Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 242
April 5, 2014
Only the Good Stuff – Multivitamins for Your Weekend [04.05.14]
We still have snow here, so that Spring has come already to Japan? I needed this virtual walk:
21 of the Most Beautiful Cherry Blossom Scenes of 2014
The piece shows millions of brightly-colored petals – estimated to be 8 million, in fact –
erupting from a volcano in Costa Rica and flowing uncontrollably into a nearby mountain village.
Watch this in 1080p on YouTube, I guarantee that you’ll be mesmerized from start to finish.
It’s so beautiful, it’s hard to believe this is real.
The spectacular redemption story of the internet this week:
“… everyone came into this theater hoping to give someone else a perfectly wonderful experience.”
Unforgettable.
The Research of Why You Need to be Regularly Napping
When One Mom does something pretty wonderful
Paying it forward. Too good to miss. Really.
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Yes — these are all with real animals.
Unbelievable!
An incredibly smart dog – Must. see.
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He shines in the smallest details and in the vast overarching skies
What a gallery of glory!
Guaranteed to bring a smile — the kids loved this one…
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This is 100% worth gathering the kids and scrolling through slow and moved…
This Dad. His eyes, his smile, his words — everything about him affirms everything his daughter says.
Her every word & question is valid to him and he’s interested in her world — beautiful.
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State-by-50-states… your smile exercises for the day
Extraordinary.
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(I. just. love. kids.)
Some Really Brilliant Answers Kids Gave on Tests
What’s on the Stack on the Farm Right Now:
Joy for the World
“The key to cultural transformation is something that we might not expect:
explosive, Spirit-produced joy in God & His gospel…”
Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality
The Final Days of Jesus: The Most Important Week of the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived
A very powerful read moving toward Easter…
I don’t know of a Lent that I have so earnestly longed for Jesus to come save us all
Found: A Story of Questions, Grace & Everyday Prayer
Micha Boyett has written one of the most beautiful memorable reads of my year
Post of the week from here …
What I really, really wished I’d known a whole lot earlier:
15 Keys to Parenting: What No One Tells You
Jason Gray is a favourite here & nobody here can stop playing his latest album:
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“Hey Soul?
Today — Breathe Grace. Grant Grace. Live Grace.
Inhale His Grace. Exhale His Grace.
Anger is contagious — so is grace.”
[- 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!}
April 4, 2014
Why It’s All Okay at the end of the Week
When I get home, the Farmer shows me these three stapled pages sent from the vet.
A to-do list the length of your arm of what has to be done to protect all the pigs from some new disease.
He talks in low tones, but I am really listening to what his eyes are saying.
These three pages of protocols have to be done immediately. The Farmer pulls me close. His T-shirt smells like the barn, like grease from the shop.
There are piano lessons and beat-up Latin books and deadlines and stacks of bills and unanswered mail and math homework and dishes in the sink and deadlines and Joshua hands me this stack of forms he needs help with for university applications.
Where do you apply for everything to be okay?
The kids run down the back walk toward the barn and morning chores. The Farmer and I watch them from the window, his hand resting steady on my shoulder.
And I nod slow… exhale.
Where we feel weak, our weaknesses are a cup for God’s power.
Where we feel stretched thin, our stretching is a canvas for God’s glory.
Where we feel out of our depths, right there is where we touch the depths of the love of God.
The Farmer squeezes my shoulder, us standing there at the windowsill with the daffodils leaning toward light.
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!}
April 3, 2014
What You Have to Know About Who You Really Are
As I flew west for a very brief 24 hour trip to speak at Catalyst in California, (take me back to the farm! and the 7 people I love wild!), my heart’s been quietly reflecting on Catalyst’s theme this year, Known. Who are we and Whose are we and how do we live intimately known by God? Today, while I wing right back to the farm, one of my very favourite author’s, Mark Buchanan, joins on the farm’s front porch to peaks gently into what we really have to know about who we really are:
Iam preparing (among approximately one thousand other things) to teach this spring at Regent College a course on the story of David.
So I soak daily in his story and his songs, and then scrounge and rummage around in a multitude of commentaries, biographies, novels, reflections.
Though David has been for me an almost constant companion since I first came to faith over 30 years ago, the better I know him the less I understand him.
He is a walking contradiction: poetic, barbaric, tender, ruthless, holy, lusty, child-like, serpentine.
He shows extravagant mercy at one turn, gaudy blood-thirst at the next. He can switch from piety to villainy quicker than blinking.
The man embodies paradox.
I’ll try to draw all this out in the course I’ll teach on David, as I’ve tried to draw it all out in the novel I’ve written about him (forthcoming).
David is not our role model: he’s our mirror.
He is not our exemplar: he’s our brother.
He often inspires us, but just as often startles and disgusts us, puzzles and enrages us.
He exposes our own heart’s strange wild mess, the chiaroscuro of light and dark raging in our own bellies.
But the deeper and longer I inhabit his story, the more and more one thing stands out above all: God loves David, and David knows it.
“Like everyone else,” , “from Samuel, Saul, and Jonathan down to the present, Yahweh is charmed by David…. Yahweh is the God who fell in love with David.”
In Louis Ginzberg’s monumental 7-volume work The Legend of the Jews, a skillful compilation of the Jewish haggadah or oral tradition, he retells the story of David in Paradise.
According to the legend, David is the superstar of the afterlife, a personage of “glory and grandeur,” whose throne sits opposite God’s and from which David “intones wondrously beautiful psalms.”
David’s “crown… outshines all others, and whenever he moves out of Paradise to present himself before God, suns, stars, angels, seraphim, and other holy beings run to meet him.”
But the main thrust of the legend is David’s relationship with God.
God throws a lavish feast on the Day of Judgment, and God at David’s bidding himself attends.
At the end of the banquet, God invites Abraham to pray over the cup of wine. Abraham declines on grounds of his unworthiness. So God asks Isaac, who for similar reasons declines. God then turns to Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua. All beg off for reasons of unworthiness.
Finally, God asks David to bless the cup. And David replies, “Yes, I will pronounce the blessing, for I am worthy of the honor.”
At first blush, this shocks us. It seems brazen effrontery, damnable hubris, reality-defying delusion. Who do you think you are?
On second thought, this sounds biblical. The heart of the Bible’s message, muted in the Old Covenant but shouted aloud in page after page of the New, is the improbable, astonishing, breathtaking good news that I am the one Jesus loves.
I am the tax-collector whose house Jesus had to enter, so that salvation could invade it.
I am the leper who cried out to Jesus on his way past Samaria, so that he could speak wholeness into me and then woo me back to worship him.
I am the lame man whose friends lowered me down through the rafters, so that Jesus could speak forgiveness and healing to me.
I am the invalid Jesus found in a dark part of town, bed-ridden and complaining, so that he could say to me, “Get up, take up your mat, and walk.”
I am the prodigal he saw a long way off, who ran to me, threw a feast for me, put his robe and ring and sandals on me.
I am the elder brother who refused to join the party, and so he went out to me and begged me to come in.
I am Lazarus, the one he raised from the dead and then invited to recline with him at the table.
I am not worthy to bless the cup, except He makes me so.
At great cost, all by his own doing, Jesus makes me his own, loves me without condition, forgives me without remainder, places his own name on me, puts his own Spirit in me, and goes ahead to prepare a place for me.
He’s made me a chosen people, a holy nation, a royal priesthood, one who belongs to God.
I am the one Jesus loves.
As are you.
I never tire of telling my students at Ambrose Seminary this. It is the wellspring of all we do and all we are. All life and ministry is overflow.
And the inflow is this one thing: knowing and relishing and never forgetting that I am the one Jesus loves.
There is a famous story about the theologian Karl Barth, maybe as legendary as the story Ginsberg tells about David – and yet, like that story, resonant with deep truth.
It goes like this: near the end of Barth’s life, having written the most monumental theological work of the 20th Century, having read virtually every other theological work ever penned, a journalist asks him, “What is the greatest truth you’ve ever heard?”
To which Barth replies, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible the Bible tells me so.”
Amen and amen.
Mark Buchanan is an award-winning author, professor, and father of three who lives with his wife, Cheryl, in western Canada. Educated at the University of British Columbia and Regent College, his work has been published in numerous periodicals, including Christianity Today, Books and Culture, Leadership Journal, and Discipleship Magazine.
At turns both brilliant, accessible and a startlingly exquisite writer, Mark’s is one of my very favourite living authors, writing books — and sentences — that I read and feast on again and again, every page being a rare gem of depth, truth, beauty and genuine warmth. I cannot recommend these books highly enough: Your God Is Too Safe, Things Unseen, The Holy Wild, The Rest of God, Hidden in Plain Sight, & Spiritual Rhythm.
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!}
April 1, 2014
15 Keys to Parenting: What No One Tells You
So when you curled up on my bed last night and we watched The Power of Ten —
nothing could have prepared me for the exponential power of the broken bits of us.
Of you four boys and two girls.
And your dad and I letting go and becoming one and multiplying love at the kitchen sink with the burnt pots stacked high and you kids scrapping and scraping hard and we all bled a bit everyday.
Who knew that toilet plungers falling off the ceiling could give you boys a black eye?
Or that you deciding to show us you could really ride your bike with your eyes closed would drive you right broadside into the pick-up truck, catapulting your chin into an implanting dent into the front fender of your Dad’s Ford.
Ten years, I walked by that chin-dented fender.
Ten years, it’s been a bit of dog and pony show and your hearts have catapulted through our own daily tilt, implanted themselves right into mine. Ten years, broken bits of us to the power of God and who knew exponential glory was found in the sticky and messy places?
Dented hearts are the ones bent real.
I never expected so much joy.
I never expected that a mother’s labor and delivery never ends — and you never stop having to remember to breathe.
I didn’t know that taking the path of most resistance often leads to the most reward.
I didn’t know that you kids would birth me deeper into God and I didn’t know that you’d drive me crazy and I didn’t know how you’d drive me to the Cross.
That Cross isn’t only our door into God’s presence — the Cross is our only air in God’s presence.
And the Gospel has never stopped being the good news headline that I’ve needed every day because I’ve been the one breaking.
I’ve been the one who has had hollering mother meltdowns and wept on bathroom floors and I’ve been the one who has come to be held up by the tender grace of it:
Unless you walk with Jesus every day will be driven hard by pride or fear.
Remember how you once watched me drop potatoes into the pressure cooker and you asked me what a pressure cooker actually does anyways?
And I told you:
“Oh, a pressure cooker’s just a pot with a lid that doesn’t let the steam escape. And if the steam doesn’t escape —- whatever’s in the pot cooks faster.”
And if the steam doesn’t escape…
And you all have made me not escape into me.
You all have been a furnace for my soul to know the refining, the white hot heat of real love where God always tilts off the dross. I didn’t know it till you: When you lay down self, you find the deepest rest.
No one told me that it would all happen at the same hallowed time: Mothering is at once the hardest and the holiest and the happiest.
When war broke out over Monopoly and the raging upended the evening, when you slammed the door in my face, when I slammed the back door and went for a long walk down the back lane, you have never stopped handing me the gift:
As long as thanks is possible, then joy is always possible.
I have murmured thanks again and again like a sacrifice and He has turned the stench of here into incense.
I have preached gospel out loud to myself how many times a day and you have heard your mother with the soul amnesia remind herself again. “The parent must always self-parent first, self-preaching always comes before child-teaching.” [One Thousand Gifts]
How many times have we scrawled it across the chalkboard, as if we could scratch it into our marrow: Only speak words that make souls stronger.
Mothers do this:
We get up everyday and practice resurrection.
We choose: Live stressed and what we practice is practical atheism.
So we hold our tongue, we stretch ourselves out, we give you our eyes when you give us the play-by-play of every single page of the whole book and we practice smiling when you walk into a room so you can believe that your Father sings love over you.
We practice our faith. We practice our faith. We practice our faith. We get it wrong and we die daily and we live forgiveness and we practice our faith. Joy is a habit. Wear it.
Ten years now, nearly twice over, and how many times have I’ve blown it and keep preaching gentle truth back to the wrinkling woman in the mirror: The way to raise children is to not raise your voice. Souls are fragile. Raising your voice can raze your children to the ground.
Parenting is about preparing children to get along with each other, to get along with you and without you, and that it’s impossible to get along without God.
If I could go back again, even to yesterday:
The moment when you are most repelled by a child’s behavior, that is your warning light to draw the very closest to that child.
What we say to our kids in passing is what becomes their inner voice.
Anger is contagious. And so is grace.
Thank God.
Thank God that you all keep teaching me about me: That every one of us has two of us really. The Short-Term You —- and the Long-Term You.
The Immediate You. And the Ultimate You.
And if I only loved the right now Immediate You —- and let The Immediate You come and go and do whatever felt best, I wouldn’t be loving the Ultimate You.
I love the long-term Ultimate You too much to give the short-term Immediate You what you want —- but what isn’t ultimately best.
Sometimes the short-term Immediate You can’t have what immediately feels best— so the long-term Ultimate You has what is ultimately best.
This is the way my own Father parents me everyday.
When the credits roll for that little film of The Power of Ten, you turn to me and grin, “Adding one zero at a time sure changes everything doesn’t it?”
And I nod and smile. And kiss your forehead.
And maybe that’s what has surprised me most about motherhood
When you come with your zero, nada, nothing and multiply it to the power of God, you get surprised by exponential joy.
Related: 10 Point Manifesto to Joyful Parenting
This. Mama. Must. Read.: Surprised by Motherhood
For all the Weary Parents, for every Mom & Dad:
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Surprised by Motherhood is the brand new book that’s ignited a movement of real mothers being real honest about real life with kids.
When you forget who you are, why you are, and where you are going — these are words that falls as gently and right as blossoms, a trail of grace for every mother. Lisa-Jo Baker is a soul sister. She whispered to me quiet when her last pregnancy test turned pink. I’ve stayed up late with her laughing and praying and eating M&Ms. I’ve slept on her couch. She awakens us all to glory with these life-giving pages.
Straight from the hip honest, straight out hilarious, and straight from His Heart, this book is pure page-turning relief. Pages I didn’t want to end. Pages I will turn to again and again. Highly recommended, Must-Read: Surprised by Motherhood.
Available today at: Amazon | DaySpring | Christian Book Distributors [or ebook or audio ]
Barnes & Noble | LifeWay | Mardel
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!}
March 31, 2014
What We’ve Got to Tell Kids About Living Extraordinary
So yeah, you won’t likely find it making the headlines of People Magazine.
But that shouldn’t stop real people from really knowing.
Marjorie Knight told me when I was nine.
She turned to me while we were hulling a heap of strawberries over her sink, and her white hair caught all this afternoon light and her gravelly voice rolled over those words like smoothened stones:
“Running hard after an extraordinary life turns out to be chasing a lie.
The realest extraordinary is always found in the ordinary.
The extra everyone’s looking for —- it’s found in ordinary.”
She didn’t say much after that, but I tasted her words in the strawberries, in the swallowing down of the rubies, the juice of them running out the side of the mouth.
I don’t know exactly when I realized that The Big Dipper spills over everyone’s house.
I have a mess of kids of my own when I realize that sunlight can warm anyone’s back in front of any window.
That there’s the dog breathing slow in sleep at the back door, and there’s a minute to sit and scratch behind his aging ears, and there are trees all down the open road with limbs reaching, the ordinary welcoming. I tell the kids to notice that.
And that it’s a ridiculously free world. Everyone gets to accept the invite to extraordinary or not.
I tell the kids that glossy red carpets can lead to nowhere and that the ordinary is the every day container that holds the realest extraordinary.
That everyone single one of us gets eyes to look into, to smile into, to witness glimmers of souls right here.
The ordinary becomes the extraordinary when the eyes see the extra glory here. That’s a life equation, take it or leave it. We could give it to the kids for free.
There’s nothing in this world that’s normal — there’s only growing blind to the glory.
There’s only wearing armour to shield the heart from the beauty that wounds.
The cynics do that. Thing is, guard your heart long enough with a shield of cynicism and that shield of cynicism becomes a lidded tomb over your heart withering up, numb and dead.
I tell the kids to be the brave and see and feel.
Tell them that our language shapes us, that we keep saying, “I’m stressed…. I’m overwhelmed…. I’m so crazy busy” so we can feel the blood hurtling wild through the veins like some extraordinary important.
But I tell the kids we’re trading in those worn out phrases: “I’m stressed” —- for “I’m grateful…” and “I’m overwhelmed” — for “I’m wowed.”
And saying the words out loud — “Yeah, I’m wowed… Yeah, I’m grateful” — so that the eyes hear what they could look for right here:
The extra everyone’s looking for —- it’s found in the ordinary. The ordinary becomes the extraordinary when the eyes see the extra glory right here.
The kids laugh that I’m the fool who wants to write it in red lipstick on every mirror, write it on a sticky note for all the wallets: “We don’t need more things. We need more meaning.“
More ordinary awakenings to the common extraordinary, to the God-glory hidden in plain sight. Take it or leave it.
Some kid left strawberry hulls leaking juice across the counter. There’s a candy wrapper on the windowsill. Stacks of hardly-tamed laundry lean. There are bare feet hanging off the end of the couch.
And there’s a headline for every day — a line to set on replay:
“I’m wowed here. I’m Grateful here. The Grace is here. The Extraordinary is here. God. is. here.”
We don’t need more things. We need more meaning. God. is. here.
The meaning unfolds in the ordinary Wow. Thank You. Yes.
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!
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!}
March 29, 2014
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [03.29.14]
Road trip across the States anyone?
29 breath-taking places in America that we could visit right now
Really: Gather the kids for this one
“In only 76 DAYS Cameron will be too old to be adopted.Cameron only has until 6-8-2014 until laws as such deem that he is too old to be adopted. Cameron is good at Chinese and Math. He’s pleasant kid with a great smile. His smile turns solemn when asked about a family. He wants a mother and father so badly.” Maybe we can find Cameron his family?
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Perspective. Vantage Point. Makes all the difference.
God’s Ways are higher than ours.
30 cities seen from bird’s eye view — who knew?
126 images to get just this as one image?
Sometimes getting the right perspective? Takes time. Check.it.out.
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How busy people make time to read
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Love Idol: You are PreApproved
Read for the Weekend here on the Farm:
“If you, like so many of us, spend your time and energy trying to earn someone’s approval—at work, home, and church—all the while fearing that, at any moment, the facade will drop and everyone will see your hidden mess . . . then love may have become an idol in your life?
Love Idol will help you dismantle what’s separating you from true connection with God and rediscover the astonishing freedom of a life lived in authentic love.” ~Join the Love Idol Movement.
[With printables for the scales, mirror, computer, fridge to cheer that you are PreApproved!]
A read for every woman Love Idol: You are PreApproved [or for other suppliers see here ]
What happens when a man’s good friend grows old? A testament to Senior dogs across America
”I entered a world of grace
where bodies that had once expressed their vibrancy
were now on a more fragile path.”
“They are seven simple words we all take for granted. But as Joanne Milne, who is both deaf and blind, heard her doctor recite the days of the week, she was overwhelmed with emotion, fighting back tears and gasping to catch her breath.
Until that moment the 40-year-old’s world had always been completely silent.
“Hearing things for the first time is so emotional from the ping of a light switch to running water. I can’t stop crying… I’m so happy. Over the last 48 hours hearing someone laughing behind me, the birds twittering, and just being with friends…” It’s all a gift, isn’t it, not to be taken for granted? Listen to everything today like it’s the first time?
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Know this and your heart will thank you
“I don’t know of any story in sports that is more emotionally uplifting than this one.”
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What began as a global project to record kids’ messes –
found itself captivated by what is actually the stories kids leave behind.
The messes were really glorious stories. Perspective shift. An absolute must read.
Smitten with this; I could spend hours marvelling at the wonder of: The Kids were Here
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What happens when two ordinary people with normal jobs, a normal home, a normal life –
say yes to God?
Post of the week from here … the epiphany that’s rocking my world:
The Secret You Have to Know about You & that Thing You are Going Through
“Hey Soul?
Peace isn’t a place you have to find, or make, get to today.
Peace is a Person.
“Now may the Lord of Peace Himself give you His peace
at all times & in every situation.” 2Thess3:16
You can’t look in the mirror & think you’ve wrecked your life,
you can’t hold up any measuring stick & think you’ve botched it so bad, that you lose Peace,
that you can’t get Peace, that you can’t find Peace.
If you have Christ today – nothing can steal your peace today.”
[- 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!}
March 28, 2014
It’s Tough Being a Woman; It’s Even Tougher Being a Prideful Woman
For my beautiful friend, Jennifer Rothschild, the words “It is well with my soul” are much more than the lyrics from a familiar hymn; they represent a foundation upon which many life lessons have been learned…in the dark. At the young age of fifteen, Jennifer was diagnosed with a rare, degenerative eye disease that would eventually steal her sight. Jennifer has taken her message of encouragement across the country speaking at national and regional gatherings and is the author of 9 books, including her newest book, God is Just Not Fair: Finding Hope When Life Doesn’t Make Sense. A humble privilege to to be sharing at a Fresh Grounded Faith event in January 2015 with Jennifer in Midland, TX — and a joy to have her on the farm front porch today:
This is my story – not yesterday’s story.
It’s today’s story – what it’s like to be blind, age 50, a wife, mom and writer who travels and speaks.
Though blind since a teen because of retinitis pigmentosa, I’m still adjusting.
Blindness challenges me, depletes me, draws tears and questions and sometimes makes me want to quit.
Why? Because it’s tough being a blind woman. But, my friend, it’s tough just being a woman, isn’t it?
Yet, what is tough can make us tougher so join me through the moments of one day in the dark. You may recognize yourself?
Morning begins when the anemic rooster of my talking clock crows. I’m in the kitchen within minutes.
But I walk more slowly than I used to.
My orientation isn’t as good as it used to be.
My first hint things had changed was when I sped toward the kitchen and didn’t realize I’d veered. I thought I was turning into my kitchen, but I was actually at the top of my stairs.
I felt no floor under foot, panicked, wondered where I was falling, figured out it was the stairs way too late and landed half way down, banged up and bummed out.
So, now I’m more guarded when I walk with hand before my face just in case – at least that way, my face is protected.
I don’t like how awkward I look and feel doing this, but morning java bids me come.
I head to the coffee pot, slowly scoop and fill, press tactile buttons and brewing begins. When the coffee maker beeps, I place my “liquid detector” on the mug’s rim and pour. When my detector buzzes, I stop. What a handy invention that has reduced spills burns and frustration!
Then it’s time to wake up our teenage son Connor. I feed him breakfast and pack lunch, help him locate shoes, homework, cell phone, hoodie and all the other things a teenage boy scatters about the house, and he’s off to school.
Then I head to my favorite chair with my talking digital Bible. I love my little device, but I remember holding my red leather bible when I could see, and feeling such intimacy with God while I read.
Now I listen, pray and often type my thoughts into my talking computer. I’m so grateful for the technology that connects me to God in a new way.
Most days I need someone to help me with mail, help me find things I’ve misplaced, take me to appointments, shop, walk me into buildings and help with anything eyes usually take care of.
Dependence is one of the toughest parts of blindness – constantly reconciling my inner capabilities with my outer disability is trying.
People often innocently relate to me based on my outer disability, because it’s most obvious, and risk missing the real me that lives behind blind eyes.
That’s what often exacerbates the isolation of blindness; it prohibits real connection.
Over the years, to compensate for the dependence and potential isolation, I’ve tried to prove myself – be more capable, more organized, more whatever it took to make blindness a bridge that connects me to others, rather than a barrier of separation.
So, an ordinary day for me requires meekness.
I’m learning to bridle my strength, humble myself and let others be strong in my weakness.
Instead of constantly trying to prove myself, I’m learning to surrender daily and let blindness be what God uses to improve me.
As morning continues, I choose my clothes with my electronic devise that detects and announces colors. It confirms I match. I’m careful to keep everything in my closet organized. Talk about labor intensive! It’s tiring being a blind Type A.
On days when I’m not traveling or running errands, I hide away in my home office, which I fondly call the “room of peace.” Usually, I light a coffee-scented candle and play some Chopin.
I use fragrance and sounds to give texture to my world.
I work on my latest project on my talking laptop. My computer voice can even sound British. It makes my manuscripts sound so intelligent! I write until Connor arrives home from school.
Homework and preparing dinner is next.
My kitchen is tactile, with marked dials, labeled measuring cups and recipes on my computer.
It’s challenging managing recipe details, finding ingredients and truly knowing when baking is done. I’ve served plenty of undercooked food!
An ordinary day in the dark challenges my desire to perform perfectly. It demands I reconcile that who I am and what I struggle with are not the same thing.
Blindness causes me to affirm my identity is in God alone – not in what I can or cannot do.
Darkness is benevolent in that way. It is what God uses to keep me acquainted with the liberating truth that I am who He says I am – not what I label myself.
Most weekends, I fly. I pack clothes in large plastic bags to keep outfits orderly. I maneuver airports with my assistant and white cane. Travel is depleting because there’s so much to keep in my head.
I often stay in hotels I’m familiar with. Remodels throw me off, though.
Once when I was alone in a seemingly familiar hotel room, I put away my things and bent down for my bag when an unexpected edge of a newly remodeled half-wall met my eye! I went to the sink and placed a cold cloth on my eye, then reached for a towel. As I bent down, another sharp edge of a newly remodeled half-wall in the bathroom met my other eye!
The pain wasn’t nearly as bothersome as the humiliation I would feel showing up at my speaking event with two shiners!
Those are the moments I look into the mirror, imagine the face I once saw, and think about how much I want to retreat.
I pray and sometimes cry…but I always leave the momentary mirror confrontation stronger, softer and more determined. Why? Because God really is strong in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12: 8, 9) and if we seek Him, we really do find Him—even in our toughest moments.
The tough things in life teach us, train us and tenderize us. They make us wiser and more equipped to love others like they really need to be loved—with empathy and honesty.
When we’re most acquainted with our needs, we are most drawn to God’s provision. When we feel our tears, we can better feel the pain of others.
Every day in darkness there are a million reasons to get bitter and quit. But, there are also better reasons to persevere. The path, even in the dark, is purposeful.
The trials God allows are not without meaning and reason. We all have days in the dark.
How sad to struggle and miss out on the deeper purpose and reward of suffering because we’re angry and walk away from God.
If we quit, get bitter or arrogant, we miss out on the higher gifts—like dependence on Him, deeper intimacy, meekness and empathy.
It’s tough being a woman, especially when life is dark. But, it’s much tougher being a bitter, ungrateful and prideful woman.
Those choices just exacerbate the dark and keep us from seeing the light we long for.
If things are tough for you, or if your life doesn’t make sense right now, hang on.
Trust that God is just…He has a plan and a purpose.
May He give you the treasures of darkness…Isaiah 45: 3
Jennifer Rothschild’s life is a joyful, grateful testimony to the amazing grace of God — which Jennifer shares so movingly in the story of her life in this video.
Humbly looking forward to serving with Jennifer at Fresh Grounded Faith in Midland, TX in January and we would both love to meet you there… .
Jennifer’s new book, God is Just Not Fair: Finding Hope When Life Doesn’t Make Sense, was released this week! Jennifer walks through 6 tough questions of faith as your guide and all the while, she holds your hand to comfort. She meets hearts right where they are when life doesn’t make sense. You can read more about the book here.
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!}
March 27, 2014
When You’re Weary & The Body Aches
Mama never talked much when she’d change out our bandages from some scrape up or other.
Times I’d take her deepening quiet like this gentle salve for the wounds weeping at the edges.
Sometimes everyone ends up feeling scraped up and bent up and betrayed.
Like the world suddenly got turned up loud and we all got jarred and scraped and everybody turned and we all got turned inside out.
Sometimes we end up wearing our bruises on the outside. The Body of Christ still wears scars and Jesus still weeps.
The big calendar taped up on the wall — taped up with old white medical tape because that’s all I could find when I rifled through the junk drawer there by the phone — that calendar says it’s about the middle of Lent.
I stand at the sink and it’s an ointment of grace to have a season to repent. There are days you don’t feel the weight of glory but the weight of this whole gory, bloody mess that is called life together.
Days you can stand at the sink and feel the weight of a world of exhausted mothers and the battered Body and the starving children and the grieving brave and the howling waiting and the warring politics and the thousand thousands injustices on this battled-pocked place called earth and sometimes grief isn’t merely observed but absorbed and even your marrow aches.
Across the table, this silhouette of Jesus keeps carrying on, Jesus hunched over and carrying that cross.
And all I can think is:
Jesus takes the infinite pain of all of this — because of His infinite love for all of us.
Jesus takes the weight of the Body, Jesus takes the things said and done, the things we wish could take back.
Jesus takes the weight of the regrets of things left undone, the things never done that we wish had been done, the things that weigh heaviest of all.
Jesus takes it all — Jesus takes the infinite pain of all of this — because of His infinite love for all of us.
I turn that silhouette over in my hand. Weightless. The hunched over, Cross burdened Jesus carrying the weight of the world and the busted up wounded on His shoulders — He’s light in my hands.
This is the amazing grace of it:
Grace is weightless.
Grace carries us home and grace covers it all and grace cures this whole bloodied, battered mess and His grace takes all the weight.
Grace is weightless. And the moment you bind up a wound with forgiving grace, you get to fly free.
I trace the outline of that Cross on His shoulders. Jesus takes the infinite weight of all — because of His infinite love for all of us. Jesus heals us all because Jesus holds us all and Jesus won’t let us go.
Jesus is the doctor of the Body and there is no disease He cannot heal; no brokenness He cannot mend; no trouble He cannot carry. Jesus is the soul salve, the Balm of Gilead, the Wounded Healer who touches our wounds with His and absorbs all our hurt into His healing heart.
Who ever loved us like this?
It is becoming realer, so you can feel it in your aching veins:
Jesus is infinitely more than useful to us — Jesus is exquisitely beautiful to us.
It’s taped to the wall above the calendar:
“… Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.” John 5:23-24
Whoever loved all us broken ones like this? In a loud and busted up world, to turn to the deepening quiet of His Word and be healed and live.
To close some forgotten door somewhere and rifle through a junk drawer and pray in this every day mess for the Body to feel the weightlessness of grace.
Just tape up your calendar and your days together with some medical tape and hear the beating of His healing heart.
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 5:30 of #TheJesusProject: “I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me.”
1. Print Out all #TheJesusProject Memory Prints from the book of John here: Scripture Memorization for the Rest of Us: #TheJesus Project
2. Week 1 of #TheJesusProject’s Study: The #1 Organizing Tip Nobody Tells You
3. Week 2 : How to Get Through the Dark Places: #PullACliffYoung
4. Week 3 How to Live When Life Just Hurts
5. Week 4: How to Get Through Snowmaggedon & Everything Else that’s Burying You
6. Week 5: The 5 Words Guaranteed to Change Your Life #DWHTY
7. Week 6: The One Big Question Today is Really Asking You [And Your Answers Changes Your Life]
8. Week 7: Why You Need the Unlikely Principle of Ruby Worship
9. Week 8: The 1 Thing You Have to Stop Doing If You Ever Want a Harvest
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!}
March 25, 2014
The Secret You Have to Know About You & That Thing You’re Going Through
Dear Daughter,
I know it seems the unbelievable impossible— but really — it’s going to happen one day to you too.
Turns out you can blink and find your mother’s very words rolling right there off the tip of your tongue. True Story.
So hear me out on this, okay?
(I know, I know — How in the world does it turn out that you become your mother and really, how do her words migrate decades later into your mouth? It’s a great cosmic mystery of the universe.)
And this is true too — it turns out you can blink and find yourself standing there looking at a younger version of your eye-rolling self. I see me in you.
I know, it looks like I am too wrinkled and beat up to get it — but try this: When you look at me, before you roll your eyes, use your imagination: I was once a something-teen-year-old too.
I could once whip my eyes around like you and sting the soft side of my own mama, and yeah, being a teenager can be a bit like being a random sniper.
Took me a long time to know that — actually, I didn’t come to know it. I came to feel it. Teenagers of our own have let me feel it.
So when you hung up the phone the other day and asked if you could go too, because, c’mon, everyone else was going? There were my mother’s words right there in my mouth, my own mother on my lips:
“Look, I could tell you that you could go… but I love you too much.”
And you did what I did — you rolled your eyes like you could just roll me down. And in a blink, I’m you, rolling my eyes at my own mother just like that.
I’m 13 and begging Mama — telling her I’m going to about die if she doesn’t let me go to Tina Moreau’s 13th birthday party. Tina’s sleepover 13th birthday party. Tina’s co-ed sleepover 13th birthday party.
Apparently my mother didn’t care if I died. Or had a hissy fit or if my whipping eye rolls resulted in said eyeballs detaching at 98 miles a minute from their sockets resulting in serious injury to anyone in close enough proximity.
Mama just said there was no way her daughter was sleeping over in the same room of sleeping bags where Shawn Petersen and Dougie Boursma were slapping their pillows down too.
Sure, I told her I didn’t like those goobery boys, I wouldn’t talk to those goobery boys, there was just no way I wanted to be the weird kid out, the weird kid with strict parents [20-year-later insert: the kid with the only sane parents] who wouldn’t let her go to the co-ed sleepover birthday party.
And my own Mama? Mama just said I could huff all I wanted to, but nothing was going to blow down her mama-clad resolve.
Then yeah, she said something about loving me too much.
And, yeah, I’d rolled my eyes.
You may have a better huff than I did, really. And yeah, you can definitely fling around to the window sharper than I could, turning that cold shoulder faster than the speed of light.
But, girl, have you got any idea how I remember wanting to go once too, because all the other kids were going, and being told that the I was loved too much to go (insert eye roll here)? I know it seems impossible, but believe the impossible thing: I know what it’s like to be in a 15-year-old bod and think your mother’s a cretin from a cave who gets some hideously sick joy in crushing all your necessary plans.
So here’s the thing:
I know there feels like there’s only one of you. The you right now. The one who Feels All The Things.
But believe the impossible things, because it’s true: There are two of you, really. The Short-Term You —- and the Long-Term You. The Now-You — and the Becoming You.
The Immediate You. And the Ultimate You.
And if I only loved the right now Immediate You —- and let The Immediate You come and go and do whatever she wanted, whatever made her Feel All The Good Things, whatever made her happiest, I wouldn’t be loving the Ultimate You.
Please hear what All The Parents finally figure out, what I finally realize my own mama was saying:
This isn’t fun for me.
There isn’t one fibre in my soft, pulsing mama heart that likes seeing the short-term Immediate You Hurt. But I love the long-term Ultimate You too wide and deep and long — the you that can ultimately be —- that I’m willing to take the ire and anger of your Immediate Self right now.
I’m willing to take your anger and your eye rolls and feel the sting of it all on the soft insides of my mother heart. I’m willing to let my own Immediate Me hurt with your Immediate You — us both hurting together —- because I love the Ultimate You and am committed to the Ultimate You and won’t sell out the long-term Ultimate You.
Sometimes the short-term Immediate You can’t have what she wants — so that the long-term Ultimate You can be who she wants to be.
Sometimes the short-term Immediate You won’t feel loved —- because this is about ultimately loving the long-term Ultimate You.
Sometimes the short-term Immediate You can’t have immediate gratification — so you can give the long-term Ultimate You what you ultimately want.
There are two of you — the Immediate You. And the Ultimate You. Who are you going to ultimately love?
So when I told you all that the other day?
When I put my hand on your shoulder and you bit your lip hard to dam everything back?
When I told you that this is what a mother does —- Though it kills me to see Immediate You hurting, I ultimately love the Ultimate You. Something burned, filled, my throat, and I felt my own dam give way a bit.
Because there’s this Father.
You and I both have this Father and it literally killed Him to see us hurting —- and I need to believe the believable possible true:
When my own short-term Immediate Self is hurting, my Father’s hurting with me.
When my short-term Immediate Self is hurting, my Father’s ultimately hurting with me and ultimately healing me and ultimately remaking me and ultimately loving my long-term Ultimate Self.
“His love letter forever silences any doubts: “His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB).
He means to rename us—to return us to our true names, our truest selves. He means to heal our soul holes.
From the very beginning, that Eden beginning, that has always been and always is, to this day, God’s secret purpose in everything— our return to our full glory.” ( One Thousand Gifts )
Your Father can’t ever do anything other than love our long-term Ultimate Self, the one He’s secretly working everything to bring to full glory.
He can’t do anything less than want our Ultimate Self to be it’s ultimate best.
So when you turned from the window, the phone still there in your hand, turned that bruised shoulder of yours and looked in my eyes, looked to see if you could trust me and this ultimate love that doesn’t feel even one iota like love?
I cupped your face and looked right into your pooling eyes and in that moment, more than any other moment, I felt the burning believing of it with you, I believed with you in the unbelievable impossible—
And you can find your Father’s very words rolling right there off the tip of your tongue, feel the tender grace of it right there on your lips:
Trust Me.
Related: How the Hidden Dangers of Comparison is Killing Us and Our Daughters
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!}
March 24, 2014
One Simple Secret to Effective Time Management This Week
When I turn down Creamery Road, I pass, yeah, surprising — the old creamery.
Pass the the creamery that’s now abandoned, the window eyes all punched out.
How did they all look, those silvery pails of milk that once lined up by the door, their tins lid hats pulled on tight, so not one white drop spilled.
But isn’t as much milk lost through a pinhole here, a pinhole there, one little drip lost after another — as in the knocking over the whole silly pail?
That is what follows me all the way home:
A pail with a pinhole loses as much as the pail pushed right over. A whole life can be lost in minutes wasted, small moments missed.
I unpack the van, haul in the door with baggage of my own. I’ve messed things up today and focused on the unhelpful and ugly instead of the beautiful and beneficial.
I don’t know why I waste time with worry in a life that’s too short to lose.
Regret and crying over spilled milk only pokes more hole in the pail.
The house is so full of life.
I put bags down on the counter.
Hope shows me her knitting. The stitches feel like hope.
The boys explode raucous over this game of chess by the fire — yep, the likes of us make even chess into a rowdy, contact sport here. Then sit with Shalom for a moment with all these strings and knots of her own that she’s determined to make into something warm. The hands on clocks are always bound hands: You are the only one who gets to decide what you’ll do with your time.
Stir soup. Bank lasagnas away in the freezer. Watch Mama slip her silver needle through the weave, minute thread flashing, tying through it all. Mind the moments and life will take care of itself.
The whole bunch of irises on the table smile.
I don’t want to lose a full life by letting the minutes leak away.
A pail with a pinhole loses as much as the pail pushed right over. A whole life can be lost in minutes wasted, small moments missed.
How we spend our time now — determines what gift we’ll get to unwrap for all of eternity.
There’s no time for fleeting distractions… and there’s time to turn everything quiet and simply focus on his eyes, the depth of his eyes, when he’s telling me what happened, and to make that call and answer her big question and get that one card to the mail and laugh at the 1,983rd knock-knock joke before that last kid walks out the door.
The best use of time is to freely love.
The best way to love is to spend time.
The best time to love is always right now.
And Grace? Grace is strong enough to carry not only what you’ve done, but what you never got done, the things that can weigh heaviest of all.
I could catch the moments, the milk of the moments all here, the graces falling, His saving grace catching me —
these gleaming pots right full to the brim.
Ephesians 5:16
making the most of every opportunity…
A pail with a pinhole loses as much as the pail pushed right over.
A whole life can be lost in minutes wasted, small moments missed.
“And this, this is the only way to slow time: When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here. I can slow the torrent by being all here. I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment. Weigh down this moment in time with attention full, and the whole of time’s river slows, slows, slows.“ ~ 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
Give thanks to the Lord! His Love Endures Forever!
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!}
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