Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 288

Links for 2012-09-13 [del.icio.us]

Family Matters @ The High Calling

"We want to talk about the joys and challenges of whatever God gives you to do..." Because we're all working... wherever we are.... and it really matters eternally.
When Compassion Becomes a Gold Rush

... There's this goal: The goal is 3,108 children sponsored between Sept. 1 and Sept. 30 through Compassion. We could do this... really do this -- in Jesus' name. Because this story? When Compassion becomes a Gold Rush? Changed. My. Life. Good to read with the kids again...
Healing Others by Showing Up

...“Mentors win by showing up.” Yes, this.
Press Release: Ann Voskamp & Toronto Cantata Chorus Teaming to Help Filipino Children

Would love to see you there! Come help us?

Baby Steps: Just. Do. Something.

 

 

 

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 2012-09-12 [del.icio.us]

The Gospel And September 11....

@ Radical with David Platt... definitely worth listening to while working in the kitchen...
Videos To Astonish and Amuse You

Really! :) (HT: Patricia) ... and that piano player!
New, Free Devotional App @ Desiring God

... "just a moment each day and come away with something solid to feed your joy in God." Grace!

The 1 Habit We Can’t Afford to Forget

It’s after the Farmer checks over the combine that I crawl in the cab, in beside him in that ratty old t-shirt.

Something about a man who wears his work with no shame.

“Ride a few rounds with me?”

The engine’s drowning out that quiet voice of his.

I sit closer, my shoulder pressing against his.

His dirt-lined hands man that steering wheel around and he turns the combine around into the light, into that field of soybeans east of the bank barn.

The field rattles with dry pods, rattles like a stirring of the dry bones, and hope, it can split right open in the dry places and yield up life.

Shalom, she sits at my feet on the floor of the combine cab. “What’s the moisture, Dad? Are they dry enough?”

She asks it in her deep “I’ve got 4 brothers and I listen to these farm conversations” voice. She crinkles the freckles of her nose all smart, waiting on her daddy to dish her the beans about the beans. The Farmer grins.

“Should have been here sooner, really.” The Farmer glances up from his steering wheel toward the numbers on the monitor. ”They’re running a bit too dry. Closer to 14% moisture would have been better… they are more than ready.” He bends again over the steer wheel.

Yesterday, the number on the thermometer said he’d had a fever of 102. Shalom pats his knee, the ragamuffin child comforting her daddy like a mama…

And hunched over a steering wheel, over the beans feeding into that combine reel, he talks of teenagers and the barn and feeding sows and what would God have for us.

And I talk of boys’ bathrooms and reeking socks and choir schedules and new homeschool routines and I sit there with a camera in my lap and nothing framed at all, and I start to feel this pressure build, all the things I need to clean and cross off the list. And sitting there beside him in the combine cab, us both watching out the window, watching the pods shell open and the harvest of beans roll in, all my insides pacing like this tomcat caged and I half howl:

“I really should go do something.”

And the man turns away from the harvest and the Farmer says to his wife:

“Being with me is always doing something — the right thing.”

The pig farmer’s wife, she nods sheepish, and I lay my hand on the knee of his threadbare jeans and his one hand lets go of the steering wheel to find mine.

It’s in the settled space of just being that it comes.

Like a pod breaking into an answer, right there in the middle of harvest.

“I told Moses that I’d fast and pray.”

The shelled beans are filling the bin behind us, and it sounds like a rain, all these round nuggets of gold.

“You know that Haitian man who I asked if he could get out of Haiti, all that poverty? And he was the one who turned to look me right in the eye, who said, “I’m Moses. I do not leave my kin.” That man.”

Now, just today, someone had written me with a project in Haiti that perhaps we could help with…

The Farmer slows down at the end of the field, turns on the headland for another pass. Levi’s crawled up high on the combine platform beside us.

“But you know how it goes.” I’m watching Levi watching the beans, looking out across the field, his face straight into wind.

“How do you know how to best invest your life? How do you know what’s wisest and where’s wisest and who’s neediest and is any of this even the point?”

The Farmer glances quick behind his shoulder to see that the stream of beans are still running in the bin, that the harvest is still coming. I keep going:

“And not an hour after I had said it out loud, that I’d told Moses I would pray about Haiti and if and how and when of the helping… I get this parable sent to me by a friend who found it buried 2 years deep in the internet – this parable about Americans finding a pile of rubble and hearing Haitians crying from under the rubble.”

I’m shaking my head. Why do I ever doubt that God hears and starts coming before you even cry out?

“So in this parable, the Christians start digging. And after several hours, they get out three Haitians: one dies of cholera, one straight up takes off without time for Jesus or thank you ma’am or nothing and only one’s kneeled down to help.”

“What’s cholera?” Shalom crinkles that nose again. “Aren’t all the parables in the Bible?” And I explain and the point of the parables is to get out of story and get right under our skin and what was that parable about giving a glass of water to the least of these?

“So then the parable has all the American Christians stop digging and have a meeting. Reasses. Are we doing this wrong? Are we being wise stewards here? Maybe we jumped in here too fast and need a better plan?”

Me or the parable — who is echoing who here?

Levi’s walking the field now. I can see Levi stopping to count pods, to just count pods.

I squeeze the Farmer’s knee:

“And I get this not an hour after I say it out loud, that I’m with Haiti’s Moses and I’ll pray and see what’s wisest — when people are dying.

The whole thing’s like — like God pushing a note under my door.” I swallow hard. Sometimes the only way you hear if God’s knocking is if you are standing right by the door — ready to go. The beans keep streaming in right behind me, harvest ready and pouring.

“So the Christians have all this talk of stewardship and timing and plans and politics — all amidst the cries of people who are actually dying under the rubble…”

That’s what the parable read:

Then one American Christian bends down and begins the work again of freeing those who are trapped. He works frantically with energy, passion and tears.

The others look at him for a moment and then one asks him, “Brother, where have you found this energy for the task? Are you sure you know what you are doing?”

“Don’t you see, loved ones?  My heart is trapped beneath this rubble, too. We are all in danger if we do not respond to this need. We are all in grave danger – those who are below the rubble and those who stand above….

My witness before the throne of Jesus lies beneath this rubble.”

And the Farmer who’s working at a harvest, he turns to me:

“Sometimes if you wait until you really know what you are doing — means you don’t know really God and what He can do.”

We are all in grave danger.

Those who don’t respond are the ones in grave danger.

“Tell your Moses yes.” The Farmer in the tattered t-shirt, he wears the habit of harvest and isn’t the habit of harvest the one habit that Christians need to cultivate most? The Farmer’s speaking loud over the engine now, over everything that threatens to drown out our yes.

“Tell your Moses that we haven’t forgotten our kin and we aren’t hard or deaf and we’re going to do something.”

Something? Even if we still aren’t sure it’s the best thing?

And I answer my own question.

When someone stops doing nothing and just starts doing something, anything — this is what starts to change everything.

I’m done with excuses that stand in the way of a harvest — when it’s time to stand in the gap for the harvest.

Being with Christ as He goes to the lost and the least is always doing the right thing. 

The harvest of beans is running loud in me and now is the time, not later,  and the harvest is ready and we can’t afford to be sick one day longer. It’s time to split right open.

The world says, follow the right people and be a success. And Jesus says follow me and be crucified — and this is success.

The world says get rich now — or at least very soon. And Jesus says give it away now — because “soon” might be too late.

The world says you find your best life when you spend it all. And Jesus says whoever loses his life for me will find it — and if you try to save your life, you’ll lose it. Does anyone believe Him?

Keep your life safe, save up life, hoard all this good to make your life good — and you will lose your life. That’s what He said.

Whoever wants to save his life will definitely lose it.

Right into twilight, the beans break themselves wide open and there is the harvest and my heart is trapped beneath all this rubble too.

It’s time to break myself, break into harvest, break wide open — break free.

And when Malakai stands at the end of the field in the last of the light, while there is still day, while there is still light —  he splits open a pod, rolls the gold beans around in the palm of his dirty hand and the habit of harvest means you get dirty and there is no shame but relief.

The boy just raises his hand. And it’s like the whole rattling dead field is rising right alive and he holds his palm up to the sun just in time.

Like an offering of yes burst into flame.

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If you want to be part of the harvest right now

Related: 10 Ways You Could Really Change the World — Right. Now. 

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

Links for 2012-09-11 [del.icio.us]

When one man brands hate onto his face...

@ Daily Mail... "But there are moments of grace.... a black woman embraced Mr Widner in tears. 'I forgive you,' she cried." Such. a. story. (HT: Jessica)
In Memoriam

@ the beautiful due.... prayerfully remembering 9/11 ...
How To Remain Faithful At A Secular University

@ Bob Russell ... "He began by making up his mind in advance." Encouraging.

The Importance of Putting the Camera Down… Just Now & Then

Summer holds on a bit and really, who can mind the clinging?

When we pack up the kids and head to the woods, we drive tent pegs into the earth, and we walk in bare feet and it is right like this.

There’s tabernacle light caught in trees, in eyes. My brother brings a vase of his roses and puts them on the picnic table, an offering.

I sling a camera around my neck.

The river runs. Blocks of wood open up like Gordian knots, answering the riddle of time with a gift of heat and all the summers past. What feels like the sharp blade of an axe can split open the blaze of radiant things. I hang the lantern high on a broken branch.

Mama washes dishes. There are never enough s’mores. Under our feet there are veins of water running, and I feel it, all the passing by. Kids run down to the river. They ride the river running on and they laugh down the river, down the gorge, and holy joy, it rings loudest in the deepest canyons.

I stand at the bottom of the gorge and I keep looking up.

All is hard and holy at once. Mothers know how the happiness and hurt entwine and love is the suffering that holds a life together.

The kids are so tall and so achingly wonderful.

When Mama and her crown of white hair and milky white bottle legs lay back in that rubber tube and Caleb paddles and pushes her down the river like some royal chariot, we laugh way too much — if there is such a thing — and we tube down the river and when she just about tips in her ring of bouyant grace, everything happy in her spills, this riotous howl.

All the years can wrinkle you into sheer beauty.

And what I think afterward, when I look at the pictures of day in the woods, in the water, is just that — just that sometimes, just a bit –

Why can I confuse staying behind a lens as staying in the moment?

Sometimes attentiveness may feel like letting go — more like being captured by the grace of the moment than trying to capture the grace of the moment.

It’s the glory of Christ that does all real justice —- so can cameras do glimpses of His glory any real justice? Yes, definitely yes.

And no.

Like the moment when I first saw him trace the outline of his daughter’s face with the tip of his finger.

The moment when Mama brushed that singular tendril and from her cheek and said Christ was enough and I could see it welling in her, how He was like an aquifer of quenching to her, and nothing could contain that moment.

When the youngest looked up from her plate, from the end of the table and the light of the candles flickered in her, in the windows, and she seemed older right then and beyond me, and some moments are only memories that ever sear you with glory.

And that night when the Farmer and I wake, thunder shaking the sky to the west, the whole sky to the west clapping shock white with the hope of rain — and then it coming, the thrumming, drumming of rain on the roof and down the windows and out across the fields and us just laying there, spooned in thanks.

There are times grace out and out defies a shutter and all you can do is murmur a prayer of thanks.

They’re all right there, all the pictures of one wondrous day —

Of the food on the table and kids in the river and a man and a woman and their children and her mother under one doming sky —

and in all these digital streams of information one can present as being present to all these the moments, but the truth is:

Framing your life may not necessarily mean that you are paying attention to your life…

That moment of my Mama tubing down the river? That moment of our four sons side by side eating pancakes in early light? That Farmer-led breakfast and the way he sprinkled berries into mountains in all the bowls? It’s unashamedly true, I am glad it’s framed, I am glad the shutter memorized it for amnesia of the soul.

Yet the thing is: Lenses can help you look — but it’s stillness that helps you see.

I had stood there with the boys, with everyone eating breakfast under leaves — and I had framed. And then set the camera aside. Turned the camera off. And there’s no guilt. All the moments a mother never captured on film — isn’t perhaps a failing, but a releasing into fully being in that moment. They say that — that you can tell as much about a life by the photographs that weren’t taken as those that were. There doesn’t have to be fear of missing.

It’s sort of wild to think about: Moments don’t need to be captured as much as they need to simply be enjoyed. There’s ridiculous freedom and glory in a courage like this.

I felt it, there in the woods with the kids: It is good to press the shutter — then set the camera aside and be shuttered up in the wild wonder. In being a partaker of life, not only an observer… 

I had stood. I had stilled. There is a seeing that can burn the heart like a film.

When the kids ask me to tube the river with them  again, just one last time, I lay the camera down and lay into it. The water laps cool. Grace is the realest stream and the most courageous of all is to be all here. The gift always come in simply being present in the moment.

And this river, it can flows us all on, beautiful and perfectly unbottled.

 

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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 2012-09-10 [del.icio.us]

So maybe tomorrow we'll try again.

@ Flower Patch Farmgirl ... precisely...

The problem of evil? The Greater Problem of Good?

So after dinner, she picks coneflowers in the garden.

Cradles the long stems in her apron skirt, carries them up through the picket gate.

And she turns to me on the top step of the porch, holds her apron out to me, all those purple petals — art in an apron.

“Why is there all this loveliness?” She wants to know.

I almost tell her — The World is full of loveliness because it’s full of of His love.

Isn’t that the meaning of beauty?

The fundamental purpose of loveliness is to convey His love.

Everywhere, wildflowers, even in cracks in concrete sidewalks. Everywhere, this fragrance, this pursuit, this passion.

But I don’t know how to say that — when I know that coneflowers unfold off the porch and she stands there with an apron heavy with garden glory and the sunflowers nod yes, when 30,000 children have starved to death in the last 90 days in the Horn of Africa famine. That’s over 330 children every single day. Why is there all this loveliness?

Don’t you mean — why is there famine and why is there this shocking disparity and what is right in a world of diets and death by starvation?

But doesn’t she really have a right to question it all — the sunflowers sparking in sun flare, the light falling late through the trees, all gold like this, the phlox blooming along the picket? I see that too, on the porch. The extravagant art that makes up this world, it does jockey for an answer. The existence of loveliness everywhere, it begs explaining.

If I raise the problem of evil in this world — shouldn’t she raise higher the greater problem of good? If evil is seeming evidence to eradicate God from our mental landscape, then doesn’t goodness, even in this apron, testify to the gospel truth of God?

How can we behold loveliness and say that this world looks like it would if there were no God?

I don’t know if I have ever thought of this before — the great problem of good on this planet.

Augustine had asked two questions of the world:

“If there is no God, why is there so much good?

If there is a God, why is there so much evil?”

I wonder if I have spent a lifetime murmuring under my breath only the second question?

But why don’t I first get hung up on the first question? The one my girl is bringing in with the flowers — why all this loveliness and where does it come from?

The great problem of good on this planet implies that there is a Great God in heaven.

Do we not wonder at the why of good because fundamentally all human beings presume the overspilling grace of God? That good is our intended atmosphere — and evil is the exception. Isn’t our default to ignore the expected and focus on the unexpected?

And even our deeming anything good or evil, it betrays our deep-seated beliefs —- because how can mere nature be either? Isn’t it just is? To even assess events as good and evil reveals our true paradigm: we believe there is a moral center at the center of the cosmos, God at the axis of the universe.

But if there is really a God at the center of the universe, love at the core of the cosmos, love manifesting itself as loveliness in the garden —- doesn’t He care about the 330 children with names and dreams and who lay in Somalia with flies buzzing around their listless, wasting away limbs, till they breathe their last starving breath sometime this afternoon?

Yet if I think God doesn’t care about the hurting — aren’t I believing the chief lie of humanity?

The one hissed in the garden to Eve, the first deception that deceives us still — that God doesn’t care about the needs of His children. And maybe this is why the world hemorrhages— if we think God doesn’t care — why should we?

Isn’t it easier to blame Him?

When I believe the Edenic lie that God doesn’t care — is that the excuse to turn away, to spread the lie that God doesn’t care — when maybe the truth is that it’s humanity that doesn’t care?

If we love because He first loved us… do we now care, because we know He did first care, has always cared, will always care and has the nail scars to definitively prove it. If all the world believed the truth of God’s character — that God cares —- wouldn’t this world become a caring place?

He cares, so we care; He loved first, so we love now.

Why all this loveliness?

Do I tell her this — that there is enough loveliness, enough beauty, enough love in this world — enough food in this world —- if we would just share?

That the problem of evil in the world isn’t a problem for proof of God —- but a problem of our own turned-in hearts? And when we turn our heart outward — we in turn bear testimony to the loving existence of God, of the body of Christ right here…

I pick one coneflower out her apron, twirl it between fingers.

Do I tell her that all this loveliness does this too: All this good makes me grateful, and my own heart needs this — a filling of His great-fullness.

Gratefulness is always to Someone and when I am grateful, isn’t it always evidence of God — a filling with awe of His great-ness.

For all this world’s sureness of the benefit of gratitude, how can we then deny that there is a Benefactor?

There is never nameless gratitude, but every instance of gratitude gives away what every skeptic really believes: every breath is a gift and if life is a gift, there is a Giver, and if there’s a Giver —- all’s grace.

When all’s grace — we give, because a gift never stops being a gift to be given…

“It’s God, isn’t it? — All this loveliness…” She says it to me smiling, picking out one of the coneflower to inhale deep…. her picking up the scent of God.

She didn’t need me to say anything.

There are things that need no words.

His love clearly manifest in the everywhere problem of good.

In every cone-flower curling itself into a megaphone of mercy.

This one long echo of evidence —

A loveliness lingering….

 

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.

So they are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him…

Romans 1:19-21

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Give thanks to the Lord! His Love Endures Forever!

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weekends are for gathering

Weekend Inspiration:

Creative Inspiration for the Weekend Cheat Sheet for scenery Shots — wonderful! 8 Things you didn’t know about your DSLR. {You are living these 7 Habits of Creativity and making happy time everyday to be creative, yes?}

Mom Encouragement for the Weekend: Just what you need!

Kid Fun for the Weekend:  These will be perfect to add into your busy days! They are super simple to make. Simply download the files, print them out and get them laminated! Provide your kids with dry erase markers and as a bonus, your dinner conversations will never be dull again!

Organize and Clean on the Weekend: I think this may be what we’ve all been waiting for!

Marriage Encouragement on the Weekend:   5 must read verses for your marriage!  AND this too!

Fall Garden for the Weekend: Planning ahead!

Fall Craft for the Weekend: Just love this! So pretty and fun!

Free Printable for the Weekend: Perfect for tucking into a letter for your sponsored Compassion child –or for a little Miss someone you know to play with — adorable and memorable.

Worship for the Weekend …. Someday…no more sorrow and no more pain…May your faith be your eyes this weekend, friends!

{Please consider clicking off music slider just below top nav bar to hear this song of worship. RSS readers can view video here… }

May the grace and truth of our Father surprise you all over again this weekend, friends…

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!}

when life leaves you with more questions than answers

Only a few more weeks left now.

That is what the Farmer says at dinner, what he says as we clatter dishes off the table, the enamel plates all stacking and clapping for the cook.

Only a few more weeks left and August will dip the beans fields bronze and the leaves will reluctantly fall off the beanstalks and just the pods will then dangle, the only rattling ornaments hanging off the naked fields.

And by then it won’t matter.

It won’t matter then if the nights lay in thick and close and humid, won’t matter if the mist lies down in all the hollows, rolls itself out, a shag white carpet around all the woods, bridges the the hills in long planks of fog. By then the mist come with the dusk can’t make mold in the bean fields. Only a few more weeks and then fall plucks off all the green and the white sky tufts can’t sift in under the leaves and grow white fungus tufts. Just a few more weeks. Will we make it? 

Tonight again I sit on the porch. I rock in the swing. The fog drifts in. An endless sea rolling in soundless.

The children have dragged quilts and pillows and stories across the dewing lawn and out to the tent. I had heard Kai talking of owls in woods and Levi interrupting with wolves and the ow-ow-ow-howl of coyotes and Shalom had only had big eyes.

We’ve already prayed, but I wander down the lane to check on them one more time. Their laughter runs across the lawn to meet me; their loud stories jostle the tent like a womb stretched over kicking quintuplets.

I smile. SSSSShhhh. My whisper’s too loud.

The canvas belly stills.

“To sleep now… tomorrow morning comes early. And with it, the barn and pigs and hens and eggs and your chores.” The mist is settling in. The crickets serenade.

“Yes, Mom.” In unison. Then a giggle… a flail…. Stillness.

All the world’s blanketed. Hushed.

I’m not asleep when I hear the panting at the back door, the breathlessness come wild cross the full length of the house. I already have my arms wide open when she flings herself onto the bed.

“How did you know it was me?” She whimpers into the crook of my neck. I pull her close. Her hair smells of dry grass and summer sun. She looks up.

“How did you know it wasn’t the wolves coming in?”

“Oh, Shalom!” I muffle this startled chuckle. “No wolves are coming round here —- and I knew it was you coming in by the way you were breathing.” I brush the damp curls from her clammy forehead.

“You know me just by my breaths?” Sometimes words and eyes aren’t necessary to see inside —- sometimes we only have to listen to the way a soul breathes to know the deep places.

I half smile.

“Are you scared sleeping out there?”

She nods, wraps her arms around my neck.

“What’s all that white coming around everywhere?” She waves her hand in the shadows, towards the window and twilight. The fog hangs on invisible threads over the fields. High humidity lowered low.

“Just mist.”

“What’s mist?” She whispers it soft.

She herself is mystery. The world is.

“Mist is….” I feel about for words. And sometimes the words “I do not know” reveal the deepest wisdom – the essence of humility and the acceptance of the God-mystery beyond our understanding. 

“Mist is … clouds.”

“Clouds come right down?” Her eyes are so wide they catch light here in the dim and I see her glint wonder.

“You mean…” she’s enters the hush of the world. “You can just reach out there and touch a real cloud? Feel it right in your hand?”

I’m caught in wonder, the child sharing her lit eyes.

“I walked with the clouds?” She can hardly believe it. Neither can I.

I read it once, how in Lima, Peru, with its little rain and heavy fogs, the women hang out rags in the hanging fog and wait till they’ve collected moisture from the mist. The clouds saturates the cloths and they wring it out. It’s a way of making water. It’s a way of surviving. It’s what they call “harvesting fog.”

She looks out the window again. I can barely hear her, her awe.

“Heaven’s right here.”

I look out the window. Her cheek rests against mine.

Heaven’s right here and we harvest His mysteries, drink from the veil we can’t see through.

This is how we’ll survive.

And wolves howl in the woods and we’re scared but none can come round here because breath of heaven surrounds and God who breathed Himself warm into us, the clay souls, knows us by our breath and He’s listening to our deep places inside and He’s already waiting with arms wide open. Just a few more thousand breaths now. We will make it.

Because God rolls in and saturates everything and Heaven’s right here.

I pull her close and think how this is it. Life’s walking with the Cloud.

For all the holy breaths left.

She falls asleep under mist. I rest in mystery.

By day the LORD went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud

to guide them on their way….

~Ex. 13:21

 

 

 

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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!}