Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 306

weekends are for seeing light

Blessings on your light-filled weekend…

All’s grace because of Christ alone,



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Creative Inspiration for the Weekend :  Read this and be so inspired…. and What if everyone tried this tutorial to draw a human eye? Or take a bit of time for this 100 Helpful Photography tutorials?  {You’re making happy time everyday to be creative, yes?}

Kitchen Love for the Weekend :   Now don’t these Piggy Pancakes look like perfect fun for a morning this weekend?   And if you are setting aside time to make a sweet gift from your kitchen this weekend (an excellent weekly tradition and perfect Saturday fun!) – these labels are just beautiful for baked gifts…

Free Printable for the Weekend : Oh my, oh my:  look at any of these classy prints for anywhere in the house

Green on the Weekend : 7 Nutrient rich brews for your plants

Kid Fun on the Weekend : Free Printables for the kids to create with for Mother’s Day including a fingerprint tree

Clean on the Weekend :  Perfect print-out for spring cleaning? 15 minutes a day!

Heart for the Weekend:  While your cleaning, take a mini-marriage enrichment course? How to Stay In Love  — a perfect start for your weekend!

Worship for the weekend :   Singing with you…

Making space for grace with you 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!}

Links for 2012-04-20 [del.icio.us]

When It's Well With Your Soul

@ The High Calling... "I soak in her words and swallow hard, wondering if I will ever have a faith like hers."
A Poem Store Open For Business, In The Open Air : NPR

@ NPR: "Zach Houston runs his Poem Store (on any given sidewalk) with these items: a manual typewriter, a wooden folding chair, scraps of paper, and a white poster board that reads: "POEMS — Your Topic, Your Price." ... and the whole world is hungry for the wonder of poetry!
spiritual practice in the kitchen

@ study in brown ... the beauty and truth of this has been turning over and over again in my heart and mind....
Switching Your Focus

@ Holley Gerth.... "Expectations keep our focus on what should be and distract us from what really is." Yes! Powerful post...

Links for 2012-04-19 [del.icio.us]

how one journaler organizes her thoughts:

moleskine + washi tape ... loveliness!

Top Time Management Secrets to Know

‘God gives us time.

But who has time for God?

This may not make  any good sense.

A well-known pastor, he was was once asked what was his most profound regret in life?

“Being in a hurry.” That is what he said.

“Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I’ve ever gained from being in a hurry.”

“But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing.… Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.”

In our rushing, bulls in china shops, we break our own lives.

Haste makes waste. The hurry makes us hurt.

Whatever the pace, time will keep it and there’s no outrunning it, only speeding it up and pounding the feet harder; the minutes pound faster too. Race for more and you’ll snag on time and leak empty. Hurry always empties a soul.

In a world with cows to buy and fields to see and work to do, in the beep and blink of the twenty-first century, with its “live in the moment” buzz phrase that none of the whirl-weary seem to know how to do, who actually knows how to take time and live with soul and body and God all in sync?

I think of this often, words of another woman seeking: “On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.”

Is this the secret that all the life experts know?

That in Christ, urgent means slow.

That in Christ, the most urgent necessitates a slow and steady reverence.

That in Christ, time is not running out. This day is not a sieve, losing time. In Christ, we fill – gaining time.

We stand on the brink of eternity.

So there is enough time.

Time to breathe deep and time to see real.

Time to laugh long, time to give God glory and rest deep and sing joy. And just enough time in a day not to feel hounded, pressed, driven, or wild to get it all done.

There is time to grab the jacket off the hook and time to go out to all air and sky and green. And time to read and wonder and laugh with all of them in all this light.

All this time refracting in prism.

All this time that could refract in praise….”

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~ excerpt of   One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

 

“…. all our busy rushing ends in nothing” (Psa. 39:6)

He says, “Be still, and know that I am God…    (Psa. 46:10)

 

Resources:

The Lantern: “He has made everything beautiful in His time” Lantern

For more thoughts on how to use time wisely to live our one life well: 

One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

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!}

15 Reasons Why Community is Important …. {Even if You've Been Hurt}

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15 Reasons To Keep Reaching out

{Even When You've Been Hurt}

 

1. Christ is the Body and He is Love and both can only exist in community

 

2. God's people are given the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5) and reconciliation begins first in our homes, down the street, in this pew, around the corner, in community — or we are ministers of misrepresentation.

 

3. It's only when you reach out to community that your gifts can be used for the Kingdom.

 

4. Joining and participating in just one group or community this year cuts your odds of dying in half over the next year.

 

5. Community is only and always what people are: beautiful and broken and utterly redeemable.

 

6. There are no I-slands in the Kingdom, only His-lands, and the notion of lone rangers is purely bad fiction.

 

7. The wonder of this: "Don't you know that you yourselves are the temple of the Holy Spirit? … God's temple is sacred and you are that temple." (1 Cor. 3) We are all the "living stones" of the temple of the Holy Spirit. But if one stone withdraws from the other stones?

The "you" in 1 Cor. 13 is plural. Y'all together are the temple of the Holy Spirit; we are a temple of the Holy Spirit together – in community. We need each other, all of us.

And believing is about belonging to a community. It's when we are committed in community that we collectively live it before the world: God is among us.

 

8. 2000 years of Christianity is founded on the breathtaking living organism of community.

 

9. Community is healthy for us: "Those with strong social connections but poor health habits (eating, exercise, etc.) are just as healthy as those with good health habits but weak social connections."

 

10. There are sisters in Christ who have died for gathering together with their sisters — how could I neglect so great a privilege?

 

11. "Dor" in Hebrew, it means generation. May we be the next generation to go next door — the generation who knows who lives next door, what they need next door, how they ache next door. The Next Christians need to be the generation of Next Door Christians.

 

12. The Christian life is the compassionate, crucified, cruciformed life. Not the comfortable life. Community is how God shapes His children into the image of Christ.

 

13. We love Him enough to meet Him where He is — "Where 2 or 3 are gathered there He is…"

 

14. Love is a tree, each person a branch. And a pile of cut off branches doesn't make a tree. Love can only be comprehended in community.

 

15. Every chance I have to love imperfect people is another chance to perfect His love in me. . This is a way to soar.

The full post is over here today… and I'm sharing more of my story of wanting to get out...

Come share your story?… I'm thinking it will be a healing place to gather today…

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 2012-04-11 [del.icio.us]

thoughts on changing a bad habit...

@ John Richardson...

for when your life seems turned upside down … {the practice of living Easter}

Turns out that all it takes to snap your back at the base is just a turning and a bending over to pick up a book.

Turns out 'safe' isn't a place you live at — but a Person you live in.

Pleated there at the window, trying to straighten the back out again, trying to unfold upright again, I could see it —

Snow falling, falling down in the orchard, falling on the apple trees leafing out this hopeful green.

Three days after the stone rolled away and all these clanking skeletons fell out of the proverbial closet and God alone walked out alive, there's snow right out there on the apple tree's leaves.

And all this talk of new life can feel like an old joke and the Easter people can feel right broken.

The robin there in the snow, he bobs confused.

That's what the Farmer had read the day after Easter, his grease-grooved finger underlining the words at very end of the book of Mark, the end of chapter 16 :

"And these signs will accompany those who believe:

In my name they will drive out demons;

they will speak in new tongues;

they will pick up snakes with their hands;

and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all."

It's an Easter earthquake right here.

"Are those the signs of the Easter people?" I had asked the Farmer that, him bowed over the Word. The whole turning world turned right upside down when that stone turned back — and who can now turn back?

"I've never seen any of those signs."

That's what Levi had said, sitting there at the end of the table.

He'd half turned towards the window, telling us, but not facing us, not letting our eyes mirror his, because sometimes when we voice doubts we have to turn away from even facing ourselves.

Levi looks out the window.

My own voice speaks soft, slow, surprising me.

"Levi… what if you throw out the demons of selfishness?

Or you speak in the tongues of grace?

Or when you were pierced with rejection and malice, just like a snake bite, you forgave — and forgiveness inoculated you from the hurt…."

Levi had turned to me, hopeful, ready to face hope. "Is that what it means?"

I smile…. "Is that what it means?"  That — and the wonders of the early church, wonders happening around the world today, and here, resurrection in us. Who packs up Easter when it's now just time to unpack Easter?

Because isn't the point to now merely raise hands and celebrate His resurrection power — but to turn the feet and walk in it?

Malakai, he announces it at the table, that he's been pouring water into the tray of the incubator in the basement, waiting for a resurrection power in the basement.

He's been making note that the humidity is right at 62% and he asks us, "Want to see my chart?"

"Are you turning the eggs?" I sit stiff in my chair, trying to hold my spine still, painless.

"They have to turn. The incubator has this little motor and it just keeps turning the eggs over."

Malakai's grinning.

Three times a day, the incubator turns the eggs on its own, like a planet on an axis.

Three times a day, this turning of everything right upside down and all new life only comes from a complete revolution.

The turning upside down of everything can simply be the beginning of turning a new leaf.

The midwife waits for the babe to turn upside down; the farmer turns over the earth and pushes a seed down so it will grow up. Upside down can be right side up…

And maybe the bending and the breaking and everything being up turned is the sign of new life about to break forth.

What had Chesterton had said?

"The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth — which means leaving things inside us."

The real idea of growth is not leaving things behind us, but leaving things inside us — Easter and resurrection and the bent Lord and risen King and this is how we rise up in a turned-upside down world.

I'm leaving Easter out — inside.

"Friday…" Malakai tells us. "Friday, I'll candle the eggs to see if there are any signs of life inside."

"Looks like we could plant Friday too." The Farmer pushes his chair back from the table. "It's supposed to warm right up and this skiff of snow'll be gone. Amazing how fast things can turn."

Malakai smiles, puts his arm around his dad, all this strange hope.

And I get up slow to clear off the table, and I bend my spine backwards, stretching it back, bending it to straighten it, the turning that hurts to heal, and the snow —

it melts out there in the orchard.

The apple leaves turning out all these dauntless petals of promise….

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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

This week and the following 2 weeks, might we consider: The Practice of Resurrection. We look forward to your thoughts, stories, ideas….

Today, if you'd like to share with community The Practice of Sacrifice … 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 2012-04-10 [del.icio.us]

For when you think you’re failing motherhood

... yes -- "I wanted to be her mother, not her hall monitor."

Links for 2012-04-09 [del.icio.us]

It's never too late to begin!

Inspiration to just begin today -- 86-year old Johanna Quaas on the parallel bars for the 2012 Cottbus World Cup. My, oh, my.
Until A Better Love

@ Shaun Groves... "And this is family isn't it? Commitment that isn't circumstantial, whose roots wriggle way down to stretch deeper than feeling, relationship with a memory longer than the present moment." Yes.
Need a special gift for someone special?

@Lifeway ... If you'd like to tuck the hope of real joy in the hands of someone special -- a mother, a sister, a daughter-- this spring, Lifeway Stores is offering One Thousand Gifts for half price -- perfect! Half price -- and behold, He makes all things new...
and if you plant one of these shrubs now...

... look what you could have next spring! "Think of them as a flower shop in your yard."
Average Home Sizes from a few places around the World

... which makes me think... how could I think more like the Brits?

What You Really Need to Know the Day After Easter

The shoes they wore Easter Sunday morning, us all sitting there in the very front row of Gorrie Bible Fellowship, they looked like they'd crossed 47 rolling dirt fields with a herd of tramping camels.

And then had an all-out dust bath with a flock of sparrows.

So much for new Easter threads and crisp white shirts and rooster tails smoothed down with a spit and a lick.

Forget the standing to sing, "Morning has broken!" and laying out the good dishes and washing of feet.

I'm not thinking about lilies and silk ties and Mrs. Martin wearing that royal purple dress in embroidered honor of Resurrection morning.

Hadn't I set those shoes out Saturday night and told them to wash them down? I know, parenting rule #32: Don't inspect much, can't expect much. But how in the world could two of my boys have worn shoes looking like remnants of the dustbowl? What kind of mother has pressed and ironed boys shod like that on Easter morning?

Lawrence Mueller, he reads the Scripture reading from the book of Mark, one hand on his tie.

Pastor Goodkey, leads the congregation in singing hymn 168. Eleven year old Samuel Bauman, he comes up to the front with his Bible and that one sheet of careful notes shaking in his right hand, and he adjusts the microphone and tells us why he believes. We stand to sing, "Christ the Lord is Risen Today."

I make a mental note not to look down at anyone's shoes, to just keep looking straight ahead.

Then Wesley Heimstra, he unfolds an eight by eleven sheet and tells us he's nervous, but he'll just read what he wrote down, if we were okay with that, and he tells us how he's just finished up school and found his first job.

How the men in the lumber yard talked crude and how they laughed when he turned away, awkward and innocent. How he got tired of being mocked and how he prayed and nothing changed, so he just came it it and I doubt his good mama ever knew: if God wasn't showing up for him in the lunch room — he wasn't going to go out on any limb for any God.

Wesley's voice is thin, transparent before the whole congregation, Mr. Greer and Mr. Nagel with their heads bowed, listening.

How had I heard last week, how the Romans crowned their emperor-gods?

How the full Praetorian guard gathered around the man about to be crowned the Roman Emperor, to drape a purple robe on his shoulders and crown him with a laurel wreath place don his head, and proceed on this triumphal procession through the city carrying the instrument of death for the sacrifice, a bull.

Welsey's telling us that after all the jeering of the guys at work — he didn't even know if  he could believe there was a God anymore.

The triumphal procession of the next ruler of the Roman empire would wind its way to Capitoline Hill — to the hill of the head — where a bowl of wine mixed with myrrh would be poured out and the bull would be sacrificed.

Then the new emperor, with a general on his left and the high priest on his right, would be acclaimed as the son of the gods and all of Rome would wait for a sign from the gods to confirm his crowning — an eclipse, a bolt of lightning, a sign from heaven.

Wesley said he just got done waiting for a sign. 

"Come one Sunday night, when I was supposed to do music with Pastor Goodkey for evening service," Wesley reads, runs his hand through his hair. "I just called him up and said I couldn't do it, that church was the last place I wanted to be. Pastor Goodkey came to see me and he asked questions and he listened and I just told him how the months and the men had wore me down and I didn't even know if wanted anything to do with Christianity anymore."

I don't look over at Wesley's beautiful mama, just keep my eyes on Wesley and his chin hardly trembling.

This is no bullet point sermon from a pulpit on Easter Sunday morning — this is life hanging in the balance and the testimony of the risings.

Why is this the bravest of all, to just tell your brazen story?

What story did the apostle Mark tell? 

That the whole Praetorian guard, all 3,000 of them, took Jesus to the Praetorium (Mk. 15:16), where a purple robe is pulled over Christ's shoulder and a crown of thorns is placed on his head and the place rings with the proclamation (Mk15:17-18), "Hail, King of the Jews!"

Then this processional through the city, Christ, the sacrifice, carrying His own instrument of death, the Cross, not to Capitoline Hill,"head hill" —  but to Golgotha, the literal translation being, "place of the head" or "death's head."

I glance down to the end of the row, our Malakai and our Levi, sitting there with their knees under their chin, their filthy suede shoes there on the edge of their chairs. Would they tie up any shoes at all 10 years from now to come sit in a church pew? Will they believe the crowning and bear allegiance to the throne?

The Farmer reaches over, threads his fingers through mine. Malakai's leaning up against Levi, watching young Wesley up there at the front of all our eyes.

Shalom whispers in my ear behind her cupped hand, "Wesley taught me Sunday School."

And I pat her cheek, pat her cheek, her round eyes looking right up at me.

"Pastor Goodkey, he stayed calm and he prayed with me and we talked about the decisions I had to make." Wesley's reading slow.

"For weeks, I kept wrestling hard, the pressures of all these guys at work — and I kept thinking about all Jesus had done for me, that Cross and that Crown…" I'm nodding and Wesley, he's brimming now.

And that's what the book of Mark had said, how  Christ was offered the bowl of wine mixed with myrrh but he refused it (Mk. 15:23), how He offers Himself as the sacrifice, with one on His right and one on His left, and how His life ran away red, given, just like a beast. And then the signs, the crowning from heaven: at the sixth hour, darkness fell over the land until the ninth hour, the thick curtain in the temple ripped straight through from top to bottom, the earth splitting right open and death, now pinned in a choke-hold, coughing up its prisoners.

And the centurion crying, "Surely this man was the Son of God" (Mark 15:39).

Not some emperor. This man.

Not Caesar, not Augustus, not Nero — this man is the Son of God, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Ruler of All our empires and warred over lands.

This God-man who leads us in triumphal procession.

"And one night, I picked up my Bible and read it for the first time in months and couldn't get enough of it, and I knew – I knew…"

Wesley holds his voice still, just still, trying to stop the dam and the cracking, and the whole sanctuary waits with heaven. I don't know how he'll hold on and go on. Maybe we shouldn't go on. Maybe we should all wait right here with what we know. I look down.

Malakai's swinging his dirty shoes under his seat.

And Wesley looks up and he let's go of everything and there are signs:

"I just knew I wanted Jesus..." and all these waters break, this flood, this six foot two young man just breaking liquid, and our boys are in the front row, right in front of him, looking up into him. The Farmer squeezes my hand.

Wesley chokes it out, "I went back to work and I didn't care anymore how they laughed at me, because all that matters was God was pleased with me, and I kept praying, and God's given me an opportunity to share grace and truth with every single one of them and they're hungry for more." Wesley's bent.

His shoulders wrack hard.

There are still resurrections and we are witnesses.

My sister and brother-in-law, they carry Baby Ema to the front of the chapel and they tell the story of the last year, of Ema not breathing and her heart stopping and, facing losing this little girl, how they came to taste it, like the mystery of manna, that when nothing makes sense, God is enough, and they know it, because they've experienced it, that the tomb is empty and He rises in us, and I can't look up now at all.

Malakai's shoes are so dirty.

And Sherry Pelletine she says it after them, that this was the year the infection came to her cancerous arm. And they put in the PIC line and her grandmother died and her back went out and she drove a friend every week to her own chemo treatments and she looked right up and asked God — how much more?

But she had done the homework in her Beth Moore Bible Study on James: she had taken the years of her life and divided it by four and into those quarters, she had written down the blessings for each of those decades, and she had challenged us to do it too, quarter our lives and look, "There are always blessings. Even when I couldn't see it, He is always there and there are always blessings."

"In the school of suffering, I learned the comfort of Christ."

I look up at Shelly. At Baby Ema on her mama's shoulder and Wesley there with his guitar by Pastor Goodkey and this is the procession, all these voices at the microphone on Easter morning, like a parade of triumphant down the Via Dolorossa, down the way of sorrows, this crowning Him Lord of all the territory of our lives.  It's the painful testings that hold the possibility of powerful testimony — and every trial is but steps in your triumphant march.

And I reach over and pull Malakai close, lay my head on his because the thing is?

Filthy shoes are fit for the Easter Emperor. 

Because aren't we but dust and aren't all the roads that to the Ruler narrow and hard and what else is there "But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ's triumphal procession…" (2 Corinthians 2:14-15).

When the back doors of the chapel open, we all stream out into the light and Resurrection and the Reign of the Risen King.

Malakai and Levi, they run across the parking lot, run across the whole gravelled parking lot, their shoes jumping potholes.

Dust flying like these flags of unexpected triumph…

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#3360 – #3370 of my own one thousand gifts … of "thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ's triumphal procession…" (2 Corinthians 2:14-15)

:: a weekend of testimony to the Risen Lord

:: Mama lighting the candles

:: this song breaking me wide open Sunday morning

:: the washing of the feet and the way they loved

:: asparagus in spring

:: the way the light made a cross over the Passover table and the youngest saw and pointed and we all nodded thanks be to God

:: singing hymns in the dark

:: waiting up in prayer

:: that the week of eucharisteo and giving thanks before the hardest of things, the message of wholesale thanksgiving is #11 on the NYTimes — there are resurrections everywhere and we are the witnesses

:: dirty suede shoes on Easter Sunday morning

:: beginning again, afresh…. praise, praise, praise.

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Print April's Joy Dare and begin this holy week — this month — right!

Count three gifts a day, 1000 gifts in 2012 (and be entered to win the NikonD90 camera?) Thank-you is a word that can change you, your world – the whole world!

And a happy new surprise for April:

Each day of April, 3 people who share their 1000 gifts Joy Dare for the day, one on Twitter {label with #1000gifts #JoyDare so we can find you!}, one sharing their gifts in the gratitude community at Facebook , and one on Pinterest (#1000gifts), will be randomly selected & entered into a drawing for a gift card @ Amazon {100$} & joy-in-a-box {signed copies of One Thousand Gifts, the photographic gift book, the DayBrightner, and the family gratitude journal} Give thanks to Him in the assembly!

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