Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 270
February 11, 2013
Why Life isn’t a Race & What Success Really is
So, we’re sort of in the midst of this. What it looks like to pack for a family of 8.
Am I crazy? Uh… Don’t answer that
So…. while we wind up the happy chaos packing here (more on that soon, Lord willing!)… One Thousands Gifts celebrates its 60th “Only.God.For.His.Glory.Alone” week on the NYTimes Bestseller’s list, and Randy Alcorn reflects on what’s hit him the hardest as he’s read One Thousand Gifts — a heart-preparing post for Lent and Easter —- and I’m remembering this post and where we were a year ago this week and trying to find & pack matching socks for 8 & pulling on my own rainbow socks again.
A beautiful homeschooling mama invites me to come have lunch with her and her friend in New York City.
I wear all black.
Pull on my black boots.
And in my black boots –
This armour — this crazy pair of handknit rainbow-striped socks.
Sometimes you have to wear His promises to remember to keep walking.
I’m not going to lie: My knees trembled.
But when you’re shod in the gospel, that prism of hope, you just keep taking the next step and you don’t let anything keep you.
The next wild leap of faith, right there at Rockefeller Center, down between 5th and 6th Avenue.
Emilie meets me on the corner, out in front of NBC studios.
She is wearing pink and a smile even warmer. I shake her daughters’ hands, Lindsay and Annie, and I nod and say I always wanted to be an Annie, but I was meant to be just a plain Ann wearing black and her rainbow socks.
Emilie says we’ll have lunch, Emilie and Lindsay and Annie and their friend and this farm girl, after their friend finishes up her morning work.
We’ll just watch her friend finish up her show from a quiet corner?
I like quiet corners.
It’s only when a make-up artist brushes my shiny chin that I get confused?
When a sound man looks for a place to clip a microphone on all my black.
When Emilie’s dear friend, Kathie Lee Gifford, leans close to say, “Honey, you’re hiding behind your hair and we want to see that you and all that joy!”
That’s when I realize this could look different than what I was thinking?
The whole time I’m praying that I don’t look like the deer-caught-in-headlights like I feel.
Did you know that your heart can sing that quietly anywhere — “Standing, standing, standing on the promises of God my Savior!”
Kathie Lee holds up One Thousand Gifts and a bit of my heart between those covers and she talks about how God’s changed her as she read the pages and from that corner where the camera is, it’s true, I may or may not have been shaking in my boots –
But I know what’s in those boots and whose promises cover me and I smile straight ahead anyways…
{Consider pausing music by clicking the speaker icon at the bottom of the left sidebar? If reading in a reader or via email, click here to view the clip of a farm girl and Kathie Lee on the Today Show? }
After Kathie Lee makes us laugh and blush and clap –
We all slip away for lunch at Neary’s and Noreen meets us at the door with her accent and these shining Irish eyes.
Kathie Lee’s been having lunch here for 23 years and all the regulars are beautifully greyed and worn through to the polish and the place could be on the backstreet of any small town in America — or on the green island. “It’s just a bit of Ireland in New York — a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”
Kathie Lee waves to Jimmy coming in the door and I pull up rainbow socks in my boots, the riches of His presence the gold to be had anywhere.
Lambchops, Kathie Lee tells us to order the lambchops, to eat them with our fingers and get the spinach too. She’ll pass out the toothpicks at the end. Emilie winks across the table at me.
We grab hands, sisters in a circle, and pray before the meal. Kathie Lee praying for Annie and Lindsay and Emilie and for us to walk in truth and who we are in Christ and not to let the enemy steal our joy. And she thanks the Lord for Noreen bringing out our plates. Noreen blushes, thanks her for prayers, and there is gold in this.
Emilie and Kathie Lee ask about kids.
Ask about pigs and fields and we talk about Jesus in center of culture and clinging to grace and praying for the gift of being broken and becoming the gift and steeping in Scripture to know who we are and the best color for walls and boys shooting potato spitballs and the sovereignty of God and the vocation of motherhood and beauty from ashes. It was a wondrously real and long lunch.
There were tears. There were even longer prayers again and squeezed hands. And Kathie Lee did pass around the toothpicks at the end. There’s something gloriously real and honest about picking your teeth with friends.
Kathie Lee looked over at me, her mouth full of “The Doctor’s Brushsticks” and her eyes all glinting happy, “We’ll count these toothpicks as gifts too, don’t you think, girls?”
And we all laugh too loud and when we take what we’ve been given and call it grace, this picks out all the grit in between and all is grace.
I saw it later, after Emilie and Annie and Lindsay and Kathie Lee had all hugged and we’d all waved this lingering, laughing goodbye.
Saw it somewhere near the Rockefeller Center and far from the farm, somewhere near 7th Avenue, a sign lit up with that one word over and over again:
“Gifts”
I believe that, right down to the toe-end of me — that His grace is everywhere, written right into the walls of this world.
And that GIFTS sign, it hung right across the street from a billboard that read “How to Succeed” — right there above the signs with the arrows.
Right there where we all have to decide what fork in the road to take, the only way we can turn and really succeed.
And that is the thing, to forget all the neon facade of everything else. The only turn we can take toward real success — is to do what we are made for: glorify God, one step after the other.
Man’s only successful end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever — His grace upon gifts upon grace.
Life isn’t a race — but a grace.
And you can always enjoy the journey when you are enjoying Him.
Jesus is the joy and He is the journey and He is the destination and success is simply a matter of enjoying God right where you are.
Back home on the farm, the sun sets across the fields.
I pull off my boots. I put on my old Birks and am ridiculously happy to be back to the everyday mess. I don’t have to race. I get to enjoy Him…here!
I read stories to a toothless kid, help a boy finish up the next page of math, wash the dishes, light falling in long lengths down the wall.
And when the phone rings and I reach over a boy fallen asleep on my shoulder, book in hand, it’s Kathie Lee and she says she just wanted to call — just whisper one word.
Thank you.
And I shake my head in the middle of this happy chaos and whisper it with her, thank you – all that really is real in this one spinning world:
Glory to Him on the lips —
and His promises in neon rainbow hope right there at the feet.
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Related:
Why it’s Worth it to Get out of Your Comfort Zone
One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Sharing over here today with Randy Alcorn
And if your tuned into Instagram this week, we’re counting more of our crazy messy gifts and glimpses of what’s up with the packing over there – and too, we’ll be sharing #GodValentines for you (straight out of Scripture) on Instagram and in our Facebook Community… oh, How He Loves You! Live Loved.
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 9, 2013
Best Prayer App, NYTimes, Good Reads & the handling of Stress: 10 Links for an Amazing Weekend
1. Best Prayer App or Journal:
This is changing my life. Because The Sister Promise? I’m taking it seriously and I’m making it and I’m sharing it. But how to organize your prayer life so you really stand in the gap for your sisters? This beautiful Prayer Journal: Daily Steps toward Praying God’s Heart
or this amazing app: The Prayer Notebook … If prayer is more important than breathing because souls are more important than life — than organizing one’s prayer life is paramount.
2. 5 Tips for Creating A Photobook {FAST} ... yes, please.
3. The Funniest Mother Read Ever? ….
I love Melanie Shankle! And every page of Sparkly Green Earrings: Catching the Light at Every Turn
shimmers with her fabulous voice, honest hilarity and the light of a Savior that makes even the wackiest days of motherhood somehow glimmer with more than a glint of God!
4. The best way to tie a scarf? … I’m really liking this one!
5. The Romans Project in my pajamas — It’s there at toward the bottom … like the pink teddy bears? (wink)
6. Bible Movies right around the corner … ”With at least 10 major movie productions based on biblical figures and accounts potentially headed for the big screen, it seems Hollywood is turning to Scripture more and more for inspiration.”
7. How to get Tap-Sharp Photos Every Time — I’d like to learn!
8. Must Read: One Factor in the Why of Stress….
Why Some of us, and some kids, can handle stress — and some of us struggle. Startling! Reading this one aloud to the kids today…
9. One Thousand Gifts celebrates its 60th Week on the New York Times! {?!!?}
… and if you’re thinking you know the dearest Grandma who needs a surprise of joy, then this Large Print Edition might bring the most beautiful smile, and just this week, a Spanish Edition for our HOLA! friends, and my sweet mama, she’s liking that robin’s egg blue leather bound, duotone edition
(love you, Mama!)
10. Verse for the Weekend: (saying it slow out loud with you)…
“Do not be anxious about anything,
but in everything, by prayer and petition,
with thanksgiving,
present your requests to God. “
~Philippians 4:6-7
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 JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
February 8, 2013
The Sister Promise: What We make to Our Sisters *Updated with Video
It was after the brownies, when I’m dabbing up the calorie crumbs, that she just spills this confession like the folds of some priestly robes.
She says she’s damaged him.
As if you can throw a kid a glare that punches him in the gut so hard you chip off a bit of his fragile soul.
Ask me how I know.
I stop mid-chocolate dab. I catch her eye.
It only takes a moment and we’re looking glass clear into each other, and a mother is a woman who can keep laboring and tearing again and again. The whole thing can be this secret bloody mess.
She’s brave to speak it, brave to say it. She looks away. Yeah, I get it.
I spread out the napkin in my hand, this distracted soothing.
You know how they tell you how that soft soft pulsing bare on the top of your baby’s head, that over time, that soft spot will grow in?
Well, that’s a lie. A child’s soft spot never grows in and a mother knows it — she feels it.
Sure, fontanelles can harden and big kids act tough, but we’re all still children with soft spots pulsing exposed. God help us. And the truck driver and the mailman and the neighbor and the kids and the big man husband and the customer service lady on the other end of the line — everyone you meet has only got this thin membrane between the world and their soul.
“Harsh words. I just get overwhelmed and it all comes out harsh and I can see it in his eyes — I’m doing damage.” Oh, man. God help us. I have so been right there. Could say the exact same words.
And she’s baring her throbbing mother soft spot to us around the table and I want to reach out and touch her there. I want her to feel someone touch the tender, broken place of her, to witness it and not turn away.
Just lay my hand on the fontanelles of her bared mama heart and not reject, not be afraid. Not solve or judge or preach or fix. Just touch her and witness and wait with her — just trust her vulnerable, broken places to birth her into the presence of God.
Quiet spreads deep between us.
If we were sitting in some man cave, some burly chest would gruff out a corny joke.
We’re women. Someone dabs up another brownie crumb. I think one of us should cross-stitch it on a pillow: One bad moment doesn’t a bad mama make. It just makes you cling to an infinitely good God.
And I don’t know who murmured it, but it seemed right, right then, the only thing to really say — “Why don’t we pray?”
Not some trite platitude — “We’ll pray for you” — as if some future promise of prayer can be offered like a flimsy bandage that no one really thinks can heal a thing.
Not “How can I pray for you?” instead of “Can we pray right now?”
Not some Christianese to thinly veil gossip that we pass on in the foyer on Sunday after sermon: “Would you pray for so and so? She mentioned last week that… ” Because passing on prayer concerns but to pass on praying — that’s not godliness. It’s gossip.
So a clutch of women bow unashamed right there and we go boldy before that throne of grace because it’s only in prayer that you find grace to help you when you need it most.
Because when we are in over our heads, the only way to stand is to fall on our knees and touch the heart of God.
Because the communion of saints is in the confessing of sins and we whisper things of the dark here in the light and there are tears.
And it’s there, before I know it, it’s out there in the room, words for these women, syllables I’m choking on, words memorized from Romans 1:11-12, and what the heart knows by heart is what the heart knows and speaks and begs to now live:
“God, whom I serve with my whole heart in preaching the Gospel of His Son….. is my witness … how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times… “
God is the witness and there are women dying and women weeping and women alone and women with these soft spots pounding pain —- and there are woman who say God is the one who sees how day in and day out they remember faces and they remember names and they remember brave things revealed and they don’t give lip service to praying — they give knee service to it.
There are sisters who don’t know how to go on and they have sisters who will kneel down and make them the promise:
God, whom I serve with my not half of my heart but with my whole heart … He is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayer…
There are sisters who have whispered things that scalded the throat and they have sisters who whisper right back –
God as my witness I’ll remember you in my prayer at all times –
the waking times and the sleeping times and the cleaning times and the waiting times and I won’t ever leave you with this but I give you my promise, God as my witness, I. am. with. you. in prayer.
Sisters who know that the only thing that prevents us from praying more is us, who know that we only fail to pray when we’ve made an idol out of self and work, who know that prayer is more important than your breathing because your soul is more important than your life.
And at the door, before the leaving, we’re two women who hug.
We nod and hug and wipe away tears and we lean into each other, fragile things, and we make The Sister Promise to each other, God as our witness, because there comes a time to seriously pray, to take parenting not just seriously, but spiritually.
And I murmur it again on the way home, memory work that is working into me…. “how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times…”
The snow falls.
And all that is damaged in this world begins to be remade by His Word.
*UPDATED: Stumbling through Romans 1:1-12 here on the farm early….
Join The Romans Project! Memorize Romans 1, 8, and 12, in 2103, just 2 verses a week:
Start here: The Romans Project – The 1 Habit God Really Wants for your New Year -
Or join our Online The Romans Project Community! Type out the verses to memorize with us over at at Scripture Typer!
The First Friday of Every Month: We’ll host a link-up here on the blog for you to link over to a video or audio on your blog of your memory work recitation … We’re leaving no one behind! Or you can share on our Facebook page?
Ah, and I’m trying to upload my recitation of Romans 1:1-12, but I’ve given up on waiting for the upload — still 206 minutes left! S.l.o.w. farm internet! I’ll post here as soon as the upload finishes! #staytuned #smile )
Can’t wait to hear your own #RomansProject. Link up?
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
The Sister Promise: What We make to Our Sisters
It was after the brownies, when I’m dabbing up the calorie crumbs, that she just spills this confession like the folds of some priestly robes.
She says she’s damaged him.
As if you can throw a kid a glare that punches him in the gut so hard you chip off a bit of his fragile soul.
Ask me how I know.
I stop mid-chocolate dab. I catch her eye.
It only takes a moment and we’re looking glass clear into each other, and a mother is a woman who can keep laboring and tearing again and again. The whole thing can be this secret bloody mess.
She’s brave to speak it, brave to say it. She looks away. Yeah, I get it.
I spread out the napkin in my hand, this distracted soothing.
You know how they tell you how that soft soft pulsing bare on the top of your baby’s head, that over time, that soft spot will grow in?
Well, that’s a lie. A child’s soft spot never grows in and a mother knows it — she feels it.
Sure, fontanelles can harden and big kids act tough, but we’re all still children with soft spots pulsing exposed. God help us. And the truck driver and the mailman and the neighbor and the kids and the big man husband and the customer service lady on the other end of the line — everyone you meet has only got this thin membrane between the world and their soul.
“Harsh words. I just get overwhelmed and it all comes out harsh and I can see it in his eyes — I’m doing damage.” Oh, man. God help us. I have so been right there. Could say the exact same words.
And she’s baring her throbbing mother soft spot to us around the table and I want to reach out and touch her there. I want her to feel someone touch the tender, broken place of her, to witness it and not turn away.
Just lay my hand on the fontanelles of her bared mama heart and not reject, not be afraid. Not solve or judge or preach or fix. Just touch her and witness and wait with her — just trust her vulnerable, broken places to birth her into the presence of God.
Quiet spreads deep between us.
If we were sitting in some man cave, some burly chest would gruff out a corny joke.
We’re women. Someone dabs up another brownie crumb. I think one of us should cross-stitch it on a pillow: One bad moment doesn’t a bad mama make. It just makes you cling to an infinitely good God.
And I don’t know who murmured it, but it seemed right, right then, the only thing to really say — “Why don’t we pray?”
Not some trite platitude — “We’ll pray for you” — as if some future promise of prayer can be offered like a flimsy bandage that no one really thinks can heal a thing.
Not “How can I pray for you?” instead of “Can we pray right now?”
Not some Christianese to thinly veil gossip that we pass on in the foyer on Sunday after sermon: “Would you pray for so and so? She mentioned last week that… ” Because passing on prayer concerns but to pass on praying — that’s not godliness. It’s gossip.
So a clutch of women bow unashamed right there and we go boldy before that throne of grace because it’s only in prayer that you find grace to help you when you need it most.
Because when we are in over our heads, the only way to stand is to fall on our knees and touch the heart of God.
Because the communion of saints is in the confessing of sins and we whisper things of the dark here in the light and there are tears.
And it’s there, before I know it, it’s out there in the room, words for these women, syllables I’m choking on, words memorized from Romans 1:11-12, and what the heart knows by heart is what the heart knows and speaks and begs to now live:
“God, whom I serve with my whole heart in preaching the Gospel of His Son….. is my witness … how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times… “
God is the witness and there are women dying and women weeping and women alone and women with these soft spots pounding pain —- and there are woman who say God is the one who sees how day in and day out they remember faces and they remember names and they remember brave things revealed and they don’t give lip service to praying — they give knee service to it.
There are sisters who don’t know how to go on and they have sisters who will kneel down and make them the promise:
God, whom I serve with my not half of my heart but with my whole heart … He is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayer…
There are sisters who have whispered things that scalded the throat and they have sisters who whisper right back –
God as my witness I’ll remember you in my prayer at all times –
the waking times and the sleeping times and the cleaning times and the waiting times and I won’t ever leave you with this but I give you my promise, God as my witness, I. am. with. you. in prayer.
Sisters who know that the only thing that prevents us from praying more is us, who know that we only fail to pray when we’ve made an idol out of self and work, who know that prayer is more important than your breathing because your soul is more important than your life.
And at the door, before the leaving, we’re two women who hug.
We nod and hug and wipe away tears and we lean into each other, fragile things, and we make The Sister Promise to each other, God as our witness, because there comes a time to seriously pray, to take parenting not just seriously, but spiritually.
And I murmur it again on the way home, memory work that is working into me…. “how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times…”
The snow falls.
And all that is damaged in this world begins to be remade by His Word.
Stumbling through Romans 1:1-12 here on the farm early….
Join The Romans Project! Memorize Romans 1, 8, and 12, in 2103, just 2 verses a week:
Start here: The Romans Project – The 1 Habit God Really Wants for your New Year -
Or join our Online The Romans Project Community! Type out the verses to memorize with us over at at Scripture Typer!
The First Friday of Every Month: We’ll host a link-up here on the blog for you to link over to a video or audio on your blog of your memory work recitation … We’re leaving no one behind! Or you can share on our Facebook page?
Ah, and I’m trying to upload my recitation of Romans 1:1-12, but I’ve given up on waiting for the upload — still 206 minutes left! S.l.o.w. farm internet! I’ll post here as soon as the upload finishes! #staytuned #smile )
Can’t wait to hear your own #RomansProject. Link up?
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
February 7, 2013
… pondering these things in her heart #1 {Gallery}
Quotes from the post: Why Weak is the New Strong
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
February 6, 2013
Why Weak is the New Strong: Radical Right Where You Are {Pt4}
So I fell extremely anemic in the fall.
Could hardly drag out of bed, felt like jello, looked like a gaunt ghost, and got winded walking from the sink to the stove.
I’d draped arms around the Farmer’s neck and told him I was sure I was right broke.
So the nurse at the doctor’s office drew this vial of blood to see what was the deal.
I dragged myself back out to the van and stood in the cold wind digging for my keys.
I wasn’t home a half hour when she called here to the house and she said — Send your Farmer back into town, the doctor’s phoned your prescription over to the pharmacy right now.
I laid on the couch and he handed it to me and I swallowed down iron.
I laid there on the couch and why do us women listen to the voices that tell us that you’re a good for nothing and you fail and that you’re less-than and you’re way too much of a weak mess to be used for anything?
Why do we let our blood run thin and watery over what someone thinks of you, or what no one says to you, or what anyone does or doesn’t do for you?
Why can forgiving ourselves — seem like the unforgivable sin?
The clock ticks loud in the kitchen.
The house siding shudders thin in the wind.
Some days the hardest thing to get on — is the strength to go on.
What do you do when the lifeblood of you – seems to be leaking away?
“What if we bought a cast iron skillet?” I lean in the kitchen after dinner one night, after the weary and the ache hollows out the inside of my bones.
Hope-girl’s scrubbing out the stainless steel frying pan.
The Farmer and the boys clear off the table in the fading light.
“You think it’d help?” The Farmer takes a stack of enamel plates from Kai. He’s looking at me like he’d do anything to make this better, like there are men who’d die to make their wives strong.
“They say that if you cook on iron — it gets right into you.”
Hope turns at the sink and half laughs. “Really?”
She’s standing there questioning, like a woman wanting to pry the earth right open and get to the core of things, and looking into her, it’s like a mirror, into all the women who want to know how, when you are weak, is exactly when you are strong enough to go on.
“The iron from the iron skillet, it gets into your food — and they say anemic pioneer women? Were actually kept going by eating out of cast iron skillets.“
And that’s what she has to know — that when you’re weakest and can’t stand, there’s a Savior who took the iron and He’ll be all your steel.
That when your day’s a mess and you can’t iron out all the wrinkles of the last week, the last year, Christ is your iron and He doesn’t make you strong: He is your strength.
How can we be anemic for anything — when Christ opened His arms and took the iron to welcome you in.
He loved you so much He took the spike of the iron so He’d be your iron when you’re too weak to go on.
You don’t need to have to have the strength to go on. You just need Him.
I want to cup Hope-girl’s face and tell her I’ve laid awake at night and stared at the ceiling and replayed the times I lost it and lost His Way and just whisper one thing her mama knows:
Anger is a symptom of soul anemia.
And your iron is Christ who sacrificed, and your iron is Christ who is IN you, and your iron is Christ who saved the world when He laid Himself down.
Real iron for the anemic is living the radical way of the sacrificed Savior — not in an iron fist.
And the Farmer opens the Bible after every meal and we all turn to Romans with him and the iron from the Word, it gets right into you when it’s your real food and sure, half-laugh that Bible reading after every meal is quaint and trite or only for the bloated holy, the steely devout. But the truth of it is, it’s only the weak who know how desperately they need iron — and if they don’t get it, they don’t get to live.
I can only say it because I’ve lived it: It’s possible to water down your Christianity with justifications until you can hardly stand.
And it’s possible to stand the strongest in Christ — when you’re too weak to stand at all.
Kids whirl loud all day.
The washing machine leaks.
I grind my teeth and I don’t notice and Malakai tells me to stop being anxious.
And it happens throughout the winter — this fall again into iron-scarred hands, this lifeblood warming in iron clad love.
Related: {The next several Wednesdays will wrestle with “Radical Right Where You Are”}
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}
The Miracle He will not Withhold from You
Change the Prepositions in Your life and You Change Your Life
Why Reading the Bible after every Meal is One Radical Habit that changes a family
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
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 JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
February 4, 2013
God Made a Mother and You — So Farmer On!
I sat beside a girl in Mr. Seuter’s grade nine math class who said she was getting out of here.
She was getting out of this no name little farming town and she was getting out of this hick place with its hick boys and she was getting free of everything her daddy ever was.
I knew her daddy.
He was known for planting rows of corn as straight as a fence line and working hard because there is hard work that makes the world a better place.
He was known for joy because it is humanly possible; because joy is always possible when you thank the Lord.
And he helped her pack up the back of that beat-up Honda Civic the day after her high school graduation.
Ten years later she told me on a front porch that there are times when coming back is going ahead.
I’d just stayed here. On a farm just outside the town where I was born to a farmer and a city girl.
Same town where I married a farm boy who was born on that same floor of that same hospital. We’d have our own babies in those same delivery rooms.
With the wives of truck drivers and teachers, carpenters and mechanics, with the people who do great things because of faithfulness in hidden things.
He’d put rings of dirt round the bathtub at 3 o’clock in the morning before he rolled into bed.
I’d scrape manure out from behind the sows and then head in to nurse the baby while setting out plates for dinner, the pressure cooking hissing loud.
There were 6 babies in 10 years.
We picked flat bed trailer loads of stones off the front field.
We fought and made up and kept going.
He grew wrinkles like a yield and I loved him more for the growing old with me.
And he laughed over those forty candles we stuck into the haystack at the top of the cake, the pig sticking out.
His hands felt worn and warm and right in mine, like we were weathering together into some holy patina.
And he’d gone to bed early, because 4:30 and the barn and those mama sows come early, and he’d pulled me close, one thick, working arm around my waist and he’d slept, each breath this warm caress on the nape of my neck.
I had laid in the dark and watched it almost muted, because someone had sent it to me, that ad, “God Made a Farmer.”
And I felt his offered sacrifice around me right then like an altar, that God made farmers and fathers and pastors and plumbers and men who’d lay down their lives like their Lord.
That God made us quiet people who’d live lives not afraid of dirt or only the applause of God.
I had laid there and there was God looking down on the Farmer loving His land and God needed someone to love the least and the little, into real whole people, and He knew that to love is to suffer so God made a mother.
That God had made technicians and programmers and supervisors and salesmen and God had said –
I need someone to get up at midnight and scoop the most fragile of humanity close to her warmth and rock though she can hardly stand and nourish though she’s mostly sleep-starved and change the diaper and the sheets and the leaked on, leaked through, and leaked down clothes though she’ll have to change them in the morning and next week and that won’t change for years.
So God made a Mother.
That God had said I need somebody with a strong heart.
Strong enough for toddler tantrums and teenage testing, yet broken enough to fall on her knees and pray, pray, pray.
Someone who knows that in every hard place is exactly where you extend grace, who looks a hopeful child in the eye and says yes, even though she knows every yes means a mess but this is how you bless, who has the courage to keep letting go because she’s holding on to Me.
So God made a mother.
God said I need somebody who can shape a soul and find shoes on Sunday mornings and get grass stains out of Levis.
And make dinner out of nothing and do it again 79, 678 times, and keep kids off the road and out of the toilet and in clean underwear and mainly alive though she’s mainly losing her mind and will put in an 80 hour week by Wednesday night and just do one more load of laundry.
And one more sink of crusted burnt pots.
And keep on going another eighty hours because raising generations matters and weaving families matters and tying heart strings matters and these people here matter.
So God made a mother…
It had to be somebody who could comb back pigtails and tie up skates just-right tight.
Who could pretend she remembered algebra and how to get home from here and that really, she was just fine, that it must just be the silly onions.
Somebody who would run for the catch, jump on a trampoline and play one fierce game of soccer and not give a thought to all those labors and her weak pelvic floor. Somebody who’d stay up late with a science project that never ends, who’d get up early for the game in the rain, somebody who’d wave at the door until the taillights were out of sight and still be smiling brave.
So God made a mother.
It had to be somebody willing to keep loving when it made no sense because that’s what love does.
Somebody who knew that patience is a willingness to suffer.
That joy is always possible because there is always, always something to be thankful for.
And that life is not an emergency but a gift — so just. slow. down. There are children at play here and we don’t want anyone to get hurt and the hurry makes us hurt.
Somebody willing to feed and lead, lay down her life and pick up her cross, give of her time because they have her heart. Someone who knows that we all blow it — and what matters is what we then do after.
Someone who could humble herself into the tender sorry that covers a multitude of sins.
And who’d bow her head at night over the girl asleep with the doll in the crook of her arm — and thank her Father for this hidden life that’s the turning gear for the a whole spinning world.
So God made a mother.
And when the Farmer rolled over in sleep, there was this deep settling in — I could feel it — of not getting out of here, but of the grace that we *get* to be here.
That there was soil to till and numbed, hard places to break up, and there were seeds to be planted in the dark and the hope.
And grace to be cultivated everywhere.
That it was same down every back road and every side street and we aren’t very different, the Farmer and the mother and all-the-faithful-that-God-made-everywhere.
All of us people known to just Farmer on.
:::
Related: What Every Mother Needs — A 25 Point Sanity Manifesto
How to Be the Mother You Want to Be: 40 Things Every Child Must Know Before They Leave Home
The God Made a Farmer Video from last night’s Superbowl ads
Sharing more of the #1000gifts this week over here at Instagram — Join the Farmer and I this week on Instagram and we can catch up with each other with the tag #1000gifts and give thanks back to God who made us for right where we are!
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
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
February 1, 2013
How to be a Better Lover
I‘m sitting there on the side of a windblown road, waiting for the Farmer to bring me a jug of gas.
We’ve knocked on a door.
Asked if we could patch through a call to home. Levi picks up.
Yes, Levi says, Yes, I think Dad’s out in the barn. I’ll go get him.
I’ll send him with gas.
But I know there’s no gas in the jug in the shop, nothing in the shed.
I know there’s nothing at home to fill us up.
We huddle in the cold of the van.
Hope does next week’s piano theory. She rubs her fingers hard. I don’t even know if the Farmer’s home, if Levi can find him. February howls bitter right through us, moaning for something more. I pray he’s coming for us. Think of that first time he took my face in his hands and kissed me too long in the dark and what he said.
His eyes had caught the light, and he said it slow and I was too young and I’ve gone back to that moment, the way it flashed, a thousand times.
“One thing you can count on is the way I’ll love you.”
He was twenty one when he took my trembling hand and slipped on the band and forever and under the veil, I was still a girl. Girl who hid behind long hair and fear and a prescribed calm that she swallowed down with the water.
The Farmer, he knows how to grow things.
The kind of man that when his wife wavers, he’s held. Girded her with prayer.
When she’s cleared out a bedroom closet to fill it with books, held down her side of the room with words, and on his side he reads the farm paper and the book of Proverbs and in the middle, he’s met her, and he’s drawn it all close, and smiled when she’s created and nodded for her to go and said no to any performing and yes to just being.
And, crazy man, whispered too often about beautiful and asked, please, to believe him and he always, always, always said that everything, always was good.
Everything, always…
He has always come. He has always filled up. And when his wife’s canned stories, instead of pears, and doubted what it is to be a woman and calmed when rocking babies and stitched lines instead of threads, clicked shutters and keys and opened life up to glory, he has always come and and said it is good. Said yes, live.
The way he has loved has made his wife a woman. This is what a man can do to a woman.
The way he loves her has made her live.
I don’t care how cold the wind blows. He has always come and in air that’s only smiled, he’s strengthened the stalk of me, opened the petals of who I am and I have fit my skin.
It’s near dark when I look in the mirror and see that pick-up truck of his coming down the road. When he hauls out a gas jug from the back of the pick-up. I knew he would. I watch him in the rearview mirror. I can’t feel my toes.
After he’s emptied the last of the jug, he opens my door a crack. The wind whips.
“Thank you.” I whisper. He smiles into everything blustery. “But where did you find any gas at home?”
“Town.” He winks.
“You had to go to town? You had to leave all you were doing in the the barn, drive all the way into town, get gas, and then drive all the way over here?” Oh. my. I feel …. ill. Frozen and ill. “I am so sorry.“
I look him in the eye. Why? Why would he?
“I love you.” He says it simply. Says it sure into the wind.
And this is why.
Love is not passion. It is the pulse of sacrifice.
We get home and I make hot chocolate. Wrap my numb fingers around heat.
Write a love note to him in my half of the our love letter’s journal
Marital love is a demanding and dying thing compared to the stuff of movies and mirages.
The love of imagination — it’s a different beast entirely than love made in the image of a Saviour with nails in His hands.
The Farmer writes little with pens. He’s a man who prefers to write his love letters with his life.
I need to write down my thanks.
After the kids are in bed, we sit with our mugs and our vows.
I rub his back and ask him about the barn and his work and the things he’s thinking about. Some tanks can run dry and it takes time to fill them.
There are no standing lovers: the only way to love is to lay down.
Lay down plans.
Lay down agendas.
Lay down self.
Love is always the laying down.
This is how to make love out of a marriage: Love lays down it’s own wants to lift up the will of another.
Love lets go of its plans — to hold on to a person.
In the dark, we set down our mugs and turn out the lights and the wind moans on and I hear it and it can come and it doesn’t matter what blows.
Love always come too.
In our room, under quilts, we lay down beside each other…
Filled and warm and close.
::
“It is not your love that sustains the marriage —
but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”
::
Related:
3 Marriage Habits Every Marriage Needs to Fall in Love Again
How to Really Write a Love Letter
Mugs and journal and love notes
edit post from archives… in honor of his birthday: instead of a new post, giving the time to him
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
January 31, 2013
What is time for but this?
Wildest Grace!
And thousands of you most beautiful people all say “Here I am” and become 1000 gifts and the cycle of grace continues on and on and the five little nieces and all us crazy farm folk, we’re bowled over and undone by this unending deluge of birthday cards for Aleeda!
From men who say “You’ll get far more eloquent cards but it matters for me to reach out too”–
From grandmas who took photos of birthday cakes and said they wished they could send it with one big fat candle.
From scribbling, grinning toddlers and whole cheering high school youth groups and stair-stepped families all leaning in and even these little puppies smiling ridiculously pretty for the camera and little Aleeda.
And it keeps snowing but we’re this melted puddle of joy.
Being radical is as radical as answering God’s call — wherever you are, right where you are.
To pick up the phone and dial that number, to invite that one person over, to make that meal, to write that note.
To make the time to love because what else in the world is time for?
Time is made for love… and we have time for this.
And that answer to “Where is God?” — You can hear the answer, all of God’s people beating God’s heart everywhere in the world.
Us all together and that beating sounding like thunder and that unstoppable Kingdom coming.
Be the gift? We can’t get her a heart but we can show her the heart of God! Email “Happy Birthday” to little Aleeda waiting for a heart transplant: 1stbirthdaycardforAleeda@gmail.com
All together we make the heart of God known as this thrumming thunder of wonder in this world!
Related: What Radical Christianity Looks like Right Where You Are
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
January 30, 2013
What Radical Christianity Looks Like Right Where You Are {Pt. 3}
You can beat your hard chest over the slaves in night streets.
And over women beaten down for her one beautifully snapping mind, and over oppression that crushes the gasping lungs of whole nations.
And all your chest banging can sound clang hollow, and I think this over a sink full of crusted pots.
The water is hot.
And not at all hot enough.
And where do you find the blasted tap to steam my lukewarm hands awake? How do you scrub clean the inside of a dirty pot?
How do live radical faith in a North American echo chamber?
And I can wonder about the state of my heart all I want, if the arteries and the valves are hardly warmed over —
but give me a break, it’s right there in my hands.
It’s my hands that are content to mindlessly scroll through Pinterest and Facebook and too often it’s escapism and not ministry (and it could be. Anything can be made a ministry to somebody. All things are Big in the Kingdom of God).
It’s my hands that grow numb and cold and refuse to fold around God in prayer, refuse to fold hope around all this bleeding everywhere.
Hands are the thermometer of the heart.
And a heart that burns for it’s First Love — it flows like mercury to the hands that then reach out to warm a numbed world.
I scour the inside of the pressure cooker.
I scour and scrape. It’s there straight across from the sink, there on the wall right there by the fireplace, two wooden letters:
IN.
IN.
I breathe in slow. Exhale. It’s never about performing. It’s always about passion. And girl — you can’t fix your heart by making your hands work harder. When you fix your moments on Christ, that fixes your heart – and your hands.
I wash out the pot, a baptismal.
Because it’s true: You can have more of a Christian lingo than really have the Christian life. We can think we’re living with Christ –when we’re really only talking about Him.
Your hands can so work in service for Christ — that you forget to fall in love with Christ.
It’s like a heart beat at the sink, slow – slow and hot and flaming high.
Like a beating, throbbing current that could heal the world.
Because the whole world — mine, the one down the street, the one that lays curved and spinning sick – it just wants to know in all of this: Where is God?
Where is God in this mess of betrayal and disappointment and sickness? Where is God down hospital halls and red light districts and gutted out dreams? Where is God when everything just echoes empty off everything carved right out?
And I don’t have the sink drained and my wet hands dried off on a thread-thin towel when it blinks up, this letter from my 9 year old niece:
Aunt Ann.
We went to Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto today, Aunt Ann.
We had appointments. And after the appointments, we got to see Aleeda.
Aleeda. I’d written about her before Christmas, in my season of hearts and miracles and radical believing.
About Aleeda, the great-granddaughter of some founding members of our country chapel and how her picture had flashed across the screen at the front of the chapel, her smile and tubes, and how she’d been at Sick Kids Hospital since July, waiting, waiting a half year of Sundays for someone to walk in and give her a beating heart. Sometimes the wait really can kill you.
And we’d bowed our heads and prayed and how do you pray for what has to happen to find a still-warm and pulsing heart — and how can we not?
For crying out loud — Where is God down hospital halls?
My little niece writes it in simple letters, pounding truth:
Aleeda is struggling, Aunt Ann. She has sores on her skin now.
My hands want to touch the screen, enfold some of all this world’s ache.
“Aleeda’s 1s’t birthday is coming up next week.
And all of us girls here were wondering if as many people as possible could write happy birthday to her?
We want to try to get 1000 cards for her.
Sort of like us all becoming One Thousand Gifts, Aunt Ann.”
And I’m all this liquid lava.
‘
Yes, little girl, yes:
“I am blessed, I can bless, This is happiness.” (One Thousand Gifts)
Radical can be as simple as radically passing on the gifts you’ve been given.
Radical is as simple as realizing God gave us two hands instead of one.
One to praise Him for the gifts given – and the other to pass on the gifts that never stop being gifts to pass on.
God made us to be helpers, not hoarders. Conduits not collectors.
“Aunt Ann, if Aleeda doesn’t get a heart soon —- .”
I don’t have to finish that sentence. I know, little girl, I know….
“And Aunt Ann, we can not get a heart for her.
But we can show her God’s heart for her.”
We can’t get a heart for her.
But — we can show her God’s heart for her.
We can’t overthrow whole systems today and empty out the sick wards by noon and mop up the whole planet’s oceans of tears by sundown and we can’t get hearts for the brokenhearted, but by God and in God and through God
We can show them God’s heart for them.
We can rip back all these layers of busyness.
We can let the rest of the world all stampede by in this lemming lunge to suburban success.
And we can slow.
And we can kneel.
And can take the time given to us to bear our bare, vulnerable selves, and show the broken down – the pulsing heart of God right in us, right with them.
That thundering question of Where is God?
Is best answered when the people of God offer a hand and whisper: Here I am.
That thundering question of Where is God?
Is best answered when the people of God tear everything else away and take the time to show it: Here’s His love for you – beating right here, right here in me, right here for you.
What else is time for but this?
And I don’t dry and put away the dripping pots in the sink.
I pick up a pen.
And the ink runs like hot mercury for a girl who needs a new heart and the whole world does.
And time and us were made to show them His.
Pssst…. want to take beautiful time and become the gift? We could all become One Thousand Gifts! Let’s do it!
Email Aleeda just a line or two of birthday greeting right here: 1stbirthdaycardforAleeda@gmail.com (if you wanted to get the kids in on it too — you could email a photo of their hand drawn cards?) My 5 little nieces will make sure you get to show God’s heart to her.
That thundering question of ”Where is God?” Is best answered when the people of God offer a hand and whisper: “Here I am.”
Related: {The next several Wednesdays will wrestle with “Radical Right Where You Are”}
First in the series: When You are Weary of Watered-Down, Vanilla Christianity {Part 1 of Radical Series}
What Does a bit of Radical Christianity Really Look Like —- Right Where You Are? {Part 2 of the Radical Series}
The Miracle He will not Withhold from You
Change the Prepositions in Your life and You Change Your Life
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
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 JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
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