Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 286

Because We All Have These Days: When We’re Just Hanging on by a String

I crack the eggs and the pan sizzles and there’s a kid hanging upside down off the couch, trying to knit a scarf.

“Remember to use the plastic spatula and not the steel one, Mama? Remember what Dad said?”

And her curls are all hanging down touching the floor and she’s doing a row of pearl with the blood all running way too fast to her face.

I switch spatulas.

“You might want to sit up.” I try to do no harm to the non-stick coating of one red frying pan.

She’s draped off the couch arm like an oranguntun, curls waterfalling down into an overflowing basket of stacked books and balls of yarn, and how in the world can anyone’s mind find the way to hold on to knitting needles when dangling upended?

Why does a mind find hope so much easier to hold on to than despair?

I  scramble eggs. Dash a bit of salt and pepper. The clock ticks loud behind me.

The day my Grandma Ruth had shock therapy, I had talked to her that morning and wondered how it really could, how electrical currents could zap everything scrambled into something whole again.

Her voice had been a whisper that morning, like crawling up hidden on a shelf and I had tried to coax her weary-worry down with talk of leaves turning and sun exploding in mums and yellow everywhere, so certain, and she had curled up small in the nook of me not wanting to look or hear or be anymore.

Grandma Ruth and I, we shared more than these long, bony noses.

“Oh.”

I look up from the frying pan. The inverted kid hangs paused, mid-stitch needles poking through yarn. “I must have….” She curls up like a Pilates instructor over her knitted rows.

“I must have dropped a stitch somewhere…  see the hole?”

“Can you work your way back to it?” I scramble up edges.

I was a lot younger than Grandma the day on a Toronto street corner when something didn’t tie right somewhere in me and a mind can drop right through a black hole, right through that gaping black hole that just ups and blows right through you. I stood on a street with the cars flashing by loud. How can it be so easy to lose your way Home? Anxiety can take all your innards and whisk you into this froth of scrambled mess and depression isn’t a cut that needs a bandage —  it’s a cancer that needs a battleplan.

I have stood at the stove and every breath can feel like you are losing the battle.

It’s either take captive every thought or be taken captive. When you realize life is war, you make prayer a shield and Christ your general and the victory is found in grace.

A friend I birthed babies with, she knows there’s no lone victors and every conqueror always has a team, so she reaches out to me last week. Tells me with she’s on the front lines and the negative thoughts are shelling her hard and she’s trying to hold the enemy back with the Word because the only way to ever gain ground is to get deeper into God.  I pray for her everyday and over the scrambled eggs.

I mean every Scripture wielded word. I can feel it again, how all that black and scrambling feels. The way to stand with the falling is to give them the gift of the knees because this is His Body catches and carries each other home.

It’s there on the chalkboard, under the clicking clock, so I don’t forget, the name of a friend whose meds fail and she’s plunging into this pitch black depression. Her husband keeps holding her because the dark’s not a place you go and try to hold yourself together all alone. He whispers it close, like dew in a drought, that God doesn’t fail.

My heart’s in my throat when I tell him that I am a Cross-fool who really does believes it: God doesn’t allow pain unless He’s allowing something new to be born. And there are a thousand ways births can happen unseen to the naked eye but it’s the eyes of the heart that see the delivering mercies of God. Every breath is always one breath closer to birthing into eternity.

What I’m thinking over scrambled eggs is just that: In the Body of Christ, a mind can break just like a leg and if we don’t hide the shattering of our bones, why be ashamed of the shattering of our hearts?

I had sat through a Sunday sermon once where the preacher had laughed about how he and the wife and kids had lived a cross the street from a psych hospital — from “the loonie bin” were his exact words.

And I had sat there, 17 and scared, thumbing the frayed leather corner of my Thompson Chain reference Bible and thought of all the times I had visited my mama behind locked doors like that and I had swallowed hard and the edge of that Bible had blurred. The congregation laughed at the preacher chuckling from the pulpit.

The untold stories of the messed up people all around you, they wouldn’t make you laugh — they’d break your heart. And if the broken would just love the broken — this might free us all from the chains of rejection.

“You help me, Mama?” The knitting kid is sitting on the floor now, and she mumbles it, bent over this straggle of stitches sagging and missing.

I turn out the scrambled eggs and I kneel with her and I get that and it’s me: What do you do when you desperately just need someone to come help you figure this all out?

And there’s the Word-whispered assurance, “I am more than you need and I am like a mother and I am your Father and I am the Light that pushes back the black and I am making all things new — and that’s a promise that I’ll wrap right round you in any pit and pull you up and close to Me.”

That’s what I write it on these cards.

Cards shaped like puzzle pieces.

9 puzzle piece cards that envelope after envelope will all fit together.

And I send the cards to those two women, sisters like me.

Sisters with messy pieces and broken pieces and puzzling pieces that they don’t have the faintest idea how to fit together.

In the midst of all that doesn’t makes sense, the ink runs like a line to hold on to:

God’s putting together all the pieces of the puzzle and He’ll fill what’s still missing with His peace.

“Even if it’s a mess, it is still okay, Mama…” The kid who was hanging upside down trying to put it together, she smiles…

And I sit in front of the stove with its scrambled eggs —

and she keeps trusting something beautiful will come of out of everything knotted and all these tangled strings.

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Related:

Dear You: A Letter for the Hard Days

Someone you know who feels like they’re just hanging on & needs some real encouragement? I tucked 9 days of these Treasure Puzzle Piece Cards in the mail… “God’s putting together all the pieces of the puzzle and He’ll fill what’s still missing with His peace.”

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

For the next 2 weeks: The Practice of Suffering…. What does it mean to pick up a cross? How do we walk through hard times? How do we participate in the sufferings of Christ?  We look forward to your Scripture study, stories, encouragement….

Today, if you’d like to share with community The Practice of Suffering ... 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.

The 1 Truth We can’t Ever Afford to forget about Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger?

My Dad had said we’d never see anything like it again — not in our life times.

120 combines lined up around one field — 160 acres of soybeans.

A harvest of less than 12 minutes. An attempt at a world record. All crop donated to world hunger.

They were calling it a harvest for hunger.

The Farmer and his brother. My Dad and the neighbor.

Farmers in their worn hats and faded wranglers and scuffed up boots, from all up and down these gravel roads. Leaving their own fields and idling in with one combine after another, CASE-IH and Gleaners and New Hollands and John Deerers, all circling the perimeter of this one field.

Levi stands tall, looking. “I think that one right there is Dad.” He’s on tip toe, pointing. He can pick his Dad and our combine out in this sea of John Deere Green?

A dying breed — that’s what my Dad had said we all are, us croppers and herdsmen. That in less than his lifetime, this country has moved from one in three living on a farm — to only one in 46.

Who will still dwell in the land?

“There’s 63 combines at this end of the field, Mom.” Malakai points to the north, us all lined up with the combines, waiting for the wave to begin. “And 63 at the other end.” He turns towards the south. “I counted twice. Isn’t that a lot of farmers in combines, Mom? ” I smile and nod. Plain, hardworking folks out here. One in seven jobs in this nation are produced from these fields, from the humble men in pick-up trucks.

“You think they can really do it in less than 12 minutes, Mom?” Malakai tugs at my hand.

“They’re farmers, Kai.” Levi spins from the field to face his little brother, hands on his hips. As if that statement alone explains everything.

When they start up the combines, exhaust plumes signaling all harvesters ready, the crowd cheers.

Shalom looks up at me, one wide open grin.

Helicopters hover, cameramen dangling.

Then the flag  — and the farmers ride.

“They’re coming, Mama! They’re coming!” Shalom’s jumping happy. The air’s thick with dust, thick with hope.

I’m choked up, and it has nothing to do with the air.

It has to do with men and food and that the first man was a farmer. It has to do with our story coming out of soil. It has to do with tilling the earth and reaping a harvest and it’s what Goethe said, “Sowing is not as difficult as reaping.”

There is ultimately no crop without unwavering commitment.

These men — it strikes me, rattles me like a wind through dried bean pods –  these men who turn over the earth, they revolutionize the world.

When a man makes a living from tending to particles of dirt, when a man does small things well –  he makes all things become great things.

And when a man works dirt, he cultivates a life needing patience and kneeling to Providence: you can’t drive a seed to grow and you can’t demand a sky to give.

There are 10,000 bushels of soybeans coming off this field in just over 10 minutes by men who labor over land and I’m rooted and moved.

How many starving are fed by this harvest?

“They’re just about done!” Levi grins.

We can see a combine in the top northwest of the field fall back, mechanical difficulties.

The lead combine in that section will have circle back to combine that strip of soybeans and this will take time. Levi rubs his hands anxious. “You think Dad can see out there?”

The work makes dust and it’s in the air, what we all are and no more, not anyone.

There’s a race of lead combines back to pick up missed strips of beans. There’s waiting on the edge, farmers in caps leaning to see.

“Last one’s coming up!” Kai points.

The crowd claps loud, smiling into all the dust. The horn sounds. The last bean is in the bin.  Hungry will be fed today and flags fly.

“Can we go find Dad? — ”

Levi’s already leading the way through the crowd, through our people.

Past the  old men worn and keen and the teenagers texting.

Past the Mennonite women with babes on hips and the white-haired farmer’s wives with their canes and memories.

Through the knots of people we weave, all these people we’re tied to.

And through all these farmers, mingling humanity, all the dust gathered, an arm reaches out, grabs my shoulder, “Hey!”

I turn and it takes me a minute to recognize who she is after all these years. Margaret older now, Margaret in her seventies now, her hand on my arm now.

“Margaret! Oh, to see you here!” I squeeze her hand.

“I saw you and just had to grab you.” Her Dutch accent is thick and she squeezes my arm and it’s hard to hear her with all the people pushing past us and I lean closer.

We might only have a minute with all the crowd pressing and I’ll just have to cut right to what’s most important:

“Margaret — all those years ago — when you had that lawn club with all the farm kids, that Good News Bible club?

You shared the gospel with me. You offered me the hope of Jesus.” I shake my head.“Thank you.”

She fed me the realest food. I give thanks for the realest food. “Thank you.”

What if she had let me starve Christless?

“It was Jesus. Christ alone saves.”

I nod and tell her, “Yes, yes, only Him — and you were the beautiful face that brought me the Good News.” She’s wrinkled and exquisite and what if she hadn’t?

What if she hadn’t?  What if fear had stopped her or reaching out had inconvenienced her or she had had far more important things to do than tell a bunch of straggler neighborhood farm kids about a Carpenter and a Cross and Nails that can fix all the broken down places? 

What if believing meant there’s no way you could stop telling the Good News because it’s more sensational than gossip that parades as news?

What if shying away from the word sin so as not to offend, offends a Holy God — and what if being culturally correct leads a whole generation a wrong shy of heaven? 

What if breaking this addiction of talking about problems could break new ground of talking about our Provider?  That we couldn’t stop sharing about how we’ve been saved, rescued, redeemed, revived? 

The current of people tugs at us, and before Margaret’s gone, I say it again, with every fibre of my being, tightening my grip on her hand: “Thank you.”

I can see her over the people, hear her heavy Dutch voice, before she’s gone in crush of people: “You’re welcome.”

You are welcome.

“Mom — I see Grandpa!” Levi’s pulling at my sleeve. And Margaret’s gone —

And there’s my Dad, Dad in his red hat and signature overalls.

“What was it like, Grandpa? Could you see anything? Were you a lead combine?” Levi’s round with questions. Shalom flings her arms around him. That in all these people — we find my Dad. 

My Dad — still looking for real Hope.

I nod and he nods and we know all that we aren’t saying.

He leads us back through the combines, looking for the Farmer too. I catch snatches of his words to Levi.

“Well, when you’ve spent your life in fields working alone — to look up and see a sea of combines.  All those combines and farmers. No — maybe not again in my lifetime. ” Dad’s shaking his head.

To be part of a Body — after a life time of emaciation and aloneness — the feast is always spread for those who will come.

Who am I inviting? Are the evangelicals a dying breed — that while 80% of us believe it’s our responsibility to share about Christ — in the last 6 months less than 40% of us actually have.  Why in the world, for heaven’s sake, don’t we and what’s stopping us and Who is really our Lord?    

Dad’s thin and wiry, walking ahead of me.

Sometimes its hard to see the starving, hard to see there’s a waiting harvest, hard to see souls and eternity — all this dust.

Dad finds the Farmer and the sons and the fathers and the grandfathers all talk harvest and harvest is all I can think of –

all this time running out.

There are beggars.

There are beggars begging something good out of this world and we have bread. We are bread.  What in this world, for heavens’ sake, keeps us from feeding the starving Living Bread? Why would fear ever keep us from spreading a feast for the famished? What is the Christian response to dire hunger?

What if  – in a world of status updates — the status quo was to lay down everything for Christ?  

Only in this one blink of a life time –

can we beckon just one person, anyone, towards eternity.

 

Margaret’s somewhere in this field…. somewhere, headed Home.

And Dad, on his way back to his combine, on his own way out of here — he stops in the middle of the field.

He stops to bend over to listen to Shalom, and I see it — how right there her skirt flies, how it flies like a flag.

Flies like a welcome –

His face so wrinkled and exquisite…

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Related:

Why any of this matters and the story that really’s shaking things up hard and good for me these days: “

Links for 2012-09-24 [del.icio.us]

God's Heart in a little green marker

@ Monica Sharman.... this is pretty exciting and ridiculously practical...
Rekindling our Inner Voices of Creativity

@MomHeart... the kids and I need this again...
Praying for the Persecuted?

Are you as a family? Have you checked out Chan and Platt's Secret Church blog? yes, yes, yes...
Why Early Childhood Parenting Is a Gospel Priority

@ Christianity Today... "As the youngest members of society founder, so does society itself."
How To Build Trust With A Child

@ Shaun Groves ... and how to build trust with every adult too... every adult too. Returning to this one again and again.

What Every Hard Week Needs to Know

Sometimes, even right before it really begins, you know how the week’s going to go.

I look in the mirror early on a Monday morning, the bedhead looking more like a monsterhead, and I look right into that water-splattered mirror.

And tell the woman looking back at me how the next seven days are likely to go down — are going to likely try to take me down.

The mail’s going to bring bills and sucker punch first thing.

And he’s going to the say wrong thing or nothing or claim he never heard you say a thing, and every time you look away from the clock, time will just up and suck down whole hours like an industrial shop vac and you’ll be left wondering where into the bowels of the world did this week go?

The inner chamber of the microwave is going to look like a gory battlefield of losing, epic proportions by Tuesday.

You’ll have to clean a toilet. Or regret that you didn’t. The laundry’s going to laugh at you.

And by Wednesday, you’ll pull a three inch hair from the chin and you’ll replay who you talked to on Monday and Tuesday this week who must have saw it at an inch and a half.

You’ll eat too much, have to referee something between little kids or still-kids in very big bodies, and it’s statistically a cosmic likelihood that you’ll be late at least once, forget something twice, and get a whole lot wrong. You’ll laugh a bit like it all doesn’t matter, or least doesn’t hurt, and there will be broken eggshells left on the counter and broken promises left after the fact and the real, exposed truth of it is, after it’s all said and done? Is that under it all, we’re right broken.

No one knows but you do war every single day with the slanderous voices in your head and you wrestle a bit with the death dark that encroaches around the edges of everything and you’re never the only one: anyone who gets up has to push back the dark.

I’m standing there in front of the mirror.

Standing there, looking right into me and the abyss of the mess of me that I’ll never get all right. And it comes down to this: Christianity is the only hope for this broken world because there’s no other way for the broken to get the Nails they need to rebuild.

That’s what this week needs, that’s all this week needs most:

More than needing schedules and productivity, this week will need a Savior and prayer. God’s not asking me to produce– He’s asking me to pray. God’s not asking me to climb ladders — He’s asking me to kneel and let go. Right there at the mirror, right at the beginning, the week begins to unfurl in slow, in hope.

And that’s what I whisper into the mirror:

His grace will be more than just sufficient — His grace is guaranteed to actually save. Time, me, the week, all redeemed and miracles happen in mirrors and to people we know. When we know Christ, we always know how things are going to go — always for our good and always for His glory. The sun flashes blaze in the mirror.

The week has this written all over it: God only allows pain if He’s allowing something new to be born.

And down in the ditch at the end of the lane, I had witnessed it, on the way out to get Monday morning’s mail.

I had stood there with the Food Basic flyer and the hydro bill and the week coming straight head on and I had watched this  monarch land.

I had stood there with the mail and the proboscis tongue unfurled into the nectar well and the wings of this king butterfly right ripped open His secret epistle to everything:

Drink the thankful sweet out of each thistle —

because this is how you fly.

And it’s right there at the beginning….

and it’s quite something….

how even at the sharpest edge of things, there are wings.

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…. that He would give any gifts in the midst of thistles — right out of the heart of the thistles -– 

more of His endless, One Thousand Gifts … thanks be to God for all of these blessings:

… a pastor’s wife who prays {#4422}

… late night lounging talks with my sister {#4423}

… falling asleep with a arms around a little girl who’s tying my hair up into knots and telling me stories {#4424}

…  drives with just my mama and I and a bag of good trail mix {#4425}

…  talking outside with my dad in the cool of a September evening {#4426}

… laughing too hard in the kitchen with a daughter who is taller than me now {#4427}

… for a friend named Holly Good who is good beyond all measure to me and her Lord, again and again {#4428}

… for #9 and crazy proof that God does things wholly in spite of us all for His glory…  {#4429}

… for thistles and the sweet drink He makes with His presence right exactly where we are {#4430}

 

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!

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weekends are for joy en masse

Weekend Inspiration:

Creativity on the Weekend: Scroll through these Fall Beauties with Leaves from BHG for some simple creativity this weekend with the family… and just. pick. one.

{You are living these 7 Habits of Creativity & making happy time everyday to be creative, yes?}

Friendship on the Weekend:  This read so encourages, yes? Couldn’t it change the whole weekend into amazing? {See below}

Kitchen Love for the Weekend: So. If you read the link above… Here’s where it gets really fun! Make your own Homemade Pumpkin Spice Latte (really!) and whip up these *2* ingredient pumpkin muffins… and then tuck in one of these gorgeous printable Fall card — and ta da!

Kid Fun for the Weekend:  Have you come up with your Fall Fun List? (Or print out this Fall Bucket List? Every day’s a gift!)

Joy for the Weekend: Grab a kid, a friend, five minutes — and a clothespin. And make this message for someone who just really needs to hear it. (Scroll down for steps) Something this simple? And so happily memorable.

Organization for the Weekend: Okay, this is ridiculously simple and pretty revolutionary for fridges everywhere… and pick up one of these for the vehicle: brilliant!

Free Printable for the Weekend: Just. This. One. for the fridge. The wall. The pocket. The mirror.

Crazy Sale for the Weekend:  {Pssst… here’s an idea: Curl up with that Homemade Pumpkin Spice Latte and an immediate, inexpensive read that’s less than a price of a coffee, but might bring real joy?   One Thousand Gifts on Kindle @$4.69 on Nook for $3.99, and at ibooks for $3.99 and Family Christian is having a 1/2 price sale on the hardcover  as is Mardel offering it at 50% off.

Worship for the Weekend : You are Healed.

{It was profoundly moving to the witness the Jesus Painter in Des Moines with Women of Faith… it’d be a grace to gather with you at Women of Faith in Kansas City? Please consider clicking off music slider just below top nav bar to hear this song of worship. RSS readers can

Links for 2012-09-21 [del.icio.us]

Free Music Download: Beautiful You

@ The Mom Creative...

The Truth about Really Having it All

I

t was after the waves.

After the waves of contractions, after the waves of blow out diapers and wet nursing pads that leaked through the let downs and the damp spit blankets that piled high at the bedroom door.

Long after the waves of colic at 3 am and the 4:30 am crying, both the swaddled and terrified toddler, and the sleepless nights in that faded worn flannel that blurred into long stumbling years —

after she had used up all the young and just hung old everywhere, clung and nursed and pulled right out.

It was after all that decade of crashing waves that she stood on the shore with the children, tanned and limbered and long, and they dug castles. She had known visions of castles. What she hadn’t known is that things come true in the most unlikely ways.

Sometimes the crashing waves don’t wash you away, but wash you alive.

She still stood.

She stood and she didn’t know how –

because she’d yelled about tossed socks and abandoned bowls and slamming doors and flipped up toilet seats and she’d hollered and fallen so many times, her skin was right grass-stained with this tripped-up world.

She hadn’t known: Grace is the backbone of every woman still standing.

She was over half way now.

If she was given a full seventy years, she was over halfway now.

Half the sunrises behind her, half the harvest moons, half the fading summers — and all the beginnings and the firsts and all her own babies, all that behind. And it made her hurt and it made her smile: It’s all the things already behind a woman that bring her beauty to the front.

She wondered then if it had been a lie? For women, men, everyone…. It had been a lie and she didn’t know where it had got started except maybe back when it was all paradise and is that why they had lost paradise, because they’d believed the lie?

“You can have it all” — isn’t the whole truth.

No matter where you — it’s never all easy. A crop is made by all the seasons and the only way to have it all — is not at the same time… but letting one season bring its yield into the next.

This is how to have no fear —

each season makes a full year.

The girl ran through the waves.

And three of the boys dug with shovels and hands and pails.

And the firstborn stood with his father at the edge of the water, shoulder to shoulder, talking man to man on the rim of the world.

She had delivered this. And she had been full and round and she, together with him, they had delivered this, each of them, and now she stood full all over again. A mother fills, only to empty, and empty, and empty, which fills her full again, and isn’t this giving away the way to have it all?

And she could feel it, there on the beach with all the children birthed, the light in their hair, in their eyes, all the time passing under her like sand:

There are a thousand ways to be stretched thin and it’s the stretchmarks that a woman wears that can be her thin places, giving her more of God.

The only way to have it all…  is to have Jesus – and like Him — to give it all away. 

Fall was coming. Summer fading.

She could feel it in the air, on her face facing right into wind.

She watched how the boys wrestled a log off the beach. She watched how they launched it into waves, into sun, into that endless horizon and everything unknown.

And in the goings and the launchings, she stood there brave — all the seasons were going to do nothing less than make a full year.

The seasons could turn. The seasons could bring it all as He meant it to be.

And she could stand there after the waves and before the waves and she could feel it –

She wasn’t afraid of swimming in the deep end, way out of her comfort zone. 

When you can’t touch bottom, you touch the depths of God.

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:Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

Links for 2012-09-20 [del.icio.us]

JOY Sale!

@Apple... selected for Apple's week long promotion of "Five Star books for under $5.99" ... One Thousand Gifts is happily cheap at only *$3.99* this week at iBooks... Praying sharing this helps someone? JOY!

Links for 2012-09-19 [del.icio.us]

Adopted Children, by the Numbers

NYTimes.com ... Good food for the thought... the soul.
Brain Waves Stay Tuned to Early Lessons

@ NYTimes.com ... why early music lessons have longtime benefits...

Dear You… a letter for the hard days

Dear you,

Dear Self and me and you and us,

Really, it’s all going to be okay.

You’re going to be okay.



Promise.

Remember when you were 16 with that ridiculous hair?

And how you’d thought that by the time you got to here, to now, it was going to be good? That by now everything would be all good.

That by now you’d know down in the very marrow of your bones, what it’s like to really live loved. That you’d be known. Fully known. And wholly embraced.

That the Big Dream would have happened, that the peace and the purpose and the Big Point would be under your skin, that the awkward would be gone and that you’d finally fit and that your life made a real difference, you’d made a real mark, and that you really mattered.

You don’t have to worry: We all get to make one unforgettable mark. And every day, with every word, we get to decide: Do we mar the world, or mark the world?

Why in the world disdain the small? It’s always the smallest strokes that add up to the greatest masterpieces.

Because the thing really is: Do we ever really know which mark we make — that will matter the most? The extraordinary things happen nowhere else but in the everyday and today can always be the beginning:

That card you signed and sealed and put in the mail, the way you smiled and nodded to the white-crowned woman bent over the still-green bananas, the way you dug around in the dirt and and left that seed or that gift of the knees and that prayer whispered for a stranger or that glass of water you handed to someone and winked because you just knew — You’ve got to remember: we don’t when and how we are leaving the greatest marks on the world. It all matters.

Believe it: Every tremor of kindness might erupt in a miracle on the other side of the world.

And the only way to ever leave beauty marks on the world is with bits of yourself — and this will hurt. Things of realest beauty don’t bring us glory — but Him glory.

Dear you, and self and me and us, –  Just For Today —  take these words, words of Dag Hammarskjold[image error], Secretary-General of the United Nations, words that you can take to the bank, take to eternity: “It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for … the masses.” Christ left the ninety-nine for the one.

Where you are, with that one child, that one street, that one call, it is a noble, Christ-called thing. It only takes one person to change the world — and one individual, one soul, can be all your world.

Really, beautiful You: The most exquisite marks anyone makes with their life — are the marks done in secret. The mark that no one — but One — will ever see.

And tell yourself this when you feel forgotten and invisible and unimportant: So the celebrities get their celebration here.

But the wise are the hidden who hold out for heaven — and the applause that comes from God. This is to choose the far greater.

I know you’re brave … and you’re scared. Because you keep doing big things that seems so small and you wonder where all this is really going and you only get one life here —

And though you’re weary, you do hard things and you keep getting out of bed and this is always the hardest part — and you keep believing that Christ didn’t leave this world until he showed us His scars — and He won’t ever let you leave this world until you leave your most beautiful mark. To show Him.

So Just For Today — listen: you’ve got to keep going.

His Kingdom is Upside Down and in Him your part is large and lovely and needed and art.

So go get the milk and take out the trash and throw in the laundry and wave giddy to the neighbors because there is a plan and there is a purpose and there is a God in heaven who didn’t just ink you onto the palm of His hands but etched your name right into Himself with nails and He’s hasn’t just got your number, He’s got your heart. He sees you, hidden in Him, and you aren’t ever forgotten because God can’t forget those right in Him. You’ve never missed the boat when you’re holding onto the Cross.

So really — you’ve got to believe it for your 16 year-old-self and 56 year-old-self and for yourself right now: really, it’s all working out okay.

Because God’s writing your story and He never leaves you alone in your story, and His perfect love absorbs all your fear and His perfect grace carries all your burdens, and your story is a happily ever after because Christ bought your happily ever after so you always know how this story ends:

You’re going to be okay.

Dear Self, tuck this away to read again whenever you need to know it again — and promise me, you’ll laugh and sing and dance a bit today?

Heaven and His Kingdom and The Feast is coming!  — so go ahead and pass down the fudge brownies.

Love,

Me.

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 Ever wanted to reach out to your young self and whisper a grace that would really free? All these things you wished your teenage self had known?

Guess what book our Hope-girl is reading right now?

For every daughter, for every sister — for every self who just longs to be grace-ful and know healing in her bruised wings:       This. book.:  Graceful (For Young Women): Letting Go of Your Try-Hard Life

Emily P. Freeman is one exquisite writer, one honest truth-teller, one Jesus-clinging sister — and if you’re looking for a key out of this cage of old voices beating hard on your or your girl — turn these pages and hear how wings might beat high and free and grace-filled…..     Absolutely Highly Recommended.

{And really — to read amazing letters to teenage selves — see Emily’s must. read. link-up of Dear Me Letters} 

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

For the next 2 weeks: The Practice of Suffering…. What does it mean to pick up a cross? How do we walk through hard times? How do we participate in the sufferings of Christ?  We look forward to your Scripture study, stories, encouragement….

Today, if you’d like to share with community The Practice of Suffering ... 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.