Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 175
April 9, 2016
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [04.09.16]
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:
Tiina Törmänen
Tiina Törmänen
Tiina Törmänen
go enjoy your day today — and the gift of this life
okay, Fedor the monkey? he’s just checking in on his friends
they’re making music on the highway
the most colorful cities in the world – these photos never get old
beautiful bonds of love
Christine Anderson
Christine Anderson
Christine Anderson
anyone else in?!? let’s go for a walk!
stunning
Frederic Seguin
Frederic Seguin
Frederic Seguin
“This series of pictures is meant to remind of how strong people are in the hardest situations.
how she’s inspiring others at 78?
and she says: “if you do something, do it right“
a unique purchase for a really good cause…
what if we all did this
without hesitation, these Southwest passengers sent their love
a harness of hope for children with Down Syndrome
Ginny Sheller
Ginny Sheller
Ginny Sheller
just too beautiful not to share
rebuilding lives at the community garden – yes
Good News Network
how he’s helping the homeless? what if we all did this?
life is better in community — always
Leslie Crawford
“My daughter is chronically ill, and I am proud of what that truly means.”
“…I’m changed — and now I’m stronger…”
“When my eyes are grateful? I really can see goodness and grace…”
My friend Jennifer Rothschild talks about her blindness and her walk with God
honored for going above and beyond — at just 10 years old
… she laughed the very best loud when I told her that this was her last hug as the baby of the family. You know, sometimes you don’t know a story is beginning —- until you find yourself looking at the last page — and the beginning of a new chapter.
[ our unlikely adoption story will unfold quietly here, in excited bits & pieces, & over at Instagram, as we travel to China this week & as we find our way through the next several months, trying to find words to a little miraculous story He’s writing ]
he was given a second chance — and now he’s passing that along to others who need it too
Post of the Week from these parts here
… so my world’s sorta getting all busted up here this week —
and it’s kinda the most beautiful thing & I’m a bit undone…
“when you feel too broken to be chosen”
How Great Thou Art
50 people: 1 question (don’t miss this one!)
Amazing Grace —
with photos of the small town where the song was first written by John Newton in Olney, England
…really, it’s okay, right where you are right now, right how things are, right how you feel:
You are broken —- and Chosen.
You don’t have to hide your brokenness —- because it doesn’t change your chosenness.
You don’t have to deny your brokenness — because nothing can ever deny you of your chosenness.
You don’t have to fear your brokenness — because there’s nothing that can undo your chosenness.
You may feel broken– but you are His Chosen, His own, His Beloved.
[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.
April 8, 2016
why we need to stop trying so hard
Sixteen years ago, during her senior year of college, Ruth Soukup fell into a dark depression that destroyed her faith and very nearly killed her. Two years, five serious suicide attempts, six psychiatric hospitals, and many rounds of electroshock therapy later, she finally began to recover from the depression. It would take her another ten to recover her faith, after reluctantly accepting an invitation to a Bible study at a local church. A firm believer that the best way to feed people’s souls is by meeting their basic needs, Ruth is committed to providing practical solutions for “everyday overwhelm” at her blog, Living Well Spending Less. It’s a grace to welcome Ruth to the farm’s front porch today…
My temptation, when I tell my depression story, is to leave it all tied up with a neat little bow.
Girl messes up. Girl finds God. Girl gets saved. Girl lives happily ever after. Cue the credits and touching theme song. Inspiring, right?
We all want the Hollywood ending.
But that wasn’t the end.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m still saved by grace. That won’t change.
But that mountaintop moment of peace and clarity, when all was suddenly right with the world?
That didn’t last forever.
I am, for the most part, still a giant mess. (Though some days I hide it better than others.)
I think one of the biggest problems we face as Christians is this idea that once we have been saved, once we’ve triumphed over adversity and come out the other side, we are somehow “fixed.”
It goes hand-in-hand with the belief that we are more or less supposed to be perfect, that we have to do the right things and say the right things, and be the right things in order to count, and especially in order to maintain our salvation.
I don’t think we necessarily intend to perpetuate this belief, but it comes through in almost everything we do.
We are supposed to talk a certain way and dress a certain way and act a certain way, and if we don’t, then well, clearly we just don’t love Jesus enough. Or maybe we’re not even really saved.
The problem with this belief is that it allows us to convince ourselves that our salvation depends on us.
Yes, we may have screwed up or made a mess of things in the past, but now that we are saved, we should be better.
It’s time for our Hollywood ending. And if we’re not better, we need to try harder. Do more. Get back to that mountaintop one more time.
We focus on our need to achieve perfection, and forget that the hard work has already been done for us, in spite of us. And when we inevitably mess up or lose our way, or when others let us down, we are devastated, confused, shaken to the core.
Last year my husband and I, along with a few other families, ended up leaving our church—the very church that had brought me back to God.
It was a devastating, gut-wrenching breakup, and the months that followed were some of the darkest I have experienced since that horrible depression in my early twenties.
In one fell swoop, we lost the community that had meant everything to us. For months I couldn’t bear the thought of going to church at all—it was simply too painful.
Every time my husband suggested we try someplace new, I would panic, paralyzed with fear at the thought of being hurt again. In fact, even now, almost a year later, we are still struggling to find a new church home. There is no neat bow, no happy ending to this story.
It’s still messy and ugly and hard.
But in the midst of this struggle, I have never been more acutely aware of my own need for grace, nor more comforted by the realization that God uses our imperfection to do His best work.
In fact, if there is one thing the Bible makes abundantly clear, again and again, it is that God uses the most messed-up, flawed, not-good-enough people to do His will again and again, because messed-up, flawed, not-good-enough people are all that he has to choose from.
There are very few Hollywood endings to be found; on the contrary, there is only story upon story of people who failed, yet God somehow used them anyway.
Don’t believe me? Look at King David, the hand-selected “man after God’s own heart,” who managed to kill the giant Goliath with just a single stone, but who also committed adultery, got his mistress pregnant, then arranged for her husband to be killed in battle so that no one would know what he did.
Or Peter, who after three years of having a front-row seat to every miracle, and just hours after telling Jesus he would follow Him to death, denied even knowing Him, not once, but three times in a row.
Even Paul, whose conversion on the road to Damascus was so powerful and dramatic one might think he would never go astray, struggled with his own imperfection, lamenting 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” (Romans 7:18-19).
We live in a do-it-yourself world, one that tells us again and again that if we can just try a little harder, do a little more, be a little better, we might just save ourselves.
It is the same mentality that compels us to fill up our homes with stuff in the first place, because that stuff becomes the status symbol for the life that we think we want.
It is the same mentality that drives us to fill up our schedules, causing us to confuse busyness with meaning.
We’ve stuffed ourselves to overflowing with the pressure to achieve.
But with all of these pursuits, despite how important and valuable they might appear to be, we will inevitably find that something is still missing.
After all, what happens when happiness fails us? Or when our social status crumbles? Or when our kids let us down? Or when our job is downsized?
We may declutter our homes, unstuff our schedules, and destress our lives, sweeping them clean, putting them in order, but what then?
Who—or what—will fill that space?
In the end, the only way to become truly unstuffed is to accept the amazing, incredible, unlimited, and totally undeserved grace we’ve already been given, and stop trying to fill that hole ourselves.
Grace is the answer we are often too stubborn to believe, and often too proud to receive.
God loves us not because we are perfect, but because He is.
He doesn’t care for us because we have all the answers and because we’ve figured out how to live unstuffed lives; on the contrary, He wants us to live an unstuffed life because He cares for us so much.
The gift has already been given.
The work has already been done.
And I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a better way to become unstuffed than to finally recognize, understand,
and truly believe that my slate has been wiped clean,
once and for all.
[image error][image error]Ruth Soukup is a blogger, wife, mom, and New York Times Bestselling author of Living Well, Spending Less: 12 Secrets of the Good Life. Through her popular blog, LivingWellSpendingLess.com, she encourages more than a million monthly readers to follow their dreams and reach their goals, sharing easy-to-implement tips and strategies for saving time and money while focusing on the things that matter most. She is also the founder of the Living Well Planner, an all-in-one tool to help you organize your goals, budget, and schedule.
Unstuffed: Decluttering Your Home, Mind, and Soul was written for anyone who feels stressed out or weighed down by a life that feel chaotic, out-of-control, and completely overstuffed. It speaks to the mom who is overwhelmed by the clutter that comes pouring into every facet of her home and schedule, from trinkets and paperwork to endless obligations and activities. This book is is real, honest, and gets right down to the question we are all facing — how can we take back our lives from the stuff that is weighing us down?
[ Our humble thanks to Zondervan for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
Links for 2016-04-07 [del.icio.us]
Our #1 Best-Selling Drone--Meet the Dark Night of the Sky!
April 6, 2016
when it’s time to be brazen
Leeana Tankersley will tell you she is a gypsy at heart; a freedom-seeker who is wildly ready for breath and life and creating. But even this gypsy at times sees her own courage and creativity buried and hidden under a lie. The lie that she is not worthy of her calling. In the midst of Middle East, mother-of-three stress, Leeana realized something – God is calling us to a brazen work; to reclaim our voice and recover our soul. It’s a grace to welcome Leeana to the farm’s front porch today…
guest post and photos by Leanna Tankersley
The word brazen swam up from my soul and out of my mouth, intuitively, a few years ago.
We were living in the desert of the Middle East, stationed there for my husband Steve’s job in the Navy.
At that time in my life, my interior landscape matched the Middle Eastern landscape: beige.
The sky was beige. The sand was beige. The buildings were beige.
This is how I felt on the inside too.
A million miles away from home, taking care of my toddler twins and a newborn in a foreign and volatile world, slightly traumatized and definitely hypervigilant from a massive move and the—hardly worth mentioning—civil infighting going on around us.
You have likely been through a season like this. Not the beige of the Middle East, of course, but a beige all your own—a season of infighting, a season of trauma, a season of displacement and disorientation.
The light has become flat. A dimension seems to be missing. Breathing is about as much as can be accomplished in a day.
During those beige days, I saw something that woke me for a second, in a subversive way.
I was stopped on a dirt road near our rented villa. My eyes wandered out the window.
Gutter water ran beside my car, and riding high on the tide were the most striking hot pink bougainvillea petals dancing along. I whispered audibly, like a murmur from beyond, “Brazen.”
The dictionary definition of brazen is this perfect phrase: without shame. And it goes on from there: unrestrained by convention or propriety. Nervy. Bold-faced. Audacious. Shameless.
In that dull sludge water, I saw my own longing reflected back to me, my longing to feel that beautiful pink instead of all the beige, all the sludgy gutter water.
I wanted the color back.
Leanna Tankersley (all photos in this post)
I wanted to feel freedom to do and be and dance and play.
Freedom to roam and risk and create and work.
Freedom to love and rest and taste and see.
Freedom to make and believe and dream and fight.
Freedom to speak up and speak out, to know what it is I want to say, to recognize the sound of my own voice.
Sometimes, for a season, all we can expect from ourselves is to sit on the floor and breathe. And that’s plenty.
But then, after a week or a month or a year or three, after we have caught our breath, we must do the work of remembering that our issues are not the same thing as our identity.
We must emerge.
Walking into living color is vulnerable. So very vulnerable. It’s like coming out from a dark room and you have to squint to tolerate the light.
But at some point we let our eyes open again. We let ourselves expand. We let our hearts and souls wake up instead of believing that life and faith and healing and recovery are one big trick.
We do the brazen work of going after the “you” and the “me” that’s been hiding, buried, muted, lost, abandoned.
We invest in our own healing.
We do it as a debt of honor to ourselves and as our most profound worship to God, our creator.
We will not live in the dark, even if that means we have to walk around squinting for a time. We will let ourselves be seen.
There is no perfect time to be courageous.
Our emergence doesn’t happen when we are at our most brave. It often happens when we are at our most bruised.
We choose to lean into the tears and the fears and the dreams and the wild and we decide we will not hide.
Even though hiding feels like so much less work.
What if you and I are stronger than we think?
What if we are more intuitive than we assume?
What if we possess greater competence than we’ll admit?
What if we have more of a voice than we believe? When you and I question our brazenness, let’s remember one seriously outrageous fact:
On the day we were created, God spoke over our newly formed existence and said, “It is good.”
Creativity, courage, freedom, and even a God-given wild were woven into us.
But over time we began to believe that the most essential thing about us isn’t this “good” that He declared. We began to believe that the most essential thing about us is that we are flawed.
So many of us have lived with any number of things that have gnawed into the longed-for freedom.
Mind plagues.
Pesky habits with the forbidden.
The worst kind of worry.
A tendency to shrink.
A timid tongue.
Harsh accusers.
Mean people.
A total lack of confidence in a bathing suit. And so on.
We begin to believe that the power of these issues exceeds the power of our identity. We lose track of our own resilience, the creative strength God Himself put within us.
God says, “I know you’re not perfect. But do you know you are beautiful? Go. Explore. Experience. Express. Remember who you are.”
You are not abuse.
You are not anxiety.
You are not depression.
You are not infertility.
You are not divorce.
You are not abortion.
You are not addiction.
You are not failure.
You are not your body.
You are not the beige.
You are the beloved, precious soul. The brazen, beautiful beloved.
Just recently I found a cabinet hidden in the recesses of our garage, still wrapped in plastic wrap from our move home after our time in the Middle East.
It’s a pretty aqua cabinet that I had completely forgotten about. I cut away it’s wrapping and I opened the door for the first time in two years.
There, on the floor of the cabinet was a dried bougainvillea bloom, a single fuchsia stowaway from a foreign land.
A message in a cabinet: Yes, it is time to be brazen.
God looks for you and for me in the cool of the day. He calls out to us, “Where are you?”
Our whole life is to be the answer, “I’m coming.”
[image error][image error]Leeana Tankersley is a writer, mom of three, and the author of three books: Found Art, Breathing Room, and Brazen. She and her husband live in San Diego, California, with their boy/girl twins, Luke and Lane (age 7), and their baby girl, Elle (age 4).
Leeana’s new book, Brazen: The Courage to Find the You That’s Been Hiding, is an invitation to receive your identity, to reclaim your voice, and to recover your soul. She wants women to unapologetically move from shame- and fear-based living toward lives that are based on love and belonging. This book contains stories, interactive elements, and spiritual truths that will coax all of you into the light. Just as God intended. I wish I could get this book into the hands of every woman.
[ Our humble thanks to Baker Publishing for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
April 4, 2016
when you feel too broken to be chosen
Dear Girl,
Unexpected snow fell last night, dusting the world and the orchard with white, like someone forgot to put in their order to choose spring.
Suitcases splay across the living room floor here this morning.
The floors are warm, defying the snowy chill of an April morning.
Trying to pack up a lifetime of hopes and dreams here and fly half way round a busted, dizzy world, fly hours and endless cramped hours straight across that worry-tossed ocean to you, Little Girl, so I can kneel down in front of you at that foster home and whisper real soft:
I choose you.
There are things about this world I wish I could tell you.
They’ll tell you that to ever get picked, you’ll have to be beautiful.
To ever be liked, to ever get a spot at the table, on the team, in the club, you will have to look a certain way, be a certain way, have a certain charisma, have a certain charming brilliance about you.
It’s a weight you could feel, right there on the edge of your shoulders, that you live with so long that it’s simply become part of you — that you aren’t wanted like everyone else.
That if everyone could choose — they probably would choose someone else — not you.
Sure, those highly venerated folks known as “They” —- they don’t put all this in some kind of public service announcement in some Manual To The Innerworkings of the World— but you don’t have spend half a New York minute glancing around at the screens and the ads and the billboards before you feel it in your gut —
The economy of everything says that to belong you’ll have to be more than you are.
Sometimes you can stand there on the pushing corner of things, watching the people stream by with their bags heavy over hunched shoulders, and you can read this in all of our brave eyes.
And it can run like the slow numb of a constant white noise in the back of your mind that you’ve just learned to live with —
If my people had a choice — if they had the option to have picked someone better than me — they would have.
If my friends could have chosen someone smarter, sharper, funnier, cooler, hipper — they would have.
If my kids, my partner, my parents, my colleagues, my employer, my community could have chosen someone more awesome than me? They would in a heartbeat.
It’s heartbreakingly easy to think that if your people could, they’d trade you in or upgrade you for a more appealing model or a sleeker, faster, sexier update.
That’s where the edges of your heart can get stuck — thinking everyone is just sort of stuck with you.
It can feel like everyone just accidentally ended up with you by default—- instead of feeling like you are not loved by accident, but chosen on purpose in spite of your faults.
This is an ache.
All we want is to be deeply wanted.
When I first saw your face, Little One — and I first held your picture there in the palm of my hand, looked down at that photo of you sleeping — that’s what they told me —- you have only literally half a heart.
You can feel like what makes your heart beat —- isn’t enough.
You can feel like if anyone saw what’s on the inside of you, they’d pick someone else.
You can feel like if anyone saw the depth of your unspoken broken — you’d never hear those words spoken: I choose you.
You and I, Little Girl? We are not so different, you and I.
I’ve got this broken heart in here and I’ve known abandonment in the my bones and I struggle to believe in chosenness and hear me with all that you are: you are not alone.
In a handful of days now?
I will reach out one unbrave hand and lay it tenderly on your uncertain cheek, like making a vow on a Holy Book, and I’ll look you in the eye and whisper it, one busted mother making the promise that a perfect Father cannot stop whispering relentlessly to a wounded world and all His walking around with their unspoken broken:
You are wanted when you don’t want to be you.
You are picked when you feel picked apart and glossed over and not good enough.
Your name is called when you’ve had lies in your head for years calling you names.
You are loved when you feel unlovely and unloveable.
You belong as you are — even when you long to be someone else.
You are broken —- and Chosen.
You don’t have to hide your brokenness —- because it doesn’t change your chosenness.
You don’t have to deny your brokenness — because nothing can ever deny you of your chosenness.
You don’t have to fear your brokenness — because there’s nothing that can undo your chosenness.
That is all: You are broken — and Chosen.
There’s nothing to ever fear ever again.
Broken. And Chosen.
The End.
And — the very beginning of everything we’ve ever wanted, this being deeply wanted.
The snow will melt in the orchard, of this I’m sure.
Spring will come, of this you can be sure, a certain chosenness about it.
And grace will fly to you, this being unconditionally loved, this changes the conditions of everything.
Feel that now —
feel that coming your way right now.
Related: when you don’t feel like you’re enough: our year long story — and a new chapter coming
…our unlikely adoption story will unfold quietly here over, in excited bits & pieces, & over at Instagram, as we travel to China this week & as we find our way through the next several months, trying to find words to a little miraculous story He’s writing…
Links for 2016-04-03 [del.icio.us]
Our #1 Best-Selling Drone--Meet the Dark Night of the Sky!
April 2, 2016
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [04.02.16]
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 / Instagram
Warren Keelan / Instagram
Warren Keelan / Instagram
come away for a bit and soak up all this wonder?
we gathered here and couldn’t help but smile
okay, now this is some surprise
Elke Vogelsang
yup, it’s just so hard to wait sometimes, you know?
Julien Knez
Julien Knez
Julien Knez
what makes a hero
(in)courage wants to invite you to bring your girlfriends, meet some of our regular contributors, and find yourself among friends.
Our first event will be held in Reading, PA on Friday, April 22nd (the night before Priscilla Shirer’s simulcast event).
You can head here to RSVP — tickets are FREE but space is limited so be sure to reserve a spot!
amazing medical breakthrough
their gift just keeps on giving…
because sometimes? we all need to be rescued
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a student’s selfless actions…”an Easter miracle”
one of the last craftsmen of his kind
“People need to have someone believe in them.” yes, yes, yes
the art of using dirt? fascinating…
Daniel Yim / The Reading Project
Daniel Yim / The Reading Project
Daniel Yim / The Reading Project
okay, yes — what a novel idea this is!
second chances — all this joy?!
how this young student thanked his grandparents?
returning a favor…70 years in the making.
We Carry Kevan
We Carry Kevan
it’s always nice to have friends who support you — 3 friends will take turns carrying their friend throughout Europe
maybe come and rest a bit?
Post of the Week from these parts here
… this is the story I didn’t know how to tell — for a whole year.
This is a story about feeling like a failure.
This is a story about being afraid of not being enough.
This is a story of unspoken broken.
This is the most unlikely (exciting?!) story ever —
“when you don’t feel like you’re enough: our year long story
— and a new chapter coming”
they can’t walk, but they can dive
“…everyone in the sea is the same. We are all the same because we cannot stand.”
she’s giving back and helping to change the world – don’t leave the internet without watching this
…your legs may be weary right now, your heart may be heavy, but whatever you are facing in this moment, it is always named Mt. Moriah – The Lord Will Provide.
Every mountain that you face, the Lord will level with His all sufficient grace…
And when God gives you His grace?
You don’t have to give your people a piece of your mind — you can give your people crazy grace & a bit of your ever loving heart …
That’s all:
Instead of giving someone a piece of your mind,
turns out far better if you give them a piece of your heart.
[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.
April 1, 2016
Enough: Accepting Grace in Life’s Worst Moments
When an arsonist randomly set their house on fire, Alison Hodgson and her family were home and in bed, and escaped with the clothes on their backs. In the early days afterwards, the sorrow of losing everything was slight compared to Alison’s immense gratitude that her family was safe and she felt sustained by an extraordinary grace. As time passed, and stresses mounted, she realized her family had lost so much more than their possessions, and that only grace could lead them home. It’s a grace to welcome Alison to the farm’s front porch today…
Three weeks to the day after the fire—this was how we were keeping time now—I woke up around four thirty and couldn’t get back to sleep.
It was a Sunday and Paul got up a little before seven to leave early for church. It was his week to help lead worship.
“I guess I thought you would have canceled this month,” I said.
“Well I didn’t, and they’re planning on me. I’d like to go.”
I didn’t want to face anything without Paul, even church.
Everyone was so kind and asked how we were doing but there were also many questions about the fire itself, which was upsetting for the children, and draining for me.
Being an introvert, if there was a way to be airlifted into church and then back out immediately after, that would be my preference many a Sunday, but especially three weeks after an arsonist set my house on fire.
It didn’t occur to me that having that time with old and dear friends on the worship team was a haven for Paul and a relief from stress. Or if it did, it was secondary to the fact that it increased my own.
My sister-in-law Dawn and her husband Thom, had picked us up by the side of the road while the house was still in flames, and we had been staying with them since.
From their home, there were several ways to get to church. I chose the quickest and most familiar route, which brought us past our property. When we reached our intersection, I stopped at the sign and we all looked at the remains of what had been home, but no one spoke.
The sight of the ruins landed like a body blow and a wave of exhaustion fell over me. I was so incredibly tired, I could barely keep my head up. The thought of driving all the way to church, running the gauntlet of caring questions, and then sitting through the service felt impossible.
“Kids,” I said, “we’re not going to church!”
No one cheered, but there was a collective and relieved exhalation.
I decided return to my sister-in-law’s house, using a different route and turned to head into town and remembered something. For insurance, I needed to call a landscaper we’d used before the fire. Their name escaped me, but was engraved on a boulder in a public garden they had planted just off the green in our little village. This was the perfect time to drive by.
The engraving had softened over the years, and I couldn’t read it at first glance. It was an early Sunday morning in summer, and the roads were deserted. I stopped the van. The garden was on the right side, so I leaned across Lydia sitting in the passenger seat and squinted.
“Can you read that?” All three children peered with me, and we read it out loud.
“Roods?”
“Rooks?”
Yes! It was Rooks—a small victory.
“Well done!” I said and took my foot off the brake.
I heard a shout and turned to see several cyclists passing me on the left, and one was right beside my door. I slammed on the brakes and rolled down my window.
Later I will figure out what must have happened. They came up behind me and paused. When I didn’t move, they started to pass me just as I began to roll forward.
“Hey!” one of them yelled, much too close to the van. His face was red and angry.
Horrified at my mistake, I rolled down my window to apologize. “I’m so—” I began to say, but he waved me away, as if to shut me up and rode off.
I will be honest. I always like to be heard. Anyone who has argued with me knows I can be . . . tenacious. So there’s that. I really didn’t like being cut off when I knew I was wrong and was trying to do the right thing.
Also, I was what the professionals call “raw.”
I stepped on the gas.
“Mama!” Lydia shouted, and I could feel the general anxiety of all the children. But justice was calling.
Tires squealed as I pulled up next to the cyclist and kept pace with him. I rolled down Lydia’s window. He looked up, surprised.
“Mama—,” Eden said.
“I was trying to say I’m sorry,” I began.
He shrugged me off and kept riding. This did not work for me.
“I’m sorry I was stopped in the middle of the road. I’m SORRY I didn’t see you because I was trying to read a landscaper’s sign because an ARSONIST BURNED MY HOUSE DOWN!”
The cyclist’s face changed. I can only imagine what mine looked like, but right then, I was past caring.
“Lady,” he said, “we’re OK.” He held out the arm nearest me in a gesture of pacification, but this—or simply the fact that he was completely wrong—set me off.
“WE ARE NOT OK!” I shrieked and stomped on the gas pedal, speeding past him.
The children were screaming now. I turned into the nearest parking lot and slammed to a stop. For a moment it was mostly quiet, except for my sobbing and the kids catching their breath.
I felt so ashamed. I was a terrible mother.
“I’m so sorry.” I turned to them. “I’m sorry I lost it.”
“That guy was a jerk,” Christopher said.
“Yeah, he was. But I shouldn’t have freaked out and driven so recklessly.”
“No, you shouldn’t have,” Eden said primly.
“You sure freaked out all right,” Lydia said. I turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide, and then she smiled. It was a nervous smile, but it was a smile, and I smiled back. We both began to laugh.
“We are not OK!” Eden imitated my screech, and soon we were all laughing but I still felt terrible.
“I’m so, so sorry, kids. Will you please forgive me?”
There was a murmur of “I forgive you” from all three. I looked at them. Tears welled up in my eyes. My throat was sore from screaming, a shameful reminder.
There was plenty to rationalize if I wanted. I was exhausted and had been startled. That guy was a jerk. And maybe there was something to that talk about post-traumatic stress.
All that was real and valid, but it didn’t change the fact that I had been wrong and had wronged another. I had certainly wronged my children.
There was no way to make amends with the cyclist, which I had genuinely wanted to do at the start until I tilted into a rage at his blow-off of my apology. But now, again, I truly wanted to apologize.
I had made it right with my children, but it didn’t feel like it. Not yet.
The funny thing about grace is, even though I know it covers every wrong, it rarely feels like enough. At least in the short term, especially when I’ve sinned before and against my children.
Time and maturity had taught me the only thing I can do is open my arms to lay down my shame and keep them open to receive forgiveness.
There is no plan B.
All I know is to admit my wrongdoing and then accept grace when it’s given — especially when it doesn’t feel like enough.
I looked at my children, one by one, and they looked back at me.
“Thank you” was all I could say,
and then I turned the van around and drove slowly and carefully —
back to Dawn and Thom’s—
to home.
[image error][image error]Alison Hodgson is a writer, speaker and humorist whose life experiences have made her an involuntary expert on the etiquette of perilous times. She is a Moth StorySLAM champion and a contributor to the design website Houzz.com. Her writing has been featured on Forbes.com, Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics blog and Religion News Service. Alison lives outside Grand Rapids, Michigan with her husband, their three children and two good dogs.
In the fire’s aftermath of insurance battles royal, rebuilding plans, parenting in the face of life’s hard questions and a scorching case of post-traumatic stress, now is absolutely the worst possible time to adopt a dog. But to Alison’s seven-year-old daughter, Eden, it’s the perfect time—and The Relentless Campaign begins. Enter “Outrageous” Oliver, and the hilarity, healing, and irresistible hope that follows in The Pug List: A Ridiculous Little Dog, a Family Who Lost Everything, and How They Found Their Way Home.
[ Our humble thanks to Zondervan for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
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March 29, 2016
when you don’t feel like you’re enough: our year long story — and a new chapter coming
Sometimes you don’t know you are walking through a door until you are already through it.
Sometimes you don’t know a story is beginning —- until you find yourself looking at the last page — and the beginning of a new chapter.
Because sometimes you don’t know — if the book will be snatched out of your hands — or if you’ll be whipped around and escorted out of the room because somebody higher up didn’t think the likes of you belong… because somebody didn’t think you’re enough.
It’s been almost a year since I’ve started losing my voice. It happens. You can find yourself living into a story — that you don’t know how to begin to tell?
But honestly —- every story that you’ve ever lived wraps itself around your DNA. Your stories will express themselves, your stories will manifest themselves —- even if you never whisper a word of your story aloud.
You can think you can wear masks to hide your story from the world —-but maybe the masks we wear are really just a way for us to hide pieces of us from ourselves?
Our stories are always stronger than our masks.
There is no mask in the world that eventually our story won’t bleed through.
Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing the last year? Hiding this story from myself — losing my voice to tell this story, any story — because we were living a story that I was scared we weren’t enough for.
The whole story started actually last February.
Something holy had happened — and that’s a story, for another time, in due time —- but that’s when the long walk began, he and I talking slow, trying to find our way through. If it hadn’t been the middle of our winter, I would have walked our backroads in bare feet. Sometimes even hard ground can be holy ground.
Come last March the snow started to melt. You could hear the sparrows up in the spruce trees and everything thawing into hope. He and I would lay there in the dark after the kids went to bed, staring at the ceiling, murmuring begging prayers for clarity. Why do I have chronic soul amnesia and forget: We want clarity — and God wants us to come closer.
Clarity did not come. He came closer.
By time last May rolled around, when the seeds were in the ground all across our dirt, when there was the hope of life coming, the Farmer had decided. You can only walk so long before you get to a fork in the road and you’ve got to take a stab of faith.
“Let’s do it.” He told me on a Sunday.
I’d looked across the room at him, trying to figure if he’d really figured this was the direction we needed to head.
“You sure?”
He’d nodded.
“If God’s leading you, I trust it — I can take this step of faith.”
I nodded slow, holding up a door frame, not knowing if we’d get to enter or not.
I mean —- we’d seen other people fling through their door, announce their big story — we’d seen other people get clear calls, loud bullhorns from heaven, Holy Spirit fire breathing in their bones so they were ablaze with a new story flung about a new room.
But here it was, May, three months of begging to know the way and what we got — was definitely not fireballs from heaven —- just a simply a conviction to obey. To trust.
That same weekend in May, the apple blossoms setting out in the orchard, a tried and true man of the cloth and the Cross, he pulled us aside and pastored the Farmer and I with words about leaps of faith, “What did Jesus in the Garden say, His face set toward the Cross? “Not what I will — but what You will.” And what did He say after the shadow of the Cross: “Out of the anguish of His soul, He saw and was satisfied” (Isa 53.11).
Sometimes you don’t feel God’s smile until after you take a step of obedience into God’s will.
We sat with that on that Sunday afternoon, the bees droning through the russet trees.
Certain peace may not come until after you take a certain step of faith. And a step of faith often feels like a step through fear.
That night the Farmer opened the only Book he owns that’s worn and battered and he read the next pages of his chronological reading, there in the tried and true book of Matthew, read it in the same chapter, that one line, not once, but twice: “Not as I will, but as you will.”
The Farmer had looked up at me and nodded.
“There’s your fireball.
And I’m sure.” He’d nodded and winked.
Maybe fireballs of faith happen just when His Word sits in your open hand.
So we went to the first class in June.
We told no one about those string of mandatory classes.
Or what we were embarking on or about our wild why. Not my dad or his, not my brother or his, not the church family or all of the kids. Because, frankly, there was no telling if we’d be deemed fit enough to make the cut, and it gnaws away a bit at you —- living on the crumbling edge of wondering if you’re enough. Every time you take a step of faith — there is this fear that you won’t be enough. You won’t be enough to make the leap, you won’t be enough to finish the journey, you won’t be enough to land on two feet.
We ran a couple of pens dry filling out paperwork and forms and files about our past, laying our bustedness down on paper. We were asked to write down our weaknesses, lay out our very worst, spell out all the things about us that might break and fall apart.
Have you ever been treated for depression?
Have you ever been to counselling?
Have you ever seen a psychiatrist?
My pen hovered. How in the world can you feel your heart and your blood all rushing deafening loud in your ears like that?
It can feel like if you show anyone your brokenness — it’s your dreams that will get broken.
I’d wanted to scrawl in my answer: “Look — Getting help isn’t a sign something’s wrong with you — it’s a sign that you are doing things right.
It’s never weak to seek help — it’s evidence of being strong.
How are you supposed to be healthy without finding a workout for your soul? Why this judgement of the people wise enough to get the best help to be better selves?”
I’d wanted to crumple those forms up in my fist and torch them before they burned the edges of my fragile bravery.
By last July, when the water was getting warm up at the lake, we got the letter asking us to produce and submit written reports of all my counselling sessions. I felt like someone had asked me to strip naked so I could be assessed, get my gums and teeth checked out, have my cellulite exposed, poked and evaluated. I felt small. Deeply broken. It started to feel like —- the greatest act of courage is to simply keep facing one direction when everything in you wants to turn and run.
Stand your shaky, holy ground.
We went and got finger prints on a summer morning right after the flashing heat of a thunderstorm rolled in from the west and across our fields.
Lined up for mug shots.
Come the lingering humidity of August, we begged every Tom, Dick and Harry to write us reference letters to try to prove we weren’t psychopathic, narcissistic hatchet-swingers but presented within the semblance of normalcy —- well, even if barely.
In the middle of last August’s wheat harvest, the Farmer stopped the combine as the sun sunk further down, boys jumped down from tractors, washed up at the water hose at the side of the barn, and we took family photos for our file right there in the field. One tired kid struggled to grin. We begged through thin smiles. I collated and organized that portfolio and letters and photos like I was warring some desperate life and death battle.
When you’ve got a big enough hope in your heart — you’re willing to risk being told you’re not enough.
I licked and sealed what felt like a hundred believing envelopes.
There’s some risks you have got to take because it turns out you can’t live not taking them. You can’t live with dreams drying up inside you like some dying and parched riverbed.
You can’t expect to keep breathing if you aren’t breathing in hope.
All through the summer, every Wednesday night, we hauled our 5 inch binders to those mandatory classes and kept our faces set like flint against the wind and we willed ourselves to keep breathing.
They came to inspect our house. Twice. I scrubbed the air vents with a tooth brush and prayed that all the closets were good enough and nothing fell down on any unsuspecting inspector’s head, because I doubted that would be helpful or that I would actually live through a scenario like that.
We served them pork roast on a platter afterward, followed by pie — – after nothing fell out of a closet on them, after they checked off all those squares on their precise little clipboard lists.
I poured coffee for them before they left. My hand didn’t even shake bad enough to spill any on the barn beam table.
Even if you don’t feel like enough — you have to risk enough — or you will die without ever having lived enough.
Even when you’re afraid of not being enough — you’ve got to be more afraid of not having stepped out enough.
Death by living is far preferable to death by being too scared to really live at all.
Then on New Year’s Eve? The very last day of of the year of 2015?
Just after 10 pm, with the popcorn machine whirling and board games all over that barn beam table, the email came through: 10 am in China.
Our adoption dossier had just logged into China. January 1st in China.
Dossier number 20160101002— the second dossier logged into China in 2016.
The Farmer and I walked around dazed. The most slackjawed, happiest daze.
After walking a million paperwork miles — have we actually just walked through a door here? Found ourselves in a story that I couldn’t even bare to whisper out loud?
And then — less than 48 hours later, on January 2nd, the Farmer stood right next to me, holding my hand in ER.
Held my hand as the doctor told us our Malakai, a gaunt 20 pounds lighter, sick as a dog, and hooked up to an IV, had Type 1 diabetes. And I’d pulled in real close to him and Malakai smiled brave.
Sometimes — The story isn’t going how you planned, but that isn’t a reason to stop trusting that the story has a plan.
Sometimes, turns out? You clearly not being enough —- is what makes the enoughness of God most clearly seen.
There’s a new crib assembled in our room, right beside our bed.
There’s baby clothes hanging in our closet.
I have a plane ticket for China —- flying next week.
Even when you’re afraid of not being enough — God’s making everything into make more than enough grace. You only have to keep believing — and keep stepping out unbrave.
There’s a stack of new children’s books here on the shelf, waiting.
There’s fresh new stories with unexpected hope chapters about to be written everywhere.
A Holy Spirit wind can turn any page.
addendum: our unlikely adoption story will unfold quietly here over, in excited bits and pieces, as we travel to China next week and find our way through the next several months… and find words to a pretty little miraculous Story He’s writing…
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