Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 205
May 30, 2015
May 29, 2015
How to Know God: The Unembarrassed Interchange of Love
He’s one of my absolute very favourite writers. A self-taught theologian, A.W. Tozer, was a pastor, writer and editor whose powerful use of words continues to grip the intellect and stir the soul of today’s reader. He came to be known as the Prophet of Today because of his penetrating work on more than 40 books on the deeper spiritual life. His book, The Pursuit of God, stays permanently on my nightstand. It’s a grace to welcome the writings of the distinguished A. W. Tozer to the farm’s front porch today…
God is a person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels loves, desires and suffers as any other person may.
In making Himself known to us He stays by the familiar pattern of personality.
He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions.
The continuous and unembarrassed interchanged of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.
This intercourse between God and the soul is known to us in conscious personal awareness.
It is personal:
It does not come through the body of believers, as such, but is known to the individual, and to the body, through the individuals who compose it.
It is conscious:
It does not stay below the threshold of consciousness and work there unknown to the soul….
but comes within the field of awareness where the man can know it as he knows any other fact of experience.
You and I are in little (our sins excepted) what God is in large.
Being made in His image we have within us the capacity to know Him.
In our sins we lack only power.
The moment the Spirit has quickened us to life in regeneration our whole being senses its kinship to God and leaps up in joyous recognition. That is the heavenly birth without which we cannot see the kingdom of God.
It is, however, not an end but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart’s happy exploration of the infinite riches of the Godhead.
That is where we begin, I say — but where we stop no man has yet discovered, for there is in the awful and mysterious depths of the Triune God neither limit nor end.
Shoreless Ocean, who can sound Thee?
Thine own eternity is round Thee, Majesty divine!
To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too easily satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.
St. Bernard stated this holy paradox in a musical quatrain that will be instantly understood by every worshiping soul:
We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread
And long to feast upon Thee still:
We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead
And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.
Come near to the holy men and women of the past — and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God.
They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out,
and when they had found Him —
the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.
“As the heart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” This thirst for an intimate relationship with God, claims A.W. Tozer, is not for a select few, but should be the experience of every follower of Christ. But, he asserts, it is all too rare when believers have become conditioned by tradition to accept standards of mediocrity, and the church struggles with formality and worldliness. Using examples from Scripture and from the lives of saints who lived with this thirst for God, Tozer sheds light on the path to a closer walk with God.
Tozer is one of my most favourite authors/theologians ever, and this newly covered life changing, The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine is a must read and may be one of my ultimate favorite books.
[ Our humble thanks to Moody Publishers for their partnership of today’s devotion ]
May 28, 2015
In a World of Injustices: A Letter to the Wounded & Suffering & Hurting
We can hear you.
You who are battered and bruised …
You who are suffering an unspoken broken behind doors we know ––
in our churches, across our tables, our streets, right now across this warring, angry planet — at the hands of lovers and leaders, and enemies and family, you who are bleeding in the shadows, who are in the back pews — or turning and walking out the door —
who are abused, persecuted and forgotten in corners all over this busted world.
We will lay our ears down to the ground and we will hear the rocks cry out and we’ll be rocked and howl loud and long with you.
The media may mask you, indifference may ignore you, agendas may muzzle you, rhetoric may silence you and headlines may miss you — but we will listen through our tears, tears washing away all the noise of power so we can hear.
Because People of the Word are to be for the voiceless, to stand with the silenced, to never make pain out to be invisible, as injustice is intolerable.
Because People of the Church are to be those who stand up so safe places open up, who lead by always going lower, who expose and confront abuse everywhere they find it, so the hope of the Gospel can be of use anywhere it goes.
Because People of the Cross are to be witnesses for the suffering, and responders to the victims, and testifiers of Truth, no matter the cost, no matter the risk, because Christ is The Truth — and where there isn’t Truth, there isn’t Christ. Why ever hide or cover-up the Truth?
No one need ever fear telling the Truth about anything — unless we fear Christ isn’t capable of redeeming everything.
It comes like bona fide good news through all the breaking bad news:
The Gospel always releases any need of covering up and makes a place for standing up and opening up. Be brave.
The Gospel always completely changes one’s eternal position before God, yet never changes one’s present consequences for crimes against people. Be assured.
The Gospel always says that we care more about the victimization of the vulnerable than about the reputation of the comfortable. Be comforted.
The Gospel always cups your face in the midst of your worst suffering — and offers you the cup of communion through your worst suffering. Be Loved, Beloved.
People will fail, systems will fail, institutions, programs, plans will fail… but you will never be forsaken, abandoned, rejected, forgotten or alone…. He gives you Himself and never stops whispering: With You. With You. With You.
Because the mercies of God never fail and His mercy envelopes your every thrumming thought and begging pulse.
I heard that once, and we whisper it down the line of sufferers, like passing on resuscitation —
Rechem, Mercy, Rechem, Mercy.
The word in Hebrew for mercy is rechem — the very same word for womb, with different vowel points.
Mercy is a womb. The Mercy of God is like a womb for the children trafficked, the vulnerable abused, the suffering who cry soundlessly behind masks.
Mercy is the womb that carries you anew every morning.
Mercy is God making Himself your all encompassing safe place — so you can grow. Mercy is always that safe space that allows growth. And new every morning.
Only where there is mercy is there growth — and hope for change. Mercy is what begs us to be mercifully safe places for the suffering and victimized and abused and all the broken in our families, our communities, our churches, in our aching, breaking world, — so every soul can enlarge and grow strong.
In a world of injustices, there are a world of people who will stand with the powerless — so there is less injustice and more of the power of the Gospel.
There is a whole world of people who won’t stop listening:
Lay your ear up against any suffering and that’s the beat you can always hear — the heart beat of our God, Emmanuel: With You. With You. With You.
God always with you.
Related: Letters to the Wounded #2
Sozan’s Impossible Choice — and Our Very Possible One
May 27, 2015
4 Ways to Better Friends
It was after Mare Griebe said she was done with me, that I knew.
Mare, she had taken me to my first youth Bible study.
She delivered the thickly folded scribbled notes from the first boy who ever asked me out . . . the one I ended up marrying.
And I had flown half across the country to be her maid of honour. And then again, ten years later to hold her first baby.
We talked lactation and I helped with latch and I thought we’d never fall apart.
We were in grade 9 when she had played me my first Keith Greene song: “So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt.” It was the eighties. We had teased bangs and thick glasses and co-joined lives. She gave me more of Jesus.
Sometimes you can wanna to go back — and there ain’t no going back.
She had called that winter.
Left a message on the answering machine. I didn’t get around to calling her back for a couple of weeks . . . I folded laundry, made pots of soup, and baked dozens of loaves of bread. I had read history lessons to kids, taken out the garbage, paid bills, checked math homework. I had found a pair of red shoes, picked up knitting and a camera and a lot of lego. Planted a garden, attended meetings, returned emails.
But I didn’t get around to returning her call.
Painful how that is — Your days never fail to betray your priorities.
Click here to continue reading how I really blew it… just keepin’ it really real over here
Resource: my absolute favourite tea cups
May 26, 2015
How You Can Keep On Hoping for What Seems Impossible
Never got over this…
So if you turned right after Clappison’s Corner and drove real slow around the potholes, you might see it?
Sneeze or blink, and yeah, you might not.
But it’s there on the top of a mossy stake, pointing the way you gotta take, either way: Hope.
You don’t want to know where all the other roads lead.
Just down the road from Centerton, thats’s where my Dad grew up on a dairy farm.
Right around the corner from the Dykstra’s* dairy farm. Hank Dykstra had seven kids and a heart attack. Fell over dead to this world and alive to the next when their oldest boy, Richard, was only 14. Sometimes people are so quiet and brave, we forget that they are suffering.
My Dad and Richard Dysktra were both farm boys about to start high school when Richard took over the farm and helped his mom raise the six other kids and milk 40 Holstein cows morning and night, 365 days of the year.
Dad said the high school bus would wait at the end of the lane for Richard and Dad would watch the door of the barn to see if Richard was coming from his cows to class. That only happened less than a handful times a month.
Because sometimes the road you’re on is more important than the bus waiting out on the road that someone else says you have to take.
My Dad grew up milking cows and growing corn, got married at 24, and bought a farm 3 hours west of Centerton.
Richard Dyskstra grew up milking cows, raised up his 4 brothers and 2 sisters, got married at 37, and bought a farm 3 hours east of Centerton.
6 long hours of unwinding road now stretched between the two neighbour farm boys and their farms.
Old Mrs. Dyskstra moved to town. My grandparents sold the home dairy farm and retired just down the road from Hank Dykstra’s farm, built a house by a pond by the edge of a woods where the frog sang all summer long.
In the evenings, Grandpa would sit out on the porch with his sweating cold glass of ice tea and watch the younger Dykstra boys drive their tractors and hay wagons by, back to the barn and the cows.
Sometimes Richard Dyskstra would crank over that diesel engine of his four wheel drive pickup truck and drive the 6 hours of road, cross a dozen county lines, back to see my Dad, to drive around in the pickup looking at crops and talking yields and tractor and sky. I’d watch their hands move with their words, two farmers in feed caps who never stopped working with their hands.
And sometimes Richard Dykstra brought his young wife and his three little kids. The oldest girl hung on her Dutch dad, on his arm, on his words, on the edge of his knee, like he hung her moon. She was four. Every child is a message that everything is possible again; your past, your story, this world, it all has another chance.
Dad’s kids, the next generation of kids, babysit the blonde hair, blue eyed Dykstra kids, while the two farmers take their wives for ice cream down roads of corn and fields of waking visions.
I get married at 20 to a Dutch farmer, move to a farm 20 minutes north of Dad and the home farm. My sister gets married at 23 to a Ukrainian, moves to a city 40 hours west of Dad and the home farm.
My brother turns 20, 25, 30, 35. He never gets married. Time likes to lie and say dreams have become impossible things. My grandparents die.
They bury them out under a spreading maple tree behind that United Church on the north side of Line 45. Holsteins grazed soundlessly on the far side of that maple tree. Old Mrs. Dykstra takes a gravestone of her own out on a grassy knoll. There comes a place when your world will go all quiet and the only thing that will be left is the last beat of your own heart.
Be still often enough you learn its beating song before its forever gone.
There are only so many bluing spring skies to inhale.
On a Friday night, with my brother only a few months from his 40th birthday, my Farmer here works till 1:30 am out in the fields, planting beans under a milking moon. We sleep 3 hours. And then hit the floor at 4:30 am, roll the kids out of bed, hang the kids’ ironed clothes in the back of the van and head back east.
Head east past Toronto. East past the turn off to Line 45 to the United Church and my grandparents names etching silent and worn into granite day after silent day. Head east past Beagle Club Road and the Old Dykstra farm and the hands of time, east past The Met where Grandma got the groceries.
I tell the kids how I can still smell her Red Rose lotion, how she kept in the car and slathered it on even her elbows every time Grandpa drove her into town.
Six, nearly 7 hours, we drive east. My father’s somewhere on this road. My mother, my brother, we’re all heading east. If you haven’t ever really decided where you’re going, any road will get you there — it’s only when you know where you want to go, that there’s only One Way.
I text my sister pictures from the road. She tells me she can hear Grandpa’s voice along that stretch of highway. The boys read old beat-up paperbacks and count roadside markers.
And then when the sun’s getting high and hot overhead on a Saturday morning, the weary Farmer and his wife find a Tim Horton’s coffee shop and the boys take hangers and pleated pants to the bathroom to replace their jeans and the girls wrestle into dresses in the back seat and a bunch of farmers try to clean up for a day that’s been 20 years, a whole generation, in the making.
Twenty years my brother, my dad’s first son, namesake of my grandfather’s father, he’s been riding shotgun and solo in his pickup, twenty years he’s made breakfast alone, took his hunting dogs out to the woods on Christmas Eve, come to Christmas morning alone. Sometimes you get so used to something, you forget that anything is possible.
But when Richard Dysktra’s wife writes me to say she had had a dream, had a dream that woke her up in the middle of the night, that their now grown-up daughter, the Dykstra girl out on the mission field, was married to my nearly 40-year-old brother? Who believes in dreams anymore?
Who believes in unseen things, in impossible things, in the things you can’t measure and control and deduce and reduce and wrap up in a reasonably neat and timely package and who in this cynical world remembers how to find Hope?
We’d all rolled our eyes. My brother went on his bachelor ways. For years. Met a nice girl. Prayed about it on some long cross country trip. Told God that as soon as he got home, he was going to ask that nice girl out. When a tractor trailer truck passes him on the road with one word emblazoned across the side: “Dykstra.” Whatever.
Except “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” [Kuyper]
My brother pulls in some roadside gas station to fill up. Prays for real clarity. And when he pulled back out on to the road? Another tractor trailer. With only word painted larger than life across its length: “Dykstra.” Whatever.
Except: “We believe that the unseen hand may be at times assuredly felt by gracious souls.” [Spurgeon]
Except we believe that an unseen Hope makes a Red Sea Road where there seems to be no way.
Except we can believe in miracles because we’ve known the miracle of change in our own hearts — and where there is real love, there are always real miracles.
Four years after Richard Dykstra’s wife’s dream and a lot of prayers and a slow courtship, after 20 years of my brother living single — we clean up and get into wedding threads at a Tim Horton’s coffee shop, and get to our seats in a little country Baptist church, and my brother stands up front in his blue jeans and boots and we all turn around to watch Richard Dykstra walk that girl we used to babysit, that girl than hung on his knee, his arm, now up to my brother’s waiting arm.
There are vows and prayers and how could my grandparents have ever known this would come to be?
When more than 30 years ago, their own boy, my Dad, went 3 hours west, and the Dykstra boy, Richard, went three hours east — and now my Dad looks over at Richard Dykstra, their kids standing up there by the preacher, I can see it glistening clear right there in Dad’s eyes: Time knows nothing.
Time can’t dictate dreams or hijack hope or determine destination.
Time may have hands on the clock but its arms are too weak to rob anybody of hope, steal anybody’s prayers, destroy anybody’s joy.
So what if Time’s got hands on a clock — it’s God who has His Hands on the universe. Every little thing is going to be okay because God is working good through every little thing.
All that’s happening is just happening to make miracles. There are miracles always unfolding under the impossibles.
“Joys are always on their way to us,” writes Amy Carmichael. “They are always traveling to us through the darkness of the night. There is never a night when they are not coming.”
Because there is never a night where joys are not coming to us, there is never a road that can’t arrive at Hope. Circumstances can go ahead and run out of time — but the courageous refuse to run out of hope.
We can always hope because there is always joy traveling to us down the unexpected roads.
And because the thing is: Hope always has a cost and hope is always worth it, because who wants the cheap and deadened alternative?
Hope fuels the soul to impossible places.
And my brother dances. He dances with the Dykstra girl at a wedding that’s been twenty years in the making and a fiddle plays and I stand beside my dad and he nods and I nod and there are no words —- no one knows how a road will unfold.
In the middle of the fiddle playing a beautiful ache, The Farmer leans over, whispers in my ear, that the sky outside is as black as your boot, rain coming on clouds like a pitch black night. Joys are always traveling to us — even down the darkest roads.
And when we step outside behind my brother and his bride, you can see the storm moving across the fields, down the road —
and there it is, the two of them standing under it, all of us standing under it:
a complete double rainbow arching like a sign of His promise round everything.
Us standing there laughing slack-jawed awe at the unboxable ways of God.
And those two rainbows arching like a Brave and Bold Hope around us —
and all the things miraculously possible.
Related: How To Get Through Dark Places
[ *names changed ]
May 25, 2015
May 24, 2015
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thank you, thank you, thank you...
...it's never too late to stock up.
Great advice here.
May 23, 2015
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [05.23.15]
yeah, come see all this wonder?
you’ve gotta take a weekend road trip around these pretty unbelievable roads?
grin.02
because we all need a bit of hope like this
maybe the most unlikely place for a concert?
WWII pilot flies again – 70 years later – this …. it’s never to late to jump in
think you could never? Think again — amazing
okay, everybody needs at least one teacher like this. absolute #lifechanger
the wonder of life
who doesn’t love this?! oldest sisters in the world at a combined 391 years of age!
the world would be something else if we all shared our space like this
… yeah, he never quite expected this
every weekend needs a bit of Paris: famous landmarks in Paris — recreated
uh…. wow!?!
Unbelievable. And completely unforgettable. I want to remember this… live like this.
have you hugged an officer today?
or, alternatively — I want to be like her if I grow up?
Eleven. She’s 11. And how she’s helped more than 500 children in need?
Be crazy inspired. We can change His world right where we are!
Overwhelming Story of the Week:
you all didn’t turn away and you stood up and did something to defy ISIS & made the story go viral and —
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU
for making more than a
HALF A MILLION DOLLAR
difference & WAGING LOVE & defying ISIS!
Check out the unfathomable story that you took unbelievably far & wide — and it
started a God-fire of passion in all of you.
Have questions? See Preemptive Love’s FAQ here
when you don’t walk away? this happens
what she’s doing at 93? a definite must read
blind pole vaulter shares – “we all struggle with something…”
doctor on wheels saving lives
without sight — but not without vision
Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil…
[check out additional Work of the People videos here]
Hey Soul? Look, today? You don’t have to be awesome & do everything.
You simply have to believe that the One who is Awesome loves you through everything.
Full stop. That’s it. Takes the pressure right off.
“Make yourselves *at home in My love*.” John 15:9 MSG
#TrustHisLoveForYou #HeIsEnough#SoHeMakesYouEnough #PreachingGospelToMyself
[excerpted from our morning prayers 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.
May 22, 2015
UNafraid: How to Trust God in an Unsafe World [or When Fear Feels Safer Than Trusting God]
As a former fear-er saved by God’s tender love and grace, Susie Davis has a passion for helping people find freedom and joy in their everyday life — you can feel it from the first moment you meet her. She exudes the freedom of joy. When she’s not at the barn or in the kitchen, you’re likely to find her encouraging fellow fear-ers or writing about uncovering joy in the everyday grace gifts like the pink geraniums and yellow finches that fill her backyard or even her little black cat, Madeleine. It’s a humbling grace to welcome my friend Susie and real hope to the farm’s front porch today…
At twelve years old I met Jesus.
I adored Him…everything about Him.
When I read the Bible and it said God had good plans for me, I believed every word.
Then at fourteen I saw my teacher murdered.
It was May, the end of junior high school, when a fellow classmate—a neighbor boy—walked into our classroom with a rifle and shot and killed my teacher.
God may have saved me, but the experience of witnessing a murder crashed in unexpectedly and made me afraid.
So afraid that I felt as if I had lost God somehow—or, even worse, that He had lost me. At fourteen I was forced to try to come to terms with this big, bad world we live in, and I was very fearful.
I loved God — but I did not trust Him.
Trusting God meant things might go wrong again — and I couldn’t afford to let that happen because then I would feel all the pain again. The pain of bad things.
And with the pain the lingering question, why do bad things happen?
I spent half my life being afraid, and by that I mean scared to stay alone in my house at night. As a teenager, I was so freaked out by being alone I would hide under the kitchen counter with the phone on my ear, anxious about things in the dark and terrified by the neighbor boy still living up the street.
The weird thing about being afraid for a long time is that you get comfortable with it.
And before long you start to believe fear itself keeps you safe and keeps bad things from happening. I felt like fear protected me. As long as I stayed vigilant, cautious, and wary, nothing bad would happen.
Instead of depending on God for protection, I held tight to something destructive.
Like an addict, I depended on something harmful and dangerous. Something that became a tool for the Enemy to push me in the corner, keep me under the counter, beat me down.
I believed in fear.
I felt hopeless trying to live with a Savior who didn’t seem to keep me safe from the bad things and was completely worn-out trying to take care of myself.
Over the years my fears spiraled out of control. I was afraid for my children. I became the mom who hypermanaged, helicopter-parented, and overthought every little thing, because fear told me that was my job.
I obsessed about my husband’s safety because fear lived by my side, whispering horrible things about the worst-case scenarios.
If you had looked into my life, you would have seen me peeking in the closets for bad guys, double- and triple-checking doors at night, obsessively washing my toddlers’ hands.
Fear infects your life in weird ways when you believe in it, always think on it, worship it. You become a fear-er.
Only I didn’t think I was a fear-er. I thought I was c-a-r-e-f-u-l. I thought I was being a good mom. A caring wife. But really, I was afraid. I couldn’t see how fear changed me—and how the Enemy took advantage of me.
“Here begins the Good News about Jesus…”
But God was not content to let me sit scared to death, scrunched under the counter, cowering, while the Enemy pounded me with more and more fear.
Eventually I let God rescue me. And He wants to rescue you too.
I promise.
God does not want you stuck under the counter or wherever the Enemy has you holed up.
God wants you free.
Really free.
And He wants you with Him…looking to Him, trusting Him, finding security in Him.
Creatively and tenderly, He cares for you. I pray you can learn to live unafraid in the midst of an often terrible and terrifying world because you know and believe in a real way that God has good plans for your life.
And because, deep down, you are able to trust God. I pray you are able to know He loves you too much to ever abandon you in any situation. Not then, not now, not ever.
Until the age of fourteen, I had an expectation of God. I thought if Jesus was my hero, He would shield me from all the bad things. Or that, at the least, bad things wouldn’t impact me the same way they did people who didn’t love God.
At a very young age, I saw God all wrong.
Being a Christian doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen.
Bad, sad, horrible things will happen regardless of whether you’re a Christian or not. And bad, sad, horrible things will hurt with equal intensity.
Being a Christian does not safeguard you from a world of hurt. Jesus Himself promises trials and sorrows. And Jesus Himself hurt.
So the big question is, what then is the value of having a relationship with God? If we’re all going to get hit with the same awfulness, all feel the same dark pain, why be in a relationship with God at all?
I guess the answer would be, so you can be in a relationship with God.
We’re all so interested in how things affect us that many times we miss the main thing: God. The Creator of the universe. The Creator of you and me.
He loves us. He wants us. He will stop at nothing to get us.
The problem is, we let the bigness of grief and pain overwhelm the obvious: God loves.
I hate this about myself, but sometimes I think I’m the center of my universe. I forget the whole idea of God as Maker and me as just me. I forget there’s an actual structure in this seemingly chaotic life and God is at the tiptop of it. I forget to marvel in everyday amazement over the idea that God loves me.
God loves you too.
No matter where you are in your life and no matter where you are with God, He loves you.
But He’s also ridiculously protective of you.
He’s not content to let fear divide your heart in two and distract you from wholehearted affection.
God wants both our love and our trust.
And He’ll stop at nothing to get them.
Susie Davis is an author, blogger, speaker and church founder. She has written five books, the most recent is Unafraid: Trusting God in an Unsafe World. Susie and her husband Will Davis Jr., have three nearly grown children that keep them laughing and humble. Together, Will and Susie founded Austin Christian Fellowship, where they spend their weekends with some of the most fabulous people in town.
As Susie shows us, it is possible to break fear’s grasp on our lives. We can be aware of the terrible without forgetting the beautiful. We can look up with joy and realize the remarkable truth: Jesus wants to take our fear and give us, in its place, true peace. Walk this liberating journey with her and learn what it means to live unafraid. Unafraid: Trusting God in an Unsafe World is a needed, must read.
[ Our humble thanks to WaterBrook Multnomah Publishers for their partnership of today’s devotion ]
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