Michele Cushatt's Blog, page 4

Advent Week 3: JOY In His Presence

For many, Christmas is a season of incomparable joy. A tree filled with lights, a church filled with music, a home filled with family, children’s faces filled with joy. And yet, for many others, Christmas is a season of loneliness and losses, a reminder of longings yet unrealized. Advent, these weeks leading up to Christmas and marked by a liturgical calendar, is less about current joy and more about anticipating thejoy of what is yet to come. In celebration of Advent this year, I’m sharing a...

Advent Week 2: Trusting In His Presence

More than merely remembering, Advent is also about anticipating, living in the tension of what is and what will be—the Second Coming, when Jesus returns. Whereas Lent focuses on fasting and repentance, Advent centers around prayers of expectation, a desperate people living in darkness who pray in expectation for the coming of the Light. Each week for the month of December, I’m sharing a focus scripture as well as an excerpt of Relentless: The Unshakeable Presence of a God Who Never Leaves ...

Advent Week 1: The HOPE of His Presence

For the month of December, I will be focusing on Advent, the four weeks preceding Christmas Day. During Advent, Christians all over the world remember the arrival of the Incarnation, God’s presence with us in the flesh-and-blood of a newborn baby—Jesus. Whereas Lent focuses on fasting and repentance, Advent centers around prayers of waiting, a desperate people living in darkness who pray in hopeful expectation for the coming of the Light. Each week I will share a focus scripture as well as an...

A Life-giving Kind of Remembering

It was 5 years ago today. November 25, 2014. The day the battle began.

It started with surgery, a surgery that would leave me marked in a way I didn’t yet comprehend. All I knew is that I didn’t have any other options. All my other options had been exhausted in the years before, and none worked. My best chance at life was six-month dance with death.

Of course, I had no way of understanding the long-term cost.

In some cases, ignorance really is bliss.

For the last twenty-four hours I’ve been...

Fresh Conversations About Faith & Suffering

It’s been my (often painful) experience that too-few people of faith engage in transparent conversations around faith and suffering. Our Christian Living Bookshelves don’t often have much to offer in the way of helping the truth-seeker who is desperate to overcome their big questions and dogged doubts. Thank heavens for people like Philip Yancey, Timothy Keller, Joni Eareckson Tada, Henri Nouwen and others. Their words, combined with God’s word, made a major difference in my faith. This is, in part, my...

ANNOUNCING! Relentless: The Unshakeable Presence of a God Who Never Leaves

“I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

I’ll never forget the day I finally said those words out loud. I sat outside, on the deck in our backyard. The sun was shining, but I couldn’t shake the cold that had set in my bones.

My husband didn’t know what to say. Neither did I.

What’s a girl to do when her last hope—her faith—turns fragile?

It’s been a few years since that day on the deck. Remembering still makes my heart ache. Yesterday, I told a friend this story. She responded simply: “You crawled your way back...hope—herclass="p1">What’s

When Pain Feels Close and God Feels Far

It was a question I never dreamed I’d ask. But that was before. Before life pulled the rug out from under my easy faith. Afterwards? All I could feel was my own pain. And God himself seemed far away.

“I’ve now come to recognize the near-universality of the “Where is God?” question. It is a question asked in the day and the night, by skeptics and believers alike. Behind the question sits a fear more crushing than any other pain:

 

The fear of being alone.

 

Although both physical pain and relational p...alone.

Thepain:

The Reason We Dance

He approached me at my book table after a speaking engagement. A young guy, maybe mid-thirties, clean-cut and professional. He stood in line behind a half-dozen others. When he made it to the front, I threw out my hand and smiled.

“Hi, there. I’m Michele. Nice to meet you!”

He must’ve offered his name, but I don’t remember it. I only remember what he said next.

“I owe you an apology.”

An apology? I couldn’t imagine what for. 

An

A Bad Rule That Needs To Be Broken

I sat alone at Gate C31, lost in my own head and surrounded by fellow passengers and all their backpacks and computer bags. In less than 30 minutes, we’d board the plane. After a glance at my watch, I settled into a free chair and pulled out my laptop, content to be alone.

That’s when I heard the screaming.

“Nooooooooooo!”

A woman’s voice. Frantic. Terrified. I looked up, my brain struggling to recognize what my eyes were seeing.

Less than 40 feet away, a mom hovered over her toddler on the carpeted floor.

“No! Nooooooooo!”

She screamed again, desperate, pounding her son’s ba...Nooooooooo!”

Shefloor.“No!seeing.Lessscreaming.Aalone.That’s

To Be Held

It was the fact that he wasn’t wearing shirt or shoes that first caught my attention, not the fact that he held something in his arms.

After all, it’s not often you see a man walking the neighborhood barely dressed.

Moments before I’d left the end-of-the-season baseball party for my son and his teammates at a local school play yard. For two hours, we’d played a rambunctious, hilarious, and definitely NOT professional baseball game, parents against kids. It was full of laughter and base stealin...