than SOLEY on the blood of Jesus.

Grace. I struggled with a particular inclination especially in my late teens, early twenties with being really judgemental and hard on others concerning biblical issues that I myself had only just learned about. It seemed like as soon as the Lord brought something to light for me, I didn’t understand why everyone else simultaneously didn’t also have that same revelation. Even though the Lord had been patient with me in “x” area of my walk, after like five seconds of seeing it myself, I was already irritated that the whole world didn’t also “get it”. I had no grace and also no humility. I will still struggle with this at times and find myself bending this way when not abiding in Christ, because my sin awareness radar is off the charts, probably because of my spiritual giftings, so I often very quickly am aware of others’ weaknesses as well as my own. But I am learning, and hopefully have learned a lot, that any wisdom that I have is first of all from God. (James 1:16-17 “Don’t be deceived. Every good and perfect gift is from above.” He has given me everything that I know and understand and so I cannot be prideful. And two, God has given us a gracious and patient Counselor, the Holy Spirit, who Jesus said “will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” (John 14:26) I am a teacher at heart, so I appreciate this name for the Holy Spirit as a Teacher and Counselor. He has God’s glory and our sanctification in mind. I need to trust Him. I need to be slow to speak and quick to pray and ready to speak when He leads, not when I am impatient.

Bad language. (Sigh). So, I know that a lot of people are still really torn on this issue and I do not even attempt to write out a thorough argument on this matter so please don't hold me to it. I don’t feel that this is nearly as black and white as I used to think it was. I think my main problem, in the first ten-ish years of being a Christian was that I kind of rated popular, obvious sins as most offensive to God and I wanted to avoid those, make everyone else avoid those, and totally pass over the issues of the heart. I focused on sins like sex before marriage, drinking, drugs, bad language, homosexuality, and abortion. Literally (I grin) that was my entire sin list. If you were cleared on that list you were good with me. My moral bar was so high on the bad language topic and was so fierce that even if you were a NON Christian with no conviction whatsoever (obviously) on this issue, I would still rebuke you! At this time I would like to apologize to YOU if you were one of those people. I was nothing shy of FOOLISH to rebuke you. Foolish. Also I would now like to apologize to anyone else I rebuked for using bad language. Why did I consider myself the four letter word police? My heart was so focused on your offensive words that I missed the whole picture of your heart or why you even used the word in the first place. All over my head. I’m sorry, again. This was also a season in my life where if you asked me to talk about the sins I was dealing with and what I was asking the Lord for help with, I would not have been able to answer you. Why? Because I wasn’t doing anything on my offensive sins list. I could not see that I was doing my own thing, hardly ever praying, judging constantly, hearing the Bible but not always receiving it in my heart or responding to it (I'm not saying I'm perfect at these things now either, for certain), and basically walked around feeling pretty self-righteous. But hey, I wasn’t smoking or saying bad words, and that’s being like Jesus right? I wouldn't have SAID outloud that this was my theology...but the beliefs that you LIVE are the ones that you really believe. I was so backwards about sin. I just think bad language is a lot further down on the list, if it’s on the list at all, as to things that the Lord is concerned about. I think there’s a lot of freedom around language, more than I thought before, and I just need to keep before me two important instructions around my words and follow the Holy Spirit’s personal conviction for me in light of them. 1. Ephesians 4:29 “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” And 2. 1 Co 10:31-32 “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Do not cause anyone to stumble…”

Dating. Especially in high school I remember having zero purpose with dating. I do think it would be kind of rare, but I hope that my kids will be graced with the wisdom that dating, or whatever you’d like to call it, is for a purpose. It is FOR marriage. It is not to fool around. Or for experience. I also really believed that as long as the guy I was dating was technically a Christian then everything was cool. No. There are lots of different kinds of Christians out there who believe lots of things all over the board and have many different convictions. I think in general Jason and I don’t understand any purpose of dating until a certain age, but we’re trying to keep it open in our hands, as the Lord leads us for our kids in the years to come. We want to stay prayerful, not religious. We want to address the heart, not the behavior. I am grateful for a community believers who believe with us that we want our boys to grow up “dating” mommy so they can practice for the years that they are pursuing their wife. And for daddies that are “dating” their daughters, treating them with a lavishing love, taking them to dinners and opening their doors and treating them as daughters of the King. I hope a generation of young people are coming who want to honor Jesus as they begin to desire marriage and spending their life with a husband or wife.

Boundaries with “sexual immorality” (this was before marriage). Another one that makes me laugh. I remember me and some of the other kids in youth group would constantly ask and constantly debate what the “line” was with “how far you could go.” Yet another inability to look at the heart. If my heart while just holding hands was incredibly lustful and distracted and disrespectful to the person I was with, then what I was commiting in my mind is to Christ the same as the sin of actual commiting the behavior. My pastor just talked today about how a religious person is only concerned about the EXTERNAL behavior, whereas Jesus digs straight down to the wellspring of our hearts to see our true motives and whether or not He or our desire is on the throne of our hearts. In that moment of opportunity to sin, am I surrendering my life to Christ, asking Him for help to be under His authority and to HONOR him with my thoughts, words, deeds, and actions? Or am I concerned with how much he will let me get away with? What a difference in heart. Even asking where the line is shows your heart’s desire is more for the sexual immorality than for purity and what pleases the Father. Psalm 19:12-14 says “Who can discern his errors? Forgive my hidden faults. (things that I do not even realize are sins) Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me. And then Psalm 139:24 says “See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.”

I'm going to post the rest of my list in another post since this is getting so far and the next one will cover more issues from the past eight years of my life...

Twenty years

2010-05-03T13:08:00.000-07:00

This September I will have been a Christian for twenty years. I remember raising my hand. I remember my mom was there. I remember where my youth pastor was sitting and where I was sitting and that I really wanted to do it and that no one made me. I remember not really having any idea what I was getting into but felt…compelled.

As I was preparing for our Bible study this week I kind of got stuck on a popular verse that got me remembering that when I turn 32 this year, shortly thereafter it will have marked twenty years with the Lord. For the past few years I have been convicted about the popular verses. I don’t gravitate to them often. Only because of pride. Oh, I already know those. Or, everybody has read that a thousand times. That’s nothing new to anyone so I’ll look for something else. Even more prideful, I’d like a new revelation about this. Gross. I’m thankful the Holy Spirit exposed that to me, starting with the famous John 3:16. There’s a reason popular verses are popular. They are amazing!

Without further ado…the popular verse…with much valid, worthy, and admirable reason to be popular…Romans 12:2 says, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

This is our instruction from now until the door of eternity. Not just a nice Bible verse from my quiet time today. This sentence is my bread, defining what in the world sanctification means. Renew your mind. Renewing our mind, with our hearts surrendered to Christ, means that we will be able to be different. But it starts with the mind. 1 Corinthians 2:16 says that “we have the mind of Christ”. That is a gift He gives. We are able to discern, now, spiritual things and to begin to think the way that God does about life, people, our spouses, our kids, non-believers, other Christians, trials, crisis, loss, blessing, and all else.

So sitting there, dwelling on my popular :) verse I didn’t want to move on because I felt compelled to sit there and examine what had been renewed about me these past t-w-e-n-t-y years with the Lord. (That’s a reaaaally long time. Wow. I feel like I should start thinking about throwing a party. I definitely should.)

So, how did I think about things before? How do I now? I made a list.

Lists are kind of fun. When I was younger, I would make “happy lists” (shout out to Laurel) and “why I am looking forward to summer” lists. Lists of how I wanted to sign my name with my new married name. And later baby names lists and prayer lists and meal plan lists and now I have this little writing book that is essentially a cute way of making a list of ideas and what people say that’s interesting and topics and all kinds of things. So, I like lists. And this list felt important when I was gathering my thoughts for our study. Not as much for the other women at all, but I was interested to do it between me and the Lord. A list of how my mind has been renewed on very specific topics. If I knew you at age 18 and haven’t seen you since, meet me – the today version – this list will help :).

One word to keep in mind: GRACE. I felt a lot of God’s grace as I was making this list. Thinking about how I saw things before and how I see things now isn’t a guilty or embarrassing or shocking thing. God is ever graceful and patient with us, revealing our sin in His timing, and refining our views of others and refining our words and refining our thought lives. There has been a lot of grace for me as slowly over time the Lord has gently addressed lots of messed up areas of thinking and living in my heart. He is soooo gracious to me and you. And I look at what I wrote, not with sadness or embarrassment, but I feel willing to expose it to myself and others because it’s a testament, a story, about a God who is about redemption. He is changing me. He has declared me a new creation. 2 Co 5:17 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” And for twenty years I have been His workmanship, changing me to look more and more like who He has declared me to be.

Since this is such a long blog…I will post my “list” tomorrow. I’ve got to have cliff hangers every once in a while, people!

Like a fast

2010-04-22T21:28:00.000-07:00

In the last couple of weeks in our women’s bible study, the mamas were talking about how to look to the Lord to be sustained in our season of not getting much help, of not getting a lot of time with our husbands, and even experiencing the feeling of being trapped by our children.

I spent a number of days just weighted down, carrying the burden of the women, and thinking on my own walk with this trial of feeling like life is more than I can handle, and learning to understand who God is in that. I presented my request to the Lord: Father how can we rely on you for strength?

I was trying to pinpoint the circumstance. It seems like it comes down to physical and emotional exhaustion. Because the first couple hours of my morning I feel organized and my kids are trucking along, we might have an activity at a certain time and I’m enjoying them. Then comes 11:00 or 12:00 am. Similar to 5:00 pm, I start to notice my kids getting weary of our house, their toys, of my instruction, of everything. And then I follow suite. I’m drained. I’m ready for nap time. I feel wiped. Multiply this times an ungodly high number when your baby is a newborn. When your body is physically tapped, even if you’ve had your iron and protein to back you, a very fleshy side of me starts to emerge. This is the moment I think of when I consider the discussion with my sisters in Christ. It’s a moment where I sense the end of myself, I sense some desperation, I begin to see my children differently than I do at 8:00am, and my own identity in the Lord becomes blurry. Like we were warned at the women’s retreat, I can begin to take on other identities, usually revolving around my emotional state. If I am saying to myself, “I feel crazy,” then I let myself act crazy. If it’s “I am so angry” then I am very tempted to act angry and feel justified. If it’s “I am done” then I might easily let appropriate and biblical instruction or discipline begin to slide. This is the state that as a mom we look to the Word and to the Lord and say, “What is there for us in this, Lord?”

So I’m writing and praying and reading and the Lord just gave me a parallel that really helped me. This physical exhaustion reminded me of fasting. When we just abstain from eating in a fast, we feel crazed pretty quickly. Or we can do what Scripture puts in hand with fasting: PRAYER AND SCRIPTURE. Fasting exposes a basic need, a weakness in us. And Deut declares that man’s food does not come by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Yes. This is how it feels. We feel differing degrees of physical and emotional exhaustion, as if experiencing an appointed season of fasting. The Lord has given us the blessing and the hard work of this season. Just like when we fast, the Holy Spirit prompts us to do so. And in this season it feels like an unsolicited, unchosen, practical fast. I am denyed free time, time alone, maybe even food, sleep, quiet, and energy. Just like in a fast: food. More than ever I feel exposed. This can lead to malnourished and crazy pretty quickly. Or, like a fast, I am in a season of leaning heavily onto the Lord. I do not live by bread alone. I do not live by free time, by moments alone, by sleep, etc. I live by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. I must have him as my bread or I will perish.

Our group is studying Romans and when we got to chapter four, we studied how “against all hope” Abraham believed God about what was promised him without weakening in his faith, without wavering, but instead was fully convinced that God would do what he said he would do. In fact the description of God in that chapter, just a couple of verses earlier was “God, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” God promises us things that require faith because they seem daunting and impossible, just like Sarah’s dead womb being able to bring new life.

I felt challenged reading this to not just be glad for Abraham and Sarah that God is a God who gives life to the dead and brings into existence things that do not exist. I was challenged by the Holy Spirit to think about it in my life, in a much smaller way. Some days my patience is literally non-existant. Some days I have no endurance. Some days as soon as my eyes open I already wish it was 7pm. Some days I feel a total lacking of love. I see more and more the more I am SPENT that I am not so great. When I am put through a wringer, deprived of free time and quiet and energy and even time to eat a meal, I become something devastatingly ugly. And I write that, oddly, with a relieved smile on my face. Because there’s no convincing once you get there. You just let yourself be laid low and let God begin to fill you with his grace. You let him begin, AGAIN AND AGAIN, as much as is necessary to cause to come into existence things in your heart that just do not exist. This is the God that he is. By nature. And by choice towards us, because he has demonstrated his love toward us.

In realizing lately a need, a must have, for the promises of God to be in my pocket lately, I came across a verse for this season of mothering that I might just take Deut 6 literally about. I am kind of considering figuring out a way to tie it to my forehead . Because what feels impossible is strength. Endurance. Patience. And the power of God. All of the lies that we battle in our season at home somehow involve these divine gifts. Yet Scripture is clear that God desires to give us these things, that as 2 Peter 1 says, “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness.”

So the verse I came across and parked on was Colossians 1:11 and instead of quoting it exactly, which you can look up for yourself, I took the promise and threw my faith upon it, reading it the way the Holy Spirit says to me:

The Lord will strengthen me with all power according to his glorious might so that I might have great endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father.

Now. John Piper said in his recent sermon at Mars Hill that we need to take the promises that relate to our issue at hand and after we read them we need to ask ourselves, Do I believe him?

So do I believe that God can strengthen me with all power according to his glorious might so that I might have great endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father? I want to! I have the desire in me to and I feel compelled to trust him. Let’s say I don’t. Let’s say that sounds too outlandish, too impossible for me. Lately as I have been studying God’s promises and then have been battling doubt about them simultaneously, I have realized that if they are not true, then there is nothing else for me. If God’s promises for me are not true, then hear this, there are no other promises for me and not much of anything to cast my hope on. So I will keep my hope, not even by choice, I will tell you. There is nothing short of an intense compelling in my Spirit towards faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the promises he holds in his hands. I find myself compelled towards faith, which itself is a gift from God (Eph 1), that Jesus is all my hope, all my might, all my endurance, all my patience, all my joy. He is my bread in this ordained “fast” from other things which were only a false sense of sustenance anyway. Lord help me believe.

“I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst…Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me.” John 6:35, 56-7

Writing Clip #3

2010-04-21T07:27:00.000-07:00

Shauna Niequest:

"Before I started collecting pennies, I used to throw them away, along with gum wrappers and used Kleenex. No one accepts them anymore, really...All of a sudden, the loss of these pennies seemed tragic to me. So I started collecting them, in a pale blue bowl that my cousin Georgia gave me for Christmas. I sort them out of the more substantial silver coins in my pocket and set them in their new place, the smooth blue bowl. I don’t know what I will do with them, but thee is something satisfying about watching their numbers grow, a little army of copper coins. It soothes me to think that if there is a place for them, then there is a place for everything. It seems immeasurably mature of me to do this, like having dish towels and stamps and spare light bulbs all in their respective places. It feels to me that if these worthless little coins have a place, then they have a meaning. And then if I have a place, then I have meaning.

In a world where less and less actually exists, where you can spend money without actually having any in your hand, and you can hat in a room without atually chatting or being in that room, these smooth copper pennies are rare, curious things. They are the real thing.

So now I’m amassing pennies like you wouldn’t believe. Maybe someday I will melt them all down and make a trophy. Maybe I will grout them into my bathroom tile. Maybe I will shellac them in tidy rows onto my kitchen cabinets or make jewelry with them. I don’t know yet. But when I walk by the blue bowl in the kitchen, I find myself absently running my fingers through the coins, sure for the moment that there are things that are real and understandable, and therefore good, things I can hold on to when my hands feel empty."

I just like that someone can make me fascinated about pennies. Cool clip.

Celebrate

2010-04-19T00:08:00.000-07:00

Celebrate: to observe with festivity or rejoicing; to extol or praise; to make widely known.

Our son, Salem, had his very first birthday a couple of weeks ago. We threw a party and just had family over, which still made for a packed out living room and kitchen. Jason and I talked, and agreed, that we wanted this to feel like a celebration of life, a time set aside to just enjoy our son and watch others enjoy him and then to invite others to speak with us, out-loud, what we love about him and why we’re thankful for him. So after lunch we sat around in the living room together and, beginning with me and Jason, we took a few really sweet minutes to just talk about Salem. To celebrate his little life. Jason talked about getting to have a son and what a gift that was and how surprised he was by his great love for him. I talked a lot about just that wild combination of boy, in the ways he kicked hard from birth and is so strong and brave, to that sweet gentle snuggly mommy’s boy he is. We talked about everything from him wearing cool hats to how he’s going to be close enough in age to the girls to be a protector for them one day. It was simple. I loved even the most simple of observations about him. It was sweet because we were celebrating life. Rejoicing together in a single being who has life and beauty and purpose and value and is loved in our eyes.

At the beginning of this week, my husband let my curious two year old hold his ring. I actually would have probably done the same thing, since she had a broken leg and doesn’t like to leave the family room without her boot on her cast. Well, as you might imagine, somehow that ring got lost. Jason must have asked her thirty kazillion times where she put it. She always simply replied that she had it on the couch. I was afraid a couple of times this week that Jason was about to take a knife to the pillows to cut every square inch of those cushions apart, like in the movies when they’re searching someone’s house for drugs. At one point this week our entire family room was IN our kitchen, with only a handful of pillow feathers left on the floor. Literally that was it. We turned the place inside and out. Jason would call multiple times a day and I knew about three seconds in that he wasn’t saying hi; he was being casual, hoping I would have some good news. Kanah got her cast off on Thursday and Jason got it in his head that she had put the ring down her cast. I was with her through her tears as they cut the cast off of her leg. The technician and I had a good laugh about the ring situation and we tore that cast apart…no ring. I texted him the bad news. Our girls are kind of OCD about wearing socks when they go to sleep. Around bedtime Jason was looking around upstairs for a pair of socks on his way to their room and saw a craft basket on the banister and there was a sock in it. So he grabbed the sock, noticing right away that it had some weight to it and immediately wondered the obvious and reached down and found his ring! He called my name and the girls and I came running into the hallway and he had his arms up over his head excitedly saying he had found the ring! The image of Jason’s joy is unforgettable. And looking down at the girls I witnessed a priceless celebration in their eyes. All week long they took on daddy’s concern. Where was the ring…where was the ring. And now they raised their arms with total excitement and jubilation crying out, “He found the ring!” and enormous smiles and laughter and shouts of celebration rang out from their little mouths, with all rejoicing over what had been found. It was actually one of the sweetest things I had ever seen! I could not separate the degree of excitement between the one who was grieving the loss and now celebrating the joy in finding it from the ones who were just witnesses of the loss and now witnesses of the finding. Their joy and excitement seemed interchangeably the same and equal. My girls literally took on their daddy’s joy and shared it with him, even though there was nothing in it for them.

Just today I began studying Romans 12. Verse 15 says simply, “Rejoice with those who rejoice.” It seems obvious, in fact almost confusing as to why it is worded as a command. But when I saw my girls yesterday show me what that looked like fleshed out, I realized that I do not do that. When I see it I am amazed and I understand why God would want us to take on joy for one another like that, but I see what it looks like to give oneself over to a reckless abandonment for another person in this way, and I must realize that I need to ask God to help me go there.

I think outside of what my girls were displaying last night I would have responded to Jason’s elation with a simple, “Cool, babe” and gone on with laundry. And yet what I saw in my girls was so loving, so gracious to Jason. When someone celebrates with you, you feel loved by them. They are rejoicing in what is such a gift to you. And it blesses you to share in that joy.

Tonight I was putting the girls to bed, which I never do, but Jason happened to be out. With the light off, I sang two songs with each of the girls and then prayed with them. Kanah has been singing with me for about two months and she now knows many song lyrics and it’s just the sweetest thing. I can still remember the first time she sang with me. I was putting her down for a nap and had her on my shoulder and in the dark we shared “Jesus Loves me” together and I just held her so tight and my heart exploded with the joy of living that moment with her. And Grace has been singing but for some reason she has liked me to sing a line and then she will say/sing it and on and on. But tonight she sang “Jesus Loves Me” with me and she was really remembering the lyrics and letting herself follow me and when we got to the end, I just lavished excitement on her and, actually remembering writing the rest of this blog last night, I just allowed myself to burst into celebration with her there in the dark. I just kissed her face all over and pressed my nose against hers saying, “Grace!!! You sang with mommy!!!” and kissed her and laughed with her and I could just see her very faintly but she was grinning so wildly and so proudly. It has to have been one of my favorite moments with her in her three years of life.

I so long to be this kind of a person. To look for ways to celebrate life, like we did at Salem’s birthday, like the girls did with their daddy, like I did last night, and to look for moments of celebration as they come and to see it as a way to demonstrate love.

Lord I am not good at this. I sense that immediately as I write. I have high expectations in life and even ones that I long for, once they come to pass, I create new hopes and goals in my mind. I am not good at stopping to rejoice, stopping to celebrate, stopping to be thankful, though lately you are teaching me to stop and try to do so. It is a discipline for me that hopefully eventually will be natural for me. In the snapshot in my mind, my daughters rejoice in complete freedom over what was not theirs, because that is not what mattered. What mattered was their love for their daddy. So, Lord, increase my love and let my freedom to rejoice look as glorious as those sweet, wildly rejoicing smiles on their faces last night. I cannot think of anything more beautiful than to “make widely known” my celebration over the people you have put in my life and I hope you will put that beauty on me.

Wednesday Writing Clip #2

2010-04-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

From Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist. (I told you I read slow).

"For me, writing is about control. Or, more accurately, a loss of control. Maybe you are a writer, and you disagree because writing for you feels more like walking on the beach or getting a massage. Well, maybe you and I should never meet for coffee. Writing for me feels like getting naked in public. It feels like falling to the bottom of a well and finding lots of creepy crawly things down there with you. It feels like opening up a box of snakes. It feels kooky and scary and out of control. It makes me upset sometimes, because it makes me honest. When I sit down to write, for a while I read magazines and send emails and wander around, and then when I finally get up the guts to crack through the ice of my mind, I find myself in an odd universe of feelings I didn’t know I felt, and memories I didn’t know I carried. After I’ve been writing for a while, I get sort of sensitive and strange, like a theater kid in high school.

One of the true hazards in writing is that you yearn to write deeply honest things that rise up from lessons learned the hard way…and then you have to learn those lessons the hard way. I had written a chapter on jealousy, and after I looked at it for a while, it seemed sort of flat and cartoony. I prayed for a new way to write that chapter, an incisive and honest way to talk about being jealous. And not a week later, wouldn’t you know it, at dinner with some friends, I found out something about a mutual friend that annihilated me with jealousy. It was a thousand straws that broke a thousand camel’s backs, and I was tumbling around and around with these vicious, terrible jealous feelings, like I was in the spin cycle with a box of rocks. That’s the last time I pray for a good chapter on anything, except being gorgeous or winning the lottery or something. You pray for wonderful, honest gritty, tender stories to write, but then you have to live through them."

If you're not a writer, maybe posting writing on writing is like an annoying English class rerun but I am kind of obsessed with writing about writing ;). I think it's fascinating and I love this clip from Shauna. I took one writing class a few years ago and maybe the only thing I took away from it, besides never to write about lesbianism ever ever ever again, was that you have to write true things. You don't just write out of thin air. You look at life, especially your life if you are willing, and write what is stark, cold, , vivid, lovely, indecent, and explicitly TRUE. And like she said, sometimes wanting those chapters to come alive means that it must come out of your own actions and heart...and it can be wildly uncomfortable. But it's the best kind of writing.

Like it?

Guest Barista

2010-04-12T08:43:00.000-07:00

I'm humbled to get to be the guest writer today for Internet Cafe Devotions. It's part of a piece you may recognize. Check it out here if you like!

Evidence

2010-04-10T15:10:00.000-07:00

I love Jesus. I’ve known him a long time. I really want people to talk about him. I really want people to not be ashamed about him. But as much as I want that in my deepest parts, even I am a little scared of what our church is doing on Sunday mornings. Scared in a this is how church is supposed to be and I stand in fearful awe of it kind of a way.

We’ve been starting each service with asking people to stand from their seats to share evidences of God’s grace, in front of the entire congregation. God’s graces are moments we have seen God to be real and we see him working in our lives. The point is to give really specific praises to the Lord, showing, demonstrating, professing that we are gathering to worship a real God who is really present and at work in our lives.

We did it a little differently a few Sundays ago. Our worship leader, Pastor Tim, was leading us into a song and in between choruses he said he was going to back off and let us fill in by shouting out praises to God. The song’s words were declaring that God was great. So he said, God is great so let’s declare his greatness, let’s declare praises to what he has done.

It struck me really heavily that we are so willing to sing songs on Sundays, we are so willing to let the words flow off our tongue about what a great God he is, and that we will remember him and that we believe, and on and on. But how willing am I to sit and meditate on how good He has been…specifically to me? Am I meditating on that? Am I sitting on that question of Pastor Tim’s, day to day? How has the Lord been good…to me? How have I seen evidence of his grace? How can all 1000 of us be so willing to sing in chorus that He is good to us and not be just as willing to sing out individually that He is good to me?

Is it all about fear of man? Or is it also about just not even knowing and recording in my heart and meditating on his goodness? Maybe one. Maybe both. Might change week to week.

A little while back a friend of mine was talking to me about how she struggles on and off with believing that everything she believes with God is really real. She doubts. The Lord instantly brought to mind a gift to give her. I had found the most perfect little pocket sized journal for my mother in law a few weeks earlier, but it had come in a four pack. I just went ahead and bought it, knowing the Lord would have me to give away the other ones for some purpose. I put them aside at home and waited. So when I was talking to my friend and she was confessing her struggles with doubt, I thought of that little book and wanted to give it to her. I felt impressed on my heart to encourage her to jot down the date and just a sentence or two every time she saw/felt/witnessed evidence that God was real in her life. So many times I think the Lord increases our faith by showing up in x and speaking to us in the midst of x and filling our hearts in x situation but later, just like the Israelites in the Old Testament, we forget him. But what if we didn’t forget? What if we could at least look back at something…to recall him? To increase our faith?

I have another friend who’s in a rough spot with just walking through sadness. She’s a sweet sister in Christ, is compelled towards Christ, and here she is in just a difficult spot of being squeezed straight through the middle of a heart breaking trial. And in our trials we start to look around and go, Really? You’re real? In this? We’ve all been there to one degree or another. And all I could do in my heart was just scroll back over her life and so many evidences of his love for her and the reality of the Lord in her life and heart just poured over me, though specifically they may have been more difficult to list. But my hope was that in the midst of her struggle, her faith would increase…by looking back. By believing in the evidence of what has already happened, even if God felt silent, and even…cruel, now.

Evidence. Evidence might be a true moment of worship. You’re singing and you’re overcome with faith. It might be an actual answer to prayer. You get a check in the mail that covers the exact amount of your rent. It might be through a word from a sister or brother in Christ, in the moment of your weakness and need. It might be coming across a Scripture verse that speaks to you as if it were your counselor. It might be the Holy Spirit whispering truth to you in a moment of confusion to bring you peace. It might be a sense of strength when you felt you could not do it. Or a recollection of a bible verse when you needed encouragement for yourself or a friend. Or a meal bought by a friend when you were out of cash or out of energy. Or the Lord awakening you at 6am when you didn’t think you’d be able to open your eyes until 10.

And I think it’s important to watch for evidence in our spouses and friends and family members in Christ too. What a joy to watch the Lord work in the lives of believers around us and then, in their moments of weakness and wandering and even just faithlessness and hopelessness we can point to very specific evidences of the Lord for them that we ourselves have witnessed. Isn’t that powerful? I can allow the Holy Spirit to use me, my memory, my witness, to increase another’s faith in the God of their heart. That’s pretty incredible.

There’s evidence. Daily. All around. Do we see him? Sense him? See his truth and answers and presence clearly?

I started an Evidences of Grace journal. Yes, it’s one of the four little mini books I bought. After I gave one to my mother in law and then my friend, the third one just kept stalking me until I realized it was for me :). I have a terribly, embarrassingly horrific memory. It’s actually something I am hoping the Lord can heal in me, truly. But regardless of a healing in this life, I know that I can record the evidences of God in written form so that I can remember him. Remember his goodness. And then! Cast my faith upon that goodness, that evident sweet goodness, on days that I’m really honestly struggling with belief in the God who I know, I know, I know has pursued me and loved me and caught me up in His Spirit.

He is real. He is good. And I have evidence. Do you?

Veronica

2010-03-25T07:15:00.000-07:00

I’ve been watching Fox news occasionally. Partly for background noise. Don’t make me explain, but for whatever reason, my kids kind of behave better if there’s more noise. Who knows. (If I'm losing you b/c you hate Fox, don't x out my page. It's not political and I don't plan on going there.)

So I’m watching a couple of weeks ago and I think it was the Hannity and Colmes show that was interviewing the lawyer of one of Tiger’s mistresses, Veronica. I’m kind of intrigued so I sit down while the kids munch away at dinner (actually who am I kidding, they’re just watching it too and ignoring their food. I don’t know how they weigh more than ten pounds).

Anyway. Veronica’s lawyer is being interviewed and is just adamant that Tiger needs to apologize to her client. She declares that Tiger has built this relationship with her and now he’s abandoned her with no explanation or goodbye or regret and she’s owed at least as much as an apology. Whoever is interviewing her is questioning how Veronica could be setting herself up as the victim when the real victim is Tiger’s wife and he is rightfully putting all of his energies towards making things right with her, since she’s the real one who’s been wronged.

Now, let me first say that I have no idea what is going on in the world. I think all this front page news about Tiger had probably seen it’s second month’s round of cover stories by the time I cared to notice in the grocery store line. So, I don’t really know all the details and I’m not claiming to be writing a report about it here. I don’t know any of the details besides the heresay that Tiger had a ridiculous amount of affairs and now he’s off who knows where, taking a break from golf. All I know is what I saw on this particular show, so don’t ask me any questions.

Anyway, I’m watching Veronica’s lawyer just get all heated. This woman is fiery. She is just demanding that Veronica deserves an apology from Tiger and he owes her that. I thought that was so interesting that at some point later I joted a little note about it in my writing moleskin, because I thought it might be interesting to include in my writing of some sort later, who knew when.

Well not but a couple of weeks later I’m in church. John Piper had been at our church for a conference and he had given our Sunday sermon. So I’m sitting there listening to the sermon and Piper’s sermon is titled, Kill Sin before it Kills You. There was so much meat in it that it might take me three more blogs to get through it all, but there was a little (HUGE) nugget just for me, just for a specific sin in my life that has to do with the fact that I am an awful lot like Veronica.

Piper’s talk zero’d in on how we have sin in our lives that is killing us inside. We allow it to kill us because we are not setting our minds on killing it. He wanted to lean into a couple of really specific examples of how to go from living out a sin to setting our minds on the Spirit in order to kill that sin. He gave lots of examples, ending on the sin of anger. Uh oh. That’s one of mine. Okay, just be cool, and take some notes. I can hear this, here we go.

He took us to Matthew 18, the parable of the unmerciful servant. The parable portrays a man who owes a giant debt and as he begs for mercy, he is granted it. And he goes away free with his debt cancelled in a great merciful act. And Piper gave this picture of a man who goes away free and grateful and praising the Lord…or was he? What happened next? He was owed a much smaller debt by another man and when this man fell on his knees before him, asking him to be patient with him, the man who had been given much mercy “grabbed him and began to choke him” and demanded to be given what was owed him.

Here is what the Spirit began to speak to me, specifically regarding my husband and my children. What do you think Jason owes you? When he does not give you what you believe you are owed, do you grab him and choke him with your words and with the hands of your heart? What do I think my children owe me? When they do not give me what I think I am owed of them, do I grab them and choke them with my words and with the hands of my heart? Am I like the man who has been given much mercy who turns around and has no mercy to extend to someone who owes me much, much, exceedingly much less? Do I not see myself in this man, who appears to be behaving so horrific and selfishly in this story? How can I not see myself in him?

Whoa. Never saw myself in that parable before. Never knew that this parable was about anger. Never had this parable minister to me like this before.

And then Veronica came to mind. This Veronica whose story seemed so far away. And suddenly Veronica isn’t so far away anymore, and she isn’t judged by me as if I could never sin like that, and suddenly I’m not laughing anymore at how ridiculous it is that she could be asking for an apology in the midst of her great sin. She came so close to me. So close. I could see myself. I am Veronica. I am demanding. I am feeling owed. I am feeling injured and hurt and victimized and needy and all queen-like in my position that all the world owes me all of itself…and then I see.

I owed. I injured. I hurt. And yet I have been shown an unbelievably great mercy. I have absolutely been freed of the anger and wrath of God that I so deserve because I did sin greatly against him. Yet. I have been shown mercy. Now will I not go and show mercy? Why would I withhold it now? Will I go and withhold mercy from such little sin against me? Did my own mercy mean so little to me?

Lord let me embrace your mercy with such a gratitude that I would not so selfishly and ungratefully withhold such a beautiful, undeserved, gracious gift to others. In my moment of being sinned against, enable me, strengthen me to drop a knee of humility in order to offer the gift of mercy. Not to see the gratitude in their eyes, not to make me great, not to change their behavior towards me, not for some great expectation in return.

But because of your mercy to me. Let me see past them, past their sin against me, past all of that hurt and all that I am owed, to your great cross in the distance, where you bled and died for me, little me who owed you everything and didn’t even know it or even care.

Matthew 18:27 “The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.”

Broken Leg

2010-03-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

I was scurrying out the door to go on this writing night when Grace came toddling up and got all up in my space to present her request.

“Mommy, can you pray for Tanah? She’s sick.” Oh precious. So I stopped to pray for Kanah’s broken leg outloud, that the Lord would heal her body so she could walk again.

Kanah heard me from the other room and said, “I am going to walk again,” which of course Grace repeated immediately, because she always does.

“Yes. You’re going to walk again! You know why?” Little Grace’s expectant face looked straight up into mine from underneath me, little braided bangs tucked up into her bun pulled back. Sweet face. “Do you know that God made your body so that it fixes itself?” I asked her, letting the wonder come into my own face. “Kanah’s leg is broken but God made her a body that would fix itself so her leg could get better!”

Grace thought that was hilarious so she let out an adorable giggle and said, “God is so funny!”

I am realizing that you really know what in the world you believe as you live out each moment of your relationships. Do I really think that God made my body? That he creatively spoke my body into being and formed it so that it miraculously has the capability to heal itself, as much as it is capable now in my "fallen" state? I do. With all my heart. And I want my little ones to cast their belief upon that too.

I really really want my children to understand that Jesus is God and He is real and loves them and is pursuing them daily. So if I really believe this and want this, then the truth of who God is is going to permeate my days and my words and my behaviors and my carefully discerned moments to point to the divine in our simple lives.

As I help them confess their sin to one another. As I help them forgive each other. As we memorize Scripture by doing sign language. As we pray toddler prayers (very briefly) for those who are sick and hurting. As we are tempted and we stop to ask the Lord to help us in our temptation and to strengthen us to obey. As I sin and stop to ask for their forgiveness, even though that’s foreign to the adult world. As we see sadness along our way in the car and we stop to pray. As we sing silly God songs. As we dance in the kitchen, praising the Lord. As I speak to my husband, with the hope to demonstrate to my children that I respect him and love him. As I kneel by their side to serve them with the humility that only Christ can give. As my daughter asks me to pray for her sister’s broken leg.

If I really have known the Lord’s love and hope for that for others, then I will be watching for those discerned moments in Starbucks and with my check out employee at Fred Meyer and with other little children in our neighborhood. I will see them, really see them, see their hearts, and as we are talking, talking, chattering about what a great sale they had on baby food today…what I need to hear above the chatter is what the Lord is saying to them. What is he saying? Does he want to use a moment like my three year olds wondering about a broken leg to teach them something phenomenal about who He is? Do I hear what he has to say? Am I listening and am I willing to say more than “Yes, honey her leg will get better” or “Yeah, great sale on that green bean baby food, wow, yeah” or “Grande dark cherry mocha please”?

And I guess I kind of seem to just be talking about evangelism. But that’s not where this ends.

I think the Christian community talks a lot about evangelism and how to talk to non-believers and some of us seem to be in tune with all of that but we can really really royally MISS IT when it comes to discerning the God moments with His own people who already know him. When I’m listening to a believer in Christ, am I listening to what God might have for me to say to them? Am I thinking about Scripture for them? Am I thinking about how to respond? Am I being compassionate like Christ or listening like a frozen audience. Is this a moment to teach…correct…train…rebuke…encourage…be compassionate…pray…carry a burden…cry…embrace…or maybe serve?

How are we missing it? If the gospel is real, if Jesus really gave his life for us and is walking with us daily, then what might he have for us to be and do and say for each other? Do we see that this gospel is real…from each other?

I am just praying, hoping, pleading that God makes my life look like this. I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, but it’s not just for me personally. It’s to give away. And away. And away. I am not just hoarding up all of his goodness and blessing and truth. It’s to give away. And I just pray with all my might, now in this very moment, that he will help me keep giving it away. Because sometimes I see the moments but lots of times I miss them or I pass them by.

I just pray that as my children view more and more of life alongside of me, growing taller and taller, and their little hands getting fuller and fuller in my grasp, that I will carefully…discern…the compelling…Spirit….of…the…Lord for them. Help me hear you Father. I am yours to use.

You are more important

2010-03-14T20:39:00.000-07:00

Written on Saturday

Jason was gracious to me today. I had more than a rough week, mostly internally. Just kind of a wreck inside. When a mom feels like a wreck inside and also happens to physically not be feeling great, having three children demand various treats at once and alternate endlessly needing instruction, discipline and just basic needs met feels like it might actually kill you. Fast.

So. Jason. Yes, I like starting the next paragraph with “So. Jason.” Because I must say that I don’t know how single moms do this business of raising little kids without having the life-giving intervention of a considerate husband. I salute them. I am burdened for them. I applaud them and if I knew you better personally, I would be your biggest advocate for childcare every time I met an older woman whose kids are grown and she’s painting her nails at home. Not that all of them are painting their nails, let that be noted. I sure hope I don’t “retire” one day, finding myself at home all day, while a future version of you single moms are persevering, exhausting yourselves in the mothering labor of love. I hope I don’t just run out to grab a dark cherry mocha and go straight back home, but instead I march my little serving feet straight to your house to make you take a nap. (By the way, don’t you love that drink? None more than me, for sure.) Wow, that was a big side note. But it’s kind of important in light of my feeling so pooped.

Back to Jason. Yesterday we were talking on the phone and I suddenly remembered he had a Saturday morning commitment, which made me want to die. I don’t think I burst into tears, but that was probably only because my tear tank had already been depleted. I began to despair and then Jason put me square in front of his other commitment. “You are more important.” I think I passed out. I am more important? Did you just win the husband of the year award in my mind? YES. It was going to be my turn to sleep in and then he wanted me to take the rest of the day until we all were supposed to be at an afternoon birthday party. ALL DAY? Can the mamas say, “YEAH!!”

I have written before about not knowing what to do with my free time. It’s a little silly how all over the place I feel at first, but once I set my mind on what to do with myself, I feel a lot freer. Bizarre I know. But as I like to mention, I am a C personality. We like structure. Lots.

I set out for Starbucks but stopped by two stores where I had giftcards. I bought a birthday gift for my mom (you’re going to love it, mom. it’s so you!!) and in one of the stores, I found myself gravitating to the kids section. I thought endlessly of Kanah and Grace and what they would look like in this and that. I bought them each a sun hat, picturing them poolside in a couple of weeks. There were cute little princess t-shirts that caught my eye since Grace’s half of her birthday is going to be “Sleeping Beauty”. But above the picture it said something like “Girls rule” which always creeps me out a little bit, like I’m raising her to be the kind of feminist that’s gone all wrong, so I opted to pass on those. (But I’m still on the lookout for a little bit of a purer version, so if you’ve got some advice…).

So I’m walking around, finding myself in Gymboree just moments later, and suddenly I’ve scrolled through to Jason’s cell, asking him if they are on their way over so I can see them. It’s been like an hour since I’ve left. I miss the kids. Thankfully they’re all dressed and ready and nearly there so I am pacing around, so anxious to love on them. I see them coming from all the way down the hallway. Grace and Salem are in the double stroller and Kanah is doing a prancing run alongside of Jason, her pony swishing wildly all over the place. My kids! I drop on my knees as they turn my direction and stretch my arms wild, crying out, “HI!!!!!!!” and because they didn’t expect me, they first stare blankly at this woman sprawled out before them, but their faces quickly turn into surprised expressions, coupled with cries of “Mommy!!!” Is that the sweetest gift of my life (right up there with this day off)? Yes. No doubt. I hugged them like crazy, like I’d been on a solo road trip for three weeks and never wanted to be gone from them again. Check the stopwatch. It’s only been one hour and thirteen minutes now. I must love this crew.

Now I am finally stationed in Starbucks a little while later, thinking about us running around Gymboree, buying their birthday dresses with matching headbands and swimsuits for our trip. I am enjoying my free time, enjoying thinking about them.

Being a stay at home mom is…wonderfully weary. :). I am always at the end of myself, leaning into the grace of Jesus, and praying out loud continually for God’s strength to be a loving mommy who’s not just making it, but really loving life with them and teaching them well and raising them intentionally into little people who are have beliefs and thoughts and spirits in them. And just being gifted with a couple of hours to re-group and breathe and be a woman apart from being a mom, is such a sweet re-start. And I thought it would take all day. And it took just about an hour.

Thank you, Jason. I feel loved. And freed to love more. Starting at 4:00 :).

Wednesday Writing #1

2010-03-10T08:01:00.000-08:00

I love good writing. I don't get a lot of time to read but when I do, give me a good sentence to take in with a cup of coffee on the side and I can go to sleep. Forget twenty pages before bed. Just give me one well articulated thought. Like I've mentioned, I thought maybe I'd start posting some. Maybe on Wednesdays. For no other creative idea than "W"ednesday and "Writing" start with the same letter. Let it be just that shallow. But it's reason enough. Looking forward to it.

First clip is from a book my veeery thoughtful friend let me borrow. It's been stalking my brain ever since she told me about it months ago and now the bright orange cover of Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist has been placed into my hands. Thank you sweet friend. Let me throw out the disclaimer that we're not totally matched theologically, but I think she loves the Lord so I'll let it lie there for now.

Here's the clip. It's actually about writing, and although I enjoy humor from writers about being writers, my clips won't always be focused like that. Enough. Here it is:

"And now I can feel things turning, slowly. I can feel this tiny, fragile writer person getting bigger, like a candle flame glowing. Tonight is a writing night, and I feel giddy, antsy bold in a new way. I feel like I have a secret: I am becoming something else...But little by little, when I start where I'm stuck, over and over and over, getting stuck and unstuck, something cracks through, and life reveals itself to me like a scroll unfurling, and I write about it. I struggle against myself, and I write about it. I feel afraid and crazy, and I write about it. I don't figure out the solution in any tidy way, and I don't have a sharp and clever revelation, but bit by bit, writing is starting to worm its way into the dailiness of my life and is creating a home there. It is becoming less and less of a strange distant dream and more and more of the actual way I live."

Any writers or bloggers relate? This reminds me a little of Anne Lammott's book Bird by Bird, from which I'd like to post a thousand little snippets because she's so amazing. I don't know, I just like this because writing about writing is a little like observing a grown adult learn to walk because of how frustrating and awkward and funny it can be. So I liked it :)

Blogging on blogging

2010-03-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

I mostly don't have good ideas. It's true. Particularly when it comes to creativity, I kind of want to cry if I have to create something from scratch. I still remember my high school art teacher asking us to mostly do projects that were thought up by us and I would just sit there with a blank page...for class after class. It was awful. And then I would finally, with like eight teeth pulled out onto the table, create something SO not me that I wouldn't even want to look at by the time I finished it. It didn't grow me at all. Instead of giving me freedom, I just felt trapped. This is because I am mostly a type C personality. When I see a good idea I just want to wrap myself around it and be mentored by it and study it and learn all about it.

Some of you who really love me and don't want me to be self-depracating right now will say, "But Kelly! You are a creative writer!" (I can hear your voices and I appreciate your generosity). Well, let's analyze that. No, I like to write about TRUE things. Things I can observe in my head, things that have already happened, things I am learning, things that are happening to YOU. See? No creativity ;). It's already out there and I am merely putting it into typed words. Yes, how I say it does end up being "Kelly-esque" but ask me to write a fiction short story and I will freeze up and start sweating and be mad at you for expecting that nonsense from me. Believe me, I took that class. Didn't go well.

What am I saying here. Well, I am a bit off topic! What I was actually thinking about when I sat down was that everyone in the blogging world seems to have signature things that they write about and for a while here I think I am going to experiment with that. You know, writing about certain kinds of things on certain days and that sort of thing. That seems to be the trend and here I go "C" on myself and decide that maybe that would focus me to write about certain things.

By the way, this blog is kind of written to myself as like self talk through what I'd like to do, so if you're still reading, I'm happy to have you, but I apologize if it doesn't seem like I am really paying attention to you...

I kind of tried this before when I would title my posts "She Speaks" for things written mainly about being a woman and "Mama Speaks" about the obvious and on and on. Because I do like to write about Jesus, being a woman, being a mom, being a wife, etc. Usually my blogs center around these things, so I know I will keep writing about these as they come up.

I think the only thing about my blog, as I write about these things is that they always seem so SERIOUS to some people, maybe a lot of people. Like I know some people think I like Jesus too much. I do like Him a ton, but there's never too much of Jesus, and I only plan on liking Him more. And maybe others think my blog is too HEAVY. Some of you still reading are like Yeah, she needs to lighten up. Probably. But I probably won't. I kind of stay in the deep end of the pool down on the bottom with scuba gear. I don't surface very often and when I do I make faces at everyone like, What is this world all about? I'm going back down :). Some of my friends live down there too, so don't worry, I'm not completely alone.

But outside of scrunched eyebrow world, I'm totally skipping out on two things I'd like to write on a little more that maybe are a little easier to chew up and swallow and don't give everyone indigestion :). I really like WRITING in general and I was thinking that maybe once a week I'd post a little paragraph of some good writing. (Good idea?). I loved it today when I was sitting in the doctor's office reading Cold Tangerines and I kept laughing outloud at Shauna like she was entertaining me in the waiting room. I actually decided to make something from her book my first post on writing clips. There's one problem with posting writing. As Jason well knows, when I want to read, I take like ten minutes getting all cozy with a blanket tucked around my feet, pillows in perfect position, drink handy, pen in hand (because I even mark up for-fun books) and I read for one minute before I fall asleep. So that might be the main problem is that I might quote the same book for....six months. :)

The other one is just things LIGHT HEARTED. Just little stories (true ones of course) and tidbits and life observations that don't have to come full circle or fit into some kind of theological frame or point back to Jesus. Because I like to write like that usually. I mean light hearted like what kind of napkins are on my island or what I'm doing to get healthier, etc. (Good idea?).

So what do you think about me coming up for air in the shallow end of the pool sometimes? Does that work for Small Belle Speaks?

Ready

2010-03-03T14:39:00.000-08:00

I love sleep. Sleep is my friend. If I could cuddle with sleep I would. I mean I love it. Jason likes to stay up late and I pretty much would cut off my pinkie (well, my left one) if he would promise to go to bed every night at 10:30 with me. Oh, just realized I wouldn't be able to type. Well maybe my (doing a look over here)...okay I don't want to give up any body parts :) but you get the picture. I reeeally like to go to bed and I reeeeally like to wake up naturally in the morning with the light, without any screaming type noises or little cries at my bedroom door or anything disturbing like that. I like it when I'm laying there until my feet get a little antsy and announce "That's enough!" and I roll out of bed all happy.

So to even write that paragraph I had to dig deep into my memory chasm to remember what that's like. My husband and I have started switching off Saturday mornings to sleep in, but I'm still asking you to feel sorry for me on my sleep in mornings because downstairs all three munchkins keep me lying there with my eyes bugged open because I hear little crashes and tantrums and dress up shoes and tools banging the coffee table until I finally give in. And this is in a house where there is a sound machine cranked up in every room. I don't even get how some families have no noise makers. I'm baffled.

So for a kind of long stretch of time I have known that naptime is not exactly the best time for getting my heart ready for the day, otherwise known as a "quiet time." Right now, as I attempt to write this, for example, Salem is screaming his head off in his crib. I've turned off the monitor, have the food network turned on softly for background noise, and I still have a knot of anxiety in my shoulders. Also, the kids all go down for naps but it's now been pushed back to about 1:30. Not really a good time to get my heart READY for the day, since my heart will not really be tested until about 3:30, which leaves only two hours of mommy time until daddy saves the day :).

I've dreaded the growing conviction that I need to get up at 6ish. But the conviction has finally swallowed me whole and it's inescapable that that's what the Lord has asked of me. Sometimes I think we kind of wait on the Lord to make sure he's really asking something and I laugh at myself thinking about how long I've been avoiding his request of me and saying, Yeah I think naptime is fine. It's sort of working. And on days it's not, it's not my fault. So I tried but it didn't work for today. And I can just do one tonight (though at least for me it's not really helpful nearly as much as the day of). So, now when Jason's alarm starts going off (he sets it early so he can snooze a couple of times) I need to get up. I have been doing a snooze with him, but then it's time. And it's kind of rough, but I have to say that I must have FORGOTTEN that like five seconds ago I was being tortured all night long by sleeplessness with Sa Sa, who thought sleep was overrated. And I must have forgotten completely life with twooooo preemie babies who were not even allowed to sleep through the night until 6 mths because of their underweight issues. Must have forgotten about that. Because when Salem started sleeping until 5, I remember feeling like doing happy dances every morning. I felt like I'd arrived. And now here I am just acting like 6 something for TIME FOR MEEEEE is somehow torturous. No Kelly. You're delirious.

And yes let's talk about how it's TIME FOR MEEEEEE. Time to wake up to the morning light and casually make a cup of coffee and break open my Bible and write in my journal and do my prayer walk around the family room and kitchen and have the Lord prepare my heart for the day. That's amazing time for me. And it prepares me to be a totally different me - the me that I want to be walking in step with the Spirit.

This morning I got up. Salem happened to be up too so I went in and changed him, fed him, and let him play in his crib, which he happily does for about 1/2 an hour. I knew Jason would shortly be in to let him visit with him while he got ready for work. The girls slept peacefully, which they usually do until around 7:30. I headed downstairs to a quiet kitchen to make coffee and cut up a grapefruit and this morning I just felt compelled to pray. So I did. If you know me, you know that prayer for me means outloud and walking. That's my favorite way. I kind of circle the family room and living room and always start with my husband, then my kids, then whoever else the Lord burdens me for. Today was a sweet time over my husband and kids mainly. By the time Jason walked downstairs lugging Salem, I felt ready, excited to see Sa Man, and ready to start my day.

My day. Yes. Well, I even took a few moments to prepare a nice little schedule for the day b/c this was the only day of the week with no plans. I was happy to lavish time on the kids, not worrying about cleaning or cooking or anything. Just time at home today. I had decided to go for a messy project - PAINTING. It was great fun. We used all kinds of brushes and animal and fun shaped sponges and even little sponge rollers with little shapes on them like stars and hands. It was great fun and a great mess but with Salem napping soundly, I loved my time with the little ladies.

From there things got a little testy. The girls just took turns throwing tantrums, getting jealous, fighting, whining, you name it. But. Yes, BUT. I have to say I felt ready. I felt prepared for them as their mommy, their counselor, their mediator, their trainer in righteousness. I cannot say this about everyday. But I can say it about today. And even though their hearts didn't change instantly and we continued and persisted in discipline and correction and sitting down together face to face to walk through what happened yet again, it was okay. Because my heart was okay. Because I do have to say when it gets all "crazy land" (which is what I like to exclaim when who knows what has gone down), it is usually because the mama is crazy inside. Not so uncommon, I will confess publicly to all of you. BUT God is good. And His gospel is real. Which means, when I tell the Lord - I need you to be my Strength today. That is what you promise me and I need that today. Please help me. When I confess that and submit myself to him, He is familiar to me in the moments of crisis and He establishes peace for me. And in that I can avoid crazy land and find myself still being who I am called to be.

A little less sleep? It's worth it.

Exposed. Now What?

2010-02-28T14:52:00.000-08:00

I used to like poetry. I am sure I still would. It’s just that my plate is kind of full and I am doing all I can do read my Bible so maybe poetry will come back around again in my 40’s. But in my teens and early to mid twenties I really did love poetry and read it quite a bit. My favorite poem by far is probably one that would seem as cliché as Canon D does to a musician, but I don’t care. It’s my favorite :). It’s the Love Story of J Alfred Prufrock:

(a selection)
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

He’s got this great picture going on of being at a party and he can’t escape the eyes of his friends and strangers, which pin him to the wall and there he is for all to see and look upon. He describes exposure so memorably that though I have probably not picked up that poem in maybe ten years (to my dismay!), I still have an emotional, familiar response to his writing. It defines through mental picture the exact reason we can’t comprehend why exposure would be a good thing for us. Just like it wouldn’t be a good thing for our clothes to fall off in the middle of church. Yep. That’d be embarrassing.

Romans 12:1 says not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. 1 Corinthians 2:16 says that we have been given the mind of Christ. And just verses earlier it declares that we have been given the Spirit who is from God, so that we might understand the things freely given to us by God. So we can think differently because of Jesus. What might seem unsensible before becomes wise. What might seem foolish before, like the thought of exposing our hearts, becomes godly and good.

So what does the Lord say about exposure? I will jot down again the verse I used in my last post as I was talking about women exposing their hearts at our Mars Hill women’s retreat

Ephesians 5:7-14 “Therefore do not become partners with them (‘the sons of disobedience’); for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. ake no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but INSTEAD EXPOSE THEM. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, ‘Awake, O Sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’”

At first it looks like that whole darkness thing is totally a past thing. You’re in the light. Don’t go hang out with those shameful people and don’t take part in all that sin. But then he gives US a direct word about dark deeds: EXPOSE THEM. So I can only assume the Lord is saying that we still, in our own ways and choices and thoughts and deeds take part in “unfruitful works of darkness.” In our identity, we are light. But somehow we’re still tempted by the darkness and we run back into it. James puts it this way, “But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” (James 1:14-15). We are lured and enticed by our own desires of the flesh. We do not do what we want to do. And out of no where we’ve eaten the apple all over again and it’s juice runs down our faces. So Ephesians is saying, Hey Christians! Sweet believers in the Light! Don’t hide those apples. Pull them out from behind your backs and throw them into the light, emptying your open hands to a Savior who wants to fill your cupped hands with good things from Him.

One of my favorite verses about exposure is Hebrews 4:13 because whether or not we want to be a part of that exposure, this verse states a reality about what is already true about you before the Lord, whether you’re into it or not, whether you fear it or not, whether you give in to it or not. “And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” Our current state = exposed. To whom? God. Every moment of our day. Every thought in our mind. Every work of our hands. Every intent, hope, daydream, conversation, and pursuit. Exposed already.

But although this should humble us, it should not devastate us. Because of Jesus. And only because of Him. 1 John 1:1 “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” The verses before that basically say – don’t be a liar and say that you have no sin. Don’t make God out to be a liar, because he says that we are sinners, so just confess that you are. And as you confess, there is not fear. The exposure is covered by Jesus’ blood. It’s in his blood that we can rest without shame, fear, intimidation, regret, comparison of sin, or with the tendency to downplay what we have done. We can expose what we have done in all it’s ugly because…

1. It’s already exposed anyway.
2. And it’s already been taken care of. We just have to cast our faith on that.

So that should be the tough part because we should care way more what God sees in us than what other Christians see in us. But we care a whole heck of a lot what other people see. So the rougher part ends up being confessing our sins before others. And there’s certainly a legitimate side to this. People are not Jesus so they do not respond in perfect holiness to our sin. Jesus is faithful to us and justifies us and cleanses us from our sin. And our brothers and sisters’ jobs are to point us to the cross, the truth in the Word of God, and to extend grace and restoration and counsel and encouragement and forgiveness – whatever is Biblically appropriate for that circumstance.

In my last post I talked about how women came on our church’s women’s retreat and at the end of the weekend there was an open mic and many, many women got up and shared things either that they had learned or very very specific sin struggles in their hearts. The speakers, too, shared not just their stories, but their e-n-t-i-r-e story. Women who have thrust their identities upon the blood of Christ can do this. They can show every corner of their lives and walk away from that dialogue free because it doesn’t matter what the other person’s response is.

Ideally we would all respond perfectly, giving glory to Christ for saving this person, for the goodness of his forgiveness, for the beauty of the freedom this person now walks in, and the wonder of the kind of gospel community God calls us to live in. This is ideal. This is what happens when we are all walking in the Spirit, listening with grace, and walking in grace in our own hearts.

But this is not what we are to to trust in. What we trust in is the convictions of the Holy Spirit. If the Lord compels me to be vulnerable with my heart or story or a confession, I cannot put my hope in a response. I respond to the Spirit and I rest in my identity in Jesus, with full knowledge that because we are all being renewed, I am not promised a Christlike response. I find that response from a Father in Heaven, who is pleased with me. And that is where I place my security.

I came to my accountability group a few months ago with a sin that I wasn’t at all proud of. I dreaded group and didn’t want to confess. What’s interesting is that these three ladies love Jesus very much and I knew that in word they would extend grace to me and that they would encourage me to walk in the freedom of forgiveness. I knew this. But I also know myself. And I know that even though my heart’s delight is in the GRACE of God, that at times I know I will think I am better. I will hear someone confess a sin and will sinfully respond in my heart with, “Wo. That’s crazy. Can’t believe she did that.” And within about a millisecond the good Holy Spirit will pierce my heart with conviction and, Lord willing in that moment, I will respond with “Forgive me Lord.” Because I know this judgement about myself, I can guess that others, because we are not Jesus and we have a flesh, will struggle to be Christlike in our response, even if that’s what we desire. We are not Jesus but he makes us more and more like him, thank goodness.

So on the way to my accountability group that day I remember hearing the Lord say, Even if they have even the littlest judgment in their hearts that you don’t even know about, I am going to free you from that. You are under no condemnation because of me. And I am going to give you the ability to confess without the need for perfection from them. What kind of freedom is that? It’s crazy beautiful.

Psalm 32 is one of my favorite pieces of Scripture about what confession is supposed to be about and so let’s end with verse 7 to be our encouragement on exposure. And notice the beautiful irony in that as we are laid bare before the Lord, we are hidden in Him and found in Him. And HE comes around us with SHOUTS of His deliverance. Amen.

“You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance.”

Giving in to Exposure

2010-02-25T10:57:00.000-08:00

Ephesians 5:7-14 “Therefore do not become partners with them (‘the sons of disobedience’); for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but INSTEAD EXPOSE THEM. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, ‘Awake, O Sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’”

Sometimes being a Christian, like a real all out Christian, can make you feel a little bit like how you feel when you watch a scary movie. I actually don’t like scary movies at all so maybe this isn’t a good analogy and now I am kind of thinking I don’t want anyone to quote me on that one, but what I mean is that in a scary movie my biggest sensations are that I want to hide and I kind of don’t want to know what’s going to happen and it’s out of control. And I think maybe now that I think about it those are the only parallels I see, so I will just giggle that that was my first line of this. But anyhow, yes, being a Christian can be scary. Because things happen that you kind of don’t see coming and you wouldn’t have wished for and it’s not a fairytale like you thought it would be. Mainly because life, namely my life (and your life) turns out to be a lot more despicable than we thought. So being a Christian can be scary because…God is all about turning us inside out. Getting us to where what’s on the inside is…exposed. On the outside. This = a little scary.

I just got back from a weekend with two hundred women at a camp where we all listened to amazing talks, sang and worshipped together, ate together, spent free time together, sat by a lake together, held each other’s babies, slept in bunks together, shared showers together, dined together, discussed deep questions, and sipped lots and lots and maybe way to much coffee together. But we also said things women in coffee shops don’t normally say. And we confessed stuff that many women would just say “my past is my past” about. And we confided sometimes not for the purpose of benefiting ourselves but maybe so that the woman listening would be set free to confide her same junk.

This felt like the least fru fru, la de da, relaxed, rejuvenating retreat I’ve ever been on. I can’t blame the coordinators. Because I really thought the flowers and via coffee and adorable handmade cookies on the table in our room made me feel like I could sit for a while. And the room where we all gathered felt like a sanctuary I could sit in alone and just breathe. And the lake was still and welcoming and good company when I hoped it would be. And there were trees and grassy fields and lots of sun, just like my spirit needed there to be. And the dining hall felt just like all the camps I had missed over the years, with big round wooden tables and dining wear that I’d kind of like to have for myself on my more nostalgic days, to just gather friends wearing hats and sweats and to laugh and eat for a long time. No, I can’t blame the coordinators for the setting. Because it truly was just a sweet place.

I think I’d have to look to what happened in our hearts, in the spiritual world to understand why I felt like taking a four hour nap when I got home. It wasn’t a bad feeling. It wasn’t a bad thing that I was weary. I just look at what went on in the spirit. I look back on the scene of that retreat when we had the mic open for anyone to share and I see us peeling back the physical world and all of the distractions and all I see is a lot of hearts out from hiding and being held in the women’s hands, up for all of us to see and witness.

And it’s not like our hearts look like gerber daisies all cute in our fingertips. Um, no. What some of us held up looked like dark goey mess that had just been unearthed. Not all the pretty stuff that Jesus has already redeemed in us and looked like daisies again. For some of us, what we held up was the stuff that we had been pushing away deeper into the corners and recesses of our being and it had been growing mold and unmentionable junk all over it. Stuff unconfessed. Stuff dipped in shame and pride. And the women just drew it out in all its ugly to give it to Jesus. So that he would take it away. So that they would be free. So that in the exposure, Christ would shine on them.

And others of us have already begun the work of responding to the Spirit and letting him scoop the yuck out of us like a pumpkin. But maybe some of us have done it privately, or only with our closest friends. We experienced freedom and Jesus’ redemption in very particular sin areas of our lives but we thought that that was it. We were forgiven, we had experienced cleansing from our unrighteousness, and boom – the book is shut on all that mess. Yeah, but the Holy Spirit is never done. He exposes us initially for our freedom. He exposes our stories later for other people’s freedom. Understanding and believing that my story is not my story has absolutely transformed the testimony of my life. All of my smaller testimonies, my smaller stories, my sin issues, and my tendencies that all add up to “my story” are on the table whenever the Holy Spirit says to pick one up and give it away. So we had things to hold up in our hands too. Whatever the Holy Spirit said to. And it’s not just the goey mess it was when it was still unconfessed. The Lord has cleansed it and made it into something beautiful and we can show all of that and be free from shame because just because I’m holding it, it doesn’t have anything to do with my identity. It’s something God is using in my life for his glory.

I’ll tell you my favorite, favorite, favorite thing I heard some of my sisters in Christ saying. They talked about how before this weekend they only shared the sinful parts of their testimonies that were the more politically correct sins. You know, the common ones in testimonies like how they drank a lot or tried drugs or had sex before marriage. When you hear that it’s like, yep, we hear that one a lot. Tell it girl. Because it’s easy to accept or give grace for and we’ve given that grace and head nod a hundred times. There’s a kind of messed up thing going on where people are comparing sins and saying – see how we’re kind of equal and all messed up --- the same? Which in a sick way all makes us feel better, instead of feeling confident in the blood of Jesus. But there’s a whole ‘nother round of exposure when you look around and no one can identify with your struggles and sins your confessing and they even seem a little untouchable to people. That’s when the gospel is the gospel of grace or it’s not. When women start feeling WILLING to share about explicit sins that seem off the testimonial path you know this Jesus gospel has really FREED some women. Because this gospel, this forgiveness, this confidence in what has been accomplished for them can even draw out the sins that are unacceptable (as backwards as they actually is, since all sin alike against God).

So I come back exposed. I come back especially feeling other women’s exposure. And I feel heavy from the knowing, heavy from a greater understanding of the reality of sin in all of our pasts and struggles in all of our presents, but the exposure is actually glorious. It really just is. Because all of it points to the truth that though our condition apart from God is truly a mess, it’s also true that our condition in Christ is glory after glory. He has graced us with his righteousness (2 Co 5:21). And stepping quietly into the light, the loving light of Christ shines down on our faces so He’s all we can see. And in that, we are free.

I’m going to post a part 2 on exposure because coming back from the retreat Satan likes to attack with all kinds of lies, just like we talked about this weekend. And his favorites after such a good time of SHARING our inner realities is that he likes to shake our confidence in the blood of Christ freeing us from shame, and he likes us to analyze what we said and how it was received. He attacks our reputation. So I feel compelled next to write about how to live the hours and days after you’ve allowed Christ to expose your heart.

Surfacing

2010-02-16T09:47:00.000-08:00

I’ve had this sense lately that the stakes to my tent have been moved out a little.

For more than three years (gosh, that’s a long time) I have been in a very interesting season as far as not knowing how to steward every area of my life very well. I know that for the most part I did as well as I could. You can’t do much on hospital bedrest or with two newborns or pregnant with two toddlers or hardly even stop to take a breath with three under three. So in some senses, I did feel the Lord open up my hands and let me know it was okay to relinquish some things that were not top priority. In a lot of senses he did that. Sometimes I fought him and was determined to feel just as bad about my clothes on the floor as I did that I had not yet written a novel as I rocked a baby to sleep and then fall asleep before I even brushed my teeth at 9pm. But Jesus was even more determined to focus my affections on three little beings and the husband and father who helped me by holding all of us.

The things I let go of to instead wash my husband’s workout clothes or change the twelfth diaper that day or clean up my underweight daughter’s endless vomit were things that mattered to me though. A lot times those undone things mattered to me because those were the the little peacemakers in my life – certainly a clean kitchen and bathroom and car and a well written journal entry make you feel like you can kick your feet up at the end of the day. Even though they are nice things, I was grateful to still find that someone who appreciates cleanliness in order to have a quiet time in that same room could still find peaceful stillness because the Lord could order that for me. But of course I had moments they mattered because I didn’t like that they hung over me, pointing at me, saying YOU’RE LAZY. Sleepless and showerless and makeupless and with weary feet and back many days, I still did feel lazy and endlessly failing at all I wanted to do and be.

Thankfully that’s not what the Lord had to say to my heart. Only the lies were saying that to me. The Lord just kept saying that his grace was sufficient for me and that He himself was my strength. I needed nothing but Him. And my faithfulness to the bodies and hearts in my home were all that mattered for now. And he could order the disorder enough for us for now.

So now I’m surfacing. Even if just a little. But it’s a little more of a surfacing than I have felt in over three years. I’m feeling my tent being stretched a little and the Lord showing me little windows into freedoms to serve our family and community more than I have felt I could stretch before. This is simple, friends, and it still doesn’t really still look quite like “freedom” and “calling” and “accomplishment” like many would define it. My life still feels oh so humbly simple, yet don’t mistake me for thinking it’s not profound. Because no one knows more than me that this is extraordinary what the Lord has asked me to take part in. So I’m good with using my freedoms to serve. To put my hands to the things, good but simple things, that I have had to set aside to zero in on literally the basics of loving and giving myself away to my family.

I am sensing the freedom to serve my family with getting the laundry done. To serve my family with a straight linen closet. To serve my family with a picked up floor so Salem doesn’t choke on dustballs. To serve my husband with fresh towels just as much as to serve him by prayer walking over the details of his life in the mornings. To serve my cute little girls with the sweet gift of ponytails carefully swept up as well to take them through the potty process hourly. To serve my little boy with my energy at 6 something in the morning and help him practice walking. To serve my children with creativity in instructing them each day of the week into the things of the Lord and just the things of toddler life. To serve my God by stewarding this body to be healthy for his glory, taking time not just to work out but pour over ideas for putting healthy things into my body. To serve women in my life with the Word, with my mind, with my heart, my time my words and my gifts of discernment and teaching. To serve faithfully in the gift and love of writing. To serve people God has set in my sphere of influence, whether or not I desire relationship with them or not, because my life is not my own and I have been bought with a price to be used and “burned up” for God’s glory.

I have sensed the Lord stretch my tent a little bit and say to my Spirit…

See what I am doing new? I am enabling you for a bit more. You will walk in grace. I will give you grace upon grace upon grace and I AM your Strength. I have set your heart free, so now go and be FREE TO SERVE as I show you. Go no further than I show you or short of what I give you to steward and do. Be free in my graces.

Isn’t that sweet from him? There is no condemnation in Christ. He is patient with us. He calls us to holiness and to greatness in him, but he knows we are utterly weak. And so he strengthens us little by little and enables us for steps we didn’t think we could take. And all along the way, he does not ever call us to feel bad or guilt ourselves endlessly or weigh ourselves down with expectations. Certainly even repentance itself – the confession that we have done wrong continually and even specifically and that we see our need for forgiveness and the ability to change – even repentance is FREEDOM because it is a relief to see that He can do it in us and we need to let go. I just love the gospel. The more I get to know it in my day to day, the more I learn that accepting its truth into my every moment of every day is what Scripture means in Psalm 119 when it says,

“I will run in the path of your commands for you have set my heart free!”

I was talking with some other women at Mars Hill Bellevue about our heart for women in our church body and we were burdened for Titus 2 and what we see coming as far as teaching in the coming year. And for me personally I read over that list and see that the Lord is getting our hearts as women back to what is closest to our hearts – the things that we struggle with as women as well as the relationships in our nearest sphere of influence. We are to be inclining our hearts to understanding about…

Loving our husbands
Loving our children
Being self-controlled
Being pure
Working at home/managing our homes
Being kind
Being submissive to our own husbands

Look how close to home (our hearts) as well as home (our physical home and relationships within it) this list inclines our hearts towards. Jesus is turning us homeward. Homeward towards the things we struggle with most as women, as well as homeward to our daily living with our husbands and children and within our homes. These are the things heavy on the Lord’s heart for us as women to press our hearts towards. There are other things and people he will call us to as well, but he starts closest to our hearts where many women do not want to begin – in our home.

All of this feels overwhelming without the gentle leading and teaching of the Holy Spirit. It feels impossible to love our husbands well when X is bugging us, to love our children when X happens over and over. It feels impossible to have self-control over my anger and purity of mind as Satan creatively tempts us with all kinds of deception. It feels impossible to have a heart for our home when we have distracting daydreams apart from the Holy Spirit about small self-centered fantasies of getting out and breaking free from our shackles to go do what we really want to be doing. And even if we embrace our homeward calling, doesn’t it feel impossible at times to enjoy what we’re putting our hands to? And doesn’t it feel impossible to let God lead us into becoming homeward and using our freedoms to serve without also feeling guilty when we fail or don’t live up to our silly to do lists?

There is freedom with the Lord. It is not freedom from him. It is freedom in him and into the things of him. What this means to me in my exact spot in life is that though my calling is great, even to the point of God asking me to be HOLY in everything I do, he reminds me he found ME. He covered ME in the forgiving blood of Christ. He declared me holy positionally in his sight, even as he is practically making me holy in actuality. He enables ME. He makes my hands and feet and heart ready to honor Him. And he is freeing my being to be an instrument for HIS purposes. And even in the littlest, silliest, most minute-ist things in life like being able to have freedom to serve my family with a dinner or clean laundry or another bedtime routine – even in these things the Lord makes me able and most importantly the heart behind all of this is what is pleasing to His sight as I use my freedom to serve him.

And you know something? It is not in saving the world that I am finding a deep satisfying identity. I am finding a depth in my identity in Jesus, who is the “radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, who upholds the universe by the word of his power”, by doing the tiniest details of my day to day. I never ever ever in my early life expected these kinds of truths about my deepest identity and fulfillment to come from scrubbing dried ketchup off my toddlers’ booster seat trays. But they are. And Jesus has more coming for me. I feel his hand on me to stay faithful. And he will keep entrusting things and life and people to me, but I’ve got to wait on him to stretch my tent. It’s small right now, and that is where my pleasure dwells. And when it doesn’t, I confess that, and he puts my pleasure back there, because that is what delights Him.

Let’s end on a good word, friends. Please listen to the Lord for YOUR heart. Surely it is for you as well as me:

“For YOU were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love SERVE ONE ANOTHER.”

My Spirit cries yes. Not just in agreement and reluctance. But because I rejoice over this goodness for all of us.

Your Affections for Us

2010-02-07T22:08:00.000-08:00

Okay this post is not going to be very articulate in the least. It's past my "witching hour" for starters, and usually I stew on my writing for days before posting but alas this time I'm just going to get my idea out there.

My last quick post was on those chocolates my neighbor has creatively decided to make and sell to support the Red Cross' work in Haiti. I was about to email her tonight with the tally and was trying to think about who I would like to order one or more for. At first I was just going to order one for Jason or maybe just one for the girls to share but then I just felt the Spirit remind me of how cultural celebrations open wounds for many people, even those striving to trust Jesus in their uncertain circumstances and relational pain.

Valentines Day is coming up Sunday and whether or not you celebrate it, it's all around in our culture and for a lot of people it's kind of a rough day because even if you have someone in your life, they are hurting in their relationship or sad or expectations have failed them. Marriage can be a rough trial between two people and Valentines Day can be searing reminder of loss, of frustration, and of a seemingly fairytale ending for everyone around them. And for many others who are single and wish they were married, Valentines might be a difficult day to choose contentment, and to trust God that he has their best in mind with the gift of singleness he has given them in his perfect timing. The love of another person might be such a deep longing in their hearts that it may be nearly impossible to understand why the Lord might withhold that earthly pleasure from them. They may struggle daily with believing that Christ is enough. And this is even if they have the miraculous gracious gift of being saved at all.

So what started in my heart as a simple, shallow wondering about who to give a silly box of chocolates to so that I could write a check to the Red Cross has grown within literally minutes before my eyes to a real and true and sincere burden for both hurting marriages and struggling singles in my life. I am heavy in my heart for them tonight and know that it's not about handing them a box of chocolates with some sort of "that's too bad" or "i feel sorry for you and i'm glad it's not me" feeling attached to it. No, for goodness sakes.

I think my heart on that box is - I am crushed with you. The Lord is helping me to experience a touch of your battle with sorrow and your battle to trust that Jesus himself is enough for you. And I long to remind you of his powerful Word to you:

"Fear not, O Zion;
let not your hands grow weak.
The Lord God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing."
Zephaniah 3:17

"You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord,
a royal diadem in the hand of your God.
You shall no more be termed Forsaken,
and your land shall no more be termed Desolate,
but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her,
and your land Married;
FOR THE LORD DELIGHTS IN YOU,
and your land shall be married.
For as a young man marries a young woman,
so shall your sons marry you,
and AS THE BRIDEGROOM REJOICES OVER THE BRIDE SO SHALL YOUR GOD REJOICE OVER YOU."
Isaiah 62:3-5

The Lord Jesus himself delights in us. I love how Jason loves me and I treasure our marriage very much, yet time and time again I have had to learn that Jason is not equipped to love me like Jesus. We fail each other time and time again with how perfectly we are able to pursue and love and know each other's needs. There must be grace upon grace upon grace and we must acknowledge the evidences of grace to praise God for when we are able to love each other well. And in the midst of all of that, even though I am married...to a Christian...who loves Jesus very much...who treasures me...and longs to be a man of God...STILL my greatest treasure in the deepest places of my heart must be that GOD HIMSELF DELIGHTS OVER ME. And if that love is the love that quiets my soul and if that love is the love that I allow to rejoice over me with loud singing, then I myself can enjoy my relationship with my husband, even in what is lacking.

And in the same way I pray tonight, thinking over faces and marriages and singles and friends and family in my life, that we would sit in God's delighting over us. That our hearts would be still and ask the Lord what his love for us is like, that we may experience him and his infinite gift of gracious, delighting, perfect pursuing love of us.

I just posted what I wrote but felt overcome in my spirit reading that Zeph verse again as the Lord reminded me that yes we experience God rejoicing over us here while we are still veiled from seeing him in full while on earth, but there will come a day when we will be at a wedding feast. The church, the body of Christ, is the bride, and Christ is the groom and it is a picture of a perfect love which we cannot experience here on earth and which we will celebrate and delight in forever! So whether single or married or widowed or any of those but hurting and suffering, in Christ we look forward to a new wedding. We will live with the Lord, who is perfect in his love and compassion and care for us and we will be known as we never have and he will rejoice over us. It is difficult to grasp but this longing that we have all carried in our hearts our whole lives for being pursued and loved and known will be brought to a beautiful completion. We often may wonder - how will we not get tired of heaven? But what excited bride on her wedding day, marrying a great guy, ever thinks - I wonder how long this will last? No, she is delighting in a love relationship. And so it will be with those who are in Christ when we are with Jesus forever. There will be no lacking in our hearts, no expectations not met, no crushing hurts. We will exist in perfect love and we will not wonder about when it might end. We will only rejoice in delighting and praise Him that it will never end.

"Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his Bride has made herself ready;
it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure"

I am reminded of my favorite song right now - David Crowder's Oh How He Loves Us. And I just weep everytime i hear it. Here are the lyrics and I'll let them close this out. Will you take a moment to listen his delighting over you?

"He is jealous for me, Loves like a hurricane, I am a tree,
Bending beneath the weight of his wind and mercy.
When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory,
And I realize just how beautiful You are,
And how great Your affections are for me.

And oh, how He loves us oh
Oh how He loves us,
How He loves us all

He is jealous for me, Loves like a hurricane, I am a tree,
Bending beneath the weight of his wind and mercy.
When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory,
And I realize just how beautiful You are,
And how great Your affections are for me.

And oh, how He loves us oh,
Oh how He loves us,
How He loves us all

He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves.

And we are His portion and He is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes,
If His grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.
And heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss,
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest,
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets,
When I think about, the way…

That He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves.
Yeah, He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves.

Chocolates to support Red Cross in Haiti

2010-02-04T14:01:00.000-08:00

My sweet neighbors Anya and Dorian are making chocolates in adorable brown boxes to sell for Valentines (and even after) for $7, with the proceeds going to Red Cross in Haiti. If you live near me and would like to buy one, they can be bought with cash or check (written out to Red Cross) and you can either pick them up at my home (with notice) or I can work out some kind of delivery. They are a great idea for a little love on Valentines for a spouse, friend, mother, daughter, Sunday school teacher, or just someone who needs a lift. Check out the pics and let me know if you'd like one! You don't have to order by Valentines, that was just an idea since tis the season. I think this is a great, creative idea and it reminds me of a muuuuch smaller scale of what Bono's RED concept is about: you're going to buy things anyway, so you might as well buy something where someone in need is also going to benefit from your purchase. Pretty amazing, practical concept. Contact me at kellyccowan@yahoo.com for an order. Thanks!
Kelly Cowan

Titus in Cyber Space

2010-01-30T20:31:00.000-08:00

Potty training isn’t going so well. (By the way if you’re not into potty training blogs, stick with me, this moves on to deeper things, promise.) Unfortunately I have a lot of families around us for whom this was a cynch over the time frame of a weekend. So it’s been a little discouraging. I went shopping a couple of weeks ago for the perfect underwear. I found Minnie mouse as well as all the Disney princesses. I felt like that plus some cute stickers were all Jason and I needed in hand to head into our potty training weekend. We read next to nothing, didn’t talk to anyone, and just thought it would work out like it has for so many other toddlers.

It all started off well and good. The girls really liked the underwear. They wanted to put it on. I think they liked the freedom of no pants and they really liked the sticker rewards. They would alternate having accidents and having successful elmo potty runs. Their sticker charts were filling up. I had not a care about doing this by myself after the weekend was over and I expected even more progress and initiation from the girls.

But come Monday I was on my own and everything hit the fan. Grace not only was begging and tantruming for diapers but she also had progressively been relapsing with her eating habits starting around the same time we first put the panties on. She was eating very little, covering her face, throwing fits, and a handful of meals literally eating not even one bite. We used to go to an occupational therapist for her eating aversions when she was around age one but slowly saw improvement as we worked at her own pace. I think she was sensing a push again with something that made her uncomfortable. We needed to lay off.

Now they’re in pull-ups during the awake hours, diapers for sleep, and we’ve up-ed the anty with two chocolate chips (plus the sticker) for every success. We’re in a comfortable place and I think we’ve got to take it easy.

Throughout the process we also realized we’ve got to do some more research and advice hunting. I mean, there are entire books on this. I am not going to read a book. But just that they exist should tell me it’s more than buying underwear and not making plans for a weekend. There are almost certainly going to be exceptions and “if this happens” type situations that can throw kinks into the training plans.

Bottom line. We don’t know anything about this. We’re newbies and we need wisdom. I’ve got none in my brain. The only thing I do have is the truth I have carried in my pocket since my kids were born – that a huge favor you can do yourself in parenting is to be an observer of your children, looking to see what they need, when they are ready for things, and who they are in the uniqueness of their creation. Besides that observation though, there is much additional, helpful wisdom that I can get my hands on. Just like seeing that occupational therapist, she was able to observe Grace with wise eyes that I did not have. We were watching the same child, but she could see behaviors that resembled children’s she had given therapy to before, so she empowered me as a mom to be a better support to Grace.

On to the title of this blog and on to a deeper burden on my heart. I am a big lover and believer in the Titus 2 life of mentoring those who are on the road just behind you. If you haven’t read the Titus 2 passage for women, here it is:

"But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine…Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love and in steadfastness. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.”

As we have been potty training, I’ll tell you that the easy thing to do is hop on the internet, do a little research and gain some “wisdom.” I think sometimes it’s helpful, but lately I have felt the burden that this is a sad rippling effect for a number of reasons.

First, and simply, when you come to a woman in person looking for wisdom on anything from potty training to confronting someone in their habitual sin, there is wisdom from that Christian women in that she discerns exactly how to guide you with that particular person or need. Take our simple example with Grace. She is almost three and speaking in full sentences and seems on paper (or on internet sites or books) as ready for potty training. But there’s much wisdom in exploring her particular issues and contributing personality traits that might change how we should train her. A woman of wisdom might be able to talk with me over an hour about her peculiarities and I might come to a more Grace-specific conclusion instead of making a black and white blanket decision about what to do with her from what I read on the internet.

I think about this too with how to raise my kids, how to discipline them, how to love my husband in our particular circumstance, how to love a friend, how to confront a friend, how to receive a piece of counsel, how to plan my house management, etc. The list goes on about what I need wisdom for as it relates to that verse above on topics like: loving my husband, loving my children, being self-controlled, being pure, working at home, being kind, and being submissive.

Sometimes, of course!, there is truth and wisdom on the internet. On a personal level, I would hope that my blog is a written display of the wisdom that God is teaching me about particular circumstances in my own life. However, if what I write on a certain subject resonates with someone regarding something they need counsel for in their own lives, I would pray that they would also “check” their life and wisdom received from me/my blog with a closer counsel in their lives, with someone who can see into the particular realities in their own hearts.

My other concern with what I will call Titus in Cyber Space counsel is that I am deeply grieved and saddened for both 1. the lack of vision Christian women seem to have these days for being a Titus woman who mentor women behind her in life (not by age but by what she has matured in with Christ) and 2. the lack of desire in women to be led and mentored by more mature women in their lives. It saddens me that both the mentor and the mentee are becoming more scarce and it is my prayer that we will always see ourselves as both. That we are called to Titus 2 both as women who need to grow in Jesus and also women who have already grown in Jesus in many areas and we need to share our wisdom (gently and humbly) with younger women in the faith. I am desperate for this to happen.

Last January I felt a clear call from Proverbs 14:1 “The wisest of women builds her house, but folly with her own hands tears it down.” I blogged about it and made a list of women I wanted to meet with and learn from about a variety of subjects in need wisdom in, mostly all included somehow in the verses above. Then I had Salem. :) So now, I am picking up that list again, determined to not seek the Titus woman out in cyber space, and to be a wise woman who builds her house by seeking wisdom where God has placed it in the lives of mature women all around me. I will continue to listen to the Holy Spirit personally, put myself under the treasured authority of my pastors on Sundays, have conversations with lovely hearts of friends who are closest to me, as well as pursue women I admire to grow in wisdom and build my house.

I’d love to know what you guys think about Titus in cyber space vs. Titus women in your community! Tell me your experience and burdens. And also…if you so feel led by the Holy Spirit, give us a shout out about potty training if you have any wisdom on it!

Creation groans

2010-01-25T21:40:00.000-08:00

When a man I respect cries or yells out with urgent, righteous indignation I am stilled and awed and moved.

My pastor, Mark Driscoll, is fairly well known for his occasional loud, convicting calls for the church to wake up or come to repentance, but not nearly as well known, though he should be, for his deeply compassionate and broken side which brings him to tears. But I think they both rise up from the same well in his spirit. And both came over him this past Sunday.

Our church took a break from Luke to show clips of videos and photography and short stories from our pastor who just got back from a very short, and very spontaneous trip to Haiti to evaluate the state of the churches and their recovery needs. I don’t think I can even begin to sum up all his pictures and stories between getting into his caravan from the Haiti airport with the UN informing them that they would not be allowed back in for safety, to the man shot within feet of him who laid on the street for hours because no help was planning on coming. It’s something you must see.

It really is difficult to live in this world, if you are awake to it. Creation groans in every direction and earthquakes like this one have happened and will happen all the time. Since the shock of Haiti I have gone on to sleep and eat plenty and think of it again and then laugh and watch my favorite shows and write and cook blue berry muffins and change diapers and think of it again. I have to live the life in front of me but I also have to stay burdened and it’s such an interesting and confusing way to live life sometimes.

And thank the Lord for prayer.

Because some people are “light” about the world’s tragedies because they’re oblivious. And some are light about them because they know but they push them out of their minds with a shake of their heads. And then some are heavy because every piece of bad news in their lives and in the world is one more real heart break that they don’t know what to do with besides medicate in various forms or throw money at it. Which has to be just about everybody without Jesus, unless they fell into that obliviously light category earlier. And some are heavy because it’s devastatingly difficult for them to swallow and they mourn and break inside, but they also pray. And Jesus has a promise for them, that their yoke will be easy and their burden will be light. So they are light, though their hearts may stay burdened. It’s a spiritual mystery to me.

There is an amazing verse that I will never forget about this very thing and it is actually the same passage that Jesus himself read as he stood up in the temple, which was a declaration that he was the fulfillment of this prophesy:

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to grant to those who mourn in Zion – to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified. They shall build up the ancient ruins; they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.” Isaiah 61:1-4

Look who he comes to, praise God. The poor, the brokenhearted, the captives, those who are bound, all who mourn, those in ashes, those with a faint spirit. And look at all he came to give to them. Amen to that. Just reading and writing that out once lightens my spirit.

If you read my blog, you already saw that I posted John Piper’s sermon on suffering and if you haven’t listened to it, I am now actually begging you. (Picture me on my face here please). Reading a sweet friend’s blog, I was reminded that our worship pastor talked about something similar to Piper’s sermon prior to Mark’s sermon. The devastation, the torn down buildings, the utter despair, the mourning, the desolation in the streets, the smoke in the air, and the hopeless spirit lingering in every stinch of death in the air is a reminder of who we are and where we were before Christ came to redeem us.

Piper hits heavy on this too as he runs through Romans 8, explaining what it means that all creation groans for redemption. He stated that our sin is the corporate reality that is being documented as horrific by all disease and tragedy. Read that again, because it has taken me ten years to understand that very truth. When sin entered the world, we were subjected to futility/frustration but so was creation. And creation’s groanings and imperfections and tragedies and diseases are supposed to mirror our hearts corporately. Piper says, “The ultimate meaning of suffering is that sin is ghastly. It shows how serious sin is.” He is careful to point out that the truth of Romans 8 is not about your sin = a zap from God. Putting it into a close encounter, he is not saying that God was specifically judging the sins of those who died in 9-11 or those who are suffering or have died in Haiti. It is supposed to reflect our corporate sin as a human race for all of time. This is a clear distinction from those who might say that God blesses the righteous with good things in this life and withholds good things from the unrighteous in this life and on this earth. In fact, Scripture says that it rains and shines on the righteous and unrighteous alike. But suffering does make a statement about our hearts. All of our hearts. It is a shocking, grand depiction of our tragic inner reality, without the redemption of Christ. It’s as if, like Pastor Mark, God is outwardly grieving and yelling out to us all at once.

The most lovely words in that text to me are this: IN HOPE. “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from it’s bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

As Piper encourages, be broken by all suffering. If you do not know Christ, (if you will allow me to so encourage you), humble yourself with brokenness to see your need for God in your state of hopelessness. If you do know Christ, stay humble that you continue to need him and let this remind you of the rampant need for Jesus and his redemption in hearts all around you so that this world may have H O P E.

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Biggest Loser in me

2010-01-19T10:28:00.000-08:00

Another season of Biggest Loser has begun. They say it’s the biggest, heaviest group ever. And this year trainers Bob and Jillian joke that they feel like they say that every year, but seriously it’s true and the heaviest guy came in at 526 pounds at his first weigh in. I don’t love everything about the show and much prefer to watch it in the slowest fast forward setting since they drag it out so long, but last season something very unlikely happened in me as I was watching the finale.

I swear the Lord comes to me in the strangest times. Toilet. Stoplight. Head on the pillow. Brushing teeth. Browsing pantry. And, apparently, watching Biggest Loser.

To show everyone what had been accomplished on the final episode, the finalists came bursting through a paper image of their old selves, as if in a victory lap, and with hands raised and audience wildly cheering as they rejoiced in their new bodies. It was literally a miracle seeing who they were before and who they had become. They were clearly not the same people. They had accomplished something that literally felt completely impossible to them. But there they were, changed in a drastic and wonderful way and my heart was so happy that they had physically found freedom from their old bodies. I actually found myself in tears as the Lord gave me a word from him for my life.

You see, I have been on about a three year journey through a sin tendency in my life that has clung to me like static. I have tried to shake it and peel it off and shoo it away and fight it and wrestle it and relinquish it and defeat it with small victories but mainly a lot of frustration that it’s still around. I have seen my sin vaguely on a “oh, who are you?” level and then more familiarly on a “oh, you’re still around?” level and then a couple years into it, it was more like a, “are you kidding me? GO AWAY!” level.

If I could display it in a physical sense I guess it wouldn’t look much different than an overweight person dealing with gluttony. They eat well for a meal and then have got to have that package of oreos and then they work out a couple days and then find themselves doing other things. Back and forth. Back and forth. Ups and downs. Blah blahh blahhhhhh.

Romans puts it perfectly. “For I DO NOT UNDERSTAND MY OWN ACTIONS. (I know!!! Seriously!!!) For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. (I know!!!!) For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man am I! Who will deliver me from this body of death? THANKS BE TO GOD THROUGH JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD!”

I do not understand my actions. True. True. True. This is craziness at times. It is true I literally have in my head who I want to be in certain circumstances. I even pray just before the rocky circumstances or conversations happen, as I usually anticipate them. Then in that terrible moment of testing, I just BAIL on what I really really want! I go for the bait, as my pastor said during Sunday’s sermon. I go for the tempting thing. For the shallow desires in my heart that linger and lay out their tasty bait for me because they know I always go for it.

For me, that would be expectations (what I set as a standard for another), self-justification (really wanting justice for myself and to be treated with absolute fairness) and self-preservation (all about reputation and being right and being on top) and being understood (though it is never promised to us that we will be perfectly understood). Those are my likely baits and they are so alluring. They are certainly something I want, but as the Romans verses say, my heart DOES want to obey God IN MY INNER BEING. Pastor Mark has talked about this before, that my deepest desires are from the Spirit as a Christian. That is what I really really want to do, want to obey, want to carry out. But I just cannot, cannot, cannot seem to carry it out.

The Lord has revealed so much to me over three years about these sin patterns in my life. I have been learning, growing, changing at a turtles pace but thankfully changing non-the-less. Losing my two pounds a week of my “flesh”. Though like a 526 pound human being, the two pounds a week is so torturous and frustrating.

I remember a testimony from a couple of years ago at a women’s retreat. She was telling her dark story and as God would enter the story she would say, “But God.” This part of my testimony has felt dark and grim and low for some time. But lately I feel a turning. And I am sensing that my story is seeing the corner where I will be able to say “But God…” Ephesians 2 has a passage like this. Read this:

“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience – among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. BUT GOD, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ…”

I am sensing a BUT GOD in my story. I am sensing that I am going to be made able to carry out what I actually want to be and do. You can’t possible imagine how many exclamation points I want to put behind that because I’ve hated who I have been!!!!!! I am so thankful for this turning.

But it’s not like it’s God’s fault and I’ve just been waiting for him to show up. I think he’s just speaking up lately about what this change will take. What kind of obedience it will require. What I will have to lay on the alter. Namely, my baits I mentioned above.

And as my pastor talked about in Sunday’s sermon, God is faithful to provide a way out of our temptation. I can take the door or take the bait. And many times I just have not chosen to go with the Spirit. And even now, it’s only been a week since I have felt all of this changing in me, but I am going with it. And going with it tangibly looks like really really rough, abandoned, scary, selfless obedience in each moment. And I don’t want to do it! But I do want to do it! The me that doesn’t want to do it is the one that would rather preserve self and be treated fairly and given justice and experience perfect understanding and basically sacrifice everything else, especially humility in order to achieve those pleasures. The me that wants to do it is the NEW CREATION in me. The me that God created me to be. She’s the girl that I take joy in being because she’s God’s daughter who delights in Him and in Him being enough for her. When I let her come out, I am free.

I am reading Sacred Marriage, which is all about what I am writing about, but now in addition I am also reading Pursuit of Holiness. I got stuck on like page four and I’m frozen there because God showed me something very important about HIS PRESENCE in my sinful cycles. I know this but I didn’t knooooooow this in my heart in each moment of temptation. The author says about those having trouble defeating sin, “Our first problem is that our attitude toward sin is more self-centered than God-centered. We are more concerned about our own ‘victory’ over sin than we are about the fact that our sins grieve the heart of God. We cannot tolerate failure in our struggle with sin chiefly because we are success-oriented, not because we know it is offensive to God…God wants us to walk in obedience, not victory. Obedience is oriented toward God; victory is oriented toward self. This may seem to be merely splitting hairs over semantics, but there is a subtle, self-centered attitude at the root of many of our difficulties with sin. Until we face this attitude and deal with it we will not consistently walk in holiness. This is not to say God doesn’t want us to experience victory, but rather to emphasize that victory is a by-product of obedience.”

So. How this theology becomes practical is that in my moment of temptation, I need to see that me treating this other person (namely my spouse) the way that I am called to love them is OBEDIENCE to God. If I can see God present in the scenario I am in and find obeying him my highest joy, then I find myself in a whole different ball park. I am less likely to be run by my emotions, led by my instincts, reacting to my spouse’s behaviors and tempted by my baits. I need to see real life in light of what is going on spiritually, with Jesus present in that very room, believing that my obedience or disobedience is something I am doing to him.

So all of this to say that I’m sitting there watching Biggest Loser’s finale from last season and I’m on the couch crying because the Lord is piercing my heart that what happened to those people physically is what He will accomplish in me IN THE SPIRIT. He is going to tear away my flesh, enable me to carry out my deepest desires of the Spirit so that I become unrecognizable from who I was before. And all I could see was my sweet husband sitting in the front row, looking at me like – Who is this wife of mine? Who has she become? And he will rejoice over the new creation in me! Lord let it be as you have shown me. Make me new. Let me come forth in 2010 as someone I would not recognize from last year. I can see her in my mind and I want to see her in the mirror. Can this change come? Yes! “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ my Lord!”

This IS extraordinary

2010-01-11T13:47:00.000-08:00

It's only 1:47pm. And this is an extraordinary day.

Our day started at 5:45a.m. with Salem waking early, which prompts me to make his bottle, walk into his room, change his diaper while he has breakfast, and dump a container of toys into his crib so I can doze for thirty more minutes. Kanah wakes up early next, at 6:30 a.m., and crawls into bed with me (her new routine) and sips on her milk while snuggling. I don't know when it happened but she has become a morning snoozer and wants to have nothing to do with playing or jumping up or down or any such things. She wants to be on my pillow with me, cuddling and sipping her milk. Grace woke up "early" (for her) next at 7:30 a.m. and by this time she had to come find the other three of us downstairs where we were watching cartoons. With daddy off to work super early today and the forementioned and abhored word "early" mentioned so many times, we were all lazily hanging out in the downstairs living room, not exactly starting the day.

The next three hours involved me finally getting off the couch and turning off the tv, Salem going to sleep on my shoulder for nap, breakfast, verse of the day on our new blackboard and signing it with our hands, prayer for a boy named Jack, learning about the weather today and me drawing a silly picture of it, web camming it with Mimi and Pop, the girls doing an art project with markers and rolling paints (you are COOL, whoever made those), making a care package for baby Zach Thomas as well as our little friend Reilly Brunson, hair, new clothes, an outfit and a couple bobby pins for me, a little email, a big living room mess, the dress switch-a-roo game with the princess dolls, oh coffee with cinnamon creamer should have gone way earlier on this list, and then Salem woke up.

Want to take our boxes to the post office? I asked before I calculated so now we were all hands in for our one outting of the day. Now began what must have been a one hour prep time to get us out the door. Salem clothes. Change diapers. Make snack bags. Find cups. Pour milk. Break up a fight. Discipline. Confession. Repentance. Forgiveness. Pour my self some water in my Starbucks cup. Ah, super parched. Third re-heat of my coffee. Tell Kanah to find her socks and put her pants on. Bobby pin in each girls' hair. Lay Salem down with bottle. One sip of coffee. Tell Kanah her pants are backwards. Break up another fight over Snow White's dress. Confession. Repentance. Forgiveness. See what's in Salem's mouth and quickly sneak away to use the bathroom. Hurry back because when I leave the room I always come back to three cries.

Are we ready? Okay girls put on your vests. Pick one thing to take with you. I hurry out to the car to throw the boxes and my purse in the front seat, put on my own shoes, and as I return to living room am straping on my front baby carrier. (Promise, I've learned if it's raining and I am going to use the carrier when I get out of the car, it's just a way better idea to put it on before you leave, though it's silly looking). The girls stumble to the car, put on dot boots and put themselves in their seats. I carry Salem out, strap him in, and see he has no socks. Oh well. No socks. It's cold and rainy but today, no socks. Double check seat belts. Start the car and turn up the music.

Ah. Driving.

Five minutes later at the Fall City post office I unbuckle the girls and instruct them to stand against the building wall right in front of our car. I put Salem in the carrier and go to the other side to grab the packages. I shoo the girls into the front door, balancing the two boxes in one hand like a tray and Salem turning his head every which way trying to see the "show" going on all around him. Someone opens the next door for us, to which I applaud him verbally with all sorts of encouragements. (So many people let the door go right in our faces). We are finally in a square,enclosed room with minimal distractions(important details to any mom) and are only one of two customers. The highlight for the girls is looking at all the designs on the envelopes the post office sells and they like to point them all out to me. Then they talk about "the man" for like 20 minutes. (The man who took our packages). I am thrilled that this is going so well (did it seem that way??). The woman behind me thinks I deserve a mom of the year award (I do! How do I get one? I might just make one.) And then she goes on and on about how she can't even believe we are all dressed and out the door (finally a person who gets it!!!) I instantly love her and would like to have her over once a week but...she's a stranger. We're all done at the post office but with all this work getting here I'm thinking gosh, can't they read us a book or let us do something cool in the back room? But alas, letting them look at my stamps I just bought will have to do. Another man opens the door for us on the way out (Fall City I am proud of you for raising all these gentlemen!) who asks if I have twins but is more interested in me having a baby boy, which he says is "lucky." Hmm?

Similar story getting back in the car and into our house and sigh...morning done.

THIS IS extraordinary. I was reading a blog by a friend recently who was talking to her husband about all they wanted to do and see and experience in their lives and she wanted "extraordinary". For them, this looks more like risk-taking and saying "yes" to life and maybe moving and certainly just living more. God is speaking to them about opening their free time and lives and hands to MORE in places where they have maybe taken the easy route or the comfy thing. I am excited for them in their obedience to the Spirit and for what God is doing in them.

I think a lot of people hit these places and sometimes like our friends, it's an answer to God saying "live a life worthy of the calling you have received" and for some it's an ITCH, which is not a call to something extraordinary. It's just an itch and they need to sit still in obedience in that which doesn't seem too extraordinarily exciting as a Christian. Though it's what God wants. I think there are people like me who read about someone else's conviction for extraordinary callings and think for a minute, Wait. What about me? Because I can't even think about that because of our circumstances. And I always hear the Lord instantly, because I think we've had this conversation so many times. He usually says something like:

This IS extraordinary. You have had participation in the divine in creating these three little beings who are now under your authority, care, and stewardship. They are eternal souls, entrusted to your care, concern, teaching, and love. This is an extraordinary task. An extraordinary reward. Most will not see this and will scurry after other things but I will enable you to see them as arrows in your quiver, as a great heritage, the fruit of your vine, a great reward and a delight. I will enable you to see yourself as a Teacher, a Warrior for hearts, a Counselor, an Evangelist, a MOTHER. This is my daily gift, my daily stewardship, my daily delight. THIS is extraordinary.

There will be other seasons when I, like my friend, will sit and evaluate life and I will see places and opportunities and adventures on the horizon to jump into and enjoy and pursue. But for now, especially for this oh, six or more intense years of my life, I am focused, determined, enabled, and gifted for the task of raising these little beings. Who breathe and have life and who I want to DRINK and TASTE of the goodness of the Lord for them.

THIS IS extraordinary. And today, resting on my couch after an eventful morning with a simple outting alongside my three little people, I let myself be encouraged to go into "part two" of our day with peace, a will to sustain me, and an extraordinary purpose.