Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 201
July 9, 2015
why every woman should know her prompt
When you meet Karen Swallow Prior, you are immediately taken with not only her brilliant mind, but her thoughtful, listening engagement. She is a Professor of English at Liberty University and an award-winning teacher. She is a contributing writer for The Atlantic.com and for Christianity Today, where she blogs frequently at Her.meneutics. Her writing has appeared in Relevant, Think Christian, and Salvo. She is a Research Fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, a member of INK: A Creative Collective, and a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society of the United States. She and her husband live on a 100-year old homestead in central Virginia with sundry horses, dogs, and chickens. And lots of books. It’s a grace to welcome Karen Swallow Prior to the farm’s front porch today…
“W rite about being a woman,” she said.
So I will.
It means something, this being a woman.
It is something bodily, yet beyond biology.
There is something of earth in it, and something heavenly, too.
It is something that can be understood, yet is not easily captured in words.
It brings forth a sense of sisterhood among the women I’ve met in places across the world, from Malawi to Morocco, from Guatemala to Ireland, from Puerto Rico to England, from Tennessee to Chicago.
And among the women I’ve never met, too, except through their words: Teresa, Flannery, Edith, Emily, Charlotte, Jane, Hannah, Julian, and so many more.
It means something that transcends age, time, place, race, class, and creed.
Yet, there are as many ways to be a woman as there are women.
When I think about being a woman, I think most about the women I come from.
I think about my grandmother, my mother’s mother, strong, stoic, and brusque, with an edge about her, both familiar and strange. She was never like other people’s grandmothers.
She was not a cookie-baking, cheek-pinching, ooh-aahing Grandma. She showed more affection for her goats, chickens, and hothouse flowers than she did to her children and grandchildren. But though she didn’t stoop to enter our world, we were always welcome to join her in hers.
My grandmother resented her whole life the fact she wasn’t born a man. This is something I could but couldn’t understand.
Born in rural Maine in 1914, my grandmother, like all women did (and do), faced many obstacles.
Yet, a rough-and-tumble woman, she seemed able to do just about everything a man could.
She competed in math against the boys in school.
She accompanied my grandfather on the piano while he played trombone in a dance hall band.
She helped him tend their 140 acres, planting, weeding, haying, reaping, feeding, milking, and selling what they produced from that land.
She stood with him waist deep in cold northern streams, fly fishing for the trout they’d fry up in an iron skillet in butter she’d churned herself in a big wooden barrel.
She birthed their two girls at home, the younger in the one room cabin she’d helped my grandfather build by hand.
She went to a Methodist church where she sat under a woman preacher.
She was stubborn, scrappy, opinionated, intense, and independent to a fault.
Anchored to a wheelchair these days, she is a bit less so. But not much.
There are women who are elegant, sophisticated, and refined. This is not what I think of when I think of being a woman. These are not the kind of women I come from.
I think about my mother, soft and shy.
My mother who loves little children and has taught them in Sunday School most of her life.
My mother for whom my father is the center of her universe, the sun to her moon.
She has made and served my father three meals a day nearly every single day of more than 50 years of marriage. She has loved (nearly) every minute of it.
She is never happier than when she is with my dad. It doesn’t matter what they are doing. Except for their love of gardens, animals, and church, my mother and her mother are not much alike.
I never saw my grandmother and grandfather display affection toward each another (save the kind of affection I suppose there is in an ongoing mutual competition). But I have watched my mother and father kiss one another good morning, good-bye, and hello each and every day.
My mom loves being a woman. Mostly, I think, because she loves being the wife of my father. I know that next to God, I owe to my parents and their example the goodness of my own marriage, different as it is from theirs.
I am somewhere in between these two, bearing the image and likeness of both of them whose bearing brought me into the world. An average yield of two generations (or more) of women.
We are three women who could not be more different from one another—and yet we share so much of each other.
I am who I am because of these women.
My grandmother’s gift to me was her toughness. My mother’s, her gentleness.
“Write about being a woman,” she said.
So I did.
In writing, we call this a prompt: the provision of a topic and directions for a writer to follow in a given assignment. Following the set rules allows creativity to flourish in ways it never would or could with no restraints or limits. It’s the paradox of the prompt.
“Write about love,” the muse whispered.
So Shakespeare did. Over and over, he explored the same theme, following the same rigid rules: 14 lines, iambic pentameter, set rhyme scheme. Those tight restraints unleashed the Bard’s mighty power, such as the world has never seen, prompting him to write lines like these:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove …
And these:
My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear;
That love is merchandized, whose rich esteeming,
The owner’s tongue doth publish every where.
And these:
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
One can fight against the rules of the prompt. One can also just follow them limply along. Or one can press into the limits until truth, goodness, and beauty are squeezed out and burst into the world.
“Be a woman,” God said, as He knit me together in my mother’s womb.
“Be a woman neither sweet nor hard. Be short like your mother and your grandmother, tending a little toward stout.
Have thick, lumpy hair, neither curly nor straight. Be left-handed. Love logic and words but be tone-deaf.
Be a woman who sees and speaks but who needs more patience, delicacy, and reserve.
Be a woman born here in this place, not that one, at this time, not another. Be born from these people and among those.”
And even before He had made me, He called me to Himself.
This was my prompt.
I press into it in hopes I will,
by the grace of God, flourish.
Karen Swallow Prior’s book Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More was named by Christianity Today & Desiring God as one of the best books of 2014. A most powerful, compelling read for the holidays. One to frame & inspire for the new year. From the heart of Hannah More: “Bible Christianity is what I love … a Christianity practical and pure, which teaches holiness, humility, repentance and faith in Christ; and which after summing up all the Evangelical graces, declares that the greatest of these is charity [love].”
“For Hannah, life was a feast, and the space at her table was abundant.” On William Wilberforce, Hannah’s friend and partner in the push to abolish slavery: “I really look up to God with a renewed thankfulness; I say renewed, for His having by his good providence drawn me to the Abolition business has alway appeared to me to call for the most lively gratitude.”
Karen Swallow Prior is one of the sharpest writers I have ever read. Cannot recommend Fierce Convictions highly enough.
Links for 2015-07-08 [del.icio.us]
this: "...we react without thinking -- that's what happened to me when I saw this. I knew I had to try and do something."
July 8, 2015
your personal summer reset
She’s a farmer’s wife & we keep dreaming about getting both of Farmer’s together to talk tractors. She and I keep notes on weather and crops and words in each other’s parts of the world. I reached across a table once and grabbed Jennifer Dukes Lee‘s hand and I told her I believed in God’s gifts in her and I prayed for His words through her to keep coming. She’s a pure-hearted, soul-encouraging woman after God’s own heart and reading her always makes me read more of Christ everywhere. Humbling grace to invite Jennifer to the farm’s front porch…
guest post and photos by Jennifer Dukes Lee
The car was a blur of red when it veered into my lane.
We crashed at highway speeds, nearly head-on. Metal bended over metal — the haunting crunch of steel, the sound of a death kneel.
The airbag slapped my face.
Glass shattered, spider-webbing across my windshield. My van plunged into the ditch. I was trapped inside.
Moments earlier, I was singing a worship song called Exalted on a CD by Chris Tomlin. The chorus affirms who God is: “Yahweh, Holy is Your name!”
In one skinny minute, the song went silent. Life came to a hard stop.
I became keenly aware of my own fragility. My body ached. I heard my own voice, now begging for the mercy of Yahweh.
Soon, rescue workers were on the scene, trying to figure out the safest way to get me out of a busted-up van.
Because of the sound of my own voice, I knew I hadn’t died.
In fact, I ended up more alive than I had been before.
Brushes with death do that. Funerals do that. Every week, the latest tragedies dominating our newsfeeds shake us awake to what really matters.
“Hug your kids tight,” urge the mamas who bury their own children.
And we do, because we’re made stark-aware of the fragility of everything here.
These are hallowed moments – the moments that change us because they shatter our self-reliance.
They remind us we are human, fleeting, all of us dying. The hushed reality of our own mortality turns us back to our only hope — and the truth that eternity is closer than we know.
That morning, while the red lights of an ambulance spun outside my windshield, never once did I think about all the stuff that occupies far too much of my everyday thought life:
What if I fail today?
Do people care what I have to say?
Why doesn’t she ever acknowledge me?
Why didn’t I get invited?
Why am I so mediocre?
Never once did I consider the latest squabble on Facebook.
I do remember looking in the back seat of my van after the crash.
My daughters’ empty booster seats had been tossed like toys into the back of my van. I wept, grateful that the girls weren’t in the van with me that day.
In that hallowed moment in a ditch, I didn’t measure the value of my life by cataloging accomplishments or failures.
I saw the value of a life in a parade of faces – real souls.
I was reawakened to this uncommonly good gift of being a person created with this purpose: to love God and enjoy Him forever.
Maybe you are like me. You know the truth about your mortality. You don’t really think you’re invincible, but at times, you live otherwise. You live like a machine, giving in to a very real pressure to perform, meet demands, make everyone happy, get it right.
We forget that we are the imago dei – not the imago factory.
Each of us gets this one life; there’s a 100 percent chance of it ending. A grand forever is coming, thanks be to Jesus.
But will we have lived in the fullness of our salvation during our time on earth? Or will we have merely passed through, missing the joy of keeping company with God?
Will we have lived as if we were made of gears and pulleys? Or will we have loved as ones with flesh and blood?
When I lose a bit of my way in this life, I return to the accident, because it reorients me. I have to re-feel that awful day on the highway.
I touch the scar on my leg, the perfect shape of a Y, the initial of Yahweh. The scar reminds me of the song that – I pray – I will always sing, come what may: “Yahweh, Holy is Your name.” I cherish my Yahweh scar.
Maybe we all need to feel along for our scars, to find the cherished mark of Yahweh upon our fragile personhood?
Maybe we need to remember that though we were wounded, we have been healed, and our scars are proof of a God redeeming all the broken things.
Maybe we need to return to the simple wonder of our own breathing – to remember that we were created by a God who sees a big soul inside the small skin.
Maybe you needed to know this today —
You are a person.
You are not a machine, a spreadsheet, an agenda, or a resume.
You are a person. You have a heartbeat, skin, scars, and soul.
Your worth isn’t calculated in efficiencies, boxes checked, or ladders climbed.
You aren’t the sum of your accomplishments — or the sum of your mistakes.
You aren’t your ambition, your energy level, your approval rating, or your mass appeal.
You aren’t a stage or a platform or a gold star.
You are not an A+, a C-, or an F.
You are not a mess or a miscalculation.
You are a miracle. Because you are a person.
Be a person today. Be all you. Resist the urge to believe that you’ve got to fight for your piece; God says there’s more than enough to go around.
Consider saying “no” to the big invitation. Dare to “miss out,” and find out what you really would have missed, had you said “yes.”
Don’t pull God into your agenda. Follow Him into His.
Live free. Love well. Stand tall on the inside, even if you’re feeling weak on the outside.
You are a person, a citizen of the Kingdom of God. Live there, Kingdom Child — live where there is always enough, where there is abundant love, where there is unending grace for you.
And should we lose our way, let’s re-feel the scars, to remember what we’ve been saved from,
and what we’ve been saved for,
to live fully and freely in who we really are –
the imago dei.
Jennifer Dukes Lee is one amazing storyteller and a grace dweller from Iowa.
She’s the author of Love Idol, an unforgettable book that is freeing women from their need for people’s approval. She is a former award-winning news reporter who now chases after the Good News story of Jesus Christ. Jennifer writes for Dayspring’s (in)incourage and her blog.
Through her latest work, Love Idol, women are rediscovering how they don’t have to earn anyone’s approval. They are already approved — preapproved! — through Christ. Women have begun to change their hearts, by changing the words they use. Instead of believing they have somethingto prove, they are reminding themselves that they have nothing to prove. They are affirming their preapproved status in Christ.
That endless, exhausting crusade for approve that leaves you exhausted? Ends in the highly recommended pages of: Love Idol.
July 7, 2015
July 6, 2015
when your plans don’t turn out at all — what turns out to be the actual case
So, yeah — if there were gardening police, I’d be on death row.
Lock me up and throw away the key.
You know –
when your garden hits a midsummer crisis and sheds its demure and orderly rows of polite and blooming tomatoes and goes all punk and angry, acting like its some python-infested jungle that might reach out and grab you by your thin and fragile jugular if you look too closely?
There came a point, early, already in June, when I briefly considered installing a snow fence around the rebels in a paltry attempt to protect the pure and unadulterated eyes of the Mennonite farmwives down the road.
I died a thousand deaths every time the mail lady stopped at the mailbox only to see yet again my garlic plants feebly reaching above a relentless army of redroot pigweed, wildly begging for rescue. I half expected every day to find a note in the mailbox from her:
Cannot you not see? Hear? Your miserable attempt at a garden cries out. Have you no farmer’s wife shame?
Straight-up: I wrestled with relinquishing my farmer’s wife card-carrying status.
The sweet corn germinated poorly. For all the passing countryside, it looked more like the thinning, last vestige of a balding middle- ager than a crop of anything.
The tomatoes plants succumbed early and pitifully to the lamb’s quarters, which, apparently, only disguise themselves like lambs so they can sneak up on unsuspecting tomatoes and devour them like lions. There was no zucchini at all. To be the farmer’s wife who is zucchini bankrupt?
Who is out begging for zucchini in the church foyer after Sunday service? There are. no. words.
I confessed to the Farmer in murmured tones one night on the porch, what was most shattering in the whole scandalous, embarrassing affair:
“I have no zinnias. No blackeyed-susans. How many years have we been here? No matter the babies or the all-day sickness or the working 18 hour days in the barn, we have never not had zinnias.”
I pray my ridiculous high-pitched grief will adequately convey the direness of the devastation.
“17 years.” The Farmer’s looking over nonplussed at the bloodied carnage of my garden. He slips his arm around my waist and pulls me in.
“You gotta remember that you were doing important things this spring. Something that I’m thinking will harvest far more in heaven than sunflowers or zinnias — or zucchinis.”
He winks at me.
Sometimes doing the most important thing eternally – doesn’t look like you are doing anything noticeably.
When we drive by the Mennonite neighbors on the way to Sunday morning service, I make a genuine Everest attempt to not look at Mrs. Martin’s rows of full-bloomed lavatera lustfully.
Turns out that someday after you turn 40 or read the Sermon on the Mount for the 378th time, you wake up and get it:
Envying someone else’s life doesn’t make your life better like actually enjoying your own does.
And it also turns out that when you have empty flower vases and no zinnias or lavateras, you end up going to a ditch.
You go to a ditch, to the woods, to the weeds growing behind the local Seven Eleven or the green potty in the park, and you just pick what you can find.
Your life is a vase that needs to find beauty whatever wild place it can.
“Happiness can only be achieved by looking inward & learning to enjoy whatever life has –and this requires transforming greed into gratitude,” wrote the ancient theologian, John Chrysostom.
Sitting there with Queen Anne’s lace scratching up my ankles, watching Shalom pluck and pick, you think maybe….
Maybe you want Mrs. Martin’s lavateras and Mrs. Bauman’s weedless squash, or maybe you want kids that aren’t rebelling loud and ugly or you want a husband that whispers quiet that you’re beautiful or you want a degree on your wall or a number on your scale, or grand accolades ringing in your ears —
but maybe …. Happiness isn’t something you ever achieve, but only receive — like a gift. Like taking now as an unexpected gift of keys that will open you to more of God.
Shalom’s got light in her hair. There are wild and free flowers right in the ditch across from the embattled garden. There is always, always, always something to be thankful for.
Yeah – there are weeds and disappointments and seeming failures. There are days that tear out still-beating chunks of your bare heart, whole seasons that feel like every breath is through burning smoke. There is always hope.
The real essence of the universe is endless grace – which is the theological term for surprises. As long as there is still time —there will be surprises.
Apparent failures can be the way your Father births a successful faith.
Shalom and I fill vases with wildflowers.
“See? Doesn’t matter if you didn’t get to plant zinnias this year, Mama. God was growing something else to fill things up.”
And I swallow hard and nod. God is always growing something to fill the empty places up.
And it’s always possible – joy is always surprisingly possible.
You can have joy any moment you turn hidden greed for more into honest gratitude for now. No matter the prison, you can be Freed by Gratitude.
Shalom leans into smell the sweet peas.
Joy isn’t about how much our lives have — but how much we enjoy our lives.
Joy is never made by Having More. Joy is always made by EnJoying More.
More Christ, more now, more grace.
The weeds on the windowsill all look like glory.
Change your life in 60 Days: One Thousand Gifts Devotional: Reflections on Finding Everyday Graces – 60 Days of Devotional Reflections. 60 Days to Joy. Practical. Profound. Pen-worthy: includes the only numbered 1000 gifts journal, space for you from #1-#1000, to begin the radical habit of thanking God for your own one thousand gifts.
The endless grace of our overflowing God, it’s meant to be experienced directly. Pick up a pen and this devotional journal for you or a friend — and witness life change. God’s just waiting to bless with the greatest gift of all—more and more of Himself…
Over one million copies sold: One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are: How do we find joy in the midst of deadlines, debt and daily duties? Embrace everyday blessings and embark on the transformative spiritual discipline of chronicling God’s gifts.
Heart-aching stories of the everyday give you a way of seeing that opens your eyes to ordinary amazing grace, a way of being present to God that makes you deeply happy, and a way of living that is finally fully alive. Come make your life the best dare of all!
(Foreign Language Translations of One Thousand Gifts)
July 4, 2015
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [07.04.15]
come exhale? an extraordinary virtual tour through all 50 states in America
well — this you just gotta see for yourself
…the most recent version of the United States’ flag was designed by a high school student who initially received only a B- for his proposed design?
glory even in the dark and deep places
zooming in at world record speeds? extraordinary
because yeah, really, no matter our actions? we all just want to be loved
yeah — sometimes you gotta catch a ride on greater wings
gather the family? — for a pretty amazing little feast
what some happy looks like around our world
a new retail concept that could bridge two pressing issues: food waste & hunger. Brilliant
maybe a really good idea for this weekend?
when a girl dances her way right into history
he’s giving it forward to this hard working lemonade stand attendee Best!
yep — the 7 minute turnaround
what this kid did? qualifies as a true hero
at 70? 100 mile endurance race? only watch if you want to be ridiculously inspired!
when the museum puts it all back together — and all is forgiven
… sort of a lot like life and grace
when the kids of America… sing for America
read this one several times this week … exactly.
what does it take to revive a masterpiece?
he’s most satisfied when? yeah, talk about soul inspiring
Books on the Stack at the Farm
Heroic Path: An encouraging read for the man in your life, for men (and their sons), seeking the Heroic Path:
“We grow when we face ourselves. When we confront Something Awful. When we summon the courage to take on the impossible…” A strengthening read to have laying about for him on a lazy summer evening.
Chasing Sunsets: A Novel (Angels Walking): … the story of one woman’s deep longings of the soul, and the sacrifices she’s willing to make in search of healing… A summer read for a day in the hammock with a glass of ice tea.
Inspiring: “It wasn’t enough to wish people well and offer a quick prayer. God’s people needed to act.”
one family. world changers. contagious possibilities.
this college student doesn’t hesitate to save a stranger’s life – what a story
“…as exceptional as this is? It shouldn’t be exceptional…”
how the award-winning photographers think
Wife and loyal dog — honor one cop who sacrificed it all
a house that raised a family — is so much more than wood and shingles…
So our farm girl, Hope? She’s in Africa on the 4th of July — which is LIBERATION DAY in Rwanda! The day Rwanda marks the end of the genocide…. the 4th of July is sweet liberty for Rwandans who chose peace and hope and the future on July 4th, 1994…
And our 16 year old Hope-girl? She writes this on her Instagram — and her old mama chokes up a bit:
Want to take your sweet liberties & help our Hope-girl free someone from poverty?
#BeAWorldChanger with our Hope & change the life of child today on July 4th!
What better way to celebrate July 4th than by giving someone else freedom!
Post of the Week from these parts here:
I scratched down this for all of us having hard days in hard a hard, loud, hurting world:
dear You: a handful of brave things for hard days in a hard world
the kids watched this a dozen times this week… because what she says at 4:33? is about perfect
their hearts beat as one — until the very end
In the beginning was this — spectacular
Hey Soul? yeah, we are so motivated: Nothing ahead of us is greater than our God right beside us.
Fear’s got nothing on us this week — nothing. Because God’s got everything — absolutely everything.
So bring it on: All fear is fraud — and nowhere on earth is beyond the reach of God.
“Fearless now, I trust in God” Ps. 56MSG
#PreachingGospeltoMyself
[excerpted from our morning devotions in 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 3, 2015
what unites a Great Land & People : the real Power of Patriotism
It was when the woman leaned back to watch the fireworks.
When the kids, full of strawberries and ice cream, sprawl about her in the grass, waiting in the thickening dusk, waiting in the sea of blankets spread out and tilted lawn chairs and balding men with bare hearts sit near the elderly, white crowned women whose lives had birthed glory.
It’s when her husband unfolds on the ground beside her and finds her hand there in the dark.
When they both sit there with their fingers laced and pressing into the damping grass, into the steadying earth under them, and the first set of sparklers goes off on the other side of the bleachers — that’s when she tastes something sweet and full of light in the back of her throat…. like an ache for all this grace.
For all these dirt-worn faces of honest farmers, the strong backs of willing vets, the lights there on the highway of every long-haul truck driver who just keeps working on.
That’s what it was — a love for the kids who run bases on a thousand ball diamonds, the teens who bag a million bags of groceries, the doctors who catch a whole country of squalling babies, for the mothers over stoves and the fathers over garbage bags.
For the sheets of rain out across the lake in the muggy swell of a summer thunderstorm, the wind rippling glory through waving fields of golding wheat, for how many trains rolling through how many towns and on until they are memories in how many horizons.
The sky keeps blooming light.
And the shade of a country of maples stretches.
And a land of winding rivers carves through forests and fields, and generations of voices carries over yards and campfires and front porches and somewhere a radio mutters a song and the night fills with a whole a nation of steeples proclaiming their thanks to the skies.
The woman could feel the dirt like a homecoming under her.
She knows what she is made of and where she’s from.
And that we all feel this undeniable bond with the land of our birth, and she knows it: we are all born of the dust of the earth and the breath of God.
And this is what makes us bound to all the earth’s people and to our homeland of heaven.
And she looks around at the dads rocking babies and the kids curled in blankets and she feels it like a work of fire in her: Heavenly patriotism is this belief that all human lives everywhere are worth the same.
That we’re a country of countries, a world of families, a earth of one human race, and that was it — the essence of this great land she lived in.
What really unites a great land is more than a flag — it’s an idea. The idea that all peoples under heaven are the idea of a Great God.
That all peoples under heaven, in our back alleys and in our hospitals, in our prisons and shelters and headlines and every person in our far-flung world, are flagged as the handiwork of God, the dream of God, the art of God.
Everywhere she looked, there it was — “I was the stranger and you welcomed me in.”
It was strange and glorious, how it was happening in her, for her nation, for all the nations: Heavenly patriotism makes you patriotic for all of humanity.
And under fireworks, she watches them all.
The mothers stroking the hair of drowsy ones and toddlers clapping awed for every color eruption, eyes reflecting every blooming of the sky. And the old men with arms around their elegant wives.
And there’s a nurse somewhere who keeps watch.
And a clerk who keeps a gas pump open and a farmer stays up in the barn with a sick calf and a youth group giving it their all a million miles away from home and there is a whole world of people and glory and life could be about the liberty of all. You are doing something great with your life – when you’re doing all the small things with His Great love.
You aren’t a citizen of here working your way into heaven. You’re a citizen of heaven working His Way through here.
And it was there in every flag: the stripes that went on like a road, like The Way of Love that goes everywhere and always welcomes the wanderer in.
All those stars like a Love that can’t be contained by the walls in this world.
There under the bloom of fireworks, you could feel it —
the love of Christ exploding a heart.
photo credit 1 and 2
July 2, 2015
when you want to walk through the hardest part of following Jesus
Sometimes you unexpectedly meet a person & you find yourself face to face with what it means to be more like Jesus. The way Tony Reinke has thoughtfully listened and engaged ideas with me, the way we have learned from each other, sharpened each other, challenged and encouraged, edified and prayed for each other, has been a model to me of what it means to be brothers and sisters growing in Christ. He has been a prayer warrior for us — and he’s been the kindest, Christ-like friend in ways our family will never, ever forget. You may know Tony’s voice as the host of the Ask Pastor John podcast, but he is also an author and his new book on the pastoral care of John Newton in a book titled Newton on the Christian Life: To Live Is Christ. As I turned these relevant, refreshing pages on Newton, I felt so many times like my heart might burst for the joy of it. So we’ve invited Tony, a brother I hold in the highest esteem, to share more with us some of the soul-stabilizing wisdom from one of the most interesting and relevant pastors you will ever meet, John Newton. It’s a grace to welcome our brilliant friend, Tony Reinke, to the farm’s front porch…
Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost but now am found,
was blind but now I see.
So the President closed his recent eulogy in Charleston by leading the congregation in an impromptu singing of Amazing Grace, the most famous hymn in the English language.
And the whole country — much of the world — joined in.
The song is so familiar many of us can sing these lines by heart.
But long before Amazing Grace was sung in a Charleston church, or recorded countless times in Nashville recording studios, or hummed over a kitchen sink, these old lyrics told the story of its author, John Newton.
A Wretch Bottoms Out
Newton was an eighteenth century wretch, and he knew it.
His early life in England was full of rebellion and selfish sin. His tongue was loaded with venom, and his heart dripped with bitterness.
When he wasn’t leading his friends in foolishness, he was making enemies with anyone in authority over him.
Newton’s Christian mother died when he was seven, and for most of his life he was raised by a religiously detached and emotionally distant father.
Yet Newton was always haunted by God.
As a young man, he fled, like Jonah, away from God and into a sea merchant’s life, where his sin could run free and unfettered.
His disdain for God kept him on water and away from churches, and his love of money lured him into the African slave trade.
But Newton’s ambition for a life “free from God” came to an abrupt end one night, when a violent North Atlantic storm slammed into his ship, and the Commander of the waves crashed into John Newton’s 22-year-old debauched life.
Death brushed close to Newton that night, so close the huge waves almost swept him off the deck and nearly swallowed his ship.
The brink of death can break thick iron chains of obstinate pride, and it did for Newton.
He would never forget this moment for the rest of his life.
God spared his life (and his ship), buoyed his soul, and shook him from his spiritual sleep and ignited new desires in his life that would culminate in his full conversion.
By amazing grace, Newton became a devout Christian.
By amazing grace, he became a devoted husband in a beautiful love story for the ages.
By amazing grace, he became one of the greatest hymn writers in history, an influential abolitionist, and a skilled pastor of souls.
By amazing grace, John Newton used the backdrop of his sin to display the magnificence of Christ.
To Social Media
Newton had a story to tell the world.
Within just a few months of becoming a pastor at age 39, Newton published his conversion story in a short autobiography.
His popularity exploded overnight. He became a celebrity convert, a center of attention, and the recipient of many letters.
Newton embraced the social media of his day — letter writing — and faithfully served in this role for nearly 50 years. Today many consider him to be the greatest writer of pastoral letters in the history of the Church.
In the nearly 1,000 letters we can now read for ourselves, Newton wrote to skeptics who were unconvinced of their need for Christ, to perplexed Christians who were mystified by life, and to many of his friends who were stumbling through the darkness of depression.
Newton used his experience, and his pen, to be a voice for Christ.
Those precious letters have been a steady diet for my soul over the years. Newton has become a friend who corrects me, encourages me, and challenges many of my assumptions about the ideal Christian life.
Life at Its Hardest
In one letter, Newton looks back over his life and writes to a friend: “If I may speak my own experience, I find that to keep my eye simply upon Christ, as my peace, and my life, is by far the hardest part of my calling.”
Wait, what?!
How can a man with one of history’s best-selling conversion stories wake up and forget Christ? And yet he did.
“To live is Christ” (Philippians 1:20).
He forgot it often. So do I.
I have a propensity to live with no awareness of my dependence on Christ.
Like Newton, I need this reminder every day.
Christ is not my acquaintance when I need a quick ‘hello’; He is my deepest and truest Friend.
Christ is not my battery pack when I need a quick jolt; Christ is the power plant of my spiritual life. I am united to Him, and He generates my wisdom, my righteousness, my sanctification, and my redemption. He is the boast of my life (1 Corinthians 1:30–31).
Newton will not let me forget Jesus.
Newton reminds me that I live by the life of Jesus.
I live by Christ, who healed bodies with a touch and who commanded death to flee with a word.
I live by Christ, who commanded waves to stop crashing and who commands sinners to stop sinning.
Most soberly of all, Newton reminds me that I live by the death of Christ, who was hammered to a cross in my place, and who drank down all the bitter dregs of God’s wrath for all my hell-deserving acts of rebellion against my Creator.
This Christ. How can I forget that I live by this Christ, who bled blood so red that it bleached my soul white?
How can I forget this Christ who rose from the dead in a victorious power that defeats every one of my sins?
How can I forget this Christ who ascended into the sky, and now reigns over every power and principality he defeated?
And still I manage to ignore him.
The Source of Our Daily Joy
The truth is, I live in a loud and busy world.
Keeping Christ in view is a fight, the central fight of my Christian life, and the central fight for my daily joy.
This daily struggle to keep my eyes focused on Christ is not how I save myself.
My daily focus on Christ is — as it was for Newton — a reminder that my full salvation is found in Jesus. He “is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since He always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25).
To the uttermost.
This was a precious word John Newton delighted in and studied carefully, like a diamond in his hand.
“It has an extensive meaning,” he wrote in a letter. “It includes a conquest over all difficulties, and a supply of all that is necessary. How totally, and (if possible) how often, should I have been lost, had not Jesus engaged to save to the uttermost.”
My hope is not in my ability to remember, but in Christ’s power to save.
In his letters, Newton pours image after image to make his point. Christ enlightens the most ignorant, He softens the hardest heart, He rescues the most lost, He delivers the most tempted, He comforts the most distressed, and he pardons the most guilty.
In defiance of all my sins, and my fears, and my forgetfulness, Christ saves to the uttermost.
My Life
The brilliance of Newton is seen in the ease of translating his 18th-century letters into my 21st-century life. Like Newton, I forget Christ in my life because I center my life around me.
Yet there is hope for me in Newton’s social wisdom.
Pre-Instagram Newton reminds me that Christ can save me from a soul-emptying addiction to praise and applause. Christ is more satisfying to my soul than likes and shares.
Pre-Facebook Newton reminds me that Christ is sufficient to save me from an addiction to online, click-bait controversies, curiosities, and celebrity news.
Christ alone satisfies the awe-hunger in my heart.
Newton’s words point me, over and over again, to the Savior who saves to the uttermost.
So, yes, Newton is right. The hardest part of the Christian life is keeping the eyes of our souls focused on the beauty of our Savior.
We must fight for focus in our daily lives — in worship, in prayer, in Bible-reading, and in between smartphone notifications.
Newton knew why this was all so important. Catching frequent sights of the glory of Jesus Christ is the apex of my spiritual freedom, it is the fuel for my daily joy, it is the key to all my personal growth and maturity, and it is the pathway to glory (2 Corinthians 3:16–18).
John Newton reminds me that keeping my focus on Christ is the hardest part of my life.
But Christ is worth the fight.
Christ is our life —
and His amazing grace is the sweet supply of our daily joy.
Tony Reinke is a writer for desiringGod.org and the host of their popular Ask Pastor John podcast. Tony is the author of two books, one on reading — Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books — and a new book on the most important life lessons he gleaned from reading the letters of John Newton — Newton on the Christian Life: To Live Is Christ (2015).
The beauty of Christ shines on every page and my prayer is that many readers will linger long in these pages and to find their hearts satisfied in Christ.
Life Changing, soul refreshing Summer Read: Highly recommending Newton on the Christian Life: To Live Is Christ.
Links for 2015-07-01 [del.icio.us]
absolutely brilliant...
Nicholas Winton Is Dead at 106; Saved Children from the Holocaust
"...his contribution to the human race is immeasurable.”
July 1, 2015
dear You: a handful of brave things to keep in your pocket for hard days in a hard world
So this is what it comes to, huh, Kid?
You pack your bags.
Pack up your bags, and you’re outta here, flying out on a plane headed east. Straight out over the ocean, straight to the red dirt of Africa.
That place where the heart of God bleeds up through the earth.
And you’ll be gone for a whole lot longer than one week of happy summer camp.
You’re 16 and you’ll be gone a month on the other side of the world, 4 weeks of interning in Rwanda. And yeah, I know, I know — this is the point. The whole point of welcoming kids into your life is to wave good-bye to adults embarking out on their own lives.
So — Braveheart, Beautiful Girl, quiet and lovely in a loud world — this is the thing… maybe everything boils down to a handful of things?
I can’t pack your bags anymore — you’re all too grown up for that…. but maybe in a deafening world, I can hand you handful of Brave and Beautiful Things for your every day?
Straight off the top, can I just quietly say — no one needs to go around with that parental policing voice in your head — you know?
The parent, superego voice that lives in your head: You always get things wrong… You are always behind and I can’t believe you didn’t get this right and how did you blow it again?!
Parents aren’t supposed to be the loud police voice in your head — but the gentle pastor at your side.
It’s always there — if you always listen for that quiet, gentle voice of Grace on the inside:
You can do this thing — because you were made to do hard and holy things.
You are always enough — because You have Jesus and He is always enough.
You don’t have to get it perfect — you just have to get back up and keep going.
So maybe yeah, think of all this as a gentle note to tuck in your back pocket — and that this getting up every day and listening for His Voice, that’s Number One of the handful of brave and beautiful things for your every day:
Number One: Fall in love with the One who is The Way — and the way you’re supposed to go will follow…. as you follow Him.
You’ve got to want to be one with Him — more than you want to be a Someone.
You’ve got to want to serve more than you want to be seen, you’ve got to care more than you want to be comfortable, you’ve got to want to give more than you want to get.
You’ve got to want His approval more than all the other things that will prove to be worthless.
Promise yourself you’ll remember this because you will need this most: You can always have as much as God as you want.
Number Two: Taste the grittiness of work — or you won’t ever taste success.
Every day you can get up and get scared — or you can get up and get yourself ready.
Nothing erases stress quite like preparation.
Bury all your nagging fears in your faithful work — or your fears will bury you in nagging doubts.
Promise yourself you’ll remember this because it will effect your joy: Be entirely engaged in the process of your work, and be entirely disengaged in outcome of your work. You can’t determine outcome — but you can determine to come and put in everything you have.
Let your joy always be in doing the work — not in the outcome of the work. The journey not only matters more than the destination — the journey actually becomes the destination.
Success is always showing up and bending down. Full stop.
Number Three: Don’t love your present self more than you love your future self.
Give your future self the present of being loved more than your present self.
That means: Make your present self a gift to your future self. Trust me — this is what really want — more than what you think you want. Love your future self — more than your present self. This is one of the best gifts you can give yourself.
That means: Do hard things in the short run — to give yourself holy and happy things in the long run.
Though everywhere tells you the point of living is to avoid suffering — please: Always embrace the struggle:
You know there’s no way around pain — there’s always either the pain of disappointment or the pain of discipline.
And don’t ever, ever, ever be concerned with failing — only be concerned about failing to keep on going.
Number 4: Be a Giver.
Get up every day and just do that: Volunteer to be a Giver. Never stop looking for a way to be the Giver. The world’s going around with a big sign: Wanted: GIVERS. (Sorry — The world already has enough takers.)
Be a Giver — and you will get the most.
People may forget what you did or didn’t do — but they won’t forget how you made them feel. Hearts have the longest memories. This is what makes you love people people and love life and never be intimidated in any setting: Lean in and make eye contact and simply listen to hearts.
Listening is a revolutionary act of liberation — it will liberate you from the prison of your prejudices and free you to love large.
And? Always speak through your heart — not through your expectations or your frustrations or your provocations or even your lips. Always let every word you speak come through your heart.
Because the bottom line is:
It doesn’t matter if you have some big title — what matters is that you have a big heart. A big heart will trump a big title every time.
Number 5: Watch your fingers so your heart can care.
Maybe the most important part of your body to control is your index finger — because it’s most like the devil: It most wants to point and prosecute.
At all costs — don’t be a finger pointer… and avoid joining packs of finger-pointers — who point and blame peers and parents and circumstances and society and somebody else.
The world doesn’t need any more finger-pointers.
It needs more people to honestly point out their own sins — and humbly point up to everyone’s Savior.
The world doesn’t need more loud people who think they have it all right — it needs more people compassionate people to sit down and listen long enough to quietly realize they had some of it wrong.
The world needs people whose sacrificial giving is loudest and largest thing about them. People who quietly weep with the wounded and listen to the hurting and generously serve the Other — because that’s what it means to genuinely love one another: not to love people just like you, but to Love the Other.
The Givers and the Listeners and the Lovers — we can be part of His beautiful healing of the world….
So when you get to the end of the day, when you get down far down that road your on, when you get to wondering what it’s all about that — I don’t know, maybe it’s just this handful of 5 Brave and Beautiful Things I wanted to tuck in your back pocket in a world that’s hurting everywhere?
And maybe I just wanted to look you long in the eyes and memorize this in the midst of everything: Trust that Grace will always meet you.
Believe that when God made the universe, that He breathed Grace as the air of the universe.
When you believe that the earth’s atmosphere is actually Grace:
You aren’t afraid of people or asking questions or risking big or laughing loud or believing the best or believing in beauty or loving across fences or walking up to people and taking off your mask and making every step you take into a leap of faith.
Please, always: Believe that Grace will always, always, always meet you.
Because Grace has a name. And He always meets you. In everything, through everything, in spite of anything.
Grace has a name — and He always, always meets you.
So go on, keep going on, Braveheart — you are loved more than you know, liked more than you can imagine, and are stronger than you dreamed…. so: Give love. And live large — And love larger.
You can’t even begin to imagine how there’s always amazing grace up ahead.
Resources:
You’re So Loved Teacup and Saucer
Celebrate Friendship Pocket Notebooks
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