Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 249

What Happens When Your Christmas Tree Becomes a Cross

I haven’t the faintest clue who noticed it first.

Maybe it was Levi, when he got clocked in the side of the head by one of the limbs when he was just trying to get to his seat at the table.

“Um…. why is this tree growing out?”

He’s rubbing his head like he’s trying to start a fire, like he’s searching for an epiphany that won’t blow out.

(November Upside Down Tree)

(Christmas Eve Upside Down Tree)

“Hey…” Malakai’s craning his neck from his seat, from his plate at the table, looking up at our upside down Christmas tree hanging from a wooden beam over the table. “The little upside down tree does seem like it’s growing… bigger.”

We hung the upside down tree in November… a cluster of branches. 

And by Christmas Eve…. it’s all…. reaching out.

I can see it –the tips of the cedar are curling, drying and curling. “Feel the tips, Mom?” I can reach one of the branches from my chair — the tips of the upside down tree feel like a …. searching…

And I can feel it like the lighting of a match —

It’s because it’s hanging upside down.

Right side up — the tree would start curling down, shriveling up dry.

But because it’s hanging upside down:

It’s not curling down — it’s curling out.

When it’s upside down — it’s dying doesn’t make it grow smaller — but makes it grow larger.

I don’t pass down the potatoes.

If you hang your life upside down, if you live the upsidedown Kingdom, your life never dies, it’s never small — it reaches out. It grows larger.

I cradle the phone between my shoulder, my ear, tell my mother while I wash the pots after dinner.

“The tree in the living room? The pretty one with lights? It’s shedding like a molting dog – needles everywhere. But the little upside down tree? In it’s dying – it’s not getting smaller – it’s curling out — reaching out — getting larger. You wouldn’t believe it.”

Or maybe you would… maybe that is exactly what really believing really is — reaching out.

Mama interrupts my blathering epiphany. “Ann — your granny.”

I stop trying to scrape chunks of crusted cauliflower off the dented up enamel bowl. “Yes, Granny — she’s okay?”

The granddaughter of Irish potatoe famine immigrants, she’s a spry 94. She washes her white curls in a bluing agent. Her lungs have had 25 years of healing after a lifetime of smoking. Her once 5 ft 10 spine is now crumbling, degenerating. Morphine is her daily fuel.

Who knows if she knows Jesus?

“The flu brokeout in her nursing home the beginning of the month. She was quarantined to her room. So I’ve called her everyday to pass the time…”

“Uh huh…” I’m back to scrubbing out cauliflower.

“I didn’t think she’d say yes — but I asked her if I could read to her?” I can hear Mama sipping — tea? “With her macular degeneration, she can’t read anymore, so I was hopeful? That maybe I could read to her devotions from The Greatest Gift?” I stop scrubbling.

“She. said. yes.” Mama punctuates the words. “She’s listening to me read the Scripture passage. Then the devotional. She’s answering the reflection questions – and then letting me pray with her.” The scrubber drops out of my hand.

“Somedays she asks to do another one.”

The tap drips loud.

Who has words?

“I just reached out to her…. I just kept reaching out to her.”

Hang your life upside down — and your life grows larger. … beautiful.

Climbing ladders of doing doesn’t make your life grow bigger —

it’s reaching out with loving that makes your life grow bigger — better.

 

The last devotional of The Greatest Gift, the one for the 25th of December, for Christmas morning, was written 30,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere en route to Uganda.

I had found an internet connection in Kampala, Uganda, sent the last devotional about The Greatest Gift back to Chicago, Illinois, and went to walk some red dirt.

Went to sit in a hut, went and listened to little Anna tell Hope-girl and I how she picked white ants from her bedroom floor to eat. She showed us the pot of swarming ants. We lean and nod.

And all I can think while I get a ham out for Christmas dinner, is of Anna and her ants.

How Anna had taken us by the hand and walked us out by the goats, out past the neighbors who lived right behind her, the mama sweeping her dirt step clean.

How I had stopped behind Anna’s house and kneeled in front of one little boy who only had no shoes, no pants, only a tattered shirt pulled over his head.

I am standing in my kitchen, ham out on the counter, the lights of the tree shimmering behind Shalom pressing out sugar cookies, and thinking about what’s under Christmas trees everywhere —-

and remembering standing behind Anna’s hut looking at the only toy that was under one tree in Africa, under the the big eyes of one little boy in Africa.

And everywhere Christmas trees blink.

They blink startlingly awake.

Christmas trees blink and really see Who He is, how He is in the face of a child, blink and see the joy of loving Him in the eyes of one little boy, a little boy with wires bent into his only toy, eyes begging to God that we aren’t playing games with what we say we believe.

There is a lonely old woman in a nursing home and someone gets the greatest gift of reaching out to her.

There is a half naked little boy in Africa with one toy and a whole lot of needs and there are families that won’t be denied the joy of getting the greatest gift by being the gift to him… to Him.

There are warm cups and loud kids arguing over what gifts to give from the Compassion gift catalogues and there are kids in slums and kids with dirty water and kids with no clothes and kids praying we give what Jesus would give this Christmas.

And there are Christmas trees down the street. Down the street and across town and blinking awake to joy right there in your house, trees that can happily turning upside down in the hearts of all the willing Body of Christ and the branches, the limbs, can all reach out, all our Christmas growing larger… greater… even more beautiful now.

Only what you have given away will ever give you joy.

When you give to the least of these, you give to the Greatest of All and get the greatest joy.

There may well be hands giving without loving — but all the loving open their hearts to give well. The Greatest Gift is given – and received – in this.

And you can see it under the branches of that upside down tree reaching out, that one heart ornament —

“I  found the One my heart loves….”

And the Babe in the manger is held.

 

 

Related:

Sponsor a Child through Compassion as your Christmas present to Jesus —

and I’d love to send you a free copy of The Greatest Gift… to thank you for being the gift back to Jesus.



Compassion Gift Catalogues

Also:

A Letter to the North American Church: Because it is Time

How to Be Beautiful — and Have a Beautiful Home and Life

Why You Are Where You Are: For Such a Time as Now

An Internet Love Story: How to Live Free

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!}

Advent Devotionals. Week 04. Love. [Video]

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

Welcome to a simple space just to slow and reflect…

Disclaimer: This ain’t all together or professional slick or anything (warm smile) … Just a simple, homemade video, taped this week by our Hope-girl, because God just keeps pressing it hard on our hearts to make a space for folks who may not have a community to celebrate the wonder and beauty of Advent with? So this is just a humble place to draw closer to Jesus? Thanks for coming anyways?

Related Posts:

The Book: The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas  

Advent Week 1: The Video Devotional for the First Sunday of Advent: Hope 

Advent Week 2: The Video Devotional for the Second Sunday of Advent: Peace

Advent Week 3: The Video Devotional for the Third Sunday of Advent: Joy

Video Devotional: How to Have the Best Christmas

Christmas at the Farm with Lizzie (Liz Curtis Higgs) and Annie 



Resource for the original 24 wooden Advent wreath and Light of the World and Morning Star  Lanterns

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!}

Come Rest

 

Praying that the video devotional for the fourth Sunday of Advent and the lighting of the Love candle will be posted this morning, Lord willing?

 

ahhh, yes…. “Rest here and be happy. Rest happy as only children can be happy in the days before Christmas.

Rest happy and love this story of a coming King who prepares the downtrodden for Christmas by becoming the Way, who lays Himself down in the crèche, on the Cross, so we can lie down and rest.

You are unconditionally accepted and unbelievably wanted … Rest and rejoice.”

excerpt from the The Greatest Gift

 

 

 

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!}

Dear Kids: What You Need to Know About Duck Dynasty, Justine Sacco, and Christmas

Dear Kids,

Saw one of you boys sitting here in a messy house last night, reading a book by the light of the Christmas tree.

Reading words.

My heart about burst.

 A guy I know often mails books.

And every time the postal clerk asks him the obligatory question about if there’s anything hazardous or flammable in the package, he always speaks truth: “You bet — words.”

Whoever said sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you?

Was dead wrong.

Ask a bearded guy from Louisiana or a tweeting PR exec en route to Africa to comment on that.

Don’t ever forget it, kids:

There is nothing more explosive than words.

Words are nitroglycerin. Words can literally ignite a heart, detonate like a global bomb — or explode in your face.

You heard of that wiry man from backwater Louisiana who was asked what he thought by a man with a recorder?

He said what he thought — but he and his family confess now that he expressed those thoughts coarsely —- unfiltered.

Listen, kids, listen like your life depends on it, because it does:

You can mean something — but if you say it mean it, no one can hear your meaning.

Have convictions — but if you don’t have compassion, you will have trials.

Please, say what you believe — but please, always be love.

Or you’re an annoying, clanging cymbal who a whole lot of people will be desperate to make silent.

Ask Justine Sacco. One woman, PR exec for the parent company of Vimeo, who yesterday tweeted 140 stinging characters that slapped and offended — and then boarded her no wifi plane. When she got off her flight 13 hours later, she found herself a hashtag that was trending worldwide, apparently fired from her high profile position, and hunted down on every social media channel by an angry mob running her off the internet — who said they wanted her dead.

Words leave your mouth, your keyboard, but words don’t ever expire quietly in a void — they always explode in hearts.

Every verb you utter causes a corresponding action, a movement, in every listener.

Measure your words — they determine the distance of your relationships.

Type up a Facebook status update — and it can be radioactive forever. Don’t be fooled by your keyboard: the Internet doesn’t have a delete button. Screenshots can make your words have a half life of eternity. Social media is exactly that — social. It impacts you socially for as long as you are a member of society.

One tweet can be the last tick in the bomb that detonates your life.

Speak slow. Off-the-cuff words too often slap.

Hear me, get this, don’t ever forget this: The tongue is the tail of the heart. The heart is known by how the tongue wags.

There is something else, kids, and I say this as a woman who scratches down words, writes books, who speaks words:

You are going to get the words wrong.

And so is every one else.

The guy from Louisiana and the jet-setting PR exec Africa bound and the neighbor next door and the pastor on Sunday morning and the friend over coffee and your wife in the car and your husband at the back door and your kids everywhere and I have and I am going to and you are and you are going to.

100% guaranteed.

The only words that are infallible — is the Word of God Himself.

So — we grant grace.

Grace is air — without it we all die.

And can I, chief among sinners, who sins daily with words, confess, kids?

Sending word-offenders to their room, figuratively or literally, may only polarize the situation and freeze positions. Cold hearts never changes words. Silencing people may not be the most effective way to educate people.

Here’s a life truth to ink somewhere into you:

When you disagree with someone — don’t dismiss them. Dialogue with them.

Exiling them, firing them, dismissing them doesn’t change them — or you.

It’s a strange but powerful paradox that upends everything: Listening is what changes words.

And words are the explosives that aren’t meant to injure people but explode new inroads — that can rightly demolish walls, destroy chains, dynamite through the impossible to the possibilities of new vistas, new ways, new destinations.

Welcome every conflict as the best possible growth opportunity. Conflict is always a blinking cursor to start a conversation toward change.

Remember what G.K. Chesterton said? That bigotry is “an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.”

If Chesterton’s on to something — and time has proven he usually was –then is it that…. bigots end conversations and big people start change through conversation?

We’ll make hot chocolate tonight, drive around and look at the Christmas lights, Christmas lights twinkling everywhere — blinking a bit like cursors.

And we’ll see it everywhere today — how the whole weary world rejoices — rejoice that the Word has come, the Word incarnate, the Word in the flesh.

The Word has come down in the midst of our conflicts and our messes and Jesus Christ, The Word, He’s lit the world. Everywhere, lights. He’s the final Word, the igniting fire that goes on forever and kindles and warms and saves.

You can see it today — the whole weary world drawing nearer now, coming close to rejoice.

Because the Babe in the manger is the ultimate blessed proof –

that Love always has the last word.

 

 

“In the beginning was the Word.

The Word was with God,

and the Word was God…

The Word gave life to everything…

and His life brought light to everyone.

The light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness can never extinguish it.” ~ The Bible, Word of God

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!}

What To Do When You Have No Idea How Get Ready In Time for Christmas

It’s on the day I forget to buy toilet cleaner in town.

The day the man at the gas pumps says it’s just around the corner, what they’re forecasting will be a green Christmas and he looks up and asks, “So… are you ready yet for Christmas?”

And I choose to smile — okay, so it was a thin smile —  a thin smile instead of hyperventilate, to keep breathing and believing, and that’s the day I drive home past the cows and the stone houses and hear it playing quiet in the background on the pickup truck’s radio and it’s a bit ironic that I have to turn it up to hear the words:

No ear may hear His coming —

But, in this world of sin,

Where meek souls will receive Him still

The dear Christ enters in.

No ear may hear His coming.

Because there won’t be trumpet blasts and a parade and fanfare, but a feed trough, a stinking manger bed, and a dark night.

Man may choose the path of least resistance but God chooses the paths of least likelihood.

I hang up coats dropped at the back door.

 

Those four lines keep ringing softly in my head.

Fill the sinks with hot water, soap suds.

No ear may hear His coming….

But, in this world of sin,

Where meek souls will receive Him still,

The dear Christ enters in.

It’s the meek, the humble, who will receive Him still — the ones laid low, the humble ones close to the earth, close to the humus, the ones bent down. God didn’t come with any buzz — He simply comes for the broken and unlovely.

Enter this mess, Christ –  enter. in.

Did the man at the gas pumps see it my eyes — how I didn’t know if my heart was ready for Christmas?

Does God see?

Preparing for the holidays is primarily a preparing of the heart.

Because what comes down is love — and the way to receive love isn’t to wrap anything up — but to unwrap your heart.

Exhale.

Exhale and make space this.

Make space just for the heart unwrapping all His love. That is all. This is not hard. This is perfect. It can happen right here, right now in the middle of this mess. 

The water in the sink grows cool. Advent could light a lukewarm heart. Burn up everything that wraps it tight…

Advent –  this is the season of preparing that prepares us for any season of life — because we are preparing our lives for Christ to enter in — which prepares for us the life without end.

Is that the ultimate purpose of this life — the preparing for the next life?

Is this why Christmas, Advent, unlike any other time of year, glimmers with a glimpse of heaven — because it’s the time of year we’re fulfilling our purpose, preparing for Christ and His coming again?

The Christmas tree’s been lit for weeks, a beacon, a preparing, an anticipation.

Why is it easier to make Christmas cookies than to make our hearts ready for Christ?

Is getting ready for Christmas as simple and difficult as simply sitting stilled before the cradle of Christ?

It’s there over the dinner table, there on the chalkboard as a prayer request: A friend whose mother’s pancreatic cancer is untreatable.

A few weeks ago, a childhood playmate writes me a note to ask me not to write her anymore.

A mother I love watches her son self-destruct and I can taste the grief in my mouth and it’s all I can taste everywhere, salty and stinging.

Turning the calendar page to December doesn’t turn life into this dance of the sugarplum fairies.

Christ shied from the sanitized — He chose the dung heaps and entered in at our stinking places. Thank God. I need a God like that. The light of the Christmas tree, it’s reflecting in the glass of the fireplace.

And Christ comes and cracks into this world and the carapace of our hurting hearts, and we can hear Him coming:  I came in unexpected ways the first time and I will come again in the hour you think not, so trim your wick, you there in the impossible dark, and light an unexpected flame regardless, and be ready with impossible hope —  for I am coming again.

Christ, He doesn’t reveal the outcome of what we face, but He reveals to us His Face. This is the gift of Christmas that flickers in the pitch black.

And yet —

Love came down and “He came to his own people, and his own people did not receive him.”

(John 1:11)

Love came down – and His own people did not recognize Him.

Love came down — and His own people did not want what He offered.

The Messiah came down and He wasn’t received as the Messiah — and Love comes down down and who receives all the moments as His love?

I’ve fumed about too many of the moments of dropped coats, strewn boots, abandoned CDs. Writhed away from the moments that make my throat burn, everything race inside. There’s things, prayer requests, on that chalkboard that I’m wild to erase. There’s things in me that I am desperate to erase. 

How in the world am I receiving Christ this Advent?

During Advent, the Christ-people, they meet whatever comes to them  — with this brazen belief that it is Love that Comes Down.

Love comes down to His own people — and His own people receive the unexpected and unlikely as His love.

The infant as infinite God — 

The Babe as bondage-breaker — 

The stump as new shoot, the ugly as beautiful, the weak as strong — 

Our loving God always comes to us wrapped in the unlikely.

We may not know the outcome but we believe that in Him we overcome — because Love comes down.

Is that how we get ready for Christmas? By readying the heart to receive the gift of every moment — no matter what the moment unexpectedly holds — as a gift of His love?

Maybe I should have said that to the man at the gas pumps?

We’re ready for Christmas,  not when we have all the gifts, but when we are ready for Christ — when we’re ready to give all of ourselves to Christ.

At the end of the day, the carols hardly play, and I stand in our messy lives and I hear them.

I light the candles at the hearth.

And I can feel how it comes.

The warmth and the flame and this slow unwrapping of everything bound …

 

 

 

Related Posts:

Advent Week 1: The Video Devotional for the First Sunday of Advent: Hope 

Advent Week 2: The Video Devotional for the Second Sunday of Advent: Peace

Advent Week 3: The Video Devotional for the Third Sunday of Advent: Joy

Video Devotional: How to Have the Best Christmas

Christmas at the Farm with Lizzie (Liz Curtis Higgs) and Annie

Resource for our 24 hole wooden Advent wreath 

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 Greatest Christmas Giveaway Ever {Free Printable}

The kids have Adore Him playing and they’re singing along and off key.

And the house wafts of sugar cookies and anticipation and names of neighbors to bless!

“You done drawing now, Mama?”

Kai’s leaning hard over my shoulder. “Can we just call it done?” And I’m thinking so, and we cut out this little hand drawn cookie envelope template. Shalom and Levi have angel  and nativity cookie cutters all over the table.

And Kai cuts out these envelopes for each cookie. And Shalom slides in cookies shaped like angels and stars and a wee silhouette of that God-Baby Who came to the manger & the Cross & offers Himself as a Savior for the world — and who doesn’t need the gift of Him most, again and again?

It’s written right there on the liner for every cookie envelope:

“The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son,

and they will call Him

Immanuel

which means “God with us” “

Matt.1:23

God with us  — is the only comfort for the wounds within us.

Kai looks up from his cutting out of the verse — “Mom? God really came, didn’t He?”

And I nod — He came.  

He gave up the heavens who were not even large enough to contain Him and lets Himself be held in a hand.

He forsook the boundlessness of space and confined Himself to skin and He gave up the starfields and took on shape and wore the bones.

He gave up the River of the water of Life that flows from His Throne Room to float the nine months on the amniotic waters. And He who carved the edges of the Cosmos, He curved Himself into fetal ball in the dark, tethered Himself to the uterine wall of a virgin, and lets His cells divide, light all splitting white.

The mystery so large becomes the baby so small and infinite God becomes infant.

“Yeah, Kai,” I fold one of the cookie templates, “The story of Christmas is about a baby who came — for the greatest give-away ever. To be the Gift.”

This is what I tell the kids making up Christmas packages for the neighbors — He came, love come down.

Love that gave — but not to those who loved Him.

Love that gave — but not to those who could give back.

Love that gave  — to those who were the poor, the bankrupt, the enemies.

Love that gave even to the likes of us. “And I don’t know… ” I am telling the story again now to me.

“Who will give away, and with their lives? Why is the world hungry when God’s people have bread? Are bread? What is there more to be in this life than to be bread for another man?“

And Hope looks up from the oven. “Remember, Mama?” She turns off the timer. “We’re calling Christmas the Greatest Give-Aways — and Jesus is the Gift!”

Jesus is the Gift and we keep giving Him away, down the road and around the corner and the world — He is the best Christmas to give — because when we share Christ, we most have Him.

And on the backside of that little verse liner, we write a Christmas note to our neighbors and tape up the back of the little cookie envelope — and tuck The Greatest Gift cookie envelope in with a little love-something for the neighbors — a hot chocolate mix, a bag of coffee, a good book, a little candle, a loaf of bread.

“Look at how many cookies we have got done now!” Kai grins from the table. And Shalom, she counts a bit giddy, this giving away that gives the Great Gift…

 

 

 

Click here to download and print out Free Cookie Envelope Template

And this Christmas story to listen to while making up cookies? I’ll pass down the cup of hot apple cider….

Related Posts:

Advent Week 1: The Video Devotional for the First Sunday of Advent: Hope 

Advent Week 2: The Video Devotional for the Second Sunday of Advent: Peace

Advent Week 3: The Video Devotional for the Third Sunday of Advent: Joy

Video Devotional: How to Have the Best Christmas

Christmas at the Farm with Lizzie (Liz Curtis Higgs) and Annie 

The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas 

Wonders of His Love Ornament is a free ornament with The Greatest Gift from our friends at DaySpring. Just add this set to your cart and use code WONDERS at checkout.

Gifts that gives a thousand gifts:

One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

One Thousand Gifts Devotional: Reflecting on Finding Everyday Graces

 

 

 

 

 

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!}

What To Do With a Hurting Heart this Christmas

That one doctor thought it was a bit of a miracle before they even cracked open the chest and cut a way at his heart.

Because who in the world figures out you’ve got a tumor plugging up an entire cavernous heart chamber when you’re blithely driving kids to hockey on Tuesday night and fine-tuning a tractor engine on Thursday and sitting in the front pew on Sunday?

Maybe you only figure out your heart’s failing when you yell at the kids over state-of-disaster floors, or when you feel like a first-class Christmas failure in the age of Pinterest, or when you and yours never get through the holidays without a whole mess of family drama — and don’t ask me how I know.

Sometimes the only thing you know by heart is that your heart knows it hurts.

So when the general practitioner in the small country clinic had suspected a tumor in the Farmer brother’s heart? The specialist could only say he couldn’t really believe it, could only think of it as a bit of a miracle. People say that when miracles happen: “I can’t believe it! It’s a miracle!”

But that’s always the best place for miracles: God meets us — right where we don’t believe.

When our believing runs out, God’s loving runs on.

They roll the Farmer’s brother into the operating theater at 1:27 in the afternoon.

We can’t think. We watch the clock. The Farmer calls his dad in Florida. They pace together. My mother calls. We pray. I keep glancing up at the minute hand, the way it keeps ticking.

Ticking.

“Did I ever tell you what Max said?” Mama’s got to be eating something. I only hear her nhuh huh.

“Well, yeah, he clapped the Farmer’s shoulder and said he really might be the only pig farmer he’s ever met and we laughed. And at the end, he prayed over us just like you’d think Jesus would — I told the Farmer that on the way home — that it’s not very often that you meet someone and walk away thinking: “He was so much like Jesus.”

“Uh huh?” Mama’s got to be eating almonds.

“But it’s that story he told — “

Can I get through this without choking up? Max’s Texan drawl was as smooth as the back of my Grandma’s Oil of Olay hand.

And he said that Taylor Storch’s family had headed to Colorado for a little skiing. That the 13 year old had laughed loud coming down the mountain. That Taylor had fallen — crashed — down a straight rocky slant of the earth. By nightfall, she was gone, slipped off this earth and Home, and her parents, Tara and Todd, were signing papers to give away Taylor’s still-warm heart.

Mama’s quiet on the other end of the line. She’s watched them a dig a hole in the earth for her own girl.

“Max said they ended up giving Taylor’s heart to a woman in Arizona whose heart was failing so weary that she couldn’t get off the couch anymore — Patricia Winters.” There’s snow falling out the window.

There’s been ugly sin this week and there’s been dead weary and there’s been more than a few moments I haven’t known how to go on.

“Taylor’s mama had only one request.” I lean against the window sill, head against the cool pane, tell my Mama what Max had said, how he had shown us a photo of Taylor with her mama. How Taylor’s mama had called Patricia Winters and asked her if she could come hear her heart.

“Oh my.” Mama murmurs what only a mama can feel. The clock’s ticking on the wall.

And Max had told us how Taylor’s mama flew from Dallas to Phoenix and knocked on Patricia Winters’ door and Patricia Winters walked right past the couch and she opened the door and she opened her arms and she welcomed them in. And Taylor’s mama fell into her arms and the two mothers just held each other, Taylor’s heart beating right there next to her weeping Mama’s.

And then Patricia Winters reached over and handed Taylor’s Mama a stethoscope.

And she laid that stethescope up against Patricia Winters and she could hear it, right there in Patricia as clear as a beckoning bell:

Thrum. Thrum.

Taylor’s mama could hear it loud and long, right there in her ears…

Thrum.

Like a thunder vibrating right through her —

Thrum.

Her daughter’s still-beating heart.

“Oh… I can’t…” Mama chokes out the words. “I can’t even imagine.”

Can’t imagine. Can’t Believe…  Miracle.

And then Max had asked us slow and quiet. “What was Taylor’s Mama really hearing?”

“It indwells a different body, but that heart is the heart of her girl…. ” Max said. “And when God hears your heart, that’s what He hears — the still-beating heart of His Son.”

The clock’s ticking on the wall. Doctor’s will be cutting into the heart of the Farmer’s brother right now.

“Mama?”

“Oh — I’m here.” Her voice’s breaking up. “Just — listening.”

Ticking. Beating.

“I was thinking this week — you know when we were in the hospital with Levi?” I turn from the window, turn the sink tap on, fill the sink as if I could fill an ache. “You know — she was the first one to come visit?”

“Yes.” Mama doesn’t have to say anything more. She knows who I mean, how it it’s been over a year and a half. That cards and letters get returned and invitations go unanswered or declined. That the strangest pain that never goes away is estrangement.

“She loved us, Mama… and I don’t know what went so impossibly wrong but I know that I miss them impossibly…”

Mama whispers it like she wishes she could make the words do more, “I know…. “

The sink water’s not much better than lukewarm.

“I sure wish I knew how to fix this — I shake my head, turn the water hotter. “Because I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

In a heart beat.

I stop. Hands in hot water.

I can hear it in me.

Thrum. Thrum.

Me with a tumor, me with heart blockage, me with a failing heart…

That’s the point:

Your heart can’t forgive the tactless no-so-great Aunt, your heart can’t forgive the words that should never have been said, your heart can’t forgive the remark that was more like a blade and left a mark how many years later. Your heart can’t forgive the step-mother, the side joke, the backhand, the over-the-top family that just gets under your skin.

Your heart can’t forgive. That’s why He gave you His.

When you don’t think you can forgive what she’s said about you —-

When you don’t think you can forget what he’s done to you –

When it’s His heart beating in you — you can forgive in a heart beat.

I look up from the sink. The Christmas tree is there by the fireplace — and it’s right there, what all the hard relationships, gatherings, families need at Christmas:

The Tree is where God’s grace does heart transplants: God takes broken hearts —- and gives you His.

I would tell Mama that later.

That they cut a 3 inch tumor out of the Farmer’s brother’s heart. That only four days later the Farmer drove his brother back home to his farm. That they prayed thanks for startling grace.

 That it’s really true: That right where you don’t believe…  is where  God meets with a miracle. 

That miracles happen in a heart beat.

 

 

 

from the archives 

Related Posts:

Advent Week 1: The Video Devotional for the First Sunday of Advent: Hope 

Advent Week 2: The Video Devotional for the Second Sunday of Advent: Peace

Advent Week 3: The Video Devotional for the Third Sunday of Advent: Joy

Video Devotional: How to Have the Best Christmas

Christmas at the Farm with Lizzie (Liz Curtis Higgs) and Annie

Resource for our 24 hole wooden Advent wreath 
Wonders of His Love Ornament is a free ornament with The Greatest Gift from our friends at DaySpring. Just add this set to your cart and use code WONDERS at checkout.

 

Taylor’s Gift: A Courageous Story of Giving Life and Renewing Hope

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!}

What Your Christmas Can’t Afford to Be Without

I walk out of a Christian women’s conference in mid-December and step oblivious right over a cross.

I’m a woman rock hard and blind.

A woman who forgets her own face, oblivious to the appalling miracle of rain that becomes wheat, bread in the mouth that becomes grace in the veins.

Of God taking my place when my sins are that I keep taking His, and honestly, I would have just kept walking straight on into the dark coming on and never looked back.

We are headed to the car — we have places to go and there are roads that lead away and I have no idea why we think that the Way that got us here isn’t always The Way.

I don’t even remember which one of us pauses there in the parking lot and murmurs it into the dusk:

“Oh —- someone has lost their cross.” I hadn’t thought it was me.

I mean, I had never seen that cross before, the one lying on the pummelled gravel, the gravel all punched out by wheels spinning and leaving and moving on. It’s lying there next to a puddle, a black cross, the forgotten remnant of a key chain.

I did linger — because I had felt it, something in me lunging to reach out, wipe off the cross’s muddied surface, clasp it. I had felt it, the recognition, like noticing your family name scrawled across a scrap, then the longing, the belonging.

I had almost knelt down.

Had almost claimed it as my own.

Almost let it take hold of me.

But did I really need a little homeless, dirty cross?

I had a few necklaces with crosses — I was wearing one.

I had come to the cross way back there already, laid my burden down. Yes, I say the Cross is the crux of my life —- but do I really need to rescue this specific lost cross from a mud puddle?

I had considered it — for a moment — and then turned. Walked into shadows.

Sunday morning finds me in the Church of Brook Hills.

Walking into the church, I mumble awkward that I’ve left my Bible in the vehicle, joke that I’m the heathen walking into church without her Bible and Robin laughs that she’d like to see me finally get saved.

We find a seat and David Platt is in jeans on the platform.

His book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream is at home, dog-eared and in the Bible-box because we’ve read it as a family after meals, after Scripture, and we’d swallowed it down, the stuff that gets caught in your gullet and won’t let you go.

There are pictures of the poor and needy hanging everywhere in this church, faces from the deep south, a slum in Africa, a run down tenement from around the corner.

I am sitting beside Kristen, a real-life Radical who’s picked up these poor and they’ve got a hold of her and they are holding her close to Jesus and from the platform he says it, words he says are for already believers, the already claimed ones,

“Your only hope for joy, your only hope for peace, your only hope for comfort, your only hope for strength and your only hope for love in this life — is found in the cross of Jesus Christ.

Your only hope in this life is found in the brutal, bloody, humiliation of a naked man on a wooden post.

My hope is that you go out of this building clinging to the cross of Christ.”

And I can feel it, like it was gutted out of me, the black carved emptiness of that lost thing I left back in a parking lot outside a stadium on my way out of a Christian women’s conference just before Christmas.

That cross I said didn’t really need right then, not the muddied one, the ugly one, the one that will mean my hands will have to get dirty.

The cross I say I’ve already once came to, been there, done that, asked for the forgiveness of sins, and then carried on, out into my life, that one time work of saving and redemption and justification all neatly wrapped up and finished up and done. And it is finished and Christ finished it but I am never finished with the cross —

I need a Cross-Centered life if I am going to live the Christ-Filled life and how do I get back to that parking lot and never move on and kneel right down and cling to it for all I’m worth?

David Platt’s saying that this Cross is the sign of God’s affection for us, that we need the Cross daily because how else can we die daily?

I know — we need a place of execution in our lives if we’re ever to rightly execute a life of faith.

And I know my life needs an axle on which to turn and my Christmas needs to be cross-centered ….

If my life isn’t cross-centered, my life is off-centered, and the warping spin leaves me sick.

My life needs centrifaith force and the centrality of the cross is the force that holds together my universe and Grace is my gravity and the Cross is my cosmos.

If everything in my world’s spinning out of control, is it because I’ve lost the centrality of the cross?

A Tree needs to stand certain at the center of Christmas. 

The worship team is playing music quietly.

Dr. Platt invites anyone who needs to come to the cross again, to cling to the cross, to come again….

And it’s only after the service is over, after one stream of people have flowed out and folks are trickling in for the next service, just before we need to leave, that I say it aloud to Robin, Kristen, Molly —-

“Can I just have a minute? I just have to … I have to touch that cross.”

I need to find what I didn’t even know I’d lost.

There’s a cross at the front of the sanctuary and I don’t care how many people are milling about and this time I kneel right down and this Christmas that we celebrate, this is the Winter Passion, the white hot burn of His love.

I look up at the cross. And I can feel it in my heart, the white hot burn of His love, and it heats me right through, liquifies everything hard, and my love leaks slow and then it comes in waves, and I am overtaken, surprised, the shoulders shuddering, the sobs spilling, spilling. And I am the woman who needs saving from herself again, again, everyday —  the dirty that needs to be wiped clean everyday, the hands that need a cross to wrap a life right around so she won’t get lost.

“I will cling. I will let go of everything else and I will cling to You and I won’t let go.”

The words slip off the tongue, a whisper, everything else sliding tears straight down and my hand’s pressing into the wood of that cross. I’m touching it and this is how God signs His Love to a loud and deaf world: He signs His love in this cross, His love to a world with wounds of it’s own. My shoulders keep heaving. He knows — He knows. And in love, He won’t leave us alone — and I’m not letting go of this Cross.

The cross, intersection of His love and my need, beam that supports the whole of a real life. The cross, the tree on which God hung Grace, the Light of the world, the only Star that shattered all my dark. I’m bent and cracked before a cross a few weeks before Christmas.

And if there is no cross in my Christmas, then my Christmas has lost Christ, and what is the manger if it not for the Messiah, the one who saves us with the scars?

This Babe who lays in a wooden manger, who came to lie on a wooden Cross, He is healing all wounds…

When we walk out of the church, the air’s turned cold. Bitter.

The blast of all the wind of this world, it hits us hard.

I walk across the parking lot toward the car.

And I’m fingering along my silver necklace to hold on to it, to feel it again, the very center of the Cosmos, the center of Christmas that I cannot lose….

This white hot love of His cross.

This warming of everything cold….

::

::

from the archives 

Related Posts:

Advent Week 1: The Video Devotional for the First Sunday of Advent: Hope 

Advent Week 2: The Video Devotional for the Second Sunday of Advent: Peace

Advent Week 3: The Video Devotional for the Third Sunday of Advent: Joy

Video Devotional: How to Have the Best Christmas

Christmas at the Farm with Lizzie (Liz Curtis Higgs) and Annie

Resource for our 24 hole wooden Advent wreath 

The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas

 

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!}

Advent Devotionals. Week 03. Joy. [Video]

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

Disclaimer: This ain’t all together or professional slick or anything…

Just a simple, homemade video, taped this week by Hope, because God just keeps pressing it hard on our hearts to make a space for folks who may not have a community to celebrate the wonder and beauty of Advent with? Just a humble place here to draw closer to Jesus? So, thanks for coming anyways?

Welcome to a simple space just to slow and reflect…

Join us and not Miss Him this year?

Consider journeying with us through December with  The Greatest Gift …   4 weeks now on the New York Times Bestseller’s List (free download of 25 ornaments with the book) – a fresh, all new unwrapping of The Love Story — your love story … awed and bowed low that God’s starting a Christmas revolution, us all turning toward Jesus. A whole bunch of us, everywhere, all over the world, who just want to open that present, moment by moment, all through Advent, the rest of our lives — the greatest gift of His Presence.

P.S. Next Sunday? Lord willing, The Barn! We’ve so been anticipating lighting the 4th candle in the barn!  

Related:

Advent Week 1: The Video Devotional for the First Sunday of Advent: Hope 

Advent Week 2: The Video Devotional for the Second Sunday of Advent: Peace

Video Devotional: How to Have the Best Christmas

Christmas at the Farm with Lizzie (Liz Curtis Higgs) and Annie

Resource for our 24 hole wooden Advent wreath

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 Good Stuff: Sharing Links that Bring Joy

Let’s pour a cup together, breathe deep, and just exhale ?

This week’s Advent Candle has been Peace. Don’t miss this one:

No more beautiful words than these

Ephesians 2:14 quietly calms: “For He is our peace…”

A man was caught on camera stealing from a tip jar….

Instead of pressing charges or even filing a police report, the coffee shop found grounds for generosity.

“In the holiday spirit, we decided to help this guy out,” says Moses. What a story… of turning the other cheek.

Scowling at the Angel: “We sat together, just the two of us. The sun would be coming up any minute. We didn’t say much. We couldn’t. We were on the verge of bursting into tears, but neither of us did… “

This whole series? Might be the greatest gift you can give your marriage this weekend…

You don’t have to clean it all up. Just make room. And ask Him in.

A must read from a friend who went to see where Jesus was born

#gamechanger

Can you hear it? Grace in every note -

An intriguing benchmark to help determine your overall health

Try this simple test?

 Don’t miss this?

WestJet airlines goes way beyond good customer service

Yes! Beautiful, fun, and FREE! Sharing this and more with you…

from our friends at (in)courage.

Beautiful, indeed.

Merry Christmas – tractor style

A harp of glass? Just — no words.

From the creation to the cross – grace finds me. Your great grace.

#preachingGospeltomyself

An unforgettable story from just one of the many Sandy Hook families.

Oh, how strong and how big God’s love REALLY IS.

Evil does not win…

… hard to whisper this out loud, head bowed, brimming & laid low before His holy throne….

Because that God’s put The Greatest Gift on the New York Times for now 4 straight weeks — slipping it into the Top 10? 

Means something of stunning, infinite, eternal beauty: A revolution of Jesus-filled CHRISTmases everywhere… Awed over every single one of you relentlessly-loved people choosing a Jesus-filled Christmas… you choosing to Unwrap the Full Love Story of Christmas — Jesus –The Greatest Gift.

May we quietly thank you with a Free “Wonders of His Love” Ornament?

Our friends at DaySpring and I are humbly delighted to quietly show our gratitude to you by giving you a free Wonders of His Love Ornament with The Greatest Gift. Just add this set to your cart and use code WONDERS at checkout. Good to the end of the year… and maybe a perfect gift — The Greatest Gift – for a friend who doesn’t want to miss Jesus this Christmas?

Come and rest and light the Advent Candles with us?

Join us and not Miss Him this year?

The last 2 weeks, we lit the Hope and Peace candle together (video above)… and tomorrow, Lord willing, JOY?

Tomorrow, we’ll post this week’s video devotional on JOY and light another Candle together?   

(Pray? this is all ridiculously out of my comfort zone and I keep hushing the temptation to high tail it outta here? Pray that this draws one heart closer to Jesus this Christmas, makes one weary soul’s December a bit easier? Pray that we’d all  just want to open that present,  all through Advent, the rest of our lives  – the greatest gift of His Presence.)

This could be Christmas like you’ve never quite experienced before —

but have always been yearning for. 

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!}