Katherine Wolf's Blog, page 3

YOUNG SUFFERING CLUB: The Smiley Family {THE STORY}

The Smileys have been friends for many years and inspirations to our entire LA community. This precious family of six will always hold a special place in our hearts as their brave walk through suffering has encouraged us to persevere in our own walk down that same road. Their humble dependence on God amidst every parent's greatest fear continues to be a testament to the unexpected joy and peace that can be mined in the depths of pain.

This is their story of suffering and their story of hope. What's yours?

{HILLARY} When I was 29 weeks pregnant with our third child, I was unexpectedly admitted into the hospital for early labor. I spent six weeks on hospital bedrest, leaving my 3 ½ year old and 21 month baby at home. The doctors concluded that something was different about this pregnancy and about this baby but they didn’t know what. Luke came five weeks early... arriving on my birthday. He was born with chromosomal and brain abnormalities and the rarest form of a rare syndrome, which only 30 people in the world have. Our geneticist actually printed googled information out for us because there’s just not much known about his syndrome. At 18 months, he was diagnosed with epilepsy.

When Luke’s journey began in my womb, my world shifted completely and everything I once knew as true wasn’t anymore. Life changed dramatically and continued to as the Lord drew me closer to Him than I had ever been before. The things I held onto so dearly in this life became fuzzy and dim and I realized that the truths I was believing were empty and were fading away with each passing breath of the ventilator that Luke was initially on.

He’s almost 6 years old now, is delayed in many areas, he cannot yet walk on his own and has difficulty speaking. His name means “bringer of light,” and that’s exactly what he does. He brings Christ’s light to this dark and shadowy world.

Initially, doctors prepared us for the fact that Luke would never see or hear or smile or laugh. They promised us all sorts of things. The future that they painted was dark and dismal and without hope. Today, Luke can see, hear smile and laugh. We have gotten to experience that God’s promises for us are so much greater than the world's. He has promised never to leave us and He reassures us that His grace is always, always enough. Now, doctors do not pretend to have any idea how Luke is going to be. It’s a giant question mark and that is okay.

 {READ THE SMILEYS INSIGHTS ON SUFFERING, HERE}

* For the latest updates from the Smiley Family, check out Hillary's blog, "Capturing Motherhood"

Waiting for the Second Advent

Thunder in the desert! “Prepare for God’s arrival! Make the road straight and smooth, a highway fit for our God. Fill in the valleys, level off the hills, smooth out the ruts, clear out the rocks. Then God’s bright glory will shine and everyone will see it. Yes. Just as God has said." ISAIAH 40:3-5 (MSG)

As a child, I remember sitting in the hard, wooden chairs of an underwhelming auditorium, already annoyed at the prospect of an afternoon wasted watching a musical with my family at the local community college. “Godspell” began with the unassumingly simple refrain, "prepare ye the way of the Lord", first sung in a solo, accapella voice so commanding it shot across the room like an unexpected firecracker. In the span of 2 minutes, the same seven words crescendoed into a rapturous, psychedelic gospel explosion. The shabby stage curtains and cracked linoleum floor, the most ordinary of spaces, were left unrecognizable in the wake of the holy vortex, so that something altogether sacred remained. I can still remember the echo of the final note as my eyes rapidly darted to the back of the room where I was sure Jesus would bust through the door at any second. 

At the crux of the Christian hope is this notion of Jesus as our forerunner (HEBREWS 6:20) the one who blazes a trail through death with the anchor on whose chain we desperately cling. Yet what about Jesus’ forerunner, the one who blazed the trail for him? What about John the Baptist, the one whose call to preparation still echoes in the deepest places of our souls? “With the spirit and power of Elijah” I imagine John’s voice was so spine-tinglingly authoritative he could’ve summoned the rains in one breath and called down the fire of heaven in the next, a holy vortex indeed. Only this type of forerunner could have turned such stone-cold, wayward hearts back to God before the main event had even begun.

Yet as we anticipate the return of Jesus, the second Advent, the final redemption of creation and restoration of God’s beloved people, it seems we are now in the surprising, even mind-bending position of being Jesus’ forerunners ourselves, just like John the Baptist was to Jesus and just like Jesus is to us. How could we, the fair-weather receivers of His gospel ever hope to emulate this commanding voice in the wilderness? How could we the broken parents, the disobedient children, the unwise and unrighteous ever wholeheartedly proclaim, “prepare ye the way of the Lord”? Well, we can because He already has. We are forerunners of grace and forerunners by grace.

But how do we straighten and smooth and fill in and level off all the things that might get in the way of everyone seeing God's glory? In John 1, simple handles are put on this most daunting of tasks:

“There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world." (JOHN 1:6-9)

It seems first and foremost, we must remember that we are not the Light. When we put ourselves in places only meant for God, we will be crushed under the weight of expectations and burdens we could never begin to bear. And yet we have been sent by God to this time and space, these relationships and influence, for our good and His glory, and this is good news. God invites us to be necessary, indispensable even, to this greater movement of light in the darkness and that should inspire us to do the things we think we cannot do.

And then like John, we are called to be tellers of God's story through our stories. For some reason, we gravitate toward playing judges and prosecutors, but we are simply tasked with being the witnesses, of telling our microcosmic versions of how HIs light has illuminated the dark of the world and the dark of our hearts. Recently, we heard through the grapevine that a beloved doctor of ours, a self-professed agnostic, was reconsidering the place Jesus might have in her life after hearing the place he has in our lives. We never sought to judge or convict or proselytize her, rather, we simply told her who Jesus is to us, and that was enough. Then the act of bearing witness to the light becomes the spark that ignites new light itself.

As we wait in the space between these two advents, the waiting weighs heavy. Waiting alone is hard, but waiting together is holy. And together we pull back the curtain of the yet-to-come kingdom of God when we bear witness to the ways in which the light of Christ has illuminated the dark auditoriums of our own souls. As we share our stories of grace in ordinary places, to ordinary people, it all becomes oddly sacred, and some who hear will find themselves for the first time amidst the wreckage of the holy chaos, and they will never be the same. Then we’ll all turn around together with baited breath, craning our necks toward the door in the back of the room, ready for Him to come, the One we’ve been waiting for.

{This blog was inspired by a recent sermon series at our church, BEL AIR CHURCH, listen HERE.}

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Happy Birthday Jesus Party!

We hosted an impromptu "birthday party for Jesus" at the end of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Now, we did this not because we felt we had the time or the energy to host dozens of munchkins and their parents in our little house but because this season into which we are entering is too sacred to not intentionally carve out moments of celebration and community.

When everything around us seeks to draw our hearts away from the hope of advent, we've got to figure out creative ways to tell ourselves and our families the story again, and sometimes the best way to tell that story is with cake! (click to enlarge images)

{See posts on our previous HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESUS parties, HERE & HERE}

#ChocolateKatChat November 2015

Catch up on the past month's episodes of "Chocolate Kat Chat" (videos embedded below) covering topics like... how we're ALL DISabled but GODabled too!how God turned our MISERY into our MINISTRYwhat you get when you CHOOSE GRATITUDEThis month's encouragement for #ChocolateKatChat...

@EE1721: Hey kat ! This is Emily from Samford in Bama! I LOVE #chocolatekatchat -- don't ever stop ! // @BLONDESTAR: I needed to hear this, especially today! :) Thx // @KARBER: Great message for this time of year.

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The Final Question...(Guest Blog for DARLING Magazine)

My mom says that before my first birthday I was talking in full sentences with most of them ending in question marks. In later years, on the drive to school, my dad would lovingly ask me to take a breath and sit with my questions so he might have time to think about his answer before I peppered him with the next one.

And in college, when I was dating my now-husband, Jay, he almost swore off watching movies with me because of the number of non-stop interrogatories concerning what was happening next and why and where and to whom.

I make no apologies for it. I’m a woman — asking questions is what women do; it’s how we make sense of the world around us. And, quite beautifully, at the heart of this very ordinary action lies a real vulnerability, an invitation to a communal experience of the world as we offer to each other, “I don’t know … but maybe you do?”

Yet, sometimes it seems our exploration becomes more stifled with each passing year, as if we should already know all the answers, as if questions are for children or for those who don’t know any better or for those of little faith. Ironically, it’s only after years of really living life that we come to know just how much we don’t know, but by that point, we may no longer feel safe to admit it out loud. In that stifling, tragically, we can start to lose our wonder.

The world stopped making sense to me when I almost died at 26 years old, and that’s when the real questions began.

* UPDATE: {THIS BLOG WAS PICKED UP BY THE HUFFINGTON POST! CLICK HERE}

[CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS GUEST BLOG FOR DARLING MAGAZINE]

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