Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 272
January 17, 2013
Even in the Bleak Midwinter, the Hope of Spring
So.. (!) Liz Curtis Higgs took me under her gorgeous proverbial wing last year when this knee-knocking farm girl said yes to God & sharing what He’s done in my life at several Women of Faith events last year. We’ve become true heart sisters, praying that God would make ours beat with His.
So when Liz jumped at The Romans Project and said she was IN — I thrilled to happily (nervously!) fling open the farm door to welcome her to this quiet space as we all memorize Romans together.
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
So, our friend Ann Voskamp says, “Let’s memorize Romans together.”
Love the Bible, love a challenge, I’m in.
I hopped onto The Romans Project online community at ScriptureTyper.com, figured out how it works (slight learning curve, but manageable), and began typing away. In a matter of minutes I tucked that first verse in my memory bank, filed under Important.
But I wasn’t ready for what happened next. Romans 1:1 quickly burrowed into the soil of my heart and took root.
These aren’t simply words. They are seeds filled with Life.
“Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God”— Romans 1:1 (NIV 84)
Less than twenty words, only ten in the original Greek. The opening line of a letter, a salutation, a greeting.
We’d write, “Hey, how you doin’?”
But Paul started out with, “Here’s who I am, whom I serve, and why I’m on this planet.”
Whoa. What’s with this guy? He comes off as both humble and boastful in half a sentence.
I want to know more. Mind if we break down the verse?
Paul,…
He’s the only Paul in the Bible. And Paul wasn’t the name he was born with. His parents called him Saul, which means in Hebrew, “asked for, prayed for.” He was loved from the start. A welcome addition to the family, an answer to prayer.
But that’s not how the early Christians felt about Saul. Not for a minute.
Saul stood on the sidelines, nodding in approval, as a devoted young believer named Stephen was stoned to death. Then Saul did his best to destroy the fledgling church, dragging men and women off to prison, breathing out murderous threats against the disciples.
He’s the last person we’d pick to write more than a dozen books of the Bible, right? The very last.
But God chose Saul. Chose him.
The Lord called down from heaven while Saul was traveling to Damascus. Spoke the man’s name twice to get his attention.
“Saul, Saul…” (Acts 9:4). Asked for, prayed for.
Saul responded at once, then ended up on Straight Street. (yes. really.) He kept the name Saul for several more chapters in Scripture, until one day we read, “Then Saul, who was also called Paul…” (Acts 13:9).
Wait. Who gave him this new name? God? The other believers? Paul himself? The Bible doesn’t tell us. But this much is certain: Paul means “small, humble.”
The perfect name for a man who wants to be less-than.
…a servant of Christ Jesus,…
We know all about servants; we’ve watched Downton Abbey (Well, Ann hasn’t — thanks for taking the farm hick anyway?) The people below stairs work eighteen hours a day, wear the same clothes, sleep in tiny rooms with creaky beds, and earn so little money they can never hope to leave service.
Yet Paul willingly, openly calls himself a “bond-servant” (NASB), a “devoted slave” (MSG), and in his later years, a “prisoner of Christ Jesus” (Philemon 1:9).
Servant, slave, prisoner.
Conviction pierces my heart, sharp and swift. Small. Humble. I don’t pray to be those things. I don’t even want to be those things.
Oh, I’m happy to serve the Lord wherever I’m needed, but I’d rather not be thought of as a servant. And I definitely don’t wish to be treated like a slave, let alone like a prisoner.
Yet God said, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name” (Acts 9:16). And Paul welcomed it. Even got excited about it. “For Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties” (2 Corinthians 12:10).
Few of us would say, “I’d like to suffer, please.” Yet Paul says, in essence, “Bring it.”
I’m so not there. Even after thirty years of knowing God, I’m not even close.
If this was my letter to the believers in Rome, the most I could say at the start is, “Liz, a…” What? Pew warmer? Choir member? Nice person? Groan.
This is the awful truth: I pray to be Christ-like, when I’m not even willing to be Paul-like.
The Lord’s patience overwhelms me. His grace astounds me. So, at the start of a new year, as I memorize chapters from the timeless book of Romans, I whisper again, “Change me, Lord.”
Please, please change me.
God certainly changed Paul. Not because the man was worthy or good, but because God had a plan, and Paul was a vital part of it.
From Romans 1:1, this story isn’t about Paul. It’s about God.
…called to be an apostle…
Make no mistake, Paul was “authorized” (MSG), “summoned” (OJB), and “appointed” (NIRV). This was something God alone could put in motion. Paul was a hater, a destroyer, an enemy, until God called him to be something else, something more: “a special messenger” (AMP), “an emissary” (CJB), “a missionary” (NLV).
Such power, to change a man completely. To turn him around and point him in a whole new direction.
Thirty years ago I was decidedly going the wrong way. I hadn’t killed anyone, but considering how many times I parked my inebriated self behind the wheel of a car, I might have ended someone’s life, including my own.
Though I didn’t throw anyone in jail, I belonged behind bars for selling drugs to my coworkers. Though I didn’t persecute Christians, I wrote a paper for my college Philosophy class titled, “Why I Don’t Believe in God.”
I am the last person you’d pick to teach the Bible, right? The very last.
But God had a plan. He did, he did.
A plan for Liz, just as he has a plan for you.
It’s not who we were that matters to God. It’s who we are becoming in Him.
Even so, we may wonder why God called us to a task for which we feel so utterly unworthy.
Paul surely felt the same. Not me, Lord. Never me. Yet here he is, writing to the Roman believers, certain of his calling.
…and set apart for the gospel of God —
Ann reminded me in an email, “Liz, we’re set apart for the gospel.” It scared me when I read it. It scares me still.
To think of being “separated” (ASV), of being “singled out “ (HCSB), when I know full well where I’ve been and what I’ve done. Oh, dear Jesus. How can you possible use me?
Not one of us is worthy, yet “the Lord has set apart the godly for himself” (Psalm 4:3). “Godly” doesn’t mean equal with God. It means belonging to God, cherished by God, counted among his people.
Paul’s charge and ours is to share this hope, to spread “God’s good news” (CEB). What is this happy news exactly? This life-changing, world-spinning news? This gospel of God?
Looks like we’ll need to keep memorizing Romans 1, because the definition of the gospel comes after the dash. …—
Seriously, that’s the last part of the verse.
On SciptureTyper.com, you’re not done with Romans 1:1 until you type that dash—a reminder that the best bits are still to come.
Right from Paul’s opening line, the Lord is beckoning us forward.
Keep digging. Keep planting. Keep growing. I have more for you. So much more. Don’t stop now.
Press on.
Isn’t Liz just a wonderful Jesus-sister? (I can’t wait to see her in March — come join us in Minnesota?) 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 JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
January 16, 2013
When You are Weary of Vanilla Christianity
For some ridiculous reason, I keep carrying around green sparkly earrings in my purse.
Like I’m hoping someday that I’ll get to wear them — and there just ain’t no Dave Brown way that’s going to happen this side of the great divide and I’m the best with this.
Big Mama, she’d wrapped them up and sent them from the great state of Texas to this pig farm in the north.
She’d written a whole book about green sparkly earrings. But there’s something the wondrous Big Mama didn’t know when she put those earrings in the mail for this mess of a mama of six.
A secret I’ve been hiding for years under hair falling hardly long enough.
When I was in seventh grade, I was the thick glasses kid who sat in the front row of Mr. Garmand’s seventh grade class, hunched over these math questions about having 19 stacked apples in one hand and 11 and a half oranges in the other hand, just knowing the real answer was that you needed a bag.
Peter Reman and his lankiness sprawled too close in the desk right behind me.
One of those days, while I moaned over math and other cosmic numerical travesties, Peter Reman just unfolded one of the lengths of his limbs and yanked on my right ear and that dangling turquoise earring my Grandma Ruth had bought me in a thriftstore in Belleville.
Ripped right through the soft skin of the lobe of the ear and I bled a bit like one of my dad’s stuck pigs.
Peter Reman’s daddy was an electrician. He looked like he just got a bit of a charge out of the whole thing.
But my Mama made it clear, from that day forth — no more earrings. That if I just let it be, that earring hole that was really now more like an elongated misshapen ditch, would eventually heal up smooth and forgotten.
It was 27 years on a January night before I wore another pair of earrings, before my sister handed me a pair of pearls and said, “Don’t you think it’s time for some glorious lovely again?”
Even if that long ago wound hadn’t healed? Even if the hole in me was too large?
I couldn’t have known that three weeks later, I’d be sitting at an evening family Bible study in my Mama’s front room, the book of Matthew open on my lap, twisting that pearl earring around in my right lobe — and it’d fall straight into my hand.
I felt my ear. Fresh red smeared between fingertips.
“It’s tore right through, Mama.” Malakai whispered it wide-eyed.
No one tells you that time doesn’t really heal wounds — only the Wounded Healer can.
I sat that night on the edge of our bed and tucked the hair behind my ear to really see.
The bottom of my ear gapes.
“You look like an ear-notched sow, Mama.” Shalom leans over my shoulder into the mirror.
I grin, wink at her and she laughs — and I feel along the two pieces of my ear hanging torn…
Notched. Marked.
– and there is that first verse of Romans 1: Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus — Παῦλος δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ – and there is Exodus 21 –
“But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master….’ then his master shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the door…
And his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall be his slave forever.“
The edges of my ear, bore through and blatant.
This murmuring with David:
“You do not want sacrifices and offerings.
But you have made a hole in my ear
to show that my body and life are Yours.” Ps. 40:6-8
I had been sitting in a Bible Study when my ear had tore straight through and here I was with a right opened ear.
Sometimes what you think is an an open wound needing to heal — is God opening you up like an ear to hear Him and obey.
I touch the notching. Catch my eye in the mirror. Mouth it – Give it up.
Give up the baggage and the sparkly facades, give up the years of waiting and the personal agendas, give up the American dream and the striving race with the Jones’s and give up pinterest perfection and be pinned to Perfect and become a slave to Christ.
The call to complete happiness is to come lay down your life completely, and the Call of Christ is always a call to come die and anything else is a lie.
Stand before that door and be bore through — because this is the only way through.
Be an ever opened ear.
What do I need more than His love and what do I want more than His will and when I am my own master, don’t I have a fool for a master?
What do you have to fear? You were born for freedom. You deliver into it through obedience.
No one ever entered into the full rest of God by giving Him only half of themselves.
You may wrestle, but in Him you have won. You may regret, but in Him you will rise. You may suffer, but in Him you are secure. You may no longer be free to live the easy way, but you will be free to the liberty of doing everything for love.
The soundtrack for misery always is “I did it My Way.”
Complete abdication to Christ is the only way to complete liberation.
That hole in me, the one I see in the mirror, the one between my fingers — it is the mark of the bondslave to Christ and it is the keyhole to freedom and my days and my times and my life are not mine but His.
Kids will upend and barge in and spin everything. The phone will ring and the computer will crash and the dayplanner will short circuit and spark and blow a fuse. God will call and God will command and this is the thing:
Knowing every interruption is a call from your Master — is liberation.
When you named Him your Lord, you gave Him right to your life on His time: Every interruption is a new work order from God.
That tearing of my ear — breaks the chains of my heart and I could be a slave to Christ Jesus and the most freeing place for a soul is in the abandonment to the will of God.
So I may never wear earrings again — But I keep trying to the wear the habit of saying yes to God.
Habits are to the soul what veins are to the blood. The very course of our life depends on them. Random acts of greatness pale in comparison to habitual acts of faithfulness.
And the Farmer whispers it to me after he turns off the light, pulls me close — “You could go have that ear sewed up, if you wanted?” He strokes my hair back. I shake my head in the dark. This is my yes to God.
I want Christ. I want this mark. Christ’s people want nothing less than this.
The slaves to Christ bear the three marks:
1. their eyes see Christ in all faces
2. their lips say yes to Christ in all places
3. and their arms embrace interruptions as Christ’s directions — as all is grace.
For the bound and released, none of it seems ridiculous –
that the ever opened ear, it can sparkle anywhere with this startling glint of God.
The Romans Project? That habit of memorizing Romans? There are more than 2200 of us committed at The Romans Project online (!!! amazing people !!!) Thousands of us saying it together: “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus.”And tomorrow? A very guest blog post by a very special surprise guest who has joined the Romans Project… (!!!).
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: (Let’s spend one more week on habits, yes?): The Practice of Radical Christianity. Does Christianity need to be radical at its very essence? What does that look like — right where we are? We look forward to your thoughts, stories, ideas….
Today, if you’d like to share with community: The Practice of New Habits … 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 sharingthe 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!}
January 14, 2013
How to Keep in Time with God
There wasn’t a morning that she didn’t flick off her bedroom light and find it right there on the edge of the table outside their bedroom door.
One round vitamin C that he’d leave out for her, before he went to the barn and his udder-dripping sows.
Like he thought she could just take it and keep the day from being infected with grief.
Like there was a way to ingest light and lower the bloody pressure of the dark.
She’d swallow that flattened vitamin globe.
She’d cut one of the grapefruits right in half.
She’d use the tip of her knife to fling out the pits and she’d watch the sun rise.
What if her son wrapped the rusting metal of his Honda around some indifferent trunk of a maple tree on the way home from school? What in the world was worth getting ready for dinner for the 82, 369th time?
And how could she raise these kids to be parched for God and care about anything more than their own skin and how can your gentleness ever be evident to all before it’s first obvious to one small, large-eyed kid right here?
She didn’t know who had been trying to soft-sell that potion to the masses:
Mothering is no second-rate ministry for the spiritually and intellectually mediocre.
Mothering is a Christ-rated ministry for soul and mind sculptors and what could ever be substandard about passing on Christ’s standard?
She prayed for whatever sharp edge truth was needed to extract a thousand more pits.
When the oldest girl came in from the barn, the girl went straight to the piano, and played the notes like a vitamin of her own.
And the mother stood there at the fingerprint-smudged window with a bowl in her hand, listening to the steady beat of those notes that decoded something in her.
She had heard it once, how a piano teacher had once stood over the white keys and had whispered it to a muddled protege: “When you are a musician and you stop counting? …it’s like running around in the forest, in the dark without a flashlight.”
When you’re a musician and you stop counting — you’ve lost the song’s way.
When you’re a follower of Christ, and you stop counting — you’ve lost your way.
When you are a believer — and you stop counting blessings? It’s like blindfolding yourself and wondering why everything’s black.
And the dog came in from the cold and she knew there was definitely a more brilliant way to live than the simplicity of the cynics who complain and rail about the obvious dark.
S he opened her journal and she just took the grace that was laid out for her everywhere.
She kept deliberately counting, gift after gift, and it was mineral to her.
The only way to keep in time with your Beloved — is to keep counting blessings.
The most brilliant way to live is to always look for the light.
And there at the piano, her daughter kept count in her head and made music in the world.
{more of the One Thousand Gifts (#4, 519-#4,520):
this trailer : this post : this community
: a son who wears a bowtie out the door : a daughter who plays & plays that piano : a farmer who leaves out a vitamin every morning to nourish his wife : Romans 1 on the chalkboard :
the call of motherhood : fresh paint on walls : fresh mercies today :
The only way to keep in time with your Beloved — is to keep counting blessings…. }
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 JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
January 11, 2013
How to Be the Parent You Want to Be: 40 Things Every Child Must Know Before They Leave Home
Dear Son —
You have to know how your unfolding from me was a miracle.
That’s the miraculous thing about miracles – they really do happen.
How is it in this crazy, holy world does a girl-woman bear a boy-child?
How does she raise a squalling boy-child into a man? What can a woman know about raising a man?
And this the thing: there’s only so much time to go from point A to point B.
How did I waste so many days? How do I make you know everything you need to know before you go?
How to love a woman and when to say yes and when to wear black socks instead of white and when to ask for directions and when to say no.
That you’ll be — radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness and vows and the real hills worth dying on. That you know how to make a bed and how to make a child laugh and how to write a letter home.
Did you know, right when they laid you wrinkled in my arms, you had this curl of hair, this swirl of hair on your forehead? You got it from me. That turning, swirling cowlick that I got from my Dad. Who got it from his mother. This is how these things go, this turning around and passing torches on.
I turn around and you’re 16.
And you’re leaving for a jet plane at 3:30 am.
When the first time you ever get on a plane, you’re flying to the jungles of Indonesia, the farthest away from us on this spinning blue marble.
Your father says that now this farm won’t be big enough to keep you anymore.
When he says it, he says it a bit like something hurts inside.
He’s made his life about showing you what real leadership is: not climbing higher towards power and status, but bending down in prayer and service. He’s been dead to all ladders and that’s what made him so alive — reaching down, to the lonely, the lost, and the least.
I roll all your shirts and stack them, one upon the other, like all the years, and know that this is just the beginning of the leavings. I bite my lip hard and try to be brave, like the day you were born. How could my mothering take so many u-turns and still get here so fast?
I remember when you were small enough to hold in my arms, warm against me, this sun bathed stone, us engraved into rock here. I hadn’t known how fast the wings would come and that you would fly into the dark, into the sun, and so soon. That when you became a man, I’d feel so empty – and so very fulfilled. I wish we had read even more books.
And I had said yes to every game of Scrabble.
The Bible’s true, son.
Every infallible, sword-sharp, breathing word of it. Don’t let anyone ever rationalize one beautiful iota of it away. Love it because it’s your Life.
And the only life living is the scandalous one: scandalous love, offensive mercy, foolish faith. Kiss babies. Always have one friend that feels on the fringe, that you have to pray to love, that makes the neighbors scratch their heads.
Stubbornly pray for your enemies till you see enemies are illusions and everyone is a friend and somehow grace. Believe in every woman’s God-sized dreams. And rub her feet at the end of the day.
Be the kind of person who apologizes first because that’s the only way happiness can last.
And never forget that happiness is when His Word and your walk are in harmony. Never stop keeping company with Christ– and all the sinners, tax-collectors and cast-offs. Be an evangelist and use your words with your hands because your part of a Body and never stop loving God with all your heart, mind and soul, and loving others as yourself. Make that your creed.
It’s true, son: Be different and know everything you do matters. It’s what the Christ followers know: One man with God can change a culture. God didn’t put people in your path mostly for your convenience; He put you there for theirs. Loving the poor will make you rich, I promise.
The only life worth living is the one lost.
No matter how loud and crazy and broken the world is, child? Let joy live loud in your soul.
And believe that you are His beloved – it’s only when you trust He loves you that you really begin to live. Really, count a thousand blessings more, never stop. Why wouldn’t you want joy? Sing to no one and everyone on the front porch in the rain and laugh so much they question your sanity. Pet the dog long.
Because really, none of us knows how long we have. Remember that a pail with a pinhole loses as much as the pail pushed right over. A whole life can be lost in minutes wasted… in the small moments missed. None of this is forever grace. That’s why it’s amazing grace.
Do it often: grab a lifeline by stepping offline. You’ll see your true self when you look for your reflection in the eyes of souls not the glare of screens.
This is what you always need to know: You have nothing to prove to anyone – if you’re in Him, you are already approved.
Be okay with not being liked: life’s about altars not applause. And be okay with not being seen or heard. It’ll let you hear and see better.
It’s late when you lay your Bible on the last of the packed clothes and check off the last thing, thinking you’ve remembered everything.
I know I’ve forgotten something – many things.
This parenting gig’s an experiment in radical grace and the work of every parent is to fully give to the child.
And it’s the work of every child to fully forgive the parents. This is how it turns, the torch passing from one to the next.
Remember that we made meals and beds and mistakes and memories – look hard for the good ones.
You zip up the suitcase. I try to keep it in, what’s blurring and spilling. And I rummage about in the closet for that necklace I’ve been saving for someday and I think today’s the day. That necklace that maybe can call you to what your mother’s been stammering to say.
And I go to hand it to you. No – put it around your neck.
Like a benediction.
A mantle.
No matter the road or what paths you cross: Wear the call to His sacrificial, radical way.
You finger the steel in your hands.
You’ve taken hold and I’m letting go.
Maybe that’s what I am trying to say?
I will never stop loving and letting you go. A mother and child live the first great love story and there is no love story without loss, and this is always gain.
Remember this no matter where you fly?
Love,
your mama…
who believes in the thousand-fold miracle that all is grace.:::::
:
::
from the archives, a yr ago this week…& I’m there all over again as he now fills out university applications
Photo credit 1, 2, 3 ,4
Related Posts: How to Pray for your daughter
What a mother needs to say to her daughter
Q4U: As our oldest is about ready to fly this coop — this mama needs help? Could we quietly open up comments and make this place a watering hole today for parents? Can we mamas (fathers?) gather round and share any parenting wisdom? I really need all the help I can get — maybe we all do?
Share one thing you regret as a parent? One thing you desperately want as a parent — desperately want for your kids? Add your wisdom to the 40 things Every child must know before they leave home?
Email readers and RSS readers — Come join the conversation by clicking here?
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
January 10, 2013
Links for 2013-01-09 [del.icio.us]
@ BBC News - Pray for the stolen girls?
2012 National Geographic Photography Contest Winners
@ Boston.com ... (the kids and I howled over the fox!)
Never Mind E-Books: Why Print Books Are Here to Stay
@ Wall Streeet Journal: "Lovers of ink and paper, take heart. Reports of the death of the printed book may be exaggerated"
Can Virtuous Habits Be Cultivated?
"... people with good self-control avoid temptations and problem situations, rather than battling with them. Other research confirmed that self-control works most effectively by means of controlling habits, rather than by using willpower for direct control of one’s actions in the heat of the moment." I don't know what to think -- but this must-read is making me think.
6 month Bible reading plan for kids
... and reading the background? Inspiring!
January 9, 2013
3 Marriage Habits Every Marriage Needs– because it’s worth falling in love again
He lays his hand on my shoulder.
Water drips from strands tousled and a rivulet runs down the small of my back.
“I have no idea what to wear.” I’m paying him no mind, standing before the closet with my towel, mumbling words. Hangers clatter.
“What you’re wearing is rather pretty.” His stubble finds the curve of my neck.
“No…” I laugh, embarrassed, try to squirm out of those arms wrapped around, reach for a dress at the back of the closet, stretch far away.
“Don’t be silly…. I just need something simple….”
I can feel him still, arms around me, tensed, steady. I know. I know what words will now come. He says them slow, low, and they run down my spine…
“When I say that you’re beautiful…” His hands on my shoulder, he turns me, and I can’t look, too ashamed.
“You said you’d hear me.”
“I know… When I asked you how I could be a better wife — that’s what you said.” Deep breath, open heart, open eyes. I look into his.
“You said that…” I’m wincing… ” When you say I’m beautiful…. I’m supposed to believe it. Just receive your love.”
Why is receiving his love always the hardest?
We lean and our foreheads touch, breath mingling.
We’ve only found this place through a trail of years.
Love falls softly; it cannot be forced. I have tried. That forcing just about undid us.
Funny, how love, this thing muscular and the only eternal, this bridge between our souls, it sags sorely under pressure. Love can’t bear the weight of our expectations.
Cracking at the joists when I’ve slammed a foot in demand andI have. When I’ve peered sharp in the over analysis and I still do. Our bridge has near split, swayed hard and only grace continues to save us.
The days and the years, they teach me these unexpected things:
Love isn’t a function of communication so much as Love’s a function of communion.
And sometimes it isn’t poor communication that fractures the marriage communion. It’s the fractured communion that poorly communicates. I am always this slow learner.
Maybe sometimes it’s best not to use so many words? Words can sometimes only magnify the fractures. Maybe communication only deepens after the closeness and communion deepens.
It’s the souls that are simply together, that are close, that laugh.
That let the eyes linger and the fingertips meet, that find their way back to the beginning and the relive the memory and the flame every morning.
How we first fell and ignited.
How can I wear love as this habit?
3 Habits: 4 Minutes: One Love
How to Fall in Love Again in Four Minutes A Day… with just 3 Habits:
It only takes four minutes a day to move into a deeper heart place. F our minutes a day to connect, deepen the communion. Live koinonia.
Who doesn’t want a deeper relationship?
1. Four Focuses
Four times a day focus on the love you vowed. When I leave the marriage bed, leave the front door, when I return to front door, return to marriage bed. These are the four critical archways of time in our day. Touch or whisper a sweet nothing when passing through these gate points, and we walk into hours of closeness. It’s the focus that makes old love fresh love.
2. Four Embraces
Four times a day, embrace. Embrace fully and hold each other’s eyes. That’s all. Repeat four times daily. The one flesh breathes best when the skin pores are close; connected.
3. Four Affirmations
Four times during the day, thank him.
For working faithfully, for hanging up his towel, for putting gas in the van, for making this heart skip a wild beat. Look for the ways to thank him and watch how he moves closer.
“Thank you.” I stand on tipped toes, hair still dripping, brush his cheek with the words.
“Thank you.” Could I begin to just receive what he’s trying to give?
Love always comes in the surrender – in the falling.
“You mean, thank you for this?” His eyes glint, a kindling, and we’re a laughing mess and love is more than words.
Love’s this life-weaving, a braid of a three fold cord, Love Himself in the center.
His fingers find mine.
This is what to wear, the perfect habit to wear –
The years and the lives all lacing together, my love slipping quiet through his.
::
::
The 4 Minute Marriage Habit to Fall in Love Again:
4 Focuses + 4 Embraces + 4 affirmations = Falling in love all over again
Related Posts:
How to Begin New Habits: A Free Daily Planner to Print
The 1 Habit God Really Wants for Your New Year
When You Don’t Want a New Year — but A New You….
Change the Prepositions in Your Life — and You change Your Life
edited post from the archives
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: (Let’s spend one more week on habits, yes?): The Practice of New Habits How do we begin again every day? How do we make a fresh start every day and begin anew? We look forward to your thoughts, stories, ideas….
Today, if you’d like to share with community The Practice of New Habits … 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!}
January 7, 2013
When You’re Ready for More than Hardly Surviving Your Life
On Saturday night when the snow falls large, like feathers from heaven’s tick, I kneel in the muck of the barn and milk a sow.
Rub her udder, warm and swollen right heavy round, nudge at the vessel fullness of her, and wait for her drip.
Wait for the sticky whiteness of her dripping sweet, the snow piling without a sound on the roof.
When I’m bent over her udder with a pail of chop for her trough, her last, this mirage of a runt, it slips out of her and feebly scrapes its way out of its blooming fetal bag. I watch it struggle for untried legs, these wet twigs.
She can’t stop her thin, begging tremor. Quakes in a cold and broken world. Presses her wet shiver up against the unwilling back thigh of the sow.
Malakai wore his suede shoes through the snow this afternoon and they puddle this sad, soggy mess of ruin in the mudroom.
Three packages have been sitting in the mud room for two weeks waiting for just one person to finally make the 4 mile pilgrimage to the post office.
There were no clean underwear in the top drawer on Friday morning and tell me, what do you do there, just standing in your flimsy towel?
What saves you all the time from going a little bit insane?
And this isn’t a crazy question.
I cup the runt to the sow’s belly up udder.
I nuzzle her bare offering with my hand, nuzzle for the shivering runt, believing the saving white drip will come. If he wants half a chance, he’s got to get some warm cream into him.
Somedays we all are desperate for something, Someone, to save us. The pitiful thing feels like a cold pebble in my hand.
C’mon — Live. Drink. I massage the sow’s udder hard.
Once this woman, she told me that she’d sent for it to come in the mail, this story of counting 1000 gifts and taking the dare to joy right right where you are, and she walked hand in hand with her husband to pick up the book up at the post office.
And who could know then, that even that night, her husband would send an email from his midnight shift, pixels that made letters that could detonate one woman’s only world — that he wanted a divorce. That he’d run into an old girlfriend and was up and walking away from his old life and those certain sermons that he’d preached for a month of Sundays from the pulpit.
She said she couldn’t remember getting off the floor a few days later.
Or remember packing up the cat or that small overnight bag or grabbing that package with its ridiculous dare of one thousand gifts or making her way to her daughter’s couch. She said the pain just went on and on and on. She said she knew God was her only way through this; that she’d listened to enough of her husband’s sermons to believe even that.
She said, “I begged to die.”
C’mon — Live!
The sow lets down and grunts slow and steady and there’s this leak of creamed hope. Open your mouth up, girl.
The runt’s only ribs, this concaved prayer.
The woman said that the pounds, they just kept slipping off her laying there on her daughter’s couch. The part of her that was left, it hoped that was the answer to her prayers, that she’d lose the last of herself and fade invisible.
“One thing I did do: I read about counting one thousand gifts.” She said this. And then she punctuated it with all the breath she still had:
“I HAD to count all my gifts — had to.
To keep me ‘here’.”
Live! Live! The runt’s opened her begging mouth and I can feel her in my hand — I can feel her every warming swallow. I can feel her belly warming. Drink.
When you are dying of thirst, passively reading about water quenches little; the only way to be quenched is to actually get a cup and drink. We have to do more than read and think and plan, we’ll have to do something.
You’ve got to open up your mouth and swallow.
You’ve got to grab a pen and count gifts. You’ve got to look for the glory and hunt for the grace and laugh in the dark and seize beauty in ugly and you can lose everything but nothing can steal Jesus and He is enough and you have got. to. live.
She said that later: “We don’t see God in so much (if any) of what we do. But He IS there. Using all our pain to help others. And we’ve got this privilege of bringing Him glory. Imagine…!”
I couldn’t. I couldn’t imagine that.
I could hardly believe you could say something like that after your vowed, tender heart had been abandoned like that, after your heart had been gorged like that.
But she was the one who had lived it and hadn’t right bled to death and she had counted gifts because she had to, had to if she was going to stay here, and she’d brought Him impossible glory in the impossible and she had testified He had saved her, so how can you not want to live a truth like that?
Believing something is one thing. But the best things only come when you decide to Be Living it.
It’s leaking at the edges of the runt’s mouth, the best of her, the milk of her. Why is it hardest, to open yourself up and let yourself be blessed?
It’s literally saving this runt, one glory, milky swallow at a time, each swallow just like one murmured thank you after another.
Spacibo in Russian. Thank you, spacibo, thank you. Spacibo, thank you — it literally means God saves you.
There is a to-do list I can’t do and demons I can’t slay and flesh I can get to die quick and there are these thin, cold days that make me quake dead weary. And there is a pen that nuzzles at the day, one number at a time, and Spacibo could be an English word: Thank you. God saves you.
God saves you! Live! Live!
And at the very end in the dark in the kitchen, Kai’s shoes lay upside down over the heat register at the back door, the washing machine’s slogging on faithful.
I sit in the still, smelling a bit like the barn and one runt determined to drink and really live.
And I take the journal from the drawer and open the pages to count and this swallowing the richness of living, it comes in letting yourself be blessed.
In the ink numbering joy…. just one saving drip at a time.
Dare you to Joy ! Take the dare to Fully Live!
1. Grab January’s Free 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 2012. Jot them down in the new numbered One Thousand Gifts devotional journal
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. Know Joy. God Saves You. Spacibo.
Believing something is one thing. But the Best only comes when you decide to Be Living it.
Join us? And happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts?
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 JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
January 4, 2013
The 1 Habit God Really Wants for Your New Year
For all of 2012?
I carry around the Mount and it moves mountains.
And there isn’t a bone in me that wants to come down from where He transfigures.
A year of memorizing Sermon on the Mount, the 111 verses of Matthew 5, 6, and 7?
Say those Blesseds for a whole year and you can feel it, your whole world flipping upside down.
First, the walks through Knapp’s woods and the snow and the beginning of the tilting and all those startling Blesseds.
Then a thousand suns and thousand mothering messes and the thousand beggings of “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and this feeling it like the the dry roof of you, this dire, parched need of Him.
Then I fell behind in the memorizing, always falling.
And there was that two and a half hour line at the funeral for Dan Mier’s sister and I held that small Bible as we inched toward the casket and I memorized God and unless your righteousness surpasses the Pharisees and teachers of the Law, you will certainly not enter the Kingdom of heaven.
And after that obliviously calm morning when one Christian said things that speared my pulpy heart and I didn’t know how to keep breathing, I lay in bed that night and murmured my memory verses like a dying heart on life support,
And I got up the next morning and I never stopped quaking or bleeding but I reached out with an invitation for them to come for dinner and break bread.
God hands you lungs when He hands you His Word and says — These are not idle words to you, they. are. your. life.
What you really know by heart is what your heart really knows — and what you really live.
And it was like the wind in the trees all spring, and it moved me, sutured together the bloodied edges and I inhaled,”And if you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that.” The world heals and dazzles and fills the lungs when it tilts upside down into His Words.
I don’t know how many times I laid my head right down on those verses, laid my head on those skin thin page like a woman pressing her cheek up against One.
Some weeks we memorized together. Some weeks I couldn’t find my mind. Some weeks I could only find my way by orienting to chapter and verse. He never releases His grip. He never stops hand-leading me forward.
In July, Caleb and I, we live Matthew 6, “so when you give to the needy,” and we fly to Haiti and muddle through security in Port-au-Prince airport only for a woman to throw her arms open to us on the other side, say she was from Tennessee and she had one of Caleb’s advent wreaths on her table back home in the States and she reads our messy stories here and her husband was memorizing the Mount with us. I felt around for those verses right there in my pocket. God’s Word is always Home wherever you are.
All summer, the verses of the Sermon stack like stones of the only foundation I can stand on and the children they say it together like a song:
“This, then, is how you should pray:
In the fall, the leaves blaze and the glory flaming everywhere, it ignites on the verses,“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light” and the only way I can keep pace with it all is when I keep company with Christ – day in and day out.
His Word is the only real seeing eyes.
Then, when the snow flies in December, the Tennessee woman we met in Haiti, she emails me:
Just wanted to say thanks. This morning my husband recited the whole Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5,6,7) to me after breakfast–what an incredible experience! He’s been working with your cards by himself all year, he never thought he could do it, but the Holy Spirit has blessed him so!
What a gift for him now, to have that Scripture with him always–it has always been his favorite passage. Thank you!
We are looking forward to what you are memorizing for 2013-– we will do it together this time.
And glory, it lumps like a searing holiness right in the gullet and I can only bow my head.
Come the very end of the year, the Farmer finds me standing in Mama’s kitchen after a Christmas dinner, staring out her sink window across the fields.
“What you thinking?” He whispers it at my ear.
I shake my head.
“You’re thinking something.” He turns me around, pulls me in.
I bury my head in his shoulder, “I fell in love — You can fall completely in Love with the Word.“
I look up at him.
“Every line this year, in every airport, in every fear? The words of Jesus’ there on Sermon on the Mount…. Our camping weekend in the woods? “If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry…” When the kids bickered? “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God.… He was there. Always there.”
Am I making any sense here? My eyes are brimming but I find his.
“When I didn’t know which way to turn — turning those pages turned me. The whole year — I learned by heart the heart of God — and He calmed my fearful heart.”
He pushes my bangs back out of my eyes.
“I just don’t want it to end.”
And he smiles, leans his forehead forward to touch mine.
“It doesn’t have to, you know.”
So the New Year moves forward — turns with just this simplicity of a trinity of habits:
One Memory Project.
1. One Word: {With} IN – to practice awaking to His presence, to live With and IN Him.
2. One Thousand Gifts – this dare to joy, to count His gifts everyday to know again who I can always count on.
There is no other way IN to His presence except through the gates of thanksgiving — and fullness of joy is found only in His presence. Thanksgiving is the key that opens the door to God and full joy –and I will count gifts because giving thanks in all things is God’s definite will for me IN Christ Jesus. (1 Thess. 5:18)
3. One Memory Project — This year — The Romans Project, chapters 1, 8, and 12 of the book of Romans. John Piper said it in his last sermon as pastor and I listened to it during the final hours of 2012, that Romans 8 may be the most powerful chapter of the whole of the canon — and memorizing only 2 verses a week through 2013 will have us know by heart three Great Chapters of the Christian faith.
This is how you make the calendar for the year: you set Christ at the center.
This is the question: Will you spend your days meditating on His Word or your worries?
This is the resolution every new year needs — a revolution: A turning every day to Christ.
This is the thing: No one sends you a memo that Today is the day you’ll need a certain verse to keep you breathing through the day.
When you memorize Scripture, it’s like carrying your own oxygen tanks.
And then there’s Jesus: Christ’s weapon against Satan in the desert was memorized Scripture. And if you aren’t memorizing Scripture — what IS your weapon against Satan?
I turn at the window in my mama’s kitchen and the Farmer asks, “Yes?”
And I half smile and nod and know my heart wants to know God by heart and I whisper yes.
“This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night,
so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it;
for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success.” ~Joshua 1:8, NASB
How to Make a Memory Commitment Booklet:
— commit His Words to heart & our hearts to Him
1. Download & Print the Sermon on the Mount Memory Cards:
Click here to print cards: Just 2-3 Verses a Week
2. Print and either have comb bound (cards are formatted to give space for comb binding), for ease of flipping cards, propping at the sink, etc.
3. Alternatively, cut and paste into a booklet like a pocket Moleskine
4. Tick off little square boxes for each day of memory heart commitment
5. Find a partner to recite to — have them sign each week on the allotted line
(only *two to three short * verses a week – the verses are in the NIV version & take a bit to load. Thank you for grace!)
6. Or Join our Online The Romans Project Community!
The incredibly committed Brett and McKenzie over at Scripture Typer have partnered with us to create The Romans Project community just for us!
A place where we
~ type out our verses in increasing levels of memorization,
~have ways to message and encourage each other,
~and have profiles to track our progress!
Warning: Memorizing over at Scripture Typer? Is ridiculously fun and you won’t want to stop! {Kids here race each other on words per minute on each verse to see who can type theirs faster… and… um. Me too. ~grin~} Seeing how many words a minute you can type your verses out is very motivating!
I confess — I am just flat out excited about meeting you over there and memorizing His Word together – it is. our. very. life.!
The Romans Project Plan for this Year:
1. The First Friday of Every Month:
We’ll host a link-up here on the blog for you to link over to a video or audio on your blog of your memory work recitation … let’s leave no one behind. Mark it on the calendar right now — every Friday we’re sharing our Romans Project memory work!
Or you can share on our Facebook page?
2. If it matters — we make time. If it doesn’t — we make excuses. Commit. And making a public commitment? Holds us to accountability — so share with your family, on Facebook, or on your blog — invite others to join you in making His Word your life.
3. And… if we finish The Romans Project? How about T-shirts?
Why Memorize Scripture?
I beg you — watch. this.
{RSS and email readers: Click here to listen to Mr. Piper’s compelling clip}
In making to-do lists to run our lives, why not make time to let God’s Word revolutionize our lives? Because making time to memorize His Word is putting the first things first.
If we fail to keep His Word in mind, we may simply fail.
In the age of Google, who still memorizes God? Are we losing a way of life… and losing our way?
“What a heart knows by heart is what a heart really knows,” urges Dennis Lennon. And what the heart knows by heart is all that can calm the heart. Direct the heart. Strengthen the heart. What do our hearts really know?
Will we who claim to be believers of the Word commit to shaping our lives with His Letters?
Committing the Holy to heart is the way we commune with the Holy Himself.
Scripture repetition is the way we daily revive our faith, the slow pumping of the Word of Life into the lungs with the breath of His Words.
And for the disciples of Christ, this Scripture Memorization isn’t a a one-time hurtle — but a life-long habit. A way of living to live the Way of Christ.
“We want this to be a discipline we practice for the rest of our lives. Think marathon, not sprint.” writes Beth Moore. “Never — NOT ONCE — have I ever known anyone to get to the end of a Scripture memory commitment and say that it didn’t make any real difference. Not a single time.”
Related Inspiration:
The Story of One Woman that will Definitely Motivate you to Memorize
Rather Memorize Colossians? Colossians in a Year: Just 2 Verses a Week
Or last year’s memory project: Sermon on the Mount: 2 Verses a week
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
Links for 2013-01-03 [del.icio.us]
@ Focus on the Family.... with Sally Clarkson
The Gospel according to mommy bloggers: the great confession
@ Lisa-Jo Baker .... yes.
January 3, 2013
Change the Prepositions in Your Life & You Change Your Life
The morning after Christmas, what I want most is to forget the saran-wraped left over turkey in the fridge and the pine needles tinkling Charlie Brown-like off the mantle, and just run away.
Just high tail it out of Dodge and mid-life and strangling regrets and the centrifugal force of time.
How do you run away hard from who you are and who you fail and who you find impossible to be?
Don’t ever be fooled that it’s just Martha Stewart innocuous: Perfectionism can be fatalism.
My Dad, he used to look at my straight A report card and then look me straight in the eye and say, “Well — maybe your little sister will someday make me proud.”
Old voices that replay in your head how you can’t ever get it right enough can be the hardest to stop.
And when you can’t live up to expectations, you can feel like dying — or running away. I can forget the gospel Truth of Grace faster than you can say Pinterest Perfection and this is the Gospel Truth: preaching gospel to yourself everyday is critical — otherwise it’s your very life that’s in critical condition.
The Oldest Son, he’s in the kitchen, rummaging around in the belly of the fridge, hunting for something to fill those two hollow legs of his.
And I’d sure like to tell it different, but we’ve only got enough time here to go with the truth — he must have overheard me muttering ugliness aloud to myself bent over in the mudroom sorting the darks from the lights and that’s always the wrong order to sort anything.
“Hey Mom?” He closes the fridge door. “If you’re running away?”
Fiddlesticks.
“If you’re running away? Can you just be back in time to make lunch?“
Drop my head, smile sigh into a heap of dirty jeans.
Love that boy.
“Yeah… yeah, I’ll be sure to here to make lunch.”
And I clean up the mess made in the mudroom and in the kitchen and in the living room and when you don’t know how to keep going, you just keep doing the next thing (forward!) and the next thing is always to give thanks.
And it’s when I’m sweeping spruce needles off the table and taking out all the de-needled greenery around the white nativity at the center of the table that I notice — there’s no baby Jesus in the manger.
It’s one day after Christmas — and we’ve already lost Jesus?
“Levi?” I holler for the kid I’d seen fiddling with the nativity during breakfast, the kid who runs the shop vac (because we need it) after every meal. “Levi, where’s Baby Jesus? Did you vacuum him up?” I’m knelt over looking under the table.
“Jesus?” Levi goes to the closet and hauls out the vacuum cleaner. “No, I don’t think so — ” He’s digging through those dust – kangaroos in the bony bowels of the shop vac looking for the carved and swaddling that is supposed to be laying in a manger.
Levi, dust all over his pants, stands at the bottom of the stairs and calls down to the basement: “Hey Kai? Weren’t you playing with baby Jesus at breakfast?”
Kai thunders up the stairs: “Jesus? Playing with Baby Jesus?” He’s lost. We all are. Levi points accusingly at the nativity.
“Oh, that Baby Jesus.” Kai stuffs his hands in his pockets, meanders over to the table. “Yeah — I was sorta, kind of tossing him in the air while I was cleaning off the table,” he looks over at me sheepishly….
“And then,” he wanders into the kitchen.
“Then, he fell under the dishwasher….” Kai lays down on the floor.
What??!!
I take a deep breath over the kid sprawled out on the kitchen floor looking for Baby Jesus under a 16 year old grubby dishwasher. Kai braves the sticky dark under the dishwasher. “Nope, not there…” Kai brushes crumbs off his hands, rolls over and stares at the ceiling. I rifle through books on the counter. Where in the world could Jesus come down from heaven be? Isn’t this indicative of my heart, a metaphor for my mess?
“Oh — then I had apple cider.” Kai pulls himself up — and I can’t believe it when I look up — he’s ladling out another cup of hot apple cider from the pot on the stove.
He turns around slow, sips even slower.
“MALAKAI! No apple cider!” I fling my hands up like I’m calling down fireballs. “We’re trying to find baby Jesus here!”
Kai looks up from his cup: “I’m just retracing my steps here!”
He slowly takes another sip…
“And then Dad told me to clean up the garage….”
“You mean — ” I put the books down slow on the counter as if I could slow down the wild in the veins — “He could be anywhere in the garage??!!”
Kai grins thinly.
“Great!” I open up the cutlery drawer and I’m standing here looking for Baby Jesus amongst the knives. “One day after Christmas and we’ve already lost baby Jesus!”
And it feels like I lose my sanctification 183 times a day over drawers left open and toilet seats left up and go figure and its just like us and of course, we’re that family who loses Jesus not 24 hours after Christmas and can I still run away and make it back in time to make lunch?
Move all the couches. Pull off all the cushions. Pull out all the kitchen drawers. Kneel on the ice cold garage floor. Beg God.
Why am I fallen and flailing? Why do my kids yell at each other like barracudas right on the way home from church with its Hallelujahs and how can he and I be just two amicable parenting ships passing in the platonic night for far too long and why does the dog tear open the garbage bag and strew soggy bacon remains across the garage floor?
Why am I always broken?
Can I just have Jesus, please?
Please — I really need Jesus and could Jesus please just take even me and I know I don’t need Jesus in a manger — but I’m desperate for more Jesus in me.
And I slump down at the back door, just wanting out.
“Kai — He’s really not in your pocket?”
Kai shakes his head, fumbles around in his pockets — “No, Mom, I already —”
“THERE! Jesus right there in my pocket!” He’s a grinning Cheshire cat with a mile wide apple cider grin.
And I smile weakly and reach for that carved swaddling in Kai’s hand and grip it for all my beating life:
“There — with you all along.”
You can feel lost — and already be found.
You can feel Christ hardly tolerates you — but Christ is 100% FOR You.
You can feel Christ barely wants you — but Christ is Always WITH You.
And I finger that chiseled Christ figurine in my palm —
Kai leans over the arm of the rocking chair, looking down at baby Jesus in my hand, wraps his arm around my shoulder.
“Not just WITH me all along, Mom. But right IN my pocket.”
With.
In.
With. In.
Union.
IN-Living.
It’s by my bed, one of the 12 top books chosen by Desiring God for 2012— Paul and Union with Christ — and I’ve got it dog-eared and underlined it, this study of the 73 “IN Christ” verses in the New Testament, and Karl Barth says that:
“Indeed, believers who are IN Christ acquire and have a direct share in what God first and supremely is in [Christ]…
Union with Christ … is the starting point for everything else that is to be thought and said concerning what makes the Christian – a Christian.
That… Union with Christ is … the constitutive and descriptive of the actual experience of the believer…”
What if …this was the Year of No Fear? How can you live in fear — when you are living IN Christ?
What if the year was an experiment of living every moment WITH Christ, IN Christ? We can always have as much God as we want.
What if loving people is living IN union WITH Christ? The Year of Koinonia – the year of communion with Christ and community with the Body of Christ.
Loving people is seeing the face of Christ.
Levi cuts it out of two pieces of wood for me, just two letters, and we set it by the fireplace: IN
Caleb stamps it into a bracelet and I wrap it around my wrist, right where the blood runs through the veins, close to the skin: With. IN.
And the year becomes this experiment in living all the moments IN the will of God, IN communion with Christ.
God’s call is never that you do more for Him.
God’s call is always that you do more with Him.
More IN Him.
Your whole life changes when you change your life prepositions.
No more FOR-living. Only WITH-Living. Only IN-Living.
I christen my year with its name, My One Word: {WITH} IN.
And by that two-letter preposition that could change a year and a life, I lay down the swaddled Who found me and beckons:
run away IN to Me.
“For no matter how many promises God has made,
they are “Yes”
IN
Christ.”
Related:
The book: My One Word for the Year: Change Your Life With Just One Word
My Previous One Word Names for my years:
The Year of Eucharisteo : The Year of Communion : The Year of Yes: The Year of Here
The Year of Koinonia
Tomorrow: The New Bible Memory Project for 2013
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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