Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 269
February 26, 2013
How Women Can Get Radical For Their Sisters
When you pick up the garbage in the streets of Minoterie, there’s the sun burning up the back of your bare white neck.
And crumpled tin cans and sucked-dry water bags and an AIM toothpaste box and empty rum bottles.
And barefoot boys kicking a ball, and boys begging you for just one swallow water, and boys lacing their fingers around your sweaty hand.
You can bend down like this in the streets with your husband and with your sons and with your daughters, their long hair pulled back in the noonday heat, and you can gather all the refuse you want in your soft hands, but places like this refuses to let their girls see the sun.
There are no girls anywhere to be seen here in this Haitian port village.
Only ours, alive and unbound and unfurling.
And I feel the silent absence of all their unseen sisters, large and looming in the alleys, and the Farmer turns to me and the Farmer’s daughters turn to me and their hands are picking up garbage but their eyes tell me they want to be picking up God’s broken daughters, the one in four girls right here in these shanties were their freedom and one hallowed life is being drank dry.
Here where garbage is thrown into the light, but girls are used up in the dark until they shatter in the shadows like glass, here where we pick all these shards in the streets that cut with its invisible trafficked girls.
Our daughters have water.
And light and hope and choices and our girls sleep on mattresses with clean sheets and clean dreams, no one buying up pieces of them to deface, to crush with the hot weight of their gratification, and we have a pantry and spaghetti and meatballs and homemade bread on our plates and Anne of Green Gables on our shelves and we don’t step over sewage in the streets or drink our carried water out of filthy pails.
And I strikes me right then, what Gloria Steinem had said: “Fire in the belly doesn’t come from gratitude.”
But it’s in me right there in the back alley of Minoterie and there’s no denying it, and it’s like a match, like a sparking, like a full flame combusting, like an inferno, searing, branding me:
Fire in the belly can come from gratitude for the blessings.
Fire in the belly and fire in the bones and fire in the Body blazes because of gratitude for grace.
I get your point, Ms. Steinem, and I hear you: Revolutionary anger is what happens when people feel wild for change.
But hear me:
Revolutionary change is what happens when people feel such wild gratitude for what. they. have. that they share it.
Steinem, she had said it with this fiery conviction, “Gratitude never radicalized anybody.”
But I want to sit eye to eye with Steinhem in a back alley in Minoterie and tell her what I feel hot and raging right in me:
Gratitude never fails to radicalize the radically grateful.
When you are radically grateful for what you have, you will go to radical lengths to share it.
When you are radically grateful for being blessed — you are radically generous to the oppressed.
When you are radically grateful, you live out of a place of radical abundance — there’s always more space for more to share the grace.
And don’t confuse the idea of personal pride with radical gratitude. You aren’t actually thankful for something if you think you actually earned it. That’s pride, not gratitude.
You are only actually grateful for something if you see it as actually a gift — as an unearned gift that was bestowed unexpectedly upon you. That you didn’t earn it, that you didn’t deserve it, that you didn’t create it yourself.
That’s a radical paradigm: that no one receives anything unless it is given him from heaven. No one receives anything — not by work, not by worth, no by wit — unless it is a gift. There is only one category for everything that exists: Gift. Self-made men don’t exist — only God-given gifts.
And that’s what I don’t know if Steinhem knows: When you’re overwhelmed with the goodness of God to you — you overflow with the goodness of God to others.
That’s what I feel burning me up: The radically grateful can never stand for injustice — because they are moved by radical grace. You can’t know grace and not be moved. Grace starts movements.
Grace is a catalyst.
You haven’t discovered fire until you’ve discovered grace. When grace touches you, it combusts you and you become one unstoppable flame.
Right there, I want to beat my chest like a drum, like a repentance, like a call: Real gratitude doesn’t make you apathetic — it makes you a real activist. Real gratitude isn’t an anesthetic — real gratitude makes you catalytic.
There’s sewage in the street and the air hangs hot with fumes and noon and urine, and there’s fire in my bones and grace is the catalyst that makes you an activist, that makes you an evangelist, that makes you a revivalist.
And I’m all turned around in just south of Port-au-Prince: When gratitude to God revolutionizes your life, God uses you to revolutionize the world. It’s why God said to give thanks in everything.
Don’t hear me, Ms. Steinem. Hear God: Radical Gratitude is the attitude of the revolutionaries.
And when we turn the last alley and the Farmer’s hauling a full garbage bag, one lone girl comes out of nowhere.
And she grabs my hand and the Farmer’s daughter reaches for the little girl’s other hand and there’s a grace that unchains us and links us and our shadows light like fire in my bones –
Us all holding hands like radical sisters around a table giving thanks.
Related:
40 Days: A Lent of ThanksLoving
My Story of Radical Gratitude
Take the Joy Dare & begin daily, intentional steps towards a life of radical gratitude
Be someone who does something to end the trafficking of our sisters: Get involved with The A21 Campaign
Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} 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 22, 2013
How to Make a Miracle Happen
They still do happen, miracles, a bit like a flash in the sky. Coming up the backside of things, coming up from the other way.
Caleb said it as soon as we drove in, that we’d been at this church, at Compassion’s school here, last July.
I told him that nah, that he was all turned around, that we’d never come this way before.
“You sure?” he cocks his head like it could help. “The buildings look sorta — familiar.” Like which part, the steel roof part or the yellow paint part? As if I could rib the good kid with words. Good son that he is, he politely ignores his mother’s limping tease and he insists.
“Do Compassion centres all have similar architecture?” He turns to our Compassion translator who nods yes, sometimes. This place is new. Only 2 years old.
Then in a rich accented English, arm pointing. “I brought you here last year, but that time we came in from the south, not from the north like then.”
And Caleb jabs a wink my way. “Told you, Mother. I’d know those yellow walls anywhere.” Uh huh. “We took pictures with the kids who needed sponsors right over there.”
And then there he was, Wenchel, flashing a smile.
And Dropsy.
And Kchneider.
Kids who last July didn’t have a sponsor and we shared their names with you most amazing grace-struck people.
And you wrapped an arm around them and welcomed them into your lives and 8 months of Compassion-love later — we’re witnesses to their sheet lightening smiles in the dark.
They’re right here, 8 months later!
Sparking eyes! Splitting laughter! Charged smiles and I’m all goosebumps and compassion is always the rain that ends the drought.
And I turn to our translator. “Could you — I think the little girl my sister sponsors — I think she might be here?”
“You know the girl’s full name?” He looks in his bag for a pen.
I shake my head.
“Then if you give us your sister’s name — Compassion keeps full records at each development centre. We will look.”
And I watch them scroll through a file of names. Two false starts. Then flip a page.
And there! My sister’s name! And in a minute, there is the little girl in the door and the room claps! God-struck! The little girl on my sister’s fridge!
The little girl my 4 year old niece, Ana, had pointed to under the red Focus on the Family magnet and said, “Aunt Annie, will you see our Esther in Haiti?” and we’d told her that Haiti was a whole island with thousands and thousands of Compassion sponsored children and likely no, but we’d keep one eye out for her. And there she is, like straight out of the blue.
Shalom bends and says it like a gentle falling, “I am Shalom. My cousin is your sponsor and she loves you.”
And I write her name, Esther, on one of the extra Creole Jesus Storybook Bible we’d just happened to serendipitously pack, and slip it into Esther’s shy hands, and your heart was made to beat for such a time as this.
You were made to make more than a living. You were made to make a difference.
You were made be an Esther, to give your life away for forever things, and anything less will give you grief.
You were made for the place where your real passion meets compassion, because there lies your real purpose.
And I touch Esther’s cheek. Miracles never cease — when someone just begins.
When someone just begins with one — believing lightning always strikes wherever we love.
And Kai and Levi stand with Myrtil and Djouvens.
And Shalom draws Dorance close.
And we pray for sponsors for these three here, for the least of these, and I see it right there on Dorance’s feet —
Red ruby slippers.
She’s wearing red ruby slippers.
And we aren’t in Kansas anymore, and we aren’t in ignorance, and we know that one spinning cycle of grace can up and lift a child up and that miracles happen like the touch of a finger out of the sky.
Dorance in her Dorothy Red Ruby Slippers looks up, looking for someone, looking like there’s no place like home.
Looking for the people of God to be a home.
Somewhere out across the fields, a kid goat cries like a child.
Will you be one who makes miracles really happen? Be a home for a child in need?
Because there really is no place like Home — Home in the people of God, the care of Christ, us His hands and feet.
Americans be a home here, and Canadians here — Kai, Levi and Shalom, they are praying that you and yours will be a sponsor for Dorance and Myrtil and Djvouens today.
Miracles never cease — when someone just begins.
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 21, 2013
The 1 Thing You Really Have to Know About Your Family
Over here today …. It’s good to be rocked and changed with you all…
Related:
Of Women & Sisters & Family & How You Really Speak Lent
Why It’s Okay to Cry
When Lent and Valentines Collide: 40 Days of ThanksLoving
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 20, 2013
Of Women & Sisters & Family & How You Really Speak Lent
So Shalom has this bag made by 3 Cords in Haiti that she carries her shoes and Bible in it to Wednesday night Kids Club, and sometimes a hen or a pig, depending on how the day slants and careens.
That’s the bag the kid keeps hanging on the first hook inside the back door and that’s the bag she swings over her shoulder like she’s always slinging pure love.
So when the Farmer says if we’re all going to leave the farm for his 40th, that he’d rather it be about giving his life away because it’s no trite proverb that it’s better to give than to receive, and we start praying about where and how and when.
Someone sends the name, Mission of Hope, Haiti. And when it turns out that Mission of Hope, Haiti, is the ministry that runs the 3 Cords that makes the bag that Shalom slings everywhere, Shalom about turns inside out. The kid starts packing.
Malakai tells her no pigs and she sister-glares that she knows that already. Mama packs a hat the size of a small island which may be the protective point. And a sewing machine. She packs that continental hat and a sewing machine that she hauls across two international borders and right through two feet of snow and a Great Lakes blizzard into the furnace heat of Haiti.
Mama’s wears that hat into 3 Cords like she’s some floating glacial berg.
Which about melts when they tell her that they’re keeping her Singer machine to stitch up the first prototypes of all new bags. Hope leans in and whispers, “Isn’t that the material of our bag hanging there on the wall?”
Shalom pats my leg wild, “They made my bag right here?” Continents and snow and oceans evaporate.
Mama smiles cool and to the point, “Put us to work.”
We fold material and gush over patterns like we’re stacking gold. “Think of the bags!” Hope laughs giddy.
Marie Maude, she takes Mama by the hand over to a barrel of headbands that all need 3 Cord cards tied to them. I watch the directions. Snip the threads. Thread through the hole of the cards. TIe and knot the cards to the bandeaux, the bags, the braided headbands. For hours, we do this, Shalom, Hope, Mama and I, fans swaying over our bents necks. There’s only the sound of sewing machines humming in gilded sunlight. The Haitian women work silently, like in a chapel, worship that only needs hands.
Sometime after the second hour, one of the women points to me, throws a finger toward Mama, and then again, finger flying between us, and I stammer out some miserable French hoping something of it limps into Creole. “Ma mere? Oui, oui, elle est ma Mere.”
The Haitian woman nods, yes, yes, and then rocks one hand like she’s nursing a babe and she points to Mama and mouths it without a sound, Mere, Mere. That’s what she’s doing — she’s signing. She’s deaf and she’s signing. The whole room is silent because all these women are deaf.
Laura, 3 Cords’ intern, she nods, “It’s why we call it The Quiet Room,” she smiles. “Except some are amputees.”
It’s then I notice legs, all these cut off places.
“Amputees who are learning sign language on their own — so they can communicate with the deaf. Two segments of society that have been dismissed as having no value, divorced from society — finding each other.” And something in this room slings around me pure and loved.
The woman signs me her name, her hand shaping who she is “ADELINE” and I say it again twice, Adeline, Adeline. She points to Hope and signs it again like a nursing.
And I say Oui, oui, then remember to nod, that your body has to live your words, and I try to make flapping hands say it, to enflesh my meaning – I am Hope’s mother. And Mama is my mother. We are three: Mother, Daughter, Grandaughter. And out of nowhere, Marie Maude flings arms like a homecoming, “Grandmere!”
And the light falls across scraps being pieced together, across the dismissed and divorced, the cut off and the women who thought they were of no value till they found community, till they found sisters who whispered Jesus and grafted them into the Body and wrapped arms around their stumped and silenced places.
Adeline signs to a woman in a hat on the far side of the room who is cutting and braiding and she signs, JASMINE, and Marie Maude flails animated between Adeline and Jasmine, Sisters, Sisters.
“Sisters? Both deaf?” I turn to Laura.
“I know. What are the chances?” Laura wraps an arm around Adeline. “And Adeline here is the single mom to 5 — four hearing children and one deaf.”
And Adeline beams and if Jesus plus nothing is everything, then real math proves that every single mother is multiplied grace.
“So we’re all family!” And Shalom hugs my leg.
And Adeline hugs Mama and Marie Maude hugs us all and who needs words when you can feel how this kin of sisterhood does something in the marrow of your bones?
It was when I had been here in Haiti in the peak blaze of last July, Johnny, our translator with Compassion, he had just told me how he had meandered out of the Hotel Montana when the deeps had roared quaking mad and blasted dust up the nape of his neck.
And I had turned to him and said it like an even madder fool: “What if you could ever just get out of here– get you and your family to the States?”
And he had looked me in the eye, and it’s what he said next that drilled right up my marrow: “I am Moses. I do not leave my kin.”
I am Moses and I do not leave my kin… and it doesn’t matter if you are born in the land of LCD screens and master ensuites and SUVs with leather seats and turkey with cranberries laid out on granite countertops — When you’re the one who ends up in the palace, you don’t forget your people. Just ask Moses or Esther or Jesus.
I up and flew home.
I flew home to my hot showers and Tropicana orange juice and kids’ dentist appointments and I could forget. I could forget my kin under tattered blue tarps and insatiably hungry pimps– especially when I was pinning pretty things to virtual boards or scanning Facebook instead of seeking His face and how in the name of heaven, could ever I forget that it. is. all. grace? That Grace alone is the gossamer thread that holds your life together.
That life isn’t made up of atoms — it’s made up of amazing grace.
That it isn’t DNA or SATs or IQ that determine your existence — but His grace alone.
And it was when I closed my eyes to pray — that’s when I would re-member. When I would be put back together and see my kin, my sisters with the sunken eyes, and my brothers with the hopeless gaze, and my Lord with His arms nailed thin across that impossible length of Cross, saying: “When you give a drink of water to them, you give the water to Me.”
Who wants to do something more than give a cup of water to Me?
And when the calendar had rolled round to Lent, we were sitting around the table reading this and Isaiah’s got words:
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own kin?“
~Isa. 58: 6-7
And that verse slams me to a stop:
The fast the Lord chooses? Is not to turn away from your kin.
The fast the Lord chooses is not to turn away from your kin, and I am Moses and I do not leave my kin, and and the bare bottom line is that if you are going to keep company with Jesus, you are going to have to give up keeping up with the Joneses. What could you want more than this?
What could you buy that is worth more than company with Jesus and your kin?
For hours, Shalom and Hope and Mama and I, our hands tie their names to the work of their hands and we’re knotted, kin that miles can’t divide and distance doesn’t exist in the kingdom of God.
We are sisters and we may be cut off and broken and we may be beaten and we may be voiceless and we may be forgotten, but sisters find hands that speak louder than words and sisters find ways to say what isn’t said and grace is the cosmic language and Christ is the soul translator.
And the fast the Lord wants is to break free free from indifference, and the fast the Lord wants is to break the chains that crush women and children and men, and those chains are in your house and around the corner and around every woman that you meet and around your sisters around the world, and the fast the Lord longs for — is you to hold fast to your kin — because loving your kin is how you love Him.
I am standing in a room full of broken women for whom a broken Savior came. There are no words. Only light. Only hands.
And one of the women, one of our sisters, the tallest one with her dress torn and frayed down the back, she just lays down the cloth for her next bag and she steps into the light and begins to braid Hope’s hair, dark silk hands through all her hair.
It’s always from the frayed and broken edges of ourselves that we can tie heart strings, that we braid our lives into light.
And the two young women are like mirror images of their Father, and you can understand kin loud and clear — Lent is always this language of radical Love.
Related:
Day 7 of 40 Days: A Lent of ThanksLoving
Don’t Turn a way from a sister? 3 Cords is a community of amputees and the deaf who make gorgeous bags that you could swing over a shoulder and sling love for a sister (or a a braided headband, bandeaux, or wristlet?) Check our their art that you can carry? And maybe gift one to a sister while loving a sister and we’re all the sisters who speak Lent’s language of Love.
When You are Weary of Watered-Down, Vanilla Christianity {Pt 1: Radical Series}
What Does a bit of Radical Christianity Really Look Like —- Right Where You Are?{Pt 2: Radical Series}
What Radical Christianity Looks Like Right Where You Are{Pt 3: Radical Series}
Why Weak is the New Strong: Radical Right Where You Are{Pt 4: Radical Series}
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 19, 2013
The Big Reveal: What Faith is, from First to Last
So…(!) since one of the kids sprained an ankle while serving here at Mission of Hope Haiti, we’ll catch up here again tomorrow with a Haiti family missions trip post, and let Liz Curtis Higgs , my heart sister who has jumped into our The Romans Project with us, slip up onto the farm porch with these heart strengthening words….Liz is the humble, 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 , and she has presented more than 1,700 inspirational programs in all 50 United States and 14 foreign countries. As a wife and mother, she is grateful to call Louisville, Kentucky home — and she’s about as down to earth and warm as it gets. I just love her — and this post? Well, have a seat on the porch with us!
text and photos by Liz Curtis Higgs
Doorways, windows, archways, gates—unspoken invitations to enter in, to explore. to discover something new.
Whenever I travel to Scotland, I return home with dozens of photos like this one. Don’t you love finding a door slightly ajar, a gate unlatched? Come in, it whispers. Look around.
The Bible paints such images too. Just before the apostle Paul launches into the second half of Romans 1—full of dire warnings about godlessness and wickedness and wrath—a door quietly swings open.
A way out of such misery. A portal into certain joy.
For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” Romans 1:17 (NIV84)
Suppose we see where this door, this single verse, this revelation leads us.
For in the gospel…
Wait. What does gospel mean, exactly? Are we talking gospel music? A gospel hall? The gospel truth?
Gospel comes from Old English: gōd means “good,” and spell means “to find out by study; to come to understand,” as in “Spell it out for me.”
The gospel, then, is how we understand goodness.
The gospel is the key that opens the door.
Paul’s life work was “testifying to the gospel of God’s grace” (Acts 20:24), “preaching the gospel of his Son” (Romans 1:9), “spreading the gospel of Christ” (1 Thessalonians 3:2), even “suffering for the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:8).
Nobody goes through all that just to share a nice idea. This gospel must be powerful, it must be life-altering, it must be the one thing everyone needs.
Agreed. So, what is the gospel?
Simply this: God made a way for sinners to be reconciled with Him. Because His sinless Son died in our place, our sin debt is paid in full. Because His Son rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, we can be sure that we will too.
Not only is this the best news in town, it’s also a gift from God. Freely given, freely received. God has thrown open the windows of heaven for us and unfurled his banner of love.
…a righteousness from God is revealed,…
It’s a big reveal, all right. Darkness to light, sorrow to hope, death to life.
Over the years the word righteous has gotten a bad rap, maybe because we’ve confused it with being self-righteous. Full of ourselves, rather than full of God.
Righteousness is what happens when “God makes us right in his sight” (NLT). It’s entirely his effort, not ours, so all the credit goes to him. This is “God’s plan” (PHILLIPS), one that “God ascribes” (AMP), done “God’s way” (MSG), resulting in “God’s approval” (GW).
All God, all the time.
Okay, but how do we get from A to B, from unrighteous to righteous? Don’t we have to do something, say something?
Keep walking, beloved.
…a righteousness that is by faith…
Ah. If righteousness is a gift, then faith must be a gift as well.
Paul assures us, “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion” (Philippians 1:6). Since our faith is sparked by God, and he also sees it through to the end, then once again, he deserves all the praise.
Perhaps what we call a leap of faith is really God lifting us out of our sin.
Thank you, Jesus. Again, again, again.
In this verse, faith also has forward motion. We progress “from faith to faith” (YLT) as we “keep on believing” (WE). Day by day our righteousness grows, “both springing from faith and leading to faith” (AMP).
We know this is true, because we’ve seen it with our own eyes.
When we catch a glimpse of God at work in someone’s life, when a prayer is answered, when we experience his presence in worship, then our faith is strengthened, then our courage is bolstered, then our trust increases.
From faith to faith. Yes.
…from first to last,…
Not only for us from first breath to last, but for all God’s people, “it begins and ends with faith” (NCV).
There may be a moment in time when our awareness of faith begins, or when we make a public profession of what we believe, but that faith has been stirring and growing inside us from day one—“a faith and knowledge resting on the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time”
(Titus 1:2).
Always and forever, God.
At work. In us.
For our good. For His glory.
…just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
We’re not the only ones memorizing Scripture. Paul recalls a verse from the prophet Habakkuk, who wrote “the righteous will live by his faith” (Habakkuk 2:4). Faith is the essence of life, a sustaining force—like air, like food, like water, like love.
As we step gingerly through the rest of Romans 1 in the weeks ahead, take heart: those whom God has called His own, those who have received His gift of righteousness, those whose faith rests in him have no need to fear God’s wrath.
Our calling is to live out the gospel—goodness understood—with humility and gratitude, pointing to the One who makes every good thing possible.
Isn’t Liz just a wonderful Jesus-sister? (I can’t wait to see her in March — come join us in Minnesota at the Set Apart Conference?) And Liz and I are praying to share more through 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 2300 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 your new year.
And oh, your heart would be deeply nourished by Liz’s weekly Bible study blog, posting every Wednesday.
Her current feast-series is Embrace Grace: Welcome to the Forgiven Life. Who doesn’t need that?
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 18, 2013
Why It’s Okay to Cry
Apparently if you try to carry a vintage sewing machine through an airport security in your carry-on, you can get yourself patted won.
Even if you have all your white hair wrapped up in a bun and you are wearing worn Reeboks with your skirt.
Mama just took it like a grandma, thanked TSA, grabbed her bag with said sewing machine and marshalled us like a battalion: “Let’s keep moving!”
Five hours later, nine of walk off the plane in Port au Prince, Haiti.
A woman in turquoise turns around in a line and says, “Hey. I’m at 500.”
It takes me a minute.
I’m slow like that.
And there are women counting gifts at the Port au Prince airport, and when we get off the bus in Titanyen, and at supper that night with rice and beans and in hot winds, and the whole busted world is full of glory gifts and just keeps spinning like an unstoppable revolution because that’s the point: When thanksgiving hits a tipping point, it becomes thanksliving and catapults us straight into the will of Christ.
A gecko flashes across our wall right after we open the suitcases.
Malakai wraps himself like a mummy in his mosquito net. Mama wonders about sleeping in that top bunk: “If I’m not thinking, that first step in the morning could be a killer.” The children at Mission of Hope Haiti fill the church on Sunday morning with singing like a storm sky rent open in the heat of July and I didn’t know I’m a parched field.
The hymns keep ringing off the rusted tin roof. They are bringing in busloads of mothers holding babies, girls in bows and baubles. They’re singing in Creole. The Farmer’s following the shaky projector on the wall and singing Creole like it’s his second language. I’m settling for some pretty bad lip syncing. I don’t understand a word of it. But the understanding of God can pulse loud and clear in your veins.
The man behind me is holding a Bible wholly duct-taped. A woman in the wood slat pew two rows over turns with her battered Bible to show the woman behind her a verse, like she’s just found something glinting like a diamond and it’s free and it’s all hers and she’s sharing it.
And the man sitting next to me wears a white shirt with “Foodland” embroidered in red on the pocket and he’s got his hand raised like he’s waiting to be struck with lightening.
When was the last time I stood in church expecting a jolt from God?
I raise my hand like a confession.
The man with the green duct taped Bible, he’s holding both of his hands up.
The music splits open.
And a teen mother in the bench in front of me, she slings her baby over to another willing shoulder, and she falls to her knees right in front of me and sobs like a child, her hand lifted over her bowed head, bare palm waving a bit like a leaf before God.
And I look down at this quaking barely hand. What if the American Dream is a false religion that preaches God alone isn’t good enough?
I look down at this girl’s shoulders wracked with a hallowed repentance, her sobs lost in hymns, in Him, and when did North American comfort-induced numbness ever lament like this? I want to touch her hand–
Blessed are those at the end of their rope because they can be tied to God.
I am taught and on my knees.
Blessed are the broken for they can be gathered into belonging.
Something inside me breaks.
Blessed are those who find themselves wholly empty, because they have space to be holy filled with God.
And the Sunday morning singing in Haiti is like a storm sky rent open in the heat of July and I didn’t know I’m a parched field and I open wide and turn my face toward heaven and when was the last time I wore a Bible till it was duct-tape thin and when was the last time I ached because I was soup poor and when was the last time I didn’t have any language at all to shield me from God?
“Only he who cries… is permitted to sing…” is what Bonhoeffer said.
Only he who cries… is permitted to sing….
Only those authentic enough to lament, are authentic enough to love.
And these people know how to sing.
And then they’re singing in English and it’s a clarion:
“Here I am to worship, here I am to bow down, here I am to say that you’re my God.”
And I’m raining.
When everything is stripped away and you have nothing left and in all your bare vulnerability, there is communion with God.
Related:
When Lent & Valentines Collide: 40 Days of ThanksLoving
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!}
February 15, 2013
Family Mission Trip #1 (Friday on the Farm)
And (I think!) we’re off!
Lord willing, we’ll be sharing the God stories in real time as we go with God and stumble and fumble, a bunch of farmers praying for the Harvest?
Join in with us on this mission trip? You’re part of the story with us and we beg prayers and fly with you on the wings of His grace!
Lord willing — more on the other side!
Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth. Give Thanks. Love well.
Become the gift.
Day 2 of 40 Days: A Lent of ThanksLoving
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 14, 2013
When You Need The Very Best Valentine
To the one who takes me anyway:
I know that it really might not have been.
That I could have laughed too loud — wait. I did laugh too loud — but the craziest thing was that you didn’t roll your eyes but looked into mine instead. I’ve got no bloomin’ reason why.
Why did you find my eyes and look straight and unashamed into me and what on earth could there have been about me in that moment that made you linger and come back again?
You could have been chasing after fancier, better, prettier, than kneeling down in front of me. Could have held some other girl’s hand, slipped your arm around some other girl’s waist, pulled some other woman close. How did you see in me – what I still can’t?
You took your life – and took a chance on me.You took your one whole, wild life and took your chance on me. That’s the miracle that rents the sky, that explodes a heart – that you chose me.
That’s the miracle love lets you say: I am chosen.
You could dance in the rain to that, your face upturned to the showering sky: I am chosen, chosen – you could spin around and around to that – I am chosen!
I am chosen.
Because of you — I get to inhale that miracle and it’s dizzying grace in the lungs.
And when you brought home the roses the other night?
Handed them to me with this boyish grin and all 12 of them smelled of promises made and kept?
I thought of that night when we sat on the back step and I told you that story I’d heard of the preacher who held up a rose and preached that purest things were like this petalled thing.
That the preacher had stepped out and handed that one singular rose to a woman in the front row and asked her to smell its lush loveliness, and, sure, pass it down.
So the rose made its rounds while the preacher preached purity. While the preacher preached of promises and hearts and keeping oneself pure, the rose had passed from hand to hand and was inhaled and admired and passed down.
And when the preacher had reached the apex of his angst, he had plucked that rose from the congregation and thrust it up – tattered and bent, like damaged goods – and he had bellowed: “Now tell me – who would ever want a rose like this?”
And a young man sitting there, he had felt it surge in him like a hot lava passion, rise like a thunder, four words shaking the pillars of earth:
Jesus wants the rose.
And you had turned to me and said it like the quiet relief of rain, “It doesn’t matter who you are — there’s not one of us that aren’t damaged goods.”
There’s not one of us not heart broken and there’s not one of us not bruised and Jesus wants the busted and Jesus whispers you.
Jesus whispers – You have to let yourself be loved.
You have to be bare and be seen and be brave and and let those who really love you, really have you. No one has enough time to crave mirage love and neglect miracle love and you can waste away waiting for hollywood love or you can wake to holy love here and it’s high time to just. let. go. and let yourself be loved.
Why did it take me so long to know? You only need one to love you. You only need one to unmask you and touch the hidden, damaged places and to say yes and love you free. One to know that love is not a pollyanna ending but a cruciformed beginning that has no end, one to live like love is the surrendered ink that writes our stories, the taken nail that holds a life, the carried crossbeam that supports the world.
You only need one to know that crushed roses smell the most of grace.
That is how you have lived and loved and laid down for me, all of this and more, and taking the garbage out to the road. You who have made your very life tell the love letter truth: That forever is not mere word, not a stretching measurement of unchained time, but forever is a place for the broken to come home to.
Jesus wants the rose and that’s the miracle that love lets you say: I am chosen.
And long after flowers, and even long after time, you’ve lived this for me, and that is the part that’s forever….
Day 1 of 40 Days: A Lent of ThanksLoving
Related Valentine Read:
3 Surprising Habits every Marriage Needs… because it’s Worth Falling in Love Again
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 13, 2013
When Lent & Valentines Collide: 40 Days of ThanksLoving
It wasn’t 2 weeks before those 40 days of Lent that he’d turned 40.
I’d kissed the old man in the kitchen and his 4 days growth had rubbed me like a matted burr and he’d laughed like a free man and said he’d never expected 40 to feel so young.
I had thought we’d celebrate and loose the farm for the first real time.
That one of the elders from our motley faith family might nurse the sows along in the winter, feed the old gals morning and night, and cradle the piglets, and we’d take all 6 of the kids to the brink of the Grand Canyon and be made small before the glory of God and that would fulfill us most, to know that we are but dust.
We’d never packed the half dozen of kids for longer than one night away, excepting Grandpa’s house. A farmer always remains. He is needed to feed and tend and care and bear and there aren’t holidays but serving everyday is a year of holy days.
I looked at flights. Schemed with the kids on the Farmer’s Big surprise. Talked quiet after Sunday Sermon with other farmers who might be willing to take on our barn chores.
But I looked across the breakfast table one morning and you could tell, the way he poured his milk, stirred his oatmeal, that a man who plans his crop while the snow’s still on the ground, who for all 365 days of the year, feeds his sows first before he ever sits down to fill his own empty, that he’d want to know if his feet were leaving the ground.
“What would you think if we all went away?” I didn’t look up from my porridge.
“Away?” He said the word like he didn’t understand it.
I tried explaining. Giving the vision. Painting the picture — of a flight. And then the whole spreading canyon and the light and the layering of colored sediment and how it’d be the best glory dirt we’d ever see.
And when I was done waving my ridiculously gesturing arms and was flat out of dreaming steam, he just sat quiet.
Scraped his spoon across the bottom of his bowl.
Pushed his chair back from the table.
“We’ve never done anything like that before.” He folded one foot onto his knee, pulled up the wool sock.
I waited.
A man needs quiet when he’s listening for directions.
“I think,” he looked out across the fields to the east, the sun coming up determined. “If we’re going to go away together — I’d rather serve together.”
“ Like – what if instead of planning a getaway — we lived a giveaway?”
What if we believed the greatest gift is to give — and we actually lived it?
He smiled, slipped big thick hands into the pockets of frayed jeans. How can your love for one broken man keep multiplying? Maybe when one woman’s brokenness touches one man’s brokenness, each become more and love becomes them, this miracle multiplied endlessly.
I nod my yes. The love of a quiet man can make your soul sing loud – loud!
We pray. We find a mission that will take all 8 of us, that says there’s something for all of us, from 7 to 17, and us about 40 yr. old fogeys. My Mama, she says she’s coming too. The kids cheer and she hoots and hollers and there’s no denying that her white hair looks like a crown. We line up the vaccination shots.
And no, no self-respecting mother would usher all 6 kids into one overheated 8 by 8 room with 2 nurses and ask them to roll of up their sleeves and watch for their own turn for the long silver sting.
And make the youngest boy go a tortured last. So that he’s sobbing mess of begging pleas.
Because that all would be a very bad idea and I may or may not know anything about such disasters and I don’t have pictures, so let’s pretend it didn’t happen.
We pack. I smile thinly. 4,792 children ask me at the same time if they can bring this hat, if this shirt matches these shorts, and why can’t they bring their entire collection of thrifted legos and if they can find room in the tattered suitcase, why can’t they then? The Farmer whispers, Pray.
And on Ash Wednesday, I do, all the bags just about ready for the door, and I know what dust I am and how fragile a soul can be.
There will be a flight – and no resort but re-sorting of our lives and there will be a canyon of pain and dust everywhere.
There will be an orphanage and there will be a chasm of poverty and there will be layers of humanity carved into the greatest glory, and there is always a theater of God everywhere and to see His glory crack the dark, you just have to let the heart keep breaking open to Christ.
The Lent before Valentines. The Love that offers a heart willing to take the arrow, the nail. And this whole earth is filled with dust-marked people and we are the radical, bought people who give up freedom to give His freedom and what greater love than to tell of His, to live His, the love that lays down for a brother?
40 Days. 40 Ways to Love. Lent: 40 Days of Thanksloving.
The fasting that is not to gain something from God, but to give something of God. 40 Days of fasting from a meal— and giving from what was saved in that fasting, so that others can eat.
40 Days of living out the thanks of my love — in letters of thanks to people in my life, in small acts of thanks that God can multiply, in giving out of our great thanksgiving. The thanks for unmerited love that overflows into unlimited love.
So we pack up for his 40th birthday and a missions trip and Lent and Valentine’s collide and we embark on 40 Days of Thanksloving.
And sure, we may all want anywhere other than suffering and ashes. But this is a dust-crushed world and Christ didn’t avoid it but chose to come to it. And the Farmer knows it. Why embrace dust and ashes? Because it’s out of dust and ashes, God grows the impossible.
Because God exchanges dust and ashes for beauty and miracles and He cares so much that He doesn’t care that it’s not fair.
Because God raises whole people out of ashes and He writes mysterious grace in dust, and with Him, dust and spit and muddied things can still help us see.
Because though you are dust and will return to dust, though everything you know may be burnt to ashes, memory scattered to the wind — there is a God who can re-collect you, remake you, resurrect you and revive you with eternity.
And at the door, we stack the bags, about ready to fly.
Coming: Where we’re headed out to this week… and more of 40 Days: A Lent of ThanksLoving
Related:
When You are Weary of Watered-Down, Vanilla Christianity {Pt 1: Radical Series}
What Does a bit of Radical Christianity Really Look Like —- Right Where You Are?{Pt 2: Radical Series}
What Radical Christianity Looks Like Right Where You Are{Pt 3: Radical Series}
Why Weak is the New Strong: Radical Right Where You Are{Pt 4: Radical Series}
For your Lent: Free Family Lent & Easter Devotional…download ornaments for your own Easter Tree
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 click here.Next Week, might we keep exploring it: The Practice of Radical. What does it mean to live IN Jesus, WITH Christ in the center of our lives? Today, if you’d like to share with community: The Practice of Radical … 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!}
February 12, 2013
Why Doing Lent This Year Is What You Really Need . . . . . (and a Free Family Lent & Easter Devotional)
I can’t seem to follow through in giving up for Lent.
Which makes me want to just give up Lent.
Which makes me question Who I am following.
Which may precisely be the point of Lent.
Last week, I’m standing on a table, snapping the shutter on a bouquet of roses, when by brother calls.
Levi picks it up, his eyes twinkling, stars risen early.
I can only hope Levi doesn’t mention he’s answering because his Mama’s standing smack dab center in the middle of the table, her all happy over a bunch of God glory found in flowers.
“Hello? … Oh, hi Uncle John.”
I smile. Levi’s a miniature mirror image of my brother, smattering of freckles bridging across the nose and the thirty years that span between them.
“What am I doing? But you know already –talking to you.” I can imagine the chuckling on the other end of the line. I set the camera aside, hop off the table.
Levi mouths it large, one hand over the receiver.”ARE YOU AVAILABLE, MOM?”
Oh, but wouldn’t I stop being Mom if I stopped being available? Levi grins and hands over my brother.
“Hey. So tell me. Lent. Fill me in, sister.”
Our faith community doesn’t practice Lent.
My brother doesn’t do Google.
When he’s got a question, he calls me on his cell.
If need be, he waits for me to Google. My brother’s a welder.
I can hear the rumble of the diesel engine of his pick-up. He can hear the low roar of my kids.
“Okay… Lent. It’s the preparing the heart for Easter. Like going with Jesus into the wilderness for forty days, that we might come face to ugly face with our enemy. Our sacrificing that we might become more like Christ in His sacrifice.”
The other end of the line is silent. I don’t know if this is good.
I keep talking.
“Lent isn’t about forfeiting as much as it’s about formation.
We renounce to be reborn; we let go to become ‘little Christs’. It’s about this: We break away to become.”
Still silence. I have one last swing at it.
“Don’t think of lent as about working your way to salvation. Think of it as working out your salvation.”
I wait.
And he speaks slow.
“Yes…. Yes…. I get it. I’m doing it. I’m doing Lent. God’s been speaking things into my life and I think this is how He wants to meet me right now.” Like brother, like sister.
I stack clean dishes and we talk about some dark corners.
We confess. We pray.
devotional book found here
I forsake and I fast and I forget and I flounder, I fall… I fail.
I’ve made soup. I’ve lit the candle. We bow.
I serve bowls, I pass out bread, I pour cups. They’re talking and I am listening and I blithely sit down and I eat.
I have bread in the mouth, the bowl half empty, when I drop the spoon. I shake the head hard. I taste disgust. I absentmindedly eat in the evening, a meal I vowed to fast from. What was I thinking? I can’t scrub my lips clean.
I choke it out in a whisper, “Do I not think enough of You to remember?”
I close the eyes tight and the heart cries the words silent. “Do I love You so little?”
It is an irrefutable law: one needs to be dispossessed of the possessions that possess — before one can be possessed of God.
Let the things of this world fall away so the soul can fall in love with God. God only comes to fill the empty places and kenosis is necessary – to empty the soul to know the filling of God.
But the flesh is corrupt. I can’t do it.
When my brother calls late in the week to talk Lent, I am honest and it hurts and he listens. He unwraps his week haltingly. Like brother, like sister.
“But Lent is teaching me.”My throat stings. “I see how depraved I am. How incapable I am in the flesh, how in bondage I am. That I can’t keep any law perfectly. Worse – oh, this cuts deep — at times…”
I struggle to keep composure, to grip the words and hand them over. Can I even say these words?
“Worse… at times… I don’t even want to keep the law. Lent’s revealing my depravity, my impotence. The utter death of my flesh. I can do nothing. My Lent convicts: I am a lawbreaker. ”
Does the emptying come only when we know how empty we are?
I feel wild, desperate. My brother honors my struggle with witness. I am grateful.
I turn towards our Lenten wreath, the path our oldest son made out of oak, the path we mark each of the forty days with a moving forward of the candle, of the symbol of the cross.
Forty days, I am reflecting on my cross, my sins.
My lent has me hard after the light…
Looking hard for release from this wretched body of death.
And there is Jesus.
Jesus with a crown of thorns. Jesus bent low, God carrying my rotting mess, Grace doing what I cannot do, and I cannot ascend to God but He will descend to me.
I whisper goodbye to my brother because I can’t speak.
I kneel down by my symbolic journey.
I finger the wood of the cross. I trace the back bowed. Jesus will have to do everything.
He will have to accomplish it all. I am ashes and I am dust and there is no good in me and I am in dire need and lent has given me clear eyes to see my sin and I am the one broken under all this skin.
I can feel the grain of the tree under my fingertips.
He is the one going to Calvary.
I love Him because His love is the only thing that can save me. This wrestle has made me know it full well.
A failing lent? It is a good Lent because this Lenten Lament of my sin — it is preparing me for the Easter Joy of my Savior.
Lent gives me this gift: the deeper I know the pit of my sin, the deeper I’ll drink from the draughts of joy.
Grief is what cultivates the soil for the seeds of joy.
She who knows her sins much, loves much, and the road to heaven is paved with the realization that I deserve hell. His rising will be all my joy, because I know it in the marrow of the bones: He is all my hope.
The candle wavers.
I know that frailty.
I sit in a dark lent.
And I feel the warming flame of Grace on my face.
:: :: :: :: ::
:: :: :: :: ::
Why doing Lent is what we need — because it leads us to Christ:
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”
-Ephesians 2:8,9
More: John and Noel Piper and a Month of Preparing for Easter
Lenten Lights: Devotions to Prepare for Easter by Nicole Piper
Lent Booklist:
1. Free Easter devotional with ornaments for Easter Tree
Remember
Now this free Lent & Easter Jesus Tree devotional…
Each days of free devotional includes:
The full text of the day’s Bible reading in either ESV, NLT or MSG (of course, feel free to read from your own Bible, if you’d prefer another translation.) Readings are selected to lead chronologically through the significant events in the story of the life of Christ — each passage of Scripture another step on our “Trail to the Tree…”
(Yes, it’s a 17 days devotional. If days are missed, there’s no guilt. There’s no rush. 17 days of reading over 40 days. Entirely Doable. Family Friendly. Slow-pace. Reflective. Heart-changing.)
A verse to prayerfully linger over as a family — a verse to pause over for a moment or two, close eyes and deeply reflect on. This journey is different than the free , in that it is just focused alone on Scripture and prayer and living the Gospel — without any peripheral notes or added commentary, only prayer… simply, powerfully Christ-centric and Biblically focused.
A short, simple action point for the day – a way to do something together as a family that not only invites the coming Kingdom of God and Jesus’ love into your home and community, but is an opportunity to apply and obediently live out the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
A full color ornament, all classic art from the masters, to hang on your own Easter Passion Tree…. an art study, like a prayerful walk through a museum. The very last pages of the book include all of the ornaments in several pages so you can easily cut each ornament out and creatively mount to your own preference.
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To Download the Free Devotional
The link to the free printable Easter Tree book is a gift included in the footer of each updated RSS post to this site. {When downloading the book, thank you for your patience! It takes a long to load all the ornaments — more than five mintues… Thank you for your grace.}
If you’ve already made yourself a friend and subscribe to daily updates from this site, just look to the bottom of this post in your reader or email — and you’ll see your gift link to the downloadable free “Trail to the Tree” book right there.
If you would like to receive a link to the free printable Easter Tree Devotional book, don’t be shy at all or stay a stranger – we warmly invite you to come and make yourself a friend! Join a bit of the journey and sign up for updates of this site via email or via RSS feed to your reader. Each update of the site will include the link to the free download of the Easter Tree book in the footer of the post.
Become a friend and quietly tap in your email address and the link to the e-book will be delivered directly to your inbox, in the footer of each updated post:
Enter your email for site updates and for the link to the Easter Tree Devotional Book delivered directly to your inbox in the footer of each update
Or, if you’d rather, the link to the free Easteer Tree Devotional e-book can be delivered through your favorite reader. Sign up for updates to this site via the RSS feed to your favorite reader. (The link to the downloadable Easter Tree book is tucked in to the bottom of each post update. When downloading the book, thank you for your patience! It takes a long to load the book — more than five mintues… Thank you for your grace.)
Make Your Own Jesus Easter Tree
To Make A Jesus Easter Tree:
1. A container to hold branches — dogwood, pussywillows, forsythia etc.
2. Cut out and mount the classic paintings of the masters, to hang as ornaments {consider writing the number of the day’s devotional on the back of the ornament}
3. Perhaps hang decorative eggs from the branches, symbolic of new life in Christ…. that out of His sacrificial death on the tree, comes new life found only in Christ
3. After prayerfully meditating on each day’s devotional & Scripture reading, hang each ornament of a classic painting upon the passion tree.
5. Consider using the Jesus Easter Passion Tree as a natural opportunity to share our only hope, the Gospel of Christ, with those who visit your home throughout the Easter season…
… and other Lenten reads…
Reliving the Passion
: Walter Wangerin’s words are poetic, sharp words worth a tree, kindling the heart to the inestimable worth of Christ. Guiding the reader on a forty day passion journey through the gospel of Mark, Wangerin’s words fan a hot flame — penetrating prose, powerful truths. Highest Recommendation.
Wangerin encapsulates why, though it is not part of our faith community’s practice, we are observing Lent:
“But in the economy of God, what seems the end is but a preparation…The disciples approached the resurrection from their bereavement. For them the death was first, and the death was all. Easter, then, was an explosion of Newness, a marvelous splitting of heaven indeed.
But for us, who return backward into the past, the Resurrection comes first, and through it we view a death which is, therefore, less consuming, less horrible, even less real.
We miss the disciples terrible, wonderful preparation.
Unless, as now, we attend to the suffering first, to the cross with sincerest pity and vigilant love, to the dying with most faithful care — and thus prepare for joy.”
Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter
: A dog-eared, perennial favorite, I annually anticipate the return of this thoughtful, classic book to the nightstand. 72 essays from writers as diverse as Amy Carmichael, Martin Luther, Malcolm Muggeridge, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, this devotional divides into six separate sections: Invitation, Temptation, Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection and New Life — and will be a book hungrily returned to year after year.
“If the ultimate, the hardest, cannot be asked of me; if my fellows hesitate to ask it and turn to someone else, then I know nothing of Calvary love.” ~ Amy Carmichael
Seeing and Savoring Christ
: John Piper never fails to be passionate for exalting Christ and his ardency sparks dry wood. This too is annual Easter read for me, pages saturated with Scripture, short chapters that light.
“Christ does not exist in order to make much of us. We exist in order to enjoy making much of him. Christ is not glorious so that we get wealthy or healthy. Christ is glorious, so that rich or poor, sick or sound, we might be satisfied in him.”
Spirituality of the Cross
: A columnist with World Magazine, Gene Edward Veith writes of the “way of the first evangelicals,” a compelling first-time read for me this Lent, exploring the theology of Martin Luther and the doctrine of the”first evangelicals.” This book struck me profoundly on several levels –and yes, it is always all By Grace Alone…
“Without food, we would starve to death. We have to eat to fuel our physical life; otherwise we grow weak and waste away. The only food that can sustain our bodies comes from the death of other living things… There can be no life, even on the physical level, apart from the sacrifice of other life.
What is true for physical life is true for spiritual life — we can only live if there has been a sacrifice.”
Christ in the Passover
: We’ve celebrated Easter with a Messianic Seder meal for many years, but this year I longed to spend time deeply reflecting on why Christ is our Passover Lamb.
Devotions for Lent (Holy Bible: Mosaic):
so that each person has their own copy, and we often revisit a previous Scripture or reflection several nights, letting those truths percolate down into the crevices.
As non-denominational, Protestant evangelicals, this season of preparing our hearts for a deeper appreciation of Mercy, the need of the Cross, the miracle of Easter, the sacrifice on the Grace-Tree that made us worthy… this is a page we linger on long…
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe him,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
Coming this week: 40 Days: A Lent of ThanksLiving
Our almost-here family missions trip
Ash Wednesday and Lent activities for Children…
and the God Valentines (just for you! You are loved!) continue on Instagram and in our Facebook Community
edited post from archive
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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