Oct 1, 2013 | 31 Days, The Good Word
Hi there! This post is the first in a 31-Day writing adventure I’m embarking on. I’d love for you to join me and read along. You can find the introduction to the series, and a “Table of Contents” as each day goes live, right here. Thanks so much for dropping in!
The last time I thought about it, I think I was staring out the kitchen window, hands deep in gloves deep in hot, soapy water, washing dishes. I’m sure I was busy wondering how it was all going to get done on that particular day: the homeschooling, the laundry, the diaper changes and naps and lunch and starting dinner and returning phone calls and trying my darnedest to check a thing or two off the estate-settling list while posting a sneak peek for Quiver Tree.
When I look back at that list? It is dumb. Because life never comes at you that way. If you’re on the baseball field, the pitcher throws one ball, and that’s what you deal with. If you’re on the tennis court, there’s just one ball coming at you, unless the person playing on the next court over is just that bad. Maybe if you’re feeling really adventurous or you’re Forrest Gump, you’ll try to simultaneously play ping pong with two people and two balls.
But really? I’ve never been slapped with a moment where there were literally eight things that needed to happen simultaneously. Sure, sometimes, more than one kid is crying or more than one diaper needs changing. But usually? Even if there are a hundred things on the list, they never all have to happen right then. The tough part is always choosing the one.
I’ve realized I think I make those lists in my head to make me feel better about the fact that I’m walking around with a bad attitude.
Don’t expect me to have a good attitude, dang it, can’t you see my list!?!
As I stood there with my hands deep in gloves deep in water in the sink, I began to feel for a moment, as if I was sinking like the heavy dishes I’d been scrubbing. But a little hope can go a very long way — I purposefully redirected my attention to God.
It probably went something like, “Lord, do You see my list?” {Sigh.}
And the reminder that immediately followed was a gift in word-form:
Just take it one day at a time.
There have absolutely been moments in my life where I’ve thought about how nice it would be to get a glimpse of the big picture. How much easier it would be to endure the tough moments if I could go ahead and see past them, see what’s around the bend. There have been moments where I’ve realized I’ve allowed my brain to wander down a rabbit trail of what-ifs that involve future possibilities that are so stinking unlikely it’s ridiculous. Or how many times have I re-lived past failures in my head, as if I could concentrate hard enough to change them?
But in His glorious goodness, the Lord already knows this thing that I’m slowly warming up to: the best way to live the days that you’re given is one at a time. Forget what’s behind and press on, but don’t worry about tomorrow, each day has enough trouble of its own.
So, friends, here it is: an unexpected gift that you have the privilege of enjoying. One slice of your wildly precious life. Savor it and make the most of it.
You always only ever have today. What a gloriously good gift.
xCC
Jul 9, 2013 | In the Name of Love, The Good Word
It all started with two completely different incidents that told me the same thing. First, there was a book a friend thought I should borrow. Someone else had recommended it back when my Dad was in the hospital. It was about a doctor who had a near-death experience and spent an extended period in a coma. When, against all odds, he regained consciousness, he had a story to tell about the experience “on the other side.” Since two people had recommended it, I figured it was worth giving it a read.
A few chapters into the book, something just started to seem off to me — and with a nod at giving as much respect as possible to the experience this guy says he had, something in my gut was just going Uh-un. {Let’s also acknowledge another fact that I had to come to terms with — this guy was in a coma for seven days and had a miraculous recovery, and my Dad was in a coma for seven days, with a very different ending.} By the time I was almost midway through the book, I sensed this whisper — that quiet voice where you’re not sure why, you just know it in your knower. And the whisper said, “Stop reading this. It’s not good for you.”
Being the very sensitive and thoughtful gal that I am, I promptly reasoned out why I needed to continue reading the book in my own mind. My counterarguments included the fact that I would have to tell the truth if my friend asked what I thought: “Um, thanks but, I kinda dropped that book like a bad habit” and another thought, which I rarely live up to, “it’s good to finish things, you’ve started, right?”
But a chapter or two later the whisper was unmistakable — and I finally closed the book and only opened it again to remove the business card I’d turned into a bookmark.
Over the next few days, I pondered the reason why I needed to close the book, and it became clear that the guy was describing an experience of the afterlife that doesn’t line up with Biblical Theology. In contrast, if you read Heaven is For Real, for example, the things that Colton Burpo describes about his near death experience agree with descriptions of heaven in the Bible. The encouragement about the beauty and greatness, and goodness of Jesus in that book strengthened my faith and encouraged me to dig deeper, celebrate more, remember again how great and powerful, and how kind and loving God is.
This book, instead, left this icky feeling in my gut, as if I was trying to build a brick house with sand instead of bricks — trying to pull together something that was never going to build anything, never give me a firm place to stand. And it just made me feel bummed I lost my Dad, really.
But a redemptive purpose was at hand — the bigger lesson behind the experience. The real sermon in the nutshell was:
The Holy Spirit is speaking. I might hear, but I am not listening or obeying.
A few days later, a completely different encounter seemed to whisper the same message. I am still juggling many tasks surrounding the settling of my Dad’s estate, and picking up an estate-related check at a lawyer’s office about twenty minutes away was on the list. I decided on a whim, about forty minutes before lunchtime, to throw the kiddies in the car and quickly run this errand before lunch. And — maybe I should mention — I didn’t know exactly where the lawyer’s office was.
Sometimes stupidity looks a lot like bravery.
I loaded the small people into the van with no small amount of effort, and was eventually ready to go, after running back inside to grab something and something else at least twice. Neither of those something elses were a diaper bag, by the way. I didn’t even remember that.
Finally pulling out of park and into reverse, I glanced over my shoulder to see a big red truck in the driveway. I put the swagger wagon back in park and hopped out to find out Who and What. A roofing estimate was ready and the gentleman who’d done the estimate dropped it off personally to explain a few things. I thanked him for the estimate, and after a brief chat hopped back in the car to get going.
And there was that whisper again.
This is not a good idea. Put the car back in park and take the kids back inside. Don’t.
But brave (stupid) me, being the sensitive and thoughtful gal that I am, promptly reasoned This needs to get done. And, it’ll be really quick. And, I’ll feel like thebombdotcom if I manage to cross another chore off the list with three kids in tow. And, I’ll call the hubs and he can help me navigate my way there since… look at that… Google Maps doesn’t actually know how to get me there.
An hour later, I was back where I started. In the driveway at our house. With a crying baby, two whining and hungry kids, and no check. I never found the lawyer’s office. Google Maps and Bing completely failed me. An extended detour wasted a good twenty plus minutes of my time. It. was. a. stupid. waste. of. time.
And there the message was again, a solid sermon in a nutshell:
The Holy Spirit is speaking. I might hear, but I am not listening, or obeying.
We took a trip up to the mountains a few weekends ago celebrate our anniversary. In six years of marriage, we’ve lived in three countries, had three kids, and called about six different places home. There is good cause for celebration.
I decided to “unplug” for the weekend. My laptop stayed at home, my phone was only used for the purpose of calling or texting, and I kept that to a minimum. And I learned a few things in the process.
First, if you can figure out where your heart is by observing where your mind is, my mind wonders where my phone is, and not where my heart is, no less than twenty times a day. If HH walks out of the room — even just to the loo — I immediately grab my phone to glance at how my game of Words with Friends is going, the time, maybe my email, or … you guessed it… Facebook.
And I mean what I say — if my mind immediately thinks PHONE before I sit down to nurse a baby, before I change from one room to another, anytime someone exits the room, or when I’m about to go to the bathroom — my phone is where I am devoting a heap of my time and attention.
Here’s some scary sauce for you. It’s the definition of worship:
The reverent love and devotion accorded a deity, an idol, or a sacred object.
My pattern is clearly one where I show more love and devotion to this sacred object that I constantly keep in close proximity, rather than the Deity — the Lord, my God, my Savior, the One I want to call my All in All.
If step one is diagnosing the problem, step two is finding the solution.
I started by apologizing to God. Lord, You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, and I’ve repeatedly sold you out for an extra half hour of youtube before bed.
And then I apologized to my Words with Friends buddies, acknowledging that if I don’t have time for my Lord, my Bible, or prayer, then I don’t have time for Words With Friends. Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That, replied my understanding friend, Mona.
I proceeded to begin deleting apps my from my phone. And I began to feel a great weight lifting. The self-inflicted pressure of keeping up with social media fluttered away. No, Pages Manager App, I don’t care that we got new likes. Sorry, Facebook, you are no longer allowed to notify me every time anything happens. To anybody anywhere ever.
But more important than the removal of the things that are not beneficial is bringing in the things that are. This means renewing my commitment to choose a reasonable bedtime over an episode of whatever show it is at the moment we’re barreling through a season of on Amazon Prime. What a novel idea — to get up early and be with the Lord, rather than to stay up late just to be entertained!
My Dad would’ve turned 65 today. And dealing with losing him is a constant reminder that we don’t know how much time we have — and time is the one thing we can’t buy more of — so it’s in our best interest to give ourselves a good long look in the mirror to ask — what am I doing with the time I’ve been given?
Just as the bucket empties just the same whether you knock it over or it has a slow leak, I am praying for help as I slowly take baby steps toward re-focusing, re-centering, and re-committing to live a circumspect life with Jesus at the center. He will fill up the cup to overflowing again, He will show me what to do with the time that I have. Thank heavens for a God who comes near to the contrite (Psalm 34:18) — I regret allowing urgency to determine my daily course of action, and allowing entertainment to pretty much fill all the space between one urgent task and the next one.
More thoughts on this Re-centering are on the way, but in the meantime, I’d love a slice of your story. Do you feel like you’re making the most of the time that you have, or do you feel caught in a cycle of distraction?
xCC
P.S. Thanks so much for your prayers when I shared a message about my Dad on Father’s Day. If you’d like to hear it, you can download it here. I kept it together – and I know prayer had everything to do with that. Thank you.
Jun 10, 2013 | In the Name of Love
For the first time last night, I had a dream with my Dad in it, and I understood, in the dream, that he was no longer alive. But then the strangest thing happened. Somehow, in the hodgepodge blur I remember, he wasn’t alive, but I could still see him, as if he was, and we were dancing.
And strangely enough, we weren’t dancing, like I might remember as a little girl, with my feet on his, or like I might remember from my wedding day, when my fluffy dress made me feel like I was floating on a cloud, and I paused a few times in our dance to get my steps together again, with a little side to side arm action and a twist thrown in, with hopes that it didn’t look like I was a mess.
It wasn’t a classy snapshot memory at all. Instead, we were on a tennis court, but I think indoors, and I think at a party, and he was at least ten or fifteen feet away from me, and we were doing the electric slide. But that line down the middle of the tennis court was between us, and neither of us could cross it. But it was still somehow good, us both dancing.
I have absolutely no memory of my Dad doing the electric slide, ever. But I have to admit, in my dream last night, he was throwing some sweet shapes on the dance floor. And he looked younger and he had more hair, and, it’s honestly hard to believe, he did not have an ECU baseball cap on.
I suppose it’s safe to say this little snippet of my life, this snippet of a dream where I felt confused but I think happy at the same time, is a bit like grief itself.
Strange, and messy.
I’ve cried more tears than I thought I was capable of crying. I’ve laughed harder, fuller and deeper than I thought I would for a while. And somewhere in between trying to figure out the work of settling an estate and supporting my talented hubs (you need family pictures soon, right?) and loving and nurturing and raising three kiddiddles, I am walking the road of this really messy thing called grief.
‘Messy’ is as best a term as I can muster – for when you will erupt in tears at a simple question for no particular reason, when you will avoid things you know need to get done {ahem, thank you notes} because you just know they’re going to be less cathartic than you hope, and really just downright hard. For when you find yourself simultaneously wanting to cheer and to cry when you realize your two-year-old still sometimes pretends to call G-pa on his “cell-phone” {calculator} or he cheers when he sees G-pa’s picture on your Facebook profile.
Grief is just plain messy.
At this stage in it, I’m running more errands than I want to and writing a lot less than I want to. (And probably need to.) But I’m focusing on staying focused, {ironic, hey?} and trying to make sure the tasks on the estate-settling list get crossed off, and I still get wholesome meals on the table. But sometimes it’s Dominos.
The busy is probably good, even though it’s hard. And the memories I’m making with my kids, cherishing them and creating opportunities for love and laughs and learning, this is where the best stuff, the most-healing stuff is happening.
God whispers gently: there is so much good still to come. He is also whispering hope and life and faith, through the voices of Sunday sermons, blog posts, His amazing Word and strong and solid teachings, like this gem by A.W. Tozer
.
The most beautiful reminder of all, in my Dad’s absence, is the constant reminder of the Lord’s presence. I’m aiming to fix the gaze of my soul on God. {Thanks, Tozer.}
Perhaps it’s a valley I’m walking through, that somehow still has some beautiful hills to climb — it’s messy to describe, but it is a place where I know there is a God who makes every path smooth by His grace.
Next Sunday I’ll be sharing about my Dad’s faith journey at the church he called home for a good while. Appropriately, it’s Father’s Day. My heart is certain there are some stories to tell, my hope is that the Lord will give me the grace to tell those stories — and communicate the greater truth behind them — well. {I’d appreciate your prayers, and if you’re local, you are welcome.}
Right now the truth I’m aiming to cling to that I offer to you as well is this: He loves us. Oh, how He loves us.
That night, in the hospital, when the end was beginning and everything was a messy blur, this was the Word, when I opened the Bible on my phone:
He was there for me, an abiding Presence, through the toughest week of my life.
Friends, He loves us. Amen.
xCC
Sep 10, 2010 | Stories, The Good Word
The “coincidences†just continue. And I keep thinking just one of you might be coming around here, still wondering if I’m making things up, or if I’m slightly delusional, or if I am just calling the daffodil of coincidence a rose by another name. Or something like that. My plan is to just keep telling stories, and keep hoping you’ll believe me sooner or later.
So last month, our paycheck was seriously less than what we usually receive on a monthly basis. Translation: it wasn’t enough to pay our outgoings. It was kind of a, hmm…food or rent? moment. I think I responded by weakly saying “The Lord’s gonna provide†and deciding I just didn’t have the emotional capacity to deal with worrying about it at that moment. But before I’d even had a chance to pray a prayer or lose myself in worry and concern, an email from my Mom was in my inbox.
She was just two weeks from departure for her trip to visit us here. And she just up and decided (and by that I would like to point to the work of the Holy Spirit) that she would share with her Sunday School class and ask if they would like to make a contribution to our ministry, since we’d just moved into an unfurnished place and were trusting for the rest of the funds for flights home, etc. They decided to give $100, and some folks who arrived late and didn’t hear the story were so concerned afterwards they brought by another $50. And then her Ladies’ Circle group decided to give $200. And then the Men’s Fellowship. And another Sunday school class. And by the end of this particular adventure in networking my Mom had an extra $700 for us, which she promptly deposited in our bank account.
I’d never asked her … she didn’t know about our shortfall … it just happened. And the fact that this was the particular moment when she decided to do it, was just a little too coincidental for me to point to coincidence if you get my drift. My heart was warmed with the reminder: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.â€
All these goings on for some reason made me think of Hagar. No, no, not Sammy Hagar, the Hagar in the Bible who gave birth to Ishmael with Abraham before Sarai gave birth to Isaac. Hagar ran away because Sarai treated her harshly when she became pregnant. It was a pretty messed up situation, honestly. And, don’t worry, we ain’t having any drama like that around here.
But she runs off into the wilderness, alone and distraught, and the Angel of the Lord shows up, tells her what to do, and encourages her with a promise. Then, “she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, You-Are-the-God-Who-Sees; for she said, ‘Have I also here seen Him who sees me?’†(Gen. 16:13)
And though Hagar’s troubles were really just beginning at that point, that encounter with God was a sign — a moment she could look back on in the days ahead. Though she was Egyptian, a maidservant, set aside, and not of ‘the chosen people of Promise,’ God demonstrated that He sees. He cares. And He shows up when we need Him the most.
Have you ever felt like Hagar? Maybe like you were forgotten or set aside, while it seemed like everyone around you was experiencing the presence and promises of God? The good news is the-God-Who-Sees can see your troubles just as well as He-Sees mine. If you love Him and you walk with Him, you can trust that He-Who-Sees-You will work things out for your own good.
The Sermon in a Nutshell: He-Sees me, He-Sees you. He knew about it before you did. And, coincidentally, I find that a very encouraging thought.
xCC
May 7, 2010 | The Good Word
In Matthew 15 and Mark 7, the story is recorded of a Syro-Phoenician Woman who asks Jesus to heal her daughter. Every time I read this story, I see something new. And as we’ve been speaking of pressing through it seems yet another lesson is here, waiting for us to get it.
The woman asks Jesus to heal her daughter, but at first it seems as if Jesus is saying He won’t do it. “Let the children be filled first, for it is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
My translation: “Look lady, I am supposed to come first, as it was prophesied, to tell the children of God, the Jews, the Good News that their Messiah has come. [Then the message will be shared with everybody else.]”
The woman heard Jesus was able to heal. Faith comes by hearing. Even though at first it seemed as if she was not going to receive what she asked for, yet because of her faith, she pressed through what could have been a great discouragement, to continue to believe in the goodness of Jesus when she wasn’t yet seeing it.
“Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs under the table eat from the children’s crumbs.”
Wow. She just got really humble. She got really low, and she pressed through to seek the miracle she so desperately needed.
Jesus’ response “For this saying go your way; the demon has gone out of your daughter.”
My translation: “That kind of heart is exactly the kind of heart I’m looking for. You kept believing even when you were met with discouragement. Now people for generations to come will read your story and be encouraged by your boldness and great faith. I knew you would do it! And your daughter is healed!”
Do you have the faith to press through and believe God is who He says He is, and can do what He says He can do, even when you don’t see it? I want to have that kind of faith! Ask God to help you press through…and believe!
xCC
P.S. I talked about this same story a while back right here, if you want to read more.
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