Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 85
February 22, 2020
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [02.22.20]
Happy, happy, happy weekend!
Some real, down in the bones JOY to celebrate today! Links & stories this week 100% guaranteed to make you smile a mile wide & believe like crazy in a Good God redeeming everything — and that there’s love everywhere & for ((you))!
Serving up only the Good Stuff for you & your people right here:
Rafał Kaniszewski / rafalkani.photo
Rafał Kaniszewski / rafalkani.photo
Rafał Kaniszewski / rafalkani.photo
some days we just need to open our eyes and take in all the wonder
oh my heart
amazed: This 98-year-old Girl Scout has been selling cookies since 1932
High School senior leaves notes of positivity for others
because yeah, “We all have a purpose…”
inspired to get out there: living, loving, racing in tandem
2 year old hugs delivery driver not knowing he just lost his daughter
a powerful interview with Christian artist, Danny Gokey
“I lean towards Jesus more than ever before…”
… when you’re battling hard, facing challenges, carrying unspoken broken? Worship and celebration can feel kinda — impossible. This is actual hope for you — because we all need real joy in the midst.
because some of us just need someone to listen and believe in us
Couple Buys 35 Acres of Land Next to a Tiger Reserve to Let the Forest Expand and Thrive
so we circled ’round this one: Huddling Penguins
Former inmates start forestry company after prison
“We all have a chance. There is life after prison, and that’s what I would like for them to take from this…”
can you even?!?
How Imagination Guides Us Toward Deeper Love for our Neighbors
The history of The Bible
one remarkable mailman – and I think you’ll agree…
Auschwitz at 75: For those who come after
The women would pray: “God Almighty, please, please see what is happening, especially the children…”
“And this is what we try to do… to never forget that there was Somebody up there that listened…”
This Family Has Driven 5,000 People to the Hospital for Free… and here’s why
#BeTheGift #TheBrokenWay
the one thing he wanted to do before he died…
Post of the week from these parts here
… right there with you as seemingly every single day can feel like this stream of tiny traumas piling up?
Know that none of us are alone in any of this.
Here’s to letting hope get into the folds of things:
When You Feel Kinda Passed By & Getting Too Old: How to Handle the Trauma of Every Day Life
the four seasons of Norway: absolutely breathtaking
Books for Soul Healing:
Joy is actually possible, right where you are.
Take the dare to discover: Life is not an emergency…Life is a GIFT.
Life is too short to do anything but truly savor it — to count all the ways you truly loved.
What if Brokenness is the Path into the Abundant Life?
You don’t have to be afraid of broken things — because Christ is redeeming everything.
There’s no other authentic way forward — but a broken way — right into a profoundly abundant life.
Journey into a deeply meaningful life with this devotional and take sixty steps from heart-weary brokenness to Christ-focused abundance. The Way of Abundance — is the way forward every heart needs.
Be the Gift is a tender intivation into the next step of deeper transformation, less stress, more joy and abundantly more peace & purpose. You only get one life to love well…to Be The Gift.
Can Anyone Really Rejoice ‘Always’?
Philippians 4:4–7
February is here!
Maybe in this new month, easy, doable ideas for the whole family to Give It Forward Today — to be the G.I.F.T. Love is a verb and that verb is give. For God so loved the world — HE GAVE. You only have one life — to love well.
And just for you, when you grab the “Be the Gift” book? Your farm girl here will immediately email you your own gift of THE WHOLE 12 MONTH *Intentional* Acts of Givenness #BeTheGIFT Calendar link to download and print from home!
Love is a verb and that verb is give. For God so loved the world — HE GAVE. You only have one life — to love well.
Pick up #BeTheGIFT — Then receive your own #BeTheGIFT printable calendar by letting us know you picked up a copy of “Be the Gift” here
Love is a verb and that verb is give. For God so loved the world — HE GAVE. You only have one life — to love well.
Pick up Be The Gift & live the life you’ve longed to this year
on repeat this week: Wanted
…right about now, the world sure could use a little Good News today, a little good-seeing, a little beauty-seeing, a whole lot of grace-seeing. So just in the midst of it all today, let’s cling to this: Grace says you don’t have to try to measure up to anyone else because Jesus came down — and He measures you as good enough, as worthy enough, as loved more than enough.
Grace embraces you before you prove anything, and after you’ve done everything wrong.
Every time you fall down today, at the bottom of every hole is grace. Grace always waits in broken places.
That’s the tragedy and the comedy of life: Grace is grace when it gives us what we’d never ask for but always needed, and moves us to become what we always wanted. But hardly ever the way we wanted.
For those who can see, the world’s beauty outweighs its burdens, its grace greater than its grime.
Focus today: Jesus is enough.
This the love story that woos your wounds, that binds your broken heart to His, that heals the aching hurt of all the unspoken broken.
[excerpted from our little Facebook family … come join us each day?]
That’s all for this weekend, friends.
Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth.
Give Thanks. Love well. Re – joy, re- joy, ‘re- joys’ again
Share Whatever Is Good.
February 20, 2020
When You Feel Kinda Passed By & Getting Too Old: How to Handle the Trauma of Every Day Life
They sell anti-aging cream to women like me.
And Spanx.
And glossy checkout line headliners that splay this shock that over 40-something women can still startlingly turn heads — as if having no wrinkle lines in your skin is somehow an accomplishment of galactic proportions.
Turns out you can just be emptying your cart in checkout #6 and end up feeling more like a piece of meat than the roast that’s on sale for $1.99 this week.
“Hold out for perfect and you end up holding nothing.”
So you end up buying 3 tulips for your way home through the snow.
Because you’ve got people you love getting to that week on the calendar page that says the Big XXX–0 … and you feel like something’s broke.
Like the world’s gone kinda mad — like your heart and head have just up and shattered over night and you are sitting in a mess trying to put the pieces together again and we all get old and there’s no defying it —
and you aren’t all you want to be and neither is anyone you love.
Favourite Resource: Grace Crafted Home
Favourite Resource: Grace Crafted HomeEvery single day has a bit of it’s own now-traumatic stress disorder. It’s not just the life crises that are traumatic. The mirror can be traumatic — and time and aging and life can be traumatic for us who are made to breathe eternity.
But maybe : The point is that your life is meant to be spent.
The point is that your life is meant to be used up and every wrinkle means you are wringing out the good of the wonder of this thing called life.
So let the glossy people take their botox and smooth things over and pretend they aren’t wringing this thing right dry, because the rest of us are going to try and we have no shame.
The kids are flat-out growing up.
Have we’ve grown into the lives that we prayed for or have we fallen into something else?
Is this it?
Why is hope of change sometimes the one miracle you don’t dare hope for?
Snow just keeps piling on the roof.
“When you really want to disappear – is when you really want to be found. When you really want to run away from everybody – is when you really want to be found by just somebody.”
Snow just keeps coming across the fields, and the tulips in candlelight and the ache of a thousand popping moments has you leaning in a doorway, waiting for something to finally come and something else to finally ebb away.
Sometimes you can want to run away more when you are a supposed-adult than when you are a kid.
When you really want to disappear – is when you really want to be found.
When you really want to run away from everybody – is when you really want to be found by just somebody.
It’s about aging — and more. It’s about time passing and never coming back — and more. It’s about getting through the birthdays — and letting yourself be loved. Even if it’s imperfectly by imperfect people.
Hold out for perfect and you end up holding nothing.
Why is it so hard to let yourself be loved?
Sometimes you can hardly bear to let anyone try to love you because it feels like a lie.
And for crying out loud, life is too blazing short to live lies.
Is that why a million haggard people hate birthdays? Because love on that day can feel like a lie, like an obligation, like a polite duty and it’s too hard to smile and pretend through its plasticity.
Or maybe it really is — that the moment you accept love, you have to accept yourself, and there’s something in that that seems unacceptable. Strange, how there’s no love without humility – no one can accept anything except on their knees.
“There’s no love without humility – no one can accept anything except on their knees.”
Maybe it’s not about birthday candles or aging; maybe it’s really about the calendar saying the time is now to look that wrinkling face in the mirror and touch that cheek gentle and whisper: “It really is okay. So you are broken. Be brave. Let yourself be loved.”
There.
Everything can still in that moment and the knots can all fall away and it has nothing to do with the tulips.
Peace is a Person. No one can steal Peace from you. And nothing can steal you from Him.
You can’t look across candles and think you’ve wrecked your life.
You can’t turn the calendar pages and think you’ve messed it up. And you can’t hold up any measuring stick and think you’ve botched it so bad, that you lose Peace, that you can’t get Peace, that you can’t find Peace.
If you have Christ – nothing can steal your peace.
I stand there watching the snow.
The house and the kids hush in the evening thickening and falling and the candles flicker boldly on.
Favourite Resource: Grace Crafted Home
And right there those memorized verses from Romans breach the surface of things, because memorization isn’t for the smug saints who have made it but for the desperate sinners who want to make it:
“Time can’t wreck your life. You can’t wreck your life. Nothing in all of this world can separate you from the love of Christ and His love is your life.”
“Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus… ”
The enemy wants nothing more at the end of the day than to make you and all your offered years feel like a piece of chopped up meat. You’ve just got to call Satan by what his ugly name really means: prosecutor. The work of the enemy isn’t ultimately to tempt you, but to try you.
If Satan can ultimately prosecute you — you will ultimately imprison yourself.
He’s like this glossy headline mocking your weathered life: “And you look around at your life and call yourself a Christian?”
And even the weary and worn-out can cut him down with one sharp edge of a memorized verse:
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? …
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us…. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth —
nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” ~ Romans 8
The prosecutor of your soul can’t ever nail you:
Time can’t wreck your life. You can’t wreck your life. Nothing in all of this world can separate you from the love of Christ and His love is your life.
Your life is unwreckable because Christ’s love is unstoppable.
“Your life is unwreckable because Christ’s love is unstoppable.”
Sure, time, age, life, this side of glory is traumatic.
Living in a fallen world can’t help but be traumatic — falling is traumatic.
Every single day is this stream of tiny traumas. (Those who dare to trust call them gifts.) We’ve all had to unplug toilets and clean up puke and crawl into bed and lay waiting for His new mercies to come again before we move.
None of us are alone in any of this.
You have to let your life wrinkle. You have to let hope get into the folds of things. You are here to be spent.
Saving yourself up isn’t how the saved are meant to live. Go for broke.
And when you are broken – because that’s what happens when you go for broke – and you look into a mirror, a calendar, into that one face, and you can’t stop the aching lump burning up through the center of your heart, listen till the rain comes.
Watch how the clouds break and break open and listen for rain and reach out your hand and feel it’s wet sweetness coming down in all this vulnerable freeness.
This is the broken that makes you beautiful.
Live like this right to the very end.
Peace can fall like snow.
Our story of taking The Broken Way:
This one’s for all of us who have felt our hearts break a bit…
This one’s for the brave and the busted and the real and dreamers and the sufferers and the believers.
This one’s for those who dare to take The Broken Way… into abundance
February 19, 2020
The Power of What if? How Imagination Guides Us Toward Deeper Love for our Neighbors
Loving your neighbor as yourself would be easy if your neighbors were all people you understood, people you agreed with, people like you. But we don’t – we live in a broken world, so how do we love well in all the division? Lauren Casper believes the key to loving others is in embracing the lost art of empathy, stepping into other people’s shoes and asking what if?—what if it were my child? What if it were me? Lauren unpacks the importance of empathy, and how to cultivate it, in her book, Loving Well in a Broken World. It’s a grace to welcome Lauren to the farm’s front porch today…
I have a very active imagination. Say a word, and my mind cooks up an image as vivid as if it were real life.
And it isn’t a vague thought that skips by; it’s as detailed as a 3D movie, and it doesn’t go away.
I can clearly visualize all kinds of events and scenarios.
This strange superpower has contributed heavily to my anxiety over the years, but recently I’ve learned to see it as a gift.
“Imagination is a tool, and just like any other tool, it can be used to destroy or create.”
In any given situation, I can ask myself, What if? and then imagine every possible answer to that question.
For example . . .
When I read a headline about a child dying in a border detention center, I immediately picture my own eight year old son in his place. I see him sick and shivering and scared. His eyes are vacant and frightened and despairing all at once.
My heart lurches, and I want to crawl out of my skin, because I am nearly losing my mind at the thought of my son hurting and alone without me there to hold, comfort, and reassure him.
When I hear about another school shooting on the radio, I imagine my terrified daughter huddled under her firstgrade desk and the fear coursing through her veins while I am miles away and helpless to stop it.
When I read another article about an unarmed black teenager who was shot and killed by the police, I glance over at my tall for his age black son playing in the pool with a small water gun, and my mind melds the two stories together.
Suddenly it’s him with the toy, not Tamir Rice, and my gut lurches to my chest as I try to shake the image of my own child lying facedown for no reason at all except that white supremacy still kills.
Imagination is a tool, and just like any other tool, it can be used to destroy or create.
If we let imagination feed our anxiety, it will cripple us.
But if we cultivate our imagination as a way to feed and grow our empathy, we can build relationships and forge new paths to our neighbors. We can love.
“If left unchecked, our what-ifs can make us run from the world, but the opposite can also be true: Our what-ifs can help us run toward the world instead.”
The ability to hear something, immediately conjure up a mental image, and hold it there can be a gift – because it can lead us to empathy.
If left unchecked, our what-ifs can make us run from the world, but the opposite can also be true:
Our what-ifs can help us run toward the world instead.
What if it were my child who was sick, cold, and alone? How would love bring healing?
What if I were struggling to pay the mortgage and buy groceries? How would love show me God’s generosity?
What if I were caught in the cycle of addiction? How might love set me free?
What if I lost my husband to violence? How would love grieve with me?
What if I were being persecuted by authority figures? How would love fight for justice?
What if everywhere I looked, doors were being slammed in my face? How would love open them?
Imagination has the power to cultivate empathy when we can picture ourselves inside someone else’s story or situation.
Maybe this is part of the reason Jesus so often taught in parables. He wanted His listeners to see the world in a new way—through the eyes of another.
“Imagination has the power to cultivate empathy when we can picture ourselves inside someone else’s story or situation.”
If the greatest commandment Christ gives us is to love God and love our neighbors, it makes sense that His teaching style would use stories rather than abstract principles.
When crowds grumbled about Jesus eating with tax collectors and others they considered undesirables, Jesus didn’t look them in the eye and say, “Here’s the principle: every human being is valuable and matters to God.”
He told them a story about one lost sheep and a shepherd who left the ninetynine to find the one.
He told them about a woman losing a coin in her home and turning the whole place upside down to get it back.
He painted a word picture of a son who betrays his father, squanders his inheritance, and hits rock bottom, but is still welcomed home by a father who runs out to embrace him.
What parent can’t picture themselves in that story? As a mom, I know that there is nothing my children could do to make me not love them.
“Maybe this is part of the reason Jesus so often taught in parables. He wanted His listeners to see the world in a new way—through the eyes of another.”
When Jesus saw the selfrighteousness of religious authorities who heaped judgment and scorn on others, He told the story of a humble tax collector.
When His own disciples wanted to put a limit on forgiveness, He told them the story of a servant who owed his master an enormous sum of money.
When the servant couldn’t pay, the master ordered him sold along with his wife and children. But the servant fell to his knees, begging forgiveness and grace. The master had compassion on him and forgave the debt.
The servant then went to his fellow servant who owed him a small amount of money and tried to beat it out of him, refused him mercy, and had him thrown in jail.
The imagery is enough. We get that one is wrong and the other right. We feel disgust and anger at the hypocrisy of the unforgiving servant—and this is the point.
Our empathy peaks, and we instinctively understand how to love our neighbors better.
“We need to let our minds wander deeper into the myriad of possibilities and struggles and emotions and needs and choices that could happen in the land of what if.”
And when a lawyer looks for a loophole by asking, “Who is my neighbor?”, Jesus tells the story of a man beaten and left for dead, and how two men pass Him by but a third does not.
The Samaritan gives of his time, his money, his donkey, his clothing, his shelter, and his friendship.
The story stirs something in our hearts, and we know deep down, even before we read the next words in the story, what the answer is to the lawyer’s question.
We know who our neighbor is.
Imagination has guided us through to empathy.
We need to let our minds wander deeper into the myriad of possibilities and struggles and emotions and needs and choices that could happen in the land of what if.
And then, we get to let our imagination lead us into greater empathy for one another, which propels us into the arms and homes and lives of our neighbors, allowing us to love them as we love ourselves.
Lauren Casper is the author of Loving Well in a Broken World and It’s Okay About It. She is an advocate, speaker, and amateur baker. Lauren is the founder of the popular blog laurencasper.com and has had numerous articles syndicated by the Huffington Post, the TODAY Show, Yahoo! News, and several other publications.
Christians are called to love our neighbors as ourselves, but we often don’t know how, especially today. How do we love our neighbors when we’re afraid of stepping on toes or don’t know how to connect? Lauren has found that the effective path to loving others is through the lost art of empathy.
In Loving Well in a Broken World: Discover the Hidden Power of Empathy, Lauren helps us tear down our pride and overcome our fear to choose empathy over apathy and judgement. Through storytelling and vulnerability, she empowers us to discover the surprising and beautiful places empathy might lead us.
[ Our humble thanks to Thomas Nelson for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
February 17, 2020
Celebrating in the Midst
After surviving a catastrophic brainstem stroke when she was just 26 years old, Katherine and her husband Jay have dedicated their second-chance life to boldly disrupting the myth that joy can only be found in a pain-free life. As an advocate, speaker, author, and mother navigating the world with both significant disabilities and significant joy, Katherine poignantly embodies what it looks like to fully lean into a good/hard life. She and Jay have paid a precious price for their wisdom and insights, and seek to generously share their experience of a life awakened to its own broken-down but miraculous nature. It’s a grace to welcome Katherine to the farm’s front porch today…
I remember the monogrammed linen sheets we were given for our wedding.
I remember unpacking them when we moved into our married housing dorm at Pepperdine. These feel too nice, I thought. My old T-shirt sheets feel a bit more suited for this season of our lives.
So I took those new sheets and put them on the top shelf of our closet for safekeeping. One day, when we move into a real house, I’ll use those on our bed, I thought expectantly.
“It would be almost nine months before I slept in something other than a hospital bed.”
Two and a half years later, those sheets would still be lying in the top of the closet, just where I left them, while I was on a stretcher dying.
As the paramedics raced me out of the dorm, our first home, the door would slam shut on that chapter of our lives.
I never saw that place again.
And it would be almost nine months before I slept in something other than a hospital bed.
Jay retrieved those special monogrammed sheets and put them on the bed at our first “real house” near my brain rehab facility. I got to sleep on them, against all odds, but why in the world did I wait?
My wise friend Sarah learned about celebrating “in the midst of” before I did.
I’ll always remember when she called with the news of her dad’s unexpected diagnosis, which hit their tight knit family hard.
But what they did next is something I’d never heard done before. They threw a “tribulation party” in their home that very night.
This impromptu gathering was full of good food and friends, laughs and tears.
And the prayer throughout was thank you. Their gratitude was not for the cancer, of course, but they were thankful to have a God who wouldn’t leave them to face cancer alone.
“Worship in its purest form doesn’t happen when everything comes perfectly together; it’s most powerful when everything is falling apart.”
Sarah’s dad eventually survived his illness and they threw an epic party to commemorate it.
But I guarantee they’ll never forget that first party, thrown in the midst, when they lifted up the God who would never abandon them.
Celebration isn’t so different from worship.
This is where the line starts to blur between party and pulpit.
Our worship should be celebratory, so our celebrations should be worshipful. And they are because we’re all worshiping something—ourselves, our futures, our pasts, the outcomes that give us more of what we think will make us happy.
But worship in its purest form doesn’t happen when everything comes perfectly together; it’s most powerful when everything is falling apart.
Inspired by my friend’s tribulation party, I hosted a group of friends to gather around my table for a “brokenness brunch.”
What was interesting about the guests at my brunch was that we all shared the experience of living in a current season of great pain, but we had very different circumstances.
One friend was on the verge of bankruptcy. Another had four kids, including one with severe disabilities. Another one had a mother with ongoing mental illness, and the last friend was in the middle of a nasty divorce and custody battle.
“When you look another human in the eyes and see how they’ve found strength in the face of their suffering, it makes you sit up with a little more hope.”
Wow, this sounds like quite the Instagram-worthy Sunday Funday, cheersing with the picture-perfect besties, right? Not quite.
But it ended up being more satisfying than any surface-y brunchy-poo ever could be, because realizing you’re not the only one in pain lifts some of the weight off your shoulders.
When you look another human in the eyes and see how they’ve found strength in the face of their suffering, it makes you sit up with a little more hope. Just maybe this will happen for you too.
And there’s no greater way to turn a pity party into a praise party than perspective.
As hard as our stuff is, we realize it could be harder. Plus, being spurred to use some of our own prayers to pray for someone else’s hurts is part of the answer to the prayers we’ve been praying for ourselves.
When I think about the healing celebrations that often happen around a table, I can’t help but think of our own table, the same one my friends and I sat around for brunch.
It’s oak and rustic and round, so no one’s at the head and everyone’s equally close to everyone else. It has scratches and permanent reminders of our children’s giftedness at drawing with Sharpies.
To this day, it’s the place where we spend most of our time together as a family. It’s the heart of our home. Ironically, Jay purchased this table after he was told by my swallowing therapist that I would likely never eat food again!
Maybe as some sort of act of defiance against this very real possibility or as an act of defiant celebration in the midst of it, he went out and bought our big beautiful table.
In some ways, it seemed like a painful reminder of a “never gonna happen” future.
“Celebration can be an act of worship and an act of hope and perhaps, in a way, an act of joyful rebellion against fear.”
But after nearly a year of almost daily swallowing therapy, I was finally given the green light to eat again. There have been few more healing experiences in my life than gathering around that table, eating a feast, and watching my family be nourished and loved.
It symbolized a party that never should have happened but now happens every day.
Jay and I no longer celebrate desired outcomes that may or may not happen in the way we envision.
But we do celebrate because, if we wait, we just might wait until it’s too late to celebrate at all.
Celebration can be an act of worship and an act of hope and perhaps, in a way, an act of joyful rebellion against fear.
It’s about remembering our future.
It’s about believing that even if our plates are empty for a while, we’ll still have a table to place them on until they can be filled again.
At the age of 26, Katherine Wolf suffered a massive brain stem stroke that nearly ended her life. Against all the odds, she survived. Now, Katherine and her husband Jay are advocates, speakers, authors and founders of the non-profit ministry, Hope Heals.
Their new book Suffer Strong: How to Survive Anything by Redefining Everything offers readers hard won lessons and practical insights from their experience of redefining suffering as a privilege rather than a punishment.
I’m telling you, once you read it you will be forever changed.
[ Our humble thanks to Zondervan for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
February 15, 2020
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [02.15.20]
Happy, happy, happy weekend!
Some real, down in the bones JOY to celebrate today! Links & stories this week 100% guaranteed to make you smile a mile wide & believe like crazy in a Good God redeeming everything — and that there’s love everywhere & for ((you))!
Serving up only the Good Stuff for you & your people right here:
Jessica Walker
Jessica Walker
Jessica Walker
Jessica Walker
Jessica Walker
because sometimes you just long for a very long quiet walk…
wide-eyed at this one: Mudskippers: The Fish That Walk on Land
Want to Fall in Love All Over Again?
All the practical tools, keys and real-life secrets right here:
Project: REIGNITE
Marriage is for the wounded brave who keep battling toward each other —
instead of battling with each other
Let’s take these small, doable steps and do this together:
Your marriage is worth it.
Each day, for the next 5 days, I’ll email you a doable, practical tool that will not only give you a fresh vision for your marriage, but move your heart toward your partner — and falling in love all over again.
This is for a limited time! Sign ups end Sunday Midnight EST! Share with a friend!
Because life’s too short to miss out on being in a relationship where you are consciously being fully seen, truly known, deeply safe.
PROJECT: REIGNITE. COME FALL IN LOVE AGAIN.
so many tears at this… a jaw dropping story
go hug the ones you love
A Couple’s Final Words to Each Other Accidentally Recorded
so this upcoming 4,000-Mile Trail? Will Let People Bike Across The U.S. on One Path!
so they’re sharing their secrets for longevity
as they celebrate their 80th Valentine’s Day as a married couple
come to a village where everyone skis
these stories prove that age is just a number
“My feeling at age 92 is that I’m just so happy to be alive and my prayer every day is ‘Thank you God for letting me be alive and enjoy life…’ ”
where I’ll be in the months ahead, Lord willing. It would be a grace to meet you…
so yeah, we gathered ’round this one – maybe you too?
standing ovation at this idea: Free student store at this high school addresses a growing need
#BeTheGift #TheBrokenWay
amazed right here: Businessman who surprised students with free tuition says don’t call it a “gift”
How Do I Let Go of Anger over Past Wrongs?
exhale: glory, glory, glory
Do you struggle to pray? Do you ever wonder if God is listening?
When things aren’t okay, I honestly don’t know a wiser, more life-giving, Jesus-clinging guide than Sheila Walsh…
When You Need to Hear That you are Not Alone
words of truth: John Piper reads Romans 8
YES: a program designed to give people struggling with additions a 2nd chance
“There’s clinical evidence that when people apply their hands to a task that demands concentration, it actually begins to re-wire the brain. We think of it more as a hedge against recidivism.”
tears… deeply moved at this
never, ever, give up
there is a difference between where you’ve been, what you’ve done and what has happened to you…
don’t miss these powerful truths here
Post of the week from these parts here:
… so now’s kinda a good week to know it in your bones: Everyone always marry wrong.
And this could be the most romantic thing of all (and honestly?
The gift you really want this week? Is our free e-series on How to Fall in Love all Over Again. Your heart is worth it:
How Real People Make (Real) Love
a thousand thank yous, Compassion International
Books for Soul Healing:
Joy is actually possible, right where you are.
Take the dare to discover: Life is not an emergency…Life is a GIFT.
Life is too short to do anything but truly savor it — to count all the ways you truly loved.
What if Brokenness is the Path into the Abundant Life?
You don’t have to be afraid of broken things — because Christ is redeeming everything.
There’s no other authentic way forward — but a broken way — right into a profoundly abundant life.
Journey into a deeply meaningful life with this devotional and take sixty steps from heart-weary brokenness to Christ-focused abundance. The Way of Abundance — is the way forward every heart needs.
Be the Gift is a tender intivation into the next step of deeper transformation, less stress, more joy and abundantly more peace & purpose. You only get one life to love well…to Be The Gift.
Come Thou Fount
February is here!
Maybe in this new month, easy, doable ideas for the whole family to Give It Forward Today — to be the G.I.F.T. Love is a verb and that verb is give. For God so loved the world — HE GAVE. You only have one life — to love well.
And just for you, when you grab the “Be the Gift” book? Your farm girl here will immediately email you your own gift of THE WHOLE 12 MONTH *Intentional* Acts of Givenness #BeTheGIFT Calendar link to download and print from home!
Love is a verb and that verb is give. For God so loved the world — HE GAVE. You only have one life — to love well.
Pick up #BeTheGIFT — Then receive your own #BeTheGIFT printable calendar by letting us know you picked up a copy of “Be the Gift” here
Love is a verb and that verb is give. For God so loved the world — HE GAVE. You only have one life — to love well.
Pick up Be The Gift & live the life you’ve longed to this year
on repeat this week: There is Good News
…so life has a million question marks — but you always have One Certainty:
You can be certain that God’s good work in you never stops, even when things look difficult.
You may be bone tired, but God never stops working tirelessly to make your soul a masterpiece.
“And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue His work until it is finally finished” … Philippians 1:6 (NLT)
Yep, you can count on it: everything little thing is going to be okay — because God is working good through every little thing. You are perfectly loved. It’s already more than okay — Jesus has got you.
[excerpted from our little Facebook family … come join us each day?]
That’s all for this weekend, friends.
Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth.
Give Thanks. Love well. Re – joy, re- joy, ‘re- joys’ again
Share Whatever Is Good.
February 13, 2020
How Real People Make (Real) Love
So yeah—- yeah, our mattress sags in the middle.
You can see it, even when the sheets are pulled up taut, how the springs at the centre have been flattened by the sheer weight of glory.
This is a man and a woman becoming one.
Some would say this has been boring, this every day love of us.
Joy Prouty
It’s been decades of this, happening after the days, us there in the dark:
We roll to the middle of the mattress, you and I, finding each other in the valleys.
Who knew that every valley is being held in the valley of cupped hands?
“Who knew that every valley is being held in the valley of cupped hands?”
There have been too many of those valleys to count.
The nights after funerals, after burying people we loved in the earth. We clung quiet to each other in the middle, the springs sagging silently under us, the words scraped raw from the sides of us.
The dark he cupped me through after my heart had been sledge-hammered and I couldn’t seem to pull all the shards out.
He said the scars became me — that they had made me become.
I forgot to shave my legs. He said it never mattered. My waist thickened and rolled and softened, stretch-marked thin over this love of ours that grew me larger with all these kids.
My sagging, rounded mother body wears it like a badge: I’ve surrendered to love in a thousand ways.
And he’d pull all of me close. Whisper it there warm at the nape of my neck, tell me that I’m your trophy bride: we’ve won real love and wear the battled age to prove it.
And yeah, sure, we’ve felt it too, in the hollow of some awful nights, laying there in the middle of the mattress, in our own valley of dry bones:
We married wrong.
Don’t buy what anybody else is selling: Everyone always marry wrong.
Because what’s wrong in the world is always us.
Marriage and love and time, these are the enormous forces that inevitably chisel and change us into strangers. The springs sag. Mattresses sigh. Marriage changes us into strangers who have to meet and introduce each other to love all over again.
None of us ever know whom we marry.
And falling in love never made anyone angels… it’s only made it clear how far we’ve fallen.
Who we say ‘I do’ to — is not who we roll over to touch twenty years later.
“The challenge for the vows is to fall in love with the stranger to whom you find yourself married.”
The challenge for the vows is to fall in love with the stranger to whom you find yourself married.
The vows are a vow to make the new stranger you’ve been long married to — know the intimacy of old love everyday.
This is the only way we become married to the right people.
And he has been smacked by my flaws, slack-jawed by my flaws, and it ain’t been Hallmark pretty. It’s been holy. You’d think after a lifetime of Sunday sermons I would have known that this is what real love always does— goes to hell and back for each other.
The real romantics know that stretchmarks are beauty marks, and that different shaped women fit into the different shapes of men souls, and that real romance is really sacrifice.
So Hallmark and Hollywood can position their glossy anyway they’d like, but the guy buying chocolates for the lady who lost it with him last week (that would be him and I), well, we can see right through it:
Love without Truth isn’t reality— it’s sentimentality.
And Truth without Love isn’t sustainable —- it’s terminal.
Real Love truthfully sees the flaws — and still really loves fully.
“Real Love truthfully sees the flaws — and still really loves fully.”
Love isn’t blind — Love is the only way of really seeing. There are men who have loved women real.
Men who have been brave and let themselves love. Which means they’ve let theirs hearts be busted and banged up and this has kept them tenderized and soft.
What else would have kept us alive and real and from growing hard?
No one tells us that at the beginning:
The moment you let love into your heart, your heart starts breaking. The only way to stop your heart from breaking is to stop your heart from loving. You always get to choose: either a hard heart or a broken heart.
A broken heart is really an abundant heart — all those many beautiful pieces only evidence of an abundant life.
We could promise each other — to carry the abundant, shattered hearts carefully — full of care.
“The reward of loving is in the loving; loving is itself the great outcome of loving.”
This is Gospel, this is what Christ did: Make yourself vulnerable, and you make yourself irresistible. This is what Love does.
The reward of loving is in the loving; loving is itself the great outcome of loving.
The success of loving is in how we change because we kept on loving – regardless of any thing else changing.
The value of loving is in the value of being like Christ.
So after he’s been up before 5 am, fed a couple hundred mama sows, taken care of more than a couple of hundred baby pigs, loaded a truck of wheat, blown out the farmyard of snow, picked up groceries when he’s got tractor parts in town, worked in the barn tonight till after 7:30, after he’s read from 2 Timothy to us around the dinner table —
I slip back into the kitchen after fitting clean sheets on a bed, to find him standing there at the sink.
Standing there doing up the last of the pots and pans.
I could weep for a quiet love like this, the kind of love they don’t write movies about, but the Maker writes down in a book of His own.
Joy Prouty
Ours is not the kind of flashy love that makes any red carpet, but it’s the kind of unforgettable love that runs red.
It doesn’t matter one iota what the checkout glossies tout: Sacrifice is the most attractive of all.
“Sacrifice is the most attractive of all.”
And boring love is what touches the deepest– our lives boring down deep into each other’s hearts.
And there are women who have loved men as the hero-of-few-words who have rescued them day in and day out, without any fanfare or flash.
There are men and women who have lived and bore the weight of it: “I am far worse than I ever dreamed. And yet you have loved me beyond what I could ever dream. You have lived Gospel to me.”
It’s happening without any headlines: our hearts are quietly boring into each other, us just letting our fingers find each other, our eyes linger. Boring love is what drills wells that taste like wine.
So yeah, yeah — so what if the mattress sags and gives way in the centre? The self-centredness of the two giving way to this rolling down into the middle and into a glorious one.
You and I entangled in these romanced cotton sheets of an old and practiced grace.
Want to Fall in Love All Over Again?
All the practical tools, keys and real-life secrets right here:
Project: REIGNITE
Marriage is for the wounded brave who keep battling toward each other —
instead of battling with each other
Let’s take these small, doable steps and do this together:
Your marriage is worth it.
Each day, for the next 5 days, I’ll email you a doable, practical tool that will not only give you a fresh vision for your marriage, but move your heart toward your partner — and falling in love all over again.
Because life’s too short to miss out on being in a relationship where you are consciously being fully seen, truly known, deeply safe.
PROJECT: REIGNITE. COME FALL IN LOVE AGAIN.
February 10, 2020
When You Need to Hear That You Are Not Alone
I’ve wept with this woman. Prayed with this woman. Laughed loud with this woman and served alongside her. I’ve been changed by the heart of this woman for Jesus. Couldn’t love her more. Her passionate commitment is to simply and powerfully allow the light of Christ to shine through the broken places of her story. Sheila Walsh doesn’t merely write words, she lives her words — and the Word. When things aren’t okay, I honestly don’t know a wiser, more life-giving, Jesus-clinging guide than Sheila Walsh. Do you struggle to pray? Do you ever wonder if God is listening? It’s a grace to welcome Sheila to the farm’s front porch as she reminds us that we are seen, we are known and we are loved…
It’s the simplest things in life that expose my brokenness. I can stand on a platform and speak to 20,000 people and not be nervous at all.
I know why they’re there. They’re there because they want God to touch them.
I am simply the earthly vessel that holds the hope.
But, put me in front of a photographer and I’m not so comfortable.
I still see myself in many ways as the shame-filled overweight teenage girl with bad skin and greasy hair, and instead of helping her out, I sabotage her efforts with two of my friends, Ben and Jerry.
Have you ever done that? It’s almost like we’re afraid to let ourselves win.
Instead, over and over, we set ourselves up to fail. Then we get mad at ourselves and pick up that overcoat of shame that’s never far out of reach.
The truth remains, God is not mad at you and that overcoat doesn’t belong to you. Jesus wore it on the Cross.
In the spring of 2019 my husband Barry and I drove to a little town in Texas for a photo shoot for the cover of my new book. I’d never met the photographer, but I’d seen pictures of the place where we’d be shooting.
“I was reminded of how God sees me, loved, chosen, bought with the greatest price anyone has ever paid for anything. That truth is hard to keep hold of in our broken world.”
It was a large white barn that’s usually used for weddings. That morning, our local weather guy predicted the worst storms we’d had in Texas all year. He said we’d see hail stones the size of baseballs.
I saw that as an out and suggested to Barry that we reschedule the shoot. He suggested that I get in the car.
The drive took a little less time than we thought it would, so we arrived before the photographer and the rest of the team. While Barry was unloading some things from the car, I went inside.
It took my breath away. It looked more like a church than a barn. All the wood was painted white. It had high ceilings and was flooded with natural light from the windows. Barry had brought a white chair from home and he sat it in the middle of the room while he went back to the car to take a phone call.
There was silence in the room and for a moment the sun burst through the rain clouds casting a golden glow on the white chair sitting in the middle of this vast, empty space and, in my spirit, I heard my Father say, “Come and sit for a while.”
He had been waiting all along. I sat there, warmed by the sun, remembering who my Father is. “Be still and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10
As I sat on the chair that day in the stillness, my insecurity took a back seat. I was reminded of how God sees me, loved, chosen, bought with the greatest price anyone has ever paid for anything.
That truth is hard to keep hold of in our broken world.
I’ve watched others struggle in a million ways.
I didn’t see her until they put the lights up in the church for the morning break.
“Jesus came for those who sit in the back row crying out, ‘Be merciful to me, a sinner.'”
The church was full apart from the back row on the left where one woman sat alone. Later that day, I saw her again.
She was sitting on a bench outside the church. I’d slipped out of a side door to get a little fresh air and, when I saw her, I walked over to where she sat and asked if I could join her.
She moved her purse and I sat down. We didn’t say anything for a few moments. Then she told me that she’d driven four hours to come to the conference.
I thanked her for coming and asked if there was no one who could have come with her and shared the drive. She smiled a sad little smile and said that she knew all the women in the front two rows. They were all from the church where she used to be a member.
I asked her why she wasn’t sitting with them. She took a deep breath and looked down at her feet. Her story is one I’ve heard over and over.
Slightly different circumstances but in essence the same story, broken choices.
“I’m not welcome where I am known,” she said. There’s a lot more to her story but it’s hers to tell, not mine.
As we sat on the bench that day, she allowed me to pray for her as she cried out to God for mercy.
I had the joy of reminding her that the one place where she is known and always welcomed is in the presence of her Father.
He is waiting, always waiting.
What troubled her the most was that she knew what she was doing was wrong when she did it and did it anyway. I reminded her, that’s why Jesus came.
“Don’t sit in the dark; let the light of God’s love in. He is waiting.”
Jesus didn’t give His life for those who feel they have the right to march right up to the front of the church and list off everything they’ve done right.
Jesus came for those who sit in the back row crying out, “Be merciful to me, a sinner.”
God is waiting for you. He is listening.
When you are in conversation with God, you in the safest place – a place where you can be fully vulnerable, known, and loved regardless.
Whether you find a quiet place in a closet, a walk in the woods, or perhaps you can put a chair right in the middle of the largest space in your home and sit there and let His love flow over you.
Don’t sit in the dark; let the light of God’s love in. He is waiting.
Come as you are. You are not alone. God is listening.
Sheila Walsh is a powerful communicator, Bible teacher, and bestselling author with more than five million books sold. She is the author of It’s Okay Not to Be Okay, Praying Women, and the award-winning Gigi, God’s Little Princess, among others. She is cohost of LIFE Today with James and Betty Robison, with more than 100 million viewers. Walsh is a popular speaker and Bible teacher around the world.
Do you ever find it hard to pray and don’t know what to say? Prayer is one of the most powerful, life-changing things we will ever do, and yet we often struggle. It’s hard to find the time. It’s repetitive, we get distracted and sometimes even bored. And the answers often feel few and far between. The good news? There is a simple, powerful way to reignite your conversation with God.
In Praying Women, bestselling author Sheila Walsh shares practical helps directly from God’s Word, showing you how to know what to say when you pray, understand how to use prayer as a weapon when you are in the midst of a struggle, pray as joy-filled warriors, not anxious worriers, and let go of the past and stand on God’s promises for you now
[ Our humble thanks to Baker for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
February 8, 2020
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [02.08.20]
Happy, happy, happy weekend!
Some real, down in the bones JOY to celebrate today! Links & stories this week 100% guaranteed to make you smile a mile wide & believe like crazy in a Good God redeeming everything — and that there’s love everywhere & for ((you))!
Serving up only the Good Stuff for you & your people right here:
Kyle Fredrickson
Kyle Fredrickson
Kyle Fredrickson
deep breathes and remember that great days happen wherever there is gratefulness
You teachers are heroes and soul shapers and generation strengtheners and we’re passing you down a cup of hot tea and all giving you a standing ovation!
oh my heart: high school track members finish last lap with student who has Down syndrome
he was coming in last, and the entire rest of the group ran back from the finish to cheer him on to the end
the wonder of it
need some encouragement? come see her story…
there is still time to join us TODAY: sign up to watch it live right here, for priceless hope!
... I mean, God shows off everywhere … #1000Gifts
so they’re saying – just 15 minutes of walking each day? Can do this…
this 61 yr old former logging elephant was rescued and brought to Elephants World to spend the rest of his days relaxing peacefully in freedom
so the Chiefs won the Super Bowl?! a few behind the scene stories here you may not have heard?
“The best place you can be in life is the center of God’s will…”
why is this grandfather crocheting? To help others feel loved… come see
so, yes: Scientists Show How Gratitude Literally Alters The Human Heart & Molecular Structure Of The Brain
“Joy is always possible as long as thanks is possible — and there is always, always, always something to be thankful for.” ~One Thousand Gifts
known and loved…just as you are
This woman volunteered to spend time with a lonely 90-year-old, then this happened #BeTheGift #TheBrokenWay
oh my heart: dads and braids and bonding
Preventing Maternal Suicide in a Land Healing From War
how we can help and pray…
Beyond grateful for the saving work of Compassion International
a story of inspiration and kindness… and playing it forward
The Inefficient Ministry of Motherhood
tears…you must come meet these boys and listen to their story
when someone believes in you…
this is just really really powerful
Post of the Week from these parts here
The Secret to Winning Your Battles (And about Soldiers & What They Really Need)
deep breath: glory, glory, glory
Books for Soul Healing:
Take the dare to discover: Life is not an emergency…Life is a GIFT.
Start counting gifts and find joy — right where you are.
What if Brokenness is the Path into the Abundant Life?
You don’t have to be afraid of broken things — because Christ is redeeming everything.
There’s no other authentic way forward — but a broken way.
Journey into a deeply meaningful life with this devotional and take sixty steps from heart-weary brokenness to Christ-focused abundance. The Way of Abundance — is the way forward every heart needs.
Let your brokenness be turned into abundance.
Be the Gift invites you into the next step of deeper transformation, less stress, more joy and abundantly more peace & purpose. You only get one life to love well…to Be The Gift.
Praise forever to the King of Kings
February is here!
Maybe in this new month, easy, doable ideas for the whole family to Give It Forward Today — to be the G.I.F.T. Love is a verb and that verb is give. For God so loved the world — HE GAVE. You only have one life — to love well.
And just for you, when you grab the “Be the Gift” book? Your farm girl here will immediately email you your own gift of THE WHOLE 12 MONTH *Intentional* Acts of Givenness #BeTheGIFT Calendar link to download and print from home!
Love is a verb and that verb is give. For God so loved the world — HE GAVE. You only have one life — to love well.
Pick up #BeTheGIFT — Then receive your own #BeTheGIFT printable calendar by letting us know you picked up a copy of “Be the Gift” here
Love is a verb and that verb is give. For God so loved the world — HE GAVE. You only have one life — to love well.
Pick up Be The Gift & live the life you’ve longed to this year
on repeat this week: Known
…if we knew what fire every single person is facing, there isn’t even one person we wouldn’t help fight their fire with the heat of a Greater Love.
So…no matter what’s ahead in your day — let’s kinda try this beautiful plan that could make the world a more beautiful place: “Help others get ahead…lend a helping hand.” Philippians 2:4MSG
Because the thing is? We aren’t here to one-up one another — but to help one another up.
The real hope of this new day is that it is the Lord helping you — with all the strength you need for the stretch of just. this. moment.
“Each of you should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms… Be generous with the different things God gave you, passing them around so all get in on it: if words, let it be God’s words; if help, let it be God’s hearty help.” 1 Peter 4:10 NIV, MSG.
[excerpted from our little Facebook family … come join us each day?]
That’s all for this weekend, friends.
Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth.
Give Thanks. Love well. Re – joy, re- joy, ‘re- joys’ again
Share Whatever Is Good.
February 7, 2020
The Mirror of Marriage: hope for every family
It’s so easy to get caught up in the idea of a worldly marriage. “Find someone who makes you happy” or “You deserve more”. It’s definitely not terrible to find a marriage that brings you utter joy and deep happiness, but when we focus on our relationship over Christ, we have it backwards. That’s why I’m so grateful for this not-too-common perspective on marriage from Dave Harvey. May we all be signposts that point to our heavenly Father in all aspects of our lives. It’s a grace to welcome Dave to the farm’s front porch today…
Okay, I’m going to say it now, and I want you to think about it. Are you ready?
The whole idea of family, in the way we experience it on earth, is only temporary.
There is a day coming when the concept of family will be swept up into a more glorious and satisfying arrangement.
Don’t let that make you nervous. What awaits us is far more magnificent.
“The whole idea of family, in the way we experience it on earth, is only temporary.”
One day the Sadducees tried to trick Jesus with a question about heaven. Jesus answered, “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30).
Jesus is not saying that because marriage isn’t eternal, it’s time to toss it on the trash heap. No, He’s telling us that something even better awaits.
In heaven there will be one glorious marriage between Christ and His bride, and that marriage will satisfy and complete every desire we’ve had for marriage on this earth.
In fact, the eternal marriage between Christ and the church is the very point for which marriage in this life exists.
Marriage on earth is a picture of that eternal reality.
It mirrors a higher purpose.
Levi Voskamp
“The eternal marriage between Christ and the church is the very point for which marriage in this life exists.”
Paul explains, “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:31–32).
In glory you will experience delight that far outweighs what you’ve experienced here and now.
If your spouse is there, it’s hardly a stretch to think you’ll experience heavenly delight in Christ along with your spouse—the one you’ve delighted in most in this life.
Being in heaven with your spouse will not be glorious because you go on being their mate; being in heaven will be glorious because together you will behold face-to-face the One to whom your marriage pointed.
In Pittsburgh, where I grew up, there is a beloved amusement park called Kennywood.
Back in the day, yellow Kennywood signs all around the ’Burgh pointed in the direction of what we believed to be the ultimate amusement experience—cotton candy, caramel apples, delicious treats.
Oh, and did I mention the roller coaster that would stop your heart and expel the candy you had just gobbled straight onto the coaster tracks?
Throwing up at Kennywood was a rite of passage, something to boast about in English class on Monday.
“In glory you will experience delight that far outweighs what you’ve experienced here and now.”
The Kennywood signs pointed people in the direction of our deep desires for amusement park pleasure, but the signs were not the reality.
Just imagine some poor kid sitting under a Kennywood sign, thinking that where he sat was all there was to Kennywood.
He’d be pretty misguided, wouldn’t you say?
The sign, of course, served another purpose. It pointed forward to something else—something that would fill that child with unexpected joys.
When sinners say “I do” in this life, they become signposts pointing to the relationship with the Bridegroom, Jesus Christ.
Once we arrive in heaven, the signs are no longer necessary.
They are caught up into something more amazing than any amusement park—the marriage of Christ and the church.
What’s true of marriage is true of family.
“Please know that what God is preparing for you is not simply a family reboot.“
Earthly families will be swept up into a greater reality—the body of Christ.
This is not to say our believing family members will become strangers in the new earth. “Do I know you? You look vaguely familiar. Were we friends on Facebook?”
Rather, as Rob Plummer writes, “If our children stand beside us in eternity, it will not be as our children but as our blood-redeemed brothers and sisters.”
It’s not so much that we lose our old family but that we gain a new family—a larger eternal one.
Right now family serves an earthly purpose. But the day will come when it will be transformed into a glorious experience that is multiplied and magnified by the larger family to which we are united.
As Randy Alcorn has said, “God usually doesn’t replace His original creation, but when He does, He replaces it with something that is far better, never worse.”
Many people have horrible experiences with their families.
If the whole concept of family calls to mind brokenness and pain, memories that elicit deep shame, or something from which you had to flee, please know that what God is preparing for you is not simply a family reboot.
“There is a future awaiting you where memories of grief will pass.”
Rather, it’s what family should have been all along—only more glorious.
Your next home will be led by a perfect Father and occupied by new brothers and sisters who have shed the scales of sin.
There is a future awaiting you where the memories of grief will pass.
My prayer is that the idea of having your broken family swept up into a new church family—even in this life—will be joyful news for you.
And I pray that as you walk in community with God’s people, you’ll find hope in the Father of love, who longs to one day bring you into a new home where you will no longer know suffering or pain.
Dave Harvey serves as the president of Great Commission Collective. He pastored for thirty-three years, serves on the board of CCEF, and travels widely across networks and denominations as a popular conference speaker. Dave is the author of I Still Do; Am I Called?; and Rescuing Ambition; and a coauthor of Letting Go: Rugged Love for Wayward Souls.
Lasting marriages are built one defining moment at a time. The moment of blame. The moment of weakness. When your spouse suffers. When dreams disappoint. When the kids leave the nest. It’s how we think and behave toward one another in moments like these that determines whether our marriage endures or falters. Ultimately, these are invitations from God to consider our direction and pursue transformation.
With 37 years of marriage and 33 years of pastoring under his belt, in I Still Do, Dave Harvey has identified those life-defining moments of a post-newlywed marriage. He wants to help couples recognize them in their own relationships so that they can take a proactive, godly approach to resolving conflicts, holding one another up as change inevitably happens, and ensuring that their marriage survives and thrives.
Whether your relationship is maturing gracefully, just needs a tune-up, or you and your spouse are locked in conflict and your future seems uncertain, Dave Harvey has encouragement and practical tools to help strengthen what remains and build a rock-solid union for the days to come.
[ Our humble thanks to Baker for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
February 5, 2020
The Secret to Winning Your Battles (And about Soldiers & What They Really Need)
What does it look like to be practice gratitude in the midst of the heat of the battle? Literally. Whether your battle is under your roof, or in your relationships, or with your health, or with some painfully challenging circumstances — you need to hear from this man, Adam. Adam is an Army Chaplain and works with REBOOT Recovery. REBOOT Recovery exists to help veterans, first responders and their families heal from the moral and spiritual wounds associated with a service-related trauma — and Adam reached out to me with these powerful words about one man facing battles — who learned the life-changing power of gratitude after reading One Thousand Gifts. It’s a grace to welcome Adam to the farm’s front porch today…
The heat was different than before. As a military chaplain in Iraq, I had experienced higher overall temperatures, but this was different.
It may have been the combination of the desert dust, stress, body armor, and nervous expectation.
“There are places in life where it takes time to get to where we are going.”
Or maybe it was the pure boredom wrapped in the tension of what may come. I don’t know.
All I know is I was concealed with 40 guys in a far flung military outpost few had ever heard of, an outpost whose existence wasn’t recognized until a year later.
There are places in life where it takes time to get to where we are going. To get to my troops was no different.
This trip took four plane rides, almost a dozen hours in a convoy of SUV’s, and over a week to get there.
I only stayed for about twenty-four hours.
But those twenty-four hours impacted the rest of my life due to a deep, yet light conversation – a conversation that placed a word forever on my heart and into my skin: “eucharisteo.”
At about midnight, resting against a cement barrier, I was exhausted. Two of my favorite Soldiers walked up, sat down with me, and we caught up on life.
“Eucharisteo – thanksgiving – always precedes the miracle.” ~One Thousand Gifts
We shared what was going on at home. The younger of the two had just found a facebook message from his fiancé back home. She broke off the engagement. Too much time away. Too much distance. She decided to move on.
We hurt with him. He saw her message earlier that day, and it was already 3 weeks old. We sat with him in the dirt and mourned his loss.
But, there was something deeper going on within him – he knew where he was at and the impact it would have on history. It was worth it. The cost of this relationship was worth it to him. It allowed him to drop a pebble into the pond of history and his ripple could be felt.
We sat there, in that moon dust, and all felt something – it may have the realization of a holy moment or an awkward silence – we were restless.
“Joy is always possible as long as thanks is possible — and there is always, always, always something to be thankful for.” ~One Thousand Gifts
I brought up a book I was reading. I brought up “eucharisteo.” I had heard of the word “eucharist,” but never thought much of it its root word or Greek origin. Whenever I thought “eucharist,” I thought of the Catholic Church.
Being a Non-Denominational Chaplain I didn’t realize what it meant beyond the bread and the cup of communion. But Ann Voskamp, the author of One Thousand Gifts, changed all that for me.
She talks about the word meaning “to be grateful, feel thankful,” and “give thanks.”
While I was in the Middle East, the theme of continual gratitude was constantly in front of me.
I asked those Soldiers what they were thankful for.
“Oh man, that ice today was great! It was the first time in a month we’ve had something cold!” Gratitude.
Then the other piped up. “I got to take a shower today – first one in a week and a half.” Thankfulness.
“These guys taught me a lesson I didn’t know I needed to learn. They taught me the simplicity of gratitude in all circumstances.”
Earlier, we had celebrated half of this duo’s birthday. When I had arrived at the outpost, I gave him a package. It was a gift from his family back home.
He shared it with his Army family. This gift had a rooted, yet simple connection, to home. At any other point in life our drink that was shared would’ve tasted below average.
Here, in this place, not far from Nineveh – THE Nineveh – we gulped down the lukewarmness. As we all enjoyed it, he smiled with a look of fully present gratitude on his face. Fully present gratitude in the midst of a war.
The deep black of the Iraqi sky and the dusty mountain range that loomed in the distance will forever be imprinted in my memory along with the depth of gratitude these men displayed that night.
These guys taught me a lesson I didn’t know I needed to learn.
They taught me the simplicity of gratitude in all circumstances.
“Rise to whatever comes to you, go to wherever you’re sent, give however your soul knows how, and give thanks whenever you breathe.” ~One Thousand Gifts
A small conversation transformed into a holy moment. The genuine thanksgiving for a cool drink and the heartfelt gratitude for a 3 minute shower made me realize how much I overlook God’s good gifts to me – no matter how simple or elaborate they are.
I closed my eyes and silently thanked God for placing me in this desert, in this physical place with such deep and rich history, to share in “eucharisteo” with them.
We sat for about an hour more, talking and listening. Listening to each other, to the silence of the mountains, and to the holy moment Holy Spirit led us into.
These were no longer boys, but men with a perspective of deep gratitude. Men who could never go back to being the same as when they had left home months before.
Men hardened by war, but who understood deeply one of the greatest lessons to learn: in all situations remain thankful. It’s real. And it’s powerful.
“Men hardened by war, but who understood deeply one of the greatest lessons to learn: in all situations remain thankful. It’s real. And it’s powerful.”
Later that year, we landed back in the United States and were corralled into a large room. We were instructed to turn around and walk down a hallway where there were coffee, donuts, and a taste of home waiting for us.
I turned around to face a set of double doors and walked through. Instantly I was greeted by Vietnam vets, brothers from another war. These same men were not welcomed home, yet here they were for us.
They paid a huge cost for our country and were rebuked for it, spit on, chastised, and poisoned by Agent Orange. They arrived deep in the middle of the night, well before sunrise – to welcome us home. To give us what was never given to them.
I heard the words, “You did it! You made it back!” “Well done!” “We are here for you!” “Welcome home, brother!”
They hugged us, shook our hands, and their wives kissed us on our cheeks.
They looked at us with eyes of compassion, but also eyes that understood where we’d been and what we had experienced. They smiled with sincerity in a way you’d have to see to understand.
I thought, “I bet this is what walking into Heaven will be like.”
I was choked up and tears of joy and sadness began to trickle down my face.
Joy for being home and experiencing this. Sadness because my dad is a Vietnam vet.
“Even as I write this, my heart is stirred with deep gratitude. I am thankful for the men and women who will stand and protect us, and our country – no matter the personal cost to them.”
His brothers – our brothers – gave me what he never received: a welcome home. Something new – something very deep – to be thankful for.
Even as I write this, my heart is stirred with deep gratitude. I am thankful for the men and women who will stand and protect us, and our country – no matter the personal cost to them.
They go on behalf of a nation, not a government. They go on behalf of us all, the citizens, not the politicians.
Like my friends, many service men and women lose fiancés and spouses in breakups and divorces. Many have missed their children’s birthdays and major holiday traditions with their families – for years.
Many have lost their limbs or their lives. Even worse, many more have taken their own lives because of the rejection, sadness, and depression that overwhelmed them as they return to America.
It seems that you lose a part of your heart on every deployment and it’s hard to put it back together.
The next time you encounter one of my brothers or sisters in the military, and feel a nudge to express your gratitude towards them, I want to challenge you to say more than just, “Thank you for your service!”
Hearing your “why” reminds a veteran that it is all worth it.
“Gratitude, in spite of all circumstance turns our broken and beat up hearts back to the safe place of faith in the Giver.”
Take a moment now, to ask yourself questions like — Why are you thankful to live in a free country? What freedoms do you usually overlook or take for granted?
Then, if you say thank you, tell them why you’re specifically thankful to live in this free country, that they’ve sacrificed so much in their own life for.
It means more than you know.
My life is forever changed in a variety of ways due to military service, but the most important thing I learned from my time as an Army Chaplain is how to live in a deeper state of being grateful, feeling thankful, and giving thanks.
In a state of “eucharisteo.”
Gratitude, in spite of all circumstance turns our broken and beat up hearts back to the safe place of faith in the Giver.
It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.
Adam is based on the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He is focused on helping others heal from the wounds of trauma, learning to enjoy life, and an amateur woodworker. Adam continues to serve as a Michigan Army National Guard Chaplain and works for REBOOT Recovery. REBOOT’s (@rebootrecovery) mission is to help others heal from service related trauma and beyond. All opinions are completely the authors and are not the opinion of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, or state or federal governments.
Books for Soul Healing:
Take the dare to discover: Life is not an emergency…Life is a GIFT.
Start counting gifts and find joy — right where you are.
What if Brokenness is the Path into the Abundant Life?
You don’t have to be afraid of broken things — because Christ is redeeming everything.
There’s no other authentic way forward — but a broken way.
Journey into a deeply meaningful life with this devotional and take sixty steps from heart-weary brokenness to Christ-focused abundance. The Way of Abundance — is the way forward every heart needs.
Let your brokenness be turned into abundance.
Be the Gift invites you into the next step of deeper transformation, less stress, more joy and abundantly more peace & purpose. You only get one life to love well…to Be The Gift.
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