Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 268
March 11, 2013
How to find Happiness in the Dark
Right after I read the story, I go looking for an old horn to screw right to the wall.
There are things worth the proclaiming, you know?
And after I find one, I walk around the house with the horn in hand trying to figure if it looks best on this wall? Or the back of this door? The Farmer raises his eyebrows.
“A horn on a wall?” He’s grinning boyish. Joshua is playing scales. Levi’s reciting Latin chants. Shalom and Malakai are arguing loud over a game of chess.
“Because you’re thinking it’s not quite loud enough in here yet?”
“You!” I tease, poke him in the shoulder, him broad like a beam that carries half my world.
“Does it look right here?”
“I think I’ve got a wall out in the barn it might look perfect on.” He winks, shields himself with his arm to fend off the next poke.
“But if you knew the story….” He nods, knowing, smiling, “Uh huh.” Stories can turn around whole hard hearts. Jesus walked backroads and spun stories and turned around lives and the axis of the cosmos.
I tell the story at lunch.
“So I read it this book … a true story.“ I pass down the squash. “A man drove a stretch of highway past this tattered cardboard sign that read just this:
“Honk if you’re happy”
And who doesn’t roll his eyes at such naivete? As if the world is this strange hybrid of Pollyanna and Sesame Street — if you’re happy and you know it, honk, honk — when it’s really just a strange new, old world, broken and a mess.
Shalom offers me her glass and I pour her water.
“But there’s this one day when the guy in the book drives past the sign with his little girl, and on a whim, he beeps the horn.
And every day, when he passes the sign, his daughter begs him to do it again, and pretty soon, every time he’s on this stretch of highway, this jaded man, this cynical man’s anticipating the sign. Anticipating honking his horn. And do you know what he said?”
I want to make sure I get it right. I push back my chair, to get the book off my night stand.
Flip through the pages… There.
“And just for a moment… I felt a little happier than I had before — as if honking the horn made me happier…
If on a one-to-ten scale, I was feeling an emotional two, when I honked the horn, my happiness grew several points… In time, when I turned on to Hwy 544, I noticed that my emotional set-point would begin to rise.
That entire 13.4 mile stretch began to become a place of emotional rejuvenation for me.”
I lay the book down on the table, reach for the water pitcher.
“See what happened to him? The sign said, “Honk if you’re happy. And he discovered that the act of honking the horn — it made him happy. It’s not honk if you’re happy. It’s honk TO BE happy.”
“Honk, Honk!” Malakai grins at the end of the table.
His mouth’s full of food.
I love him wild.
::
“So who puts up a cardboard sign beside a highway: “Honk if you’re happy”?”
I have to get to the rest of the story before the table erupts into a fest of honking Canadians.
“This man’s got to find out. So he finds a house on the other side of the trees that line the highway —- and he goes up to the door and asks the folks if they know anything about the happy sign?
And the man at the door welcomes him in and says yes, yes, he made the sign.” Malakai’s grinning, his cheeks right full.
“And this is why he made the sign: Because he was sitting there everyday in his house, sitting there in a darkened bedroom with his young wife who was terminal, sitting there watching her every day, as she lay there waiting to die.
And one day when he couldn’t really take it anymore, he painted up that sign and stuck it out by the road. Because, he said —- I reach for the book again, to find the right page, to get the words right:
“I just wanted people in their cars not to take this moment for granted.
This special, never-again-to-be-repeated moment with the ones they care for most should be savored and they should be aware of the happiness in the moment.”
I look around at all their faces ringing the table, the jewel of them slipping around me in this space.
Light’s falling across the table.
Hope’s one strand of loose hair is it’s own gold.
Something inside of me trumpets loud and long.
::
I can only whisper the end of the story.
“At first, after he put out the sign, there was only a honk here and there. His dying wife asked what that was about and the husband explained how he’d put the sign out there.
After a few days, there was more honking and more… And the husband said that the honking…”
I look down again at the book but everything’s blurring. Finally the line surfaces…
“.. that the honking, it became like medicine to her.
As she lay there, she heard the horns and found great comfort in knowing that she was not isolated in a dark room dying.
She was part of the happiness of the world.
It was literally all around her.”
The happiness was literally all around her.
God is literally all around us.
So much light’s falling across the table.
“I think that horn of yours, it will look best in that doorway.”
The Farmer winks.
And when The Farmer heads out to the shop after lunch, I call after him — Remember to bring in a screwdriver! So we can hang the horn.
And he waves back to me as he runs across the farmyard.
And when I’m standing in the kitchen, wiping off the counters, I hear it clear, from the farm pickup parked out in the laneway, out by the shop: Honk! Honk! Honk!
I laugh! He’s out there honking the horn of his truck!
I turn to the window, laughing…. He’s happy! Happy…
And I reach for my pen laying on my open gratitude journal there on the counter.
“Honk if you are happy” is in reality: “If you want to BE happy, honk.”
And “Give thanks IF you are happy” is in reality:
“If you want to be happy — give thanks.”
Giving thanks is what gets you joy.
Everyone gets to decide how happy they want to be. Because everyone gets to decide how grateful they are willing to be.
Waiting till you’re happy before you give thanks, is like waiting to be healthy before you take your vitamins. Vitamins are what make you healthy. Giving thanks is what makes you happy. Giving thanks is the way we awaken to the presence of God all around us and only in His presence is fullness of joy. Giving thanks is what gets you joy.
It’s taking me a lifetime to get it:
Joy isn’t a function of what happens.
Joy is a function of what I think.
Joy is a function of how I thank.
And I write it down in that gratitude journal which is really my attitude journal, “The farmer honking a horn — and that grin of his.”
This has become like medicine to me.
::
Shalom waves to the Farmer from the window. He’s waving back at her.
She sings the words quiet to him, “Honk, Honk!” — honk to BE happy — and she knows he can’t hear.
But all the world is heaven’s clarion and even in the dark, we are surrounded by it — by all the happiness of the world.
Honk to be happy.
Give thanks to get joy.
I keep the journal close, the thanks ready.
Quite literally?
He’s all around us.
An Excerpt from:
One Thousand Gifts Devotional Journal: Reflections on Finding Everyday Graces
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60 fresh & releasing devotional reflections, each one like a singular tree, invite you to take wing into a forest of graces. 60 Days of Devotional Reflections. 60 Days to Joy. Practical. Profound. Pen-worthy: includes the only numbered 1000 gifts journal, space for you from #1-#1000, to begin the radical habit of thanking God for your own one thousand gifts. Perfect for spring?
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Join us? And happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts? Dare you to Joy! Take the dare to Fully Live!
1. Grab 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!
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Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} 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 8, 2013
Letters to the Wounded {#1}
And after sharing Letters to the Wound {#2} this week? …. I went back in the archives and pulled out Letters to the Wounded {#1}.
D
ear Wounded,
You were bleeding quiet in my inbox.
I read your letter slow, line by line, the way one follows the trail of smearing salty red back to find the gash, to the place where the skin weeps blood.
I read your words, the ones about doubting God and I felt along your questions, and I see it, where you hurt. I read how ones who claim Christ’s name thrust the sharp point and inflicted the injury and I winced and I read of the silence when you pounded heaven’s gate and something inside me twisted tight and broke, and I read your story, again, again.
I have your blood on my hands.
I’ve got your bloodied story on my hands and I’ve got my own messy, gory past and I too live wounded — wounded by life and this aching strangle of sickness and dying dreams; wounded by the church and the licks of thoughtless tongues, infighting, and hard, indifferent hearts.
Wounded by God.
There. I said it. I don’t know if I could have if you hadn’t been brave enough to say it first.
You wrote me —- well, a collective you, several in one day, all with different scenes in that one play ending with the same last line, “How to believe?” —- and you didn’t even know why you bothered to write me a letter really and I smiled and nodded because I get that.
What can any flesh and bones embodied in time really say when it’s your spirit that is groping about to feel His Spirit?
Yes, this is Spirit work. But I can wholly listen to your story. Tell bits of mine.
My own story of doubt and fist shaking and shoulder shuddering sobs and wrestling with God and revelation and pilgrimage. I can tell you what I doubt and why I doubt and who I doubt. We can share our stories, because I think story, not argument, may reveal there is a God who wrote Himself into the human story with the words ‘In the Beginning’, and a God Who stays with us throughout each page and paragraph until the last chapter.
Your story had a saved mother and a skeptical father.
And a voracious cancer that gutted her body and your last fierce vestiges of belief until nothing was left of either.
I could feel the caustic burn of her death as I read your words and my throat swelled. Her in all her beauty and monumental faith shrivelling away and how she never seemed to feel any comfort of the Lord at all. She had said so.
How you’d like to get your hands on God and throttle His audacious, negligent neck — wound Him just a bit. There. You said that too.
But even if you could just grab hold of the absent God’s neck — just prove that He really existed — maybe that would go a long ways to healing?
I don’t know why your luminous mother had to die a heinous death like that and why your family has had to ache like this and why Christians have failed to love you.
And I don’t know why my sister was killed, why my two nephews were both born with fatal diseases and we buried them within 18 months of each other, why prayers didn’t save my Dad, my parent’s marriage, who we all once were.
All these tears and burial plots and echoing hospital halls — how long, oh God, how long? Why don’t You show us Your hand, Your face — even Your bending neck?
The wounded people —- who can blame us for asking: Is there really a Doctor in the house? Are You here? Do you hear?
We say we just want evidence, we just want just one iota of tangible, undeniable proof that God’s close.
But maybe proof of His existence would satisfy us little, be little more than cold comfort and maybe this is what God really knows.
Maybe more than scientific, conclusive evidence of God, maybe the dark depths of us really long for the filling of a wounded, weeping God who doesn’t write answers in the starts but writes His love in our scars. With His scars.
Maybe in ditches and by death beds, maybe we aren’t seeking evidence of God as much as we are seeking an experience with God.
And maybe that is precisely what God has given, day after day, right here in the midst and the mess —- not hard evidence, but a holy experience.
And that’s what I’m experiencing as I keeping writing down 1000 endless gifts.
The uncontainable God reveals Himself in the smallest containers of grace.
… the first light through the window
the sole sparrow on the telephone line
the cold glass of water and the laughter after lunch
the blankets at the end of the day…
And writing thanks for the seemingly trite let me see that nothing is trite, that the small is sacred and the Doctor in the house binds up our wounds with scraps of daily mercy. He is the sacred in our everyday and I have found He is real in the daily common and the hallowed, ordinary now, and I still doubt and who. I. doubt. is. me.
This is a long story and I will tell more of it, but it began like this:
I had lived embittered at what I judged the injustices of this world — but how I had missed that grace was the greatest injustice of all?
And He gave the grace to us.
And us wounded ones who have lost parts of ourselves in the battle, who walk around with gaping, bleeding emptiness, who feel the longing for something we have lost but can never seem to find, perhaps that aching is itself an answer from God?
That our craving for Him is a way of experiencing Him. And in our hungering for God, we are slowly healed by God.
And know this: We won’t wash our hands. We cry with you and we remember you and we carry your woundedness with us and our heart will beat with your bleeding heart.
And The Wounded Healer with the scars, He bleeds with us all.
Related:
Letters to the Wounded {#2}
Because When it’s a Bummer, it might be Perfect
What Everyone Who Feels Like a Loser Really Needs
Dispatch from a Near Drowning, and a Love Note to Self-Loathers
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 7, 2013
Dispatch from a Near Drowning, and A Love Note to Self-Loathers
Today, an author, friend, another mama of 6, living not off land, but sea, a woman of deep wisdom and whom I hold in the highest esteem — Leslie Leyland Fields, with a dispatch from Alaska:
I was swept off my feet a few days ago.
By the massive cold hand of a wave—an ocean wave twice as big as its brothers. I was there on the beach beside my house with camera in hand because of a certain desperation. A certain hate of the familiar.
Rain and snow had lashed our houses and windows for days on end, which is usual for this island in the Gulf of Alaska. We live and commercial fish surrounded by wilderness, among stupendous beauty, but it is not always enough.
When we predict the weather successfully, first we feel smart, then we’re depressed. We don’t want to be a weather prophet. We want to be surprised. We want the weather to break free from the centrifuge of our gloomy prognostications.
This week, for a few days, I had a stupendous bout with self-loathing, which is much deeper than despising the familiar. I suspect you’ve had a bout or two yourself. At least I hope so. I do wish it upon you, even now, this month when in many places spring begins to pull grasses, flowers and hope from the cold soil beneath us. I am not of the cult who instructs people to begin their days standing in front of a mirror wrapping their arms around themselves chanting, “You are Beautiful! You are gorgeous! You are loving and perfect!”
(I have an article in my files from a pseudo-Christian magazine urging just such a routine.) I won’t confess the details, but for a few terrifying hours, I saw into my cracked, pathetic heart and I was slain. I was stripped of excuses, the usual cover-ups. I was selfish, callous, a Cad without the “bury” to cover it . . . I was no-good, rotten.
In that mood, and tired of cowering from the weather, I took to the beach with my two youngest sons, 9 and 11, in a freezing rain. With winter coat, boots, hat and hood I followed them out to the black gravel beach a minute’s walk from our house. The days of storm and wind brought massive waves, a thunderous surf crashing to our familiar black shoreline.
They had come to play. With my new camera in hand, I had come to work.
They stood on the rocks and as each wave pulverized the shore, they stood above on the rocks and lifted their arms, as if flying. Faces into the rain and wind, every watery explosion brought exultation. When tired of that, they played wave tag, me following them with the camera, snapping their joy in the relentless storm, a marvel.
What brings me fatigue and despair brings them delight.
Then it hit. The boys warned me as they ran to the higher rocks. But I didn’t hear in time. The wave hit my knees, knocking me to the beach. Splayed and aswirl in seawater and kelp, I thought only of the camera, my new expensive camera and held it aloft. Imbalanced, and all my clothing immediately sodden, I couldn’t get up. The wave, retreating back to the water, began to drag me with it.
“Mom!” the boys cried, watching with horror.
“Abraham, help!” I called to my 11 year old, who stood too stunned to move.
“Help me!” I cried again, helplessly. He ran toward me and held out his hand, eyes huge. As the wave receded, I heaved myself over onto my knees, grabbed his hand and stumbled to my feet.
My boots were full of icy water, I was wet to my waist and littered with pieces of kelp. I knew I would be shaking soon.
It was the best thing that happened that day. Swept off my feet by the familiar—the familiar grown strange and dangerous. How had I forgotten? Like my own heart. How had I forgotten the danger there, the darkness, the force that can slay others, slay myself, when I see it true?
I was swept by another wave just two days later. On Sunday I was part of a drama troupe that enacted “The Love Chapter,” perhaps the most beautiful and most famous words about love ever written. “Perfect love is not proud, it is not self-seeking, it does not boast, it does not envy, it does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth . . . True love hopes, believes, endures all things…”
As I spoke and enacted these words on stage with people in my church—-giving food to a hungry man, bending down to tie a boy’s shoe, giving another my coat, I was nearly drowned with the simplicity and hope of this love—a love that pours from a humble heart, from a heart that knows its own darkness.
‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.’
I realized, this is all I have, a crooked heart.
This is all you have, a crooked heart.
Knowing this, we can drown in our own salt tears — or we can love one another more.
I choose more.
Text and photos by Leslie Leyland Fields
Ann and I “met” through word and screen at first, as she was beginning to write One Thousand Gifts. Profoundly aware of the responsibility that had come to her, Ann sent her first chapters to me, as I work with writers as a Professor in Seattle Pacific’s Creative Writing Program. I walked the edges of my wild Alaskan island reading those chapters that sucked the wind out of me. I did not know how God would use her words out in the world—who can know such a thing? But I knew this was an uncommon, pure heart I wanted to listen to. A year later we met at a writing conference and sat up until 3 a.m. joining stories, children, farm and ocean, and our deep shared love for Jesus, logos, word and world. A year later Ann contributed her stunning essay “The Land that is Us” to my anthology, The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God. We continue to share a common feast…come join me at www.leslieleylandfields.com
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 6, 2013
What Everyone Who Feels Like a Loser Really Needs
It’s half way through Lent and forget that sign of of dust they brush on the center of your forehead.
I’m bowed over the sink after a teenage daughter’s slammed out the backdoor.
Slammed out of my ugly diatribe.
And I’m thinking I need something more direct, right there on the middle of brow.
The one the Farmer frowns deep at me and shakes his head that it isn’t true.
She says she didn’t. I say she did. I don’t know how it suddenly got so loud and we both lost.
I do know there are parenting days when the terms of endearment can get confusing and it all feels more like the terms of endurement.
Our arguing, it can go in circles. I don’t like it. What I like even less somedays is me.
It’s there in the center of the kitchen table, the the wooden Lenten wreath — Christ encircling round everything on His way to Calvary.
Encircle our crazy circles, Lord?
Everything blurs and spills.
Whoever had the crazy idea that Lent was for the good who were forsaking some lush little luxury?
Lent’s for the messes, the mourners, the muddled — for the people right lost. Lent’s not about making anybody acceptable to a Savior — but about making everybody aware of why they need a Savior.
Wasn’t it Lewis who said that we are to be Little Christs?
If I’m following Him on His way to Golgatha, the place of the skull…. I finger the figurine of Christ carrying the cross.
Lent’s about little dyings.
How could so much of my flesh still be alive?
The girl whose side the sharp edge of my tongue pierced, she’s escaped to under the Manitoba Maple tree. She’s leaning up against the trunk’s mark — the scarring mark where a wind storm ripped off a limb last spring.
How could I have said those things and what part of this glorious child has my storm ripped off and how have words left marks?
In one wild moment, my disordered desires can betray how quickly I can lose my God-orientation. “Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?” I’m this spring rain over sin and everything swims.
Encircle us, Christ, us in all our dizzying chaos.
When I feel like I’m drowning–
I’m at last ready to drown in the ocean of God’s unearned grace.
The sun sets.
She’s at the couch, cheek against the window, looking out. I sit softly beside her, say it softer…
“I’m sorry.” I reach out and her shoulder’s warm under my hand. This way of somehow holding her, healing her. I murmur it again and again, trying to find the way out, the way back, and repentance is always the first step. “I sinned and I’m so sorry; I’m so sorry.“
Hadn’t Mama always said that: “It’s not that you aren’t going to blow it. It’s what you do with it after.”
“I’m the one who did it wrong, Mama.” She turns from the window, turns to face me.
She hardly whispers it, but it reverberates loud in this canyon, “Sorry, Mama.” And everything fills and our eyes find each other, flow into each other, and I reach for her hand, squeeze her hand, and forgiveness is a river that sweeps everything away.
“You know what you are?” I smile into her eyes searching mine.
She shakes her head, eyes brimming.
That’s when I know she needs a sign of who she is, right there on her forehead. That’s when I know she needs to know who she is no matter what is said, what happens, what storm descends. Her and I both.
Her mother needs to make new signs to hang everywhere, to live under.
“You know that index and the thumb that makes the stiff “L” sign — the loser sign?” She half grins.
She knows what her Father thinks of me making that hand gesture and she says it slow, “Yeeees?”
“See how these fingers can angle — how they can bend in surrender to Him.
And if you lay the other index finger a cross, pick up your cross and follow Him– there it is —
there’s the sign to wear, the sign showing the way out of a mess: “A” –
amazing.
She has to know this, that the word, “amaze,” it comes from the act of wandering in a maze.
The word amaze — -comes from being bewildered, overwhelmed with wonder — amaze.
The losers, the ones lost in the labyrinth of life, lost wandering in the maze of life, are the ones made amazing – by the One who solves the mazes of life.
I touch her cheek, “In Him, you’re already amazing.”
She blushes and I laugh, nod my head yes, insisting to this daughter who has to know her Father’s heart for her now because of the Son.
In the flesh, you’re a mess.
In Christ, you amaze.
Get. That. In.
I sign the “A” over her and Christ with the scars, He marks her.
“And you are too, Mama.”
She laughs and when I give myself the L sign — she reaches over and turns it into an “A” and I brim.
And all the daughters, we could do that for each other, turn all the “L”s into “A”s and we could wear the sign of the Son and know. it. is. true.
You don’t need higher self-esteem.
You need greater self-grace — that comes from the depths of His grace.
Amazing grace in your self-talk — makes everything amazing.
The wooden Lent wreath is there on the table. And it all comes round like a circle — His grace that you accept for yourself — is the same grace you then extend to others — which then graciously circles back to you.
And there too, the figurine of Christ, there on the circling wreath, there with the sign of sacrifice, showing how to move through Lent.
How to move in the right direction —
encircling the maze and the mess with this already amazing grace…
::
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::
Related Post: Family Lenten Activity: A Repentance Sorry Box
How When It’s all a Bummer – it Might Be Perfect
Letters to the Wounded (#2) — I found Letters to the Wounded (#1)! and it’s coming this week…
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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 with Him towards Easter, might we consider: The Practice of Sacrifice. We look forward to your thoughts, stories, ideas….
Today, if you’d like to share with community The Practice of Sacrifice … 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!}

March 5, 2013
Because When it’s a Bummer, it might be Perfect
Wept with this woman. Prayed with this woman. Laughed loud with this woman. Serving alongside Sheila Walsh with Women of Faith, I’ve been changed by the heart of this woman for Jesus. Couldn’t love her more. While I’ll be sharing Letters to the Wounded {#1} later this week, today, Sheila Walsh slips into this quiet corner with words for all the wounded… words that I come back to again and again…
Iam very fond of sheep.
I grew up on the west coast of Scotland with sheep all around me, field after field of white wool and incessant crying when things seemed a little off.
I spent the first ten years of my life trying to get close enough to hug one but they’re not big on hugging. Even if I crept up quietly behind one it was as if they had a sixth sense and saw me coming. I now know that sheep have a field of vision of around 300 degrees so they had an in-built heads up on annoying Scottish children.
Interestingly enough they have poor depth perception. For this reason, sheep will avoid shadows or harsh contrasts between light and dark. They will move towards the light. They head into the wind and towards the light. I try to remember that most days.
Of all the lessons I have learned from these defenseless, gentle animals, the most profound is the most painful.
Every now and then, a ewe will give birth to a lamb and immediately reject it. Sometimes the lamb is rejected because they are one of twins and the mother doesn’t have enough milk or she is old and frankly quite tired of the whole business. They call those lambs, bummer lambs. Unless the shepherd intervenes, that lamb will die.
So the shepherd will take that little lost one into his home and hand feed it from a bottle and keep it warm by the fire. He will wrap it up warm and hold it close enough to hear a heart beat. When the lamb is strong the shepherd will place it back in the field with the rest of the flock.
“Off you go now. You. can. do. this. I’m right here.”
The most beautiful sight to see is when the shepherd approaches his flock in the morning and calls them out, “Sheep, sheep, sheep!”
The first to run to him are the bummer lambs because they know his voice.
It’s not that they are more loved — it’s just that they believe it.
I am so grateful that Christ calls Himself the Good Shepherd.
“He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
After he has gathered his own flock, he walks ahead of them,
and they follow him because they know his voice.”
John 10:3-4 (NLT)
In the most painful place in my life, hospitalized with severe clinical depression, I too learned the most profound lesson, we are loved because we are His – not because we can do tricks like seeing people approaching from behind!
Until the day I see Jesus face to face — I will be a bummer lamb.
It’s no longer the bad news; it’s the best news in the world because it’s not that Jesus loves his bummer lambs more -
it’s just that they actually dare to believe it.
Sheila Walsh is a dear heart-sister, featured speaker with Women of Faith, a bestselling writer sold out for Christ, and author of the powerful book, God Loves Broken People: And Those Who Pretend They’re Not.
This woman’s a light for for God & all the wounded Bummer Lamb sisters @ www.sheilawalsh.com
Related: Letters to the Wounded {#2} …. Lord willing, sharing back to Letter #1 later this week.
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 4, 2013
Letters to the Wounded {#2}
Dear Thriver,
You didn’t just survive, so let’s toss that myth right at the outset.
I’ve seen you living chin brave through the hurt and how you keep taking one step out of bed and one through the door and how you scale mountains by relentlessly taking steps forward. The way you keep walking? You’re no victim. You’re a Thriver. You may bleed but you rise.
I’ve seen your wounds.
Not that you badge-flash your scars. Or try to hide them, ashamed. It’s just sometimes I see a passing flicker in your eyes, old pain shooting white right through. But mostly, quietly, the scars just become you, who you are, they just become the way your skin pulls mottled and raised over your soul and this is how you fit.
How you can look healed and thickened and still feel so thin?
If someone brushed by you just a certain way? You’d blue tender and sore all over again or just spill without a sound.
Inside, the warrior is small. The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.
I just — I just wanted to reach out and — just touch, glance, your wounds. You don’t have to say anything. Explain anything, excuse anything. I just wanted to touch them — you– acknowledge them. You. Bless them, you, without a sound. Because Wounded Warriors win. There is no remission of sins or the crossing of finish lines without things getting bloody. You are so brave to keep facing the light. To keep walking toward Home.
The Scarred Savior will know you’re His — by yours.
And when He cups your face, that moment when His scars touch your skin, you’ll be wholly healed.
Hang on.
Press in.
Look up.
Can I just whisper? I know you must feel like people have wanted you to go away. Sweep your scars under the proverbial rug. Erase you, avoid you, silence you.
Because it’s too uncomfortable for us, the neighbors, the church, the Body, to face our own culpability in scars. Face our own fallen disfigurement. Pollyanna wasn’t the only one who wore rose-colored glasses. Few like to admit that we come from a long line of Roman soldiers. And when it comes to the bloodied and wounded, we suddenly all lose our thin, bare necks and become turtles, shirk back into our see-nothing shells. We don’t want to know details or listen to wounds weep or wade into the bloody mess. Christ is the Truth but too many of His people run from that.
If Christ is The Truth — then where there isn’t Truth, there isn’t Christ. Why ever be afraid of the Truth? You only need fear the Truth of anything — if you think Christ isn’t capable of redeeming everything.
If we believe in the sovereign grace of God, the redemptive restoration of God — then we are never afraid of the Truth.
And maybe our deafening silence is just this: Truth necessitates confrontation — and a whole lot of us are more chicken than Christian. We’d rather save our own skin, than the skin of the bruised and battered and beaten. We’re more in love with self-preservation than with Savior-glorification.
We’d rather make pain invisible than say injustice is intolerable — so the injustice continues.
So we pretend you don’t exist, so we can pretend the sin that caused this wound doesn’t exist — because ultimately, our actions prove it, we don’t really think the Wounded Healer exists.
That God can raise up phoenixes from ashes, that He is and this. is. what. He. does.
And that which we refuse to thank Christ for — we refuse to believe Christ can redeem.
Thriver? There’s a whole lot of us who believe. Who are getting to our feet and sticking out our necks and we want you to know: we want you. You not masked, you not prettified, but you with your messy scars and your tender blue places and all that just-below-the-skin-hurt. Because when we ignore suffering — we ignore the Suffering Savior. We need you. We need to cup your tears, to water hard and crusted places, or there’s no growth in the Kingdom of God. We need your raw story — or we lose any hope of the redemptive Story. We need to hold your broken heart — or we have no heart.
I. am. sorry.
I am sorry for how alone you have felt. How abandoned, how ignored.
We need you — It is the scarred ones who make the Body of Christ sensitive.
It is the wounded ones who makes us heal and the hurting ones who make us honest and it is the broken ones who put us back together again and it is the scarred ones who make the Body of Christ sensitive.
Once, we found a trapped and wounded bird. And when we cupped it close —
it turned toward the light and flew.
More letters to the wounded in the coming weeks.
Giving thanks in everything because we fiercely believe that Christ can redeem anything.
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Join us? And happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts? Dare you to Joy! Take the dare to Fully Live!
1. Grab January’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!}

March 2, 2013
10 Links for a Wondrous Weekend
1. For a Saturday morning: One of the Differences between Happy and Miserable Marriages: Chores
2. And then, for your Saturday afternoon book reading inspiration… ah, scroll slow.
3. Just. beautiful.
{Consider muting Mr. Nevue’s music over there in the left sidebar, clicking on the speaker icon? and RSS readers may click here for the video}
4. Think resurrection: Free Printables for new life this spring
5. Be the Gift: The most charming Get Well Kit with free printables. Perfect — over and over again.
6. Maybe, after this week, you just. need. this.
{Consider muting Mr. Nevue’s music over there in the left sidebar, clicking on the speaker icon? and RSS readers may click here for the video}
7. Marriage Boost for the Weekend: Print out this. And then pick this. this. or this. Get creative! Laugh!
8. Organization Tip for the Weekend: (or a bungee cord or two under a shelf?)
9. Easter Planning: These. With onion skins.
10. When we Love: {on replay here!}
{Consider muting Mr. Nevue’s music over there in the left sidebar, clicking on the speaker icon? and RSS readers may click here for the video}
“When we love, when we love the least of these –then they will be brave and free…. If not us — who will be like Jesus to the least of these?”
Americans be a hero here, making kings., and Canadians be a hero here, making queens.
Best. weekend. ever.
Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth. Give Thanks. Love well. Become the gift.
May the grace and truth of our Lord and Savior surprise you all over again this weekend, friends!
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 1, 2013
How to Make This Month Amazing {Video}
What you know by heart — is what your heart really knows.
And the crazy things is, right at the first of the month: what the heart knows by heart is all that can calm a heart.
Direct a heart. Strengthen a heart.
So I’m thinking: What does a heart know by heart?
So March blows in — and this heart here stammers out a recitation of Romans 1:1-17 of The Romans Project:
{Consider muting Mr. Nevue’s music over there in the left sidebar, clicking on the speaker icon? and RSS readers may click here for the video}
And so each month of the Year moves FORWARD! —
just turns with just this simplicity of a trinity of these 3 habits:
1. My One Word for the year:
{With} IN – to practice awaking to His presence, to live With and IN Him.
2. Counting my One Thousand Gifts –
Each day, this dare to joy, to count His gifts everyday to know again who I can always count on. And new month? New gifts, new thanks, new joy! Write down just 3 gifts you’re grateful for each day and, the scientific research agrees with Scripture: you increase your happiness by 25%! {Who doesn’t need that!?} So we hang it on the fridge for the whole family to take the #JOYDARE! Scavenger hunt for God’s glory!
Jump in and print March’s Joy Dare right here.
Giving thanks in all things is God’s definite will for you IN Christ Jesus. (1 Thess. 5:18)
and the third habit of the trinity of habits:
3. This One Memory Project — The Romans Project, chapters 1, 8, and 12 of the book of Romans. Romans 8 may be the most powerful chapter of the whole of the canon — and memorizing only 2 verses a week through 2013 will have us know by heart three Great Chapters of the Christian faith.
This is how you make the calendar for the month: you set Christ at the center.
This is the question: Will you spend your days meditating on His Word or your worries?
This is the resolution every new month needs — a revolution: A turning every day to Christ.
This is the thing: No one sends you a memo that Today is the day you’ll need a certain verse to keep you breathing through the day.
When you memorize Scripture, it’s like carrying your own oxygen tanks.
And then there’s Jesus: Christ’s weapon against Satan in the desert was memorized Scripture. And if you aren’t memorizing Scripture — what IS your weapon against Satan?
And I turn at the window on the first day of the month of March, the wind blowing good things. Satan may be a prowling lion but he is on a leash —
and with a trinity of habits, hearts are on the Lamb.
Related: The 1 Habit God Really wants for You This Year
How Memorizing Romans has Made My Prayer life what I always longed for: #TheSisterPromise
And my friend, Liz Curtis Higgs, is in with us on the #RomansProject too and walks us through (the way only Liz can) the meat of what we are memorizing:
Even in mid-winter: The Hope of Spring
The Big Reveal: What Faith is, From First to Last
How to Make a Memory Commitment Booklet:
— commit His Words to heart & our hearts to Him
1. Download & Print the Romans Project Cards:
Click here to print cards: Just 2-3 Verses a Week
2. Print and either have comb bound (cards are formatted to give space for comb binding), for ease of flipping cards, propping at the sink, etc.
3. Alternatively, cut and paste into a booklet like a pocket Moleskine
4. Tick off little square boxes for each day of memory heart commitment
5. Find a partner to recite to — have them sign each week on the allotted line
(only *two to three short * verses a week – the verses are in the NIV version & take a bit to load. Thank you for grace!)
6. Or Join our Online The Romans Project Community!
The incredibly committed Brett and McKenzie over at Scripture Typer have partnered with us to create The Romans Project community just for us!
A place where we
~ type out our verses in increasing levels of memorization,
~have ways to message and encourage each other,
~and have profiles to track our progress!
Warning: Memorizing over at Scripture Typer? Is ridiculously fun and you won’t want to stop! {Kids here race each other on words per minute on each verse to see who can type theirs faster… and… um. Me too. ~grin~} Seeing how many words a minute you can type your verses out is very motivating!
Memorizing His Word together – it is. our. very. life.!
The Romans Project Plan for this Year:
1. 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. Mark it on the calendar right now? First Friday of the month, we’re sharing our Romans Project memory work! Or you can share on our Facebook page?
2. If it matters — we make time. If it doesn’t — we make excuses. Commit. And making a public commitment? Holds us to accountability — so share with your family, on Facebook, or on your blog — invite others to join you in making His Word your life.
3. And… if we finish The Romans Project? How about T-shirts?
Why Memorize Scripture?
I beg you — watch. this.
{RSS and email readers: Click here to listen to Mr. Piper’s compelling clip}
“We want this to be a discipline we practice for the rest of our lives. Think marathon, not sprint.” writes Beth Moore. “Never — NOT ONCE — have I ever known anyone to get to the end of a Scripture memory commitment and say that it didn’t make any real difference. Not a single time.”
Related Inspiration:
The Story of One Woman that will Motivate you to Memorize
Rather Memorize Colossians? Colossians in a Year: Just 2 Verses a Week
Or last year’s memory project: Sermon on the Mount: 2 Verses a week
February 28, 2013
When You are Tired of Worrying
The child at the orphanage, she grabs hold of my Mama’s hand like might she blow away.
Like you could be carried straight away into the unknown.
And she pulls Mama down, right down to the earth, forces Mama to sit and she starts pulling strands of Mama’s chiffon hair out like she’s white cotton candy in the wind.
“Looks like you’ve exploded.” I’m chuckling, kneeling down beside mama and right up against this lovely livewire who is “fixing” Mama’s hair.
“A genteel Albert Einstein with your thumb stuck in a light socket.”
“Why thank you!” Mama half chuckless, nods her head like she’s been crowned.
The girl’s hands are just flying, unplaiting Mama’s white, then twisting these strands with those, and undoing and updoing, and we’re just sitting in the sun on the porch of an orphanage, communicating only with this undoing of locks and I feel free.
How long will I have Mama and are we supposed to live our lives here or up and move there and how do you best pour out your one wild life and couldn’t we make room for just one more child and what if I’ve missed the boat and what if we bury children, mess them up, get sick on them and the dreams all blow away like papery ash and what if my heart gets shattered and what if that is what makes me whole and how do you make your singular life work best?
What if not fearing was the giant secret of really living?
All those hairs on Mama’s head are numbered.
An orphan girl is undoing Mama’s hair in the wind and every single one of those hairs is numbered by a Father who can be counted on. We’re never abandoned. I don’t have to have it all figured out. I don’t have to know where I’m going. I don’t have to know what’s up ahead. My Father numbers my hairs and I can count on Him.
No one knows what the next minute holds — but you let ourselves be moved into it anyways. Because somewhere inside of you, you know Someone holds it.
Because you trust Someone more than you realize. Because having faith in a carrying God is part of your DNA whether you realize it or not.
Mama’s locks lift into the wind, spin free in the wind.
It could be like this: I could go with the wind. I can accept not knowing where I am going because I’m accepted.
Embrace the unknown, because I am embraced.
The days could look like this: I can practice just loving the unknown simply because I am known.
Because only when you are blown to the unknown heights, do you unfurl your wings and begin your flight.
It’s not the knowing where you’re headed that matters — but that you are known and He has your hand. You don’t have to know where you are flying to — only Who you are flying into.
The miracle that matters is the unfurling of wings.
You may not know the way through the storm, but if you just open wide your wings to the wind —- there is always grace enough to carry you Home. What are you afraid of?
The miracle that matters is the unfurling of your wings.
There is nothing to be afraid of.
Mama’s hair cascades everywhere. The little girl cups Mama’s face in her warm palms. The surest way to find out if you can trust God? Is just trust Him. The freefall of faith is what makes you free.
The child turns toward me and I clap and Mama howls at the ridiculous wonder of it.
I can’t stop watching Mama’s hair blowing wild, and her loveliest, miracle unfolding, unfettered, unafraid.
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!}

February 27, 2013
Because His Daughters’ Hearts Beat with His
I’m still ringing with yesterday’s heart cry: Gratitude has never failed to radicalize the radically grateful and when you are radically grateful for what you have, you will go to radical lengths to share it and when you’re overwhelmed with the goodness of God to you — you overflow with the goodness of God to others. Fire in the belly can come from gratitude for the blessings. That’s where I’m at right now. And Christine Caine comes to this quiet corner of the web and we both ignite. A heart sister, Christine has impacted me in profound ways this last year, our conversations cutting me right to the quick. We all gathered as a family to watch Chris’ video message here — and there are no words. Only now living it. Now living it. if you do nothing else online today — watch this message.
The courtroom in Thessaloniki was eerily quiet.
We had just finished hearing the testimony of a young woman who had been trafficked from Serbia into Greece. None of us could believe the horrors to which she had been subjected. Brutal beatings. Starvation. Rape. Degradation. Every. single. day. For two years.
The judge asked the trafficker,“Why did you do this to her?”
Smiling he answered, “The punishment for selling her is much less than that for selling drugs, and I can just kick her into submission.”
There was an audible gasp.
This case is a glimpse of the depravity, pain, suffering and wickedness that surrounds us. Most of us are unaware that this is going on. Everywhere. Everyday.
It is into such darkness that Jesus sent us.
It’s hard to go into places we never knew existed. It’s hard to help people hidden in plain sight when we are not looking for them. It’s hard to be aware of them and their plight when we are distracted by other pressing concerns, namely ourselves. While we are busy trying to make our own lives easier, better and happier and securing our own prosperity, education, comfort and safety, we can so easily forget that these are the right of every son and daughter of the king.
It is easy to judge the trafficker, but what about judging our own heart? How can we who profess to be Christ followers remain disconnected from the suffering of those who bear His image? Do not all people have equal value and dignity in the sight of God?
Such injustice exists because our hearts do not compel us to get involved in alleviating their suffering or the injustice they are subjected to.
In that Greek courtroom, the trafficker revealed the true state of his heart. At least he was honest. Perhaps it is time for us all to take an honest look at our own hearts?
Jesus warned us that because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most would grow cold.
Who then are the few?
If our heart beats for what God’s heart beats, shouldn’t compassion for people and a passion for His mission on this earth be our Holy obsession.
Am I not supposed to love my neighbour as I love myself?
When good people do nothing, injustice thrives.
{Consider muting the music by clicking the speaker icon in the left sidebar to listen to Chris’ unforgettable message? RSS readers can listen to Chris here – worth every minute!}
Christine Caine is an evangelist sharing the gospel with hundreds of thousands around the globe every year and the author of Undaunted.
I’ve read Christine’s Undaunted: Daring to do what God calls You to Do not once, but twice. And Chris’ story is part of why we took our family to Haiti. Take the dare to fully live — and make a difference… undaunted! Christine is the founder of A21, an international ministry that exists to end trafficking injustices in this century. Will we be the few? The radically grateful can never stand for injustice — because they are moved by radical grace. You can’t know grace and not be moved. Grace starts movements. #GraceMovement
Related Post: How Women Get Radical for their Sisters
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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