Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 167
July 23, 2016
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [07.23.16]
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:
Warren Keelan
Warren Keelan
Warren Keelan
your free invitation to exhale
yep, it’s hot out there
Bored Panda
We found this really fascinating – you may never look at the world the same again
A mystery philanthropist has been spreading cheer
they’re catching on & seeing the beauty in the ugly
brand new concept — so what do you think?
he’s doing something really extraordinary here
everyone needs a friend
people blessing Fred left and right. yes, yes, yes
This week’s Sticky Note for Your Soul:
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beauty knows no age, trends, colours
please come join this raffle? and help a mom of 12 who is battling cancer…
just — enjoy the gift of this
Coty Vincent/Facebook
a beautiful story that’s going viral: We can do this! #BeAJohn
Chip & Joanna Gaines openly sharing from their heart
Meg Loeks
Meg Loeks
Meg Loeks
just too beautiful not to share
inspiring friends
Anna Harris/VOX
Anna Harris/VOX
“I tripped and fell at my final Olympics. It was one of the best things to happen to me.”
this young girl is leading the way
Erika Jeorgean Swart
he had a seat belt and a prayer
Chad Cloward
one amazing duo: come meet them
yes, bald and beautiful
here’s something we can rally around –
The Purpose Hotel: Change the World in Your Sleep
Post of the Week from these parts here
Why Wait Till Marriage: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
giving people the dignity of work
what’s the first step in the direction of your dreams? come see
let’s pray
…people may forget what you did or didn’t do — but they won’t forget how you made them feel. For hearts have the longest memories.
Let His love words shape your world: “Take to heart all these words… it’s your life” Deu.32:47
And then? That’s all today:
Speak every word today through your heart —
not through your expectations
or your frustrations
or your provocations
or even your lips.
Always let every word you speak —- just come through your heart.
The world needs us to belong to each other, to hear each other, to hurt with each other, to be kind to one another.
[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.
July 22, 2016
when you’re waiting for an answer … and you don’t hear anything
When Malakai’s afraid, he chews on his bottom lip like his grandmother.
And there’s no getting around it:
He looks like a caged coon up there in the pew before the piano — biting at his lip, hands fidgeting.
He’s eight.
How can I really tell him — that catastrophizing is how we make our own soul-cages. That fear’s always the flee ahead.
That he really could take one long, deep breath and just relax. Abide. Because it’s never about your capabilities. When you’re in covenant with Christ, it’s His responsibility to cover your cracks, to be all your competency and completeness.
Inabilities, in Christ, are made all-sufficient, just-right abilities. Abandon worries — and wholly abide.
Malakai writhes in his seat, looks about wildly for me.
All I can do is try to hush his wide-eyed nerves with a feeble smile.
But is it really possible to make a nod from the fourth row of a music festival enfold one scared boy into arms that hold tight? I pray.
The adjudicator steps forward with his sharp yellow pencil in hand. Malakai eyes bore into me.
“Now, boys and girls, when I call your name, you may come up to the piano, introduce your piece to us — and then play your very best.” He punctuates the air with that graphite point.
“And don’t forget to bow when we all clap. Then you’ll return to your seat. And so it will be the next pianist’s turn. But please–”
The adjudicator looks over the top of his glasses, pencil suspended in one long, midair pause —
“Please — each of you, wait until you hear your name called. I will need time after each student to write my notes and give you each marks.”
Malakai steals a look my way.
Is it possible for nerves to chew right through a bottom lip?
The adjudicator takes a seat at his folding table at the back. Waves the air with his #2 graphite pencil and invites, “Roseanne Wideman?”
A little girl in brown braids and mirror-shiny black patents steps up to the piano, murmurs something undecipherable and wills her trembling fingers from middle C to a halting G. You could tell — the only Hallelujah chorus moment for Roseanne Wideman was after she curtsied and lunged for the refuge again of the pew.
We clap her relief.
As our applauding fades, Malakai rivets around to find me again in a sea of tight-faced, anxious mothers. I’m the one smiling thinly. He mouths it large: “NOW?”
No, I shake my head, no. I nod in the direction of the adjudicator bent over his portable table.
Malakai lights up, nods back his remembrance. Ah, he nods — yes, yes.
“WAIT” he mouths it to me and to all the wound-tight, out of tune mamas. Waiting is just a gift of time in disguise — a time to pray wrapped up in a ribbon of patience — because is the Lord ever late?
So we wait.
And wait.
That one adjudicator graphite pencil scrawls loudly. Big loops. Rapid underlinings. Scratch, scrawl, scribble in all this waiting space.
Malakai twists his hands.
The boy beside him keeps rubbing both of his hands up and down his pant legs, his head bobbing backward and forward in time, a kind of sedentary pacing.
And then he springs. The boy beside Kai. The boy beside Malakai springs to the side of the baby grand piano — a thin boy in a faded yellow plaid shirt, his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. Kai stares bug-eyed. Swings his head back. Does the adjudicator sees it too?
Why is this wisp of a boy, bangs hanging in his eyes, standing up there already?
Has his name been called?
The adjudicator’s still furiously writing. He hasn’t even looked up.
Kai’s eyes are these big platters, pleading soundlessly with me.
“Mom! Do something!”
But the little boy speaks.
“I am going to play Tennis Waltz for you today.”
The little boy’s quavering whisper’s hardly louder than the scratching of the pencil.
The pencil at the back stops abruptly.
Us parents look back to the adjudicator helplessly.
The yellow-shirted boy is already playing. Playing the notes gently, surely.
When Kai’s taken, he leans forward and half smiles, like his mother.
He and I are twin reflections across the sanctuary.
And the little boy plays a shy grace.
A duet with a divine calling.
A clarion.
Malakai doesn’t remember his mark from that music festival.
Doesn’t remember what the adjudicator said when he assessed his performance. I pray he remembers how loud I clapped when he grinned and bowed big.
But on the backroads home, Malakai leaned up over the seat and I can’t forget this:
“Mom? You know when the adjudicator was still writing down his report and we were all waiting for him to finish? Because we had to wait for him to call out the next name?” I’m driving, nodding. “And then that boy in the yellow-shirt just stood up and announced his song…?”
“Do you think he just heard it in his heart — that God was calling his name?”
I almost hit the brakes.
Sometimes you have to answer — when no one else hears a thing.
Sometimes you need to step up — when everyone else is still sitting down.
Sometimes in living your best life, the most missed ingredient — is to live obedient to God.
How else can there ever be a song? Unless you answer the call of God?
That’s the only rhythm that can make music: to do the will of the One whose heart beats at the center of the cosmos.
Regardless of what anyone thinks of us.
Maybe the genuine followers of Christ always march to their own drum —
Thrum: I will walk with God. Thrum: Even if I walk different than everyone else.
Was it just that he heard his name called down the canyons of his heart — and love compelled him to lunge forward?
Love is never a trite feeling. Love is a wildfire in the bones, a burning flame willing to serve — willing to say yes.
“Mom?” Malakai’s speaking to me — but he’s looking out the side window … Or within.
And I can’t believe he says this:
“Do you think God’s calling our name too — and we’re just not listening?”
That we are waiting for someone else to call our name — when God’s already called us?
That nothing is lost by sacrifice and everything is lost when you’re sitting down when you should be stepping up?
That when you’re waiting for an answer and it seems like life is silent — God is actually calling?
That who answers God’s call loses nothing, but a life deaf to God’s call loses everything?
And there’s this stillness that sits between us. A waiting….
We wait.
And then it comes, a humming — an answering.
I can hear him. Malakai’s making music from willing lips —
One song of strong surrender from his heart….
Links for 2016-07-21 [del.icio.us]
Our #1 Best-Selling Drone--Meet the Dark Night of the Sky!
July 20, 2016
Why Wait Till Marriage: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
So, Son, you up & bought your own house in your last days of being 18.
A century old red brick near the university campus, all set up for seven roommates.
And then your kid brother went and got accepted down at the university in his last days of being 16.
Those are stories of their own that’ll get told sometime. You boys have done mighty fine by your dad and me — mainly in spite of your Dad and me.
In a few days here, those 5 good guys you found to room with you in your red brick will be moving in, and you two boys will wave bye to the farm here and head off into big dreams.
Your old mama’s got some big feelings about you boys of ours, you two oldest first brothers, headed out of here already, but that’s for another time — and besides you need me to be brave.
Need me to keep smiling and making bacon and eggs here for a few more mornings here yet.
But there is something I’ve got to muster up some courage here to say now, that I don’t quite know how to say, so you boys just grant your old Mama grace as she stumbles through this, something I sure wish someone had sat down and told me.
The other day, somebody sent me words of a woman a few years older than you boys.
Words about how she regretted waiting until she was married. How she’d waited until her wedding night and how she wished she hadn’t. How waiting wrecked a deep and real part of her.
How all those years of no made her ashamed of when she finally said her marital yes. How she couldn’t be intimate after she got married because she still felt she’d be in sin.
She felt the only way she could heal, that her marriage could survive was if she chose: a God relationship or marital relations. Guess what she chose — and your first guess doesn’t count.
Hey — I get it. I really, really get it. I waited and I was her.
After getting it into your head that you don’t — it can take a long time after you say “I do”…. for the rest of you to say I do. There’s a story I know about that, that’s likely never going to be told. You don’t need to know the self-hating, shaming pain of that story – just that your father is a very caring man who knows that the soul of a woman needs to feel a deep safeness before you ever touch the skin of a woman.
And I guess that is exactly the point that nobody really told us:
Your skin is the outer layer of your soul.
Your skin and your soul are one in ways that Hollywood and MTV and the mall won’t ever tell you.
Your skin and your soul are profoundly connected and this is a profoundly beautiful thing. There is no shame in this — only the glory of God who made your body art to reflect your soul.
So contrary to what hook-up culture may be touting in the back halls of high schools and behind the closed doors of university dorm rooms — there’s nothing casual about giving away your soul.
The union of two bodies is nothing less than the union of two souls.
Physical oneness is a holy God-created ceremony to express nothing less than a soul oneness.
So I guess that is the question your generation has to answer—- Why do with your body what neither of you are willing or ready to do with the whole of your life?
When someone isn’t willing or ready for spiritual oneness, emotional oneness, legal oneness, financial oneness — why let them steal physical and soul oneness from you?
And the thing was, after I said I do, I somehow thought there was shame in what my body needed to do —- instead of beauty in what my soul got to give.
Somehow the focus during my youth had been on mere skin — instead of on ultimate soul-intimacy.
But maybe if we preached this far more often from the pulpit, maybe if parents told their kids it far more often, maybe it would not only make waiting until marriage make more sense — but it would make marital intimacy make real happy love:
The joy of physical oneness is but an echo of the joy of spiritual oneness with Christ.
That is the breathtaking, otherworldly miracle:
“The ecstasy and joy of sex is supposed to be a foretaste of the complete ecstasy and joy of total union with Christ,” is what theologian Tim Keller writes.
Take real note what Keller says here, sons:
“Great sex is a parable of the Gospel—to be utterly accepted in spite of your sin, to be loved by the One you admire to the sky.”
That might just right upend your world, the whole disoriented, hurting world: “Great sex is a parable of the Great Gospel.”
As God calls His people to exclusively commit to Him alone — so we’re called to commit to exclusive intimacy alone — an echo of Belovedness.
As God commits to wholly, unconditionally, and covenantally accept us forever in spite of our sin and flaws, to love us passionately to death —- so physical intimacy mirrors a whole, unconditional and covenantal acceptance of us forever in spite of our shortcomings and flaws, to love us with a passion that is willing to die-to-self.
Hook-up culture may have cheapened it and legalistic cultures may have shamed it, but the real Truth is you can’t contain the otherworldly beauty of it: Physical union is a parable of union with Christ.
Listen —- Scripture’s call to abstain from premarital and extramarital relations is not about controlling the power of male/female sexuality — it’s about reflecting the otherworldly power of God-soul exclusivity.
Our exclusive physical oneness is to be witness of the people of God’s exclusive oneness with God. The exclusive communion between husband and wife is to reflect our exclusive communion between soul and Christ.
They may be saying something different on the university campuses but listen for the holiness of it: Union isn’t merely physical self-expression to feel good — it’s ultimately about soul self-giving to love well.
Physical union is a God-made ceremony to express the exclusivity and intimacy and totality of oneness —- and if you use physical intimacy to express anything less than that, you’ve destroyed its very meaning.
It may not be popular, but I guarantee you it’s powerful: Unless physical union is about making committed, covenantal love — the essence of it’s God-given meaning is destroyed.
But hear me — no matter what’s happened in the past — Jesus wants you, Jesus chooses you, Jesus holds you, Jesus keeps you and there isn’t one of us that hasn’t been broken and there isn’t one of us that doesnt belong, that He doesn’t stop calling “Come, Beloved.” No matter what’s happened to the rose — Jesus desperately wants the rose.
Maybe just hear this quietly too, what your Dad and I have lived: Feelings come and feelings go and feelings cannot sustain a relationship.
A relationship needs something stronger than feeling for it to endure and flourish —- Relationships need the safety and strength of a binding, legal covenant to thrive. A covenant is the most powerful infrastructure to be powerfully intimate.
And this is the epiphany for us old and married to keep remembering, that keeps renewing and reviving everything:
As the covenant is necessary to be powerfully intimate — so being powerfully intimate is necessary for the covenant.
Just as much as being intimate needs the ceremony of the covenant, the covenant needs the constant renewal ceremony of being intimate.
That your Dad and I can vow, to keep renewing our covenant with that intimate ceremony of an old and practiced passion.
That’s quietly ours. And maybe yours is quietly this:
Your naked body deserves the honor of being shared only with someone who is covenanted to never stop loving your naked soul.
Head back to school, kids, go move into that red brick with your 5 good buddies and head out to your classes. Dreams have a way of finding even the waiting —
amazing grace that loves all of you all the way up to the sky.
Related: 25 Things Our Sons Need to Know About Manhood
No Matter the Past — Why Jesus wants You
July 18, 2016
what does it mean to be chosen?
This woman knows a lot about hurting times. As a young attorney under Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communist regime in the 1980’s, Virginia Prodan dedicated her career to defending fellow Christians against unjust persecution in an otherwise ungodly land. For this she was kidnapped, beaten, tortured, placed under house arrest, and came within seconds of being executed by a gun-wielding assassin. The courage Virginia demonstrated time and again in the face of unthinkable adversity is nothing short of remarkable. It is an honor to welcome her to the farm’s front porch today to share part of her incredible story…
As a child growing up under a communist regime, I knew nothing but fear and lies.
Our entire world revolved around our leader, Nicolae Ceausescu. He was our God (or so we were told), and his word was law.
Anyone who questioned or disagreed with him was considered a traitor to the government and was either thrown in jail or disappeared, never to be heard from again.
Needless to say, we lived in a constant state of anxiety and mistrust, as anyone could arbitrarily denounce a neighbor, classmate, or family member for making “antigovernment” statements at any time for any reason.
The government even had spies planted in the churches. No place was safe.
The best way to avoid trouble was to remain silent, question nothing, and try to blend in.
Unfortunately, none of these traits were in my nature.
Even as a child, I questioned everything. I wanted to understand everything. The more fear battered those around me into silence, the more obsessed I became with discovering the truth.
That’s why I became an attorney. It wasn’t until I became a Christian, however, that I truly understood what real truth was.
And once I found that truth, remaining silent was no longer an option. Nor was blending in.
Shortly after I was baptized, I began defending fellow Christians who were facing imprisonment for such grievous acts as transporting Bibles across the Romanian border, sharing their faith, and worshipping privately in their own homes.
I didn’t seek these clients out. They chose me. But then, so had God.
When I accepted Christ, I accepted His call to defend His followers, no matter the risk or the cost. And both were great.
I was in constant danger. All that was necessary to incur the wrath of Ceausescu was to say the wrong thing at the wrong time in front of the wrong people. And here I was, challenging his laws and taking his own government to court.
I quickly became an open target for all the hostility and intimidation the communist regime could bring. Many days I awoke to find that my tires had been slashed overnight. My clients, friends—even my children—were threatened by the secret police.
My daughters and I were held under house arrest for almost a month. I was kidnapped, bullied, pushed into moving traffic, and physically beaten by the secret police.
Friends and co-workers began distancing themselves from me for their own protection. And yet, I was constantly amazed at how readily young believers would risk their lives to protect me. Just as I put myself at risk to protect and defend them, they did the same for me.
But they were not the only ones. No matter how dire, how dark, or how dangerous the situation, God was always there protecting me.
I would love to say that I was brave. That I never once feared for my life or for the lives of my children. But I did. My fear, however, was only temporary. I knew that if I was obedient to God, He would protect me when I was in danger, He would give me strength when I was weak, and He would give me courage when I was afraid.
And He did.
Time and time again, when I was frightened, He took away my fear.
When I did not know what to say, He gave me the right words.
And when my enemies threatened to kill me, He gave me the courage not only to stand up to them, but to forgive them—and hardest of all—to love them.
You see, when God chooses you to do His work—and I believe He has chosen all of us to do His work—not only will He provide you with everything you need, He will protect you from peril until that work is done.
That is what it means to be chosen.
“Be strong and courageous, and do the work.
Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord God, my God, is with you.
He will not fail you or forsake you until all the work for the service of the temple of the Lord is finished.”
Virginia Prodan says, “I should be dead. Buried in an unmarked grave in Romania. Obviously, I am not. God had other plans.” Her memoir, Saving My Assassin is a must-read for all generations. She was kidnapped, beaten, tortured, placed under house arrest, and came within seconds of being executed under the orders of Ceausescu himself. How Virginia not only managed to elude her enemies time and again, but how she also helped expose the appalling secret that would ultimately lead to the demise of Ceausescu’s evil empire is one of the most extraordinary stories ever told. Saving My Assassin is the unforgettable account of Virginia’s search for truth, her defiance in the face of evil, and a surprise encounter that proves without a shadow of a doubt that nothing is impossible with God. Saving My Assassin is a read for times like these.
[ Our humble thanks to Tyndale for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
July 16, 2016
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [07.16.16]
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:
Mary Anne Morgan
Mary Anne Morgan
Mary Anne Morgan
some of the best Airbnb rentals in each state
why no aquarium has a great white shark
come along with me?
Karolis Janulis
a drone photography contest winner list – you really must come see these
smiling
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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an open interview with gymnast Shawn Johnson
so we gathered round this one: watch how a silver ink circuit pen creates light
what an idea
Tony Luciani
Tony Luciani
Tony Luciani
son creates art with his mother to help her feel young again
One cop’s small act, hoping to mend relations
they watched their differences melt away
never too late
“just a group of high school students” changing the world
Sierra McLaughlin
instead of receiving presents for her 9th birthday, she wanted to send an important message…
yes, yes, yes
We Believe #JesusChangesEverything
Live streaming TODAY from 9am – 9pm!We believe Jesus Changes Everything. Together 2016 will be a massive collective moment when we will ask Jesus to reset our lives, our nation, and our generation on The National Mall, Washington, DC today!
We are praying that this will be a generation-defining time of unified prayer, worship, and a call for catalytic change.
Today we will be praying, learning, sharing, loving, and reseting together! It’s embolding to join with others, to know we’re not alone, to realize we can do more together than apart.
A call for hope is rising – the hope that only Jesus brings – to change our generation forever.
Won’t you join us? You may also join us via live stream right here ALL day!
#JesusChangesEverything #IFPray #Together16 @ifgathering
you tell the story…
Post of the Week from these parts here:
when you’re desperate to live faith & grace in a polarizing, angry world
some good words here — including footage from the upcoming film, Ben-Hur
you’ve got to meet her: Kenzie Hinson
one to play on repeat. forever
Thy Will
This is historic and epic for such a time as now —
If you click on nothing else today, please join us here!
Live streaming TODAY at the National Mall: 9am – 9pm
…so headlines can weep again & again, but nothing can still the legacy of the brave, Lord…
and You reach out & take our unnerved hand gently right into Your steadying, safe hand:
“I will come to you… I tell you, do not be anxious about your life… Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you… Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid… Call upon Me & I will answer [you]. I will be with [you] when [your are] in trouble… Be strong & courageous.” Jn14:18, Mt 6:25, Jn14:27, Ps91, Josh1:9
So that’s what we do on days in our world like this — we take Your hand & we nod — The secret of life is to refuse to let worry walk in our front door & refuse to let trust slip out our back door.
We don’t give up being brave, we don’t give up trusting, we don’t give up hope— we give up our fears.
With brave hope we look ahead — to the One who has our heart…
In the name of the only One who ever loved us to death & back to the realest & forever life. Amen.
#PrayersforOurHeartache #PrayersForOurWorld
[excerpted from our little Facebook community … come join us?]
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.
July 15, 2016
Links for 2016-07-14 [del.icio.us]
Our #1 Best-Selling Drone--Meet the Dark Night of the Sky!
July 14, 2016
when you’re desperate to live faith & grace in a polarizing, angry world
When you stand down at the river, the world get’s mighty quiet.
Like the mightiness might actually come in the quiet.
My Grandmother never told me that —
But it’s what I tell the kids a thousand messy times, though they know I’m the one preaching the gospel of it to myself:
When you’re worked up, whisper.
It’s how God can usher Himself into a place— ask Elijah.
It’s best parenting practice. It’s best life-survival practice. When the world gets loud, put your ear down to it and listen — and then whisper. When everyone yells, no one can hear.
When the world and you are worked up, whisper — and a pin will drop. The other shoe will drop. Then we can finally get our shoes on, finally get somewhere. Get somewhere better.
The river keeps navigating its complex course.
Keeps rolling out the possibility of another way, a way less travelled, a way through.
My Grandmother, the wizened ones, they did always say that:
In a loud world — certainty is what sells.
People love the hawkers, the big talkers, the bloggers that sell certainty.
Turn on the cranked up experts, click on the screaming headlines — and what people are shopping for is certainty. Certainty sells because we like to take home our boxes — to put people in boxes, put our life in neat boxes, put parts of the world into manageable boxes.
Turns out what we want most is someone to just sell us some certainty about who is who, and what is what, so we can have this sense of knowing what’s safe — instead of knowing Who is the Savior who calls us to love in dangerous, upside-down ways.
Turns out we want someone to reduce all people to caricatures, give our overwhelmed lives some oversimplified solution, formula, soundbite, so we can feel the relief of safe — instead of living in the reality of a Savior who calls us to live unsafe so others are literally saved.
We like to buy certainty and take home our little boxes — because we like to check out people and check off our little boxes.
But the thing is: Truth isn’t found in trite boxes — Truth’s found in the richness of Christ. Truth doesn’t come marked as simplicity — Truth comes marked with the fullness of grace, or it isn’t Truth. Truth is a Person and He is the complexity and the empathy and the integrity and the certainty and the supremacy of Christ.
And the river’s wide and deep and strong and long and there are layers to all this water, quiet depths. The travellers and followers and disciples, we navigate complexity. We acknowledge complexity. A river like this faithfully carries us Home.
Because the Truth is: We’re not called to carry boxes — we’re called to carry crosses.
Box carriers are about buying certainty for living. Cross carriers are about carrying the complexity of living.
Box carriers strain for the power of controlled lives. Cross carriers surrender to the power of the Christ life.
Box carriers box things into simple. Cross carriers unpack things and sit with the suffering.
It’s only those who carry crosses who can know how there is an intersection of the many complicated things that bear down on people.
By this all people will know that you are my disciples — not if you label one another, but if you love one another. (John 13:35).
They’ll know you are My disciples if you don’t label the limping people, the misunderstood people, the people with a different ethnicity, skin colour, culture, depressed people, struggling people, sick people, confused people, angry people, hurting people — but if you love them.
A kind of miracle happens when we don’t label people but love people.
And love is ultimately not a trite good feeling, but a steady current of quiet actions that could carry the loved person toward ultimate good.
Love is stubbornly praying for your ‘enemies’ till you see ‘enemies’ are illusions & God makes everyone grace in your life: a friend.
If we knew what current everyone was trying to battle, there isn’t even one person we wouldn’t help fight their current with the current of a Greater Love.
What is our faith if it’s not about living so that people from many streams of life are carried by the current of His love — toward Him and Home.
The world changes when we don’t categorize, polarize and demonize people with broad brushstrokes — but when we apologize, empathize, evangelize and prioritize people with these quiet brushes of grace.
Because it turns out: Christ-followers aren’t called to go buy certainty — we’re called to go walk by faith.
Christ-followers don’t have a certainty to sell —- we have a certainty who saves, and His name is Jesus. The absolute certainty we have is the Truth of Jesus — and He welcomes us into living the humble and complex nuances of a servant Faith.
Faith that says we are all just people who are both His good and our bad and He’s the only One good, Faith that requires His patient love and His merciful understanding and His servant actions and His willingness to suffer with and for the wounded.
A river runs through all the farmland to the west, a river runs through all this— the river of Life.
On a warm day in summer you can hear the grasshoppers in the long grass along the riverbank.
You can hear the pin drop of whisper: Come to Me and drink, all you who are parched for peace & thirsty for unity & dry for the shalom of the Kingdom of God.
The light off the river lights all their faces. Maybe finding stillness, and listening in the quiet, here there is a hearing, there is a seeing —
Maybe the world and every thing we see, maybe it’s more beautifully diverse shades of a transforming grace.
July 12, 2016
how to love your spouse with kids in the house
The transition from “married” to “married with children” can be tough. Less sleep. Tighter budget. Busier schedule. As much as you love your children and work hard to nurture and train them for the future, the challenges that come with parenthood can make the “for better or for worse” promise a hard one to honor. Patrick and Ruth Schwenk believe it’s possible to build a God-centered marriage instead of a Me-Centered or Child-Centered Marriage. They’ll inspire you to avoid the dangers of spouse-neglect and self-neglect, explore ways to parent together as one team, and find balance in the middle of the busyness. It’s a grace to welcome Patrick and Ruth to the farm’s front porch today…
guest post by Patrick and Ruth Schwenk
My (Patrick’s) father passed away suddenly in 2010, just eight months short of what would have been fifty years of marriage to my mom.
Not long afterward, my oldest sister gave his wedding ring to me.
That gift reminds me how he sacrificially loved my mom for nearly five decades. That ring also brings to mind memories I have as a kid sitting on my father’s lap, spinning that gold ring around his finger.
It was nothing more to me at the time than jewelry. I would tug on it. Spin it. Hold it in the palm of my hand. Eventually I’d slip it on, where it would hang, obviously oversized for my tiny little fingers.
It never occurred to me until my wedding day, when Ruth slipped my own wedding ring onto my finger, that something so small could be so weighty.
The ring immediately felt oversized. Not because it was too big for my adult finger, but because of how significant wearing a wedding ring is.
It was going to take some growing to step into my new role as Ruth’s husband. A bit panicked would be a good way of describing how I felt standing at the altar that day!
Now, as a pastor, I have the joy and privilege of officiating at many weddings. Sometimes it is hard for me to watch couples walk down the aisle after exchanging their vows.
I know they are walking into the great unknown. I wonder if they, as I did on my wedding day, feel a bit panicked by the thought of what lies ahead.
I wonder if in the future they will be faithful to the vows they have made to each other.
I wonder what they will walk through and how they will respond when kids come along.
Will they fight for, and not against, each other?
Will they see their rings only as costly jewelry, or will they see them as a reminder of a sacred and costly calling to lay down their lives for each other?
Will they walk down the aisle together and continue through life together?
The traditional wedding vows a couple make have been around for a while. They date back to the Church of England during the sixteenth century. These vows are a commitment about the couple’s future together. These are not vows to feel a certain way, but are a promise, pledge, or declaration of intent to behave in a certain way toward each other:
I take you to be my wife (husband), To have and to hold,
From this day forward, For better, for worse,
For richer, for poorer, In sickness and in health,
To love and to cherish, ’Til death do us part.
These are enormous vows! They encompass God’s purpose and plan for marriage. They are selfless, costly, sacrificial, committed, and one-another-centered vows. They express the heart of God for a man and a woman as they enter into the sacred covenant of marriage.
However, there is one problem. There is a missing vow—and it’s a big one!
It is the vow to love your spouse with kids in the house.
Marriage is both a blessing we receive and a battle we fight for in love, commitment, sacrifice, and grace.
The challenge in marriage is not how it starts, but how it continues, grows, matures, and flourishes over time.
The transition from marriage to family creates a whole new set of complexities and threats to the marriage relationship that can make it difficult to keep our marriage vows. Suddenly the relationship is no longer about pleasing each other; it now includes the responsibility of caring for other needy (and sinful) members of the family! So the work of keeping the husband-wife relationship a priority requires a lot of effort.
It might sound strange, but one of the greatest challenges we face in order to live out the missing vow is our desire to be great parents.
The problem arises when our desire to be great parents overshadows our desire to have a great marriage. Out of our desire to raise kids the right way, our love for each other gets kicked to the curb. Not intentionally, of course. It just happens.
The effects are seldom seen or noticed immediately, but they can eventually grow into significant problems:
A couple’s needs are neglected.
Intimacy dwindles.
Romance cools.
Conflicts go unresolved.
Meaningful communication becomes infrequent or nonexistent.
Attention and affection shift from spouse to child.
Financial decisions are dominated by the child’s needs and wants.
All of these indicate that a couple is moving into the arena of being too child-centered. The child’s needs and concerns are being met at the expense of a once healthy and God-honoring marriage. This is completely normal! It is to be expected during times of transition, but it is not to become a way of life.
In our own marriage, we experienced all of the challenges of moving from married to married with kids. We loved being parents. We did Pizza Nights because Tyler loves to eat. We did Sports Nights because Noah is our little competitor. And we did Movie Nights because Sophia and Bella love a great story. We even tried a few Adventure Nights (campouts in the backyard), which didn’t go so well!
In all of the fun of being parents, we needed the reminder that it was okay to continue being great lovers.
We haven’t stopped doing some of these fun things as a family, but we have intentionally built in time for just the two of us.
It’s possible to have a great family and a great marriage.
This is where the missing vow—our commitment to continue to love our spouse when we have kids in the house—comes into play.
Children will join us on the journey, but we have to be careful that they don’t come between us on this journey.
One of the greatest gifts we can give our kids is a healthy, loving, and God-honoring marriage.
Patrick Schwenk is a husband, father, and pastor. Ruth Schwenk is a wife, mom, and blogger. She is the coauthor (with Karen Ehman) of Hoodwinked: Ten Myths Moms Believe & Why We All Need to Knock It Off and Pressing Pause: 100 Quiet Moments for Moms to Meet with Jesus. She and her husband are the creators of ForTheFamily.org and TheBetterMom.com. Patrick and Ruth have been married for more than seventeen years have four children.
For Better or For Kids is about remembering that even when you feel worn out, over-extended, and neglected, you promised to be a team. Marriage with kids may not always be what we expected, but it is good. We need to make a vow to love our spouse with kids in the house. Give yourself the gift of a deeply meaningful marriage. Highly recommending For Better or For Kids.
[ Our humble thanks to Zondervan for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
July 11, 2016
what to hold on to when it feels like the world’s hurting
The sparrows are full song at 4:48 am and his breath beside me is still this gentle relief of sleep.
Who says the timeline has to be same for all of us?
The last two weeks Shalom’s been ripping off these strips of duct tape and defiantly plastering the bottom of her foot, MacGuyvering some belligerent plantar wart that’s over stayed its welcome.
Malakai keeps loosing track of the hours but not the dog, reading Redwall out there in the leafy shade of the ash grove on a rocking chair he screwed together himself, split maple and simple ways.
The boy’s sitting out there under trees I planted as finger seedlings 16 summers ago, all large with our third then stretching the sides of me.
How could I have known that 16 summers later, the girl who’d come from me, she’d be the girl taller than me, nearly 6 feet and a wider smile, stretching what I know of being a woman and real? Her and I make pies and time slows out in the hammock.
The wheat behind the orchard’s come into full head. It’s turning itself into pure gold. Things like this actually do become possible in the surrender.
You can find him most days, the Farmer looking to the west, always the west, watching the sky, watching how the ocean becomes a cloud, comes across our fields from the west. The soybeans keep drinking in the waves made rain that fall now from over our heads.
Levi says he stood out there and you couldn’t deny it, the corn was way taller than the boy himself by the 4th of July. Who knows how these things happen? Maybe just that —- Surrendering to time and what comes lets miraculous things happen.
Yeah, sure, there may be those who think they have all the answers, but there’s a comfort walking with those who have questions, those who are wrestlers and wanderers and wonder-ers, who find the leaning into the questions lets them live into stronger answers.
No matter what the headlines scream, no matter where you stand on the curving earth, we are all held together by the same gravity, that we all share air.
So many questions, some I sit with and retrace slow: Why are there people so starved that they steal bits of other people’s exposed souls as snacks for their own bony ego?
Why is it the hardest of all to give up on being someone else’s version of perfect and begin the hard work of becoming yourself?
Why does it take so long to realize that the words you speak bleed up through your skin, making you more becoming or beastly?
Time unfolds that too: Never have I lived with anything as bewildering my own soul.
And I can stand on the heat of a July porch and watch the sun set with the Farmer across those wheat fields and feel how though we once started as curled and embryonic as a comma, a pause in the timeline, a space looking for answers, we can grow into the curved, open-handedness of question marks.
And maybe that is the exact posture of faith — faith is the empty hand curved to willingly receive.
There is faith that believes the most astonishing truths in the face of the dire headlines: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die — yet shall he live.”
There is faith that accepts no fast, next day delivery, but rests that the new order of things waits on the hands of God, not the hands on the clock.
There is faith that stands or falls on the truth that the future with God is more fulfilling than anything forecasted by either the fortunetellers or the fearmongers. (The power of sin and worry and fear over us is always the power of deceit over us.)
There is faith that in the midst of the setbacks, God is setting up everything for the comeback of your joy.
He and I linger long enough to find the porch swing. The wheat dozes in the thickening twilight. The beans rustle in the day’s last wind. The corn stretches.
Sure, these crops were planted by the hand of the Farmer but it’s clear every single day we look out at them: they rest in the hand of the Father. It’s only a mirage to think that any of us have control, that we turn the world.
Who knows what tomorrow brings, what the sky will have blow in? Who knows what questions will rise like unexpected storm clouds, what questions will still remain? The yield always only comes in the yield.
The Farmer nods toward the fields in the thickening dark, “We’re all just living in a sea of faith.”
And for days afterward, when I feel like I am drowning in questions and news and life, it rings me, like the answering song of surrendered old chimes—
That is all — we are all just living in a sea of faith.
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