Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 164
September 8, 2016
the unlikely thing you have to believe when you’re living a life you didn’t choose
When they said she’d need blood thinner, I knew what they were saying — they wanted me to give my baby what used as rat poison.
I mean, my dad used to lace food bait with Warfarin, wait for rats to gorge themselves and then bleed out. Bleed to death.
They lay out the pink tablets on the table, a thin needle.
They explain this: Her blood can’t clot through that new heart shunt. Her blood will have to run free for her to live. You can’t live with obstructions in your veins. This will be the plan:
Warfarin, crushed and mixed with water, administered orally via syringe in the mouth. Enoxaparin, another anticoagulant, administered with a needle injection, just under the skin.
“Inject in her thigh, every morning and night, 12 hours apart. Just — squeeze her upper thigh, and inject the 11 units in at a right angle. Needle’s small — ever seen an insulin needle before?”
Have I seen insulin needle?
Have I seen insulin needles.
January. I’d seen my first one back in January. We’d been told on New Year’s Eve that her adoption file and her little broken heart were supposed to heading our way… and then 48 hours later we’re standing around a hospital bed with Malakai aiming an insulin needle at his stomach.
Those needles feel like a sharp thorn in the side, like a poison we have to take and keep taking, like a hurt that is meant to help and healing is a strange beast, the universe a mystery that doesn’t need solving as much as it needs embracing.
Malakai had looked up, needle still in hand. “When my little sister gets here with her broken heart?”
“She’s gonna know that she’s not the only one broken. That I’m broken, that I need at least 3-4 needles every day to stay alive. That we’re all a kind of broken, that we all need each other and healing.”
The kid has no idea that half a year later, a little girl from China will share his last name and be his own little sister lying on a hospital bed with her chest wired shut over her broken heart and I’ll be holding an insulin needle up over her thigh.
But I already know about insulin needles and I’m the one pierced right through:
Sometimes….
The thing you never would choose for your life, chooses you for a reason.
Sometimes…
The thing that you’d never pick, picks you to become brave.
Sometimes….
You get what you need — by walking through what you never wanted.
The thing you never wanted, may turn out to be be the thing you need most.
I hadn’t known: The thing that may make you fall a bit apart, may be part of what one day holds you a bit together.
There are bruises up her leg from injections, and there’s still light, trusting light, in her eyes, and there is bravery to be found in even the weakest places and I try to find mine.
I find this too at the edge of her hospital bed, at the outer edges of things: There are reasons we don’t understand that someday will help keep us standing, there is pain that isn’t a poison but a prescription, there are broken ways that are actually breaking us free.
I’d known of a dream once — a woman didn’t want the cross that was hers, but wanted — actually, said she needed — to choose a lighter one, an easier one.
She found an ornate gold one and thought it was obvious that she could carry a cross like that and embody beauty. She needed that cross instead. But she found that the gold was heavy and her shoulders were hurting and that crosses that look better may not feel or be any better at all.
Then she found a cross covered in roses and knew that this was the cross that she needed instead. But she found that the thorns were cutting and her skin was bleeding and that crosses that seem easier may actually be harder, your skin not meant for that kind of rawness.
Finally, she turned and saw a cross she would never choose, plain and worn, but with engraved with a few lines that seemed to call to her, that spoke to who she wanted to become. She didn’t need — or want or choose — this cross instead — but this cross chose her.
And when she carried it, she found it fit her, that it became her, that it let her become more of who she always wanted to be when she let that cross shape her, form her and transform her. It was then that she saw that there, on the underside of the cross, was her own name — this was her own old cross.
This was the one she needed, not another one instead — because Christ had bore all the weight of this one in her stead.
The cross that is yours is always the lightest, kindest, rightest. And if that seems like flattened cliche, a crock of blarney or a flat-out lie — then the universe is telling you it’s time to intimately trace the heart of God. At least that’s one of the mysteries that’s worth binding yourself to.
The cross you’ve been given —
is always God’s kindest decision.
The cross you carry — is carrying you toward who you are meant to be.
The insulin needle feels light, like it might inject us with light, with living, and courage to do hard and holy things every day can feel like the weight of glory and our little towheaded heart warrior’s eyes catch mine.
After the needle has made us a larger kind of brave, she wraps her arms around my neck, like she’s a star hanging star, and nothing clots in our veins when we live surrender, live broken and given to what He’s given.
There’s space to believe that everything’s bleeding into a kind of cross-shaped grace.
[image error]
Our story of taking The Broken Way:
This one’s for all of us who have felt our hearts break a bit…
This one’s for the brave and the busted and the real and dreamers and the sufferers and the believers.
This one’s for those who dare to take The Broken Way… into abundance
Related: The Story of adopting our beautiful heart baby…
How to Help a Breaking Heart: Because You Have One & So Does Everyone Else
What Happened After We Got the Diagnosis: About Brokenness, Suffering, & Joining The Club
September 7, 2016
Links for 2016-09-06 [del.icio.us]
Our #1 Best-Selling Drone--Meet the Dark Night of the Sky!
September 6, 2016
when you’re living a life you didn’t choose
Melanie Dale knows something about life not looking like she thought it would. After twelve years of building her family through infertility and adoption, she finally snuggled down with three kids from three different continents, cultures, and stories. She thought, “Now the fun begins,” but then they encountered diagnosis after diagnosis. With words like “autism,” “mental illness,” “ADHD,” and “trauma” hanging over her family, she’s had to redefine what life looks like. And through it all, the infertility, the waiting, the loss, the adoptions, and the diagnoses, she’s learning to love the life she didn’t choose. It’s a grace to welcome Melanie to the farm’s front porch…
My whole family is together because of unfairness.
It’s a weird thing, wishing with all my heart the unfair stuff hadn’t happened to any of us while simultaneously being incredibly grateful that we’re all together because of it.
Infertility, loss, sickness, autism, mental illness, death, countless transitions, and layers of pain. We didn’t choose any of it. But we’ve learned to love it. And we learn to love it more every day.
Sometimes I have to blink to see if this is real. My life.
I whisper to myself, “I get to do this.” This life I never saw coming, not in a million years of planning.
Our family is raw and real and layered. Each week there is fresh pain, a new unfairness, but we are learning together.
I love my extraordinary kids so much I feel like I can’t breathe typing this. And I could’ve missed it. I could’ve missed them. If I had gotten precisely what I thought I wanted a million years ago.
Picture yourself getting on a roller coaster. Part of the ride is waiting in line for a crazy long time. You’re sunburned and annoyed and the person behind you smells like the bottom of a garbage can. Sometimes it feels like the line will never move, but you watch the coaster loop around up ahead and know that it’ll be worth it if you just wait.
When it’s finally your turn, finally, after all that waiting, you step into your little coaster car and ease into your seat. You fasten your seatbelt, and that harness thingy comes down over your shoulders.
You’ve waited all this time, and now you’re feeling a little nervous.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Just as you think about running away, the ride takes off and you’re inching up a really steep hill. During the climb, you have nowhere to go and the terror crawls into your throat and you hear the car clack clack clacking to the top. The climb feels like forever.
You finally make it to the top and feel like you’re going to barf. The car starts down, and for a moment you hang over the top until you plunge down, loop, and spin. The wind punches your face and your lips blow open into a grinning scream.
Your stomach feels like it’s dangling out the back of the car. After plummeting to new lows and rising to new heights and spinning till you can’t spin anymore, you land back at the beginning with bugs in your teeth and a smile askew on your windblown face. It was terrible. And wonderful.
This is what I call the God-ride.
It’s waiting endlessly, feeling petrified, fighting vomit, miles of anticipation, and whirling, racing, plunging through the air.
It’s exhilarating, and you want to go again and again.
I didn’t choose this unexpected God-ride, but I love it with all my ripped-apart, sewn-back-together heart.
I’m so glad for every moment of the journey, even the moments when I thought I wouldn’t make it, because now I get it. Now I understand. All the pain. All the waiting. It was all for them.
I’m not the same person I was when I started.
I’m still in progress.
I’m still a mess.
But I’m their mess. I’m their mom.
And it took the whole journey to bring me here.
I want us to walk into a life of thankfulness and security in God’s grace.
Our circumstances may not change, but as we walk together, we can experience joy. It’s not fair. It’s absolutely not fair. It’s hair-raising and occasionally stomach-churning. And it’s oh so exhilarating.
I’ve been changed by a God who loved me through disappointment and continues to carry me through the unfairness of life.
I’ve discovered the intense joy that comes through the pain, through unfairness.
I’ve moved from desperation and desolation into gratitude and grace.
Rather than listing all the ways life isn’t fair, I begin to offer praise, and in the praising, I worship deeper, love harder, and experience God’s pleasure.
I just reread that last paragraph and am equal parts mm-hmming and wanting to gag myself with the nearest available spatula. It’s all true . . . half of the time.
The other half I’m still a big whiner. It’s a work in progress, blah blah something about the journey blah.
After years of telling God it’s not fair, I can now say that I’m grateful for my struggle. I would never, ever tell someone else to be grateful for theirs.
We can’t tell people in their pain to be grateful. That would be the highest cruelty. But over time, after having raw conversations with God and acknowledging the life unfolding around me, I see the beauty of His creation.
It’s not fair. It’s different than fair. It’s new and unique and it’s mine.
When I was a child, we used to gather at my grandparents’ house with the whole family for Christmas. On Christmas morning, we’d tear into presents, and there would be these little gifts without bows tucked in with everything else.
My aunt loved estate-sale shopping, and throughout the year she’d find little surprises that made her think of us and she’d scoop them up and save them. These weren’t the expected gifts, the ones with the shiny bows front and center under the Christmas tree. These were the unexpected bonus gifts, unadorned and tucked amongst the fancier things. She called them “no-bows.”
This unexpected life is a no-bow. There is no neat little bow on top. Nothing can quite tie it all together.
There is no bow.
Whatever you’re going through right now or whatever you’ve been through, it’s hard, maybe it’s awful, and it will leave a mark.
There will be times when you stare at a wall, and times when you wave your fist in the air, and times when you’ll feel like you’re tearing apart.
And there will be scars.
And there will always be those things people say or photos you see that will take you right back to that feeling of helplessness or desperation.
There will be triggers. You are marked.
There is no bow.
But what I’ve learned and what I’ve seen in my own life and in the lives of so many other brave warriors is that we do learn to love our lives, as is, with the scars, naked and bowless.
Scars can be beautiful.
Melanie Dale is the author of Women Are Scary: The Totally Awkward Adventure of Finding Mom Friends and It’s Not Fair: Learning to Love the Life You Didn’t Choose. She’s also a contributor for Coffee+Crumbs and an advocate for Children’s HopeChest. Her writing has been featured on Parenting.com, Scary Mommy, Working Mother Magazine, Deadspin’s Adequate Man, and Today’s Christian Woman, and she’s a panelist for MomsEveryday TV.
Sometimes when life falls apart the only acceptable response is hysterical laughter. When things get so far gone, so spectacularly a world away from any plans you made or dreams you dreamed, you feel it bubbling up inside of you and you scream, “It’s not fair!” And it isn’t. Fair is an illusion and life is weird. It’s Not Fair: Learning to Love the Life You Didn’t Choose is a safe place where we can talk honestly about how to survive the death of a dream, without annoying platitudes and bumper sticker Christianity. We can learn to love these lives we didn’t choose. We’ll do it together, and we’ll laugh along the way. And yes, she’s got it right: Life can be broken and hard and you can have scars and love it anyway. Please visit unexpected.org/itsnotfair to learn more.
[ Our humble thanks to Zondervan for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
September 3, 2016
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [09.03.16]
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:
Esther Havens
Esther Havens
Esther Havens
when I sit with this woman’s photos? the world stops and exhales
the first day of school is the best
Cassi Werner
Cassi Werner
Cassi Werner
Simple graces not to be missed…
and we’re smiling
this one’s for those who drive in traffic each day: some simple solutions?
Laura Izumikawa
Laura Izumikawa
Laura Izumikawa
she’s the queen of dress-up, all while she sleeps. could not stop smiling at this
a short history lesson on Guam – did you know?
now that’s a really good catch!
the letter from a teacher that’s been read around the world
so what do you think? can paper really cut wood?
Dirk Dallas via fromwhereidrone.com
Dirk Dallas via fromwhereidrone.com
Dirk Dallas via fromwhereidrone.com
come along for the view from above?
painting over the hate with strokes of love
Matthew Willey/The Good of the Hive
Matthew Willey/The Good of the Hive
Matthew Willey/The Good of the Hive
come see why he’s traveling the world to paint 50,000 bees
Instead of the standard ‘Welcome Back’ newsletter, Mr. Reed made this
This week’s Sticky Note for Your Soul:
FREE daily printables to encourage youSimply fill in your email here and the whole library of free printables and tools unfolds right before you:
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the brilliant colors of New York
some great thoughts for everyone right here
good, good words
compassion always wins
WFAA
“…it’s not about the money, it’s about showing someone you care…”
changing the world with their kindness
…so this happened — and it’s kinda gutting us & remaking us…
‘How to Help a Breaking Heart: Because You Have One & So Does Everyone Else’
maybe share with everyone you know?
you’ve got to meet him: Zion Harvey — the next chapter in a remarkable story
a reflection of aching joy: you are beloved
Dmitri was imprisoned for 17 years because he refused to recant his faith. He was mocked & tortured, but as he was being taken to his execution God did the miraculous!
So today let’s remember? Let something steal your Joy today & you let something steal your strength.
“The joy of the Lord is your strength” Ps 5:11.
Today Joy will not just happen.
Today Joy will not just come unbidden.
Every moment Joy must be taken.
Every moment Joy must be chosen.
Every moment Joy must be RECHOSEN.
Because His Joy is your OXYGEN.
And the people living plain and down to earth know it— if you let something steal your thanksgiving, you let something steal your joy, and if you let something steal your joy, you let something steal your strength…
…so that in everything we can stand strong in God today!
[excerpted from our little Facebook community … 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.
August 31, 2016
when you feel a bit busted & old: the traumatic disorder of everyday life
They sell anti-aging cream to women like us.
And Spanx.
And glossy checkout line headliners that splay this shock that over 40-something women can still startlingly turn heads — as if having no wrinkle lines in your skin is somehow an accomplishment of galactic proportions and worthy of worship – and you can just be emptying your cart in checkout #6 and end up feeling more like a piece of meat than the roast that’s on sale for 1.99 this week.
So you end up buying azaleas on your way home in the rain.
Because you’re getting to that week on the calendar page that says the Big XXX–0 … and you feel like something’s broke.
Like the world’s gone mad, like your heart and head have just up and shattered over night and you are sitting in a mess trying to put the pieces together again and we all get old and there’s no defying it and you aren’t all you want to be and neither is anyone you love.
Every single day has a bit of it’s own now-traumatic stress disorder. It’s not just the life crises that are traumatic. The mirror can be traumatic and any self-reflection, and time and aging is traumatic for us who are made to breathe eternity.
And Miley Cyrus will someday have a wrinkled neck and Little Prince George will be wheeling a car out of Kensington palace and his Dad will have no hair and his mother’s will be white and it is what it is and your choice is either receive your life or reject your one chance at living and you can ask all you want where does the time go, but it doesn’t get stuck under the couch.
The point is that your life is meant to be spent.
The point is that your life is meant to be used up and every wrinkle means you are wringing out the good of the wonder of this thing called life.
So let the glossy people take their botox and smooth things over and pretend they aren’t wringing this thing right dry, because the rest of us are going to try and we have no shame.
The kids are flat-out growing up. And speed and time are the addictions of all space outside of heaven and the kids are standing there looking us now in the eye and we are stumbling out of bed and looking in the mirror and wondering if we’ve grown into the lives that we prayed for or have we fallen into something else?
Is this it?
Why is hope of change sometimes the one miracle you don’t dare hope for?
Rain just keeps thrumming the roof.
Rain just keeps coming across the fields, and the wheat and the azaleas in candlelight and the ache of a thousand popping moments has you leaning in a doorway, waiting for something to finally come and something else to finally ebb away.
Sometimes you can want to run away more when you are a supposed-adult than when you are a kid.
When you really want to disappear – is when you really want to be found. When you really want to run away from everybody – is when you really want to be found by just somebody.
It’s about aging — and more. It’s about time passing and never coming back — and more. It’s about getting through the birthdays — and letting yourself be loved. Even if it’s imperfectly by imperfect people. Hold out for perfect and you end up holding nothing.
Why is it so hard to let yourself be loved?
Sometimes you can hardly bear to let anyone try to love you because it feels like a lie.
And for crying out loud, life is too blazing short to live lies.
Is that why a million haggard people hate birthdays? Because love on that day can feel like a lie, like an obligation, like a polite duty and it’s too hard to smile and pretend through its plasticity.
Or maybe it really is — that the moment you accept love, you have to accept yourself, and there’s something in that that seems unacceptable. Strange, how there’s no love without humility – no one can accept anything except on their knees. (Everything else is stealing.)
Maybe it’s not about birthday candles or aging; maybe it’s really about the calendar saying the time is now to look that wrinkling face in the mirror and touch that cheek gentle and whisper, “It really is okay. So you are broken. Be brave. Let yourself be loved.”
There.
Everything can still in that moment and the knots can all fall away and it has nothing to do with the azaleas.
Peace is a Person. No one can steal Peace from you. And nothing can steal you from Him.
You can’t look across candles and think you’ve wrecked your life, you can’t turn the calendar pages and think you’ve messed it up, you can’t hold up any measuring stick and think you’ve botched it so bad, that you lose Peace, that you can’t get Peace, that you can’t find Peace. If you have Christ – nothing can steal your peace.
I stand there listening to the rain.
The house and the kids hush in the evening thickening and falling and the candles flicker boldly on.
And right there those memorized verses from Romans breach the surface of things, because memorization isn’t for the smug saints who have made it but for the desperate sinners who want to make it:
“Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus… ”
The enemy wants nothing more at the end of the day than to make you and all your offered years feel like a piece of chopped up meat. You’ve just got to call Satan by what his ugly name really means: prosecutor. The work of the enemy isn’t ultimately to tempt you, but to try you.
If Satan can ultimately prosecute you — you will ultimately imprison yourself.
He’s like this glossy headline mocking your weathered life: “And you look around at your life and call yourself a Christian?”
And even the weary and worn-out can cut him down with one sharp edge of a memorized verse:
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? …
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us…. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth —
nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” ~ Romans 8
The prosecutor of your soul can’t ever nail you: Time can’t wreck your life. You can’t wreck your life. Nothing in all of this world can separate you from the love of Christ and His love is your life. Your life is unwreckable because Christ’s love is unstoppable.
Sure, time, age, life, this side of glory is traumatic. Living in a fallen world can’t help but be traumatic — falling is traumatic. Every single day is this stream of tiny traumas. (Those who dare to trust call them gifts.) We’ve all had to unplug toilets and clean up puke and crawl into bed and lay waiting for His new mercies to come again before we move. None of us are alone in any of this.
Growing cold and numb and buying a year’s supply of botox isn’t going to make you soul beautiful. You have to let yourself feel. You accept freedom the moment you accept the apology that no one offered.
You have to let your life wrinkle. You have to let hope get into the folds of things. You are here to be spent. Saving yourself up isn’t how the saved are meant to live. Go for broke.
And when you are broken – because that’s what happens when you go for broke – and you look into a mirror, a calendar, into that one face, and you can’t stop the aching lump burning up through the center of your heart, listen till the rain comes.
Watch how the clouds break and break open and listen for rain and reach out your hand and feel it’s wet sweetness coming down in all this vulnerable freeness. This is the broken that makes you beautiful.
Live like this right to the very end.
Peace can fall like rain.
[image error]
This one’s for the brave and the busted and the real and dreamers and the sufferers and the believers.
This one’s for those who dare to take The Broken Way… into abundance
Related: 40 Things You have to know Before You are 40 — Letter to a Woman Mid-Way
Links for 2016-08-31 [del.icio.us]
Our #1 Best-Selling Drone--Meet the Dark Night of the Sky!
August 29, 2016
how to celebrate God’s faithful presence throughout the moments, days, years
Nursing our little girl through recovery from open heart surgery, it’s kinda clear: Time is a gift that we sometimes forget we’ve been given. Time is an opportunity to experience eternity in the everyday. Michelle Van Loon is our guide through the major events of the Jewish and Christian calendars. She grew up in a Jewish home and came to know Christ in her teens. The colorful but disconnected puzzle pieces of the faith she’d experienced as a child began to be placed into a Jesus-shaped framework. They fit perfectly. Michelle invites us to discover our spiritual roots and the rhythms of our days. It’s a grace to welcome Michelle to the farm’s front porch today..
guest post by Michelle Van Loon
For 85 percent of each week, modern Jerusalem is a noisy place.
One and a half million camera-wielding pilgrims jostle for space with the city’s eight hundred thousand permanent residents each year.
Mix fervent prayer, the chatter of mothers walking their children to the market in strollers, the dialed-to-eleven volume of debate in cafes and at bus stops, car and taxi horns honking, sirens blaring, and feral cats fighting, and you have a mad symphony of sound.
But as Friday afternoon marches toward sundown, these sounds fade, and the city takes on a remarkable stillness. Save for a few cabs and service vehicles, cars disappear from the streets. Businesses close their doors. Voices dial down their volume from eleven to four.
A holy hush descends on the city long before the first star appears in the desert sky over the city.
It is Shabbat, the Sabbath. The hush holds the city in its embrace until about an hour or so after sunset on Saturday. The volume builds once again in the early evening darkness as Jerusalem returns to its regularly scheduled program—until the following Friday afternoon.
The first time I experienced Sabbath in Jerusalem, I heard within the silence a loving reminder: There was a story the infinite God was telling us about Himself within the finite measures of time that He’s given to each one of us.
It is a story about who He is and who we are called to be.
In our plugged-in, 24/7/365 world drumming to an insistent, unvarying beat every single day, we are prone to miss the cadence of eternity.
God has built his own rhythms of restoration and celebration into our days and years. Let us have ears to hear them.
In our always-connected digital world, many of us have become accustomed to the idea that we are the architects of our days. We make our appointments and set our schedules, all the while kvetching that we’re just too busy. Our overscheduled lives proclaim to the world and ourselves that, really, we’re super-indispensable people.
We allow a subtle pride to warp our understanding of our role in God’s story: “Look at my crammed datebook! If others need or want me this much, I must be pretty important.” And if they don’t, then it’s not a far leap for some of us to believe that maybe our lives don’t matter much.
I’d like to suggest that our watches and Day-Timers and Google calendars are not the measure of our worth. We who belong to Jesus understand (at least in our heads) that we are not our own.
Our eternal God has given us this slice of eternity, right here and now, in which to live for and with Him.
Following a calendar that tells us our lives are not all about us is a powerful place to learn to inhabit that sacred gift of time. When Paul acknowledged not all followers of Jesus see specific days as holy, he wasn’t suggesting that everyone in the church needed to hit the ‘delete’ button on the discussion (Romans 14:5-10).
He was, instead, encouraging them to give one another lots of grace as they sought how to honor God together in their community.
He never discounted the value of the weekly/yearly rhythm of holy days. He simply wanted the Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus to understand that the finished work of Jesus the Messiah fills full the meaning of these festival days:
Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. (Colossians 2:16-17)
That reality must shape our ordinary moments and our sacred days. For those of us who find our spiritual identity determined by our own schedules, growth in discipleship may well mean choosing instead to be formed by the rhythms of appointed times with God in our individual lives and in our church communities.
Those holy days are gifts of love from God designed to help us understand the nature of eternal life.
Rabbi Sidney Greenberg offers a wonderful explanation about the difference between the kind of holidays that populate our own calendars, and the everyday eternity of a holy day:
“On holidays we run away from duties. On holy days we face up to them.
On holidays we let ourselves go. On holy days we try to bring ourselves under control.
On holidays we try to empty our minds. On holy days we attempt to replenish our spirits.
On holidays we reach out for the things we want. On holy days we reach up for the things we need.
Holidays bring a change of scene. Holy days bring a change of heart.”
Explore the gift of time and take a look at the stories, structure, history and relationship of the Jewish and Christian calendars.
These holy days are not additional to-do’s for your busy life.
They are instead a way for you to create intentionality in the way you live the gift of eternal life God has given you through His Son.
Have ears to hear the rhythm of eternity in each moment and sacred day of our lives.
Michelle Van Loon is the author of several books and a regular contributor to Christianity Today and patheos.com.
In her newest book, Moments & Days, you will see God’s faithful presence in real time, both in the Scriptures and in your daily life. Rediscover the gift of time through the Jewish and Christian holidays, drawing closer to God’s faithful presence.
Moments and Days restores a sacred sense of time throughout our year, enriching our experience of each “holy day” and enlivening our experience of even the most “ordinary time.” This one is really beautiful.
[ Our humble thanks to Tyndale for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
August 27, 2016
Links for 2016-08-26 [del.icio.us]
Our #1 Best-Selling Drone--Meet the Dark Night of the Sky!
August 26, 2016
How to Help a Breaking Heart: Because You Have One & So Does Everyone Else
Someday, they say this is true like coming taxes and the grave —
Your heart will break.
You may not feel the the crack of it, but you may feel the bleed.
Your chest may pain to the touch and you may want someone to break your chest wall down, to get to you, to not leave you alone in the ache pressing, the way it’s hard to breathe.
So, this is hard but true: you will need someone to get a saw.
You will need a fine, sharp blade and an oscillating saw and you will need to let them saw through the sternum of you, crack open your chest wall.
Sit with that a moment: Your skeletal armour will have to break if anyone is ever to get to your heart.
This is a hard thing:
You must surrender to a breaking that must happen if you want any of your brokenness to heal.
I hadn’t known this or felt this — but I have now and I cannot forget.
You may need to let your right pulmonary artery be cut away and sutured directly to your superior vena cava. At least, that’s what the surgeon told us, told us what would have to happen to her little broken heart.
And this is a harder thing — You have to trust that the breaking of your heart will heal you into a kind of stronger.
The greatest strength can grow straight out of the greatest weakness. The universe is a beautiful place, made in the strangest ways. I AM knows who we are and what we need.
And the people who love you, right in the midst of the aching? They will need to be brave. (Sometimes the greatest courage is to trust enough to let go.)
They will need to hope that miracles can make a home right inside of broken people. They will need to believe that broken things can become new things.
(Sometimes your people may have to pace in waiting rooms, 8 hours, more, because broken hearts need time. When you’re busted and bruised… people around you may have to kill the clock. Because — broken hearts don’t heal on anyone’s timelines.)
Please be gentle with yourself; grant yourself grace and time. Any kind of heart break will land you in a kind of ICU. It’s true: A heart has to be monitored if you’re ever going to survive. This too will take patient time, a quiet suffering of its own.
Listen to the beat of your own heart. Listen to what it’s telling you, to the rhythm it wants you to keep. Listen to the bravery of your beats — believe that your heart is pounding together something new. This is how He made a heart to work. Listen to this and rest.The way to recover is to cover everything with grace.
Take all the time you need to find out for yourself how this is the most proven kind of true: The best kind of intensive care for a broken heart is to let the words of Christ intensively care for you.
This can be hard to swallow—- when we want easy serum for our veins, cheap comfort bought with plastic, quick fixes that cost little and let us be fine without refining anything. But if you let His Word wash your wounds, let His grace caress your pain, let His Truth touch your bruises, let His hope heal your ache, you can feel a kind of resurrection on earth. His promises are more than true — they are your resuscitation.
Turn to the window and wait for the sun to rise, to keep always rising. Never stop being surprised that it does, never get over the miracle that you get to see it.
It’s okay to let the tears come, to weep over all this pain, all this love, all this beauty, all this brokenness and the hard roads that we somehow find ourselves walking, forcing one step in front of the other.
It’s okay to let someone trace the scar down the middle of you and to touch your holy brave and bear witness that your fight is hard and sacred.
It’s okay for you to feel along your wounds wired closed and wonder why you have had to warrior through all of this.
And it can happen that they find out in recovery, that when they broke open your chest walls to get to you, when they broke your broken heart in different ways so healing could happen in new ways, that somehow your lung’s collapsed —- and that’s why each breath hurts.
Even though you’re in recovery, you’re still in pain. This can happen. And somehow you still have to keep breathing through the ache.
Sometimes you can’t experience full recovery until you let your pain be fully uncovered.
You have to be a willing brave, if you want more.
And when you don’t know how?
When you don’t feel brave?
When it all feels too hard?
Turn and look up into someone eye’s and let yourself be seen and touched and known.
Let yourself hear it, and let it reverberate through the hurting chambers of you and let yourself never forget:
Pieces of your broken heart mend when you make peace with what He gives.
The healing has begun.
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This one’s for the brave and the busted and the real and dreamers and the sufferers and the believers.
This one’s for those who dare to take The Broken Way… into abundance
August 23, 2016
when you feel kind of ruined — this one question can change everything
One brisk November evening during Ruth Everhart’s senior year at a small Christian college, two armed intruders broke into the house she shared with her roommates, held all five girls hostage, and took turns raping them at gunpoint. Reeling with fear, insecurity, and guilt, Ruth believed she was ruined, both physically and in the eyes of God. In the days and weeks that followed, Ruth struggled to come to grips with not only what happened that night, but why. The questions raced through her mind in an unrelenting loop—questions that would continue to haunt her for years to come: Why me? Where was God? Why did God allow this to happen? What am I being punished for? It’s a grace to welcome Ruth to the farm’s front porch today…
Hyave you ever felt ruined? I don’t mean just a bad hair day—or even a bad haircut month. I mean a more permanent state.
Have you ever felt like you yourself had been ruined?
Maybe it wasn’t because of something you did, but something that was done to you.
That’s my story.
When I was twenty years old and a senior in college, intruders broke into the house I shared with friends. The armed criminals robbed us, terrorized us, and raped us.
By the time morning came, my safe, happy life was over. Even my future had been destroyed. I felt ruined.
What’s more, I believed that I was ruined.
Feelings are one thing, and beliefs are another, but the two feed into each other. Together they create reality.
My ruined self felt no hope and saw no possibility of feeling hope in the future.
What had been done had been done.
Can a ruined person ever be un-ruined?
Decades later, I have such compassion for that broken young woman.
She couldn’t see the choices and possibilities ahead of her. Everything seemed to be a mangled heap. She might as well toss her future out a second-story window and listen to it crash. Perhaps the sound of shattering would be a kind of comfort, the cold satisfaction of hopelessness.
I thought I was beyond breakage.
Maybe you know exactly what I mean. Maybe you have a similar story. Do you hold it inside as a secret?
I know you’re out there. You’re why I wrote my memoir.
There’s nothing tidy about my story. Yet I tell it all, even the parts I’m not proud of.
It took years for me to pick my way through the wreckage of hopes and dreams.
I raged against God as I went.
I made a mess of the mess. Because it turns out that ruined people tend to ruin things.
In wrestling my story onto paper, I realized that certain ideas had contributed to my sense of ruin. I wonder if you recognize some of these from your own life:
~ I was raised in a churchgoing family and taught that we all fall short of the glory of God. Not one of us is clean, no not one. I overlearned that lesson, which predisposed me to see myself as unclean and worthless.
~ I had learned that a woman’s worth is different from a man’s, wrapped up in her role as helpmeet. A woman is not an actor so much as a reactor. A woman is to serve willingly, even selflessly. In hindsight, the violence wrenched my self from myself, by which I mean my will to act.
~ I was schooled to shun vanity and embrace purity. A Christian woman, I was taught, is to be unsullied by the world, untainted by worldliness. I didn’t know what to do when the world reached out and sullied me, when evil tainted me.
Given all that, is it really such a surprise that I felt ruined by rape?
At twenty years old, I was on the cusp between innocence and knowledge. I knew many things about being a woman, but not everything. I hadn’t learned to raise certain questions and demand answers. I hadn’t yet found my voice.
When I did find my voice, I had a question. This one:
When a man violates a woman, why is it the woman who bears the stain?
And then came the follow-up:
Why is this true in every time and place and culture? Even today? (If you don’t know what I am referring to, google “honor killings” or “Boko Haram” or “violence against women.” Women are still dishonored by the acts of men.)
Once I was able to frame this question, I felt outraged, and the outrage gave me strength. I was able to push back against the sense of ruin. I began to reclaim other truths I had once known:
I reclaimed the lessons of a churchgoing family, which taught that Jesus came to show us the way to the mercy seat. It turns out that a person can be un-ruined. This, in fact, is a working definition of grace.
I affirmed that a woman is both an actor and a reactor. I claimed my essential selfhood, which affirms my creation as God’s child, having the same innate value as every other child of God.
I schooled myself in a new definition of beauty—as something that’s evident in those who have been wounded and healed. I learned to esteem scars rather than to avert my eyes. Scars are visible signs of a person’s story and are therefore intrinsically beautiful.
Every story is a gift from God.
Now I want to pass a message along to daughters — to my own precious daughters and to anyone else’s as well.
We are all someone’s daughter. So hear me:
You are valuable no matter what happened to you.
You get a hand in writing your own next chapter.
Nothing that a person does to you can ruin you.
Ruth Everhart‘s, Ruined, told with candor and unflinching honesty is an extraordinary emotional and spiritual journey —
that begins with an unspeakable act of violence —
but ends with tremendous healing and profound spiritual insights about faith, forgiveness, and the will of God.
[ Our humble thanks to Tyndale for the partnership in today’s devotion ]
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