Bigger Picture Moment: Change Course

We wake up in the morning to gray clouds and more precipitation dripping from the sky like someone forgot to turn off the faucet. 

My oldest peers out the back door and exclaims that it looks like there's a swimming pond in the park behind our house. 

The ground is sopping wet, saturated and flooded; I see it spread out before me and feel the waters creeping up in my heart, too. 

While the boys excitedly peer out the window, wishing aloud and to each other about how they hope we let them go back there and muck around in the waters, I look up at the sky and whisper-pray

"Don't forget us. Please, oh God, please, turn off the faucet soon. There's only so much flooding we can take."

I lure the boys away from their viewings of a water wonderland, ask them to get dressed for the day. 

"Where are we going today, mom?" the oldest asks. 

"We're going to the farm, to the store, to school, " I say as I peer out at the flooded wetlands creeping into our yard. 

That's truth, yes, we're going all of those places but, it's not everything because honestly I've already started driving today and I can tell you I'm heading nowhere good.

All morning, I've been staring out the door at the flood waters and staring at unfolding news brandished across screens and staring at genetic testing results just in, and where I'm going is beyond the farm and store and school. Where I'm going is straight into the murkiness of flood waters, and I just know I've got to change the course before I'm in over my head.

The little one takes my hand and we head up the stairs to dress as I call for my oldest to do the same; he's not excited about where we're going today either. 

"And maybe on the way we should keep our eyes peeled for rainbows and songbirds and buds. We can count how many we find."

He smiles, and the three of us, we alter where the direction we're heading, eyes lifted to the skies. 

Thinking, That's All: In Grieving

Like most everyone else I know, my heart felt like it went through a paper shredder as news broke yesterday about the dozens of little lost lives in the Newtown elementary school shooting.

Shredded into millions of tiny pieces.

My sister happened to come over as the news was breaking, and we sat at my dining room table with her only and my youngest, weeping and praying ...  mostly unable to even find words to cry even prayers.

What happened yesterday is undoubtedly and rightfully devastating to the Newtown community and particularly to the families who have suffered a heart-wrenchingly tragic loss.

But many of us onlookers are reeling, too, as if we were a physical part of that community, as if we actually knew the families who lost these precious babies when we know them only by news stories, only through our deep empathy and realizations that many of the families are likely much like our own.

Our grief seems to be deeply rooted, many of us so very truly broken hearted over the lives lost .... and maybe about more than just the lives lost.

Last night we went to a Christmas party, and I cried almost all the way there.

As I wept, I realized my grief stretched beyond sadness for the families and responders and the entire community; I grieved, too, the fallenness of our world. I grieved the evil that runs rampantly, like wildfire, throughout our world.

I grieved sin.

Oh. There's that word that separates, that divides, that stirs debate and conjures up definitions that are distorted.

I awoke to my mentor's thoughts, and I ate them for breakfast:

"We live in a world of relativism. This week's events in OR and CT declare loudly that there are absolutes—not everything is grey. Evil exists. Sin exists. Some things are not just poor choices, they are fundamentally wrong and offensive to a holy God. As a nation, we've seen God's standards profoundly violated this week, and I think on some level all of us whose hearts are breaking know this to be true."

Sin -- the very choices we make that are in direct opposition to a good God, a holy God, a righteous God, a loving God -- the kind of God who didn't just make a bunch of rules and leave us to figure existence and eternity out on our own, but the kind of God who came near.

The kind of God, who by sending His son to be Immanuel -- God with us -- demonstrated His love for us through not only words and healing and love during His life as a man

but also demonstrated His love for us by making a way for us to be reconciled to Him through Jesus' death and resurrection, His conquering of both sin and the grave. The kind of God who gives us a choice to love Him, to choose Him.

I grieve that we choose to doubt His goodness, denying the crazy-awesome love of that kind of God -- the kind who loves us more than life and into eternity.

I grieve sin.

And that's where I'm left still and silent, heart heavy and weeping while the world continues to spin.

How are we supposed to celebrate at parties while our hearts are broken? How are we supposed to laugh and be merry in the middle of our deep sadness? How are we supposed to celebrate Christmas as we mourn and grieve?

As I spill these heart cries to a friend she asks, voice filled with compassion,

"How are we not?"

How are we not supposed to celebrate beauty, goodness and love even as we mourn and grieve?

We can grieve evil, grieve tragedy, grieve fallenness, but we cannot let it steal our joy or else evil takes more than what it deserves. 

And in clinging to our true joy -- the hope we have in a God who came near, who made a way for us in our brokenness through Jesus to come to Him in His goodness, who promised to destroy sin for good on a day yet to come -- we offer Light in the darkness, Hope to the hopeless, Wholeness to the broken.

How should we best grieve as people who know this Light, this Hope, this Wholeness? {1 Thessalonians 4:13}

We comfort the afflicted.

We come to Him as we are, speechless as we may be as the "Spirit intercedes for us through wordless groans." {Romans 8:26}

We give to Him our anxiety and "with Thanksgiving through prayer and petition make our requests known to God." {Philippians 4:6}

We share the Jesus who came to "bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners." {Luke 4:18-21}

And we to cling to joy, hopeful and knowing that in the end, God, in His tireless love, wins. 

Why am I so certain of God's promises? Because He has been crazy faithful in my life and in this world throughout history. Click here for a really good listen about why we can trust God. Choose "Christmas Wrappings: Wrapped in Prophecy" by Josh Peterson. 

Everyday Life: There is joy

There is joy.

It is wild and spread out like fields of unexpected wildflowers rolling up hills and stretching out across meadows. Sharp bursts of lemon and violet polkadotting the lush greens of fields.

Photo courtesy of Corrin.

There is joy, and it cannot be stolen unless I first give it away.

Unless


I first 


give it


away. 

I steal my own joy, rob myself barren of it when I worry-wander into tomorrow while I'm still living in today.

What sense does it make to live in tomorrow's fears?

Fears that might never and will probably never unfold into realities?

Something happened this weekend, after the suffocating what-if waves began lapping at my feet

and I toyed with wading far into the worry-waters.

When I turned turned my back on that sprawling sea of uncertainty,

ran uphill,

fell to my knees

and opened my hands to the Giver of Good gifts,

I began to not just see the good gifts given, the many good gifts given, but I began to more intimately trust the Giver who keeps giving them.

I soaked up words from Ann Voskamp's book One Thousand Gifts, and I realized it was true, what she's written:

"The quiet song of gratitude, eucharisteo, lures humility out of the shadows because to receive a gift the knees must bend humble and hand must lie vulnerably open and the will must bow to accept whatever the Giver chooses to give.
Again, always, and always again: eucharisteo precedes the miracle."

The miracle, for me, is having eyes that can see joy spread out in the moment,

joy saturating the spanning seconds of today,

joy not stolen by the what ifs of tomorrow.

I've been so greedy.

I've been trying to unwrap gifts before they are given.

In my worry, I've been trying to see the potential dips and valleys that might be waiting in a new day with no more light than that of the moon; I've been trying to see the lay of the land ahead of me while its still, from my view, encompassed in shadows.

There is joy, radiant and saturating. 

And it dawns when the sun rises to shed real light on the day unfolding at the foot of the horizon, when palms are turned up and opened ready to receive the gift as the light inches higher and higher, moment by moment.

Just Write: Constant

A constant state of healing.

That's what these past few weeks have been.

I used to think there was this spectrum, spanning from happiness to grief, and that I could settle somewhere along it each day or week or even month.

But the longer I live, the more I realize joy and pain are this interwoven web of threads that don't easily separate, and that my life is less about walking a spectrum line and more about navigating the weave.

So I heal, neck-deep in gratitude while I wipe both laughter-and-pain-provoked tears from my eyes, while I kiss little owies and the lips of the man I love, while my hands scrub bubbly dishes and soapy kids in the bath tub.

And I rest in the constantness of where living and grace merge.

Thinking, that's all: Christmas is for the hurting, too

"The real beauty of Christmas is to understand the ugliness it cures." John MacArthur 

So we're in the thick of the Christmas season, a time of year that is laced with beauty and joy and celebration.

And I'm talking about how my heart hangs heavy after another loss.

I'm grappling, grapsing at how to remain authenticly true to sharing my story from where my feet are planted when there are so many deep emotions bound up in this loss during the celebration time of year.

Because I don't want to neglect the beauty, the good, the wonder.

I'm thankful.

I'm so thankful.

I'm thankful for Jesus' birth and what that means to my eternity, your eternity and my here in now, your here and now.

I stand in awe of the gift that came wrapped as a Baby King.

But I'm hurting, too. And it's real. And it's wounded-open. And it's burning. And it's sometimes out-of-my-mind sharp with pain.

She stops me dead in my thoughts to share that His birth wasn't wrapped up in shiny tinsel and big bows. That the birth that brought Him into this world was red-blood running and filled with the pangs of birthing a child. Samely, His death was that, too.

Lest I forget, as well, the wailing of mothers through the land after Herod claimed the lives of baby boys, attempting to steal the very breath out of the tiny king's lungs. And the betrayal Jospeh must have felt at Mary's pregnancy announcement. And the uncertainty Mary must have harbored about being pregnant, miraculously, with the world's Bright Hope.

"We are surrounded by uncertainty everyday, but there is a God that wants to go with us, who wants to lead us through the uncertainty of it, and that, too, is the message of Christmas." Joe Boerman

And so this Baby King, He offers this redemption for the suffering, this certainty in the face of uncertainty, this healing of hearts, this covering of blemishes, this promise of restoration, this hope of life forever within His perfect kingdom through both his birth and then with his death.

And Christmas is about that part, too, beyond the shine and tinsel-glow. It, too, is about the hurting and the hope gifted for hurting no more.

For the first time, through eyes that know tears as well as faint wrinkles from joy spread across my face, I recognize more than the wonder and the beauty and the awe of God breaking his 400-year silence with the cries of a Baby Savior echoing into the night from a stable, more than the majesty of a star shining so bright, foreshadowing the light that had been brought into the world through that birth.

Resoundingly, I see more and more why Christmas is for the hurting, too. And how the trials cannot be extracted from the joy and celebration, for they make Christmas all the more joyful.

And so I stand where my feet are planted knowing more than ever the joy.