For the Joy: Chapter 1

 

FOR THE JOY

 

CHAPTER 1

For since He Himself was tempted in that which He has suffered, He is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted. Hebrews 2:18

 

Gimme one reason to stay here, and I’ll turn right back around. Tracy Chapman

 

At 3am I woke up to a text from a long-lost friend whose story is too sacred to spill here. She has been living dead inside, exhausted from stuffing the weighty truth of her existence, and it’s all coming up now, in middle age. We have had a loose connection for most of our lives, though we were soul-tied from a young age. A battle cry sounded in my heart as I read a gut-wrenching story that resulted from the emotional scars being sliced open by a wise and careful surgeon of the heart.

 

I had set my alarm to get up in time to make double coffee for my early route. As I drove in the darkness, the sadness, the heaviness, the anxiety of the release felt like a heart-bleed. As if I had a supernatural pipeline to what was happening inside her from across the country. Only God does these things, and I knew it. Feeling it, sitting with it, pleading with God about it, rolling the realities of her life around in my mind made for a turbulent ride.

 

I arrived home mid-morning and climbed into bed. My husband was just getting up for the day. He had, had an especially brutal week in his vocation as a prison chaplain. Most weeks are hard, but this week was traumatic. Though he was scheduled to work, he took a personal day. He needed the rest, more from the prison than for his physical body. He would go in for an afternoon meeting that met outside the walls. It felt more bearable.

 

The kids were stir-crazy. It was too cold to play outside, and they had spent too many hours inside these walls. We live counterculturally, homeschooling our brood. Once their school is done, I don’t generally fill their remaining time. They have each learned skills that keep them busy, and they play together, but on days like this, it feels like… not enough.

 

I laid in bed with my eyes closed reminding myself not to latch onto thoughts as they floated through my mind. Sleep would come. I had to also remind myself to stop moving. Sleep would come. I reminded myself to quiet my soul. Sleep would come. After half an hour, I accepted that sleep wasn’t coming and got up. When I’m driving, I load up on caffeine to stay alert. Sometimes when I stop moving, the potion continues to keep my heart racing, despite my best efforts to slow it down, and that was the case today.

 

I got up, loaded my black minivan with children and backed out of the garage. On Tuesdays we go to the library. I had an appointment following the library trip so it was cut short, but the kids didn’t seem too disappointed. A stack of new books always feels like opening a stack of Christmas presents. I mean not quite, but it carries its own momentary excitement.

 

After my appointment, I arrived home to find one of my grown daughters washing her car in the driveway. At this writing, I have graduated four children from high school and home-dwelling. That leaves me with five in the nest, which feels like empty nesting after having nine at home. (Hahahaha… empty-nesting with five kids. Who woulda’ thought?) She was waiting for me to come home so I could help her file her taxes. I’m not the finest accountant, but I am usually willing to try. So, after she finished restoring the shine to her car, we got down to business.

 

By the time we finished filing, it was dinner time. I didn’t have a plan; somehow it always slips my mind when I have an early morning route. My husband had been home for about an hour after his meeting, and he was irritated about something unrelated. That something turned into a fight when I realized that I was supposed to be running carpool for the middle school girls Bible study within the hour. The carpool would put us an hour past dinner time. The interactions between me and him got pretty dicey at that point. I ended up getting fast food, feeling incredibly grateful to have the money and the option to just go get food. I felt so grateful, in fact, that I wrote a post on social media to thank my local Burger King. (Also, thanks again, BK.)

 

I crawled into bed at 7:37 and was sound asleep by 8:30. When I woke up this morning, I felt like I could finally shake the previous day off and begin with a clean slate.

 

At the peak of the previous day when I felt depleted, defeated and on the verge of tears after the fight, I thought about running away. I could have dropped everyone off at the house with those hot brown bags, backed out of the driveway and driven away. I have the physical capability of walking away at any time. I could just disappear. It’s my life, I choose. At least it seems that

 

However, the wreckage of a knee-jerk decision like that would be colossal. Of this I am fully aware. Everything we have spent our lives on would go up in flames in an instant. All of it. It would burn to the ground and everyone, I mean everyone, would have to start over. Rebuild trust. Rebuild hope. Rebuild security, joy, peace, love. In their place, the weeds would begin to grow. Doubt. Confusion. Insecurity. All of it. It would stunt the growth and well-being of every person in my circle. I am keenly aware of this, because I’ve seen it happen. The ripple continues endlessly. But not for us, not this time. Because of Jesus, I stayed.

 

“For we have become partners with Christ IF in fact we hold our initial confidence until the end.” Hebrews 3:14

 

The journey of our faith is no different than the journey of our life. I really thought about running, but only for a split second. Then I also grabbed a hot brown bag full of steamy French fries and went into the house with my people.

 

My long-lost friend; I love to read her perspective when she opens it up to the world. She’s a deep well of vast experience, with exquisite taste and an eye for all things beautiful. She can mine beauty out of anything. When I read her post the day before, it ripped me open. Tears sprang to my eyes. My stomach knotted up. The language was cryptic, but I knew exactly what she was talking about. The infinitesimal experience that I had with the subject matter was enough give me eyes to see her into her reality. Immediately I began to pray that God would go to her, be with her, give her helpers, lead the navigation of so much pain that I couldn’t begin to comprehend. I wasn’t sure of how I would be received. It had been a long time since we had, had any connection, but I had to risk it and make contact. I could hear the darkness threatening to swallow her up. I could bring Light, so I reached out. Our engagement was rich and hopeful. I felt the heaviness begin to lift, but the stirring continued. I prayed for her for days on end.

 

When I first considered putting my name in for my driving job, I knew it would require one day a week, and it would mean very early mornings. I did the training but regretted taking the job immediately. Why did I do it? We didn’t need the money. I didn’t want to sacrifice a full day away… I thought I heard God when I decided to do it, but after I accepted the position, I felt doubtful. As the weeks turned into months, I realized that my compulsion to volunteer to drive was, in fact, prompted by the Holy Spirit.

When I do a route, I have seven hours to focus my mind on Jesus through prayer, podcasts, quiet contemplation, music, phone calls, and virtually no interruptions. I give Him the hours, and He fills me up. It’s rich and good and my soul is full when I get home. I can see past the mess and the to-do list with vision. This was no mistake of my own, it was a gift from God.

 

When we met, my husband’s vocational trajectory was pastoral ministry. The traditional path includes being a youth pastor for a few years, then moving into an associate pastor position, then to a senior pastor position until retirement. At least that’s what we thought. When we resigned our second church position, we knew God was leading us into something else. We had too many kids to rely on the cost-sharing insurance plan. He was also outgrowing the role and needed something that would challenge and excite his passion for ministry. Chaplaincy was all of that and so much more. Even now, twelve years later, when he has had a hard week, I have to be careful in my response because the weightiness of it generally lands at home with a different face on. He gets irritated about things that don’t usually bother him. He’s more impatient. He targets me, he targets the kids, and it all hurts, but it’s never what it seems. In the situation of the missing meal and the forgotten carpool, rather than lashing back, I let the tears come quietly and asked God to soothe his bleeding heart. That kind of soothing is a ministry that, try as I might, I am incapable of doing.

 

When we are in Christ, He is our advocate in temptation and our partner in affliction. I can only pray and wait. I felt grateful that the Holy Spirit reminded me that his reactions to me were the product of his experiences earlier in the week, and that I needed to extend mercy beyond myself. Instead of fighting it out, demanding that he see my side, I absorbed the metaphorical hits and extended mercy in my quietness.

 

We’ve been able to negotiate a way for the kids to continue their regular school days when I am working. They begin by reading the Bible and working on memorization. As meager as their education may feel at times, I have found peace in our efforts. Last week daughter said, “Well, even if it’s a snow day, I think we should do the morning part. It’s the most important.” I could’ve cried. She chose to get up early and worship God instead of sleeping-in on a day when sleeping-in was allowed. It’s reassurance to me that what we are doing is good and right.

 

The BK brown bag especially plucked the strings of my shame. I could’ve beat myself up about the fact that I didn’t have a plan for dinner forcing us to spend money and eat unhealthy food, but I chose not to do that. There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ. If you came to me and said, “My children haven’t had vegetables for a month!” I’d say, “Who cares? Just give them some corn tonight!” Why it is so hard to talk to myself the same way? Turning the shame into a song of gratitude flipped the onslaught on its head. I want my children to be healthy and to have healthy habits in place, but they are probably not as healthy as your children, and that is fine with me.

 

When I got into bed early, it felt like I was washing away the bitter parts of the day and laying my head on Jesus’ chest. He steadied my heart, stroked my hair with His gentle presence, and spoke words of mercy into the whirlwind in my mind until the voices quieted down, and I slipped off into a sweet slumber.

 

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 2

Beware of the drift

For this reason, we must pay attention all the more to what we have heard so that we will not drift away. Hebrews 2:1

 

The house I grew up in was five blocks from the community recreation building where there was an indoor pool. They didn’t charge membership fees like a standard YMCA, so you paid for each activity. The fee to swim was $.50 per person, which was cheap entertainment for us. My two older brothers and I were allowed to walk down the street to go swimming, as long as the boys kept an eye on me, and we were home before dark. I was a fearful kid and didn’t like to take risks, so I spent most of my time hanging out in the shallow end of the pool, jumping off the side and watching people dive off the diving board. Sometimes they dove right out of their suits, which was hysterical to me! Truth be told, that was the main reason I brought along my goggles.

 

One particular day, I was feeling brave. Against my oldest brother’s command, I sidled along the pool wall, under the buoy rope, and into the deep end. I felt pretty safe. There was a gutter that ran along the perimeter of the pool, so I had good grasp as long as I was holding on. My brother and his friend were hanging out on the wall of the deep end. He told me to go back to the shallow, but I assured him that I was fine and didn’t have to do what he said. I got close enough to be seen but not close enough to get yelled at and pulled myself up on the gutter, took a deep breath and plunged myself to the pool floor twelve feet down. Once my feet made contact with the floor, I allowed myself to sink a little lower. Then I’d bend my knees to launch myself back up. Once my hand broke through the surface, I would reach for the gutter to steady myself, and start the sequence over again. The first few times I was perfectly fine. It was exhilarating.

 

I was having so much fun I forgot that I needed the wall to steady myself and just bobbed up and down. When I was sufficiently worn out, I reached for the gutter but it wasn’t there. I had drifted. Panic struck, and I began to flail in the middle of the deep end pool, splashing and gasping. Each time I got my lungs full of air, I yelped for help, but my mouth would fill with water, and I’d go down again. It seemed like forever before my brother noticed my struggle. While still holding tightly to the wall, he grabbed my arm and pulled me to safety. I clung to the gutter for dear life, coughing and panting, as he turned back to his friend and kept talking as if nothing had happened. As if he hadn’t just saved me from drowning and sudden death at the tender age of nine.

 

The drift is real. It is so easy to feel safe and confident in the pool when you are holding on to the edge with both hands and your body clinging closely to the wall. Even when there are waves from a cannonball off the high dive, if you are holding on, you are safe from going under. It’s the same thing in the faith journey. You are good, as long as you are paying attention, holding tightly to the truths that you’ve learned, diving into the Word every single day, and abiding in Christ moment by moment.

 

The drift comes when you wake up late, too late to read your Bible. You tell yourself you’ll read it as soon as you… get out of the shower, are on your lunch break, get into the pick-up line, after the news, before bed. The drift comes when days go by and you haven’t even opened a Bible or listened to anything that builds you up and points you to Jesus. The drift happens when that guy at work that is so funny and such a good work buddy, smiles and says he likes your dress. Your mind drifts back to that lingering smile later that evening. The drift happens when after a fight with one of your kids, you find yourself in a drive-through of McDonalds or the donut shop or the liquor store and bury your hurt or frustration with consumption.

 

The drift isn’t obvious. I had no idea I was slipping further and further away from the safety of the wall until I was already drowning. If it was obvious, it’d be easy to deter it by formula and habit. Nooooo… it creeps in silently. The thoughts are subtle. “It won’t matter if you don’t read your Bible today, you deserve to sleep a few extra minutes after that awful night.” Or “What do you really get out of reading one chapter, anyway? It’s not enough to matter.” The lies are stellar. They chip away at what you know is true, and you exchange truth for the path of least resistance. It’s easy to get too distracted and too busy and too consumed with Facebook or Instagram or Amazon or Netflix to spend any time with God. But Jesus knew we would drift. That’s why He said this:

 

“I am the true vine, and my father is the vinedresser. Each branch IN ME that does not bear fruit, He takes away and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it (oh, hi there, Suffering. I didn’t hear you come in…) so that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in ME.” John 15:1-4

 

The metaphor isn’t complicated, but it’s important to understand. IF you are in Christ, and you aren’t bearing fruit…the fruit of a viable relationship with God, abiding in Him and producing good works, then the Father may very well TAKE YOU AWAY! A branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in JESUS.

 

Abide. To stay and keep staying. When I think of abiding in Christ, I envision a little one with his mother, never straying too far from her side as she goes about her day. My little boy, when we are home, checks in with me often. If we aren’t in the same room, he will come find me. When we are away from home, he inevitably finds my hand the moment we are out of the car. He stays close. He feels me holding his hand. He calls my name, and I answer. He makes eye contact with me in a room full of people. He stays connected to me.

 

It’s very similar with Jesus. We make contact with Him as we read His Word, the Words of eternal life in the Bible. We think about Him, meditate on His Word, and allow those thoughts to permeate our lives throughout the day. We memorize the words so that they float to the front of our minds at random times. We listen to music that brings glory to God, through lyrics and skill. Long after we shut off the sound, the songs continue to play in our heads, continuing to bring glory to God. We pray in private, under our breath, in our mind, in crises, in the quiet of morning, in the dark of night, and throughout the day with our people. Our engagement with Him is unceasing, our thoughts always returning to Him. We read books, listen to podcasts, have conversations that come back to Him and the work He is doing in us, around us, and through us. We have an awareness of the sins we are prone to as He reveals them to us. We avoid them, fight them, starve the desire for them because we know that when sin is allowed in our lives, it separates us from God, and that is the last thing we want when we are abiding in Christ.

 

When I was very young, a team came to our church for a week-long Kids’ Crusade. We learned a verse set to music that we sang every night. We sang it loud and quiet, silly and serious, over and over until it was set in our memories. I still sing it at random times when it comes to me. “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, oh Lord, my Strength and my Redeemer.” Psalms 19:14

 

I wrestled with a consistent pattern of prayer and Bible study for decades. I would get a good rhythm going, and then my life would shift. We’d have a baby or we’d move across the country or we’d have another baby... It might take months before I could establish a new routine, so my devotional time just fell to the wayside. To curb that, I started watching for markers in my day, things that don’t change. One consistency is that every morning I wake up with my phone alarm. When I look at my phone to shut it off, the addiction grips me, and I am compelled to check Facebook. Or my email. Or my bank account. At some point I decided I would not look at anything until I had read a chapter from the Bible app. I found a reading plan on the YouVersion app that tells me what to read every day. It became automatic, and I developed the habit of reading my Bible every morning, without fail. I can honestly tell you, there are days when the words don’t sink it. They seem to fall flat on my soul with no reverb. But I believe the Bible when it says, “the Word of God is living and active…” I know that my efforts to abide in Christ are not in vain, and that God can give those words roots in my heart, whether I feel it or not. In regards to busyness, this habit can be injected into your busyness in so many other areas, you’ll be shocked. If every time you check Facebook (or whatever you compulsively check) you purpose in your mind to read a Psalm first, you’ll likely be reading more of the Bible than you have in years! 

 

It seems like prayer is easier, you don’t have to be alone to do it. You can pray in your mind, thinking about God, talking to God, asking God for help throughout the day. That is how I prayed for years and years. It was good, and God honored those prayers. But when I set aside a few minutes every day, specifically devoted to prayer, I began to notice a deeper connection with God. I start by spending five minutes in silence with Him. After that, if there is time, I bring my thanksgiving and the petitions of my heart to Him. When I stop everything to enjoy His company for five solid minutes, it is as if heaven and earth have collided. We are together here, just like in Eden. My favorite time to meet Him is at daybreak with a cup of coffee.  I can’t explain it, but His presence changes me, and I love Him more and more. The Heidelberg Catechism answers the question, “What is the chief end of man?” with this answer, “To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” John Piper offers a slightly different answer with this, “To glorify God BY enjoying Him forever.” I look forward to those few minutes alone with Him every single day, and I believe it’s because that is where I enjoy Him the most.

 

Sin is so tricky… it makes me mad. It sneaks in stealing and killing and destroying and making a mess of things. It’s a gentle wooing away from what it true and good and beautiful with the promises of better, and more, and instant gratification. Why would anyone ever give it the time of day if it didn’t taste good for a minute or an hour or a month. It really does taste good, but the sweetness will turn bitter once it sits in your belly and sickens you and shames you for eating it. It will take everything from you. It’s a lie from the father of lies, and you are not so holy to avoid it without some careful sidestepping. Let me tell you one of the things that will loosen the power of sin in your life. It’s confession. Turn the lights on in the areas that are hidden. Sin wants to bury you in shame and cause you to hide from the truth, hide from accountability, hide from freedom, because it knows that as soon as it comes into the light, you’ll discover its deception. Confess your sins to God and then TELL SOMEONE! Say it out loud. Get the words out of your mouth, no matter how hard or embarrassing or reckless or devastating it is. Say the words. Turn on the lights. Let the air on it and allow healing to begin.

 

About a month ago I found myself in a pickle. I had been waffling between diets, as is characteristic of most of my past thirty years. The thing is, if you’re on keto, you can eat fat as long as you don’t eat carbs. If you’re on WW you can have anything you want if you load up on free foods and write down your points. If you’re on Intermittent Fasting you can eat anything between the hours of this and that, but not during the fasting hours. If you’re counting calories, you can eat anything if you’re keeping track and you stay under your limit. When I’m between diets, I forget the rules and eat all the things all the time. When I’m slipping because of a fall-out with my husband or a hormonal hurricane, I tend to eat a lot of sugar. I mean, a ton of sugar. Sugar in my coffee, in my tea, full sugar soda, candy, cookies, cookies, cake, cookies, ice cream, and cookie dough. Also cookies. I had a rough day, alright?

 

On Tuesday afternoon we went to the library because that’s what we do on Tuesdays. Early that morning I had driven a long route so I was tired and hormonal. I went into the library with a mission. It wasn’t to check out library books. Rather, I had my mind set on the vending machine they had recently installed. Why a library needs a vending machine in the lobby I’ll never know, but today I was excited about it. As I walked through the doors, my heart began to race. Here’s the thing, we’ve had this vending machine in the library for months. I never cared about it before, never even looked at what was in it. Today, I had a feverish attraction to it.

 

I sent the kids to look for their books and headed back to buy myself a snack or two. As casually as possible, I strolled in the direction of where it was set up, pretending to be perusing the books on the shelves nearby. You can imagine my shock when I arrived at the precise location, and there was no vending machine. I moved a little more quickly down another isle and another looking for the blasted machine but it was gone. GONE. No Cheetos. No candy bars. No sodas. No packages of gum. None of it. Finally, I asked one of my girls if she knew where it went, but she just shrugged. I tried to be cool, “That’s weird, isn’t it? I wanted a candy bar. Hahaha.”

 

Realizing I wasn’t getting my fix from the library… this is so embarrassing to admit, but I think it’s important. I hustled the kids through the checkout line and drove over to Dollar General, one of their favorite haunts. I knew I could find what I wanted there, and so much more than I could get from the stupid library vending machine.

 

We stormed the place like a mob and spread out like ants at a picnic. The kids went to the toys while I made a b-line for the candy isle, where a guy with a cart was blocking my entrance. I didn’t want to look too obvious, so I just went into the next isle where I hit the jackpot. Yellow Zingers. The isle-blocker finally came out of candy paradise, and I moved in with haste. I stood there looking at my options for the better part of ten minutes. I don’t even know what I was looking for. The same guy that was hogging the isle before, tried to move in on me, but I stood my ground. It made me mad that he kept trying to get in the way of me getting my fix.

 

I felt hostile. Possessive. Angry. And humiliated. I left with the yellow Zingers, Andes mints, and a bag of snack-sized Snickers, all of which I promptly hid in an empty drawer in my bedroom. Alarms were going off inside me as I stashed the yellow bags, but I pushed past them, hard.

 

I thought that this must be what addiction feels like. The feelings I was carrying around like a precious hidden treasure resembled those of an addict, looking for the next hit. I couldn’t help what was happening inside me, but God was calling me away from it. Here’s the lie I believe when I want what I want. “This isn’t a big deal. It isn’t going to matter.” I wasn’t going to eat the whole box of zingers. I wasn’t going to eat all the candy in one go. It’s not like I was going to binge it all and then purge or anything like that. I just wanted to have them tucked away in my drawer so that when I needed a little escape, I could go into my room, close the door behind me, slide the drawer open, and savor the goodies hidden therein. All. By. My. Self. If that doesn’t resemble sin in the most impervious way, I don’t know what does.

 

Imagine sin is a sweet little kitten and you are a fifth grader in the home you grew up in. Your dad is deathly allergic to animals and has given you strict and careful instructions not to even touch a cat or you could bring the dander into the house and the consequences could be deadly. You’ve always been fine with that, none of your friends have cats. You have a sort of fear of them anyway, knowing they could kill your father, or at least you would have to be quarantined for a very long time should you ever have any contact with one, for his safety.

 

You’re walking home from school one day, and you hear the tiniest cry from under the bushes. Your bleeding heart pleads with you that someone needs help! You push aside the branches and find the sweetest little white ball of fur struggling to get out. A teeny white face with striking blue eyes makes eye contact with you and lets out the most pitiful “meoowww”. Your heart bursts. It is so sweet and tiny and you have to help it, it needs you so much! It’s in trouble!

 

In the back of your mind, you hear the warnings from your parents. You know you shouldn’t, but it’s in distress. For a moment you think about walking away. Not your cat, not your problem, but then it cries out again and you have no choice but to help. You reach through the leaves to disentangle the helpless animal and carefully bring the baby kitty out of the bush. Before you realize it, you’re holding it close to your body to give it warmth and comfort. It feels so right. You saved this kitty from imminent danger. How could anyone ever say that this is wrong?

 

You set the kitten down on ground delicately and begin to walk away, when it cries out to you again. You stop, looking back, and it runs to you, wrapping its little self around your leg. You pick it up again, who knew an animal could be so soft? Holding it to your face, you take a deep breath. It smells enchanting. You feel like your heart will burst all over again. You love this little kitty!

A tiny tickle in your throat triggers a short coughing spell. Setting the kitty back on the ground, you to your senses and continue toward home.   

 

Still coughing as you walk through your front door, you wipe your eyes and nose with your sleeve; they are running like crazy. Going into the bathroom for a tissue, you catch a glimpse of your face. Your eyes are red and swollen. As you wipe them again, the itching sets in. Glancing at the mirror, you see red bumps surrounded by hot redness on your neck and coming up on your cheeks. You are itchy all over. Now the tears. How are you gonna hide this? The coughing, the itching, the rash… you will surely be found out! And what about your father? Have you put him at risk now that you are home?

 

A prayer in The Valley of Vision, page 99, says “Great was Thy grace in commanding me to come hand in hand with Thee to the Father… that I may live repenting of sin, conquer Satan, find victory in life.” We must be putting to death the deeds of the body so that we might live!

 

“When a man sees his lust as a trivial thing, it is an indication that he is not mortified. (putting to death our natural impulses) We cannot go forward (in Christ) unless we recognize the danger of our own hearts. We need to be intimately acquainted with the ways, wiles, methods, advantages, and occasions in which lust has the victory.

 

“This is the way men deal with their enemies. They search out their plans, ponder their goals, and consider how and by what means they have prevailed in the past. Then they can be defeated… We need to know how sin uses occasions, opportunities and temptations to gain advantage (over us).” Voices from the Past page 56.

 

I used to believe it was easy to get close to God. We sang a song in Sunday School that taught that if you read your Bible and pray every day, you’ll grow. If you don’t, you’ll shrink. True enough, but I didn’t consider sin in that equation. Sin separates us from God, no matter how much we read the Bible and pray. Jesus said, “If anyone comes after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me” and again in John, “if you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.”

 

To be a follower of Christ is an all-encompassing endeavor. We are not of this world, but we have to live in it. We have bodies of flesh, but we walk in newness of life. We are surrounded by people in the world, and we are called to be salt and light in a wicked and depraved generation. That is much more powerful than we realize, so we must draw strength and wisdom and courage from God to fight sin and overcome temptation as we represent Him in the world.

 

Be careful of the drift, darlings. It will surely drown the life and light out of you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 3

Suffering

For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to perfect the author of their salvation through SUFFERINGS. For both He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one Father for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren; Hebrews 2:10

 

A few years ago on Christmas day, after breakfast, presents, the Christmas story and a Christmas movie, we packed a bag and hopped in the car to go to Nana’s two hours away to continue the celebration. Before we left town, we stopped at our QT for gas and coffee. It was busier than I expected for Christmas day. Bopping cheerfully into QT with a few fellow coffee lovers from my entourage, I happened to notice a woman from my church. I had seen her daughter there many times, but this woman was only familiar from Facebook. (Our world is so bizarre) So I noticed her and her daughter in the corner by the coffee bar giggling and looking oh so joyful on Christmas day! I felt envious, because that’s what happens inside me when other people are happy, and then I felt compelled to introduce myself.

 

“Are you Stephanie?” I asked, cutting into her path to the register.

“Well, yes, yes I am!” she responded with such sweetness and her perfectly curly hair and looking tiny in a pair of cute leggings while I looked like a can of busted biscuits, because that’s what I always look like by Christmas day.

“I’m Becca, we’re friends on Facebook. Our kids are in youth group together. I just wanted to introduce myself in person.”

“Oh how nice to meet you! That’s wonderful! How wonderful!” she said, just shining with sweetness. She seemed genuinely happy to meet me, this stranger that accosted her in QT on Christmas morning like she was some kind of celebrity.

 

I allowed her to pass and stood there at the coffee counter in awe. The only thing I knew about Stephanie was that she had Lupus, two boys on the spectrum, or with Autism, and two daughters. Fast forward several years, and sweet Stephanie continues to post beautiful snapshots of joy from her life. Sitting in the chemo chair. She got sick. Then her husband got sick. Then she got sick with cancer. The children are growing up, and she is trying to live life with them through a four hour window each day, because that’s the only time she has the energy to be upright.

 

This woman knows suffering on a level that I cannot even begin to wrap my mind around. This husband, these children, know suffering on a level that I cannot even begin to understand, but my heart swells for her every time she posts another smiling picture, thanking God for people that love her, from the chemo chair. Because at the end of the day, she knows what is hers to hold, and when you have Jesus, you have hope, no matter what.

 

Faith reminds us that Jesus is instep with us through with us through

difficult days. He is our partner in affliction. This is a slippery slope for the soul that holds faith loosely; the questions of suffering, “If God is good, then why would He allow…” all the miserable things in this broken-down world.

 

I’ve suffered heavy hits, but in the darkness, I clung to Jesus. I felt alone in my agony, except for Him. He knew every detail and already occupied my pain. I rested in Him when I couldn’t eat, sleep, or breathe normally. He held me, though silently for a time. He steadied my heart.

 

I don’t know why suffering must be apart of our lives, but I know that we have to walk through it, usually without knowing why. If Christ is your soul’s keeper or not, there will be suffering in this life. It is valuable to understand that He knows the agony of this life. He felt it in His mortal body. He knows what a racing heart, a sleepless night, a punch in the guts feels like.

 

IF you are His, He is with you in your affliction. If you do not belong to Jesus, maybe He’s calling you.

 

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me, Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. Ps 23:4

 

Jesus learned obedience through suffering. If Jesus calls us brethren, then we will also learn obedience through suffering. I don’t know why it has to be this way. I don’t know if learning obedience is more like you learn how to trust God during suffering. Or maybe you learn to lay down your dreams and your plans and allow God to do whatever He intends to do through your suffering. Maybe it means practicing forgiveness when you know full well that the cause of your suffering was intended for your harm and could have been prevented. It doesn’t really matter what the why is, because if you think it could help you endure with more gusto, it probably wouldn’t. I mean, Jesus fed 5,000 people one week. Then turned around right after that and fed 4,000 and the Pharisees come up to Him all like, “Ok, if you’re really the Messiah, give us a sign.” Dude… seriously??

 

I know for me, I hear from God. I move on whatever He says to do, and then He comes through and confirms that it’s right and I’m elated and euphoric and happy as a lark. Like this one time, I felt like I was supposed to sell some cinnamon rolls, put myself out there, make a little money, be obedient. After about six months of tossing the idea around, asking people for approval, then tucking it back in my pocket in fear, I finally did it. I put a post on Facebook that said, “I’m baking cinnamon rolls this weekend. $20/dozen. Message me if you’re interested!” That was it. Easy peasy. The comments came rolling in. This guy wanted some but he lived out of town. This girl wanted some but she was in a different state. A few people ordered that were really local. Then I happened to have a runner making a day trip here and back to my hometown, so that brought in a few more orders. That night I was so enamored by all the traffic on my cinnamon roll post that I forgot to start the dough. It wasn’t totally necessary, but it made for a better consistency if I made the dough and let it rest in the fridge overnight. I realized my err at 11pm and told my husband. He told me to get in the kitchen and get it going, but I was tired. I’d start it early the next morning, I told him.

 

The next morning, I got up early and started the dough, just like I had planned. I scalded the milk, let it cool, added the yeast and flour, let it rise, and voila. When I returned to roll out the dough, my dough was only about half as high as it usually was. I continued the process anyway and started another batch. Two more, actually. I couldn’t risk any of it going to waste. I needed to have seven dozen done by that afternoon! After I repeated the entire process on the second and third batch, I had the same problem, minimal rise! Panic set in. It was all a blur after that. I prayed. I reached out to my friend who is a real baker. I cried a little. Then I pressed on. I would let the dough rest a little bit longer and then set it on the porch, we’re mid-winter at the is time, and mimic the fridge for a few hours. The first few pans rose about halfway, but I baked them anyway. They rose a little more, but for fear of under-baking them, I overbaked them. Ugh. The next batch rose a little higher and the third looked almost normal when I put them in the oven.

 

As each pan was frosted and delivered, I felt more in awe of what God can do. That night, I had one remaining pan with one cinnamon roll missing. I planned to take it to my Sunday school class the next morning when I noticed an order I had missed in the chaos of the failed dough. I texted her and told her about the partial dozen and offered a discount. She said she was happy to pay full price and was on her way to pick them up. When she pulled out of the driveway, I stood there in dumbfounded. I made all this extra dough because my kitchen was too cold to let the dough rise. Then I baked all the pans for the sake of not wasting the dough. I allowed my family to eat one dozen, to test the ones that tasted over-baked, and because I never want to bake something that yummy and keep it from them. Then I used a 9x9 pan for the last little bit to take to my neighbor for his birthday that weekend. Sold the rest. Sold all of the rest. Because God was stirring in my heart this idea that I can do something from home to generate income, and honestly, I love doing it. 

 

Then a week goes by and He speaks again. “Do this thing.” And I’m over here like, “waaaiitt… Are you sure about this?” Why? Why?? It’s what we do. We wrestle with our faith. And so when the clamps tighten down and the suffering begins, we don’t have time or energy or fortitude to ask all the questions or wrestle it out. We choose: right or wrong. We’re going to submit and learn obedience or we’re going to resist and whine and complain and argue about why we have to go through it. Maybe this is significant in determining where we are in our faith journey, or more obviously, if we are in Christ or not. If Jesus suffered to so many souls to salvation, can we not endure for just one more hour, whatever the thing is, and so bring God glory in it?

 

The heaviness in my heart, the threatening climbing sickly choking feeling climbing up from my stomach into my throat reminds me to breathe. Minute by minute. I feel myself getting lightheaded, I feel the tears coming. I find myself grasping for answers. Maybe if I call… maybe I can ask so-and-so she can tell me what to do. If I show up at the place and demand answers. If I have a well-prepared speech, I can change the turnout. I can make the better things happen. I can help. If I do something. Do something. DO SOMETHING!!! And the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead that dwells in me, gently reminds me to breathe. I take a deep slow breath and feel the tension drain from head. My eyes well up. He reminds me to open my hands. I’m white-knuckling the thing. Holding it tightly to my heart, trying to think my way out. Plan my way out. Help my way out of the suffering. I open my hand in a symbolic gesture of surrender. I’ve done this whole scenario over several times today. The thing is not mine to fix or help or do. I must walk with the suffering close at hand. I must, in fact, let go of the desperate need to hold the controls of the thing and take suffering by the hand, moving forward. I must live with it broken. Pray, darling. Pray. I allow the tears to fall, holding both hands open as if to allow a tiny bird to fly out. The Holy Spirit, from deep down in my soul, intercedes because I have no words.

 

Just yesterday, before the news came, I began this chapter with no suffering in my life. I have walked through dark days and I have come to a place of peace and quiet and so I told the story of Stephanie’s suffering. I meant to tell you about Lisa’s suffering. And Linda’s and Sindi’s. But today I have my own story of suffering because it all came crashing down with the news came in.

 

Bear it with joy.

Count it all joy.

Walk through it for the joy.

 

And then Brittany came over. Brittany and I were introduced to each other long before we met. Her story of salvation took place in a McDonalds. A pastor in our church told about how she had visited our church shared a meal with our people, and then never came back. When she needed a quick escape from her life on evening, she took the kids and ran to McDonald’s play place to figure out her next step. That’s when she ran into April. “Didn’t I meet you at Neighborhood Dinners at my church last year?”

 

“Yeah, I think so…” she was shy and guarded but the friendliness built a bridge.

 

Their conversation continued. April can talk to anyone about anything and make them feel like she’s been in their life for years. “No pressure, really, but if you want to come back to church for a Sunday morning, I’ll save you a seat!”

 

That was all it took. Brittany came to church, sat with April, gave her life to Jesus, and she has a new life.

 

That was the story I heard sitting in the pews. Brittany goes to the same service I do, so with tears streaming down my face, I looked around to see where she was. I remember when she started to coming to church. There’s something really unique about her, even though she’s very reserved. She and April both had tears on their cheeks. It was a moving moment.

 

Fast forward about six months. One Sunday morning after church, my friend Jackie appears out of nowhere, taps Brittany, who was sitting in front of me, on the shoulder and says, “Brittany, Becca. Becca, Brittany. There ya go.” And she was gone.

 

“Brittany, I’m so happy to meet you! I loved hearing your story when Jason told it!” I said.

 

“Becca, people have been telling me I have to meet you because we both homeschool!”

 

“YESSS! We’ve got to get together. Let me get your number, and I’ll set it up.”

 

Fast forward three months, after several set and cancelled play dates, I texted her again. “Hey Brittany! I’m having coffee and coffeecake at my house tomorrow, if you can make it!”

 

She couldn’t believe it. We hadn’t had any contact since before Christmas, and she said she was going to text me that very day when she got my text. That’s how God works.

 

She arrived early at my house, and I still had to drop a few kids off before my coffee date, so I said, “Come on, you can just ride along with us!” She was easy to talk to and seemed to roll with my chaos without flinching. We got back home and I was able to fill in some details of a phone call I received while we were driving. She had some experience in what I was going through and said, very carefully. “Sometimes you have to let them go until they’re done with it.”

 

Open your hand, darling, and let it fail. Wait for the call from the hospital or the police. Do what you can with the wisdom you have for the situation, and don’t fuss and fret over what might be or could be or isn’t happening. Let it go. It was a powerful message of redemption. She said, “My grandma used to say, ‘If I gave you good homemade food all the time, it would taste bland to you. You have to taste bad food to know how good mine is. Sometimes that’s what you have to do. You know, when I moved back in with my mom, I ate hamburger helper and cereal all the time. You know how good my grandma’s meatloaf tasted after that??”

 

Yes. Yes, I do. I spent a season of my life in the company of some fierce defenders of the gospel and their children. Collectively, we kept our kids barred from sin in every capacity. Limited TV and Internet. Homeschooling. Limited video games. No cussing. No exposure to smoking or drinking. We set them up for friendships with each other and carefully filtered their company outside our circle. We fed them good homemade food.

 

Somehow, like smoke under a door, sin came along and latched itself on to my children, each one in a different way. Funny story, the sin was already in their hearts. It just manifested more maturely and in other ways. They gained access, unfiltered access, to the internet. It planted the seeds of some real awful darkness. So began the darkest days of my life as a parent.

 

It occurred to me after the blasted internet came to haunt me and taunt me again, that if my kids never sin, or get caught in sin, never feel the shame, the need to hide, the need to cover up, then how can they learn repentance? How can I tell them my stories of sin and forgiveness? How can I lead them into redemption and God’s unfailing love, if I never let them fail? This is a tricky slope I’m standing on. I’m not, in any way, suggesting that we let our kids have the keys to the universe so they can taste sin and be reckless in their lust for pleasure. I’m just saying, we have to find a way to allow them to try out their faith and fail, with a safe place to come home to. Isn’t it better for it to happen inside our walls instead of when they’re grown and the world is literally at their fingertips?

 

Maybe I’m trying to circumvent the Holy Spirit and His work of redemption, by assuring their salvation inside these walls. I’m a chronic helper. It’s kind of a sickness. But there has to be a better way, a more comfortable way of navigating this parenting bit and Christianity and the whole thing. I feel like a failure. I feel like there is something I could do better, and there is. Guess what it is? Pray more for my kids. Live my life unfiltered before them. Be genuinely who I am without pulling punches. Fast for them. And then hold them with an open hand. They are on loan to me, after all. Everything in this life belongs to God, and everything in it, though He allowed me to birth them and rear them, each of their lives is His to have and to hold for His good pleasure. May God have mercy on their souls, and mine also, that we would finish the race strong, or weak, big or small, desperate or ravenous, that we would finish together.

 

PS 126

Those who sow with tears
    will reap with songs of joy.
⁶ Those who go out weeping,
    carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
    carrying sheaves with them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 4

He was faithful to Him who appointed Him, as Moses also was in all His house… for every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God… but Christ was faithful as a son over His house—whose house we are, if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end. Heb. 3:2

 

Merciful God…

At this moment my child is wayward like the prodigal. We gave him the freedom he demanded, he stayed under the umbrella of his sister’s watchful eye for a few months, and now he’s out in the big world all. A. lone. The wrestling deep inside me is this. I am his mother. He is a child. He is not old enough or ready enough to be out in the big world by himself, but alas, he has left us. He occasionally responds to my efforts to reach out to him, but completely at his own bidding. The ache in my heart, the knot in my guts, the spontaneous tears all caught like a hook in a stream, to his wayward heart.

 

I could go out and search for him, I could actually call the bank and ask what hotel he paid a large sum of money to, and he’d be found out. I could load his stuff in my car and demand that he come home, and he probably would. I could put him in my basement, monitor his coming and going, keep close tabs on his spending, and take him off the insurance so I would have to drive him to and from work. But what good would this do? He has chosen a path I would not choose or even allow him to take, but he has taken it against my wishes. If I box him in, he will rage against me. He has done it before.

 

On the other hand, I could cut him off completely. Change the garage code. Lock the doors of the house. Sell his belongings. I could take him off our phone plan and insurance. I could deny him every commodity of being a member of our family, and then wait for a response. I would imagine he would then disappear for more time than I can bear to even write down, and it would wreck me.

 

I’ve chosen neither of these paths, but taken my cues from the father of the prodigal son, who, against his better judgment, gave the prodigal what he asked for with an open hand. He did not offer his blessing, but he conceded. When the boy returned to his father, he was welcomed in his repentance with open arms.

 

I’m tempted, almost coerced, into worrying many, many times a day. I have a knot in my throat almost all the time. My body reminds me that all is not well. I keep working through my days, and when things settle and the day gets quiet, which it rarely does, I remember that my boy is alone in the big world and the worry threatens. Then I pray. “Go to him, Lord. Seek him out. Break the hardness in his heart and bring him into a right relationship with you, and bring him home.” The Holy Spirit reminds me to hold him with an open hand. He is, after all, on loan to me. I have loved him as unto the Lord, because God is his keeper, not me. Even if I could do it, physically, I could not do it. He is not mine. Hold him up in prayer, with an open hand and the gates of my heart open to allow for the work that God must do in him.

 

Hebrews 12:7 says, “It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons… <earthly fathers> disciplines us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

 

So much here spinning in my head. Like, is this discipline about him and about me? Are we all getting a part in this disciplining? What is God training me for in this? When I discipline my children, it’s for their good. To keep them safe. To teach them how to function in the world inside the fences of reason, courtesy, consideration for others, godliness, and frankly, dignity.

 

At seventeen this one has resisted discipline throughout all of this life. I can see the work that God must do to train and discipline. It makes sense to me, that even in the waywardness, they must fall and fail and hit bottom in order to feel the ramifications of their actions. There must be suffering in order to learn obedience, just as Jesus did and all of us do. We always say, “some people have to learn the hard way” but honestly, doesn’t everyone? What learning is ever done the easy way? It’s a physical transformation that takes place in your brain from one form to another. I get it. If I use manipulation either by holding as hostage or by cutting off, I am undoubtedly getting in the way of what God needs to do. I feel that by holding the situation with an open hand and covering my dear one with a cloud of prayer, I am allowing the work of God to be expedited with the greatest efficiency.

 

WHAT HAPPENS IN YOUR BRAIN WHEN YOU LEARN SOMETHING?

 

In the same vein, my husband and I are suffering, and in that suffering, learning obedience. Are we also being disciplined in this? I can only speak for me, because I plumb my own depths. Is it control? Is the mission of this round of discipline to teach me to continue to open my hand and hold this one and all the others of mine loosely, as an offering to the Lord? Would our lives be more diligently obedient if I wasn’t desperately trying to help everyone, but standing aside to let the work of God take place? Maybe it’s that I need to be more diligent in prayer, so the Lord continues to bring me crises in order to hold my attention on Him and to give away my fears, doubts, worries, anxiety, to Him as an offering, and not to hold them tightly to my chest as a security blanket.

 

It’s not mine to know. The more I pray, and ask permission to reach out to my boy, the more I hear the Lord reminding me that he is not mine to save. I imagine him going home to a cheap motel, living next to prostitutes and drug dealers and transients, coming home from work to an empty room, possibly with bugs in it, holding a bag with fast food in it, and looking at his phone for someone to care, and I’m not there. I imagine in his mind he flips through the footage of all the times I failed him, let him down, wasn’t there for him, hurt him someone, and adds each day that I am absent from him like to that footage. That is what’s holding me hostage. I need him to know that I will never leave him or abandon him, but the Holy Spirit is asking me to do just that. Abandon him to his wayward path and allow him to feel the aloneness of it, to feel the emptiness, to know on a deep level, what it feels like to be separated from God and family. I pray that God is merciful and that it doesn’t last long. He’s a child, still in his formative years. There is much at stake.

 

 

It’s about holding on till the end. All this, every word, every prayer I’ve prayed over this book, over you my precious readers, every thought, every scrawled note, every screenshot in my mind toward this work, is engineered to spur you on to the finish line. I thought I would write about how to manage your household, how to keep things picked up to promote an environment of order. I thought we would exchange recipes and trade ideas that would help us to eat out less and cook  more, and encourage healthy habits in your family. I thought I would be able to share some hacks I’ve learned in marriage and parenting, but it turns out, I have to, I’m compelled to share the underbelly of my life, and to tell you what the Bible says, and how I did it, how I’m doing it. The first day in decades, that my husband and I decided to start fasting for our kids again, my son left. I started the chapter on suffering that very day. At the beginning of the day, I wrote about a friend of mine that has suffered immensely, because my own suffering felt like it was an island in the ocean and I had been on the mainland too long to remember what the leaves on the trees looked like and what the air smelled like and how bad the water tasted.

 

All of those are good things, and I would imagine that at some point they will all surface in my writing, because they are in my heart. But the message of this writing has become clear to me as if in neon lights every time I open my Bible.

 

NONE OF IT MATTERS IF YOU DON’T FINISH. None of it. None of the sleepless nights you spent all night praying. None of the tattered pages of your Bible, dog-eared and tear-stained from the hours you poured over its pages. None of the times you shared the gospel with someone at the expense of your own identity and friendship. None of the years that you spent pouring into your children for the sake of the Jesus. None of it. None of it. None of it will matter if you don’t endure to the end. …whose house we are, if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope first until the end.

 

CHAPTER 5

ANCHOR

This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil. Heb. 6:19

 

In the fall of 2018, my daughter made the shocking announcement that she would be leaving for Marine bootcamp the following spring. Being the oldest of our nine ninos, we were shellshocked at the news. I was happy for her to make a plan for her life, but the marines… I just couldn’t imagine my sweet girl carrying a weapon in the defense of our country. It was overwhelming.

 

Her lease was up in October, so she moved back into our house with her two dogs, and settled in for the next few months to train and work and move on to her big new life. My perspective was and continues to be that God’s plans for our lives prevail regardless of our own ideas of how things should go down. This was no different, even though I was—nervous, let’s say, about sending my 20-year-old daughter into the marines to march shoulder to shoulder with a company of marines, the fiercest fighting force in the entire military, by reputation.

 

I kept trying to sway her from proceeding by telling her that the marines were the toughest, but they also got the worst rations. That when the air force and the marines were in the same town, the air force had the nicer hotel with better food, while the marines slept at the Motel 6. They sort of remind me of the Spartans; stripped of every luxury and indulgence in their training, in the name of physical ferocity. Everything I told her like this pushed her further in. They were bada** and that’s what she wanted to be.

 

A few weeks before she was scheduled to leave, she asked if we wanted to see a band play in a relatively small venue in the city. I was already crazy about the band, so my husband and I bought tickets for ourselves, Kennedy, and Jasmine, my next oldest daughter. Novo Amor, a dreamy melodic mix of melancholy and lyrical genius, would surely not disappoint. I was nervous about the night, I hate to go places I’ve never been. I certainly didn’t have any reference for how the bar scene would go down, but I was excited to have this experience with the girls and Dale, before Kennedy shipped out.

 

We arrived early, first in line, actually. Standing in the cold for several minutes while Dale parked the car, they opened the doors a few minutes ahead of schedule and we just walked in. When they started accepting payments, we got our tickets and had first picks at seating. The room was completely empty except for the bartenders and the band members backstage. I chose the high-top table close to the front, but not too close. It was surrounded by chairs and I had no intention of standing the whole time. Apparently that is what most people do, stand the whole time. There was one table close to the stage and there were three other tables in the back of the room.

 

As the room began to fill up, we noticed one of the lead singers at the bar alone. I wanted to go ask for a picture, but Kennedy insisted that I stay in my seat and not embarrass her. The crowd was less intimidating than I expected. Dale and I were among a handful of the oldest people in the room. The rest were kids that just wanted to scream and sip their beers. My girls made obnoxious moves to keep the beer sippers out of our personal space, but by the time Novo Amor and Ed Tullet took the stage, it wouldn’t have mattered. I wished I would have chosen to stand next to the biggest speaker in the room.

 

A marvelous swirl of sound resonated off the wall in perfect harmony, moving and throbbing, and collecting the hearts of every listener mesmerized in the tossing of the musical waves of each song.

 

I expected their songs to all sound the same, but each one was uniquely shaped and molded with careful intricacy. Being a new follower of the group, I was disappointed and not knowing all the words to each song. I did know a few, though, and when they played, I died. (When someone says something really funny at this moment in time, people say, I’m dead. Or you killed me. Or you slay. I’m saying that I metaphorically died of rich slathery goodness dripping out of my mouth because the music was that good.)

 

My song, Anchor, began slowly and quietly, just like how I had heard it so many times before when I played it on youtube.

 

…Took the breath from my open mouth
Never known how it broke me down
I went in circles somewhere else

 

It was so perfectly lovely I closed my eyes. The sound washed over me in waves, churning and spinning, rising and falling like the ocean. I was completely absorbed by the time the bridge, that incredible bridge, came.

 

Anchor up to me, love

Anchor up to me, love

Anchor up to me, love

Anchor up to me

My love, my love, my love…

 

That’s when the tears came. I could hear Jesus calling. I could see Him reaching his hand toward me, beckoning me to anchor up. He was singing our love song and it wrecked me. I was shipwrecked right here in the middle of a bunch of half-drunk college kids and their plans to hook-up or drink the night away. Right in the middle of the swirling toppling waves, Jesus was calling to me.

 

“Trust me with this. I have her. I know the plans I have for her, plans to prosper her. I want to give her a future. Anchor your heart to mine, and stop fretting.”

 

We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. Hebrews 6:10

 

When I began to pray over this book, God brought me to Hebrews. I didn’t know what was in Hebrews, I just trusted that this is where He wanted to me begin. Every morning I read a chapter of the book, just as I have done for months and months. I missed this precious verse the first few times I read it, but when it caught me, I was caught. Like a deer in a bear trap. Tangled, stuck hard. Only, not like in that brutal way. I read these words and I’m transported to the night Jesus called me to anchor up to Him with the words of a love song. Jesus, the hope of glory, the anchor for the soul. Firm and secure.

 

CHAPTER 6

GOD SEES Me

What is man that you remember him or the son of man that you care for him? Heb 2:6

 

Psalms 8:3 When I observe your heavens the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you set in place, what is a human being that you remember him as son of man that you look after him?

 

The wonder of these verses is not lost on me. I come across them in my Bible reading and I read them again. I come back to them again. God. Sees. Me. What is man that you remember him? Why do you care so deeply and richly for us when humanity is such a lost cause… we fail. We fail. We fail. We fail. And you love us. You see us. You pursue us. You hold us, our lives, our tiny details, in your perfect hands and you are mindful of us. Beautiful God, I am overwhelmed.

 

I will never fully grasp how, in my world, I lose something, like a whisk. A can opener. A bag of dried cranberries. I hunt and cry and yell and blame and get so angry, I could explode. Then I pray, “Please, can you just show me where it is?” and it appears. I see it. Like a light from the sky shines on the thing. Or I have a thought, I remember that I put it in a basket that I have looked past for half an hour in the search. All the sudden I see. I have eyes to see. Because God has given me eyes to see.

 

We are in the middle of a global pandemic as I write. We are in day 12 of quarantine. I began keeping the kids home and limiting traffic in and out almost two weeks ago. Yesterday was the first day of official “stay-at-home” order for the entire Kansas City Metro area. We are in a global crisis.

 

A few weeks before Christmas, the news of a new virus called the coronavirus, or COVID-19, broke all over the world. China had been stuck by a mighty blow and it was spreading like wildfire. By February, it was all over the world. By March, the entire countries of Italy and Spain closed their borders. They United States blocked all trade with Europe. The market crashed. Schools all over the country closed. People were dying by the thousands, projecting a million and a half Americans would die. Cruise ships were quarantining their passengers for weeks in order to safely keep the disease from spreading further.

 

At first, they said symptoms presented as a high fever and dry cough. It seemed to affect more men than women, and people in their 60s and older were high risk. People with autoimmune disorders were ordered to stay away from crowds as the sickness was certainly deadly. As more people contracted the illness, Washington DC and San Francisco and New York City shut down. No one in the streets. Times Square was a ghost town. Then more people told their version of the sickness once they recovered. Headaches. GI issues. Loss of smell and taste. Young people were no longer less likely to get it. They world had such a limited understanding of it, it reminded me of the story in the Bible when Sampson lit all the foxes tails on fire and sent them running through the fields of his enemies, leaving desolation in every direction.

 

So we stay in our houses, scouring the news pages and Facebook in hopes of good news and something to make us laugh. We try to establish a life inside these walls, with absolute bare minimum physical contact with the outside world. We live moment by moment with no end in sight.

 

And I’m standing in my kitchen with tears in my eyes because I can’t find the dried cranberries I bought to make oatmeal bars just like Wendy’s and all the sudden I need to make them so badly because I can’t cope with being inside the walls anymore only I can’t find the dang cranberries. So I ask God, “Can you just show me where they are?” and I remember a little basket that I set up for baked goods when my pantry was too full because I was storing up food for the quarantine and I needed a little more space.

 

I usually spend between $700-$800 on groceries in a month. That’s modest, considering I also have a budget for eating out and getting sodas from Sonic. When the news of potential lockdown began to circulate, I took it very, very seriously. Even though I had just purchased a huge re-stock of groceries after the cupboards were practically bare, I went to the store to get a few things just in case. When I got to the car with the first load, I got a message from my husband that said

 

Last night I stopped by Price Chopper to get some extra groceries. Just in case. Just in case the novel coronavirus quarantines us to our house or shuts down the economy, we should have some extra bags of cereal and milk. Maybe bread. Can’t hurt.

As I was loading the car, I saw a guy from church and said hello. Then I got a text. “Kansas City was declared to be in a State of Emergency. Get more.” Back in I went.

I’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life. I know what “a run” looks like. I didn’t think this was a run. Until I saw the checkout lines at 9pm. As I scrambled around the store collecting essentials; flour, milk, potatoes, pasta, marinara, pop tarts, toilet paper, I passed the guy that I had seen in the parking lot. He said, “Didn’t I just see you loading groceries into your car?”

Heh. Heh. Yeah… I felt the heat in my neck as I explained the text I had received, finishing with, “might as well feed the hysteria, right?” In that moment I felt a little cuckoo.

We’re doing the best we can over here, washing our hands like surgeons, drinking grape juice, and adding more vegetables. I know you are, too. Just remember, when you get overwhelmed with the news and the empty shelves, we’re all in this together.

 

This was my last trip. I realized that every night I was waking up remembering something else I had forgotten, determining to go back. Finally, after I realized that I had spent twice our grocery budget for the month, I had to stop. I was shopping for control. I was shopping out of fear. I was no longer being responsible for my household, I was staying ahead of the curve. It had to stop.

 

Most mornings I fry five eggs, two for me and three for Dale. It’s a good way to start the day. I never think about how many eggs I’m using because I buy 5 dozen at a time. When we get down to the last one, about a week or so later, I buy more. For over a week, the egg shelves have been empty. When I got down to two and a half dozen this week, I immediately started to put my shoes on to “run to the store”. God stopped me in my tracks and the Holy Spirit spoke into my fears. “How can I show you my provision if you keep running to the store? Ask me for what you need. I will provide for you.”

 

I needed this wake-up call so badly. God saw me. He was holding my precious, well-tended family in His hands, and my striving was all in vain. He is our keeper. Why does He do these things??

 

He loved us when we had no beauty to attract His affections. We lay trodden underfoot and polluted in our blood. There is nothing lovely in man. Christ knew all this clearly. In eternity past, Christ saw all our faults, and not one after another, but all together. This adds great wonder to the lov of Christ. He saw every perverse look, every unkind gesture, every rebellious motion, every disingenuous act. Every hear was visible from eternity. Here is the wonder of Christs love It is fixed upon man, the worst of creatures. Consider His resolution and wonder: I will give eternal life to those whom have dishonored me. Valley of Vision page 76.

 

Why do you love me? Why do you love me? Always and forever. Always and forever.

 

 

CHAPTER 7

WAITING

So also Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of man, will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him. Heb. 9:28

Waiting is the worst. It occupies a portion of life that is despised by many. I hate waiting, too. The most trying season for me has always been waiting for a new baby. It’s the hardest, longest wait in life. Also, waiting for Dale Sutton to graduate college so we could get married. That was a long wait.

Sitting in the coronavirus quarantine means a lot of waiting. I’m not bored, not today. Today I have plans. The sun is brightly shining. The wind is gently blowing through the neighborhood. I am happy. I have food in the cabinets, my children are healthy, my husband is working, and we have money. All is right with the world.

I keep thinking about my faith. It’s easy for me to trust God because we have food and our health and money. There are people in my community that don’t have money because they’ve been laid off their jobs. They only have housing and electricity and water because the government mandated the companies to allow for non-payment. Some children only have access to food because they are on a free lunch program at school and the community is aware of their need, therefore, sending food to their homes. It’s alarming.

Even with everything I need, it feels like forever. I feel like I’m staring down the barrel of forever inside these walls. I can survive like this, it’s my life. We are fine. Everyone is well, and we are living pretty much as usual. It’s the aftermath I’m afraid of. What is it going to look like when half the businesses in town close? What about when the people in the community begin to separate as have and have-nots? What if the culture goes into post-COVID-19 shock? I don’t want to go into shock. I want to keep on living the way we always have because it’s comfortable.

Funny because I’ve been judging the world and all its business for years, watching them flit to and fro, never sitting down to meals together, never spending time investing in their marriages or their children, just letting the machine do all the work while they complained when things didn’t go well. Now the whole world is homeschooling and the daddies of the world are working in bedrooms at the back of the house, eating meals with the kids at the table and coming to bed instead of going out for drinks after work. And I’m complaining, like Jonah, that things are changing. This is exactly the change that the whole world has needed for sooooo long! And here I sit wishing it would all end so we can get on with it.

I fear the changes. Seriously afraid of what it will look like in the end. Becca, big adventurer, dreamer for the masses, living from a quiet corner of the bedroom, fingers blazing across the keyboard, just scared to death that she’ll get fatter and look like a mountain when the smoke clears and the dust settles.

We can survive this. What if someone gets sick? What if, in the mercy of God, someone dies and we are left behind? What if I die?

Honestly, if anyone dies, I selfishly want to go first. I want us all to go, if we must, with as little suffering as possible. Here’s my cowardice, but seriously, I want to be with Jesus. He is everything to me and I want Him so badly, to know Him in his fullness, not just a virtual reality of Him here. I want to walk with Him and be with Him and sit at His feet, but I know that I will stay on here until the work He has called me to do is done. And it’s not done yet. It’s not time yet.

Courage is not being fearless in the face of hard and scary things. It’s doing the hard and scary things scared. I hashtag most of my Instagram posts #doitscared to remind myself that this world is a scary place, but I’ve still gotta to do the thing. Even when, especially when it’s scary.

The waiting… the waiting… but to bring salvation to those that are waiting for him.

Sometimes Dale goes out to pick up dinner for us. I can hardly catch my breath in anticipation of his return. He’s just going after burgers, but the moment he walks out the door, I have to occupy myself with something to distract me from counting the minutes until he returns. I feel that way about him coming home from work sometimes. Especially these times. Covid times. The best part of my day is hearing the garage door open and the jingle of his chits coming out of his pocket. It means the day is done. Time to clock out. I am not the lone adult in the room anymore, there is another that is my reinforcement. He partners with me against the barrage of questions, arguments, spreading of affection, and negotiating solutions to the problems in the house. More importantly, he sweeps me into his arms and looks me in the eye to ask me how my day was. He makes me feel like a person with feelings, not just Rosie Robot, the house manager. He brings sweet relief.

How much more, precious reader, does the anticipation of the return of Jesus to bring to us salvation cause your heart to race? Cause your eyes to fill with tears? Cause you soul to yearn for his return? I almost can’t even think about it. I have to put aside the longing. I can’t sit in it long, for it fills me with restless desire for Him, and the unmet fulfillment is more than I can bear.

But in that, Jesus is close to the brokenhearted. He is near in times of trouble. The comings and the goings of the Good Shepherd in and out of our lives is enough to bring peace and bolster endurance.

“Here is one more thing I must tell you. I will take you to the foot of the mountains Myself, so that there will be no danger from your enemies. From then on, you will not see Me all the time, Much-Afraid, but I will be able to hear you whenever you speak to Me. Whenever you call for help, I promise to come to you at once. Two special helpers will guide you on the steep and hard places while your feet are still crippled and you can only go slowly. I have chosen them Myself. Will you accept them with joy and let them be your helpers?”

There is coming a day when this life, all of this, will fall away like a loose garment, and our real lives will begin. The coming of Christ is the commencement of our release from these broken-down old bodies and this broken-down old world. If we can only endure until the end, for only then will we be saved.

 

CHAPTER 8

PERSEVERANCE

Now we desire each of you to demonstrate the same diligence for the full assurance of your hope until the end, so that you won’t become lazy but will be imitators of those who inherit the promises through faith and perseverance. Heb. 6:11-12

When I was a sophomore in high school, my best friend had this brilliant idea. “Let’s join the swim team!” she said. We, neither one, had ever been on a swim team. Nor had we had ever competed in any sort of athletic competition up until that time. I was resistant.

“I don’t even know how to swim!” I protested.

“They’ll teach us. Seriously, this is a great idea. We’ll go to practice every day, we’ll get skinny, get to go to meets, and since we’re not any good we won’t have to compete!”

She had me at “we’ll get skinny”. We started the team as novice swimmers. There wasn’t a lot of instruction. The coach, we’ll call him Jake, Jake would yell out, “Give me 200 free. Go.” And I’d lean over to her and say, “What does that mean?” She’d make that I dunno face where she raised her eyebrows, twisted her mouth down to one side and shrugged. The rest of the swimmers would be turning at the opposite end of the lane to head back by the time coach realized we were still there. “Do you know how to freestyle?” We nodded, he explained what 200 meters meant, gave some tips on how to make the standard stroke more effective and then yelled “Go”. Only it was never actually like GO. It was clipped, like “Gup”. Off we went, swimming with all we had, trying to look like we knew what we were doing.

The first few weeks were exhausting. We swam for two hours everyday after school, and much to our chagrin, two hours on Saturday mornings. We didn’t have cell phones back then, so if our practice got out late, we would miss the extracurricular bus that hauled all the sporty kids home. That left us sitting in front of the high school waiting for Bonnie’s mom or dad to come get us whenever they remembered that we needed a ride. Those were long days. I was so tired, I’d come home and crash around 7, not waking up until morning. What surprised me more than anything was how hungry I was, all the time. I was getting skinnier alright, but I could put the food away. It was incredible! Why I stopped swimming, I’ll never know.

I didn’t sweat the first meet because I thought surely, I wouldn’t have to race, I was a terrible swimmer. My times were never outside the slowest heats on my team. Thankfully Bonnie’s weren’t either, so we got to swim in the same lane or next to each other almost every day. When Coach Jake read off who would swim what stroke in what heat, mine and Bonnie’s names were both on the list. I was mortified. I turned to face her in the lane. “I thought you said we wouldn’t have to compete!?” I whispered angrily.

“I didn’t think we would!” she said with that same I dunno expression on her face.

After practice, I approached Jake and said, “Coach, I thought I wouldn’t have to compete.”

“Why would you think that,” he asked, tossing a tennis ball in the air that he carried in his pocket. The older guy’s version of a fidget spinner, I guess.

“Because I’m a terrible swimmer,” I said.

“Everybody competes,” he said, turning away.

Our first meet was at home, so that took some of the pressure off. I knew the pool, my people would be there, it was all good, except that I had to race. 200 free. My mom and brother were in the stands ready to cheer me on. My race was the last one of the meet, slowest heat for freestyle. I sat with my team swallowing my guts and wishing I could just run out. Bonnie and I talked about making a break for the doors, but then her race was announced and we were stuck staying. When they announced my race, I got up and walked toward the starting block in my lane. I had practiced diving in, the turns, all of it. I knew what I needed to dol. I’d do the best I could, and get a pizza when it was all over.

The gun cracked, I dove in and started to swim, arm over arm, kicking with all my might. There was a problem the second I hit the water. My goggles, which were usually suctioned to my eyes, flipped and filled with water. I knew if I touched the bottom of my lane with a hand or foot, I’d be disqualified, so I kept kicking and turning my arms like a windmill, while trying to sweep my goggles down my face with my right hand each time it came around. About three-quarters of the way down the lane, I was able to position them around my neck so I could effectively use both arms and breathe. As I turned at the end of the lane, I realized most of the other swimmers were swimming in my direction on their second lap. Ugh. I was going to be the last one swimming. And I didn’t have my goggles, so even if I was a good swimmer, I had a handicap of not being able to see.

I finished the race dead last by at least 25 meters. It was humiliating. Everyone in the stands was pity-cheering for me as I dragged myself out of the water. Standing by to congratulate me was my best friend, Bonnie. She threw my towel over my shoulder, patted me on the back and said, “Whew. I’m sure glad that was you and not me.” 

I didn’t even really know what I was signing up for, I could only see the benefits. Bonnie and I had a regimen that we started in seventh grade together and carried on into high school. We walked or drove to school together, then we walked or drove to my house after school. We made a pot of macaroni and cheese that we split, and then spent the next several hours daydreaming, listening to music, writing poetry, eating cookie dough, skipping through cemeteries, and talking about the boys we intended to marry and how we’d convince them to let us all live together because we couldn’t really imagine living life without each other. We were both obsessed with not getting any fatter, even though we literally ate cookie dough straight out of the roll. Just cut that sucker in half and jointly ate the whole thing. We also ate frosting out of the can. So, getting skinny without dieting was always the goal.

Swim team taught me things I would never have fully gotten the gist of without it. I learned that even if the coach is twenty years older, he will flirt with teenaged girls.

Actually, that wasn’t it. It was about endurance. It was about showing up every day, even when I could barely get out of bed that morning because of how sore I was. It was about doing what I had to do to be a part of a team. I wasn’t the best, I quite possibly was the worst, even though I was pretty sure Bonnie was worse than me. I didn’t have much to offer except a body. I swam races so someone else didn’t have to wear themself out for the event they were really good at. I showed up and swam, even when I didn’t want to. I gave up my weekends to swim. I was too tired to go anywhere on Friday night, and Saturday morning I had to get up and go play water polo in the deep end for hours.

Bonnie and I could have walked away at any time. We could have individually walked away, as a matter of fact, I think she got a sinus infection and dropped out. I finished though. I stayed until the end. I never felt like a good swimmer, but I did shave some time off my stroke when I started racing back and breast stroke. When the coach put me in second heat instead of fourth, because Christy DeBauge couldn’t race, I shaved four seconds off, which is a lot of time!

I showed up for practice. I had to sleep more. I gave up weekends doing fun things. I had to eat more, which was amazing because I was getting skinnier. I had to practice every single day after school. And I had to compete, which was terrible because I was a nervous wreck all the way to the meet, and then I got diarrhea because my nerves were so shaken. It really did a number on me. But I finished. I endured. I stayed the course. I finished strong. I did it scared. I don’t know if I mattered to anyone on the team, but Coach Jake was really proud of me by the end of the season and told me so.

It seems like such a silly comparison, but it is so appropriate for the Christian walk. So much of the journey is just showing up. Go to church. Read your Bible. Get alone and seek Jesus. Do the thing that you feel led to do for someone. Encourage one another daily. Build one another up in Christ. Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. Live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel. Love God. Love people. Do the next thing, and keep on! Run the race set before you with ENDURANCE!

It’s about finishing strong. If Bonnie and I had left the swim team after the first meet, we wouldn’t have been counted as members of the swim team. Only people that finished the season received letters and pins. If you walk away in the faith, you are not counted with Christ in the last day. Your commitment, no matter how many years of your life it occupied, will not count toward anything if you don’t finish the race. God isn’t interested in what you did or did not do. He wants your heart. Finish. Don’t let sin entangle you and rob you of the joy you’ve found in Christ. Live your life for Jesus from this day until the end, whether we are caught up to meet him in the air, or we pass from this life to the next. Keep on going, darlings, to the FINISH!

SYATF

I have this cousin named Tina. She is the cutest. I think she’s in her fifties, and you’d never know it because she looks just like she did in her twenties. Tina married Billy when I was in the seventh grade. Billy is just like Tina, he is in his fifties, but he looks like he’s in his twenties.

She was actually my step-cousin, and I was close to her sister who was a year older than me. I was the oldest girl cousin by blood, so I had a little bit of an advantage in the fam, but we were friends no less. After Tina and Billy got married, they moved to St Louis with the military. My uncle was especially fond of me, so when they decided to take a trip to visit, he invited me to join him and Nicole, my cousin, and my Uncle Sean. I’ll never forget that trip, the details stand out in my mind like they happened yesterday. We arrived in St Louis and it was windy. We walked downtown and did some shopping. Shopping was something my family rarely did unless it was necessity shopping. I already had a feeling Uncle Bubba was rich, the shopping confirmed that fact to me. We stopped in a shoe store where Nicole found a pair of penny loafers that she had to have. Bubba as not one to say no, so he bought us both a pair. I felt like I was the queen of the universe when he showed  me how to put the penny in the gap in the leather where it would stay put. He even gave me shiny new pennies to put in my mine so they’d shine in the sun. You’d have thought he gave me a million dollars when he handed me that bag. I don’t remember ever feeling that way before that day.

Tina and Billy’s apartment was small, but neat. She told us that she had tried to bake cookies, not exactly the domestic type, but she found a bug in the flour so she threw the whole batch of cookie dough and flour in the trash. She was adorable, she snorted when she laughed telling us the story. I had not spent much time with her before, and I had no idea how delightful she was, smiling and laughing as easily as breathing. I adored her and her cute family.

We played cards into the wee hours of morning, and when we left St Louis, I was sad to go. I somehow knew I wouldn’t have quality time like that with my sweet cousins again.

I was raised in a Christian home. We went to church every time the doors were open, prayed for our food, raised our hands in worship, knelt at the altar on Sunday nights, and sometimes cried for no reason at all during services or especially touching songs. We didn’t cuss or drink or smoke, or have sex before marriage or watch MTV or cheat on homework. Or, we weren’t supposed to. The rules were clear. People that did these things were not, by all appearances, and by this standard, Christians. My Uncle Bubba drove me from my grandma’s house to his house about and hour and a half away in a soft-top jeep. When we got to his house, his wife, Elke, announced that we were having “sh** on a shingle” (aka gravy on toast) for dinner, and they drank wine with their dinner. And had beer in the fridge. And they had HBO, big no-no. They were clearly not Christians.

Years later when Facebook came on the scene, I reconnected with Tina. Facebook reconnected anyway. She worked as a member of the office staff in a school. She’s worked there forever, I have no idea if it’s grade school or high school, nor do I know what she does. I just know that she’s been doing it forever and seems to absolutely love it. I think Tina loves everything. She’s such a darling, with some saucy snarky wit, and she’s never not smiling.

A post on Facebook popped up one day of small a tattoo she had recently gotten with a few members of the office staff. It was a heart that said “SYATF” on the inside. I had never seen anything like it, but people in the comments were just gushing over it. It wasn’t fancy or particularly unique, just a heart and these five letters. I googled the letters in a search bar to see if I could figure out the meaning. It meant “see you at the feet”. See you at the feet. Of Jesus. At the end of all of this, she and her friends had vowed to God and to each other that when this is all over with, they would meet up at Jesus’s feet. It brings tears to my eyes every time I think about it, even now. I was blown away that my cousin that I adored so completely was a believer, but more than that, that she had eternity in her sights. She had made a commitment that only a true believer set on enduring till the end could every possibly make: the commitment to finish the race strong all the way to the feet of Jesus. INSERT ALLL THEEE CRYING EMOJIIIIIS HERE!!!! I absolutely love it. SO dang much. Even as I type, I’m dreaming up a way to design a similar tattoo and ask my husband and kids if they all want to get it together.

Jasmine is considering buying a tattoo gun with all her quarantine work money. Maybe it will be simple enough that she can practice on each of us with this precious and costly acronym. At any rate, if you are a believer, and I pray that you are, let’s make this promise to each other, if only in our hearts. SYATF. 

April 14, 2020

Hebrews 4:9 Therefore a Sabbath rest remains for God’s people.

I woke up without the usual scramble and remembered Jesus and the resurrection, and my soul felt full, rich and satisfied.

I read about the disciples trudging back to the fishing boats, the only thing they knew before Jesus. I sensed how hopeless they must have felt, even after walking with Him every single day. Watching Him show them what to do. Teaching them with the words of eternal life all that time. After He proved beyond all doubt, who He was with the resurrection, He was nowhere to be found. They didn’t know what else to do.

Take heart, dear ones, your fears and doubts are not to bring you shame. Look for Him. The disciples found Him just past the water on the shore. Just past the night, at daybreak.
Keep holding on. Morning will come, and He come for you.
“But when the day was now breaking, Jesus stood on the beach...”
John 21:4

 

With the endless corona talk circulating like fruit flies in the summer around here, there had also been a lot of talk about end times, the rapture, the return of Jesus, and the apocalypse, whatever that means. For a few days my littles were saying, “Listen! I think I hear the Donald TRUMPets!” in reference to the trumpet blasts that will usher Jesus’s return to “pick us up” as Moses would describe His return. I think it’s pretty incredible to think of it that way. For decades I’ve lived with my hope of His return in a dusty filing cabinet in my mind, trusting it to be true, but not living with it in my sights until a few years ago.

My Sunday School class read a book by Ann Voscamp called “The Broken Way”. In the book she shares the story of a close friend that was in her last months of life in a battle with cancer. How she continued to give everything away until the very end. In one phone call the friend says to Ann, “Always keep eternity before you.” It hit me like a ton of bricks just fell from the sky and landed fully in my lap. I was keeping eternity in file cabinet, with no eyes on it, whatsoever. No. This was not the way the people of God ought to live, but to focus on eternity and what lies ahead, forgetting what’s behind, and PRESSING ON toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of Jesus Christ! It became my mantra. I said it as often as possible in conversations, in text, in Sunday school. I made a hand-lettered wall hanging that said the words and hung it above my dresser in my bedroom so that I would never forget to remember to always keep eternity before me. These days have brought a fountain of joy to my heart, as the possibility of the return of Christ comes into focus.

I’m not a seer. I don’t pretend to know when the end is coming. There is worldwide sickness. Tornados. Earthquakes. Locust destroying crops in apocalyptic proportion in Africa. The cultural climate feels so weird… like things are shifting. Normal is fading and new is coming, but what that means exactly, I can’t tell you. I just keep looking up. The sky has been extraordinary, by the way. Spectacular, really. The weather goes from 80 degrees to 40 in a day, and back to 70 then snow the next few days. The Midwest is renown for it’s bizarre weather patterns, but this is uncanny. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it! Our yard work is sitting half done because it’s so dang cold all the sudden, I don’t want to go outside!

I will tell you this, my children and listening for trumpets for the first time in their lives. They are praying that Jesus would come back quickly. My big kids are considering their salvation in ways they never have before. It’s a remarkable shift from the everyday hustle to the present day-stand-still. I say stand-still like that’s what we do. We never do that. But for the rest of the world, not working or going to school or soccer or dance, it must feel like a stand-still. Again, I retract. I’ve seen the schedule of zoom calls it takes for a family of five to do their distance learning. Yikes. But you know what I mean… these are strange times, but they are OUR times. We MUST fix our eyes of Jesus and keep going in our work here.

The disciples… I can’t get this out of my head. They’re out fishing, right? And Jesus comes on the scene. They literally drop their nets and walk away from their normal lives. Just walk away, no questions asked. Yes. We want to follow Christ, whatever that means, which none of them could have ever predicted what that would have looked like. They just went!

Fast forward three years, they’ve spent practically every waking hour with Him. I mean, I wonder if we actually see every time that they weren’t with Him because they kept freaking out if He wasn’t there. I’ve recently come to notice how many times Jesus went away to pray. Good grief… I can so relate to His life on this level. Early in the quarantine I left the house to take the trash outside to the trash cans. It’s not far. I go out the kitchen door, through the garage, and half-way across the driveway, and I’m there. Boom. Done. On my way back into the house, I picked up a few things in the garage and could hear the kids running through the house screaming for me. It wasn’t a casual, “Where’s Mom?” It was hysterical, “MOM! MOM!!!! MOOOOOOOM!!!!” I was probably out of the house for a total of four minutes. We’ve been together every single hour of every single day for weeks, and I walk out of sight for four minutes, pandemonium breaks out all over the house. I digress. It’s funny how I’ve never noticed. Look it up. He’s always trying to get away from the crowd, and sometimes from the disciples.

So they’ve been together all this time, almost constantly. After Jesus is crucified, and even that night, they are separated and everything changes. He’s in the hands of the authorities, and they don’t know what to do. Can you imagine?? Then He is resurrected, so He’s there somewhere, but they don’t know where. They don’t know what to do, so they go back to the boats. Toss out the nets. Stare listlessly into the wild blue yonder… and remember when He was theirs, and they weren’t alone in the world.

This, oh  my goodness, this I can relate to. It’s partially why I keep eternity in the filing cabinet, because it hurts that He’s there and not here. That probably sounds so strange, He’s never been with me, but He is mine. And the promise that He’s coming for me… the wait is unbearable sometimes. If I didn’t have purpose, I think I’d lock it up and never let out. But today is my real life, right now, and I have work to do. I’m doing it right now, reminding you to ALWAYS KEEP ETERNITY BEFORE YOU!! I brought it straight out of the filing cabinet and plastered it across my wall, right across from the bed so that the first words I see in the morning are these words.

He promised us this incredible rest with Him in eternity, starting in heaven and coming back to a new earth, just like Eden. That is what our future holds, but this? This broken-down old world? This is the FOR REAL work that is ours today for NOW.

I worked in a nursing home for several years while my husband was in school. I loved the work, but the position left little to be desired, let’s say. Bottom feeders did the job I did, so if I was working with someone that only took the job for the paycheck, I did most of the work. I carried most of the burden so that my sweet ladies would be cared for as gently and patiently as possible. Let the other girl fill water jugs and take the trash out. Anyway, we were required to wear scrubs every day except for Casual Fridays, when we were allowed to wear jeans to work. I wore scrubs every single day. One day my nurse asked me, “Don’t you know you don’t have to wear a uniform on Fridays?”

“Yes, I know. But I need the clothes to differentiate between my real life and my work life, so I opt out of Casual Fridays.”

It probably sounded precocious, I realize, but it was sincere. My husband was in seminary full-time and also worked two jobs while I was working nights full-time. It felt like we were underwater upside-down most of the time, so I wasn’t kidding. My clothes told me what day it was and what hat I needed to wear.

This is work. This life, that feels like real life but not quite, this is our work. We have a job to do. God designed our humanity for something very, very specific. You have to figure out what it is. And by figure out, I mean, seek first the Kingdom of GOD and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. He’ll show you what it is! He’ll put it in your path, if you are following Him.

Get up in the morning and open your Bible app before snapchat or Facebook or your bank app or the news headlines or even the weather. Read the Word of God, it will bring life to your bones. It will transform your mind. It will change you from the inside out. Close your eyes and give it all to Jesus. First thing, before you get out of bed. This is following!! He makes us like Him, even though we live in this broken-down world in they bodies of death. He resides IN us and works THROUGH us for His glory. This is work. Forget casual Fridays. Focus, darling, fix Your eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. He will give you what is yours to do. Do it with all your might until our rest comes. He will come back and get us, or we will pass into death, and therefore into life. Then we rest, and our real lives begin.

 

 

CHAPTER 9

ON WRITING

Hebrews 12

1: Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside very encumbrance and the sin that so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race the is set before us, 2:fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3:For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

I started keeping journals at a young age, probably around third grade I got my first diary with an actual lock and key. It was the most precious thing I owned, outside the purse I carried filled with candy, quarters, and that gum that had some kind of juicy filling that was like a party in your mouth around the second chew. I filled the pages with details about the boys I loved, the boys I hated, and the places we went. In middle school I wrote a play and passed out scripts to every willing participant I could round up. It was basically a more sophisticated round of Barbies, with real people saying the words I fed them in the story that I dreamed up. By high school I was writing poetry and journaling like it mattered. The pages were still filled with stories about boys and drama, but God was the current running through every situation like an intrinsic ribbon in my life. I started a blog as soon as my adult life began, and that was where I told my story. It was a long and inconsistent journey of how God moved in people and things around me. I never wasn’t a writer.

Last year, my baby turned five, my oldest kids moved out, and I had something that I hadn’t possessed since early in my marriage. Time. For some people, raising five kids hardly seems like it would accommodate a lot of free time, but let me just tell you. After having nine in the house, this feels like a walk in the park. We only have one teenager, mind you, so that makes a big difference after having four at a time. When it occurred to me that I might have an opportunity to do something, I immediately started researching what it takes to get published.

I have words, people, so many words that need to be shared across many, many pages. I listened to Jan Karon’s Mitford Series on audiobook over the past few years and even considered writing something in the same vein, but there’s so much more pressing in my current events, I don’t have the capacity for fiction.

Every chance I get, I sit down and write words. All the words. Stories and thoughts and ideas and stories and then I get his with Imposter Syndrome. My words are just words strung together. I need refining, teaching, organizing. I can’t just tell stories in a book and expect people to be dazzled by it. I need to say things that matter. I think the intrinsic value of that precious ribbon running through my life to translate into my writing. I need God to limelight, or I’ll burn my eyes out. I need to read so much more, so that I have people with much more heady words to lean into. I need to learn writing styles and practice focusing my work. But I just want to write. It’s like I’m learning to fly and I ain’t got wings.

Sitting here in the dark, directionless, I remember what God told me in the light. I was born a writer, and there is work for me to do. So for now, I must write, whatever it is. Get it out, and let it ride. He will give me one step at a time. He will enable me to put all the pieces together so that I am inviting others to sit on the bench with me. So that in my smallness, there is an audience that God drew, the ones that need to hear.

 

 

My dear friend Shannon (Lana) lost her husband in a terrible and tragic fight with cancer (Parkinsons) this morning.

Lana is older than me by, maybe, 15 years. I’m 43 at this writing, that would make her, potentially, 58. That could be right. She’s lovely with an elegant style and pretty hair. She is sharp, sophisticated, and always ready with an encouraging word.

A few years ago *Lana’s husband Howard (Ed) saw a chiropractor for a chronic issue with his hip. Things did not go as planned. Since then it’s been a steady schedule of different doctors, appointments, frustration, discouragement, and a steady decline in his health. Every week *Lana came to church a little more disheveled. It was taking more and more time for her and *Ed to get there. Some weeks she would begin to share and tears would choke out her words. Sometimes sobs. The heaviness of her situation weighed heavily on all our hearts. It was painful to watch her working endlessly to be the breadwinner and the caretaker for him, as well as the caretaker for their home and finances. The burden seemed endless and at times, unbearable.

This morning Lisa texted me. “Are you up? I need to talk to you. I haven’t head from you this week.”

Another text. “Well I just looked back at texts. I guess I have… <laughing with tears emoji> Just not really the one thing I needed to talk to you about.”

My guts wrenched a little at what she was going to tell me. We have been through hard things in our marriages together, hard things with our teenagers together, hard things in general, together. I knew this wasn’t going to be easy, whatever she had to say.

I was driving by myself to trade cars with Dale, so I had some uninterrupted time to listen. She told me the story of Ed’s most recent progression. It sounded like a landslide, and poor Lana was really going through the ringer. At the end of the story, Ed was on hospice for who knew how long.  We talked about what we could do for Lana, how to pray, and how awful it had been for her, our dear sister. Then we hung up and got busy doing things and living life.

Half an hour later she called me to say that Ed had died. 

Tears ran down my face.

I barely knew Ed. He was just a nice older gentleman that was married to Lana. One day Marilyn called me to ask if I could come help her “get Ed off the floor”. Marilyn is my Sunday school teacher. She is affectionately known as an oracle of wisdom and more recently, a lighthouse. She defines steadfastness. That day, she had stopped over to drop dinner off while Lana was at work and happened to find Ed on the kitchen floor. He was a very tall man, and his strength was limited. She couldn’t get him up by herself. I lived just down the street, so she called me in for reinforcement. Together we were able to help Ed get his onto his knees, then to his feet and back to his chair. He was trying to make coffee when he went down, and Marilyn needed to be somewhere else, so I stayed behind to make sure Ed got his coffee. If that were me, I’d have been looking forward to that coffee all morning. I intended to make sure he got it!

We visited while the coffee brewed. I managed to find everything he needed to make it just the way he liked it, then I sat down and told him about my family. When he learned that my oldest daughter had just returned from boot camp, he shared his own frightful experiences and his gratitude to God for getting him home. He shared some of his frustration with his illness, concerns with being on so many medications, and repeatedly thanked me for coming over to help. He was warm and vulnerable and kind. I would have loved to stay and visit all day long, but I had people waiting for me at home, and Ed needed to rest, so I excused myself. That was my first and last conversation with Ed.

After the phone call from Lisa and many tears, I considered what my day required of me and set about it again. I needed a walk before anything else. I needed fresh air in my lungs, wind on my face, sunshine on my hair. I needed to see the horses at the end of the road. I needed to see intrinsic beauty and feel God in the wide-open world outside these walls, so that’s what I did. I slid into my tennis shoes, bundled up and headed out. When I walk I love to listen. Sometimes it’s music, but more often it’s a podcast, and even more often it’s an audiobook. Today Annie F Downs was talking about “Tragedy” in Looking for Lovely. She got to the part where in her attempts to rescue her friend from pain, he said “No. I need to stay in this. I need to feel God here. It feels… sacred.” He had just lost his wife in a terrible car accident. Just like that, she was gone. I thought of Lana. I thought of Marilyn. Then I remembered that Marilyn had called me two days before, and I hadn’t called her back. Immediately I dialed her number.

“Becca?”

“Marilyn…”

I could hear her sad exhale.

“You called me a few days ago, and… I’m letting the business choke me out.” Tears spontaneously ran down my cheeks. “Do you remember what it was? Was it about Lana?” It was days before Christmas. My basement renovation was finally finished the day before. I had been spinning plates, so to speak, on every appendage and balancing almost all of it, but I forgot my mantra. People before things.

“I think it might have been, but I don’t remember. I just… how are you doing?”

“I’m so, so sad for Lana…” I fought back a sob so that I could get the words out. I bumbled on about how I barely knew Ed, and I was almost relieved for our friend that had been working herself to death to take care of him. How God has interwoven our lives in such a way that I felt like I could feel some of the storm raging in her heart, and I couldn’t stop crying. “This is what it means to bear one another’s burdens.”

She spoke gently and evenly, affirming my feelings and my words. She reminded me that even if we couldn’t see her now, we would be there when no one else was, after the funeral passed and the holidays were over, that was when Lana would need us most.

Marilyn lowered her voice a little as she made a meek confession. “I’m not very good at death. Some people are gifted at it, they know just what to say. I’m not. I don’t have the words, I’m awkward… It makes me nervous.”

Sometimes we have coffee on Monday, me and Marilyn. She is a mentor to me, but not intentionally. It was a divine appointment. God placed her in my path five years ago. She is the answer to decades of prayer. One day we were sitting at my kitchen table sipping coffee and eating tiny muffins that my girls made for us. I was trying to excuse my dog’s incessant barking. “He’s a good dog, really. I think he just wants to be where we are and to meet you, but sometimes he’s not nice so we keep him locked up when people come over.”

She smiled and said, “Well I’m kinda glad you do. I’m scared of big dogs.”

Marilyn? Scared of anything? I must have heard that wrong.

“When David was very young, he was in boy scouts. You know, they sell popcorn every year. So, I took him out to some of the neighbors to sell. We were walking down this pretty long driveway. Out of nowhere, this huge snarling dog comes running straight at us. I was scared to death, but I had my little boy with me. I couldn’t worry about myself, I had to protect him. I got in front of him and told him to stay behind me. I figured I had one chance at a good kick. I stood there in front of David waiting, ready. That dog ran straight for us, and when he was almost to me, he turned and went past us. Apparently there was a cat somewhere in the trees behind us!”

My eyes were as big as saucers. I laughed and cheered with tears in my eyes. This was the most courageous act of motherhood I had ever heard. Here she was, this very young mother, she might not have even been twenty yet, placing her body directly in the line of danger. She was ready with a plan of action to save her son. I wanted to applaud her bravery. She was scared, and she did it anyway.

I have a fear of dogs myself, due to an unexpected incident with a new mama and her precious litter. I know what I do when a dog is after me, I RUN! Who knows what I would have done if I had a little one with me?

Her confession about not handling people and death very well was precious to me. I encouraged her to not let fear discourage her from being there, to lean into the awkwardness, be ok with the brokenness. We cried for Lana, built each other up, prayed together, and then went back to do the things that were required of us next. We did the next thing.

I had to drive back to Leavenworth again to retrieve my car and return Dale’s. In that time, I prayed. The words “Your presence is enough. Tell her, ‘Your presence is enough’,”. I rebuffed. I can’t hear from God, not like that. I listen to His voice for me, but… I left the Assemblies of God for a Reformed Baptist community. With that I left a lot of fringe beliefs, like hearing from God, behind. I also left some of my heart behind. I’m slowly retrieving it. “Your presence is enough.” Even if it wasn’t the Holy Spirit giving me these words, they were true.

I started to text send a when my phone rang. Marilyn. I answered, it hung up. A minute later it rang again. Marilyn. Again I answered, but it was dead. I dialed her number.

“Becca.”

“Marilyn, are you trying to call me?”

“Yes, but it kept hanging up. I have to share something with you. You’re not going to believe it.”

I couldn’t believe it. A new woman, Carla, had come to our class. We’ve had a good core group of 6 or so of us for as long as I’ve been in the class. People come in and out occasionally, but when they come, they’re either in or out. We, the regulars, are hardcore, all in. It’s the best kept secret in the church, that class. God has carved out a little corner for us to hide, under the cover of solemnity for the sake of our fragile heartaches. When someone stays, we know it’s because God brought them to us.

Carla came once, missed a few, and then came once more when I was gone. Because she’s been present recently, she is included in our group correspondence. When Marilyn texted the news about Ed, Carla responded, “My heart aches for her. My husband passed away one year ago today.”

God had brought to us another sister. I rejoiced with Marilyn at the miraculous thing we had just witnessed, and then I said, “I have a word from God for you.”

It seemed so absurd to admit it, but I knew it was from His heart, and she needed to hear it. She was leery, I could hear it in her voice, but I proceeded obediently.

“Your presence is enough. You don’t have to say the right thing, or do the right thing, or prepare yourself in any way. Your presence is enough.”

When my marriage went into a full tailspin, just months after joining the “Unconditional Love” class, Marilyn called me. “Becca, would you like for me to come over? I could sit with you and pray with you…” I dodged her more than once, but she kept calling. I ran out of excuses and finally said yes. I didn’t know her very well and felt exposed in my pain. She came over like a breath of fresh air. We sat on the porch while my kids played. She spoke gently, never prying or judging. She prayed for me, and then she left. I don’t remember a single word she said, but I can still see her sweet face. I can hear her voice as we both looked out over the yard, it was so soothing. Her presence was enough to ease my suffering for those moments. I felt better because she came over.

We go through a couple of books a year in our class. A lot of times we do studies that include a video and a study guide. They are simple to prepare for, for both teacher and student. We’ve done deep, rich studies that rattled me to the core and changed my life’s trajectory. We’ve also done shallow studies that I could’ve have written in my sleep. I tend to obnoxiously yawn when we are doing a study that skims the surface. I crave the deep dives. I need them. The shallow ones feel like a waste of time as I’m speed-reading the text and scratching out the most obvious answers. When I get to class, Marilyn opens her book, covered with writing, whether the study is rich or poor. She begins to ask the listed questions, and then shares these gems that she mined out of the material while she was preparing. Wisdom rises out of each lesson every week because she had asked the Lord for it, and He has supplied.

Marilyn came from brokenness, the likes of which I will never fully know. But God, in His kindness, drew her out of the miry clay. He washed her white as snow and gave her His name. He began to bless her home and grow the fruits of the spirit in her life. You would never know, to look at her, that she was a runaway, a drug addict, abused, neglected, and desperately lonely. Today she’s rich and clothed with dignity and grit. She laughs at the days to come because she trusts God implicitly. She is our lighthouse. Her presence is enough because she brings Jesus. Every. Single. Time.

I told her, and she believed me, that her presence was enough. Lana wasn’t ready to see her. She wasn’t ready to see Lisa. Or me. Or any of us. She wanted to be alone.

I’m sitting in my bed at 11:21pm. Lana isn’t ever far from my mind, I’ve been praying for her for so long. God brings her to mind often, and I pray. Today, I feel the ache, the heavy, and not just for her, but for Carla and also for Dana, my mother-in-law. I wonder if I’ll be a member of the widows’ club someday. Dale’s convinced that he will die young the way his dad did, and his dad did before him. One day I told Dana that I see her as Naomi and myself as Ruth, the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law duo that found themselves collecting scraps in the king’s field to survive, after their husband/son died. Maybe we would finish out this journey together for her remaining years. It’s morbid, I know. Dale talks about it so often, though, it seeps into my thoughts.

Will I want Marilyn to fly to me? Will I lock down, cry for days or weeks or months in my bed? Will I be a good mother to my fatherless children? I think about these things in the wee hours of night, after everything gets dark and quiet. I can only hope that God, in His mercy, will speak gently to me in the valley of the shadow of death. “My presence is enough.” Enough to carry me out of bed. Enough to put my arms around my children and cry with them and be strong for them and love them enough to wash my hair. Enough to let them be funny and ridiculous and too loud when I want everything to be dark and quiet. Enough to keep living, when all I want to do is stop.

My life is not own. For me to live is Christ, to die is gain. But we keep going. We keep living for the joy set before us. We endure heartache and tragedy and trial and pain. We endure suffering so that God can perfect us, the way Jesus was perfected in suffering for our sakes. Let us not be weary in well-doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. (Gal. 6:9)

Those who sow in tears shall reap with joyful shouting. He who goes to and fro weeping, carrying his bag of seed, Shall indeed come again with a shout of joy bringing his sheaves with him. (Ps 126:5-6)

Hebrews 12

1: Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside very encumbrance and the sin that so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race the is set before us, 2:fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3:For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

 

PS 126

Those who sow with tears
    will reap with songs of joy.
⁶ Those who go out weeping,
    carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
    carrying sheaves with them

 

CHAPTER 10

December 27^th The Re-entry

Christmas is a holy season for us. We commence celebrating on November 1^st, and we wrap up the party on January 1. It’s non-stop. I know it’s holy all on it’s own, but what I mean is, my people take the day off work. We have a sleep-over Halloween night so that every second of the commencement happens when we are all gathered together under one roof. It begins with a huge breakfast, then decorations, then Christmas movies, then the season of busy takes flight. Christmas cookies, Snowflake cutting, hot chocolate, Tuba Christmas, Journey to Judea, Sutton Christmas on the lake, Sutton’s Annual Christmas Gala, Church Kids Christmas Program, Seasonal Celebration, (that one I added this year and it may trump a lot of these next year.) MawMaw’s Christmas Eve weekend party, The Christmas Eve service at church with looking at Christmas lights and the kids’ gift exchange, and finally the actual day including brunch, the Christmas story, presents at our house, then turkey and presents at Nana’s house, and a few days’ sleepover there. It’s fast. It’s intense. It’s spectacular. I love every minute of it until I’m way too tired to keep going and we keep going because the schedule demands it.

I have told myself for the past few years that I will not keep that pace next year, but I love it so much when it’s upon us that I can’t for the life of me whittle it down. I love it so much, the togetherness, the Christmas cheer, the jingle bells and holiday llamas on people’s sweaters, it’s absolutely the best time to be in a crowd. In my dreams, I would start a few lines of a Christmas song in a crowded mall and my tribe would immediately join in, in four-part harmony, and finish the song in unison. It might never happen. While they are all wildly talented, they are timid and conscientious and a little too concerned with what other people might think, like their mother.

It’s two days post-Christmas. Today we returned from the sleepover at Nana’s. I’m tired. Soul tired. I realized it last night when the Moses came into my bedroom at midnight scared to sleep in a room down the hall. My response was short, hostile, accusatory. I blasted him about just going to sleep, powering through the fear, asking God to help him. I really just wanted him to go away so I could shut down. I could hear him softyly crying down the hall and it cut me to the core. I didn’t want to be inconvenienced anymore. I didn’t want to handle his fear. I just wanted it to end. The night before a cousin stayed the night and I blasted them too. It was hours past bedtime for the little ones and I needed to clock out, but their chatter wouldn’t let me. I wanted to bury the noise, but nothing helped. I asked God for help, and things quieted inside me. I need to learn to say no. I literally cannot handle it. It’s too much.

We rearranged our original plan for this Christmas week to accommodate big kids’ work schedules and to try to get back in time for the funeral.

I got up early this morning to have coffee with my dad

 

When we transferred from California to Missouri, we lived in a hotel for part of January into March. We weren’t established in a church yet, and my cousin was on staff at a big church nearby. He’s a wildly talented musician, and honestly, I just wanted to hear him play, so we visited his church one Sunday. When we arrived at the parking lot, there was a line of cars waiting to get in. I couldn’t believe how many people there were. Parking attendants waved us into a visitors’ spot and directed us to the welcome center inside. The kind greeters there took the kids’ names and led us down a long hallway to the children’s ministry wing. There was an area replicating an arcade to the left, there were multiple bounce houses behind that, and there was a separate area to right with lines of chairs and a stage for the service time. The leaders explained how things would go and whisked my starry-eyed children away.

The service was extravagant. The lights were low when we arrived, and the music had already started. Strobes and stage lights were flung from every direction. Smoke billowed off the stage. People waved their arms and swayed, clapping and shouting. There were cool videos to rep the announcements, and the preaching was relevant and cutting edge. It felt a little big for me. After being way too small in a big church away from home, I was ready to have a name in smaller company.

When it was over, I moved slowly through to crowd to retrieve my children. Their faces were tentative when I arrived, but no one was crying and that seemed like a win.

“How was your class?” I asked once everyone was buckled into a seatbelt.

“Well, they called us up on stage in front of everyone,” my daughter said. “We got to talk in a microphone.”

My kids are no strangers to the stage. In California, they won a lip-sync battle with a routine they choreographed on their own to the Family Force Five song, Love Addict. I barely knew they were even practicing for it, being nine months pregnant with number six. I was in the hospital recovering from delivering her when they performed it. My oldest was ten and my youngest was three. All five kids participated and nailed it! I was proud to the gills.

This wasn’t the same situation, though. By my own estimation, there were over 100 kids in their class. Who in their right mind would pull kids on stage on their first visit to a new church?

“What did you say?” I asked in disbelief.

“They were talking about superheroes, and they asked us to say our name and tell what superpower we would want to have if we were superheroes,” my son explained. That seemed innocent enough.

“So what did you say?”

“Well first they asked Jasmine-“

She cut him off and said, “I said, ‘To control the weather,’ ” This sent me into gales of giggles. She was so cute, and I was so proud of her for thinking on her feet.

“Then they asked me, and I said, ‘Hi, my name is Micah and my superpower would be invisibility.’” He enunciated each syllable in the funniest way, which made me laugh even harder.

“Then I was the last one up there, and I said, ‘I’m Tre, and I would want THE GLOW.” Tre was my little guy, and that sent me over the edge.

“Then I yelled out from the audience, ‘Tre, tell them what is THE GLOW!” I was dying… tears ran down my face as I laughed and laughed and laughed.

“MOM! It was so humiliating! Why couldn’t we just say, ‘to fly’ or ‘to have laser eyes’ or something normal! Why do we have to be such homeschoolers? To control the weather?” Jasmine wailed from the backseat.

I was swelling with pride. My people got up on a stage in a room full of strangers and had the coolest answers ever. In my book, this was a classic homeschool win.

I had tucked this away in a box on a shelf in my hall of memories until this morning. I was on the path that I walk nearly every day. It’s January. It was 45 degrees. In the Midwest, this is unheard of. We are usually buried in snow and bundling up like Randy, the kid on A Christmas Story, to go out to get the mail. My husband wanted me to go to the gym with him, but I politely declined. “My love, it’s January 2^nd. That place is going to be packed. And besides, if it’s over 38 degrees, I’m walking outside every time.”

I’m listening to Emily P Freeman’s audiobook, Simply Tuesday. She stopped me dead in my tracks when she said, “invisibility”. It was the section after the stairwells and how we have to fight to keep the light inside brighter than whatever light shines on us from the outside. The word triggered me, and I laughed out loud. Then I began to lean into the word. Invisibility.

As a child, I spent long, lonely days feeling invisible to the world. No one knew me or needed me, and it hurled me into dreams of a big family where I would always be needed and never be alone. I’d never be invisible again.  Conversely, my darlings were born into the spotlight. We’re a mega-family, all born with red hair. We homeschool, as the cliché goes, and when we moved to a little town in Missouri, we bought a people mover the likes of which no one else drove. Everyone knew us. They knew where we were at all times, because in a town of 5,000, that’s just how it goes. They stopped us in the grocery store with all the usual questions. “Are they all yours? How do you do it? Where’d they get that red hair?” ;/ (My hair was sun-bleached from spending hours outside in California. It never recovered when we returned to spending half the year indoors. I loved it. I always answered with pride, and worked hard to graciously listen to every persons story about who in their family had red hair or how they had always wished for more kids but it wasn’t in the cards for them.

My kids joked about being freaks when they were old enough to realized that not everyone lives with that kind of notoriety. When we bought our white Nissan NVP3500 with the black racing stripe down the side, they said, “We need to make a video about our rich homeschool van.” I thought that translated “cool van”. Matter of fact, I wrote that first and remembered differently when I saw the words. I don’t think they ever thought it was cool. Anything that tagged them as homeschoolers was not cool.

I flashed to that day at the Rock and felt like a waved crashed over me as I remembered my boy wishing for invisibility. I thought about how when we felt like we had lost control and enrolled him in a private Christian school, hoping that the structure would steer him to smoother waters, he would beg me not to pick him up in the van. One day when all the littles were with me to pick him up, they were playing on a set of cement stairs when school let out. He was furious and refused to speak to me until days later.

He wasn’t enamored by the spotlight, he just wanted to fly under the radar. It never made sense to me until this morning when that word flipped the lights on what was true.

Maybe if I had listened, asked more questions instead of shaming him for being selfish and ashamed of our family, maybe he wouldn’t have struggled so desperately to keep his head above water when the waters got choppy. Maybe he couldn’t even have articulated it, but if I had been curious instead of hostile, maybe there could have been a bride between us instead of a chasm full of hot spattering lava.

I feel sad and heavy writing these words. He walked through the literal valley of the shadow of death. I did too. We were both barely surviving. If not for Jesus and His mercy, maybe we would have gone under and not recovered.

There’s this idea that if you do the right things, your kids will turn out great, and you will be praised for all your hard work. We honestly thought we were doing it all pretty well. We were having babies, you know, be fruitful and multiply, we were homeschooling, and we were doing family worship pretty regularly. We didn’t cuss or smoke or drink very much. Each kid had a safe clean place to live and healthy. Mostly homemade food to eat every day. I was schooling them with a pretty good track record, and their teeth were checked on a regular basis. We rang in every new year with a toast and hugs and noisemakers. We made valentines in February, ate green pancakes in March, made May baskets for the neighbors in May, and went to fireworks shows when it was illegal to shoot them off ourselves. In September we decorated for Fall, October made costumes and went trick-or-treating, November made apple turkeys and pulled out all the stops for a homemade Thanksgiving for just us, and December, forget about it. Snowflakes, gingerbread houses, secret santas, and stockings and presents and Christmas cookies for everyone. We even created our own private holiday that trumps all of them. It’s legit.

We tried to be objective when we disciplined our children. We spent time with them when Dale wasn’t working, accomdated them having friends, homeschooled and guarded their hearts until they were old enough to take the charge. We tried to listen. Tried to protect them. Tried to teach them the Gospel. Tried to keep them in a church where they could grow and have fellowship.

When the ceiling came crashing down on me with one kid then the next, I felt hopeless. I wanted to disappear. I felt like I needed a complete do-over, and I still had a lot of kids to raise. It was like the wind got knocked out of me. By all appearances we were doing everything right, but the fruit was coming out rotten. I wasn’t sure how to be a good mom anymore, because it seemed like we had done so many things wrong that there was no redemption. Only, we thought we did everything right, so what now?

When I was in high school, my youth group met up at the river where a rope swing was hung over a cliff. One after the next, we swung out over the river and plunged deep into it. I had never done anything of the sort, but I was eager for the rush of adrenaline. I got my courage up and grabbed the rope. Holding tightly, I got a running start and swung out over the water. The drop was amazing. Hitting the water was a shock. When I stopped falling, I tried to swim toward the surface. To my rising fear, the darkness of the water continued to surround me. I was running out of air and didn’t seem to be getting any closer to top. I finally just stopped swimming and let myself float. Confusion rattled me when I started floating upside-down. I had lost my bearings and was actually swimming toward the floor of the river. I made it to the surface before I passed out from lack of oxygen with quite a story to tell. I don’t remember if I jumped again. I think I did a few more times, but the only vivid detail of the memory is floating upside-down. It was the most bizarre feeling.

That’s what I had to do. I had to stop flailing in my role as a mom, and trust that God would enable me to recover. I had to stop swimming and just float for a while. There is a lot of criticism aimed at mothers. I have always gotten it in the grocery store, as I am marching my troop through. But now, more than ever, my grown children point out the errors I am making in raising my younger children. They accuse me of being unwilling to discipline, too soft, being afraid of them. They tell me they are going to be terrors, worse than any of them were.

I beg to differ. I also can’t guarantee that, that won’t happen. I can tell you this, and this alone.

God called me to be the mother of all these children.

His Word is true. If we made a colossal mistake in parenting, it was that we allowed our anger to cloud our judgment when things got intense with our kids. We didn’t always give consequences apart from our emotions or frustration. The Bible says the anger of man will not produce the righteousness of God. As I have softened toward my children, they have become more receptive to the Gospel in their daily lives.

I can’t do everything right. I can only do the best I can with what I know and what I have.

Children are born people, and what I think they should be has very little to do with who they are.

 

CHAPTER 11

…how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? Heb. 9:14

Inside my house, there is a continual rule of order. It’s called “the pile file” system. I learned it from my dad, who has everything he needs stacked in piles, and if you move anything, it upsets the whole system. He knows where it is in the pile and he’s the only one who knows the filing system of the piles.  Here, it is a similar system. We have piles. Piles on the counter. Piles on the table. Piles in the laundry room. Piles in the sunroom. Piles in the work room. Piles in the basement. Piles, piles, everywhere piles. I try to keep the piles in the common areas at a minimum, but honestly, keeping the piles at bay is like trying to capture the wind. There are so many people and there is so much stuff, I have almost given up the fight. Except that it drives me crazy. About every three months the insanity compels me to stop everything and organize.

This week, the insanity has risen to a height I cannot fully explain, and I started the frantic organization of piles. The Fly Lady calls them “hotspots.” They are the areas that tend to collect stuff. The idea is that you take five minutes to clean them up. I was working on one such area when I stumbled across a box of treasures from my adolescent years. It was full of pictures of my long-lost junior high and high school friends. As I poured over each photograph, I was transported from my clutter back to another place in time.

Naturally I texted my best friend from those days, who was equally transported. For a few hours we texted back and forth about various pictures and shared memories from those days. She seemed dazzled by how happy we were. I certainly looked happy in the pictures, and I probably was, but the real joy I have known since those days far surpasses that superficial happiness.

A few months ago another friend from my childhood texted me about a situation that broke her heart. We have known each other since we were very young, and our history gives us a connection that I don’t share with many people in my current circle. Even though we don’t see each other or talk very often, we stay connected on Facebook and the occasional text.

Because I’m not closely involved in her life, I couldn’t give her much more than a listening ear a compassion for her pain. She seemed surprised that someone would be capable of such heartless treatment of another human being. I told her that I don’t have answers for that, but I know someone that sticks closer than a brother, He promised to never leave her or forsake her if she surrendered to Him. She assured me that she was fine, her life was good and she was happy. I let it go. She wasn’t interested in talking about Jesus, so I gave her the space she wanted. A little while later she texted me again, assuring me that she is happy. It wasn’t more than a month later when she texted me again bemoaning the painful assault she had received from yet another. She felt used, worthless, discouraged and frustrated. She is prone to isolation and tends to be defensive toward people because of her family history. Again I pointed her to Jesus, the giver of real joy, a joy unspeakable and full of glory that cannot be fully known this side of heaven. She wasn’t interested in sinking her life into religion, she assured me that she is a good person.

I was shocked that someone that grew up in the same church I grew up in had such a listless grasp on the gospel. How can we have been raised by the same Christian principles and be so vastly different in our understanding? Even my sweet husband, who was a preacher’s daughter, knew that Jesus died for the sins of the whole world, but he had no idea his grace was specifically intended for him.

In an effort to bring more light to the issue for you, my precious reader, I want to tell the story of Jesus in a way that you may have never heard it before.

 

As the cold wind blew hard across the field, the old farmer sat alone in the warmth of his cozy kitchen sipping from a steamy hot cup of coffee. The bitter cold whipped and roared across the field outside.

The forecast predicted a blizzard through the night, and the snow was just beginning to fall in big, round puffs. At the sight of this, he turned his attention to the hearth and lifted a heavy log from the stack of firewood, tossing it onto the slow burning embers.

He heard a sound he didn’t recognize from the kitchen and turned to look. Nothing had fallen from the walls, the doors and windows were all closed. He stood motionless for several minutes, but the stillness remained. The log from the fireplace was beginning to crackle.

“Must be tir’d.” he thought, returning to the table. His coffee was still warm.

The snow was falling heavily now. He felt grateful that his pantry was full of food from his recent trip to town. He wouldn’t make it back for a while.

Again, that strange sound caught his attention causing him to look up before he heard it again. Something was hitting the kitchen window.

“What ‘n the world?” he said as he stood to get a closer look. Cold wind blew the snow in every direction. The gentle snowfall had become a winter storm in a matter of minutes. As he stared into the white chaos he spotted a tiny sparrow under the big oak tree that towered over the barn. It hopped from the lowest branch to the ground and back up in a scramble.

“Must’a got caught ‘n the storm…” He watched as the bird seemed to gear up for flight and flew straight for the window. It hit hard and made a sickening thud on the glass. His heart stopped. Looking back at the tree he spotted two more little sparrows. They seemed determined to follow the same deadly path.

The warm glow from his kitchen window was the only hope these little creatures could see for survival, and they couldn’t get in. His heart was pricked with compassion for the hopeless little ones. Turning toward the door, he pulled his boots on, put on a heavy coat, slipped on his gloves and double-wrapped a thick wool scarf around his neck and face.

The wind howled around him as he trudged through the mounting snow toward the barn. The animals were safely housed inside, but they startled when the barn doors opened ushering in the cold like a cruel intruder. As the light flooded over the field, the birds scattered in every direction, far, far from the refuge of the barn.

He waited a few minutes, even scattered some feed on top of the snow to draw them in, but the sparrows feared for their lives in the presence of the giant stranger and refused to come near. Finally, for his own sake and the sake of the other animals, he was forced to close the doors and return to the house.

The old farmer shook the snow off of his coat before stepping out of his boots and back into his slippers. He poured himself another hot cup of coffee to warm his bones. In no time, the awful thud of birds at the window returned.

“Maybe if I looked like a bird, they’d let me help ‘em,” he thought sadly. With no resolution tonight, he resigned himself to sleep on it. In the morning he would find a way to save the sparrows from their desperate state.

As the old farmer slept, he stirred and moaned from the troubles that weighed on his heart. Finally rest came, and he fell into a deep sleep.

He was awakened shortly after by a knock at the door. The old farmer slipped his feet back into his slippers, wrapped a robe over his shoulders and hurried to the door. Much to his surprise, there on the rickety old porch stood a young girl holding a basket. He invited her into the little cottage for warmth.

“Hello, kind sir, I’ve sweet bread and rolls for sale, would you care to buy?” she said, seemingly unaffected by the threatening blizzard she’d stepped out of.

He hadn’t much money, but the child must have been in great need to be out so late in the night.

“Yes ma’am, I believe I would,” he said pouring the entire contents of a coin purse into her mitten-covered hand.

“Oh my, what generosity. May the blessings of God be on you, kind sir,” she said handing him a wrapped loaf and turned to go. Before he could ask if she needed a place to sleep, she was gone. The old farmer seemed taken aback by the whole ordeal. Maybe his tired old head was playing tricks on him.

He eagerly untied the bundle, removed the baker’s paper and began to eat. The sweetness seemed to sink down to the innermost parts. He felt transformed in a way the he couldn’t quite explain. With the last bite, he sank to the floor. Extending his arms to catch himself, he realized that he no longer had arms, but wings in their place. Startled by the transformation he shook, flailed and flapped and began to rise off the ground. In no time at all he was flying around the room. Stopping on the back of chair at the kitchen table to collect himself, a thud on the window pane reminded him of tiny sparrows stranded in the cold.

In an instant the old farmer in his sparrow form flew to the door to rescue the perishing birds, but he found it latched and locked. Without the use of his hands, he had no way to open it. He flitted from front door to back door and from window to window. All were tightly shut.

The fire was dying down in the hearth, but it was still too hot to attempt the chimney. However, there was a coal hatch close by. The hatch had doors in the inside and outside of the cottage for easy access. The old place had settled over the years leaving gaps that my just be wide enough. He set to work at once, squeezing and squirming to get through the gap from one side to the other. His head went easily, but it took incredible strength and extreme discomfort to contort his body through the spaces. Finally he emerged in the bitter cold.

The tiny sparrow, now covered in coal dust, shook himself and took flight. From the sky he spotted the big oak tree and found a safe haven in the low branches near the trunk. As he perched several others joined him on the branch. When one left, he followed, and so did the others. Wherever they stopped, more birds joined.

It seemed to be getting colder. The old farmer knew he didn’t have much time, so he said a prayer and flew headlong into the storm to the barn. He tried to lift the latch with his beak, but it wouldn’t budge. The few that had followed him turned back toward safety. He was becoming weary when he remembered that a small piece of glass had fallen out of the back window leaving an opening. Sharp glass could cause injury or even death to such delicate creatures, but he had to at lea/earlyst try.

Going alone, he navigated his way through the wind and snow to the broken window. Perching on the sill, he passed through the opening, scraping his tiny body on a sharp edge. Once inside found his way to the first stall where the donkey was housed.

Desperately he flew from the stall to the door, from the stall to the door, from the stall to the door. Finally the donkey moseyed out of his stall toward the bird. Flying up and down, the donkey seemed to nod before giving a firm kick. The forced caused the latch to trip allowing the door to fall open just enough.

Out he flew to the tree harboring what now seemed to be hundreds of birds. He perched near the center of the flock for close to a minute, then took off toward the open barn door.

At first only a few followed him. He flew back out to a different branch, waited, and then flew back into the barn. A few more followed, but many of the birds stayed in the familiar tree, afraid to brave the cold.

In his flight he noticed a string of tiny red drops in the snow beneath him. The glass had wounded him, and yet he pressed on, drawing sparrows away from the darkness and into the warm glow of the barn where there was food and shelter. He began to notice his body ached and his energy slowed. After one final trip to the tree, he returned to the barn. Somehow the heavy barn door closed behind him with the CLICK of the latch.

Early the next morning, the sun poured in through the windows of the little cottage in the field stirring the old farmer from a deep sleep. As he rose, he rubbed his eyes. His arms were sore. “Crazy dream,” he said as his feet searched for his slippers, but they weren’t in their usual spot by the bed. He found them in the kitchen and his robe was in a pile on the floor.

As the coffee brewed on the counter, he noticed a brown scrap of baker’s paper sprinkled with bread crumbs. “Huh,” he said to himself.

 The field was covered in sparkling white brilliance. The snow was piled in banks against the side of barn.  From the window he noticed a string of tiny red drops between the barn doors and the big oak tree that towered over the farm. Except for the snow, the branches of the tree were bare. The barn doors were tightly shut, but in the windows of the barn, he could see tiny creatures flying back and forth, in and out of sight, safely kept inside.

Before time began, God was there. The only living record of His existence is the Bible. It says that He spoke and there was light. He spoke and there was a planet with water and land, living plants and animals. Flying and swimming things. And then he took the dust of the earth and created the first man, Adam. He breathed life into the body he formed, and humanity began. His took a rib from the man and  formed a woman to partner with him, perfect compliments of each other in relationship and life, and humanity walked with God on the earth.

Now there was a serpent that came to the woman and spoke sweetly to her, gently twisting the words of God, and tempting the woman to distrust what He had said. She disobeyed God and brought her husband to eat from the forbidden fruit, and God cursed humanity and the world. Their sin was passed from generation to generation, staining every person in the human race. God allowed their sins to be paid for by sacrifice, and for centuries, people offered animals to God as an offering for their sins.

God knew saw that the burden of sin was unbearable for humanity and from God, the Jesus was conceived in the womb of a virgin by the Holy Spirit. God became man, taking on flesh, He looked just like us, felt everything we feel, knew what it meant to walk as a man and feel the weight of sin in the world, even though he was completely sinless. As a man, He taught the people around Him the heart of God, and when He had completed the work His father, God, had given Him to do, He was killed as the ultimate sacrifice for our sins. He died an innocent man, condemned by the sins of the whole world.

After being in the grave for three days, Jesus rose from the dead and walked among His people. They saw Him, they touched Him, they recognized Him by the scars on His body from His death. He came back to life and promised that even though He had to go back to the Father, He would return to bring all of His people to be with Him for eternity.

God, the giver of life, has the capability to forgive you of all of your guilt, sin and shame. Everything you’ve ever done wrong, everything you ever will do wrong, He can take that from you and cast it far away from you because Jesus paid your way. He died so that you can be reconciled to God. Not only that, but when you confess your belief in Jesus and repent of your sin, He will give you a new heart that knows how to love Him. You don’t have to try to clean yourself up and stop everything you do wrong, but God will make those things undesirable to you now, because you are His, you are no longer a slave to sin, but a slave to righteousness. You will sin again, but God has forgiven your sins and you don’t have to feel the burden of that guilt anymore. Repent, turn away from sin, and run to Jesus. He is the source of real joy. He is the Way the Truth and the Life!

 

CHAPTER 12

In the days of His flesh, He offered up prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. Hebrews 5:7-8

We are living in the weirdest time I’ve ever lived through. My son asked me what the worst thing we’d ever been through was, and I said 9/11. You see the numbers and you know exactly what I’m talking about. The country was terrified. People got through what we all believed was impossible to breach- our public safety. They broke the system of our peace, and we all banded together. It wasn’t that we did all this stuff to make things better, but we hung flags. We bought t-shirts with patriotic emblems. We wrapped ribbons in the trees, we linked arms across the country against every foe that would threaten the greatness of our country. That was what we did, and it was amazing. I felt safer than I had ever felt because all the sudden we weren’t looking at every stranger in the street as a threat because there were real people threatening us.

 

We’re in corona world right now. Everyone is wearing a mask. There are race riots in the cities over police brutality. News anchors are broadcasting in front of cities in flames, using the words, “a mostly peaceful protest.” It seems like everything around us is forcing us to look at each other with suspicion. Do you have coronavirus? Are you going to infect me? Are you racist against me? Are you thinking I’m racist against you? And most recently, Who did you vote for? Are we on the same team or mortal enemies because politics is our life line.

 

The culture has already become so fractured, you don’t have to ever leave your house. You can work from home, go to college at home, order groceries and household supplies from home, shop from home for clothes and furniture, and you can have practically any kind of food you can imagine delivered to your home. You could have every facet of life and needs met without ever leaving your house. Now add into it that the world is a dangerous infected place and people are against you. Why would anyone ever want to leave their house?

 

Jesus.

 

In our family worship, every time we ask a question, someone yells, “Jesus!” as the answer. Funny thing is, it almost always works. What are you thankful for? Jesus. What do you look forward to? Jesus. How can we live our lives in a manner worthy of the calling of Christ? Jesus. What do you do when you are afraid? Say Jesus. What do you do what you feel sad? Think about Jesus. How can we minister to others when they are struggling? Jesus. He just works for everything, and it’s true here too.

 

I’ve read Hebrews through over and over because I want it to be my heartbeat as I write this book. These words have hooked me like a devil-horse fishing lure. I can’t get them out of my mind. “He learned obedience from the things which He suffered.” Wait, Jesus had to learn obedience? The Son of God, fully God, fully man, had to suffer to learn obedience. How much more is this true for us?

 

I’m an introvert. Honestly, you’d never believe it if you knew me from church. I love people. I love connecting with people. I feel full when I am surrounded by people, but when I leave, I feel depleted. I need quiet to refill my energy. It’s interesting that God would put me in a house full of people. I mentioned that to say that everything in me wants to run. Run for the hills. Take my people and hunker down on an acreage far away from the city. Learn how to farm the land and raise animals, and just stay inside the walls. Never NOT be afraid. Get as far away as possible from the progressive movement, and find peace that way. But where do you find that in the Bible? Jesus went to the people, all the people. The ones that needed Him most desperately are the ones we find Him with most often. The longest passages on His interactions are the ones He is meeting with one-on-one, and most of them don’t look much like church people. They are the dejected, the sick, the sinful, the neediest. He met them where they were and endured suffering on their account. He gave them their lives back and had his threatened because of it. Eventually His life was taken from it because of the reputation He gained from doing the work of God. Who am I to decide that this world is so bad I need to escape it with my family? How can I reach the lost if I am hunkered down out in the sticks with just my people?

 

In the book, “Hinds Feet on High Places” the main character, Much Afraid, is promised a journey to the high places where she will receive a new name and new legs to replace her lame ones. And a new smile to replace the crooked one, wrecked by fear. As the Good Shepherd leads her up to the base of the mountain, He reminds her that the journey will be difficult, but He will give her two guides to hold onto as she goes. He will take her as far as He can, but she must journey most of the way without Him. Her relief dissipates when she is introduced to her shrouded guides, the tall, dark, looming figures. Sorrow and Suffering.  I cried reading this part of the book to my children because I know they must endure suffering to learn obedience, just as I have. Just as Jesus did. I hate it for them, but there is peace in the knowing. Righteousness is learned in the hard things. Hope comes to life in the darkest hour. Joy comes to fruition in the suffering because Jesus is so close you can almost hear Him breathing. I wish it wasn’t so hard, but it is. In this life you will have trouble, but how much sweeter it is to not have to go through it alone?

 

 

 

CHAPTER 13

Let love of the brethren continue.

Hebrews 13:1

 

I started leading worship in my youth group when I was 16. The couple that volunteered to lead our worship services learned that they were moving away and approached me about taking over. I had some expericene singing, but I had never played piano for anything like this before. They promised to help me learn before they left, so I said yes. God was calling me to something bigger than me. I relished the challenge even though I was scared to death. I took it on and prayed my guts out and practiced until my fingers bled. Actually, they never bled. They didn’t even callous. I just annoyed A LOT of people in my house. It didn’t take too long for me to find my niche as a worship leader. I already had a consuming love of worshiping God, so heading up the music was something I cherished.

 

After I graduated from high school I moved to Chicago to work with an inner-city mission team. I had the opportunity to lead worship from the piano many times in the churches we worked with. From there I went on to Bible college with some of the students on the team. After a few months of attending a mega-church, God began to stir my heart for something smaller. A guy I had a class with invited me to go with him to a little country church that needed help, so I went.

 

The church was about 20 minutes from our college. There were three or four of us that rode together, and I remember feeling a rising anticipation of what God was going to do in this new adventure. When we got there, I was introduced to Pastor Kathy, a widow that took over the pastorate when her husband died. I was moved by her exhilarating passion for God and the way she modeled her total dependency on Him. The church was made up of about 20 people, mostly older people, that had been in the church all their lives. The building had that smell of an old country church. You know, the musty carpet, the sticky wood pews with red seat cushions. It’s kind of like what Grandma’s house smells like in the summer. I was in love. The song leader introduced himself before he walked up to the platform and welcomed the congregation before inviting them to stand. Then he started singing, just belting out these old gospel songs I’d never heard. He got through the first one and then said, “Do any of you college students know how to play piano?” I sheepishly raised my hand. “Come on up here and play this song for me!”

 

The piano faced the wall on the left side of the podium, but there was a mirror attached to the top of it so I could see the congregation as I played. I had never seen anything like it before, and I’ve never seen anything like it since. Brother Hardin started singing again, and as soon as I found the right key, I jumped in and played along. I couldn’t believe I was doing it! After that I was asked to take over as the song leader. It felt like a sacrifice. I loved the big, cutting-edge music in the big churches. I felt like I was missing out on what everyone else was doing, sometimes. But as I write, my heart is bursting with thankfulness that God called me to such a sacred place. It was a lowly position, one that no one else wanted, but I was chosen for it, and I found myself excited to serve the Lord with this precious few.

 

Dale and I got married the weekend after he graduated. He took a job in my hometown, but we both knew it just a layover to get up to our first ministry position. Each place where we served as staff members, I was given the opportunity to use my gifts in worship. It became a real crutch in my identity. Everyone knew who I was because of what I did. So when Dale went back to school, I took a full-time job as a CNA where I only sang to calm anxious hearts and to soothe quiet souls as they passed from this life to the next. It was humbling, but I needed God to strip away the fanfare in order for me to really find myself in Him.

 

During the next 13 years, I was invited to sing at a few weddings and funerals, but my role as worship leader was non-existent. It took a long time to get to the place where I was truly ok with the fact that people knew me without knowing that part of me. I only cared that they saw Jesus in me.

 

It was a strange shift because Dale was working as a chaplain in ministry, essentially without me. Doing ministry together was something that we both missed, so when he asked me to come sing at the prison, God had already been preparing me to say yes.

 

I had been in the prison for a tour a few times, but I had never worked as a volunteer. To be honest, I was afraid to go in. I knew, though, that God was going to empower me and keep me safe for whatever He wanted me to do. With that confidence, I got my list ready, pulled my hair back, took off my jewelry and climbed the stairs to the front door. As I walked through the metal detector, my heart raced. I just needed to pass through two more gates and I would be at the mercy of God in the company of 1500 inmates. I sat in a foyer outside the first gate while waited for Dale to come get me. It felt like a very long time before his sweet face peeked around the doorway. He walked next to me as we walked down center hall. Inmates filed passed us on both sides about 3 feet away from me. He had instructed me to not make eye-contact as we made our way to his office, but several men fought hard to catch my attention. I smiled as I stared straight ahead and pretended not to notice the crude gestures.

 

Standing in the front of the chapel, I began to play the first song. There were around 150 guys there, and as they lifted their voices, I felt the power of God fill in the room. In all of my life, I have never experienced anything like it. Things at the prison began to get complicated as staffing changed and I had to stop going in. It broke my heart.

 

In the spring of 2019, I attended a live simulcast of the If Gathering. It’s a women’s conference that is broadcasted across the world, and women are built up, encouraged, and equipped to go back out and bring Jesus to the people around them. As I sobbed through the weekend, God pricked my heart with a commission to join the worship team at my church. I loved sitting in church, worshiping with no eyes on me, and the commitment felt too big, but I heard Him call me to do it so I did.

 

I had a meeting and a sort of audition with our Music Pastor that summer, and he invited me to attend a few practices. Somehow, we were unable to work out a time for me to do that before then Covid happened. I wasn’t able to observe a rehearsal until winter of 2021. To tell the truth, it didn’t bother me because I had done what God asked me to do by putting my name on the list. Everything else was up to Him and His timing.

 

When my first Sunday came, I was nervous, but I was prayed up and ready. We had a great rehearsal during the week, and then we had a great pre-service rehearsal, and then we met up in the Green Room for prayer. During that 15-minutes I realized why God had called me back to this ministry. It wasn’t that He needed me. It was that I needed to belong to this team.

 

This past weekend a group of us attended the National Worship Leaders Conference in Nashville. We road-tripped for 10 hours. We slumber-partied for three nights. We ate our meals together. Every day we whole-heartedly worshiped until we were so spent that we could barely hold our arms up any longer. After the last session, some of us drove to the airport, and some others drove on to other destinations. As I sat on dark plane with a hot cup of airplane coffee on my tray-table, I tried to read but my mind was spinning. My heart was too full. Carefully I tucked the book into the pocket on the seat in front of me, closed my tray table, and shut of the reading light. For the next hour I closed my eyes and thanked God that He brought back into the company of the brethren.

 

It’s not that I don’t have fellowship with believers, but I haven’t had a desire to open my doors and call out to all that are needy to come in and eat with us. I haven’t felt that compelling ache to do something that Jesus would have done. This week was a wake-up call. I needed them and they needed me. There are so many lonely souls sitting in church alone, and it ought not be. May God, in His mercy, teach us how to love each other.

 

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for y this some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember the prisoners, as though in prison with them, and those who are ill-treated, since you yourselves also are in the body. Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled for fornicators and adulterers God will judge. Make sure that your character is free from the love of money, being content with what you have; for He Himself has said, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you,” so that we confidently say, “The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid. What will man do to me?”

 

“By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:35 

 

Great God, King of the Universe, we are truly nothing without you. We are weak and small but You are all-powerful. You hold our lives in your hands. You have prepared the way for us to live our lives in a manner pleasing to You. You have given us everything we need for life and godliness, and we commit all of our way to you. Teach us, oh God, to abide in You. Let Your words abide is us. Knit our hearts together as one in You, united in spirit, intent on one purpose, to glorify you and enjoy you forever. For the joy, in Jesus’ name we pray, amen.