Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 125
March 19, 2018
About Giving Your Kids What They Desperately Need To Get Through Life
Being a recent parent to a young child again, I am reminded of the tenderness in which we should teach our kids about the Bible. I love getting to sit with Ashley today, who accepted Christ at a young age and formed a first love with the word of God and the person of Jesus. My prayer is that all of our daughters (and sons) would also experience these sacred texts in this way. God’s Word never goes away, passes away or falls away —but is always given to show us The Way. And when there is an illiteracy of His Word, there’s a warped reading of everything. It’s a grace to welcome Ashley to the farm’s front porch today…
I was around 6 years of age.
And my family attended a small Baptist church outside the budding metropolis of St. Louis, MO.
I remember the building like it was yesterday. White. A big wooden cross on the front. There was an upstairs with nursery rooms and a sanctuary. The downstairs was filled with classrooms for small groups and discipleship.
“If you want to know how things are going to turn out every day — read the Bible every day.” ~A.V.
It was summer.
I was attending Vacation Bible School this week, during this summer.
The theme of the year was “God’s Big Adventure.”
I got to carry in the Christian flag one day and was so honored to represent. I remember meeting new friends.
I remember playing games and learning about the character of God. His loving kindness. His grace.
I remember the second to last day and getting the opportunity to ask Jesus into my young, innocent heart. I was heart-bursting excited.
I’ve thought back on that day in my adult years wondering if I truly understood the magnitude of the decision I was making but I remember thinking and knowing my need of a savior, my need for Jesus.
My parents had divorced when I was young and though I knew their intense love for me, the wounds of a divided home had left a vulnerable spot for the love of a heavenly father to come in and make His home.
Shortly after VBS was over, my parents and pastor talked to me about getting baptized and sharing with our church family the decision I had made and the importance of coming forth publicly and making this declaration.
Now this might seem like an insignificant part of the story or that I am dragging out this time in a young Midwestern girl’s life, but this was of most importance because this also meant I got my first real bible. (With my name embossed on the front, of course!)
“You will be able to handle your world, as well as you handle His Word.” ~A.V.
I knew the stories of the Bible, but I did not yet have my own personal relationship with the scriptures. I read this sacred text no differently than I would read other fairytales with heroic characters and plot twists galore.
During the first few years of my faith journey post VBS, the Bible was explained to me as a love story from God Himself.
To me.
This concept seemed so far off to me initially, this colossal divinity was writing to little ole me? In St. Louis, MO?
But as I studied God’s letter for myself and began to discipline myself in reading, even before my age was marked with double digits, I found time and time again that this was true; the Bible was constantly reminding me of God’s love for me in the words that He said about me and in the great acts of love He displayed.
“All other words evaporate, don’t take up space, don’t hold weight — but God’s Words hold more weight than heaven and earth, because they made heaven and earth and hold the weight of Glory and can rest in your hands, lodge in your heart, and resuscitate your heart.” ~Ann Voskamp
“It’s a quieting truth: Spiritual disciplines are not about getting Him to love you… but about getting yourself to place where you can hear Him tell you He loves you.” ~A.V.
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Rom. 5:8
“But you, O Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.” Psalm 86:15
“But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love…” Nehemiah 9:17
“‘Though the mountains be shaken, and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,’ says the Lord, who has compassion on you.” Isaiah 54:10
These scriptures are ones that pierced my heart at a young age, to truly know the love of God and to cling to that as I formed my identity throughout some really hard teenage years and well into my most formative years of early adulthood.
My love for the Bible and my desire to learn more about this man, Jesus, grew with each passing day.
“God’s Word is the only thing that never falls apart — and holds us when we are falling apart.” ~Ann Voskamp
And for a young girl, who at times, had a hard time knowing her worth and was looking for acceptance at every turn, this love letter, this wooing of the beloved, was exactly what she needed.
As we raise our children and teach them about Jesus and expose them to the Word of God, there are many options we have. Our friends at Zondervan have created the most fun and thought filled Bible when it comes to teaching our kids about Jesus and the lessons in the stories. They have tapped into that childlike adventure and wonder and along with fun characters take young people on a journey to discover the story of redemption through Jesus. All other words may be distractions, abstractions, or detractions, but God’s Word is always effective action.
The NIrV Seek and Explore Holy Bible is about engaging the child’s whole being—heart, soul, and mind. This Bible helps children understand God’s Word by utilizing the nine common ways that children learn: Logical reasoning; Visualizing; Discussing and debating; Learning with others and using interpersonal skills; Reflection or intrapersonal skills; Emotional engagement; Experimenting and doing; Kinesthetics; and Nature.
Join nine wild animal characters as they guide young readers through the story of God’s Word one step at a time. Read God — and you can read life: The NIrV Seek and Explore Holy Bible is the ideal stepping stone from storybook to full-text Bible — and it’s the Bible that our Littlest Girl calls her own and carries everywhere to “read”!
[ Our humble thanks to Zondervan for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
March 17, 2018
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [03.17.18]
Happy, happy, happy weekend!
Some real, down in the bones JOY to celebrate today! Links & stories this week 100% guaranteed to make you smile a mile wide & believe like crazy in a Good God redeeming everything — and that there’s love everywhere & for ((you))!
Serving up only the Good Stuff for you right here:
Mary Anne Morgan
Mary Anne Morgan
Mary Anne Morgan
she captures life’s moments like no one else I know
how these backyard beekeepers are hoping to change the world
so what happens when you combine marbles, magnets, and music?
You Must Fight Hard for Peace thank you for this, Jon Bloom
we couldn’t stop watching this one!
fascinating research
space travel altered his DNA: Identical twin astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly are now genetically different after Scott’s 340-day mission in space.
one of the planet’s most remote locations, a vast wilderness accessible only by boat or plane: the landscape is extraordinary and the friendships are tight.
Do you want to welcome others in but get stuck because making food, cleaning the house, decorating, and facilitating conversation feels impossible—or at least too overwhelming, so why bother?
What if you had simple ways to overcome those obstacles and lean into the gift of opening your door? What if the how-to’s of hosting people in your home didn’t have to get in the way of the get-to of welcoming people into your heart and pointing them to Christ?
never, ever, ever give up
Lisa Holloway
this photographer captures all 11 of her children in one stunning heirloom portrait
just another snow day at the Oregon Zoo
how this church is loving their community? they let the homeless sleep inside, offer blankets, and so much more #BeTheGift #TheBrokenWay
oldest recorded message in a bottle recently discovered
kinda hard to believe? this 6 year old’s lemonade stand helps a family in a big way #BeTheGift #TheBrokenWay
I wish you enough…
her quiet act of kindness gets noticed in a huge way
We don’t have to be afraid of our own brokenness or our own failures. We are actually falling into His arms, and we don’t have to be afraid of failure because Jesus’ arms never fail.
a most powerful story of the heart:
“I needed to clean up the messes that I made by being so stubborn. And I have ask anyone within ear shot to forgive me…”
you’ve got to meet him: Bob Rutherford.
This retiree is warming the feet (and hearts) of the homeless throughout Canada in big ways
challenges can be hard – but a little positivity and fearlessness can go a long, long way
The Unexpected, Surprisingly Simple Way To Never Miss Out on the Abundant Life [Pt. 2]
You can be okay
even when you don’t feel okay
because who you are
is not how you are.
Your heart can kind break more times than you can count
which only means
your heart has been made into abundantly more.
This can be your story — even when things aren’t okay
Post of the week from these parts here:
My Mama, she’d straight up tell you this story with no shame, though it kinda burns me up with embarrassment (Who DOES these things? Apparently, I do — for decades)
But it’s the story at the end that I tell about her, that had her brimming with tears of the gentlest kind.
Because really — who doesn’t really need to know the way to the abundant life?
These stories right here — are kinda my everything life-changing right now:
a beautiful story of rescue and reunion
these best friends living in a Syrian refugee camp? show how anything is possible when you have a faithful friend to help you through
on repeat this week: Come to the Table
… you are as able to take another step toward the life you want — as you are able to live Response-able. The Responsible are those who own how they are always Response-able — always able to have a response, determine their own response, and own that response.
What would happen if the scars you carry are what God uses to carry Christ to a scarred and broken world? For when you reflect Christ, you get to see the world like He does. This changes your world. This ushers you into the abundant life you long for.
And it’s how you choose to remember — that determines how the broken dismembered things in your life will be remade and re-membered.
You have to choose to intentionally remember God’s goodness, if you want your brokenness to be re-membered into wholeness.
The Remembering People — remember they are Response-able and they are Reflectors and they are the Rememberers that remember abundance is found only in His presence.
And remember today: The abundant life is found only in an abundance of God — and we can always have as much of God as we want.
[excerpted from our little Facebook family … come join us each day?]
That’s all for this weekend, friends.
Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth.
Give Thanks. Love well. Re – joy, re- joy, ‘re- joys’ again
Share Whatever Is Good.
March 16, 2018
Sexting, Porn & Affairs: How to Heal Layers of Pain
It’s kinda heartbreaking trying to imagine the pain of discovering that the man you love has been viewing pornography, sexting, or having an affair. Sexual betrayal deals one unbelievably devastating blow to our self-image and self-worth. You grapple with the fact that the man you thought you knew has intentionally lied and deceived you. In the midst of this betrayal you might ask if there is hope for a future free of this pain? Dr. Sheri Keffer experienced the devastation of sexual betrayal first-hand and invites you to discover the healing you can have after this trauma. She has helped many women going through the same trauma she experienced now find healing and hope. It is a grace to welcome Sheri to the farm’s front porch today…
guest post by Dr. Sheri Keffer
It was a cool November day as I sat in an airport waiting to fly into Reston, Virginia.
Looking down at my phone, I saw a text come in from one of the counselors, Barbara, saying, “I am praying for all of you this weekend. I am praying specifically for deliverance.”
When I got into my hotel room, I decided to look up the word deliverance:
1) The action of being rescued or set free
2) A formal or authoritative utterance
Early the next morning I got an email from a woman named Gale:
I will pray God will break those chains and truly set the women free. He is alive in us and able to overcome. I’m painting a lion as we speak. He is the Lion of Judah and is on the move in your hearts. Unleash Him! I just started painting Him so it’s mostly the underpainting. Just remember I have a bunch of work to do on this painting, just like the Lord continues to change me!
Concealed within this story is the idea of an underpainting.
These are the layers of color we never see.
The artist paints them underneath what will become the finished art piece to create richness and depth.
Like the artist Gale, we can feel exposed by our unfinished product—the imperfect parts of us that others typically don’t see.
Yet when we share our stories and invite others into these layers of rich imperfection, we can find comfort and acceptance there.
Used by permission of Gale Strickland, artist. Underpainting
Used by permission of Gale Strickland, artist. Final painting
After seeing the painting, one of the women shared how much the idea of underpainting helped her open up in her partner trauma group:
Investing in whatever it takes to heal our underlying shame beliefs will influence how we see ourselves on the surface.
“I felt so much shame about Adam’s sexting and affairs—I didn’t have enough curves to keep his interest. I couldn’t keep the pain in anymore, but it was too embarrassing to talk about.
When I saw that underpainting of the lion, I realized I don’t have to be perfect. My beliefs were “My body’s not good enough,” and “I’m shameful”—now I know those beliefs aren’t true.
Why am I letting Adam’s betrayal judge my body? Why am I telling my body something’s wrong with it? I used to like how I looked. When I said it out loud, the women cheered.
They met me with grace and love. Instead of hating my body, I brushed in some new layers of paint.”—Amanda
Investing in whatever it takes to heal our underlying shame beliefs will influence how we see ourselves on the surface.
That may be the most impactful portion of our recovery work.
Two hours later Sharon, one of the women on our prayer team, emailed a formal declaration of hope that included these lines:
Here is my prayer for you and the women as I read Lamentations.
Declaration of Hope
I declare God’s faithful love over you and bless you with His love that never ends!
I declare over you God’s mercies never cease and bless you with His mercies raining down upon you in this time!
I declare over you, “How great is the Lord’s faithfulness!” and bless you with the greatness of His faithfulness towards you in the midst of all that surrounds you!
I declare over you that the Lord’s mercies begin afresh each morning and bless you with His new mercies for today!
I declare over you that the Lord is your inheritance and bless you with all He has to give and provide you in this very moment!
I declare over you that your hope is in the Lord!
Yes!! I bless you that your hope is in the Lord!
I declare over you that the Lord is good to those who depend on Him, to those who search for Him.
And so I bless you with the goodness that comes from waiting quietly for His grace, His daily saving grace, His deliverance!
Yes! I bless you with the Lord’s daily mercies raining down!
I bless you to stand with ever-renewed hope in Him!
I bless you with the goodness that comes from quietly waiting upon His grace, His daily saving grace, His mighty deliverance!
Because your hope is in Him!
I bless you that He and He alone is Jesus!
Lord of Lords! King of Kings!
Your Champion in the seen and unseen realm!
Yes! I bless you that He is your Faithful and True One who rides the white horse!
I bless you with daily hope arising! Hope, hope, and more hope.
It was stunning to see how again these lines spoke of a Faithful and True One.
God as our Jehovah Ezer connected three women —
an artist, a counselor, and a prayer warrior —
to bring us a formal declaration of His presence, a promise of deliverance, and hope.
Dr. Sheri Keffer is the cohost of the nationally syndicated Christian talk show New Life Live!, with an audience of more than two million people each week on 150 stations nationwide. For nearly twenty years, she’s been in private practice as a marriage and family therapist in Newport Beach, California, and is a Certified Clinical Partner Specialist (CCPS) and Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT). She is a passionate advocate for women who’ve experienced betrayal, and she holds a doctorate in marriage and family therapy and a master’s degree in theology, both from Fuller Theological Seminary.
In her new book Intimate Deception: Healing the Wounds of Sexual Betrayal, Dr. Keffer invites you to discover the healing you can have after the trauma of sexual betrayal. As a marriage and family therapist and a woman who has personally experienced the devastation of sexual betrayal, Dr. Keffer gives you the tools you need to not only survive this traumatic experience but also thrive in your “new normal.” Life will never be the same after sexual betrayal. But you can recover and become stronger. This compassionate book shows you how.
[ Our humble thanks to Baker for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
March 15, 2018
The Unexpected, Surprisingly Simple Way To Never Miss Out on the Abundant Life [Pt. 2]
Nobody has to tell you that, because you can honestly just feel it:
Abundance is an expansive ocean and you’re an island surrounded by its unendingness.
There is blue as far as you can see — if you can see.
All their eyes around the table were ocean blue at Sunday dinner, all the kids and cousins. I felt like I was standing at the edge of something deep and wide and long that went on forever.
Abundance is not to something be attained — abundance is something to awaken to.
And our smallest, her eyes are an island of brown, and here we are all, surrounding her in a thousand ways, engulfing her in love, endlessly, forever, lapping up on her shores and feeling ourselves abundantly, wildly, lucky.
You can do that at Sunday dinner, look around at your people, look at all the brave ragamuffins and beautiful misfits who you get to call yours, and you can feel it pounding like a tidal wave of truth in your very own chest:
Abundance is not to something be attained — abundance is something to awaken to.
You can end up wanting to memorize all the faces, memorize this waking to the smell of fried chicken and warmed rolls and the faint scent of polished shoes and perfumed wrists and old cologne.
You can hear a cat can meow from behind a bedroom door and the dog’s thumping his tail in the mat in the mudroom and there can be a pile of laundry in more than a basket or two there by the washing machine and the stove can need a deep scrubbing and there can be a splaying of bills across your desk.
It is not what we get, but what we give thanks for, that gives us the abundant life.
But there is breath filling your lungs and there is time, even yet, and there is still light and hope, and why did you get this one breath, let alone another two, and there is rising today, the sun, and all the possibilities, and resurrections everywhere, abundance rising out of ashes, and you can’t doubt it.
You can believe this, witness this. You could sit at a table today, pass a plate down, and look into the eyes around you and feel it like a rising tide that carries you forward even now:
It is not what we get, but what we give thanks for, that gives us the abundant life.
Overflow with gratitude and it will quench every inch of your life.
How is there all this light? How is there all this light in all their eyes?
How is there all this love and how could we want to live anywhere else but in the love that is the tsunami that floods everywhere because He who is in us is greater and His great love cannot stop rising in us.
You can watch how they pass down the water pitcher.
Abundance is about riches, not about money. And if your hands are full of the riches of Christ, how can your heart not be full of the abundant life?
And you can take that pitcher in hand and you can fill your cup and I am telling you, that elusive abundant life that kinda runs through your fingers like water running on and on?
This can fill you and you can feel it like an ending of emptiness:
Abundance is about riches, not about money. And if your hands are full of the riches of Christ, how can your heart not be full of the abundant life?
And you just might hear the universe murmur that — if tired hands don’t feel full of the riches of Christ, those weary hands might take His, and long hold the tried and true Words of Christ, and linger longer at the nail-scarred feet of Christ, and feel the wounds of Christ trace all the tender scars like He is finding His people and you’re finding yours.
Scars speak a private language that only the wounded know and Christ wears His scars because He is abundantly fluent in broken hearts.
You could look around you right now.
True abundance isn’t about net worth, but about your worth to Christ and what the riches of Christ are worth to you. You can wake and watch and the feel the worth of now.
Abundance is not about your hands being full, but your heart being full.
And your heart can fill with here and now, and there’s grace in this moment for those willing to wake.
Abundance is not about having excess. Abundance is about realizing you have enough.
Tilt your head on a tilted planet and watch how the angle of light hits things really proves we don’t have to angle for things — there is enough if enough of us live given.
Honest to God, there’s enough breath in the lungs to murmur your thanks to God. Get lost in people’s eyes today and in swaths of sun on any afternoon, and lose track of time and get lost in a good book, and smile abundantly, till your cheek hurts, because you are alive after all, and you have time to feel wind on your face and you have time to reach out to one person and remember how we all belong to each other and each of us gets a place to belong and the abundance of your life is not measured in the ways you gained — but in what you gave away.
I’d heard it said once that passion is the way to abundance and when I asked if she knew that passion literally means suffering — she nodded and I knew right then that I would give the rest of my life to understand how suffering is the way to abundance.
And I looked around a table full of my people, everywhere, I looked into the faces of all the people, and I listened to their rabble and their laughter and their dreams and their brokenness and you can see how everyone is a hero every day because life is hard and everyone needs a witness to their courage so none of us are alone.
And that’s what filled me at the table:
The abundant life is only found in loving abundantly.
I hold my cup and abundantly feel that for all of them, right now, just as they simply and wholly are.
Is that when it happens, not in my cerebrum, but in my gut, in the pounding chambers of my heart. Yes, I can feel that’s when there’s a knowing in the core of being, what a preacher said once on a Sunday morning.
Held up a cup up and poured it full of water. And said that this was genuine koinonia. Not sipping hipster coffee out of styrofoam cups out in the foyer. But actually pouring out of cups, being filled and emptied and filled with the abundant life.
This was what that Greek word for community, koinonia, literally looks like, what it literally means: a pouring out and a pouring into.
Isn’t that what happened in the beginning, all of the expanse of space rang with the words, “Let us make man in our image.” Let us.
Wasn’t that all our genesis and isn’t that the beginning of all abundance: We were made out of community, to be in community.
You were made out of an abundantly loving relationship to be in abundantly loving relationships.
The abundant life is only found in loving abundantly.
The water pitcher is being passed all down the table. It’s being poured out. Cups are being filled.
I am breathing, waking, witnessing, seeing, filling, feeling.
Can the abundant life be as simple and as profound as giving abundantly and letting yourself be abundantly filled to give and pour out? It is loud around the table and there is love being poured out and passed around and empty places are being filled.
And this is the moment I understand it, how suffering is the way to abundance — because to passionately love is to suffer. Because to love is to live given. And this doesn’t make me afraid — it makes everything feel deeply right.
Abundantly right.
The little 3 year old girl with the brown eyes in this ocean of blue, she taps my shoulder and says it loud over the din, “Mama? What about me?”
She’s holding out her empty cup to me.
And I pour some of my water into her cup. And the grace of it washes over me:
The abundant life is about giving your thanks, giving your life, giving your heart. Only the given life is the abundant life.
And I nod to her — but I am nodding to me.
If you want abundant life, give your life away. Anyone can do this, so anyone can have the abundant life.
She who gives abundantly, gathers abundance.
And then, all around the table, we take each other’s hands, hold each other’s hand, bow our heads.
And I know my farming man is praying at the end of the table, giving thanks for the food, for us gathered, but all I can hear, all you can hear, is this ocean of abundance kissing the shores of everything:
Abundance is about pouring out, because only what is poured out can fill with abundantly more.
You find yourself at a crossroads every day — and what you need to know is the way to abundance.
How do you find the way that lets you become what you hope to be?
How do you know the way forward that lets you heal, that lets you flourish, the way that takes your brokenness — and makes wholeness?
How can you afford to take any other way?
The Way of Abundance — is the way forward that every heart longs for.
Related:
How to Stop Drinking Mud Soup & Other Messy Cycles: When You Just want to Figure Out How to Live the Abundant Life (Part 1)
How to be Okay Even When Things Aren’t Okay (Video)
March 14, 2018
How to be Okay Even When Things Aren’t Okay (Video)
Your heart can kind break more times than you can count
which only means
your heart has been made into abundantly more.
You can be okay
even when you don’t feel okay
because who you are
is not how you are.
This can be your story — even when things aren’t okay:
When things aren’t okay…
you need a safe place.
A safe place to be raw and real — a place for the abundant life to resurrect.
These gentle pages
do nothing less than take you
on an intimate journey of the soul —
show you The Way of Abundance.
The Way of Abundance that your soul yearns for.
Pick up Your Way to the Abundant Life Here
March 13, 2018
How to Stop Drinking Mud Soup & Other Messy Cycles: When You Just want to Figure Out How to Live the Abundant Life (Part 1)
My mama tells the story that when I was a gangly four-year-old kid, they hauled my kid brother and sister and I, down to a panhandle town named Hereford, Texas, for a handful of months, and my dad sharecropped cotton with this farmer west of town.
And I played with Nancy Leigh Craig across the street who was two years younger and a whole head and a half shorter than I.
My mama remembers it and I will never forget, how every time I ventured next door to play with Nancy Leigh Craig, that little slip of a girl would pull out an empty glass mason jar, and Nancy Leigh Craig would fill it with heaps of dirt dug up from the dog run behind her house, and then she would fill that jar up with water, throw in a bunch of weed tops, and stir the whole mess up with any found stick.
You can be 40 something years old— and still be swigging down mud soup.
And then, mama doesn’t have to tell me this part, because it’s the part I can still close my eyes and see: Every time that two-and-a-half-year-old Nancy Leigh Craig and I whipped up the murky concoction? She would hold it up and tell me in her most authoritative two-and-a-half year old voice:
“Drink the mud soup!”
And I was the lanky four year old girl who did exactly what two and a half year old Nancy Leigh Craig told me to do: I gulped down that mud soup like a lap dog who could only nod.
Then I’d up and walk across the street to our townhouse across from the tennis courts on 198th Avenue, and I’d whisper in my mama’s ear: “Mama? I’m afraid I’m going to die now.”
Mama, she would cup my face and say, “But my Ann-girl — why in the actual world would you drink that mud soup? — AGAIN?”
Levi Voskamp
Levi VoskampAnd there are days you don’t need your mama to say even a word of it to you, because you can feel it strike you like like a bolt of lightning from the the throne of God:
You drink Mud Soup whenever you consume what isn’t life-giving good for your soul.
You can be 40 something years old— and still be swigging down mud soup.
I’d started to scratch it down in my journal and that scratching started decoding a bit of my life: You end up drinking mud soup whenever you see yourself as the passive victim in your story, instead of an active co-writer of your story, when you act like you don’t determine your responses to a situation — but your actions and responses are determined by somebody else.
You drink Mud Soup whenever you consume what isn’t life-giving good for your soul.
Having the courage to refuse to drink mud soup does not mean refusing discomfort, refusing suffering, refusing hard things and living given and living surrendered and living sacrificially can be life-giving good for your soul.
Sometimes the cup we drink from is suffering — ask Jesus. And you find the abundant life — wherever you turn toward the sign: Welcome to The Surrendered Life.
The only way to the abundant life is to accept discomfort in your life. The way to what we want — is often through what we don’t want.
Painfully hard things are part of the price of admission to a purposeful, holy life.
But that is very different than when a woman feels like she has no voice, like she has lost her voice in her own life. When a woman feels like she has no voice, she can grow soul-deaf to the voice of God in her own heart.
When a woman feels disempowered — she can doubt the power of God.
When a woman fears saying no to certain things — is there actually a fear saying yes to better things?
Is fear of saying no to other people — really a fear of saying yes to what God wants for you?
How did my aching soul, my broken heart, not know: You swallow garbage for your soul when you’re a fear follower instead of a Christ follower.
Is the Church made up of more fear followers than Christ followers?
I asked my mama these things and her life is my answer:
The only way to the abundant life is to accept discomfort in your life. The way to what we want — is often through what we don’t want.
You always have a choice to make a choice.
And you can only be an agent for change in the world — when you believe there’s agency for change in your own life.
I don’t bother telling my Mama that there are days that I’m no victimized Mud Swallower, but I’m a flat-out villainous Mud Slinger who’s a brazen blamer, blaming my people, and this world, and that situation, and when anyone blames others for the state of the world, they abdicate their own responsibility for changing the world.
And this world is kinda full of the resigned Mud Swallowers and the rebuking Mud Slingers and if you anoint yourself a fault-finder, you find yourself at fault in the end.
When complaining and blaming is a way of life — we can’t complain that there’s no one else to blame when we can’t find the way to the abundant life.
Levi Voskamp
But don’t go thinking for one hot New York minute that there aren’t days that I don’t morph from Mud Swallower into Mud Slinger — and then into a bit of a fake-hero Mud Runner.
Whenever anyone races in with a rescue of short-lived relief, they become the martyred Mud Runner. One becomes a savior-complex Mud Runner when one can’t stand the time involved for growth, when one can’t trust the faithful process of first the dying and then the rising, when one’s wildly afraid of broken things, so there’s no trusting that God’s redeeming things.
But the thing is: Too often when you are focused on short-lived relief — you can undermine real relief for the rest of your life.
Be patient with God’s patient work.
Don’t be afraid of broken things.
The way of Abundance is always first the dying and then the rising. Be not afraid of practicing your faith everywhere — your God is practicing resurrection everywhere.
I have stood at the sink and confessed it to Mama: It’s a Messy Circus Cycle, passive Mud Swallowing, blaming Mud Slinging, martyred Mud Running, and the circus becomes my circus and the cycle becomes my own kinda painful crazy.
And in the 4th week of Lent, in the centre of the farm table, there’s a circling wreath telling a different story than any vicious cycle that tips life into a muddy mess.
There’s an Abundance of Presence that beckons into an encircling ring of meaningfulness.
My Mama moves the candle in the Lenten wreath on Sunday morning and there’s a way to live in a sacred circle of Presence and I watch how she does this, lives a story that tells of the wanted life, tells of the abundant life.
Watching mama’s eyes, I’d dare say she’s made her whole life about taking that yearned for way of abundance.
Hasn’t she taken the way of the Response-able, the Reflectors, the Rememberers, the way of those who operate in the Circle of Abundance Presence — because this is the only way out of the Messy Circus Cycle and into the Abundant Life?
I don’t know when she showed me first:
You are as able to take another step toward the life you want — as you are able to live Response-able.
The Responsible are those who own how they are always Response-able — always able to have a response, determine their own response, and own that response.
You are able to feel as much joy as you are response-able — able to respond with the right response, at the right time. Able to respond with gratitude, able to respond with surrendered givenness, able to respond with kindness, because no amount of brokenness gets to break our kindness.
You are able to embrace the abundant life — as much as you embrace being response-able.
These are hard and holy things for the the brave can rise to, but choosing to be Response-Able, is the only way to be able to live the life we long for.
I can bear witness, testify how Mama, she lives out of the Abundance of His Presence by being Response-able, and choosing not to deflect mud, sling mud, or blame others for the mud, but to reflect Christ, share Christ, and whisper how all are beloved in Christ.
Reflectors don’t blame others — but reflect Christ to others. Blaming Mud-slingers may look for who to nail, but Reflectors look for ways to be like Jesus who took the nail instead of blaming anyone. Blaming Mud-slingers may look everywhere for who and what is at fault, but it’s the Reflectors who look for ways to reflect the faultless Christ everywhere.
When you reflect Christ, you get to see the world like He does. This changes your world. This ushers you into the abundant life you long for.
I watch how the candle light flickers and reflects in Mama’s eyes.
And I remember.
I remember stories that we don’t tell, remembers words that we don’t speak but simply, bravely, live, remember how Mama shows me how to never stop remembering what literally re-members all that’s been broken and dismembered.
And I just quietly reach out for Mama’s hand…
How you choose to remember — determines how the broken dismembered things in your life will be remade and re-membered.
You have to choose to intentionally remember God’s goodness, if you want your brokenness to be re-membered into wholeness.
The Remembering People — remember they are Response-able and they are Reflectors and they are the Rememberers that remember abundance is found only in His presence.
The abundant life is found only in an abundance of God — and we can always have as much of God as we want. There are ways to enlarge our wanting and ways to expand our hearts and the way is possible — and who can afford to miss it?
When my mama opens up this new book of words, The Way of Abundance, and reads how all the pages are dedicated to her, I cup her face and I read to her the story that she’s written with her days, a story different from being a Mud Swallower or Mud Slinger or Mud Runner, a story of surrendered givenness that has let the Potter shape and transform her into the beauty of cruciform.
Levi Voskamp
Levi Voskamp“Sometimes you just long to acknowledge where you’ve come from. Who has walked the way before you — shown you more of the abundant way with bits of their brave lives, brave heart,” I read the words to Mama slowly, reading the story of her abundant life back to her.
You have to choose to intentionally remember God’s goodness, if you want your brokenness to be re-membered into wholeness.
“Mama, you have been the bravest—and your brave has won ten thousand battles because it’s made us all braver countless times. We have all watched you boldly take the way of abundance — no matter how the road seemed to wind through broken valleys that turned into the valley of His cupped hands.
We have all watched you boldly take the way of abundance — no matter how the way twisted through wildernesses where He wooed, wildernesses where He never brings to abandon but only to bring us closer.
And we have all watched you boldly take the way of abundance — no matter how it seemed like it didn’t matter—because God makes meaning out of messes, because He is the God who can make all our brokenness into abundance, because, you and I say this back to each other over and over again: The Writer of the story has written Himself into the hardest places of yours and is softening the broken edges of everything with redeeming, abundant grace.”
And Mama kisses me gently and I whisper to her the best lines of the life story that could be ours, all of ours:
“So, like you always tell me, all is always, in every way.
Abundantly well.”
What do you do when you wake up and feel like you’re not enough for your life? Or when you look out the kitchen window as dusk falls and wonder how do you live when life keeps breaking your heart?
In sixty vulnerably soulful stories, the highly anticipated The Way of Abundance moves from self-weary brokenness to Christ-focused givenness.
Christ Himself broke like bread, giving Himself to us so we might have a lifelong communion with Him. Could it be that our brokenness is also a gift to the world? These tender devotionals dare us to embrace any and all brokenness as a gift that moves us closer to the heart of God.
This gentle but exquisitely profound book does nothing less than take you on an intimate journey of the soul.
Order Your Way to Abundance Here
Today is the LAST DAY TO PRE-ORDER YOUR WAY OF ABUNDANCE AND STILL RECEIVE the free Perpetual Lenten Calendar of the Beatitudes and the free “Keep Company with Christ” Church Calendar and the free #BeTheGift Calendar all to you immediately. Please click here with your order information.
March 12, 2018
A 4 Step Battle Plan to Destroy Fear
As she sat there, all the gruesome details unfolded in Maria Furlough’s mind. She was 18 weeks pregnant and the doctors told her that her baby would not survive long after birth. Maria would have only minutes with her son. Maria’s fears unfolded before her as the reality of her next coming months hit her like a ton of bricks. How could she possibly survive this? How could her family survive? The fear painted picture told her that the pregnant months before her would hold nothing but torment, pain, suffering, and death. But fear lies. It always lies. The story that God wrote in Maria during her months of carrying Gideon was not one of death, it was one of a new peace filled existence. Peace not dependent upon circumstance, but solely on the fear fighting power of the Holy Spirit within her. In Breaking the Fear Cycle, Maria shares with us all the tools she used to battle her own fears and her deepest prayer is that this book will minister to ours too. It’s a grace to welcome her to the farm’s front porch today…
Every time I give in to a fearful thought, I am taking a bite from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil all over again.
I am deciding, like Adam and Eve, that God’s reign on my future is not good enough for me; no, I need to try to tackle it myself.
Trouble is, my brain was not created for such a thing.
In our finite minds, we cannot comprehend the complexities of our futures. We can calculate all the what-ifs and the whys, and so we fear.
We fear because ultimately we wonder if we can trust God to do His job well.
Would you be willing, with me, to give God His job back?
Would you be willing to try, to take one brave and faithful step toward fearless living, by taking captive any and all thoughts that fabricate a future we do not yet know will come true?
Will you try?
This is no small thing. I know this because I lived it.
I woke up every morning and waged war against my fearful future telling. To have any hope of real change, I had to come up with a battle plan.
This is not just one of those “yeah, I’ll try to get better at that” type things.
No, this is a “I must have a plan of what to do when my brain starts getting on the fear train into the future” type thing.
Step 1: Identify a future fear the second it pops into your mind.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Is this thought about something I know to be true right now, or am I trying to tell the future?
Is this fearful thought based on something that is true or is it based on something that I am imagining could come true?
Call it out. Immediately identify a future-based fear when it comes, and stop it dead in its tracks.
Step 2: Talk to yourself.
Sounds funny I know, but try it.
Say it out loud, talk to yourself, write it down, do whatever you need to do to get your brain back into the moment.
Make yourself take a pause in your thinking. Try deep breaths, prayers, anything!
Step 3: Ask yourself this question, What do I know to be true right now?
Ask yourself, and then answer it.
Your answer could sound something like this: “What I know to be true right now is that this potential fear is not a reality, it is an idea.”
Then list out facts about your day, things that actually took place.
Step 4: Focus on blessings.
Combat negative with positive.
List all the blessings, big and small, you have in your life right at this moment.
Focus on them, go through them, smile about them, thank God for them. Try going through the “ABCs of Blessings,” naming a blessing in your life for every single letter of the alphabet.
Step 5: Name God’s truths .
There is power in God’s Word.
It is alive, it is sharp, and it is helpful (Heb. 4:12).
Reciting Scripture helps. It isn’t one of those things you have to feel or believe. You simply have to do it.
The power is in the promises, and they simply need to be uttered.
So utter them over and over and do not stop until you notice a shift in your peacefulness.
Following are some of the verses that helped me. I wrote them on my hand, taped them on my bathroom mirror, posted them on my kitchen cabinets.
I put them up everywhere and anywhere so that when I needed them, they were easily accessible.
Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matt. 6:34)
Have no fear of sudden disaster or of the ruin that overtakes the wicked, for the Lord will be at your side and will keep your foot from being snared. (Prov. 3:25–26)
She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come. (Prov. 31:26)
You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord, the Lord, is the Rock eternal. (Isa. 26:3–4)
Then Job replied to the Lord: “I know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted. You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.” (Job 42:1–3)
When you picture the future, do you see God there?
Too often, when our brains are fixed on the worst-case scenario, we don’t imagine God meeting us there.
Surely that (whatever “that” is for you) would be so terrible that even God could not reach me in that place.
As a result, it’s tempting to convince ourselves that clearly we know what is best.
Our logic and analysis lead us to believe that we, and we alone, know the best, nicest, and loveliest plan for the future.
The truth is, we take God right out of the picture.
Would you venture into some time alone with God? Would you to sit with Him for a minute?
Picture your days unfolding before you—the good, the bad, the feared, the coveted—and maybe even let the planning of your own future unfold on paper and see what comes out.
Are you so convinced that your way is the only way?
Do you see happiness if, and only if, God answers your prayers exactly the way you want Him to?
Sit with Him awhile. Give Him your plans and ask Him if you are holding too tightly to the future you have envisioned for yourself.
Search your heart to discover whether you have made future planning your job instead of God’s job.
May God’s mighty and powerful peace meet with you as venture to give God your future, once and for all.
Maria Furlough is a proud Momma of 4 kiddos on earth and one living in the arms of Jesus. Her greatest joy includes loving on women with the comfort and the power that God has given to her. Maria has been writing Bible studies for over ten years and now enjoys shepherding women at her home church in Huntersville, North Carolina.
In her new book, Breaking the Fear Cycle, Maria shares that there is a way to live free from fear. Using her own story as a catalyst she shows readers how to overcome fear for good. She shows readers how step out in bravery and name their fears out loud, choose to bring them to God first before acting on them, and to trust God to be the only planner of our future. She shows what it looks like to finally give God full control over our lives and choose His sovereignty over our own ability. We can break the cycle of fear, grow through our suffering, and finally learn how to fully rely on God’s promises of protection and peace.
[ Our humble thanks to Baker for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
March 10, 2018
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [03.10.18]
Happy, happy, happy weekend!
Some real, down in the bones JOY to celebrate today! Links & stories this week 100% guaranteed to make you smile a mile wide & believe like crazy in a Good God redeeming everything — and that there’s love everywhere & for ((you))!
Serving up only the Good Stuff for you right here:
Meg Loeks
Meg Loeks
Meg Loeks
exhale just now…the whole earth is full of His glory
because we all need a friend
Akie Nakata / Instagram
Akie Nakata / Instagram
Akie Nakata / Instagram
can hardly get over these incredible works of art
because some of us need an everyday hero
90-year-old ‘Candyman’ makes days sweeter at this hospital – volunteering for the last 23 years
10 Absolutely Stunning Street Transformations
Cindy Lawyer
in case you wondering what that 20 min of daily reading will do?
This snowy owl floating on ice could be the most majestic thing you’ll see today?
Read the Bible with Someone Else: Four Benefits of Studying in Community
Kathie Lee Gifford talks about the inspiration behind new book
“The rock is Jesus. He’s the rock I built my life on. I’m here to share the good news that God loves you…with an all-consuming fire of a love. And He’s waiting for you to come to Him.”
Photo by Roie Galitz
Photo by Sarah Blesener. Homeschool family living in Watford, ND. Curtis, Kate and Jude, siblings, lay in their backyard in Watford, North Dakota. 6 July 2017. The Long family has five children whom they homeschool. Western North Dakota attracted families from across the nation during the recent oil boom. Watford, like other rural towns in the region, is now facing unemployment and overdevelopment since the decline of the oil industry.
Photo by Pedro Jarque Krebs / Instagram
oh wow — the photography here! Come see and maybe vote for the Reader’s Choice winner for the Annual Smithsonian.com Photo Contest!
so folks are flocking to Alabama to get a glimpse of this ‘one in a million’ yellow cardinal
In Nairobi’s Largest Slum, These Young Ballerinas are Dreaming Big
seeing his world through color for the first time
a jaw dropping story here: Stranger’s kidney donation sets off chain reaction that’s hard to believe
#BeTheGift #The BrokenWay
Nothing but the blood of Jesus…
Elisa Coltro / Facebook
at 93? She’s flying to Kenya to volunteer at an orphanage
‘treat everyone like you know them’
How student journalists are telling their own story after Parkland shooting
Levi Voskamp
Tired of a Hard Place? When You’re Caught Between God & a Hard Place [Brutally Honest Psalm #5]
because there are times when we need each other
just go ahead — and shine your light!
He was born without legs. Now he’s a world record holder – and he has some encouraging words to share
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Post of the week from these parts here
A woman’s life withers or expands
in proportion to how much she risks opening her heart
And it takes courage to stand against evil toward women, but even more so to stand against the indifference toward the plight of women.Why We Need Women: International Women’s Day & Standing with Girls to Change the World
a beautiful friendship that crosses cultures and continents
Might you consider sponsoring a child? It’s all gift, grace, that is His that flows on through us and into the world….
What do you do when you wake up and feel like you’re not enough for your life? Or when you look out the kitchen window as dusk falls and wonder how do you live when life keeps breaking your heart?
In sixty vulnerably soulful stories, the highly anticipated The Way of Abundance moves from self-weary brokenness to Christ-focused givenness.
Christ Himself broke like bread, giving Himself to us so we might have a lifelong communion with Him. Could it be that our brokenness is also a gift to the world? These tender devotionals dare us to embrace any and all brokenness as a gift that moves us closer to the heart of God.
This gentle but exquisitely profound book does nothing less than take you on an intimate journey of the soul. Pre-Order Your Way to Abundance Here
Free for you
The 40-Day Perpetual Beatitude Lenten Calendar & The Keep Company with Christ Church Calendar are free for you
Just let us know right here, about your pre-Order of The Abundant Way, a 60-Day Journey into a Deeply Meaningful Life — and we will slip these 2 unique calendars, (and the bonuse 12 Month Intentional Acts of Givenness “Be The GIFT” calendar) into your inbox for your own journey into a deeply meaningful life.
you’ve got to meet him: Hippie Jack — he brings hope and help to the neediest
on repeat this week: Never Too Far Gone
…when you’re between God and a hard place, it’s God’s presence that transforms every hard place. Presence transforms place.
When you’re between God and a hard place — turning toward His face changes the place. Place turns to grace when turned toward His face.
When you’re between God and a hard place — press closer into Him and let the warmth of His beating heart keep yours soft.
Wherever God has you right now — you can have as much of God as you ever wanted. Wherever God has you, you can have God. This is always the greatest saving grace.
So remember this today: whatever place you’re in is a place of God. And when you’re in a place of God, you cannot displace your courage. Christ is for you, with you, in you!
You can’t be courageous unless you first have courage — and Christ is all your courage.
[excerpted from our little Facebook family … come join us each day?]
That’s all for this weekend, friends.
Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth.
Give Thanks. Love well. Re – joy, re- joy, ‘re- joys’ again
Share Whatever Is Good.
March 8, 2018
Why We Need Women: International Women’s Day & Standing with Girls to Change the World
W
hen it came it right down to it, she might as well have just been the old woman who shacked up in a shoe.
Women who want an easy story rarely change history.
True, she seemed only about 5’2, and her worn and weathered skin looked like polished leather, and she was all of a frail eighty-eight years old, but there are women who make sure wherever they live is taking steps in the right direction.
When we knocked on her door just before an afternoon storm blew up over the hills in the east, the 88 year old woman beckoned us straight into her circle of 10 big-eyed, hungry kids. Every face in the room was nuanced and intricate, rich with story.
Women who want an easy story rarely change history.
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Levi VoskampGrandma Em’s an 88 year-old woman who had 10 children living under her roof, 10 children around her table looking for food for empty tummies, 10 children looking for a pillow and place to sleep, 10 children needing shoes and clothes and school fees and books, all under Grandma Em’s care alone.
When you care about a woman, you care about a generation.
How did that string of lines go again?
There was an old lady who lived in a shoe, she had so many children — she had so many children she’d welcomed, that she became kind of a bottomless well of joy, that she drank from a well of youth, and welcoming children had her become well in her soul. A woman’s life withers or expands in proportion to how much she risks opening her heart.
There’s not a stick of furniture in the house.
Grandma Em motions for us to come in, to sit on the dirt floor, on the mats she rolled out. The cotton bed sheet that serves as the only door way in the two room house, it moves in the wind, moves behind Grandma Em, its pattern of garlands of roses feting the dirt hut with pale festoons of grandeur. You can feel how Grandma Em’s smile is regal — brave.
You can see it in the sinews of her neck, her strong arms: A woman becomes brave like muscles are built: she exercises courage even when she’d rather not.
Grandma Em was a refugee for 50 years, driven out of the country of her birth by bloody machetes hungry for her people. She reaches for my hand. Her gnarled fingers feel light between mine — she feels like so much light. Her face begs memorization. We search each other’s eyes. The desecration of God happens wherever we dehumanize women of His making.
I can’t stop thinking it: Grandma Em looks like a luminous ebony pearl.
Looking for joy is a woman’s best way to look young.
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Levi Voskamp
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Esther Havens for Africa New LifeGrandma Em doesn’t tell me about the birth of her own 7 children — only that she has buried 3 of them and 4 remain.
She doesn’t tell me all the details of how she came to be mothering 10 children at 88, only that when their parents died or found themselves crippled with disease, Grandma Em found herself holding another child, another swaddled babe.
A woman becomes brave like muscles are built: she exercises courage even when it’d be easier to not.
She does tell me how she kept saying just that, time and again and again, “You can stay with me.”
Who doesn’t yearn a bit to hear that beckoning: You can stay with me, you can belong with me, you can be loved by me, you can be chosen by me, and everything you’ve ever counted on, can be counted as lost, but you can stay with me.
There are women who are front porch lights and when everything else grows dark and leaves, they remain and make themselves a place to stay.
I lean in and ask Grandma Em, “What gives you the courage with each of these children — to say yes? When each child was brought to you — why did you never say, ‘No — I can’t help more?’”
Grandma Em sits tall in front of me, her eyes reading mine, mine reading hers. She leans forward too and I notice how her pronounced her collar bone is but what I am thinking is:
A wise woman forgets about holding out for the wishbone and remembers to grow a backbone.
Grandma Em slaps my knee hard, like my own grandmother always did, like she can jar me awake, and then the words she says next are like a bolt from the other side:
“I just — I just don’t have a tongue that could chase away a child.”
I don’t have a tongue that could chase away a child.
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Esther Havens for Africa New LifeIf you think you have enough to share, you’ll always have more than enough. If you don’t think you have enough to share, you’ll never have enough to be happy.
My own tongue’s stilled. I don’t have word for Grandma Em. Things in me are thrumming hard:
Do I have a tongue that could chase away a child in need —- so that I can have more ease, more comfort, more things?
Do I have a tongue that could chase away the eternal — just so I can have the temporal?
Or — do I have a tongue that could chase away self-gratification — so there could be glorification of God?
“I never could have words that would stop a child running toward me,” Grandma Em takes her hand and holds it to her heart.
I don’t even notice that my own hands have followed suit, are pressed against my own heart.
And then Grandma Em says, “I’d rather have them here…” She pats her chest, there over her own defiant heartbeat. “Whatever I have, I share with them.”
She’s holding her hand over her heart.
Share what’s in your heart and you receive more than your heart can hold. You can read that plainly in her eyes.
“I always just want to embrace them.” Grandma Em grips my hand tight.
I hardly dare whisper it to her: “You didn’t ever say, ‘I just — I just don’t have enough’?”
What if we stopped looking for more — but started looking toward the plight of more women?
And Grandma Em says it without a trace of any shame, “I know. It doesn’t look like I have enough. But if there’s something on our plates, there’s always something to share.”
I want to cup her face.
If you think you have enough to share, you’ll always have more than enough. If you don’t think you have enough to share, you’ll never have enough to be happy .
Happiness is a function of sharing and living given gives you joy.
“There are definitely days I have completely nothing,” Grandma Em nods towards the door “and on those days, I cook greens from the garden. And then I give each of the ten children just one small spoon on each of the plates for everyone. And they only eat that.”
All of the children are watching my face. I reach out to touch little Frank’s cheek.
When children go to bed with a small spoonful of greens in their tummy, who says they can change that and pull a greenback out of their wallet?
There are women who don’t have enough food for their babies, but they feed their babies hope, they feed their babies dreams, they feed their babies love and they feed their babies resurrection power.
Every life needs a woman.
Every woman needs an advocate.
Every advocate needs a dream.
Every life-giving dream needs a woman.
And we never stop circling back to the gift of women, the hope of women, the promise of women.
Grandma Em’s voice resonates in the little mud hut:
“Even if there’s not enough food in our stomachs, there’s still enough love in our hearts. We have enough. We are content.”
I look around into the eyes of these 10 children who call her Mama, her grand children and great grandchildren and grand nephews and nieces and far distant cousins.
When children go to bed with a small spoonful of greens in their tummy, who says they can change that and pull a greenback out of their wallet?
“We live away, on the edge of things — so we can be contented in all things.” Grandma Em is looking at her clutch of little ones. “We can be content with the what we have, if we aren’t looking at what others have.”
There it is: Her house grew smaller and her heart grew larger and she comes from a long line of women who contend with oppression, contend with poverty, contend with little, and are content with fighting forward and loving large and giving much and never giving up.
“There is a proverb,” Grandma Em turns to me, “ ‘Whatever a child cannot see, she will not cry for.’ ”
I nod — but I want to tell Grandma Em:
It may be true, whatever a child cannot see, she will not cry for — but what if we turned our eyes from the more that we cry for, and turned to see you, who cry to be seen?
What if we stopped looking for more — but started looking toward the plight of more women?
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Levi Voskamp
Esther Havens for Africa New Life
Ann Voskamp with Levi Voskamp
What if we turned a blind eye to all the stuff that consumerism wants us to cry for — and refused to turn a blind eye toward our sisters — and our refrain jarred the world awake:
We see you, the woman forgotten, the woman fighting forward, the woman forging a way where there seems to be no way, and we will cry with you, and we will rise with you, and we will lift the the sky with you.
When I dance under that rising sky with Grandma Em and her brood of 10, words come and those words feel like a revolution:
It takes courage to stand against evil toward women, but even more so to stand against the indifference toward the plight of women.
It takes courage to rise and join the cry:
Every life needs a woman.
Every woman needs an advocate.
Every advocate needs a dream.
Every life-giving dream needs a woman.
And we never stop circling back to the gift of women, the hope of women & the promise of women.
Outside of her house with so many children laughing like light and playing with hope, Grandma Em and I know exactly what to do: we hold on to each other, enfold and encircle each other, and we keep turning to see each other.
And it happens like a movement of wind: we are the women dancing with a rising of possibility.
On International Women’s Day, don’t chase away the dreams of our daughters
Change the world & emancipate a girl:
Give one girl an education
130 million girls right now — are being denied an education. And every one of those girls counts. You could be one of the blessed & lucky ones who get to put one of these girls into school.
On International Women’s Day, you could be one of the blessed & lucky ones who get to stand with your sisters in Africa and help them dream. When we refuse to be part of helping girl’s dream — how do we refuse to be like Christ?
On International Women’s Day, this is our chance:
When we help a girl dream— we’re the ones who live woken.
March 7, 2018
How to Disciple Passionate – Not Perfect! – Jesus Followers
When Phil and Diane Comer held their firstborn infant in their arms, the truth pressed on their shoulders like the weight of the world: This is a person, a human—we hold the potential to hurt him, to damage him, to turn him away from God. What should we do? How should we do it? What if we make a mistake and this child we love with such ferociousness grows up and decides not to follow Jesus? Now, thirty-seven years later, having raised four children who love and follow Jesus, they realize their job has changed: they are doing all they can to bring hope and practical help to parents whose desire is to raise up the next generation of passionate Jesus followers. It’s a grace to welcome Phil and Diane to the farm’s front porch today…
guest post by Phil and Diane Comer
Our daughter Rebekah was one of those children who really, actually wanted to please.
Like many people-pleasing children, she would sometimes lie in order to avoid getting into trouble.
When she was about ten or so, I caught her in a long, ongoing lie.
Unbeknownst to me, she’d been cheating on her math homework—not because she couldn’t get it, but because she wanted to get it over with and head to the barn behind our house, where she boarded her horse.
Just before we caught the lie, Phil and I had been praying for wisdom, trying to figure out why our happy little girl had suddenly become unhappy and cranky.
That’s what hidden sin does to us, doesn’t it? It makes us miserable!
When I discovered Rebekah cheating, she was devastated, genuinely repentant—even relieved to get it out in the open.
It was one of those rare teachable moments—we get just a few of them when we’re raising our kids.
Rebekah’s heart in that moment was wide open and vulnerable. Tears flowed down her cheeks. We sat on the front porch and spent a good long time talking about failure.
About Paul saying in Romans 7:18-19: “For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”
I didn’t punish her.
Instead I just held my little girl as she cried.
I told her all about God’s astounding grace—that God covers her sin. That freedom is just one step of repentance away. That He welcomes her with open arms, failure and all.
And that: The way of grace is not about following the rules perfectly, but about coming back to Jesus over and over again and saying, Without You I can do nothing. I can’t even be honest.
I watched Rebekah’s faith become real that day on our front porch. I watched her fall in love with her Savior. I saw her sweet, Sunday-school faith progress to a real, vibrant, going-after-God kind of faith that would hold her close to Him in the years ahead.
Don’t be afraid of your people’s failures!
Just like Paul and Peter and Jacob and David, mistakes can be the very realities that bring them into an authentic faith of their own.
It was Albert Einstein who observed that, “In the middle of every difficulty lies an opportunity.”
Of course we want to guide our people around the quicksand of habitual sin, but, even more, we need to introduce them to a Redeemer who can take the worst about us and turn us into people who are all about Him.
Be alert to those moments of vulnerable brokenness, and show your people the way of God’s amazing grace.
Teach them the beautiful truth of Romans 8:1: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
No condemnation! No more shame!
Remind your children of what they may not yet understand, while you tell them what John Lawrence discovered: “Greatness does not consist of not making mistakes, but in what we do with them.”
You’re not trying to disciple perfect people, you are trying to raise godly people— people who love God with all their hearts and who are following hard after Jesus.
But, you might protest, shouldn’t godly people be especially well behaved with stellar attitudes and high standards?
What is a passionate Jesus follower anyway?
Rather than a one-size-fits-all-definition, let’s continue the Rebekah’s story. Fast forward about six years. Rebekah was seventeen by then, with a summer job at a coffee shop.
I woke up at four-thirty in the morning and noticed a light on down the hall. I thought maybe one of the kids was sick, so I hurried out of my own warm bed to investigate.
There sat Bekah, propped up in bed, reading her Bible.
When I asked her what in the world she was doing up when she didn’t need to be at work for another hour, she said: “I just can’t go in there without this time with the Lord. It’s harder than you know, Mom. I need this.”
She was delving into God’s Word because she personally felt the need.
My girl wanted Jesus.
It was all I could do not to dance my way back to my bedroom!
Phil and Diane Comer founded Westside: A Jesus Church, a church filled with young families in Portland, Oregon. They went on to launch Intentional: Raising Passionate Jesus Followers conferences. Phil and Diane have been married for nearly forty years and have four grown children and a growing cadre of grandchildren.
Raising Passionate Jesus Followers is a manual full of practical, biblically based guidelines that parents will be able to turn to again and again through each stage of their children’s development. Starting at birth, into grade school, through the daunting teenage years, to launching them into college, and finally letting go, this book contains the why’s and the how’s parents need. This book will serve as an invaluable resource for any parent whose greatest longing is to shepherd their children into a vibrant faith in God.
[ Our humble thanks to Zondervan for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
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