Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 282

Links for 2012-10-23 [del.icio.us]

4 Keys to Finding The Perfect Mentor You’ve Always Wanted

@ Margaret Feinberg... yes.
So, About Church…

@ Deidra Riggs... good question.

How to Live, Blog, Write

Ifly this week to Allume ….

Get on a plane and go to women I feel are a bit like a home to me.

Who understand family and the call to blog and this daily fight for all joy in Him. And we’ll pray and we’ll laugh and we’ll talk about why we do this blogging thing and family and being real and what it means to be a follower of Christ.

It’s still pounding hard in me, this keynote from two years ago & how I keep fighting for daily joy in Christ alone:

The Text of the Closing Keynote of Relevant ’10  (envision farm hick, nerve blotchy neck)

Thank you for grace.

It’s a privilege to be here this evening with you. I’ve been blogging for six years, since 2004, and you beautiful women — are my very first blogging conference. And such women you are! For such a time as this. Such women you are, for such a time as this.

These past days I have met you and prayed with you and laughed with you and I know this about you: You are a holy wonder, you are –every. Single. One. Of. You.

Might I give my Compliments to your Maker?

You have come from all over the continent, from Canada to California, from Oregon to Oklahama, you have packed your bags, you have flown with faith, you have invested and prayed and you have longed to go deeper with God. May I say this about you? You are brave. You didn’t know what this would be like. You didn’t know if you would belong here. Would your hair be okay, your clothes, your weight — you inside. Would anyone like you?

Because we are women living in the upside down kingdom, can we do things upside down here tonight? Might we begin with a round of applause, applauding the God who makes the wonder and beauty of each woman in this room – You are liked and you are loved and praise to our God who dreamed you up and ensured that you were perfectly and wonderfully made and would you applaud right now the making of the woman sitting beside you — our compliments to your Maker! You are beautiful and you belong and thank you, Lord for such women for such a time as this!

And now… may we open in a Word of prayer to Him who made each of you and is worthy of all our applause?

A Prayer for Bloggers

I am no longer my own blogger, but Yours.

Refine me with each post how You will, rank me how You will.

Put me to service, put me to suffering.

Let me be a follower — instead of seeking followers

Let me post for You —  or be put aside for You,

Lifted high, only for You, or brought low, all for You.

Do with me and each post whatever You will, because You alone know best.

Let me not strive but submit

Let me not compete but care

Let me not desire hits but holiness

Let my blog be full of You, and let it be empty of me.

Let me crave all things of You, let me care nothing of this world.

Let my words be focus only on the greatest of audiences: You.

And You are enough.

May I write not for subscribers… but only for Your smile.

May my daily affirmation be in the surety of my atonement not the size of my audience.

May my identity be in the innumerable graces of Christ, never, God forbid, the numbers of my comments.

May the only words that matter in my life not be the ones I write on a screen — but the ones I live with my skin.

I freely and heartily yield every sentence, every title, every post, every comment… or no comments… all to Your pleasure and perfect will.

My only fame is that I bear your name

My only glory is the gift of Your Grace

My only readership, Your eyes that seek to and fro to find

Make this so. Lord…

Yawhew, you alone are my God, not Google

Jesus, you alone are my Savior, not sitemeters

And Holy Spirit, you alone are my Comforter, not comments

So be it, today, yesterday, and every post to come.

O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

thou art mine, and I am thine.

This is my prayer I have made on earth, over thie keyboard…

let it be ratified in heaven.

In Jesus’ Name…. Amen.

I come to you tonight, wondrous word women, with nothing but a string of stories… for that is all I have, all we all have, really – the Word God making our lives into lines that we throw to each other.

The lines of our stories become literal life-lines that we throw to each other when the storms come and beat hard on our lives.

So I tell you a story tonight… words I wrote on a screen and clicked the cursor on publish. I am a mess and I tell you my messy story — and it may be the story of the women who read your stories — real women looking for real lifelines.

I had typed out the title to this post – entitling it, naming me:

What to Do When You Want to Give Up and Stay in Bed

Shadows of depression can ride up like a highway man in the night and and steal away all the silver linings.

I wake on a Sunday to his cantering away.

I lay in the bed a long time.

The legs, the spirit, too heavy to move. The sun’s high already, the sheets warm. I make a point of not looking at my watch or the bedside clock’s hands ticking, vainly trying to nudge me out.

Maybe I can bury myself deep under covers, a bunker, escape today and no one will notice?

I don’t bother moving today because I already know I’ll lose.

I know I can’t get the laundry caught up this week and I know I can’t make deadlines. I know the bedrooms I tidied through last night will be dumped out by nightfall, the sink I left empty last night will be piled high by noon, the floors I washed yesterday will be tracked dirty by supper.

I will definitely lose today, tomorrow, all week. I roll over, smother my face in the pillow.

How did my daily challenge to get up and “Work!” dissolve into this apathetic

“Why?”

I think…. when I began to believe in the head that there’s no way through for the heart, when my inner world fell for the lie that nothing can change in my outer world.

When the problems before you seem to loom larger than the Power behind you, the purpose in living falls right out from underneath of you.

And it’s only a half dozen children pounding in from the barn, looking for breakfast and Sunday morning clothes, that compel me to push the feet to the floor, faith to the fingers.

Our greatest triumphs are always our most solitary ones and every great triumph begins with the decision to get out of bed.

I throw back the covers.

I lay out bowls. Clatter out spoons. Cunch across stale remnants of last night’s dinner still under the table. I’m mumbling how I can never get anything right, and how come I can never get caught up on all my lists, work, projects, and what in the world is wrong with me that is right with everyone else, when the Farmer comes in quiet from morning chores. I can hear him at the back sink, washing up those thick hands.

I cringe still.

Has he heard me muttering ugly?

“Annnnn…..” I hear his voice gentle at the tap, his love running over me like water.

I close my eyes. He’s heard me. And I know how he feels about bad self-sermons.

Boys wrestle in the bedroom. Floors shake. Then there it is, his hand on my shoulder.

He asks it soft, “Been a long time since I’ve heard you talking like that.” His hand finds the nape of my neck, strokes me kind. “You just fallen sick with perfectionism again?”

I don’t open my eyes…. To my dust and my smudges and my grime and my love-smeared mess. Why can’t I remember…

the state of my space doesn’t reflect the state of my soul.

I ring the dinner bell for boys to tumble to the table. This morning, even the cast iron bell in the hand feels like a millstone around the neck.

I eat breakfast in silence and I don’t know how I am going to get dressed for church, rustle up a meal for 10 when we get home from church, make it through Latin and spelling and the early Renaissance and piano scales and fractions and the three meals a day for eight people this week and the 4 loads of laundry a day and all the prayers between now and church again next Sunday.

I do the next thing. Clean off the table.

“Thank you, Lord, for the food that filled these dishes, that I am well and here and I can clean off this table.”

It sounds mechanical. And a tad lame. It is. I am doing the next thing.

Wipe the counters. And I say it aloud,

“Thank you, Lord, for water to wash off counters and that the dust bunnies around here haven’t yet grown into monsters and that the jam stuck sticky all over everything really does just wash off, and for this husband that treats me tender when I’m stuck.”

One foot in front of the other and one murmured thanks after another and underneath the everlasting arms will hold.

And when I am home and over the stove, stirring up dinner, apron over my black church dress, The Farmer slips up behind me, slides his arm around my waist and whispers, “You’ve gotten over that nasty spell of perfectionism?”

I’m surprised too.

“I guess it’s just coming to realize…” I lean back into him and I didn’t know the words until they slipped out true,

“God doesn’t ask me to be perfect; He asks me to praise.”

I don’t have to have smudgeless windows and empty laundry baskets and gleamy toilet bowls! I don’t have to have a perfect life, all problems solved! I think I hear the Hallelujah chorus!

I simply need have a grateful heart to give Him glory.

Gratitude in all things is the only thing God asks.

Can I take each seeming problem and turn it back to praise?

That alone is the one thing that is needful.

The pot on the stove bubbles over and with a quiet half smile, I wipe it clean.

And the clouds out the window drifting east, all chariots glinting silver.

::

This is what I blog. Because this is who I am. I am a mess – who often doesn’t want to get out of bed.

Who struggles and preaches ugly self-sermons to herself and some days just really doesn’t know how to go on. I don’t have it all together. I blog about not having it all together. And you know what? I’m almost willing to hazard a guess that there a whole lot of other women out there like me who are a bit of a mess and who don’t know how to get out of bed some mornings and who have to fight. Hard. For. Joy.

I wrote a whole book about this, this past year,One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are. It’s a book about my struggle for joy, my simply not wanting to get out of bed.

And in that book, I wrote these words:

“… and I know all our days are struggle and warfare (Job 14:14) and that the spirit-to-spirit combat I endlessly rage with Satan is this ferocious thrash for joy.

He sneers at all the things that seem to have gone hideously mad in this sin-drunk world and I gasp to say God is good.

The liar defiantly scrawls his graffiti across God’s glory and I heave to enjoy God . . . and Satan strangles and I whiten knuckles to grasp real Truth and fix that beast to the floor.” ~One Thousand Gifts

And when you sit down to your keyboard, and you write a blogpost — you are writing for me. You are writing for messed up me, and the messed up woman next door, and the messed up woman sitting beside you in church and messed up You. We need your messy stories. And you need your messy stories.

Why do I need your story and why do you need your story?

Because story is a way that the Spirit of God can bind our wounds.

It is in story, we meet the Spirit of God. The reader meets the Spirit of God in the reading of story — the word made flesh in your life. The writer, you, meets the Spirit of God in the writing your story – the word made flesh in your own life.

The Word God wastes nothing and He heals two broken hearts with one story – the reader and the writer.

Us who are fighting for joy from behind the laundry heap and in the trenches with the crying kids and with the bruised marriages and the crushing debts and the battered , frayed dreams, and we. Don’t. want. To. Get. Out. Of. Bed — we need your messy, real, authentic, unmasked stories. And you who are fallen and broken and scraped–  you need your messy, real, ugly stories.  Because in the hands of the Spirit, story becomes a salve to the skinned souls.

The first person that any words ever heal — is the writer of those words.

Because our words aren’t wholly our words.

They are from the Word God Himself.

T.S. Eliot says,

If the word ‘inspiration’ is to have any meaning, it must mean … that the writer … is writing something that he does not wholly understand.

This is what you do when you blog.

You come to the screen with a shimmer of your story – but you come empty, not fully sure of what you are going to write. And this is okay. Because you don’t have to have all the answers. If your writing is inspirational — you will write things you don’t wholly understand. You will be surprised by the Spirit as He speaks new truth to you through your story. Because what you think you have to say – may just be the first words of a far greater truth that God wants to speak to you.

I need your messy story… and you need your messy story.

So tell me your story, not your sermons, tell me your thrashing, and not just your theology. Tell me about your questions – and not just your quest.

Because we read so that that we know that we aren’t the only ones.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian who was martyred by the Nazi’s during WW2, he wrote these words and this is for you, and this is what it means to be a community and we are a Christ body and we are this to one another:

“The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation.”

The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him.

She needs her again and again when she becomes uncertain – and this is the power of blogging in the upside down kingdom. This is the holy work of a blog, so don’t every feel shy or ashamed or embarrassed that you blog. Because the body of Christ needs to speak to itself and it needs to speak to the world and this is the beautiful , poy of a blog. I get discouraged and I become uncertain and I fall down and His word through your words is the connective tissue in the body of Christ and we need each other. Please. Keep. Writing.

Because I am just one decision away from disaster.

Every single last person reading your story, your blog, is just one decision away from a spiritual, financial and moral mess.

Can you see them, their faces and their lives and their hearts? Me! on the other side of your screen.

There are women, men, who are reading your blog and are pondering decisions that will change the course of their lives—and their children’s lives and on out into eternity. Women who are so weary they have absolutely no idea how they are going to put one foot in front of the other today. Mother’s whose hearts are shattered into a million shards by prodigal sons. Marriages with debt around their feet like a millstone. Wives on the brink of some emotional affair.

They are sitting in front of screens, on the other side of your screen and they are looking and clicking and they are reading.

They want something REAL -honest. They are yearning for something INTENTIONAL – that you’ve prayed about. They are longing for something RELEVANT.

What are your words? What are you going to say?

This is the world God has called you to write to. Not a sermon – but your story.

Tell messy me how you handled not wanting to get out of bed. Tell broken me how you keep your vows. Tell fallen and sinning and wrecked and saved me how you see God – right where you are and how you are wrestling your faith out and how you don’t have answers but a lot of questions.

And your God is so big He doesn’t live in boxes but in your gritty-grace-filled life.

There is so much at stake – souls. There are many at so risk – us.

I didn’t know six years ago, and nearly 2,000 posts ago, on a September night, when I clicked “publish” on that first corn-husking post, that it would be me I’d be peeling back. ….

I didn’t know that He’d use stories to heal me. 

I couldn’t have known the cost. 

I never thought of how and when these postings might end.

 I wasn’t prepared for the fire and the heat and the Spirit and the fear-begging-to-be-made-courage.

I didn’t know how much I didn’t know.

I couldn’t have imagined the people-beauty, the souls luminous, the Glory-stories.

 I never expected so much joy.

Six years later, and I’m still pounding it out, and I have grown smaller…. hushed. I am the same and I am changed and I am less and I am more and I have seen Him.

And His name is Where-Two-or-Three-Are-Gathered and Community is a Love-Body that holds itself close in the wind. I never knew.

Six long years of tracing the outline of days with the arc and curve of letters and finding the Spirit in the story.

Finding you, the sisters in His story.

There is so much at stake – souls. There are many at so risk – us.

It is in your story, you meet the Spirit of God.

You just blogging, doing that word that sounds like a blob,  this thing that others may snub – may I just say: you are an artist. In the line of your Father God, you are an artist.

Ezra Pound once said that the artist’s task is this:

To “make it new.” The “it” is the truth of the world. A work of art doesn’t invent truth, but it does make it accessible to us in ways that are not normally available because words and images have been tarnished by overuse or neglect.”

And this is what you do when you sit down at the keyboard in the upside down kingdom.

You are an artist and you make the truth of the world new to be me again when you tell the truth through your story that is new to me.

You make art, and you don’t invent truth, you tell me the real honest truth, that the kids keep bickering and you yelled at everyone at dinner and you’re feeling around for the face of God in the midst of all this darkness and there are days. You. Just. Don’t. want. To get. Out. Of. Bed. and you make it accessible to me because you tell it to me in your story. You are an artist of the Word, daughter of your Father God who has always been an artist, who has always been a creator.

God speaks through prophets and poets and the pots all cracked.

And He speaks through you in these last days, these days when:

” I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy.” ~Acts 2:17

There is so much at stake—souls. There is so much at risk – us.

And the upside down kingdom needs your stories of good news that there is a grace that uprights a fallen world. We need your art.

Did you know that the first people that we know from Scripture to be filled with the Holy Spirit were not priests, not kings, not generals. The first two people to be filled with the Holy Spirit were — two artists, two craftsmen, two makers named Bezelel and Oholiab — who built Moses’ Tabernacle?

Then Moses said to the Israelites, “See, the LORD has chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts.”

~Exodus 35:29-31

When you make with words and when you craft with lines and when you click that shutter on that lens, looking for the beauty and glory and reality of God, you are an artist in the line of Bezalel, and He fills you with the Spirit of GOD, fills you with skill and ability and knowledge – and in your art, He heals you and He heals me.

There is so much at stake – souls. There are many at so risk – us.

And it is in story, we together, meet the Spirit of God.

The Word God wastes nothing and He heals two broken hearts with one story – the reader and the writer.

You in the upside down kingdom with a keyboard, you making art, you making the truth new to me, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Jesus gives this to you tonight, He gives you the Great Commission,

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…and lo, I am with you always.” (Matthew 28:19-20).

And THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE. How do we with blogs and keyboards go into all the world? Aren’t we all really like Peter — cowards and liars and deniers and absolute messes? I am. I am.

BUT GOD. But God, what does He do? He fills the rag-a-tag disciples, the messes like Peter – with the Holy Spirit – just like He did Bezalel… And we see it again and again throughout Acts – that the phrase “filled with the Spirit” is often linked to a consequence: They “spoke with boldness”(see Acts 4:13; 5:29; 7:51; 9:27).

Filled with the Spirit – spoke with Boldness.

YOU, with a keyboard – you are an artist.

You with a blog – you are filled with the Holy Spirit.

You telling your story – speak it with boldness.

Is that what makes a successful blog? You an artist, filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking your story with boldness? What is success?

What is success for a blogger? 25, 000 hits a day, thousands of dollars of ad revenue, a book contract and a movie deal? Is success measuring your self-worth in subscribers?

Whether as a blogger, or a mom, or a wife, or a single young woman, we keep striving and we keep straining and we keep struggling and we keep seeking success – but what IS success?

Do you lay in bed some nights wondering what it is you keep stretching for… starving for?

What if you could just go to Jesus and ask Jesus, King of the Upside Down Kingdom … What is a success?

This is what He whispers to you:

Whoever wants to be great must become a servant. ~ Matthew 20:26

Whoever wants to be great – must become a servant.

Whoever wants to be a great mama, a great wife, a great woman is called to serve and a great blogger must serve with every post, serve with every story, serve with every well-ordered lines…. Whoever wants to be a successful blogger must be a serving blogger.

It’s not about you. Your blog is not about you.

Success is service.

Your success as a blogger is not determined by your hits, sitemeter, or subscribers.

You are a successful blogger, the most successful blogger, from the very first day you ever posted, if you simply do it as an act of loving service unto Jesus.

And even if no one ever reads another word you ever write, you are a success in loving service. You are always a success when you are serving because the way to be great in the upside down kingdom is not climb higher but to go lower.

Your calling isn’t to be a blogger. Your calling isn’t to be a business owner. Your calling isn’t to be a success.

Your vocation is always and only this: to be a servant of God.

Our vocation is always serving. You are always a success when you are serving because in the upside down kingdom the way to be great is not to climb higher but lower.

So if blogging success in the upside down kingdom is service, to go lower, how do you serve in the upside down kingdom, how do you go lower?

The only way to serve in the upside down kingdom is the way a duck makes a nest – with feathers plucked from her breast. With bits of yourself.

I had read it once to the children:

What a Mother Must Sacrifice

Houses may be bought, built, or borrowed.

But homes can only be made, and that with bits of ourselves.

Or so the ducks told me.

They told me without a sound, just simply as they preened and nestled, a painting, oil on canvas. The children press in close too, for a better look at Alexander Max Koester’s painting Ducks, and I read aloud the caption below the brushes of color.

“Mother ducks pick feathers from their chests to line their nests.”

(Koester’s painting: Moulting Ducks)

I pause and the children gaze thoughtfully at a clutch of plump white, blizzard of feathers fallen down. But it’s those words that mesmerize me: “pick feathers from their chests, to line their nests.”

Eyes fixed on a duck breast puffed, mother plunging beak in deep, I question wondering self: “How else did you think nests were lined?”

With leftovers. With feathers discarded, the molted, the not-so-necessary feathers. I thought mother ducks picked feathers up from what was laying about, scraps, lining nests with what simply could be mustered after the fact.

But no. (Is that only the way of human mothers?) No, a mother duck plucks each feather out from the heart of her bosom, warm and soft.

She lines the nest with bits of herself. The best of her, from the deep spots.

She cups her young in her sacrifice.

Children pull at the corner of the page, anxious to see the next painting, and, reluctantly, I move on. But for weeks, part of me lives among Koester’s ducks. (Koester, captivated, painted dozens of duck paintings throughout the course of his life. I’ve come to understand.)

Days later, I am scrubbing out the arches of muffin tins after breakfast, the clock ticking insufferably loud in my ears, time running down. Children need books and learning, and I’m tuned for the expected chime of the doorbell, a service personnel’s scheduled visit. And the words rise near to the surface, “I don’t have time for this! No muffins tomorrow morning!”

Pluck.

The words sharply sink. And I, learning, line this nest with a feather. Not a leftover. But one decidedly plucked. The service man meets me with muffin tins still in the sink, and a circle of happy young. Whose tummies next morning fill with another batch of muffins. I will make time.

As the sun’s perfect globe of glow sets nears the horizon, these boys, glint in eyes, recalibrate vacuum cleaner to fire socks. Weary, I have food to find, laundry awaiting escort, math sheets to mark.

They fire sock cannons.

And I Pluck.

Bellies jiggle, peals of giggles, as old mother chases after future men, wrestling them down, tying them up in tickles. We warm here in laughter. It feels good, wild and alive. So again they fire, and again I pluck with feathers of my time, bits of me, and we pile high, one atop the other, nesting down into sacrifice, soft and small.

Some feathers for this nest, the parts of me and time I have sacrificed, have hurt, pain of the plucking lingering long. But why speak of the details? And was it really sacrifice, or just this too-tender skin? It’s done, it was necessary, it was for something better. Some nights, when all sleep, I feel along the hidden bald patches.

There are times, too many, when they call, “Read me a story?” “Wanna play a game with me?” “Can you come help me?”

And this mother refuses to pluck. Something, some task, someone (me?), rates as more pressing, more important. I deem our nest acceptable just as it is. I don’t want to sacrifice more of me.

Then comes the pecking, the scratching, the squawking. With feather lining wearing thin, the nest chafes hard. We hurt and cry. Nests need feathers deep.

Someone must pluck.

When will I learn that down sacrificed settles and soothes?

For scraps won’t suffice. Snippets of time, leftover me, a trinket, a diversion, tossed.

Mother ducks don’t line nests with feathers, dirty and trampled, the molted and unnecessary. Why would I? Nests need feathers fresh, warm with mother’s life.

Night descends and calls children to dreams. I lead them to their bed-gate, arms and legs under quilts worn from the ride. I read stories, stroke hair, say prayers. Prayers to Him who plucked hard from His own heart.

A sacrifice, staggering and true, for love of His very own. We learn love from His laid down.

Tired heads nestle into pillows, pillows of down.

On feathers plucked, we rest.

Related: May the Children Eat First

How to Parent: Just Guide Gently

The original Koester painting, “Moulting Ducks,” is part of the collection at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle www.fryemuseum.org

::

Nests need feathers deep. Nests need sacrifice, soft and small.

This is what your home nest needs… sacrifice of you. Line your nest with bits of yourself. Pluck. Sacrifice.

And this is what your online home, your blog, needs. Sacrifices of you. Will you tell us your real, hard, painful stories – the ones that terrify you to tell? Will you peel back the masks, give up the fluff, will you get real….

Someone must serve… someone must sacrifice… someone in all this blogosphere must pluck.

If there are to be any nests in the blogosphere for souls to come find rest — someone must pluck.

With bits of themselves.

For scraps won’t suffice for our children, snippets of time, leftover me, a trinket, a diversion, tossed. And scraps of ourselves won’t suffice for real, authentic service in the blogging of our stories.

We talk about taking our blogs to the next level and I am here to say yes. In six years of blogging, I haven’t had had a sitemeter installed on my blog, and I’ve blogged 5.5 years with no comments, and I don’t have sponsors or ads but I am here to say yes, please take your blog, take your life,  to the next level.

And the next level in the upside down kingdom is to go lower – to humble yourself further.

Because the only platform in the upside down kingdom is an altar.

The only platform Jesus Christ stood on was a place to lay down and die. And we as His followers can stand only on that kind of platform—a place to come lay down as a sacrifice.

Pluck  from your breast.

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Reads for Bloggers:

 Six Things Every Christian Blogger Needs to Know

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Links for 2012-10-22 [del.icio.us]

What’s a Christian business owner supposed to do?

@ WORLD Mag .... Deeply appreciate Tyndale and Mr. Taylor...
Look what she did with her Joy Dare!

@ A Path Made Straight ... Elise always blesses...
The Integrated Life

@The High Calling "…the measure of integration in life is lordship: How is every aspect of my life (work, family, friends, faith, community) a ministry of serving others to the glory of God?"
Lemonade stand vs. cancer:

U.S. News... one boy. Making a difference -- right where he is!

How to Handle Losses

All through the woods, the trees are letting go.

I told the Farmer on the way home from Sunday chapel —

when we came up to the top of Bobbie Johnson’s corner, and just before he turned, where you could look long to the northwest and out across Gingerich’s cornfield to their woodlot with the embers of maple —

that it was brave, the way the trees made dying look glorious.



How did you let go and relinquish glory and be willing to stand bare, straight into wind?

There’s fog in the morning. That’s how the week starts — Monday and early and fog hanging on in the corn and at the edges of greying trees. The zinnias are browning old at the picket fence. The light and the laundry just keep coming without fail.

It’s Biblical — let everything that has breath praise the Lord. But just because He allows everything to, doesn’t mean most everyone takes Him up on the offer.

Is it robbery for everything that has breath to take oxygen from His world and not praise the Lord?

I can start the spin cycle and be a thief and still beg to be with Him today in Paradise.

When she’s in from the barn, she slams that back door, her hair dripping like she drowned in that shower that doused her curls and the smell of hogs, and she comes grinning and looking for me, holding out her hand.

She announces it like a heralding:

“I lost my tooth. The Lord has blessed me.”

In the east, the sun burns away the mist and I come to.

The Lord has blessed me.

How does she do that? How does she fill her gaping with celebrating and who sees blessing in loss and how can you just hold on to some peace and sanity and your half of the quilt even in nightmares?

How in the world can her and the trees let go and praise?

When heaven gets into your world.

She’s feeling her tongue through the hole and I grope around inner craters.

She’s grinning right through this silly hole in her mouth and I knit brows over kids yelling, and when did I start thinking serenity was something that I owned, that peace was something I had property rights to — and that I’d been straight out robbed if I lost a bit of peace and quiet? How can I lose it when I lose things as trite as a clean counter, a break, an uninterrupted moment?

And I touch the edge of things —

Who am I to complain in losses — when what I lost wasn’t mine to begin with?

She looks like Job standing there.

Job standing there with her tooth in her hand: I lost — and the Lord has blessed. Job loses everything he loves and that’s his first response — this wild, tenacious thanks:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return.

The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;

blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:20–21).

“Want to see it?” There’s this bare black gap in her grin.

And she hands me what the Lord has given and what the Lord has taken away and I hold her tooth and Job is the witness to the impossible made possible:

When thanksgiving is your default — the enemy gets his defeat.

You defeat your dark when thanksgiving is your default.

Her pearly tooth, it rolls like a favor between my fingers.

Anything I have, I don’t deserve.

Everything I have isn’t a given — it’s given.

Nothing is a given — everything’s a gift.

Who am I to complain in losses when what I lost wasn’t mine to begin with?

It’s like Spurgeon‘s murmur:

“Praise is the beauty of a Christian. What wings are to a bird, what fruit is to the tree, what the rose is to the thorn, that is praise to a child of God.” ~ Spurgeon

Yes, let — we are always allowed. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord — because praise is breath to a child of God. Praise is the only way to really breathe.

The child, she look glorious.  I say it to myself all morning, like something new cutting up through places in me: I lost — the Lord has blessed.

And the toothless Job child, she’s singing it loud, over the vacuum cleaner slurping up the dust kangaroos on the stairs and she sings only slight off tune and that only makes me smile, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, worship His holy name… ”

Unyielding gratitude to God — is how God makes us unstoppable.

The leaves keep giving away. And all these losses, this day and what is now and everything here slipping away — and she wiggles another pearly with her tongue and says it with the sure certainty of a toothless prophet, that it’s likely she’ll lose the next one soon.

And I nod and smile brave at the glory and the losses without end…

grace and God coming without fail.

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and counting more of the One Thousand Gifts that never end… thanks for Christ who does it all, gives it all…

#4489… for hard eucharisteos and the breakdown out in the cornfields here early this morning

#4490… for a Farmer who bends the knee to whatever God bestows, calls it gift, and goes looking for new parts

#4491… for letting go of agendas and self and falling into the safety of God

#4492… that piano that keeps playing out songs through all these kids practicing — unstoppable gratitude

#4493… for every single kernel of corn — it might not have been — nothing is a given… everything’s a gift. 

#4494… for off tune singing

#4495… for staying in this moment with God and nothing more

#4496… for boys who get up before 4 am and do chores and go to the fields with their dad

#4497… for toothy grins and brave mamas

#4498… ” And He takes the empty hands and draws me close to the thrum of Love. You may suffer loss but in Me is anything ever lost, really? Isn’t everything that belongs to Christ also yours? Loved ones lost still belong to Him—then aren’t they still yours? Do I not own the cattle on a thousand hills; everything? Aren’t then all provisions, in Christ, also yours? If you haven’t lost Christ, child, nothing is ever lost.” ~ One Thousand Gifts

Day 22: Catch the whole 31 Days to Crazy Joy series right here

Like some crazy joy? (Anyone not want more joy?) Tap in your email to not miss a day of

your guidebook to 31 Days to Crazy Joy

Free October Joy Dare: Look for 3 gifts each day to give thanks for. Print for the fridge. Dare the family to Joy!

{Join as we share our Joy Dares here every day & enter to win the monthly Joy Dare Basket…. and the Nikon D90… Looking for the collection of the Whole Year of Joy Dares?}

And why bother keeping a gratitude list of His gifts?

Because those who keeping a gratitude list:

1. Have a relative absence of stress and depression. (Woods et al., 2008)

2. Make progress towards important personal goals (Emmons and McCullough, 2003)

3. Report higher levels of determination and energy (Emmons and McCullough, 2003)

4. Feel closer in their relationships and desire to build stronger relationships (Algoe and Haidt, 2009)

5. Increase your happiness by 25% — (Who wouldn’t want a quarter more happiness!) (McCullough et al., 2002)

Who doesn’t want all that?

“Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Thess. 5:16–18).”

Will you 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!}

Links for 2012-10-20 [del.icio.us]

three a.m. candid

@ study in brown ... ever known hard days -- nights -- with kids? This is one to come back to.
The Most Magnificent Photos...

... the whole earth is full of His Glory...

Your Laughter Medicine for the Day & Free Printables {Crazy Joy: 20}

Your Saturday morning needs this… really.

Ken Davis, author of the amazing Fully Alive and a very good friend whom I have the privilege speaking with at Women of Faith, has kindly encouraged and mentored —  and made my sides hurt with happiest laughter.

{Please consider clicking off music slider just below top nav bar? RSS readers can come with laugh with Ken here…}

Want to keep laughing with the family and Ken?…

And more laughter right here!

Then — really — go print some joy off for yourself this week. Just to remember the fight for joy is worth it!

Hang the Joy Bunting somewhere in your house! Somewhere to remind that the fight for joy is worth it!

Print out the free printables for a mirror, a fridge, over the sink, the table, the mantle: somewhere to help set the tone of the day!

Joy is the Best Makeup : the Joy of the Lord is my Strength : Comparison is the Thief of Joy : Find Joy in the Journey : Joy to the World

Joy for the Day:

Though you do not now see Him,

you believe in Him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory,

obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

1 Peter 1:8-9

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Day 20: Catch the whole 31 Days to Crazy Joy series right here

Like some crazy joy? (Anyone not want more joy?) Tap in your email to not miss a day of

your guidebook to 31 Days to Crazy Joy

Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

why the crazy sacrifices are worth it . . . . {Crazy Joy 19}

Joy, it comes in the morning…

Joy, it comes not in the gaining but in the giving, not in being someone but in being a sacrifice, not in laying up treasures, but in laying down self.

Joy, it comes in the mother who doesn’t think twice to do the unthinkable, to do the unlikely, the unlovely, the unheard of — who lives the Gospel.

It comes in the woman who loves the kid who has no one, the man who isn’t thinking about winning on earth but in heaven, the kids who cheer for the hurting.

Joy, it comes like this:

{Please consider clicking off music slider just below top nav bar? RSS readers can view these two unforgettable videos here… }

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And it comes again in the morning…. what lets the beginning always happen again:

True sacrifice isn’t the losing of anything — but the finding of joy.

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Day 19: Catch the whole 31 Days to Crazy Joy series right here

Like some crazy joy? (Anyone not want more joy?) Tap in your email to not miss a day of

your guidebook to 31 Days to Crazy Joy

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 2012-10-18 [del.icio.us]

Study: Germs Trump ‘Five Second Rule’

@ CBS Atlanta ... really? What every mother needs to know {wink, smile}
It’s a Girl

... oh. my. "More female children are eliminated in India and China every year than females are born in the United States." To read humbly and prayerfully, though very uncomfortable... "To deny it, to be too uncomfortable to look at it, to be too embarrassed to see it, is to be complicit in it."

Links for 2012-10-17 [del.icio.us]

Every Morning There’s War

"Am I wanting to look at Twitter before I look at Jesus? It sounds stupid. That’s how stupid sin is." This video is truly worth the 2 minutes....
An unparalyzed faith

"Since I praised God for the last 10 years of my life, I should praise him now..." You have only five minutes for the internet today? Spend them all here. I choked up reading this one aloud to the family. No. words.

Why the Battle for Joy is Really Worth it {Crazy Joy 17}

Back then I said I’d never be like him.

I slammed doors to punctuate the point and to make sure my dad knew it.

You can be tall and 15 and think you know a lot of things.

And you don’t think about growing old and looking squishy around the middle and telling teenagers to just turn out the lights.

You don’t think about how you can open your mouth and let the sharp side of your tongue tear the innards out of a soul —- and there’s no way you can stuff the whole bloody mess back.

I don’t know how it happened exactly.

Or maybe the truth rightly stated is — I really don’t want to remember.

How we were late, 35 minutes late, and when I got in the van they were all waiting, all 7 of them, waiting and squashed close in a mini-van that’s far too mini for lanky Dutch teenagers and late summer heat and one late mother who can flare into this wide-eyed, wild agoraphobia when facing hours of finger food and paper plates and BBQ small talk with absolute strangers.

It got ugly.

A kid hadn’t ironed his shirt.

Over the course of a whole hour and ten minutes of hunting down socks and doing up hair and scouring for one battered croc — and telling my jangled it’s-time-to-go-nerves a dozen times that all fear is fraud and nowhere on earth is beyond the reach of God — I had told the boy at least 5 times, that he really did have to iron that shirt. 35 minutes later he’s in the van looking like he’s rolled with a bunch of wombats to Timbuktu and back.

Maybe I should have shrugged the shoulders?

Maybe I should have said it didn’t matter, let’s just go? But I had asked him – five times. More like 5.8975 times and in this insistent, your-mama-she-means-business-voice.

So, to a van full of the waiting and the hot and the frustrated, I say no ma’am. No ma’am, we are not going like that. Back into the house and you have. to. iron. that. shirt.

And the kid starts wailing. At mock pitch levels. Like I’d just announced an imminent amputation of a necessary limb or the banning of birthdays.

And every nerve ending in this highly sensitive body is already feeling unraveled and gory and I don’t even want to go to this thing and I feel the iron weight of time and kids and expectations all pressing down on the lung and his howl is jet thunder in the frayed veins.

And I turn hard toward the bawling kid.

“Out.” I’m not proud that I can hiss.

Here’s where it’d be convenient to claim I wasn’t thinking straight, that some tightening screw had somewhere loosened and the side of the thing had fractured and fissured in the loud sound.

But it’s been said and I’ve laid up nights, thinking about it, and it’s true and I say it like this:

No matter the jarring, a jar of fresh water can’t spill filthy water.

When you’re upset, you upset what’s really in you. 

I grab the boy’s arm and lean in close to his face. His wracking sobs are hot and hard in my face.

And I’m gnawing. Gnawing on the side of lip, pulling on my mouth like I’m trying to hold something back, like I’m trying to chew through to something better than this – better than him.

How can you have held the child that came from you as an ember of very heaven and then glare blind angry and stomp him right out? Who can look into a child and forget miracle?

Me — the amnesiac mother who forgets holy all the time.

I lean in and over, gnaw like a wild thing, and the kid pulls back and wracks it out like this haunt — like this high and holy haunt.

“When … you… do… that…” His shoulders heave, chocking back all this heart water right undammed. “When… you… chew… your lip like that?” He wipes his face with the back of his arm. “You … look… just… like… Grandpa Morton.”

And there’s no air in my lungs.

I’ve caved, in a moment everything’s caved.

Like him?

It’s like a flashing supernova, the look in a child’s eyes and there’s a flaring mirror and you see you are everything you’d said you’d never become.

You can become everything that once undid you. I’m right tipped, upset and know who I really am and what really spills, and here is why I’ll never stop being a grace beggar, a wild Cross-clinger.

“Please… Don’t… Do… That…” He can’t stop the heaving of his shoulders, his heart.

I’m undone now — undammed.

And feeling so damned.

How can grace get a hold of you when the past won’t let go of you? How do you leave a legacy different than the one you’ve been left? That’s what I’ve got to gnaw through to. Why do you mangle the ones you love most?

“Sor…ry… Mama… didn’t… mean… to make you… cry.” And he’s the one who can’t stop.

And I kneel down and let go of his arm. And I hold his face. That’s what I should have done, done right at the beginning. What would happen in a world where anger was your flag to reach out and cup a face?

He looks so scared and wrung and thin — every child’s a thin place.  I see God.

And that’s what comes:

If you don’t fight for joy, it’s your children who lose.

What do I want my children to remember — my joy in clean floors, made beds and ironed shirts — or my joy of the Lord?

You will be most remembered — by what brought you most joy.

The joy of the Lord is your strength and the person of Christ is your unassailable joy – and the battle for joy is nothing less than fighting the good fight of faith.

His cheeks in my palms, they’re so white, so wet.

It’s his eyes — if you’ve put the fear of yourself into a child, how is there room for the joy of the Lord? Joy isn’t an optional feature to the Christian life — it’s the vital feature of the Christian life.

Battle for joy or lose your life. Or other’s lose theirs.

And I whisper sorry.

I tell the boy I know nothing yet, nothing.

Every ungracious moment means someone doesn’t understand grace.

And the boy crumbles into me and I hold onto him and a forgiveness I’ll never deserve and there’s a grace that can hold us, that can mold us, the way joy can bend you soft at all the joints.

And I murmur it into the thick of his hair, that even now He can still make us like Him.

The boy touches my cheek like a flag waving yes.

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:Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}