Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 266
April 11, 2013
How to Make a Home
Sometimes in the middle of the night, her hip would graze his and his arm would find her waist and she would lay awake in the middle of their life.
She didn’t know what would come next and how it all would unfold, but that new mercies always would.
He made it simple. Raising, teaching, the children, wasn’t.
And the meals she always had to keep figuring out, and the laundry that toppled over, and the floors that kept growing mess. The way her mind and heart would wander, crumble at the edges, and she would reach for steadying in her Maker. The way she’d get lost– and remember to breathe. But this, this making of a family, it was not a calling to dismiss but a calling to make disciples.
A calling, that which keeps calling you and you never stop listening for, that is what a calling is, the way He keeps speaking: “This is the way, walk in it.”
So she made soup and matched socks. She scrubbed out the tub. She awoke: One always gets to decide what is mindless work and what is soulful work.
She would decide.
She decided for art, to make her life art. She would make it all art — it all would be art, worship, a gift back. It all would preach Gospel.
And he, he too had these simple ways that steadied her, there in the dark, always in her dark. The way that he talked and moved his hands and worked and held her: he knew how to keep it simple.
Just keep the focus simply on Christ — Walk Forward. Keep company with Christ. Love always. Bend low.
In the midst of everything that went wrong, that was all. They would see everything as the ugly beautiful – because Christ is redeeming everything.
Together, they would make a life of by doing hard but holy things.
She would light candles. She would murmur thanks.
She would touch him often and gently.
And there would be that:
The best place to make a home is in the state of amazing grace.
Related:
A Life Plan when Overwhelmed: Sanity Manifesto Printable
How Not to Miss your Real Life Calling
A Video in which I wrestle this out
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!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
April 10, 2013
When Life Burns… What We Could Do for Each Other
When that chimney started on fire, right up the center of the house, right up through center of my bedroom, I heard my Dad holler.
Heard the roar, heard that fire roaring just behind the yellow bricks there in my room.
That yellow brick road that you could follow straight up to the sky.
I curled my toes up tight under my nightie. Pulled my knees to my chin, pressed my back up against the wall near the window, near the cool. You could feel the heat off the chimney that drove up through the room. My sister wound small under blankets, pulled the sheets up over her head. As if you can hide from fire.
Why doesn’t anyone tell you? That whenever you want to stick your head in the sand — is when you need to stick your hand out for help.
That fear only happens when you try to go alone. It’s why all the angels always come with light and say do not be afraid. It’s why He says I am always with you and I won’t ever forsake.
I’d reached through the heat for my sister’s hand.
I’d reached for my sister’s hand when we’d drove away from that locked psychiatric ward, when we’d left my mama behind, and there were kids wailing and there was gnashing of teeth and there were bite marks torn right through the car seat to prove it.
Don’t ever think different: Hurt is a contagion.When one person hurts in a family, everyone aches. There is no one who doesn’t feel the heat of the flames. The singe of sickness, the sear of sadness, the way one person can ache and everyone feel it in their veins. My mama cried behind closed doors. I rocked on in the closet.
But Becomers, they don’t pull away from the suffering but lean into it, “knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint” (Ro. 5:1) and there is no. other. way. You can’t call yourself Christian, one of Christ’s, and live trying to make wide circles around pain. You don’t close your eyes to the hurting, pretend the wounded don’t exist.
To follow Christ means to follow Christ into suffering, not onto easy street.
To be a Christian means to suffer — that’s what Christ did.
Dad hollered at us to get out of the house, to get out the front door, that that chimney was roaring and who knew when the whole thing could go and I pulled my sister in. And I had said that, felt it all through my teens into my twenties– that depression is like a room engulfed in flames and you can’t breathe for the sooty smoke smothering you limp. That suicide is deciding there no way but to jump straight out of the burning building.That when the unseen scorch on the inside finally sears intolerably hot – you think a desperate lunge from the flames and this land of the living seems the lesser of two unbearables.
And God? That’s what God had said: “Save others by snatching them from the fire.” Jude 1:23
To the mama who’s singed with overwhelm, the kid whose burned by bad decisions, to the girl who feels like damaged goods and the woman who can’t breathe for hopelessness –
Feel their flame and feel their heat and the people of God face fires.
That’s what we do. You fight fire with fire and the people who have fire in their bones are called to fight the fires of this world.
There’s a teen right down the hall in his own lake of fire right now, a woman in the back pew wanting out, a girl on some street corner looking ways and no one is coming.
Every follower of Christ — is called to follow Christ into the lake of someone’s fire and hold out a hand. That’s our calling.
“Save others by snatching them from the fire.”
You can’t be anyone’s Savior. But you can be someone’s prayer warrior.
Let God be God and you be His serviceperson. Because the thing is — the hottest flame is aloneness and you snatch someone from the fire by simply grabbing their hand.
That chimney roared like a monster, like it was going to swallow us up, and Dad, he kept hollering for us to come, like he didn’t know that sometimes you’ve just got to take the time to go find someone and show them how to move their feet. Show them that ultimately pain can never be escaped from, only passed on, until it reaches a Cross.
That there is never an escape from pain — suicide, drugs, alcohol, addictions, distractions — nothing on this planet eradicates pain. You can’t escape pain — you can only pass pain on, or nail it to a Cross.
Until pain is taken to the Cross, until pain is absorbed into a cross, pain is always passed on…. passed back and around and on.
Someone’s got to take up a cross. Someone’s got to take it to Jesus.
Mama found Him and He lifted the weight, and her, and carried and when she laughs now I think glory. The way her eyes glint like her silver crown and laughter can rise like a resurrection. Like a miracle right out of fire. And I pray with a friend, pray a thousand times, for the miracle of medication to recalibrate a delicate balance of chemicals, and I fight my own heat with a pen and ink and praise for a thousand graces, because there’s an enemy who tries to turn every fire to destroy your faith — when every fire can kindle your fervency for your first love Who never lets you go.
And that night in the dark, my sister and I held on to each other, clung, and we pushed past that glowing chimney and it’s thundering rumble of flame and it’s true, what the Becomers and the Survivors made Thrivers know –
Burden is only a weight when borne alone. When the burden is borne together, by a Body, the burden becomes bond — soul strengthener.
Out on the lawn, you could see the flame shooting higher.
And I just kept holding my sister in the dark, holding on, that promise of presence regardless….
Related:
What Christians need to know about Mental Health
Letters to the Wounded
Every Wednesday, we Walk with Him, posting a spiritual practice that draws us nearer to His heart.To read the entire series of spiritual practices The next 3 weeks, as we walk out after Easter, might we consider:The Practice of Resurrection. We look forward to your thoughts, stories, ideas….Today, if you’d like to share with community today,The Practice of Resurrection…just quietly slip in the direct URL to your exact post….. If you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.
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!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
April 8, 2013
What Christians Need to Know about Mental Health
Dear Church,
Cancer can be deadly and so can depression.
So can the dark and the shame and the crush of a thousand skeletons, a thousand millstones, a thousand internal infernos.
We could tell you what we know.
That — depression is like a room engulfed in flames and you can’t breathe for the sooty smoke smothering you limp — and suicide is deciding there is no way but to jump straight out of the burning building.
That when the unseen scorch on the inside finally sears intolerably hot – you think a desperate lunge from the flames and the land of the living seems the lesser of two unbearables.
That’s what you’re thinking — that if you’d do yourself in, you’d be doing everyone a favor.
I had planned mine for a Friday.
That come that Friday the flames would be licking right up the the strain of my throat. You don’t try to kill yourself because death’s appealing — but because life’s agonizing. We don’t want to die. But we can’t stand to be devoured.
So I made this plan. And I wrote this note.
And I remember the wild agony of no way out and how the stars looked, endless and forever, and your mind can feel like it’s burning up at all the edges and there’s never going to be any way to stop the flame. Don’t bother telling us not to jump unless you’ve felt the heat, unless you bear the scars of the singe.
Don’t only turn up the praise songs but turn to Lamentations and Job and be a place of lament and tenderly unveil the God who does just that — who wears the scars of the singe. A God who bares His scars and reaches through the fire to grab us, “Come — Escape into Me.”
Nobody had told me that –
that one of the ways to get strong again is to set the words free.
You know — The Word that bends close and breathes warming love into the universe…. and the words mangled around swollen secrets and strangling dark — just let the Word, the words, all free in you.
My Dad, he had told me that if I told, it’d slit us all.
So much for believing the Truth will set you free. So much weight for a wide-eyed nine-year-old.
So I locked lips and heart hard so no one knew about the locked wards and the psychiatric doctors and why my mama was gone and it’s crazy how the stigma around mental health can drive you right insane.
There are some who take communion and anti-depressants and there are those who think both are a crutch.
Come in close — I’d rather walk tall with a crutch than crawl around insisting like a proud and bloody fool that I didn’t need one.
I once heard a pastor tell the whole congregation that he had lived next to the loonie bin and I looked at the floor when everyone laughed and they didn’t know how I loved my mama. I looked to the floor when when they laughed, when I wanted them to stand up and reach through the pain of the flames and say:
Our Bible says Jesus said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a doctor, but those who are sick.” Jesus came for the sick, not for the smug. Jesus came as doctor and He makes miracles happen through medicine and when the church isn’t for the suffering, then the Church isn’t for Christ.
I wanted them to say it all together, like one Body, for us to say it all together to each other because there’s not one of us who hasn’t lost something, who doesn’t fear something, who doesn’t ache with something. I wanted us to turn to the hurting, to each other, and promise it till we’re hoarse:
We won’t give you some cliche – but something to cling to — and that will mean our hands.
We won’t give you some platitudes — but someplace for your pain — and that will mean our time.
We won’t give you some excuses — but we’ll be some example — and that will mean bending down and washing your wounds. Wounds that we don’t understand, wounds that keep festering, that don’t heal, that down right stink — wounds that can never make us turn away.
Because we are the Body of the Wounded Healer and we are the people who believe the impossible — that wounds can be openings to the beauty in us.
We’re the people who say: there’s no shame saying that your heart and head are broken because there’s a Doctor in the house. It’s the wisest and the bravest who cry for help when lost.
There’s no stigma in saying you’re sick because there’s a wounded Healer who uses nails to buy freedom and crosses to resurrect hope and medicine to make miracles.
There’s no guilt in mental illness because depression is a kind of cancer that attacks the mind. You don’t shame cancer, you treat cancer. You don’t treat those with hurting insides as less than. You get them the most treatment.
I wanted the brave to speak Truth and Love:
Shame is a bully and Grace is a shield. You are safe here.
To write it on walls and arms and wounds:
No Shame.
No Fear.
No Hiding.
Always safe for the suffering here.
You can be different and you can struggle and you can wrestle and you can hurt and we will be here. Because a fallen world keeps falling apart and even though we the Body can’t make things turn out — we can turn up. Just keep turning up, showing up, looking up.
Mama came Home and I found grace, a thousand, endless graces, and it is by grace we are saved, grace adopting us into a family that no illness can ever remove us from.
Grace, that miracle which even the darkest can’t consume, but only consumes you.
Light pried through the dark. A shaft came through a window like a lifeline. And the birds sang and we heard them.
Related:
Praying earnestly for hurting families this weekend (@CNN)
The Story of my own journey back
Share here the one thing you wish people knew about mental health?
{bird photo credit}
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 new numbered One Thousand Gifts devotional journal— The Farmer’s writing in his with a red pen and daily – the numbers in the journal already there! Motivating… 3. Share your gifts everyday in our beautiful Facebook community to enter everyday for the monthly $100 Amazon draw (or link to your blog post with your list of gifts). 4. Count #1000gifts in 2013 and enter to win a Nikon DSLR camera with lens. Slow Down. Savor Life. Give thanks. Believing something is one thing. But the Best only comes when you decide to Be Living it. Please, jump in, make your life about giving thanks to God! — Just add the direct URL to your specific 1000 gift list post… and if you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other in our refrain of thanks by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.
Give thanks to the Lord! His Love Endures Forever!
Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
April 5, 2013
How to Get through Life’s Hard Parts (Video)
When the notes keep coming out all wrong, Hope looks up from the piano.
“Is that what she said? Didn’t she say play only the left?”
Yeah, that’s what she’d said, I had heard her — that willowy piano adjudicator who’d tucked a loose strand of mouse brown hair behind her one bending ear and she had said that it goes like that, that your life can’t sing unless you play.
And you can’t really play unless you know how to play through the hard parts.
So if you ever want to play through the hardest parts — play the left hand alone.
I lean over Hope’s shoulder, look at notes ascending like this climbing of ladders, searching for dreams.
I pick up the sheet of music, as if just by holding notes the harmony would come.
“How did she put it again? That the right hand is your default, that the right will come naturally.” Hope lets her left hand find keys…
“But if you want to make music through the hard parts — play the left alone. Practice the left again and again. And then –” Hope looks up at me and we say it at the same time, us both remembering how the adjudicator had pushed her glasses up nose to punctuate that handful of words: “Write. out. just. the. left.” Hope smiles, runs on with the rest:
“Because when you can really write out the left hand from memory, you can really play!”
Hope plays the left hand alone.
She writes out the left hand notes alone.
I strip down beds. Wash linens. Match socks. Have theological and political and economical debates with insatiable teens and read apologetics and Dr. Seuss and the Puritans and The Wind in the Willows to littles. Snap at a husband. Wash gravel down the mudroom sink. Mutter about messes.
Make squash soup and line up four boys and give four boys their spring crew cuts and sweep up the shorn of the four and there’s a lifetime of sins that can’t ever be swept under the rug. Work through bills and files and taxes and blow a fuse over too-wired boys and serve 8 bowls of squash soup and bend my stiff neck in prayer over a steaming bowl. My burned hand weeps.
Dishes still strewn, kids scattered, laundry piled, I sit at the table, blind to what needs ignoring and seeing truest, and I write out Romans 1, the shoddiest scribe, brazenly desperate to know His face and my way.
This is being hooked up to life support.
Because the thing is — you can read as many self-help books as you want, a daily diet of bulleted how-tos… but the only way to mend a heart is to memorize God’s.
The only way to really breathe is to inhale Truth.
There is always a way back.
There is always now.
Memorization isn’t for the saints who have made it. It’s for the sinners who want to make it.
Memorization is like learning to say your name, like learning where north is, like knowing your phone number home — it’s knowing who you are, where you are, Who He is. What the heart knows by heart is what the heart knows — how else can we know who we are? Memorization is 24/7 soul orientation.
I sit there after dinner with the scraps and the remains and a pen and verses and there’s this remembering the contours of His heart, the way the lines pulse.
Your life doesn’t sing unless you play.
And you can’t really play — unless you know how to play through the hard parts.
And you know how to play through life’s hard parts when you know His love by heart.
And the verses, they come, sitting there writing out the left hand alone.
Verses that come again in the hard parts and the dark parts, to get stuck on continuous replay in the heart, the lame dancing new and slow.
The Romans Project
Guess which sisters met in the middle of the midwest and played the left hand together?
My heart sister, Liz Curtis Higgs , the wise (and funny!) author of 30 books, including her nonfiction bestseller, Bad Girls of the Bible , and her newest release, The Girl’s Still Got It: Take a Walk with Ruth and the God Who Rocked Her World, joins us in The Romans Project, with videos of us reciting to each other, and Lord willing, Liz will meander up here to the farm porch throughout The Romans Project and share how God is changing her through the memorizing of Romans 1, 6, 12. (It’s only 2 verses a week for the year — come join us? Over 4,000 of us are gathering over at Romans at ScriptureTyper.com — Liz and I would love to have you! Consider Scripture and your heart and the 1 Habit that God really wants for you in 2013.)
Join The Romans Project! Memorize Romans 1, 8, and 12, in 2103, just 2 verses a week:
Start here: The Romans Project – The 1 Habit God Really Wants for your New Year -
Or join our Online The Romans Project Community – Type out the verses to memorize with us over at at Scripture Typer…
The First Friday of Every Month: We’ll host a link-up here on the blog for you to link over to a video or audio on your blog of your memory work recitation … We’re leaving no one behind! Or you can share on our Facebook page?
Can’t wait to hear your own #RomansProject. Link up?
Be Inspired to Begin: (It’s never too late. Baby steps. Forward!)
The 1 Habit God Really Wants for Your New Year (The Romans Project)
Even in the Bleak Midwinter, the Hope of Spring
The Big Reveal: What Faith is from First to Last
How to Make this Month Amazing (Video)
The Sister Promise: What We Make to Our Sisters (Updated with Video)
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!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
April 3, 2013
How to Live Through the Messy
This? This is *right* where we are at this week:
She asks me how it’s going.
And I have to smile.
And I tell her that there are pots on the stove and crumbs on the counters and yes, wherever we are, there’s always so much good and there are always hard things.
There’s the lists. And the laundry, the books and the homework and the learning.
And these kids we’re raising, they keep falling, a lot like their mother. Parenting’s this way of bending over in humility to help the scraped child up because we know it takes a lifetime to learn how to walk with Him.
And then there’s this fear beast that I thought I’d already wrestled down, skinned, hung and mounted — and it’s the thing that breathes again ugly and too close.
It’s strange how knots in the pit of the stomach can try to undo everything.
For the life of me?
I can’t get it all right.
Heaven and earth both know I am a miserable mess away from perfect. This is exactly why the bruised knees just have to bend at the table of communion, and say, yes, please.
I need Jesus.
I need His life.
I need the perfect, sinless sacrifice of Jesus Christ who can take all the broken messes and make them into mosaics of Grace.
And what I really need? Is to come to the table of communion so I can celebrate this messy life! Because this is how the dictionary defines a celebrant: The person who stands at the table of Communion is a celebrant.
The person who lives in communion with Christ is a celebrant. A celebrant is the one keeping company with Jesus.
A celebrant is one who celebrates the extravagant grace of Christ.
A celebrant is the one keeping her eyes on Jesus and His perfect sacrifice — precisely because she isn’t perfect.
The sinners and the sick, the broken, the discouraged, the wounded and burdened — we are the ones who get to celebrate grace!
The timer’s beeps. I pull the roast out of the oven. There are dishes in the sink. And it’s crazy — the relief of just smiling.
Christ invites us to celebrate the full life as the celebrants — not because we’ve got it all together, but because He’s finished it all at the Cross!
The Art of Celebrating Life isn’t about getting it right — but about receiving Grace.
Regardless of the mess of your life, if Christ is Lord of your life — then you are the celebrant out dancing in a pouring rain of grace!
Because when it’s all done and finished, all is well, and Christ already said it was finished.
I light a candle for the table.
This could be the full living: make every moment communion with Him, be the celebrant and let a celebration of Grace inhabit the days; let God open the hands, lift the arms and make me a praise, a rising incense, a certain song.
Aren’t all the worshippers celebrants? When should we stop worshipping? Or stop celebrating grace?
Grace is sufficient, grace is amazing, and grace is for everyone imperfect.
I wipe off the messy counters.
Cup my hand at counter’s edge for whatever comes —
and then turn towards the table already set and call everyone to come.
from the archives… Blistered burn healing. Kids sick. Thank you for prayers. Eucharisteo always precedes the heart miracle.
Lifeline! Right now! (2 Corinthians 4:18 MSG)
“So we’re not giving up. How could we!
Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without His unfolding grace.
These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for us.
There’s far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow.
But the things we can’t see now — will last forever.” 2 Corinthians 4:18 MSG
Every Wednesday, we Walk with Him, posting a spiritual practice that draws us nearer to His heart.To read the entire series of spiritual practices The next 3 weeks, as we walk out after Easter, might we consider:The Practice of Resurrection. We look forward to your thoughts, stories, ideas….Today, if you’d like to share with community today,The Practice of Resurrection…just quietly slip in the direct URL to your exact post….. If you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.
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!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
April 1, 2013
What an Easter Monday Faith Looks Like
‘Do not abandon yourselves to despair –
We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song!’
~ John Paul II
‘All new life comes out of the dark places, and hasn’t it always been?
Out of darkness, God spoke forth creation. That wheat round and ripe across all these fields, they swelled as hope embryos in womb of the black earth. Out of the dark, tender life unfurled.
All new life labors out of the very bowels of darkness.
The fullest life itself dawns from nothing but Calvary darkness — and out of tomb-black breaks the radiance of Easter morning.
Out of the darkness of the cross, the world transfigures into new life.
And there is no other way.
It is dark suffering’s umbilical cord that alone can untether new life.
It is suffering that has the realest possibility to bear down and deliver grace.
And grace that chooses to bear the cross of suffering overcomes that suffering.
My pain, my dark—all the world’s pain, all the world’s dark—it might actually taste sweet to the tongue, be the genesis of new life.
And emptiness itself can birth the fullness of grace because in the emptiness we have the opportunity to turn to God, the only begetter of grace.
And there find all the fullness of joy.
So God transfigures all the world …
Darkness transfigures into light, bad transfigures into good, grief transfigures into grace.
And empty transfigures into full…”
~ excerpt from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Sun’s rising after Resurrection Sunday on a Monday world where everything’s changed…
Easter Monday faith believes that in impossible darks — impossible light sparks.
Easter Monday faith believes that the tombs places of our life — are but womb places for new life.
Easter Monday faith believes that Christ tenderly takes our doubts — and says touch my scars…
This faith believes in stones that roll, in grave clothes that fall, in an Easter people who sing hard hallelujahs …
because we believe in resurrections always coming.
~ 2nd degree burns on my hand while making Easter dinner — so from the archives today. Thank you for grace, for prayers…
Why bother?
Why bother keeping a gratitude list of His gifts?
Because if you keep a gratitude list, you:
1. Have a relative absence of stress and depression. (Woods et al., 2008)
2. Make progress towards important personal goals (Emmons and McCullough, 2003)
3. Report higher levels of determination and energy (Emmons and McCullough, 2003)
4. Feel closer in their relationships and desire to build stronger relationships (Algoe and Haidt, 2009)
5. Increase your happiness by 25% — (Who wouldn’t want a quarter more happiness!) (McCullough et al., 2002)
Who doesn’t want all that? Just three gifts a day. Best gifts in April is finding joy in Him and His daily grace!
“… that habit of discontentment, it can only be driven out by hammering in iron that is even sharper —
The sleek pin of gratitude.” ….
Print April’s Joy Dare … Print out the whole year of Joy Dares
Blog your 1000 gifts, or tag #1000 gifts on Instagram, or join us on Mondays and link up to the list on your blog, or record a legacy of your 1000 gifts in the new numbered journal
Join us — and happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts …
:
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 new numbered One Thousand Gifts devotional journal
Give thanks to the Lord! His Love Endures Forever!
Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
March 31, 2013
…. Rise. Rise up {Easter Sunday Reflection}
The cornerstone of Christianity
is this rotting cell sparking,
a heart valve quivering in the pitch,
a beetle scratching in the black while
convex chest cavity shudders,
sunken death inflating with His hot breath,
atoms of the second Adam recreating
all the universe.
::
::
Can you feel it, within, in your darkest places?
He is alive! And in us!
(Consider pausing the music in the left sidebar in the very bottom corner, clicking the music icon.
If reading in a reader or via email, click here to view this video
We’ve watched countless times — and it has me in the happiest tears and every time!)
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!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
March 29, 2013
When You’re Tired of Being Torn: Why He Came {A Good Friday Reflection: The One-Piece Life}
Our Pastor calls to ask if I’d do one of a few dramatic monologues for Good Friday service— a moment through the eyes of the mother of Jesus? So I write down words… and imagine the mother of our Lord… fingering the bloody tunic of her Son.
Son…. Son of God… Son of mine…
God.
Why?
From the beginning I have watched and I have listened and I have pondered all these things quiet in my heart — but now I have to ask:
why?
Why didn’t You come down from that Cross in all Your power and Glory?
Why didn’t You blind the chief priests with Your divine radiance?
Why didn’t You still all their blasphemous tongues with the army of the heavenly host, with Your burning holiness, with Your flaming sword?
Isn’t that who You really are?
Oh Son — why?
I know… I know.
Only Your blood flow can extinguish the flames of hell.
There was no other way.
How could You let a lost world burn?
You took fire so we could walk free.
You took violence so we could be victors.
You took hell so we could be healed.
Sin hurt You far deeper than the spikes.
And You let the horrors of satan take a swipe at You so that all horrific sin could be wiped clean.
And You knew it all along.
You were conceived into skin for the Cross — the cave of that manger beginning glimpsing the cave of Your Messiah, martyred endings.
You who had no beginning, You were born for this, for the blood, that we might be reborn to life.
Oh Son….
I know… how could You have been our Saviour if You hadn’t known suffering?
How could we have worshiped You if You weren’t wounded?
How could we bow to You if You were not bruised?
We could only believe in You because You have lived in us — in our mangled world, in our aching pain, in all our hurting humanity.
You alone are the God for us — because You alone are the God who has been one of us.
You felt what we feel, You touched the death that we know, You came to us as Immanuel: God with us.
I remember when Joseph first told me… that the angel had told him that You would be called Immanuel… God with us.
I started weaving your robe right then.
The loom work was soothing, the shuttle slipping back and forth, like rocking, a lullaby. And I dreamed of You and holding You and how someday You would wear this cloth…. this tunic without seams.
It’s tradition, what all Jewish mothers give to their sons when they leave home: a seamless robe.
And I began Your one-piece before I even beheld You and I wove late through the nights, under that circle of moon and I thought of You who has no beginning and no end, You from which all things are from and through and to… and I gave you the robe and I watched You walk this sod and I was there.
I was there at Calvary and I stood near that Cross with my sister, Mary, the wife of Clopas and with Mary Magdalene and I saw you heave breathe.
And I saw the blood trickling down from the iron pierced holes in your feet and I saw the soldiers take Your clothes… this one-piece robe… and I hardly breathed… and I heard them say, “Let us not tear it.”
And when they already had tore you right through…
“This all happened that the Scripture might be fulfilled.”
And I heard you say, your voice gurgling blood, “Dear Woman… here is your son.”
And I went home with John, my mind thinking of you torn and your one-piece robe still whole…
How You let your side be ripped open that our lives need never be split into sacred and secular.
How you were slashed that our lives could be seamless — all holy.
That the veil in the temple rents in two because of You, and there is no longer a divide between the common and the hallowed and the whole earth is full of your glory and You are the continuous, unending, divine thread that weaves through all of the world, holding all together… even when you, Son, are rent apart.
And hanging naked and blood smeared and dirt defiled, You nodded slow and You said yes — You gave us your one-piece robe of seamless holiness and You clothed us, the filthy ones, in all your white righteousness.
Your blood wasn’t enough.
Your buying us back wasn’t enough.
Your being our brother wasn’t enough.
Nothing short of dressing us beautifully and calling us Beloved would be enough.
O Son…
That I’d take up this cloth that You give me and be who You name me — Beloved.
That there’s no more being torn in a million directions — that no matter what pulls, I have a one-piece life life in You: One direction, One purpose, One audience, One Love, One Joy — a one-piece life — all holy, all meaningful, all offered to You.
That I’d wear a One-Piece life and see Your face in a thousand faces, in a thousand humble and unseen places, and all my life would be all with You. And the moon will shine round and the threads of all my moments will shine with Your glory. And this one-piece life — that it’d be all be for the One and True God alone…
I swaddled You in the beginning…
And now You hold me and robe me in 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!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
March 28, 2013
When You’re Struggling through Holy Week (Thursday)
There’s snow in the middle of Holy Week.
A dusting, a sugar snow, an Easter snow.
As if the whole smashed world is intent on freezing.
Doing whatever it takes, over and over again, to stay numbed to the burn of the pain.
Because somebody’s beloved kid had a womb scraped out to get rid of a kid. As if a family tree can be conveniently cut up.
A 14-year-old boy shoots himself right through and two mothers gasp for air and the funeral is for Good Friday.
Try breathing through that. Try walking to Easter and resurrection with that.
A man I’ve known since we were kids, he tells me depression has sapped his wife of anything warm blooded and pulsing, that she lies in the dark all day and won’t eat, that he carries her like a limp rag doll to the bath, that he goes to the barn and weeps where no one can see. I don’t know what to say. So my heart just fractures. I tell him I’ll pray, that I’ll ask everyone to pray.
A friend’s first born heaves on a ventilator, lungs seared. He tells me that he hasn’t left that bedside for six days.
Watch your child struggle up for air and you think a lot about Christ drowning in His own blood, the slow gurgle of grace.
You don’t give a flippant shrug about mocking chocolate bunnies and strangling pastel silk ties. You could care less about floral centerpieces when you’re breaking into pieces behind closed doors. This whole smashed world’s a bloody mess and there are people right outside the window, right behind those velum thin walls all down the street, living this slow, soundless bleed, and Holy week can feel like a hell. And that’s why He came.
In the middle of the week, we go to the woods where they pierce the trees.
Where they drive spikes right up through the willing bark.
The man who tapped the trees for sap, for maple syrup, he says you have listen for a whistling leak of air in the sap lines, you listen for the hardly howl.
Listen for it.
He says if you want any syrup, you have to walk through the woods listening, looking for the broken air leaks in the sap line. You have to go to the broken places and people, you have to clamp the leaking places with grace. There are howls everywhere, in the pulsing lines of all the living, all the feeling.
It’s part of living:
Love will always cost you grief. Love is always worth the price.
And all I can think of is, oh, the Love that bought us, the steel driven into the trees, even these trees leaking, crying, sweet on Holy Week.
Levi’s studied the poetry and hymns of Isaac Watts all week. He keeps humming hymns through the woods, like a mingling with bark.
“The sap will run straight through now till about Good Friday,” That’s what the burly, grey-haired maple syrup maker tells us. “The trees usually run till Good Friday.”
The trees cry until God hangs upon the tree.
The world moans loud, but He hears your howl. The world smiles thin, but He touches the depths of your deep grief. The world moves on, but His love moves you. He takes the nails to take your pain and He runs liquid with you.
Shalom holds a finger over a sap pail, waits.
Then there it is, there it is, and she takes it, straight to her lips.
His tears are sweet to us. Because our God’s acquainted with grief, He is intimately acquainted with us, with our thorns hidden and driven deep. We don’t cry alone.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Sap fills a bucket, makes the emptiness hum with a weeping offering. We never cry alone.
Sure — everyone loves a Christmas Tree. But’s it’s that bent Easter Tree that guarantees His love for us.
Levi bends over the bucket, listening — and I hear him —- I hear what he’s humming and I don’t even think he knows he’s humming it, like this unconscious plea:
Alas! and did my Savior bleed And did my Sovereign die?…
Was it for sins that I have done he groaned upon the tree?
Amazing pity, grace unknown, and love beyond degree.
At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light, And the burden of my heart rolled away….
Trees are tapped for sap to make sweet, and Christ is nailed for love to wash wounds and our hearts are right broken here for heaven’s sake and we ’ll go home and put a lamb on the table and He took the cup and He gave thanks for it and He begged:
Do this in remembrance of me.
For heaven’s sake, do this:
Take your broken heart, your shattered heart, and give thanks for the heart of God who bleeds with yours and this is how your broken, dis-membered heart is re-membered – when you remember to count the ways He loves. Count, like you’re taking your own pulse, like you’re determined to keep breathing.
Remember the one thousand ways the Scarred God’s loves you, give thanks for Him in the midst of an almost hell, and your dis-membered heart re-members.
Thursday of Holy week, the bloodied and limping, the bruised and the sinners, the self-hating and soul-maiming, the howling and soundless–
– all us broken, we will remember to give thanks for His breaking and pouring out and this giving thanks is what re-members us.
“Did you hear how he said it, Mama?” Malakai asks me at a syrup dinner of pancakes in the dark of candlelight. “How the maple syrup runs just until the frogs sings?”
His face is lit in shadows.
Like the frogs know something, like all of heaven knows, and it sings relief for the sacrifice of the Tree.
Levi hums the hymn on — “Thus might I hide my blushing face while His dear cross appears — dissolve my heart in thankfulness, and melt mine eyes to tears…“
And I pour out more of the dark maple syrup and I taste the sweet on my tongue.
And our God is not a God to merely believe, but to experience, not to only believe in, but be held by. A God who not only breaks for you but breaks with you, a God to not only have creeds about, but to have communion with, a God who not only who dies for you, but who cries with you, the God who touches you and binds you and blesses you and heals you and re-members you because He let Himself be dismembered and He is the God we not only believe in— but we know. We know – know beyond a shadow of doubt, death or despair.
He has touched our tears. He has cupped our broken hearts with His scars. He has whispered to the howl, “I know, I know. And I’ve come to begin the making of all things new.” We believe. Because we know. He knows our grief. We know His goodness. And the truth is – we don’t need an explanation from God like we need an experience of God.
And that is exactly what we get.
We get that experience of God when He stretches open His arms on that Cross and cries,
“For you. For all your regrets and for all your impossibles, for all that will never be and for all that once was, for all that you can’t make right and for all that you got wrong, for your Judas failures and your Peter denials and your Lazarus griefs, I offer to take the nails, the sharp edge of everything, and offer you myself because I want you, to take you, you in your wild grief, you in your anger and your disappointment and your wounds and your not-yet-there, you, just as you are, not some improved version of you, but you – I came for you, to hold you, to carry you, to save you.”
The thanks, the yes — it could come like sweet relief.
The broken hearts — they could re-member.
The lament — it could be absorbed in love.
And I taste of holy week, taste of what of runs from that Tree, taste and experience grace and He is good.
All this Easter snow, this sugar snow, coming down like the purest redemption.
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!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
March 27, 2013
Why You need an Island of Quiet right now
Sunday, there’d been the crowning, the waving of the palms.
Monday, then the cleansing, the cursing of the fig.
Tuesday, the conflict, the plotting of the Pharisee.
Then come Thursday — there would be the communion, the breaking of the bread.
And Friday, the crucifixion, the hanging of the impossible dead.
And at no point could anyone have imagined the confusion of Saturday or the culmination of Sunday.
But Wednesday?
Wednesday, the calm, the calm, the silence of the Christ.
There’s no record of what Christ did on the Wednesday of Holy Week. Did He pray on Wednesday?
Did He go up on a mountainside and watch the sky and feel the blood in his veins, the air in his lungs, the weight of the world bearing down?
Did He prepare quietly for suffering on Wednesday because He knew: the quieter you are, the more grace you hear.
Because He knew –
be still
means stop trying to achieve great things…
and simply receive grace.
The Wednesday of Holy Week, it comes quiet and stilled. The clouds lie low. There are prayers.
The fuel of public service is always ignited by private communion with God.
Waiting for a son on Wednesday afternoon, every act of patience this learning to wait on God, there is Christ too in the silent middle of Holy Week –
there with the patience 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!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
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