So This is What’s Been Happening (Or How to Live Your One & Only Life )

I’ve been on lamb watch, watching for signs of new life, the first 10 days of the new year.

The new year’s only 11 days old, when our family patriarch , my husband‘s beloved father, departs from life on this earth.

Life is this long waiting and a short blink — and just what you do with the time in between. It’s strange how that is: When the short dash of a beloved’s life ends, a heart fracture from missing them, cracks and begins. 

I’m kneeling in the straw of a tiny barn, beside a swollen-with-life mama sheep on the frigid, cold 12th night of January, when I help her slip-deliver a steaming wet lamb into the world. She contracts, and there’s a second pair of feet, and I grab hold, and pull, and there’s gasping for air of this earth to fill lungs, and there’s an unexpected doubling of fresh life curled in barn straw. I help each lamb’s gangly weakness find their legs, find their mama’s thick colostrum, to gulp down all the milky warmth.

Late after lambing, I come in through the snow, under a studded blanket of silvery stars.

Come to pray over our youngest little girl who’s already slipped under quilted blankets of her own. And I pray over her the words I’ve prayed for more than a decade or two, prayed over her six older siblings, framed words that hung in hallway of the farmhouse that my husband grew up in, that framed print that his Dutch farming father had walked past, and literally had walked out, every day for decades, and I kiss his granddaughter’s forehead, as I pray those same words like a benediction of life over her:

“Only one life, twill soon be past, 

Only what’s done for Jesus will last…”

And I stroke back her long black hair: 

“Live for Jesus, Child… so live for Jesus, so live with Jesus.”

When I turn out the last light, I linger there beside the very same faded words that I found in a flaking gilded frame at a thrift store.

Only one life, twill soon be past… Only what’s lived with Jesus will last.

I had picked up the frame when my eye caught it at the thrift store, reading once again those words that had meant much to me as a teen, and a first-generation believer, when I first read them hanging like a heartbeat in my in-laws home. Words the generations before had faithfully lived by. Words I wanted framed in our own farmhouse, for our children and grandchildren and all the generations to come to live by as their own mission and vision.

I had flipped the thrift store frame over and could barely read this faded pencil scrawl, “Isobela… July 3, 1945, With love, Mom and Dad.” Isobela’s mom and dad had the same prayer for her as Mom and Dad Voskamp had had for their family. Then in the bottom corner, in the same penciled handwriting, Isobela’s mom had written: “Bought in a bookshop in Harrisburg, Virginia.”

But here the print was, thousands of miles away, more than 70 years later, in a thrift store with a price tag on it of $9.99. Was Isobela still alive somewhere — now more than 70 years old? What had she done with her one and only life?

I’d carried that vintage thrift store print home and hung it right there under under the aged and antique frame of another thrifted print I’d found, of the tried and true Beatitudes. And there the two lines hung in their frame, like an underlining of the framed Beatitudes above:

“Only one life, twill soon be past, 

Only what’s done for Jesus will last…”

The newborn twin lambs aren’t a wobbly and very green 12-hours old when we gather as a family, sons and daughters and daughters-in-love and a few wee grandchildren, in at our 129-year-old stone church to wash the old worn floors for a funeral of our family patriarch who’d walked all the days of his life with the Lord whom he loved.

We are but dust and there is but little in life that will actually last and all the broken shards of our lives can be made into a mosaic of grace. 

We scrub. And we sand and paint. 

And we move and build and stain.

We set out candles and there are lights and love that can never be extinguished.

It’s almost midnight when I stand on tip-toe to dust every one of the old stained-glass windowsills. We are but dust and there is but little in life that will actually last and all the broken shards of our lives can be made into a mosaic of grace. 

Come early the next morning, after I’ve hayed and grained and hauled water to the new mamas and their lambs, we sort through stacks of yellowed photographs that a life collects. And us, all his descendants, frame up grinning snapshots of one man’s sacred and gifted life — from burly boyhood back in the Netherlands, to fresh fatherhood in a new country, with his own brood that grew to 9, to a brotherhood of daily Word-keepers and faithful prayer-warriors who believed that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Daughter-in-loves arrange bouquets of blooms that a Dutch man loved. 

When the people come, hundreds of them filling a 129-year-old church, for a 90-year old man, the space between us all, and under those sanctuary’s old vaulted beams, fills with stories.

The sanctuary’s full of stories of the nearly two and a half decades that the Dutch farmer and his wife invited for Good News Bible Club, a club grew to more than 75 kids over 20-some years, welcomed into their farmhouse every Friday night, week after week, year after year, to share the good news of Jesus. A whole generation, a whole community, welcomed into their farmhouse and the heart of Jesus who is the Life.

A life is always well-lived when it’s lived through Life Himself. 

A young twenty-something nurse drives more almost 2 hours out from the city in  a snowstorm because he’d been her favourite— always so full of real life, always so genuinely loving.

And then there was all the folks who came because they were impacted by the more than two decades of Tuesday nights of opening up he and Mom Voskamp, opening their farmhouse for a prayer meeting to pray for missionaries all over the world because Dad and Mom Voskamp genuinely believed it: Prayer isn’t the least we can do in the world, and prayer isn’t the only thing we can do in the world, but prayer is the most we can do to genuinely impact the world. 

Lives are touched when we kneel down and prayerfully keep touching the hem of Jesus’ love. 

And as I watch a lifetime of folks, farmers and nurses and builders and mothers and salt-of-the-earth families, come through those big red doors of the old stone church to pay their condolences, to offer their nodding thanks, everything for me is brimming and blurring, as I’m witnessing the humble miracle of an honest life well lived: 

You get a life more to the full, when you give more of your life away. 

In Christ, when you pour your life out — you end up being soul-nourished for forever. 

What ends up being the most life-giving — is giving love, and more love, to everyone in your life. 

Let Jesus love you to life — and your life and love will never, ever end.

Let Jesus love you to life — and your life and love will never, ever end.

Grandchildren and great-grandchildren sing. We all stand for his favorite hymn: Count your blessings, name them one by one. A video plays of him reciting Psalm 23. We smile and wipe our cheeks with the back of our hands and reach for each other’s hands. 

A life is always well-lived when it’s lived through Life Himself. 

It’s the next week, when the lambs are just starting to frisk and spring dance in the barn, when my husband’s big brother messages us out of the blue in the middle of the afternoon:

“You know — Dad’s funeral was a reminder for me of that plaque Mom had in the farmhouse at home:

“Only one life, twill soon be past…. Only what’s done for Christ will last…. For me to live is Christ.“

How many countless people across the community, who had been invited into the farmhouse across the decades, had read those words in that little framed plaque? 

I look up — and there’s that thrifted print hanging with the same words on our farmhouse wall, whispering how to live your one and only life in a way that will actually matter in the end. 

Let Jesus love you to life — and your life and love will never, ever end.

And after such a tender, heart-enlarging week, I look down and open up the very first page of  “Loved to Life” that’s just about to be released into a whole heart-tender world, and there it is, the dedication of the book, a prayer and singular heartbeat for generations:

“Only one life, ’twill soon be past,

Only what’s done for Christ will last.

Live for Jesus, live for Jesus. He came to give us life, 

the realest Life to the full.”

I run my hand slow across the page. 

The Love you’ve been looking for your whole life — He is looking for you, to love you to life — and life to the full.

Those imprinted words are more than a dedication — they are words to dedicate your life to. Words that can become the story of your only life. 

Only a life that’s lived with Jesus — is Life at all.

Only a life that lets itself be fully loved by Jesus — can fully experience actual life.

 I leave the book open to those words.  

The Love you’ve been looking for your whole life — He is looking for you, to love you to life — and life to the full.

And I head out to feed mama sheep with new lambs… all our days now, on a love watch, a life watch, watching for Love Himself who comes as a sign of new life, to change the coming year.

Come Find the Love You’ve Been Looking Your Whole Life ForCome be Loved to Life

40 Days with Jesus.

A 40-Day Pilgrimage with Jesus through the book of John, to journey to the Cross for Easter.

Only one life, twill soon be past…

only a life lived with Jesus will last.

Come — 40-Days with Jesus isn’t too much, & it’s just right to be Loved to Life, & change your one & only life.