Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 241

[A Christian Passover & Printable] When Holy Week is Far from Perfect & You Just Need a Perfect Lamb

 

 

So on a week when you feel messy and behind and burdened and it’s obvious that you’re flailing and aching just a bit —

it’s the small things.

A few plants in dirt for an Easter Grace Garden. Some figs and almonds from the store on Tuesday and some thorns in a crown — even just one or two.  Read just one devotional  (download here) between now and Sunday and hang an ornament on the Easter Tree.

And have a Passover meal on Thursday.

The house won’t be perfect. There’s drywall dust in the mudroom. I’ve failed in ways that feel like a piercing.

But the lamb?

I need a Passover Lamb more than anything else.

Need to prepare a Passover meal, rub the marinate into the lamb,

blood ponding on plate,  my hand massaging the meat,

fingers pressing out more of that impossible red,

all the necessary essence of Easter, all very non-Hallmark,

the nostrils filling with this wretched stench of sin,

and this one beating heart hurting for the only God

whose wild love

had Him pass over perfect and tear open a vein

and  become a lamb dragged to the slaughter

without bleating or begging

to cleanse the bloody mess of all those who’ve fallen

behind.

this mess

stained deep into my skin.

 

 

One Passover Meal. Same Passover Program. Two different print options:

Print the Lamb Edition (click the dowload in the top right (arrow on a paper icon) and then print)

or Print the Traditional “Haggadah” Edition (click the dowload in the top right (arrow on a paper icon) and then print)

(with historical background of a Messianic Passover meal & table requirements, thanks to  a partnering with www.CrossroadsChurch.com )

(The actual text of each, to lead you through a Passover Meal, is the same in both free printables)

To Set a Simple Table for a Christian Passover:

1. matzah (or Wholewheat Unleavened Bread)

2. juice of the vine (wine, grape juice, non-alcoholic wine)

3. sprigs of lush green parsley

4. horseradish (bitter herbs)

5. chopped apples and raisins (called haroset)

6. heavy shank bone of lamb

7. boiled egg

8. small dish of salted water

Make it Simple Menu:

Roast Leg of Lamb with Rosemary



Balsamic Roasted Red Potatoes

Baked Asparagus with Balsamic Butter Sauce

Haroset (Chopped Apples & Raisins) for Passover

Wholewheat Unleavened Bread

Baby carrots

And for dessert: New Life

Resources:

I AM – Messianic Passover Seder Plate I AM – Communion / Passover Cup I AM – Passover / Communion Candle Holders

Three posts are shared here today for Holy Week: Day 3

Post 1: When You’re Feeling Spiritually Dry during Holy Week [Holy Week: Day 3]

Post 2: [How to Serve a Christian Passover] When Your Holy Week is Far from Perfect & You Just Need a Perfect Lamb 

Post 3: When You Need a Garden Getaway in the Middle of Holy Week: Make A Garden Getaway

Our Easter Essentials this week: The Free Easter Family Devotional with Ornaments

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

Make an Easter Garden: When You Need a Garden Getaway in the Middle of Holy Week

So the thing is, back there in the beginning, we all had this shattering fall in a garden.

And we mark it on the calendar, Christ, falling in the garden of Gethsemane.

Christ, righting our messy fall.

So the kids and I, we put our hands into dirt,

and we remember our garden fall and His garden grace,

and we make a Grace Garden for Easter.

:

How to Make a Grace Garden for Easter

This is what we did:

We gathered

1. a basket, some dirt,

2. some plants at the nursery, a beginning too,

3. tramped to the woods for just the perfect moss

4. found a wee glass dish for a pond, a few shells too {optional}

5. and drilled a hole in a stone. {or use a small planting pot or peat pot, laying on its side}

6. We planted a garden, {filled a pond with water}, laid the flattest, the smallest  stones from our lane, as a winding path to the tomb and our great freedom coming.

7. We found a stone that read GRACE and put it at the entrance of the Garden Tomb. That seemed perfect. (write Grace or Resurrection or Joy on a flat stone?)

8. And come Palm Sunday, we’ll plant some seeds, resurrection hope in the dark of the earth, and line the little stone path with smalls candles, one for each night of Holy Week, miniature garden torches, for the Light is coming.

And each night, all week we’ll light another wick… until Good Friday, when all went dark.

9. And in the evening of Good Friday, the children will shape a caterpillar out of modeling wax, swath it in small square of silk, tuck it in the moss outside the stone over the entrance of the tomb….

10. On Saturday, we’ll remember and we’ll wait.

11. And come Sunday, Easter morn early, in first light dawning, we’ll roll back the tomb, see only the husk of silk left behind, a butterfly a light in the branches of tree over the Tomb.

Tutorial to Make Easter Sunday Morning Butterfly: Click Here

12. And we’ll ask it, incredulous at grace all over again, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” (Lk. 24:5) He is alive!

So this is the path we’ll walk the last week of Easter, right across the Grace Garden.

From dark to Light.

From cocoon confinement to conquering in Christ.

From sin grit to saving Grace.

And an Easter Grace Garden will unfold, a parable, a living visual of the metamorphosis of all the cosmos…

And we’ll walk with Him again,

in the garden in the cool of the evening,

reunited by the truth of His grace alone.

::

Three posts are shared here today for Holy Week: Day 3

Post 1: When You’re Feeling Spiritually Dry during Holy Week [Holy Week: Day 3]

Post 2: [How to Serve a Christian Passover] When Your Holy Week is Far from Perfect & You Just Need a Perfect Lamb 

Post 3: When You Need a Garden Getaway in the Middle of Holy Week: Make A Garden Getaway

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

When You’re Struggling & Holy Week is Just Hard (Holy Week: Day 2)

There’s snow in the middle of Holy Week.

A dusting, a sugar snow, an Easter snow.

As if the whole smashed world is intent on freezing.

Doing whatever it takes, over and over again, to stay numbed to the burn of the pain.

Because somebody’s beloved kid had a womb scraped out to get rid of a kid. As if a family tree can be conveniently cut up.

A 14-year-old boy shoots himself right through and two mothers gasp for air and the funeral is for Good Friday.

Try breathing through that. Try walking to Easter and resurrection with that.

A man I’ve known since we were kids, he tells me depression has sapped his wife of anything warm blooded and pulsing, that she lies in the dark all day and won’t eat, that he carries her like a limp rag doll to the bath, that he goes to the barn and weeps where no one can see. I don’t know what to say. So my heart just fractures. I tell him I’ll pray, that I’ll ask everyone to pray.

A friend’s first born heaves on a ventilator, lungs seared. He tells me that he hasn’t left that bedside for six days.

Watch your child struggle up for air and you think a lot about Christ drowning in His own blood, the slow gurgle of grace.

You don’t give a flippant shrug about mocking chocolate bunnies and strangling pastel silk ties.

You could care less about floral centerpieces when you’re breaking into pieces behind closed doors.

This whole smashed world’s a bloody mess and there are people right outside the window, right behind those velum thin walls all down the street, living this slow, soundless bleed, and Holy week can feel like a hell. And that’s why He came.

In the middle of the week, we go to the woods where they pierce the trees.

Where they drive spikes right up through the willing bark.

The man who tapped the trees for sap, for maple syrup, he says you have listen for a whistling leak of air in the sap lines, you listen for the hardly howl.

Listen for it.

He says if you want any syrup, you have to walk through the woods listening, looking for the broken air leaks in the sap line. You have to go to the broken places and people, you have to clamp the leaking places with grace. There are howls everywhere, in the pulsing lines of all the living, all the feeling.

It’s part of living:

Love will always cost you grief. Love is always worth the price.

And all I can think of is, oh, the Love that bought us, the steel driven into the trees, even these trees leaking, crying, sweet on Holy Week.

Levi’s studied the poetry and hymns of Isaac Watts all week. He keeps humming hymns through the woods, like a mingling with bark.

“The sap will run straight through now till about Good Friday,” That’s what the burly, grey-haired maple syrup maker tells us. “The trees usually run till Good Friday.”

The trees cry until God hangs upon the tree.

The world moans loud, but He hears your howl. The world smiles thin, but He touches the depths of your deep grief. The world moves on, but His love moves you. He takes the nails to take your pain and He runs liquid with you.

Shalom holds a finger over a sap pail, waits.

Then there it is, there it is, and she takes it, straight to her lips.

His tears are sweet to us. Because our God’s acquainted with grief, He is intimately acquainted with us, with our thorns hidden and driven deep. We don’t cry alone.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Sap fills a bucket, makes the emptiness hum with a weeping offering. We never cry alone.

Sure — everyone loves a Christmas Tree. But’s it’s that bent Easter Tree that guarantees His love for us.

Levi bends over the bucket, listening — and I hear him —- I hear what he’s humming and I don’t even think he knows he’s humming it, like this unconscious plea:

Alas! and did my Savior bleed And did my Sovereign die?…

Was it for sins that I have done he groaned upon the tree?

Amazing pity, grace unknown, and love beyond degree.

At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light, And the burden of my heart rolled away….

Trees are tapped for sap to make sweet, and Christ is nailed for love to wash wounds and our hearts are right broken here for heaven’s sake and we ’ll go home and put a lamb on the table and He took the cup and He gave thanks for it and He begged:

Do this in remembrance of me.

For heaven’s sake, do this:

Take your broken heart, your shattered heart, and give thanks for the heart of God who bleeds with yours and this is how your broken, dis-membered heart is re-membered – when you remember to count the ways He loves. Count, like you’re taking your own pulse, like you’re determined to keep breathing.

Remember the one thousand ways the Scarred God’s loves you, give thanks for Him in the midst of an almost hell, and your dis-membered heart re-members.

Come the middle of Holy week, the bloodied and limping, the bruised and the sinners, the self-hating and soul-maiming, the howling and soundless–

– all us broken, we will remember to give thanks for His breaking and pouring out and this giving thanks is what re-members us.

“Did you hear how he said it, Mama?” Malakai asks me at a syrup dinner of pancakes in the dark of candlelight. “How the maple syrup runs just until the frogs sings?”

His face is lit in shadows.

Like the frogs know something, like all of heaven knows, and it sings relief for the sacrifice of the Tree.

Levi hums the hymn on — “Thus might I hide my blushing face while His dear cross appears —  dissolve my heart in thankfulness, and melt mine eyes to tears…“

And I pour out more of the dark maple syrup and I taste the sweet on my tongue.

And our God is not a God to merely believe, but to experience,

not to only believe in, but be held by.

A God who not only breaks for you but breaks with you,

a God to not only have creeds about, but to have communion with,

a God who not only who dies for you, but who cries with you,

the God who touches you and binds you and blesses you and heals you

and re-members you because He let Himself be dismembered

and He is the God we not only believe in— but we know.

We know – know beyond a shadow of doubt, death or despair.

He has touched our tears. He has cupped our broken hearts with His scars. He has whispered to the howl, “I know, I know. And I’ve come to begin the making of all things new.” We believe. Because we know. He knows our grief. We know His goodness. And the truth is – we don’t need an explanation from God like we need an experience of God.

And that is exactly what we get.

We get that experience of God when He stretches open His arms on that Cross and cries,

“For you. For all your regrets and for all your impossibles,

for all that will never be and for all that once was,

for all that you can’t make right and for all that you got wrong,

for your Judas failures and your Peter denials and your Lazarus griefs,

I offer to take the nails, the sharp edge of everything, and offer you myself because I want you, to take you,

you in your wild grief,

you in your anger and your disappointment and your wounds and your not-yet-there,

you, just as you are, not some improved version of you, but you – I came for you, to hold you, to carry you, to save you.”

The thanks, the yes — it could come like sweet relief.

The broken hearts — they could re-member.

The lament — it could be absorbed in love.

And I taste of holy week, taste of what of runs from that Tree, taste and experience grace and He is good.

All this Easter snow, this sugar snow, coming down like the purest redemption.

 

 

 

{This is part of a series this week on preparing hearts for Easter.

Part 1: How to Start Everything Well: can be found here}

Part 2: A Family Activity for Passion Week can be found here

Part 3: The Cross-Centered Life

Related: The book One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are goes deeper into the meaning of those days before Easter, eucharisteo, communion, being re-membered — and finding joy in what really matters. Making a life of holy joy – fresh start in the middle of the hard.

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

If You Want to Start Your Holy Week off Well {A Holy Week: Day 1}

My Grandma, she told me if you found a man who’d weep over a story — that was a man you could marry.

The morning of Palm Sunday, the porridge boils over and burns on the stove.

Hope tries on three dresses, slumps into the kitchen and declares she has nothing to wear. Shalom can’t find her pink hair bow — only a blue one that’s missing the barrette. Caleb points out that someone’s dropped their orange peels all down the back garage steps.

I’m strangling down a frustrated rant.

Malakai, reaching for milk for his porridge, slips off his chair and splits his lip right open on the edge of the table.

There is blood dripping on our kitchen floor on Palm Sunday.

And on the kitchen table, there’s a bent silhouette carrying a cross.

He’s nearing the Story’s climax.

Twice, Jesus weeps in the Story.      

When He saw where death had laid out Lazarus, when he saw his friend’s tomb, when he stood with the crying Mary, His Spirit moved like over the face of the waters, and water ran down the face of God.

That’s what Grandma had said: A man who can break down and cry — is man who will break open his heart to let your heart in. 

Jesus wept.

He had loved Lazarus.

Our God is the God to find comfort in because ours is the God who cries… the God tender enough to break right open and let His heart run liquid and He is the river of life because He knows our heart streams. One day He will wipe all tears away because He knows how the weeping feel:  He has loved us.

I hold a crying Malakai and his bloody lip on a messy Palm Sunday and our tears and love mingles with God’s.

Palm Sunday –  the second time in the Story when the pain breaks Him and when the palm branches wave, our God weeps:  When Jesus approached Jerusalem, “he wept over it and said, ‘If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace…”

If only you had known what would bring you peace…

You want comfort — and I offer you a Cross.

You want position — and I offer you purpose.

You want ease — and I offer you eternity.

God cries because His people cry for things that won’t bring them peace.

The people that praise Him quiet on Palm Sunday on the way into the city — are the same crowd that cry “Crucify” loud on Good Friday when it doesn’t go their way.

And I am the woman who praises Him quiet when it goes my way — and who complains loud when it doesn’t.

This is what happens when God doesn’t meet expectations. When God doesn’t conform to hopes, someone always goes looking for a hammer.

I can bang my frustration loud.

The Pastor would say it on Sunday — that the people’s Hosanna was a cry that literally meant “Save us! Save us!“

Jesus weeps because we don’t know the peace that will save us. What brings us peace is always praise.

There are donkey days and I’m the fool who doesn’t recognize how God comes. God enters every moment the way He chooses and this is always the choice: wave a palm or a hammer.

How many times have I wondered how they could throw down their garments before Him on Sunday and then throw their fists at Him on Friday? But I’m the one in the front row:

If my thanksgiving is fickle, then my faith is fickle.

I stroke Malakai’s forehead. Press mine to his.

“Can we just go to church now, Mama?” Malakai murmurs it, takes the cloth from his lip and I see the wound. I wipe his wet cheek.

I hold him. Just hold him long on Palm Sunday morning, with these tears on the fingertips. Ready for praise on the lips. Keeping company with the Christ who cries, His heart broken wide open to let us in.

And I nod, “Yes, yes… let’s.” And he slides off my lap.

And we walk out the door for church on Palm Sunday, waving this brazen, unwavering thanks.

Waving it before the Christ walking right there with the palms open wide.

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Join us? And happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts? Dare you to Joy ! Take the dare to Fully Live! 

1. Grab the free JOY DARE Calendar with 3 daily prompts to go on a scavenger hunt for God’ gifts … {or write down any gifts you choose. Use the free app.} 2. Count 3 gifts a day and you have over #1000gifts in 2014. Jot them down in the numbered One Thousand Gifts Devotional Journal  — The Farmer’s writing in his with a red pen and daily – the numbers in the journal already there! Motivating…  3. Share your gifts everyday in our beautiful Facebook community or on Twitter (label with #1000gifts #JoyDare) to enter for the monthly $100 Amazon draw (or link to your blog post with your list of gifts). 4. Count #1000gifts in 2014 and enter to win a Nikon DSLR camera with lens. Slow Down. Savor Life. Give thanks. Believing something is one thing. But the Best only comes when you decide to Be Living it. Please, jump in, make your life about giving thanks to God! — Just add the direct URL to your specific 1000 gift list post… and if you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other in our refrain of thanks by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.

Give thanks to the Lord! His Love Endures Forever!

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Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [04.12.14]

The Joy Project - a must see.

A Complete Glory Wake Up

What this doctor does? Yes, please.

Stunning.

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 No. Words. 

Read. this. slow…. Really.

An amazing project – paper is not to be underestimated!

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What happens when one little girl never gives up…

Only God.

Paying attention to our lives? Let us pay thanks to our Lord!

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Fascinating natural homes all around the world.   Must see.

A boy with Autism.  His extraordinary gift. And the unforgettable way he’s giving back.

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What seniors & grandparents really need?

Joining us with David Platt this Good Friday?

What People Eat Around the World…  fascinating

Because your work matters to God…

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One lost wallet — and what no one expected

This priest was next supposed to say a few words to the bridal couple… Instead — this happened!

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10 foods that are healthier than most of us think

yeah, a bit rough around the edges, but these two? Unforgettable. Two Dutch nans take their very first flight.

Okay, so I teared up happy. What’s one dare you can take this weekend?

Life is a gift — really unwrap it.

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Post of the week from here …

Why You Really Have to Keep Falling in Love

 This Weekend: Do Something That Matters

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It’s the The James 1  simple day planner for the hard days, for every day.

1. Ask God for wisdom

2. Believe God without doubt

3. Thank God no matter what

“If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, & it will be given to you. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt.” James 1:5-6

[- excerpted from our morning devotions in our little Facebook community

where every morning we share a word like this to encourage each other & #PreachGospeltoOurselves... 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. 

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

How the Cross Intersects with Every Day Life: a preparing for Good Friday

Once, before we have a table with drawers for Bibles, we had this Bible Box.

Where we put all the Bibles, right by the sticky farm table, so we could eat Real Food after each meal.

There was one other book we kept in the Bible Box.

That we read after dessert. Like dessert.

That book got dog-eared and ragged. It became velveteen. And we became real.

That book was Radical. Written by David Platt. God made those dog-eared pages to be kindling in us, to light something beyond us in us.

To light and awaken us to right where we are — to be a radical gift right where we are. So all together, all of us together here in this community of joy warriors, we got to send everything from One Thousand Gifts  back to the Guatemala City Dump and build a school.

We were “just moms” at sinks and “just dads” at desks and “just kids” with joy dares stuck in our pockets with radical thanks to God on our lips. We were just exhausted and we were just at the end of the rope and we were just busted up, but we did hard and holy things and we were the everyday gritty radicals who murmured brazen thanks anyways.

And this is what God does —

God takes all the “just” people and uses them to just change the world — just when they don’t even know it’s happening.

God’s making a thousand things happen when we don’t even know they are happening. 

God uses the “just” moms and “just” people to do just that: just change the world – them doing just what they’re called to with just what they have in their hands, with just enough faith to say thanks.

And I don’t know, maybe that’s the crazy thing: Radical Gratitude is the attitude of the revolutionaries. The radically grateful become the being radically givers.

It’s been this upending journey of letting His Cross make us radically cross-shaped. A journey part of which had the Farmer and his hick going up the Amazon in Ecuador with Compassion and some of the most hilarious and normal holy women you could know.

Sophie Hudson and I have smeared serious bug spray on and wore matchy Columbia shirts in an open boat and she’s thrown me a lifeline more than once and saying she loved me back from a pit is no understatement. Plus, she wrote the laugh-out-loud book with Bacon in the title, so there’s  the “this side of heaven” perfection of that. Simply, this pig farmer’s wife loves her to the moon and back and right around a hog’s hind leg.

I’ve sat with Sophie while her pastor, David Platt, he’s preached the Cross and Christ and there are times when you are gloriously ruined and raised remade and it is right.

A few weeks back, Sophie and I laughed too loud and were just ridiculously real and David asked profoundly probing questions about how does the Cross and Everyday life look in keeping-it-real homes, and his beautiful wife, Heather, spoke these gems of singular wisdom. It was an hour and half of glory. Because it was all Jesus.

Because it was inhaling it again:  The cross is not simply our door into God’s presence — but it is our only air in God’s presence. We don’t get over the cross, but rather we spend a lifetime allowing God to get the cross into us.

Because bottom line: If my life isn’t cross-centered, my life is off-centered, and the warping spin leaves me sick. My life needs centri-faith force and the centrality of that cross is the force that holds together my universe. Grace is my gravity and the Christ’s Cross is my cosmos.

The Cross isn’t just the kindling that ignites our Christian life … the Cross is the very fuel of all of our life.

If the the cross of Christ isn’t your everyday fuel, the fire you warm your heart around —  then you grow cold….

Sophie said afterward it was her highlight of 2014 (true, that — the year’s still early!) but I couldn’t agree more. There is nothing as good as preaching His good news to yourself.

But.

None of the audio recorded. Because of course.

So. David and Heather asked if we could sort of, kind of, write out some of what we said, to share at the Radical blog? Sophie did that startlingly perfect– powerfully. And yeah, I did not.

But the important thing is?

Dr. Platt is going there this Good Friday. Secret Church. Live simulcast. Six hours. Intensive study of the Word. Like the persecuted church.

Unlike the persecuted church — not at the risk of our lives. Like the persecuted church — not taking His Word which is our life for granted.

Like the persecuted church, meeting in churches and homes, all around the world, for a six hour quenching for your soul with Living Water, the only water that matters, that satisfies.

There’s nothing like standing with your Bible under a Niagara of Truth at midnight. 

This Good Friday: six hours, from Genesis to Revelations, studying the Cross and Everyday life:

Secret Church – The Cross and Everyday Life from David Platt on Vimeo.

From the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we lie down to sleep at night, how does the death of Christ on the cross transform every single detail of our day?

How does the cross compel daily disciplines like prayer and Bible reading or a regular routine of fasting and worship?

How does the cross change the way we view our jobs and vocations throughout the day as well as the way we rest and relax at the end of the day?

What, if any, unique effect does the cross have on the ways we spend our time, set our priorities, make our decisions, and love our neighbors?

How does the cross change the way we view food and exercise, sports and entertainment in this world? The Bible says, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).

So how do we do that? And how does the cross of Christ inevitably enable us to do that?

During this Secret Church, as we explore the implications of the death of Christ for our daily lives, we will discover the exhilarating joy that is found in following Jesus to the glory of God on a moment-by-moment, day-by-day basis.

The last two years, I’ve live tweeted Secret Church because the riches of His Word cannot not be shared.

And this year, Lord willing, our family will be gathered in our little country chapel on the evening of Good Friday with our people, farmers and mamas and truck drivers and carpenters and lanky teenagers and squalling babies and we’ll tune into Secret Church and I’ll have a kid leaning on my shoulder and a Bible open on my knee and I’ll be live tweeting Secret Church, a high point of the year, a desperate need for my soul.

To the degree you experience Jesus and the Cross as Beautiful every day, you will be changed every day into beautiful.

There’ll be dog-eared Bibles and radical prayers and kids sprawled everywhere and there’ll simply be Him.

There’s a way to become radically real and beautiful and velveteen.

 

 

Next week, Lord willing, we’ll be sharing many more resources here to prepare for Resurrection Sunday… but I cannot recommend Secret Church to you, your family, your community, highly enough. I know of nothing to prepare your heart for Easter Sunday quite like Good Friday’s Secret Church — right where you are, wherever you are. Counting down days here.

All the details to tune into Secret Church right here.

Related:  Sophie’s not-to-be-missed interview with David and Heather Platt on the Cross & Everyday Life

This hick’s. 

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

How to Win What Your Brave & Broken Heart Needs in Real Life: The Bench Principle [Giveaway!]

 

 

So you’re on the other side of this screen right now, scanning words for something to stitch up the hairline fractures of your heart.

You’re the one who keeps doing it: Sometimes the bravest thing is showing up for your life everyday.

You keep remaining when it’d be easier to run. Keep doggedly hoping for better when it’d be more than a mite easier to be hurt and bitter.

Sure, some say brave means you have to jump out of a plane like the Navy SEALS. Squeeze your eyes and free fall off the sheer side of the earth. Take a bullet or at least dodge one. (Don’t tell me you don’t do that everyday.)

But there are places that know: The Brave are the ones who trace the inside of their every day wounds and don’t grow hard. 

 

To continue reading … & I’d love to connect (in)courage & share a giveaway & be brave with you… we need that today: 

 

 

 

 

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

Why You Really Have to Keep Falling in Love

Stay in love.

I tell the girl that in a hardly voice, the kind of voice that comes from a primal place.

Though, truth be told, she tells me she doesn’t know if she had ever found that love place in the first place — which, yeah, makes it relatively hard to stay in love.

“I don’t think I’ve ever loved Jesus. So I don’t know what it means to stay in love with Jesus?”

I swallow hard — oh.

“Jesus has been about getting into heaven.

Jesus have been about getting saved.

Jesus has been about getting good.”  She’s numbering off what she knows on her glossy red fingernails.

How in the world did Jesus get to be our check-off list, these rungs on a ladder, the morality we pull on to dress for success?

When Jesus is been about getting into heaven, getting saved, getting good, Jesus isn’t a passion in your life, He’s a tool in your toolbox — and tools can get flippantly tossed. Anybody can buy any old hammer in any aisle of Walmart.

When Jesus is been about getting into heaven, getting saved, getting good —

Jesus is only merely useful to you — when He longs to be ultimately beautiful to you.

Her eyes are searching mine, more than a bit desperate.

“I thought Christianity was about getting into heaven, getting saved, getting good — No one ever told me that Christianity was about staying in love.”

Falling in love, staying in love? That’s what seduces across the radio waves. That’s what the lingerie catalogues woo us with, what the billboards tease us with, what the MTV videos hard sell.

When the world ’ s selling goods dressed up as love while the church is selling law dressed up as good news — -  guess where the next generation starts lining up?

Looking into the eyes of this hardly twenty-something girl, it’s about as crystal clear as it gets:



Our faith better be deeply connected to our senses and our heart, or a sensual world will destroy our faith and steal our heart.

If Jesus hasn ’ t passionately wooed you — the world eventually, definitely will.

She tells me her exam schedule and what lipstick she thinks is best for spring and she tells me that she’s still going to church with a bunch of kids from her dorm but everyone is hooking up and she just tells me straight up: “Look, we all just want to follow our hearts…”

On the wall right behind her, I’ve got taped up #JesusProject verses:

“I seek not my own will but the will of Him who sent me…

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about ME.”

And all I can think is: Unless Jesus has all our heart, we don’t want to follow where our hearts will lead us at all. 

Unless you fall in love with Jesus — you fall into debated regulations.

Unless you fall in love with Jesus — - you fall into dead religion.

Unless you fall in love with Jesus — you fall into dreaded rules.

Unless you fall in love with Jesus, you end up having an affair with the world.

We sit by the front window and I pour her a cup of steaming tea and I tell her what I’ve tasted: how the earth under our feet, the spring rains coming down on our faces and the stars spinning all around us in all this brazen glory: this is for us, us, us.

These are for you—gifts—these are for you—grace—these are for you—God, so count the ways He loves, a thousand, more, never stop, and feel it in your veins, and taste it on your lips, and feel it before you die, or you die — the wooing love of God.

There’s a cross on the table. There’s a back hunched in this staying, remaining, iron love. Gaze on that Cross —- see those arms spread eternally wide open. Who ever loved us like this, to death? to life?

I can feel it — and we have to feel it — He’s writing it into the world, in His Word, in a thousand ways, the way you stay in love:

You ’ re more than your hands do.

You ’ re more than your hands have.

You ’ re more than how other hands measure you. 

You are what is written on God ’ s Hands:

Safe. Held. His. Beloved.

 

 

 

Related:

Paul Tripp’s – Fall in Love Again

My own story of discovering how much He loves me

Bible Study for the Rest of Us: Every Wednesday in 2014, Lord willing, we’ll unpack that wk’s #TheJesusProject memory verse from the book of John:  Scripture Memorization for the Rest of Us

Next Wednesday, we are memorizing and unpacking John 6:35 of #TheJesusProject: “Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”

1. Print Out all #TheJesusProject Memory Prints from the book of John here: Scripture Memorization for the Rest of Us: #TheJesus Project 

2. #TheJesusProject’s Study: The #1 Organizing Tip Nobody Tells You

3.  How to Get Through the Dark Places: #PullACliffYoung

4.  How to Live When Life Just Hurts

5.  How to Get Through Snowmaggedon & Everything Else that’s Burying You

6.  The 5 Words Guaranteed to Change Your Life #DWHTY

7.  The One Big Question Today is Really Asking You [And Your Answers Changes Your Life]

8.  Why You Need the Unlikely Principle of Ruby Worship 

9.  The 1 Thing You Have to Stop Doing If You Ever Want a Harvest

10. When You’re Weary & The Body Aches

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

The Relief Every Parent Needs to Know

The pressure to be a perfect parent raising perfect children — it penetrates every mama’s heart. The merciless critic relentlessly reminds us we aren’t measuring up. Moms, more than ever, need to hear the good news of the startling grace of God.  This is what inspired Jeannie Cunnion to lay bare her own battle with perfection and the God who set her free in her newly released book, Parenting the Wholehearted Child. Grace is woven throughout each page, revealing how parents and children alike can live from the freedom found in being wholeheartedly loved (and liked!) by God. A grace to welcome Jeannie to the farm’s front porch today…

by Jeannie Cunnion

Vibrant red and orange leaves covered our walkway, and crisp fall air filled our lungs.

Excitement bounced between our three young boys – Cal, Brennan, and Owen – as our family headed out the front door for the long awaited elementary school pumpkin patch festival.

My husband, Mike, had to drive to the school to drop off a few items our family was donating.

Our boys, on the other hand, convinced me that riding our bikes to the festival was a good idea, and the four of us peddled our way down the driveway.

It was only a few minutes into the ride when I realized Brennan was lagging behind.

I asked Cal to stay put while Owen and I backtracked to assist him.  When we returned to the busy street corner where Cal should have been waiting, he was nowhere in sight.

My heart started pounding and my mind began racing, but I assured myself Cal-anxious to see his friends-had simply chosen to go ahead to the festival.

When we arrived at the school, we went directly to the bike rack searching for proof that Cal had arrived safely…but I didn’t see Cal’s bike. Nor did I see him playing with his friends on the playground. Starting to panic, I scanned the crowd of people to no avail.

Moments later I found a kind friend who offered to keep Brennan and Owen while I searched for my missing seven-year-old son.

After several minutes of searching the school property, with fear invading my every thought, I called Mike and then I made the call no parent should ever have to make: I called the police and described every feature of my beautiful son.

As the harsh reality set in that Cal was definitely not at the school, a good friend advised me to backtrack our path in case Cal had gotten scared and decided to find his way home.

I was certain Cal would not have attempted to return home without us, but because I didn’t have a better plan, I got back on my bike and headed home in a complete haze, crying out loud and pleading, “Lord, please protect my son.”

The five-minute bike ride felt like an endless journey, but as I entered our neighborhood I saw a child in the far-off distance walking in the street. I peddled faster, faster until I knew it was my son in the distance. He was walking up a hill, no shoes or socks on his feet, crying and scared.

I began yelling, “Cal, Cal, Mommy is here. Baby, I’m coming!” and I raced faster, desperate to hold him in my arms and cover him in my love.

When I threw my arms around my sobbing son, he began apologizing for disobeying and going ahead of me on his bike.

“Mommy,” he cried, “I was so scared, and I’m sorry for not listening to you. I was so excited to get to the festival, but when I got there, I felt bad about disobeying, so I turned around to come back to you. But I got lost, Mommy. I’m so sorry.”

With a breaking but relieved heart, I assured him, “Cal, I love you so much. I’m not mad at you. I’ve been praying Jesus would keep you safe while I searched everywhere for you. No need for apologies right now, baby. I’m just so happy to have you back in my arms. That is all that matters.”

I didn’t want to let go.

I wanted to keep his heart pressed against mine, my tears mingling with his.

Whatever he’d just done paled in comparison with the joy in my heart to have him back in my arms.

My love for him was unfazed by his wrong actions. By his disobedience. By his going ahead of me, trying to do life without me.

He was home-that was all that mattered.

Later that night after the kids were in bed, I reflected on the events of the day and was reminded of the parable of the prodigal son in the Luke 15.

You know the story – the rebellious son demands his inheritance from his father, sets off to satisfy his every desire, squanders his inheritance, and-after losing everything and finding himself in the depths of despair-returns home fearful of rejection and fully prepared to pay for his sins.

But to the son’s amazement, the father graciously and gladly and generously welcomes him home.

Luke describes the son’s return this way: “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20).

He ran to his rebellious son.

Before his son ever spoke one word of regret or remorse, the father ran to his son and embraced him.

The unconditional love and absolute acceptance the father had for his son in this parable symbolizes the unconditional love and absolute acceptance our Heavenly Father, with great extravagance, pours out. on. us. through his one and only son, Jesus Christ. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).

This parable is a portrait of God’s radical grace, a poignant reminder that when we are in Christ, there is no condemnation, no shame, no “That’s what you get for disobeying me.” There is only, “I am so happy to have you back in my arms. I love you so much!”

Oh friend, I find so much hope in this parable.  This unfathomable grace isn’t just for my son. It’s for my weak and rebellious heart too. As a mom “prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love,” I never have to fear my Father’s rejection or disappointment.

This love – it wrecks me. It drives me right back to Jesus.

This extravagant grace of God forever eliminates the burden of perfection – perfect obedience, perfect parenting, perfect anything.

Grace is God’s final word of unconditional love and acceptance in the perfection of Jesus Christ.

Absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us (Romans 8:39 MSG).

His arms are open. He is running to meet you, to pull you up, to hold you close. To captivate you, and your child, with His wholehearted love.

 

 

 

Jeannie Cunnion holds a Master’s degree in Social Work. Her professional background combines counseling, writing, and speaking about parenting and adoption issues for organizations such as Bethany Christian Services and the National Council for Adoption. Jeannie also enjoys blogging, serving as the Council Co-Chairman at Trinity Church in Greenwich, CT, and leading various parenting courses and Bible studies when she isn’t cheering on her boys at one of their sporting events. She lives with her husband, Mike, and their three boys in Old Greenwich, CT.

Jeannie’s new book Parenting the Whole Hearted Child, equips with biblical wisdom, practical ideas, and shares the good news that it is God’s extravagant grace–-not our perfect performance—that transforms the hearts of all of us.

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

The Best Gift for the Overwhelmed: Sometimes You Need Joy-in-a-Box

A bird flew straight into the kitchen last night.

Perched right on the top of that weather van on the mantle.

And I looked up from the sink and thought it was you right there,

your heart pounding right there out of your chest.

It’s hard to be overwhelmed.

What if we could do that — hand each other Joy-in-a-Box?

That one overwhelmed swallow flew in a window, flew behind the couch, perched there on the arrow of the vane up on the mantle.

On the weather vane on the mantle, eyes flashing, lost and only silently wild.

Drying dish hands on the edge of my apron, I can see it, that singular pounding of that one feathered breast.

The tremor of one heart, it can shake a whole house.

The whole earth it does that, the whole earth quakes.

What if we did that — stand with arms stretched right out and point in the right direction, point in the direction of the best place to to land?

Grace could line our days and Joy can be a nest.

The Puritan Thomas Watson wrote, “He who takes a review of his blessings, looks upon himself as a person engaged for God… He dedicates himself to God.”

This way.

This way, I tell the sparrow. Pointing in that direction, the direction of grace, gratitude, joy — this is the best gift.

She who re-views her blessings, re-views herself — sees herself as beheld by her Beloved.

When you re-view blessings, you view your life right and you re-joice — and who doesn’t want joy over and over again?

Rejoice – it means that: to swell with joy again, again, again.

Who does this, who lives in a repeating joy? Sparrow with your wildly thumming heart in a very big world — do you know this? Repeat the sounding joy.

The thing is: we only repeat the sounding joy, re-joice, re-joy again and again, when we remember to give thanks — and again repeat.

And when I remember to give thanks in a fallen and broken world, this is what re-members me and I am put together again.

That sparrow, I can see it’s beautiful shadow on the wall, how she opens her beak, her mouth, but she is too tired, too scared, too lost, and there is no sound. She is looking for song… right where she is.

Richard Wurmbrand, imprisoned in communistic Romania for His joy in Christ, he had said it — how he’d used his chains for Christ to make songs of praise to Christ.

It could be like that. I could tell the sparrow that and it could begin with me: Followers of Christ take the inconveniences of plans and make them into instruments of praise.

Followers of Christ take the inconveniences of life — and make them into instruments to love.

The sparrow on the weather vane, she turns and the weather vane it does, it creeks the highest notes.

We watch. We wait.

Will that sparrow…?

Sometimes you feel caged when really you’re only cupped.

And then she does — she spreads her wings and she finds out: He is the air of this world and she’s meant to soar.

She swoops right towards the open window and I can hear it, re-joy, those wings that thrum thanks again and again and again.

And this is how a sparrow flies…

 

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{Consider pausing music by clicking the slider in the left margin just above the social media buttons? If reading in a reader or via email, click here to sing this amazing little songview?}

They are singing our song, fellow sparrows!

Isn’t this the perfect song for us counting One Thousand Gifts, wanting to share the dare to fully live — to live in His presence and the fullness of Joy! Sing on, friends, our theme song!}

 

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The Best Gift for the Overwhelmed ? Joy-in-A-Box

  

Free Printables for Joy-in-a-Box:

How to Make the Best Gift for the Overwhelmed:

Joy-in-a-Box

1. Print out & cut out a Joy Bunting (or the Eucharisteo Bunting) — tuck into a box with tissue paper…

2. Print and cut out the bookmark on 10 Reasons on Give Thanks and Find Joy. Punch a hole in the end and slip a pretty ribbon through. A perfect — oh, so necessary — reminder on how to find Joy on the Hard Days. {I’ve soul amnesia and need to preach the gospel to myself everyday…}

3. Print out all these free gratitude journal graphics to beautify, pretty up, customize and make lovely your own 1000 gifts journal. (So grateful for Joshua’s loveliest work! We had such fun dreaming of pretty things for us all!) Customize your own journal — or make one for a friend and tuck into the box? Or print out several copies and slip them all into the Joy Box so she can have the happy fun of creating her own. {Send a blank journal too?}

4. Print out this recipe and bake up a few of the bird nest cookies, just a sweet treat and prayer for her to nest in His constant care….

5. Print out and send the monthly Joy Dare – (oh, do the dare!) a dare to find just these three gifts every day. To begin to shift perspective and look for His grace everywhere… a hunt for His glory right where we are! {Invite her to join the community at facebook.com/onethousandgifts where we share the gifts found each day. Count 1000 gifts in 2014 and at year’s end enter to win a Nikon D90 camera?)

6. Print out the Free 7 gifts, Good and Lovely, booklet and tuck it into the Joy-in-a-Box too? To put in her pocket and write down His graces throughout the day? {Or download the free app?} Maybe include the free Year of Graces Calendar, a space to write down joy everyday?

7. The Best Part? Print out and tuck the 4 JOY Bible verses into the Joy in a Box — to direct one beating heart back to Him in all things. Just hit print and ta-da — Joy-in-a-Box! Our happy, free love gift to you!

To download the Complete Joy-in-a-Box & 1000 Gifts Journal Kit?

Head right here for the whole beautiful thing!

8. You might too, at the last, wrap in some tissue and tuck a feather in the bow — one little gift book or maybe  one devotional, with 60 devotionals for months of finding joy right where you are and includes a numbered journal to write your own 1000 gifts — a legacy of joy… — and put it in the Joy-in-a-Box too?

{If you share the Joy -in-a-Box – will you share a photo of it over at the FB Joy Community  … I’d love to see your creativity with these printables and we can all be inspired to share joy?!}

Related:  In case this helps just one person? For less than a coffee & a donut, have some joy on hand to hand out? Christian Book Distributors tells us that for a limited time:  One Thousand Gifts is on sale for just a sweet $5?

One Thousand Gifts Devotional: Reflections on Finding Everyday Graces 

Photography Book: Selections from One Thousand Gifts

 

Join us? And happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts? Dare you to Joy ! Take the dare to Fully Live! 

1. Grab the free JOY DARE Calendar with 3 daily prompts to go on a scavenger hunt for God’ gifts … {or write down any gifts you choose. Use the free app.} 2. Count 3 gifts a day and you have over #1000gifts in 2013. Jot them down in the  new numbered One Thousand Gifts devotional journal — The Farmer’s writing in his with a red pen and daily – the numbers in the journal already there! Motivating…  3. Share your gifts everyday in our beautiful Facebook community to enter everyday for the monthly $100 Amazon draw (or link to your blog post with your list of gifts). 4. Count #1000gifts in 2013 and enter to win a Nikon DSLR camera with lens. Slow Down. Savor Life. Give thanks. Believing something is one thing. But the Best only comes when you decide to Be Living it. Please, jump in, make your life about giving thanks to God! — Just add the direct URL to your specific 1000 gift list post… and if you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other in our refrain of thanks by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.

Give thanks to the Lord! His Love Endures Forever!

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Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}