Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 245

The Real Secret to Being Healthy: Multivitamins for Your Weekend

So, the last two days, I’ve been struggling with this hounding fever,

this sickness chilling up the underside of bones.

And hey, who knows if you pick up something when you walk through slums, when you step over sewage and the bloated bones of who knows what –

a dog? a rat? the bones of God?

Or maybe you get this sick when you’re sick of your cheap grace that veneers toxic up over all these social ladders, these American dreams of upward mobility that leaves Jesus rotting forgotten with the poor.

Jesus rotting with the poor while we turn the worship music up louder and fill the pews on Sunday morning with all our polish and talk of Gospel.

Or, yeah — maybe the fever is finally the holy fire waking in your brittle bones, the live and glowing amber taken in tongs and laid upon your lips swollen with stuff that will burn up in nauseating fires of their own.

The repentance comes like a relieving healing:

God’s people are God’s plan for ending poverty — and He doesn’t have another plan.

Who knows what you pick up in the slums but maybe your hand picks up the hand of Christ’s in a child?

And you feel the purifying amber burn away the materialistic dross and straw —  till all that’s rightly left is love.

So you can find yourself finally standing strong on Sunday, singing this worship that isn’t cheap emptiness —

because you reached out to the weak and did not turn away from your Jesus whom you call Lord.

Will you reach out right now? These children desperately need someone to not turn away

We don’t want to deny anyone the joy of being part of this Guatemala Dump Miracle —

Pray for just one of these children today?

Related:

Don’t read this. But READ THIS. Because WHO WOULD HAVE BELIEVED THIS would happen?

The One Secret for Real Change

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!}

Don’t Read This. But READ THIS. Because WHO WOULD HAVE BELIEVED THIS would happen?

So there’s this 19-year-old cutter who laid down the blade in her hand and brandished a pen.

And Mrs. Stoope, this 78-year-old Michigan grandma who has seven sons, her hair wrapped up in a white bun and has this Bic blue list she’s scrawled in her own hand, numbered now up over 10,000 graces.

She always keeps a copy of the book on hand too, Mrs. Stoope who’s handed out over 1,200 copies now, from that businessman she tracked down from her grade one class to the farmer in the John Deere tractor a few roads over.

To know Mrs. Stoope is to love her and yeah, I’m thinking she had no idea what was really happening. None of us did — because, c’mon, how could we?

There was that everyday gritty radical who handed a copy to an Iraqi student in the middle east and he turned the pages and let Jesus love him and then let Him save him.

And the missionaries who read and counted grace in the slums of Bangladesh, the woman who was raped who was the hero who fought for her soul with every grace numbered and the woman who had an abortion booked but someone handed her this book and she saw that even the unplanned could be a gift.

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

And I pack up the farm hicks and my Mama and we get on a plane and fly to a dump.

Hop on a plane and fly the same day that all the headlines are talking about some snake-handling Pastor in Appalachia letting a rattler entwine round him and he dies from the bite. Apparently 8 snake bites are fine — turns out, it’s the ninth that’s the killer.

What is real belief and why bother believing and how does that belief take on real skin? And what if all our smallest things are actually the biggest things?

We stand at the dump. And my heart about bursts, thinking of what white-crowned Mrs. Stoope and the cutter who counted and the mother at the sink who made herself a joy warrior, and all this band of revolutionaries who started a movement and didn’t do it because they knew what they were doing.

Vultures circle over the dump like sky serpents.

There are kids who eat and dig and work down there in that rotting dump under those winding vultures.

There are 30,000 people who spend their days scrounging for an existence in a rotting dump. I’d be a brazen liar to say oh yeah, I’m really up to handling any of this.

But that’s the thing no one reads in the headlines:

We all like being comfort-handlers but let a comfortable life wrap itself around you and that’s what ends up being the snake that snaps it’s head and poisons your life with pointlessness.

It’s been a lifetime of a thousand things since I first stood here three years ago.

September 2010. I had stood at the Guatemala dump with a bunch of busted up Compassion bloggers.

There was one question. We’d looked into the abyss of those nauseating heaps with its beautiful children and whispered, “Where are you, God?” and He’d whispered back and I’d felt the heat of those words: “I’m here —- where are you?”

And there was Saul — who said he was a pastor, “not the crazy king,” he laughs — a pastor at the Guatemala City dump.

I had stood in his church, his Compassion development centre bursting with tattered kids from the dump, playing there in the only safe place they knew, where they had painted all the walls with murals of Hope, and I asked him how his belief had taken on real skin.

And he had told me in Spanish, his eyes never leaving my face, that he’d fallen into a drug addiction at 13, that all his teen years, he stumbled through drug addiction.

He and I both: No one is too far gone from God. 
His arm will go anywhere, to redeem anyone, from anything.

He says he got saved. I had asked him how, how in the world, how did he find God here?

“I passed a billboard and it made me think. Made me start reading my Bible, starting in the book of Proverbs.”

“What did the billboard say?” I had needed to know — what are the answers in places like dumps? What do signs say when you need a sign?

“The billboard, it said: “God is love. Now experience it.”

His eyes are brimming. I can hardly swallow, this burning lump. Vultures are swooping over children and children are digging for food and God is saying I am here — where are you? And there are billboards with messages:

God is love. Now Experience it. I’m standing at the Guatemalan City Dump and Pastor Saul’s telling me about the Holy Experience of living God’s love, and I’m nodding yes! yes!

Now experience Him not as an argument, but as One you adore, not only as a philosophy, but as a person, not only as a doctrine but as Dad. God is love — now experience Him.

What had Tim Keller said? “To the degree you experience God’s love toward you – that He sees you as beautiful and radiant – you will be changed.”

To the degree you experience God loving you as His Beautiful, you will be changed into beautiful.

“So I went to a church service,” Pastor Saul, he had told me this in earnest, his face inches away. “And I laid out prostrate on the floor, and I gave my life to God. When I stood up, the addiction was gone. I never felt any cravings again.”

He tells me, his hand punctuating the air, “not since that day — August 10th, 1986, 8:30 in the evening.”

Why in the world does he bother telling us the date? Why does God step out from behind veils and make His face blindingly known? So we can experience Him.

And I can only whisper it, English into Spanish eyes: “August 10th — is my birthday.” How could any of us know what was going to happen?

The translator murmurs it to the pastor and Pastor Saul, he hears and he breaks and tears and a smile and a grasping of my hand, a shaking, a liquid laughing, and his other hand touches his chest and this is what he says:

“And that is the day of my rebirth. Us — you and I —-” He moves his hand between us, a hand to express the experience of God between us and I have no words either.

And on a hot day next to the Guatemala City Dump in September 2010, Pastor Saul had found words, wet eyes seeking… “I do all this because he who has been loved much… he now serves much.”

I was an absolute nodding mess. She who has been loved much, she now….

Then Saul has motioned for me to up up the side stairs of his church, Compassion kids pushing past us, and he’d pointed.

Out to this tangled mess of a lot next door and said how he had this dreaming prayer for the church to buy the land and build a vocational school for children who lived and worked in the dump. A place for kids who rummaged through garbage heaps to play guitars and learn computers and take language classes and bake bread — a place for them to taste the holy experience of God.



I’d listened to Saul, nodded — and I had flown home.

But Pastor Saul’s wild dreaming prayer never stopped winging in my heart— but what did I have in my hands to give? What did any of us really have to give?

I’d flown home from the dump that September 2010, and three months later, that book I’d scratched out about a crazy dare to experience God’s love, it flew out into the world.

That book with a nesting clutch of eggs and a trembling story of how one broken, fear-bound woman had counted all the ways He loves and she’d found wings.

Mrs. Stoope had counted thousands of gifts too, experienced His love. And the teenage cutter, and the depressed woman in Syracuse, and the book club of mamas called the YaYas in Georgia, and a whole church in a suburb of Windsor who strung up their photos of gifts all around the sanctuary, and a Bible Study group in Michigan of truck drivers and football players and businessmen and a movement of people moved by His grace.

Nothing remained the same and everything changed. To the degree you experience God loving you as His Beautiful, you will be changed into beautiful.

And now over three years later, 2014, I’m standing again at the edge of the Guatemalan dump with Pastor Saul.

Standing there with the farm kids and the Farmer and my beautiful Mama and every single reader who picked up One Thousand Gifts and became the gift back. Because everything from One Thousand Gifts became a gift to the needy in Jesus’ name, became a gift back to Jesus through Compassion, became a gift to Jesus.

Here we are three years later — and Saul’s dreaming prayer of a school stands at the edge of the dump.

And there are kids strumming guitars, notes rising even here.

And there’s a class teaching English to grinning students and they sing it in English to us, “Everyone needs Compassion, the kindness of a Savior…” and I’m a teary, smiling, happy mess all over again.

And Pastor Saul opens the door to the computer lab and there are kids living in the grime of garbage being creative at keyboards. And yeah, really, what can we do but throw our hands up and laugh giddy in the bakery with all these kids in aprons, hands in flour, smiling shy over cake recipes?

The words in the pages of that book had taken on skin, had stood, what we believed becoming what we really live:

Christian hands never clasp

and He doesn’t give gifts for gain

because a gift can never stop being a gift—

a gift is always meant to be given…. ~ One Thousand Gifts

All is a gift and a gift never stops being a gift —- so all we have and all we are is always we meant to be given. We are blessed, we get to bless, this is happiness!

They said that One Thousand Gifts is a book about a radical communion and the school that all of your One Thousand Gifts built echoes with prayers — it is an invitation to communion with Christ.

They said that One Thousand Gifts is a dangerous book and the school that all of your One Thousand Gifts built rings with kids’ laughter — it is a danger to all hopelessness.

And we all said it — that One Thousand Gifts is a book about that: Do not disdain the small — because it’s the ordinary that adds up to the great. And the school that all of your One Thousand Gifts built stands because of you, giving thanks to God who gives everything.

We were “just moms” at sinks and “just dads” at desks and “just kids” with joy dares stuck in our pockets. 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 takes the ones who who feel like they have so little to give, but who give thanks, and God makes this enough. God makes them enough.

Give thanks and you always find out that we’re one of the ones who get to give. Give thanks and we find out that there is always more than enough to give.



Give thanks and you always get the miracle — the miracle of more God. And He is enough.

Eucharisteo, thanksgiving, always precedes the miracle.

Pastor Saul stands with his wife in the shadow of the school that radical gratitude built and he takes his wife’s hand.

I watch how he takes her hand. The same hand that touches the heads of the children of the dump who flock to meet him and hear him say each of their names.

The same hand that reached out to touch the shoulder of every drunken man sprawled out near the dump, as he whispered their name.

The same hand that cups the faces of these men every week to shave them, offer their warring bodies hot showers at the church, gives them a haircut, because this is what a pastor does with his hands.

He raises his one free hand only slightly when he says it to us lowly, quietly, his life never about anything loud or noticeable: “All that matters is that we were Davids — David “who had served God’s purpose in his own generation” Acts 13:36.

And I can hardly nod, God so loud in my ears.

All that matters is that we are Davids who served God’s purposes in our own generation.

That we are Mrs. Stoope over stoves and grandmothers over God’s goodnesses and people over ourselves and we just take whatever is in our hands and just thank God for it and He just uses this to change the world, multiplying our thanks into the abundant Enough to give and this is what the passionate do with their hands.

We are the Davids who served not our own agendas but God’s purposes in this generation and we are the Esther Generation right here and now and it is us who want hard and holy things because we want more than hollow lives.

We are the Davids who served not some cultural ladder but God’s purposes in this generation and we are the Esther Generation rising right here and now and it is us who want a life more than self-focus and cell phones, more than iPhones, iTunes, and iLove, who want a Life of loving the least, the lonely and the lost right. where. we. are

Who know that being like Christ and caring for the poor in our homes and down the street and across town means more than just caring about easing our consciences  – it means caring enough to live lives of real sacrifice.

We are the David’ who served not ourselves but God’s purposes in this generation and there is a whole Esther Generation rising right here and now and it is us who say now is the time:

For the faith brave 
to skydive, to take wing and fly.

I run my hand along the wall built by the radical two words — thank you —  the thank IOUs of Mrs. Stoope and the cutter and the brave mother and the worshipping men and all the band of revolutionaries who were changing the world and didn’t even know it and that is what the hand of God does. 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.

Radical Gratitude is the attitude of the revolutionaries. The radically grateful become the being radically generous.

And I turn the corner in the school and there it is, painted on these bricks stacked with a movement of thanks.

Vultures can circle at the dump — but I reach out to touch this:

To the degree you experience God loving you as His Beautiful, you will be changed into beautiful.

From a clutch of eggs, all these birds taking grateful wing.

All that we have clutched released — so we can fly.

 

 

Related:

Christa Wells’ Song: Thousand Things Happening

We don’t want to deny you the crazy joy of getting to be part of this story! We don’t deny you the crazy joy of getting to change the world! Start here — and you get to be a part of the amazing that Pastor Saul and Compassion are doing in Guatemala.  Be a gratitude radical — a revolutionary that flies.

 

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 the Battle for Joy is Worth It

The words for all of this beauty on #TheFarmHicksAdventure is coming.

But for today, I’m over here at (in)courage – “Why the Battle for Joy is Really Worth It”…

 

 

 

 

Related: Coming soon! Lord willing! I can’t wait! The miracle unfolding:  The Movement that began with Two Words My Story of Radical Gratitude Take the Joy Dare & begin daily, intentional steps towards a life of radical gratitude End the trafficking of our sisters: Get involved with The A21 Campaign

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 One Secret for Real Change

When we get on that plane early Sunday morning, that air line flight attendant hands us pretzels.

The kids all say thank you.

And I’m grinning like a fool, knowing a bit of the miracle that’s coming. I’m grinning like a fool, burning up with what happened last year.

How last year, when we picked up the garbage in the streets of a slum, the sun was burning up the back of your bare white neck.

There were crumpled tin cans and sucked-dry water bags and an AIM toothpaste box and empty rum bottles.

And barefoot boys kicking a ball, and boys begging you for just one swallow water, and boys lacing their fingers around your sweaty hand.

There were no girls out there.

You could bend down like this in slum streets with your husband and with your sons and with your daughters, their long hair pulled back in the noonday heat, and you could gather all the refuse you want in your soft hands, but places like this refuses to let their girls see the sun.

There were no girls anywhere to be seen here in that little slum village.

Only ours, alive and unbound and unfurling. And I feel the silent absence of all their unseen sisters, large and looming in the alleys, and the Farmer turns to me and the Farmer’s daughters turn to me.

Their hands are picking up garbage but their eyes tell me they want to be picking up God’s broken daughters, the one in four girls right here in these shanties where their freedom and is being drank dry.

Here where even the garbage is thrown into the light.

But girls are used up in the dark until they shatter in the shadows like glass, here where we pick all these shards in the streets that cut with its invisible trafficked girls.

Our daughters have water.

Our daughters have light and hope and choices. And our girls sleep on mattresses with clean sheets and clean dreams, no one buying up pieces of them to deface, to crush with the hot weight of their gratification. We have a pantry and spaghetti and meatballs and homemade bread on our plates and Anne of Green Gables on our shelves and we don’t step over sewage in the streets or drink our carried water out of filthy pails.

And I had struck me right then, what Gloria Steinem had said: “Fire in the belly doesn’t come from gratitude.”

But there’s no denying it, and it’s like a match, like a sparking, like a full flame combusting, like an inferno, searing, branding me: Fire in the belly can come from gratitude for the blessings. Fire in the belly and fire in the bones and fire in the Body blazes because of gratitude for grace.

I get your point, Ms. Steinem, and I hear you: Revolutionary anger is what happens when people feel wild for change.

But hear me:

Revolutionary change is what happens when people feel such wild gratitude for what. they. have.  —that they share it.

Steinem, she had said it with this fiery conviction, “Gratitude never radicalized anybody.”

But I want to sit eye to eye with Steinhem in some slum back alley and tell her what I feel hot and raging right in me: Gratitude never fails to radicalize the radically grateful.

When you are radically grateful for what you have, you will go to radical lengths to share it. When you are radically grateful for being blessed — you are radically generous to the oppressed.

When you are radically grateful, you live out of a place of radical abundance — there’s always more space for more to share the grace.

And don’t confuse the idea of personal pride with radical gratitude. You aren’t actually thankful for something if you think you actually earned it. That’s pride, not gratitude.

You are only actually grateful for something if you see it as actually a gift -– as an unearned gift that was bestowed unexpectedly upon you.

That you didn’t earn it, that you didn’t deserve it, that you didn’t create it yourself. That’s a radical paradigm: that no one receives anything unless it is given him from heaven.

No one receives anything — not by work, not by worth, no by wit — unless it is a gift.

There is only one category for everything that exists: Gift.

Self-made men don’t exist — only God-given gifts.

And that’s what I don’t know if Steinhem knows: When you’re overwhelmed with the goodness of God to you — you overflow with the goodness of God to others.

That’s what I feel burning me up: Gratefulness doesn’t make us blithe little pollyannas. Gratefulness doesn’t make us comfortable  – it makes us radical. 

The radically grateful can never stand for injustice –- because they are moved by radical grace.

You can’t know grace and not be moved. Grace starts movements.

Grace is a catalyst.

You haven’t discovered fire until you’ve discovered grace. When grace touches you, it combusts you and you become one unstoppable flame.

Right there, I want to beat my chest like a drum, like a repentance, like a call: Real gratitude doesn’t make you apathetic — it makes you a real activist.

Real gratitude isn’t an anesthetic — real gratitude makes you catalytic.

There’s sewage in the street and the air hangs hot with fumes and noon and urine. There’s fire in my bones and grace is the catalyst that makes you an activist, that makes you an evangelist, that makes you a revivalist.

And I’m all turned around in just south of Port-au-Prince: When gratitude to God revolutionizes your life, God uses you to revolutionize the world.

It’s why God said to give thanks in everything.

Don’t hear me, Ms. Steinem. Hear God: Radical Gratitude is the attitude of the revolutionaries.

And when we turned the last alley and the Farmer’s hauling a full garbage bag, one lone girl comes out of nowhere. And she grabbed my hand and the Farmer’s daughter reaches for the little girl’s other hand and there’s a grace that unchains us and links us.

The plane lands yesterday sometime in the heat after noon.

It doesn’t land in Haiti. It lands in another country, a country that’s been working on this miracle for the last 3 years.

A miracle that began with just two words. Across the tarmac, our shadows light again like fire in my bones.

A fire that can’t stop — a fire like a movement. A movement of grace. The miracle coming!

Us so moved by grace and grace always starts movements. Us all the radicals who can’t stop this brazen murmuring of thanks.

 

 

Related: Coming Tomorrow! Lord willing! I can’t wait! The miracle unfolding:  The Movement that began with Two Words My Story of Radical Gratitude Take the Joy Dare & begin daily, intentional steps towards a life of radical gratitude End the trafficking of our sisters: Get involved with The A21 Campaign

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: Links that are Multivitamins for Your Weekend

EXHALE. Take Your 5 Minute Visual Vacation Right Now 

(Why Miss it — it’s absolutely Free!)

The Mystery Message written for the Cancer Mamas

Read this and dare you to not tear up? 

“But he never complains…”

Ways You Can Change the World as  Stay-at-Home Mom: Yes. Yes. Yes.

“No one in the entire history of the Olympics has ever done ANYTHING unexpected as THIS!”

An absolute must watch for every woman.

“Once they’ve taken away your imperfections, there’s not much of who you really are left …

This is how I’ve always wanted to see myself.  Now I’m questioning why I ever wanted to look like that.“

Because why couldn’t we all help each other cross the finish line with dignity?

What this man says is most satisfying? Exactly. Beautiful.

{Consider turning off music by clicking the speaker bar near the bottom of  the left margin?}

What One Woman Discovered:

How There’s No Check Box for Joy

Would you do what this father did? What if we all did? Unforgettable.

30 Photos: Your 100% Guaranteed Smile Today

What Does One Mom Do — When No One Will Come to Her Son’s Birthday? 

One For the Fridge: Beautiful free scripture art printables

{Consider turning off music by clicking the speaker bar near the bottom of  the left margin?}

What Women Started Singing Everywhere This Week:

Why You Really Matter: An Anthem For all Women

One Brave Dad and his daughters

For me, one of the Most Powerful videos I’ve ever seen. I can’t get over it.

Don’t Leave the Internet Today Without Watching This

Post of the Week here:

How Tired People [Make] Love & have an “Anything But Boring” Valentine’s Weekend

What’s been on top of the book stack on the farm this week:

Priscilla Shirer blazingly writes Hope and Jesus into any situation: “Nothing is impossible with God. NOTHING. Not even that thing. Your thing. The One Thing that seems to defy all attempts to defeat it, restore it, heal it, change it, overcome it, undo it, or just to get through it.

Your God cares and He is a God who CAN.

Believe it, Experience it: God is Able.“

Kingdom Come… this week… in us…

– take us to the hungry, show us what a Love can do –

{Consider turning off music by clicking the speaker bar near the bottom of  the left margin?}

This? This is happening. Packing today for NINE of us.

Track with us through The Crazy next week? This is your story. And just typing this makes me smile-cry. The Farmer & all of us hicks and one more (?!?) — all leaving on a jet plane tomorrow & giddy you’re coming with us.

Where? With Who? Why?  Starting Monday: the Surprise! #FarmHicks #BetheGift #1000Gifts

[ We'd love to have you join our community on Facebook for daily morning devotionals?

 

That’s all for this weekend, friends. 

Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth.

Give Thanks. Love well. Re - joice.

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 Tired People [Make] Love & Have an “Anything But Boring” Weekend

Dear Husband…. so yeah, yeah—- our mattress sags in the middle.

You can see it, even when the sheets are pulled up taut, how the springs at the centre have been flattened by the sheer weight of glory.

You and I and this becoming of us.

Some would say this has been boring, this every day love of us.

It’s been decades of this, happening after the days, us there in the dark:

We roll to the middle of the mattress, you and I, finding each other in the valleys.

Who knew that every valley is being held in the valley of cupped hands? 

There have been too many of those valleys to count.

The night after her funeral. We clung quiet to each other in the middle, the springs sagging silently under us, the words scraped raw from the sides of us.

The dark you cupped me through after my heart had been sledge-hammered and I couldn’t seem to pull all the shards out.

You said the scars became me —- that they had made me become.

I forgot to shave my legs. You said it never mattered. My waist thickened and rolled and softened, stretch-marked thin over this love of ours that grew me larger. My sagging, rounded mother body wears it like a badge: I’ve surrendered to love in a thousand ways.

And you pull all of  me close. You whisper it there warm at the nape of my neck, tell me that I’m your trophy bride: we’ve won real love and wear the battled age to prove it.

And yeah, sure, we’ve felt it too, in the hollow of some awful nights, laying there in the middle of the mattress, in our own valley of dry bones:

We married wrong.

Don’t buy what anybody else is selling:  Everyone always marry wrong.

Because what’s wrong in the world is always us.

Marriage and love and time, these are the enormous forces that inevitably chisel and change us into strangers. The springs sag. Mattresses sigh. Marriage changes us into strangers who have to meet again and introduce each other to love.

None of us ever know whom we marry. And falling in love never made anyone angels… it’s only made it clear how far we’ve fallen. Who we say ‘I do’ to —  is not who we roll over to touch twenty years later. The challenge for the vows is to fall in love with the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

The vows are a vow to make the stranger you marry —  come to intimately know love everyday.

This is the only way we become married to the right people.

And you have been smacked by my flaws, slack-jawed by my flaws, and it ain’t been Hallmark pretty. It’s been holy. You’d think after a lifetime of Sunday sermons I would have known that this is what real love always does—- goes to hell and back for each other. Thank you.

Thank you for never mentioning the burnt soup, the piles of unmatched socks, the ring around the bathtub — thank you for keeping the covenant of the eyes and the vow that rings round us. The real romantics know that stretchmarks are beauty marks, and that different shaped women fit into the different shapes of men souls, and that real romance is really sacrifice.

So Hallmark and Hollywood can position their glossy anyway they’d like, but the guy buying chocolates for the lady who lost it with him last week (that would be you and I), well, we can see right through it: Love without Truth isn’t reality— it’s sentimentality. And Truth without Love isn’t sustainable —- it’s terminal.

Real Love truthfully sees the flaws — and still really loves fully.

Love isn’t blind — Love is the only way of really seeing. You have loved me real.

And I have loved you as the hero-of-few-words who has rescued me day in and day out, without any fanfare or flash.

The real romantics are the boring ones — they let another heart bore a hole deep into theirs.

Day in and day out, we’ve lived the ordinary, boring love — our hearts boring into each others.

You have been brave and let yourself love. Which means you’ve let your heart be busted and banged up and this has kept you tenderized and soft.   I am sorry. I. am. sorry.

What else would have kept us alive and real and from growing hard?

They didn’t tell us that at the beginning: The moment you let love into your heart, your heart starts breaking. The only way to stop your heart from breaking is to stop your heart from loving. You always get to choose: either a hard heart or a broken heart. A broken heart is always the abundant heart — all those many beautiful pieces only evidence of an abundant life.

We could promise each other — to carry the abundant, shattered hearts carefully —- full of care.

This is Gospel, this is what Christ did: Make yourself vulnerable, and you make yourself irresistible. This is what Love does. You have lived Gospel to me.

The reward of loving is in the loving; loving is itself the great outcome of loving. 

The success of loving is in how we change because we kept on loving – regardless of any thing else changing. 

The value of loving is in the value of being like Christ.

You have lived and bore the weight of it —- I am far worse than I ever dreamed. And yet you have loved me beyond what I could ever dream. You have lived Gospel to me.

It’s happening without any headlines: our hearts are quietly boring into each other, us just letting our fingers find each other, our eyes linger. Boring love is what drills wells that taste like wine.

So yeah, yeah — so what if the mattress sags and gives way in the centre? The self-centredness of the two giving way to this rolling down into the middle and into a glorious one.

You and I entangled in these romanced cotton sheets of an old and practiced grace.

 

 

Related: The Real Truth About Boring Men & the Women Who Love Them: Redefining Boring

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 Tired People [Make] Love & Have an “Anything But Boring” Valentine’s Day

Dear Husband…. so yeah, yeah—- our mattress sags in the middle.

You can see it, even when the sheets are pulled up taut, how the springs at the centre have been flattened by the sheer weight of glory.

You and I and this becoming of us.

Some would say this has been boring, this every day love of us.

It’s been decades of this, happening after the days, us there in the dark:

We roll to the middle of the mattress, you and I, finding each other in the valleys.

Who knew that every valley is being held in the valley of cupped hands? 

There have been too many of those valleys to count.

The night after her funeral. We clung quiet to each other in the middle, the springs sagging silently under us, the words scraped raw from the sides of us.

The dark you cupped me through after my heart had been sledge-hammered and I couldn’t seem to pull all the shards out.

You said the scars became me —- that they had made me become.

I forgot to shave my legs. You said it never mattered. My waist thickened and rolled and softened, stretch-marked thin over this love of ours that grew me larger. My sagging, rounded mother body wears it like a badge: I’ve surrendered to love in a thousand ways.

And you pull all of  me close. You whisper it there warm at the nape of my neck, tell me that I’m your trophy bride: we’ve won real love and wear the battled age to prove it.

And yeah, sure, we’ve felt it too, in the hollow of some awful nights, laying there in the middle of the mattress, in our own valley of dry bones:

We married wrong.

Don’t buy what anybody else is selling:  Everyone always marry wrong.

Because what’s wrong in the world is always us.

Marriage and love and time, these are the enormous forces that inevitably chisel and change us into strangers. The springs sag. Mattresses sigh. Marriage changes us into strangers who have to meet again and introduce each other to love.

None of us ever know whom we marry. And falling in love never made anyone angels… it’s only made it clear how far we’ve fallen. Who we say ‘I do’ to —  is not who we roll over to touch twenty years later. The challenge for the vows is to fall in love with the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

The vows are a vow to make the stranger you marry —  come to intimately know love everyday.

This is the only way we become married to the right people.

And you have been smacked by my flaws, slack-jawed by my flaws, and it ain’t been Hallmark pretty. It’s been holy. You’d think after a lifetime of Sunday sermons I would have known that this is what real love always does—- goes to hell and back for each other. Thank you.

Thank you for never mentioning the burnt soup, the piles of unmatched socks, the ring around the bathtub — thank you for keeping the covenant of the eyes and the vow that rings round us. The real romantics know that stretchmarks are beauty marks, and that different shaped women fit into the different shapes of men souls, and that real romance is really sacrifice.

So Hallmark and Hollywood can position their glossy anyway they’d like, but the guy buying chocolates for the lady who lost it with him last week (that would be you and I), well, we can see right through it: Love without Truth isn’t reality— it’s sentimentality. And Truth without Love isn’t sustainable —- it’s terminal.

Real Love truthfully sees the flaws — and still really loves fully.

Love isn’t blind — Love is the only way of really seeing. You have loved me real.

And I have loved you as the hero-of-few-words who has rescued me day in and day out, without any fanfare or flash.

The real romantics are the boring ones — they let another heart bore a hole deep into theirs.

Day in and day out, we’ve lived the ordinary, boring love — our hearts boring into each others.

You have been brave and let yourself love. Which means you’ve let your heart be busted and banged up and this has kept you tenderized and soft.   I am sorry. I. am. sorry.

What else would have kept us alive and real and from growing hard?

They didn’t tell us that at the beginning: The moment you let love into your heart, your heart starts breaking. The only way to stop your heart from breaking is to stop your heart from loving. You always get to choose: either a hard heart or a broken heart. A broken heart is always the abundant heart — all those many beautiful pieces only evidence of an abundant life.

We could promise each other — to carry the abundant, shattered hearts carefully —- full of care.

This is Gospel, this is what Christ did: Make yourself vulnerable, and you make yourself irresistible. This is what Love does. You have lived Gospel to me.

The reward of loving is in the loving; loving is itself the great outcome of loving. 

The success of loving is in how we change because we kept on loving – regardless of any thing else changing. 

The value of loving is in the value of being like Christ.

You have lived and bore the weight of it —- I am far worse than I ever dreamed. And yet you have loved me beyond what I could ever dream. You have lived Gospel to me.

It’s happening without any headlines: our hearts are quietly boring into each other, us just letting our fingers find each other, our eyes linger. Boring love is what drills wells that taste like wine.

So yeah, yeah — so what if the mattress sags and gives way in the centre? The self-centredness of the two giving way to this rolling down into the middle and into a glorious one.

You and I entangled in these romanced cotton sheets of an old and practiced grace.

 

 

Related: The Real Truth About Boring Men & the Women Who Love Them: Redefining Boring

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 5 Words Guaranteed to Change Your Life: #DWHTY [#JesusProject 5]

Somebody sure got old Marjorie Knight’s name plain wrong.

I’m the geeky toothpick-kid from one farm over.

Standing there in Miss Marjorie’s aged kitchen smelling of wood stove and rising bread, and you could outline her silhouette there in the window over the sink, her running the water — how she looked like a stone polished perfect.

You could see how the old woman’s shoulders rounded under her tufted polyester sweaters, how the edges of the woman had rounded smooth.

They’d said the cancer would take her in weeks. That it’d eat right up the rounded sides of her. I weeded her strawberries.

Mama sent me down the road to Miss Marjorie’s farm with Shepherd’s Pie. I’d leave the tin foiled pyrex on her glossy floral table cover ripped and fraying at the edges. Her house smelled of a hundred years and Old Spice.

Miss Marjorie never did really just talk — her words chuckled. Like her words rolled like chuckling water over a stony life. I don’t have to close my eyes to still hear her.

Forget whatever anyone else said. Forget whatever any doctor said. The miracle simply happened one day at a time: Miss Marjorie laughed through the weeks and lived another 22 years.

All that matters is whatever He said. All that mattered was how she lived.

Do whatever He tells you.

Mary had said that to the servants at the wedding of Cana, before Jesus’ first miracle: Do Whatever He Tells You. Just five words. I tape it to a chalkboard, folded it into a purse, let the truth of it round off the sharp edges of my life. I walk straighter, braver.

Do Whatever He Tells You. Walk across whatever field, take whatever mountain, cross whatever sea.



Doesn’t matter if anyone else says can’t.

Doesn’t matter if anyone else says don’t.

Doesn’t matter if anyone else says won’t.

All that matters is whatever He. Tells You. 

It’s what we’d told our ragamuffin kids when they were little: “Your Dad will call you– and if you can’t hear him? You’re not where you are meant to be.”

Your Father calls you.

And if you can’t hear Him?

Ain’t that always it: We want clarity — and God gives a call.

We want a road map — and God gives a relationship.

We want answers — and God gives His hand.

Sure, fences and rules are easier:

This is the best life and that is the less life.  This is the way and that way is a copout. This family is on fire for the Kingdom and this family is just going to crash and burn.

But the point is: God singularly calls you and a call from God is about relationship and a call is something one keeps listening for — come this way, come to the land I will show you. 

It’s taking this hick a life time to learn it: God wants you to lean on the Guide — who speaks to you through His Book.

Why would God give a map — when He wants to give you Himself?

We need the person of God more than we need the plan for our life.

His voice is what you keep listening for….  and the heart of faith is your ear pressed into the heartbeat of His Word.

“This is the way for you — not her way, not their way — but My Way for You.” Stay close enough to the Word to hear your Father’s voice. Do Whatever He Tells You. 

Do whatever’s the next thing. Do whatever He puts in front of you and do it with great love and this is what makes any day, any life, anybody great. Miracles keep happening in the mundane.

Do whatever makes you a God-wrestler, that makes you push and press into Him, till He wrests your hip socket and you never walk the same.

There are swaggers and there are talkers and there are pundits and cynics and megaphones, but there are annals that bear blatant testimony: The real leaders only limp.

I watched how Miss Marjorie walked. Never trust a leader who doesn’t limp. The Limpers lead you lower. Limp into service and prayer and limp under that cross you carry and you walk as the greatest. Just do whatever He tells You.

Don’t let anyone tell you any different. Don’t let anyone tell you that radical is a geographic location or about any ovations.

Jesus does radical things: He raises the deadened and cleans the stained and breathes the Spirit impossibly weary.

He makes you to do whatever He says; He makes you to do the radically great things:

Live low and trash your anger. Be kind and be gentle and be thankful. Only Speak Words that make Souls Stronger.

Do Whatever He Says. This makes you the Gritty Radical. Simple, daily things:

Never let real joy be controlled by the things you can’t really control.

When the heart’s a bit bitter, better still the tongue. Tongues are tails of the heart. Trust your tongue only when your heart is tender.

The sin of not finding enough Joy in Christ, this is the sin that dresses up as all the other sins.

This is the radical He’s always calling Christians to – the Gritty Radical: the radical that rounds off sin. That lets the water of the Word keep wearing away the sin, sanctifying.

Don’t be fooled that there’s such a thing as Glamorous Radical. Wherever you are, there’s only Gritty Radical. Just Do Whatever He Says.  

Do Hard Things — most often means doing small, obscure, everyday things.  Just Do Whatever He Tells You.

And it will look upside down and it will look introverted and it won’t look like it makes any sense. I tell myself that every quaking morning: You’re only living Faith when you taste a bit of Fear in your mouth. It isn’t really Faith unless it tastes a bit like fear. Feel the fear and Leap Anyways.

Your Father is infinitely bigger than your fears.

I wear my bracelet, my word for the year marking me: JESUS. Simplicity isn’t a matter of circumstances, but of focus. Four words. Do. Whatever. He. Says. #DWHS

It’s changing my year. It’s changing my life. The miraculous miraculous….  The Gritty Radical: #DWHTY

Success isn’t about being amazing…. it’s about being obedient.

What really matters is living a life that is good on the inside — not one that just looks good from the outside.

I’d told my mama once that somebody should have called Marjorie Knight, Marjorie Dawn.

It’s a thing to be said about a woman, how a woman can make miracles anywhere, just doing whatever He tells you:

The woman had laughed the hard times into wine.

 

 

 

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 the 6th verse of #TheJesusProject: ”For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.“ John 3:16

Related:

We’ve been invited to join IF Equip, a global Bible study going through every verse of the book of John which is a perfect fit for those of us doing #TheJesusProject. I’d love to see you over there.

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

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 Matter: An Anthem for Women

The gorgeous woman that had stood up there on stage with the microphone?

Yeah, she hikes up the side of her shirt to show the whole crowd of us how her white thigh spills thick over the elasticized waist of her pants.

And I’m sitting there wanting to know what Jesus thinks of women.

“I’ve been rejected all of my life because of my size.“

That’s what she says at this gathering of women I was once at.

The singer holds her milk white thigh right there and she’s vulnerable thin to the front row and to those at the back  and I look down at my feet.

She’s standing on a stage and she’s holding out her bare roll of skin, a bearing of soul, holding out her cellulite.

She’s begging us to look in her eyes and why are we looking away?

There are thousands of women there were sitting under this roof holding out their hearts like empty cups.

They were right next to me — all these women rejected for the size of their pants, the size of their house, the size of their family, the size of their callings, the size of their work.

Women brushed off because they live too large or they live too small, because there is more of them than people know what to do with.

 Because they can’t or don’t or they won’t fit into someone else’s box.

Women who can’t make their faith just fit thin into their heads and these skinny lines of dry bullet points, but let their God-life roll over into their outed closets and messy stories.

Women who don’t only fit into these categories — mommy blogger, size small, housewife, single career woman, mother, retiree — because they are women made in the image of God and they are more. than. only. this.

I look around at all these women, scarred and banged up and brave and still standing, and the singer is standing there a bit bare and all I can hear is their song.

All I can hear is the whole uncontainable song of this sisterhood of women and I see how their lives break the refrain and the whole place reverberates with a truth that rolls over…. rolls like thunder.

Our God is the God of Hagar and Ours is the God who sees.

For the women forgotten and for the women discouraged and the women lost, there is water in the wilderness and He is our well and all. is. well.

Ours is the Savior who told women stories and this is serious theology — stories that were messy and large and in full colour life:  stories about a woman with a broom and He says she is the hero who lives good doctrine, the woman in her house seeking and finding the certain kingdom of God.

Ours is the Savior who sings of us, of the woman who won’t walk away from the unjust judge, the woman who will not walk away from the call, from the plea, the women who never give up, who just keep on keeping on —  and He says she is honored and His, the woman who just keeps going and giving and believing in grace.

And God Incarnate, Son of Man in the flesh, He makes one of His daughters the cameo of real theology and right praxis, a sister, this woman, this widow, who walks into the temple, and gives the very smallest of coins, 1/5th of a penny —

And God Incarnate praises the woman who. did. what. she. could…. who just did what she could in the small and the sacrificed, and He said it was everything and He deems it large and this is who we are.

We are the women who want the thing God wants — more than we are afraid of it. 

We are the women who know when the love of Christ motivates — the more fearless of everything we become.

We are the women who know real joy is not found in having the best of everything but in trusting that God’s making the best of everything.

We are the women who make our lives about the cause of Christ, not the applause of men.

We are the women who live to express the Gospel, not to impress the Jones’.

We are the women who live not to make our absence felt, but to make Christ’s presence known.

We are the women who know it’s not about us and all about Jesus. 

We are the women who unloose the hair, the women who do the lavish unlikely, the women who bow at the bare feet of God and touch pure holiness and we are rent by grace and we break and we fit and we spill over everyone with this shocking love.

We are the women who are the real sisterhood:

Girls can rival each other. But the Real Sisterhood of Women revive each other. 

Girls can empale each other. But the Real Sisterhood of Women empower each other. 

Girls can compare each other. But the Real Sisterhood of Women champion each other.

We were made from dust, a bit of earth kissed by heaven,and we are made to be ground breakers and peacemakers and freedom shakers.

So you can take your glossy Vogue covers and use them for washing windows because we’ve always thought the most beautiful women have dirt under their fingernails and could shake a bit of the very earth out of their worn and pioneering shoes.

The singer on the stage, she stands there and she says this, her eyes welling, her skin bare right there in her hands:

“I’ve been rejected for my size — but Jesus takes all of me.”

And all the women who’ve felt rejected for the size of their lives and the size of their bodies and the size of their gifts, they stand and sing it with this breaking free abandon— Jesus takes all of me.

Thousands of women lifting the roof right off everything.

 

 

Related:

Glimpses of this weekend’s IF Gathering

Women Ending All Comparisons: The Measuring Stick Principle

Come check out more about the IF Gathering?

 

Giving thanks in everything because we fiercely believe that Christ can redeem anything.

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 this month’s 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 numbered One Thousand Gifts devotional journal. 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 2014 and enter to win a Nikon DSLR camera with lens.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 – Sharing Joy on your Weekend

Nature photos that are sure to amaze…

Beauty is everywhere, the whole earth full of His Glory

Our amazing world from a bird’s eye view

exhale and take a 3 minute vacation to celebrate everywhere.

  2 months later?  Checking back in on our friends Theo and Beau –

A duo you just can’t miss!

Amazon has nothing on these:

Maybe wander through a bookstore this weekend?

Did someone mention snow? What you really must see –

Nodding yes — for every parent to read.

Award winning photography. Brilliant work.

Love these free printables! A really great selection– must see!

… when you hear him laughing loud and you come find the Farmer in the middle of working on bills, holding a book (!!) he found on the counter, and he reads parts of it aloud to you and you both laugh till your sides hurt and you feel ridiculously young again and in a messy house you both think about hanging an antelope on the wall and staying up late revelling in this crazy life of togetherness.

The Farmer grinning and chuckling through every page:

The Antelope In The Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life

Young  Scientist Challenge Winner displays his extraordinary invention

{Consider turning off music by clicking the speaker bar near the bottom of  the left margin?}

A baby giraffe stands for the first time? What. a. beautiful. moment.

Love. is. here. Love. is. now.

He is the Lord.

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[ We'd love to have you join our community on Facebook for daily morning devotionals?

Or follow ridiculous farm happenings on Instagram?  ]

That’s all for this weekend, friends. 

Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth.

Give Thanks. Love well. Re - joice.

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!}