Down to the River

That’s Old Stuff

July 31st, 2025

“When a child comes into your life, it is time to relearn life, not teach them your ways.”

What River has taught me about life and faith in the 5 years and 9 months he’s been part of my life is too big for words . Many of you know the major testing and building of faith Nate and I underwent the whole second half of my pregnancy, when the doctor told me at my anatomy scan that there were such major problems, we should consider termination. And if you know that, you probably also know the continuation of battles River has had to fight since birth. But still, if you know all of this, you likely also know how incredible of a story God has written and continues to write through this child. God chose River.

Yesterday, River turned five years old, and he rang in his fifth year with hospital scrubs and a smile…..I thought we were looking at his 5th brain surgery for birthday #5, but God continues surprising me!

The day before his birthday, I was at a friend’s house with my sister and a bunch of kids between us. On the way to her house, River commented that “his brain hurts” but was holding his neck (hmm), and he was laughing about it. I am always triggered when ANYTHING that could be shunt-related surfaces, but it helped that his brother’s throat was also a little scratchy and sore that morning. What started as a play date with swimming and smiles and good adult conversation quickly turned into me zeroing in on River who was just not acting himself. He wasn’t eating, he was randomly putting his head in my lap, he wanted to go downstairs to play away from buddies and wanted me to come with him. I was starting to get that feeling – that feeling of knowing there is a tiger in the room. I was humoring him by standing all the superheroes up in a line – his request – as I studied him lying down between each figure’s moment of glory while trying hard to rally and ignore what he was feeling. I asked him to look up at my wiggling fingers (one of the signs of shunt malfunction being that he wouldn’t be able to), and he grabbed his head and told me not to make him do that. I immediately called Nate and told him I believed we were heading into shunt malfunction territory. I slowly gathered my stuff together, knowing we had much time before we could be confident to take him in, and River surely did what he could to make us all think he’s cool as a cucumber, but I knew better.

River laid his head in his lap most of the drive home, while still trying to let off an energy that he’s okay, especially with his brother P trying to make him laugh. I gave him Motrin for his rising temperature when we got home, which turned things around enough for us to know we had to at least wait until tomorrow because nothing was quite bad enough. These times I have gotten to know well…..where we have to carry on as if nothing bad is happening, while also holding space for the possible reality that we might be heading into brain surgery in the very near future.

The next morning, he was fever-free and happy, but the subdued nature of his smiley energy had me convinced there was a tiger still in the room. He kept scratching his head, especially near his shunt, and I told Nate I wonder if that precedes swelling along the shunt line (a sign of shunt malfunction). Sure enough, as soon as I was handing him over to his speech teacher early afternoon, I noticed a small degree of puffiness developing along his shunt line. I told his speech teacher what I think that means, sent him back for speech, and called Nate. It felt like Nate knew the call was coming; he was ready in every sense of the word.

When River came stumbling out of speech the way he usually does (just so full of life and laughter, that boy!), I got down on his level and told him we needed to take him to the hospital to have the doctor look at his shunt. The way he so easily accepted that was another confirmation to me; he knew something wasn’t right with his shunt. I started trying to put on my pep talk hat and tell him how strong he was and how God is going to look after him, but he was already in that place. He already had a fearlessness about him that was put there by the Lord. “Moommmm, you already saaaaid that,” he said, clutching my face with such an intense seriousness that his face shakes, like he always does to make me laugh. He skipped on into Dad’s car without me even telling him to.

You might think this is strange, but I have pinpointed it. The way River was surrendering to having to make his way to the hospital reminds me of the way Jesus surrendered to the much anticipated day of making his way to the cross.

“While he was still speaking, Judas, one of the Twelve, arrived. With him was a large crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests and the elders of the people. Now the betrayer had arranged a signal with them: ‘The one I kiss is the man; arrest him.’ Going at once to Jesus, Judas said, ‘Greetings, Rabbi!’ and kissed him. Jesus replied, ‘Do what you came for, friend.’

It’s not that Jesus wanted to die on the cross. Just the night before, he told his disciples “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” And he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

Yet it came to be known, it was indeed God’s will for it to happen this way, and when he was confronted to be taken to his unfortunate destiny, he had a God-given peace about it. Not a happiness, but a peace. To the point that one of Jesus’s companions drew out a sword and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. And Jesus said to him, ‘Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen this way?’

The sweet surrender when we know it’s not ours to determine, but God’s. The sweet surrender of not necessarily understanding God’s ways or His will, but knowing we can trust anyways. The sweet surrender of being untouchable and unflappable even when it hurts, if we know we have taken it to God and therefore know we are following the path He has us on.

Let me tell you – my 7-year old (who I call A in my blog posts), has this understanding down pat. When River was on his way to the hospital with Dad, we prayed for him. I asked A how and why he was so calm and steady. I said, “Are you just not really thinking about it much or are you just feeling a strong sense of trust in God?” He said, “Both. I just know that God has a plan for him.” And A says that with every hurdle any of us come across – an unwavering understanding that God’s got a plan for each of us.

Here is part of a video Nate took right after his MRI, that of course I’m going to make deep and profound!

“Crying? That’s old stuff.” YOU GUYS, THIS IS HUGE. He is essentially quoting Ephesians 4:

²⁰That, however, is not the way of life you learned ²¹when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. ²²You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; ²³to be made new in the attitude of your minds; ²⁴and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

There was crying on the way to the hospital when Nate prepped him that he will probably need the noisy machine, just like there was crying in the garden the night before Jesus’s death. But when the time comes, we take heart. River didn’t even need the twilight anesthesia they typically give little guys, he was so still. That’s the Holy Spirit in him, I’m telling you. My one friend wrote this once I sent her this video: “I fully believe this child has the Holy Spirit of God moving in his soul. What a beautiful testament of the grace of Jesus.” And another friend commented on my sister’s birthday post honoring River: “You are a very special boy and everyone who comes in contact with you can’t help but be touched by the special gift that God has instilled in you of hope and faith that God is certainly in control.”

As I write this blog post, I am moved by the song “Church” by Tasha Cobbs Leonard and John Legend (listen to it); these lyrics I resonate with deeply:

Where’s the piano?
With all of its bangin’
And where are those people?
With all of their praisin’
And all the emotions that I have been chasing
Where is that feelin’?

God, it’s just You and me now
Tell me what to do now
Teach me how to have church on a Monday
You can be my company
Here’s my heart, take the lead
Teach me how to have church on Monday

Just hours before taking River in….those are the times the air feels so thick. That space I explained above, where you’re operating as if nothing bad is happening, while also confronting the possibility of heading into battle in the very near future. That’s why when I heard these lyrics, I felt it so deeply, remembering back to that very morning just a couple hours before go-time. Life and the journey of faith is not always mountaintops and praised hands. Brandon Lake’s “Hard-Fought Hallelujah” is a good anthem for this point. Some days and some moments, praying does not feel good or come easy, the right words and right sprit aren’t obvious. But still, that’s when we pray. I prayed. I prayed for this to be the former, not the latter (nothing bad happening!), but I also prayed that in the event of the bad happening, that God would make it KNOWN to me and Nate. For us to have the discernment and confidence to know it’s time to take him in. And God DELIVERED. As He always does! He let me catch a glimpse of just enough “puff” around his shunt to have the confidence it’s time. And let me tell you all, it’s a whole other burden to carry, staying confident when we have a smiling, joyful boy at the hospital, with seemingly nothing wrong. To stay strong and confident that we are there for good reason is a feat. But we have God to fight that with us and He gives us that same strength that He gives River! And sends me all the right people to encourage me along the way.

Just like Jesus prayed to God when overwhelmed with sorrow, I cried out to God that I was losing confidence in choosing to send him to the hospital at one point after talking to Nate about the status, but that it’s not like I wanted River to have brain surgery to prove to the world I wasn’t jumping the gun! It was such a terrible feeling! Just like the song, it was a moment without the piano and the bangin’…it was just me and God then. “Here’s my heart, God, take the lead.” That’s when my friend called me and spoke truth over me and I was back in action, back to remembering that I acted on what I felt the Lord leading, and no matter how it ends, “you did what was needed and you move forward. No justifications needed either way.”

Whooooooo-wee. Let me tell you how the Lord answered!! As it turned out, River’s shunt setting had somehow changed from 2.5 to 1.0, which means his shunt was draining 60% more fluid than it should have been! What this also means is that he did not need brain surgery – this can be fixed from the outside! I still cannot get over the way we pray to God sometimes, and it’s like we hand him a couple possible outcomes and ask that he helps us manage the two possible outcomes, but then sometimes there is this other outcome we didn’t even know existed. I’m telling you, this is God!! He’s done it time and time again in River’s life.

Here is a photo of River right before his MRI…this thumbs up was to tell us once again, that God has a plan for him. River knew it, A knew it, may we all come to know it….that He has a plan for YOU. And if this story sounds like it can’t happen to you this way, IT CAN. You guys, start praying. And He will show you. He will move. He will provide. He will teach you.

I didn’t even know what God was teaching me this time around, it’s been such a blur! I knew I needed to write a blog post but I didn’t know what I wanted to say. Well I went to bed last night telling God to tell me what to say, because I had nothing. Well here I am this morning with a boatload of fish…..remember that story? The disciples weren’t finding one single fish to catch. They asked Jesus for help, he told them to put the net on the other side of the boat, which sounded absurd, but they listened and they had too many fish to carry. This is what God does for ANYONE who asks, so just ask.

Happy 5th birthday to my baby (yesterday). It is the biggest honor of my life to be your mom and learn from you.
Your Heart Is Your Instrument

March 28th, 2025

Last month, my sister and I went to the Elevation Worship concert at PPG. I expected to have a great time with my concert buddy and BFBN (best friend besides Nate), but I did not expect to be so moved spiritually that here I am a month later centering a blog post around it, as it’s come up time and time again for me since then.

Steven Furtick, founder of Elevation Church in Charlotte, delivered a sermon that night; frankly, I wasn’t in the mood for a sermon! And I did see several people leaving as it became apparent this was happening lol, but I’m sure glad I stayed! Let me first just state – I don’t know much about Furtick or his church or even the worship band other than liking a handful of their songs – how “theologically sound” they are in every way. I just know what I heard tonight has impacted me in a big way, and it’s had a ripple effect in how I’ve been able to share it and apply it with my children, as well.

The sermon was entitled “Tune Your Heart to Truth” – which is really quite a contrast to the popular phrase “Follow your heart.” The problem with our heart is that we have courageous moments and crazy moments, Furtick stated. “We are living in a time where it’s more important than ever that we do not trust our hearts to tell us what to do; we need the truth of God’s word to guide us like never before, so we don’t wreck our lives.” He went on to also criticize the line “Live your truth” – “It’s good advice if your truth is God’s truth.” How often we go after God and have it right but then turn right back around getting caught up in our own ways. (MORE ON THIS LATER).

Colossians 3:1 states Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. “You can’t just go by your feelings, you’ll give up, you’ll cower before the challenges in front of you. Your heart is not your instructor.” Furtick went on to say you need to think of your heart like David says in Psalms 144:9, like your instrument: I will sing a new song to you, my God; on the ten-stringed lyre I will make music to you. A lyre is a harp…well your HEART is a LIAR. “Your heart will tell you things that aren’t true, your feelings will tell you you can’t make it and you can, your feelings will tell you it’s over and it’s not.” That’s scriptural – Jeremiah 17:9: Your heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? When you look back at the Psalms verse, what’s it saying? “I’m going to worship you, God. There are all these lies coming against me. I’m in trouble. I’m in fear. I’m in discouragement. I’m having a difficult time with this. There are many enemies who rise against me. But I’m going to sing to you, God.” Because he understood that “my heart is a liar/lyre. Not only is it deceitful, but it is an instrument.”

PART 1: Our Hearts Being In Tune with God

He then got out a guitar and said, “I want to demonstrate for a moment how to tune your heart to truth.” So first, he sang a beautiful worship song “What a friend we have in Jesus” followed by “Great is Thy Faithfulness” that we all joined him in singing, and honestly I thought that was going to be the climax of the evening – I was already flying high! Crying out the lyrics I embedded for you within the song titles is EXACTLY what this whole sermon centers around (so keep reading)….what beauty arises from these moments of pursuing the Lord with our whole, bang-ed up heart!

I thought that was going to be the whole demonstration of what tuning your heart looks like….these lyrics preached such a strong reminder that trying to carry the burdens ourselves is when we are truly weighed down in life – it sounds so simple but we simply forget it! Over and over again, Psalm 55:22 just doesn’t take root (Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous be shaken). After we all sang out those incredible lyrics to God, Furtick said, “Isn’t it amazing when your heart is in tune with Him?”

YES, I was FEELING that, and immediately lecturing myself to remember this, lying to myself thinking maybe someday soon like maybe even tonight I will officially get this down pat! And you guys, this is why I NEEDED this second part I’m about to get into in Part 2. If I didn’t get this second part this night, then the next day, waking up the wrong way with the wrong set of values for the day and losing fruits of the spirit by the second, I would have been looking back at this night feeling weighed down with discouragement, feeling down on myself for my stupid heart! How it can go from courageous to crazy in no time. Heck, even if I would wake up the right way with some great one-on-one time with God and was feeling the same high I was feeling the night prior, would there not be moments once I would get back to the to-do list, once I would return to interactions with others where there is much room for pride, jealousy, anger, impatience, etc. to creep in, that I’d just be feeling down on myself, until the next time I get it right, and then that same cycle would repeat?! So let’s get to that second part, shall we? How can we break this cycle??

Well first……we don’t. We don’t break this cycle. But we also don’t get discouraged by it. We get ENcouraged by it, by the fact that the cycle is inevitable, for it empowers us to turn to God sooner and mightier than maybe we would if we let the lies that evolve from the cycle to take root and keep us farther from God as we wallow in self-pity or spin ourselves out of control as we listen to the wrong things, the wrong truths. The second part is coming, I promise, just first a little more setting up for it:

“When you’re in tune with him, the panic attack can’t get you. When you’re in tune with him, the thing that’s waiting for you back home looks smaller when you get back home, because God gets bigger when you magnify Him, when you’re in tune with Him. When you’re in tune with Him, the wind and the waves have to obey the voice in the name of Jesus and be still. When you’re in tune with Him, you can sleep like a baby in the middle of a storm. When you’re in tune with Him, you can just roll it over to the Lord and know that He’s already working out what you’re worried about and if he dresses the lilies with beauty and splendor, how much more will He clothe you? It feels amazing to be in tune with Him. When you’re in tune with Him, and aligned with Him, and you feel this strength and you realize that I can take this one day at a time and I don’t have to think three months into the future and I don’t have to think 30 years into the future, and I can say ‘give us this day our daily bread’ and my Father will feed me and my Father will care for me, and I don’t have to live in the shame of my regret, and in the shadow of my past mistakes. When I’m in tune with Him, I realize that if I confess my sins, He’s faithful and I realize he will forgive me of my sins and cleanse me of all unrighteousness, when my heart is in tune with Him.”

YES! But this ain’t heaven yet….

PART 2: Our Hearts Getting Out of Tune with God

“And tonight, our hearts are in tune with him. But I want to show you what happens, so often. It’s why we have amazing moments with God, followed by moments of tremendous despair.” Oh, I am listening, Steve! Why is it like this? What am I missing? What am I getting wrong? (The answer, btw, is nothing, other than believing maybe I am missing something – Haha -yes, it’s that confusing! Bear with me)

That’s when the second part began, and this is the part that I didn’t know I needed!

“But then you get back home, and you get distracted…..”

He brought out the lead singer of the band to play the part of the devil. He went on…… “And while you are distracted, you’re scrolling, you’re distracted, the pressures of life, you’re distracted, the pains in your body, you’re distracted, the kid that is driving you absolutely crazy, you’re distracted, and while I was distracted, he was de-tuning…..He puts his hands on this instrument, and while I am distracted, He is de-tuning my instrument of my heart. [At this point, his devil helper is turning all the knobs on his guitar while he is looking the other way]. This is what the enemy loves to do. To get you distracted by the past, distracted by the future, distracted by things you can’t control, distracted by things you can’t do anything about, which by the way, if you haven’t figured this out, one thing you cannot control is other people! So even getting distracted by what somebody else is posting, wearing, saying, when somebody else gets married, buys a house, graduates…….. all of that stuff is a distraction. AND IF THE DEVIL CANNOT DESTROY YOU, HE WILL DISTRACT YOU TO THE POINT THAT ALL OF A SUDDEN, YOUR HEART BEGINS TO SOUND LIKE THIS (strumming down and all of a sudden it sounds terrible). You see how beautiful it sounded when it was in tune? And then this devil puts his hand on my heart? My Lyre? My instrument?”

OKAY WOW. Suddenly I felt SEEN. I’m not a fan of overusing that term but it’s just right here! And I understood this cycle I go through from a different perspective. I saw the moment I turn away from this feeling of such intimacy and oneness with the Lord as INEVITABLE. I WILL go right back to my sinful ways of _________, ___________, __________. I will! Fill in the blank – what your negative tendencies are! Where the devil gets you off track time and time again! But God’s love for me and God’s grace for me does not DEPEND on how well I am or am not getting it right! His Hand is always on us.

And he went on to say how ridiculous it sounds to trash the guitar just because it’s out of tune. But that’s so often what we do, we give up. “But if you make the decision in the name of Jesus, you can say, ‘Get behind me Satan, for greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world! I’m getting my heart back tonight!’ And all you have to do….every time your heart gets out of tune, and even if you have to do it 100 times a day, you can’t just do this once, every time you pray, you get your heart back in tune with God. Every time you worship….you don’t have to be at a concert to worship God, you can worship God in the car, kitchen, hospital, etc. Do not let the enemy trash your heart just because it’s out of tune.”

PHEWWWW. And it didn’t even end there. There was then a THIRD PART to this awe-inspiring analogy. And I was still listening!

PART 3: Tuning Our Hearts Back to God

“You have a relationship with somebody who is always in tune. If you have a relationship with Jesus, He is always in tune.

So then came the next helper to demonstrate this third part of the analogy – the keyboard player named LJ. He said, “You have to turn to the one who is always in tune. And LJ’s instrument doesn’t go out of tune because it is a digitally-built instrument. It is programmed to be in tune. That’s like God….God is not subject to human whims, God is not subject to human environments, God is bigger than that, He is enthroned, He is seated. Set your heart on things above. So I turn to LJ, who is in tune, and I say ‘LJ, show me what is true, play a high E for me’ and he plays a high E, and I play my high E, and my high E doesn’t sound like his high E, so guess what? He’s not coming down to where I am. I gotta come up to where he is (and Furtick keeps strumming his E alongside LJ strumming his, until he gets there). So you bring it to Him and you get in tune with Him.” He went on to say it’s not just once a week at church you do this……but daily. “Sometimes even when you’re at work, you gotta lock yourself in the bathroom for about three minutes, and just pray ‘God if you don’t help me right now, I’m about to burn this whole place to the ground!’ Because your heart is courageous and crazy, your heart is a liar! It has to be tuned! So you tune it and you say, ‘God, I’m feeling tempted right now, and the devil is telling me that this temptation is bigger than me, but Your Word says that no temptation has overtaken me, except what is common to man, and that You’re faithful, and that You will not allow me to be tempted beyond what I am able, but with the temptation You will provide a way of escape, and You tune to truth….give me a B.’ And again, the Bs don’t match up. So if your heart is telling you that you’re not gonna make it, but God is telling you you are, your heart is wrong. You just gotta tune up to truth. Am I close, LJ? Keep playing. Cuz I don’t wanna be tuned to what I think sounds right, I want to be tuned to what LJ says is right. Give me a G. I come before God and I say, ‘God, show me what to do about this situation. I know what I want to do, but I need to tune my heart to your truth.’ Give me an A. You bring your anxiety before the Lord, you say, Lord, I’m feeling so nervous about this, God show me what You say. You say in your word that I don’t need to be anxious about anything, but by prayer and supplication I can bring my petitions before you so God I’m bringing my children before you, I’m bringing this miscarriage before you, I’m bringing this opportunity before you, I’m bringing this stressful situation before you. I’m going to tune my heart to truth.”

And after bringing each janky note to the ultimate Tuner, it’s back to sounding beautiful: “I’m back together again.”

He transitioned into the next song “Graves Into Gardens” saying we all have an LJ – it’s Lord Jesus. “The enemy cannot have your peace, your joy, your family.” He told us to take back tonight what Jesus Christ died to buy for us. He had us tell our neighbors these powerful truths that are also the lyrics of this song, that we’ve got a God who turns mourning to dancing, who gives beauty for ashes, who turns shame into glory, who turns seas into highways, who turns bones into armies…….and graves into gardens.”

WHAT A JOURNEY. We can look at this cycle as a cycle that explains why we are worthless, why we are unworthy of love, and continue down a bad path getting farther away from God, or we can look at this cycle as inevitable and to accept that fact instead of being continually discouraged by it, letting the discouragement keep us even further from the truth. We can STOP, wherever we are in this vicious cycle, and we can TURN our instruments to God, asking Him to play for us, to model for us, to intervene for us, ONE note at a time, one step at a time. Lord, direct my path and tune my heart to you. One word at a time, Lord, allow my speech to honor You and have my heart follow. Tune my heart one string at a time. Little by little, God will do BIG things.

It just so happened (but not coincidentally!!!) that the memory verse that my oldest son P was assigned to the very week following the concert was John 15:5: I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” WOW – thank you Lord for allowing me the opportunity to connect this sermon with this memory verse. I told P and A all about the sermon I just went over with you all, and how, to follow and embody this verse, we can think of our hearts as instruments. And time and time again (choosing the right moments to do this, of course), I have been able to remind the boys to “tune their guitars” when they’re feeling themselves slipping into their negative tendencies. For illustrative purposes, one of my kids is trying to work on whining less. I’ve been able to, after the fact, discuss that it was when he let being in a bad mood for no real reason (or for a good reason even!) get the best of him and start to direct his steps….how inevitably, negative self-talk crept in, given he is trying to work on this, and that that likely caused him to get even farther from where he wanted to be with less whining in his life. How he can instead, next time, literally turn his body around to mimic this important moment illustrated so beautifully within Furtick’s sermon, take a deep breath, and say to God “you know, I’m really mad right now, I’m upset right now, I’m not happy right now, whatever it is. Lord, I am pausing to just ask that you help my heart feel less mad or sad, help me move on from whatever it is I’m holding onto, and help my words be more positive and my heart to follow, too. Help me get in tune with You and how you see me, how you want me to see me, how you want me to feel, and how you want me to interact with others.” It’s been such a powerful visual for them.

Oh, and TRUST and believe I’ve been tested time and time again since! It was the very next day I was so annoyed with my husband over such a stupid thing – like literally revolving around us being late to something and it was all his fault in my head and I was having so much trouble, knowing exactly what I needed to do – to tune my instrument, but just feeling stuck in my agitation! Well I did end up taking a breather after dropping off the late gang, and forced myself to try to get in the right posture while still seeing red! Well this song came on and I’ve been using it ever since, in attempting to get out of funks. Ahhhh, God strikes again with sending me what I need when I face my jaded heart towards Him.
Present in God’s Will

January 3rd, 2025

This morning, I decided it’s time to write a blog post because I am DUE, but I didn’t feel the way I usually do when I write a blog post – which is that I have something to say…..I simply didn’t! So I spent the 20 minutes I had in the car driving (good think time for me), to see where my mind was leading me for today’s post.

Just two days ago, on the very first day of the new year, I had snapped two photos that I thought I might use for this blog post, even though I had no idea what the post would be about, as I said. So that was my starting point as I let my mind wander while driving, hoping to pinpoint why exactly I took those photos – where I was going with it. The two photos are below. One shows a beautifully decorated gingerbread tree that my kids had made the week before Christmas, now in the trash, and the other photo is of our once-decorated and lit tree that was subsequently bare and dry on the curb for the garbage men to take.

So I started pondering….what bigger idea was in my subconscious here, that led me to document this moment? Because I can tell you, I hadn’t given much thought as to why I was pulling out my phone to capture the scene, nor was I even feeling emotional or deep at the time. And even that statement alone is deep! Bear with me……

As I began thinking about it, I realized I had been documenting the strange existence of the passing of time, and how fleeting our emotions and our days are. Looking ahead to this moment a month ago would have been heart-wrenching! I would have gasped at this photo and wondered if the girl on the other side of that camera is okay?! Because my present self taking that photo knew how much my past self was looking forward to Christmas, and all that comes with the holiday season. I love it! I love….buying gifts for people I cherish, all the songs and decor, the daily advent devotionals and advent rituals we have created as a family, and anticipating several days on end spent entirely with my immediate and extended family on both sides. And this Christmas, even with the high expectations I always place on it, did deliver! It was a wonderful Christmas.

But why I took a photo of the aftermath was, I came to realize, because I was FINE, I was mentally and emotionally content and still joyful taking it all down and moving onto the next season of life. The subconscious reel that was playing in my mind when I took the pics was this reminder that in every season of life, there can be joy. And this reminder that for there TO be joy, we have to have our hearts in the right place chasing after the right things, or else we WILL be let down when the anticipated excitement ends. We have to be grounded in what each and every day holds and what we need to be prioritizing, and not let ourselves live beyond the moment.

And in the same vein, this also serves as a reminder that just as it can be hard when good things come to an end, it’s also hard / even harder when bad things come…yet even then, God is with us and gives us what we need at each and every turn our life takes. I read a quote recently: “God didn’t remove the Red Sea. He parted it.” I was being dramatic when I called it “heart-wrenching” for Christmas to be over, because in fact, we DO experience these ACTUALLY heart-wrenching moments in our lives. There are people of faith around me who are living absolute nightmares. And just like I was documenting this fast-forward moment of the fun being over, I can recall the times I thought to myself: “Wow, if I had known this moment was coming, I wouldn’t have even been able to get out of bed in the days leading up to this.” It is a gift not to know what lies ahead. It is a gift to have to rely on God each and every day to give us what we need, to rely on God to give us what HE KNOWS we need. It is a gift to not be the one in control. To take control is to hand back this gift to God and say “no thank you,” which leads to striving and striving and ultimately failing.

So what broader theme or challenge am I being led to, I asked myself, as I neared the end of my drive and the beginning of my time to write? Being present. Surrendering control to the One who actually has it, the One who created it. God created control, and He created it for Him to have, not for us to have. I looked up synonyms of “control” to fact check myself, and I stand by what I said as I read the list of synonyms: jurisdiction, power, authority, command, dominance, mastery, leadership, sovereignty, supremacy. All of these things belong to God and if we say or act otherwise, we will fall, we will fail, we will be continually chasing after something we can’t get ahold of or conquer.

Maybe you never thought of this idea of being present and in the moment as an act of worship, an act of acknowledging the Lord reigns supreme. And that can be true in that I know several people who aim to achieve inner peace and presence of mind who do not declare Lord as He who reigns. However, I don’t believe true and utmost inner peace and presence of mind can exist apart from this notion that God is in control and that it is in our best interest to seek His will for our life with this awareness that He created us, and He knows us and our life path best. That is the belief I am operating from within this blog post.

Being present and experiencing inner joy – is that not the challenge of the day, the week, the month, the year, the decade, the century, scratch that, throughout all of time? Being present is as ever-present and as absolute of a struggle as God himself since the moment humanity fell! The moment Adam and Eve ate the fruit – oh, how we want to take control and not rest in the moment God created for us with the knowledge He has given us in that moment and in that moment alone! We tend to get ahead of the moment, and it’s often only subtle ways we get ahead of ourselves, but think of two parallel lines and how doomed the whole setup is if one line gets off by just a hair.

A.W. Tozer writes this:

“If you forget that God is and think of man just as being here, somehow, without any thought of his origin, then you have at least a dozen major problems on your hands. And the attempt to solve one upsets another. If you try to solve a social problem, you get yourself into a political problem and political problem upsets a labor problem, and labor problem creates an industrial problem. And so we go on mixing ourselves up because we’re thinking of ourselves apart from out origin. If we realize that God made us and made us in His image, and that our first responsibility is to Him. Then, if we went on through the truth revealed to us and settled that responsibility or met it, we’d settle our theological problems and automatically, the other problems fall into place. It wouldn’t mean there wouldn’t be something to do, but it would mean that we had hold of the heart of it and that we could solve it without disrupting something else.”

What came to mind next for me was a sermon from this past summer, given by Northway Dormont’s Paul Hunter entitled “Faith Beyond the Fence,” in which he spoke about this idea that we get ourselves in trouble when we straddle the fence between what God says and what the world says, and often times, it’s not even a drastic or conscious tension between the two, but it’s where the devil wants us to be to begin doing damage. He said “No family wakes up and says, ‘you know, I just think I want to go from good to bad to just plain worse today.’” His sermon was based on Joshua 24: 14-15, which was a “valiant and definitive challenge to the Jewish people”:

14 “Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. 15 And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

He essentially says, pick a side. “Joshua realizes he’s kind of got to outline for them what it is that they’re actually supposed to be striving for. What is it that the Lord wants from them in their lives if they’re ever to remain a pure and a blessed nation? Verse 14 tells them that “we are called to be completely and purely earnest in our decisions and our actions. But not just that, he says to put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the river. So he’s telling the children of Israel, hey friends, you need to fear God, you need to live earnest lives, but guys we cannot negotiate with who our one and only true and living god is. Never negotiate. He’s telling them we can’t go back to worshipping those false gods that they did all those years ago before. The people had gotten away from God and replaced the one and only true living god with fake imitations. And they had negotiated their way into bondage. Friends, we need families that will stand up in today’s culture and time, that will stand against the tug of war for our affections, and our attentions, and never negotiate on where we stand with the Lord. How does a family negotiate? We negotiate by becoming inoculated to the ways of God. And everything under the sun becomes the priority in life besides the main thing which is God’s mission for our lives. We would never negotiate for ourselves intentionally a bad business deal. Yet we often times, and most always, if we get into a battle with the devil, we will negotiate spiritually with the devil and put ourselves in a worse position than we were before.”

Hunter said his purpose in the sermon was to get us to “evaluate the choices that we’re making in light of the Bible. In light of what the Bible says to ensure that we are living in the center of God’s will and the confines of God’s will because again, most folks never intended to straddle the fence. But they’re right where the enemy wants them to be….ineffective, and torn up on the inside, and small choices had led us to a dangerous place.” If you’ve ever read C.S. Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters,” you’d know that whole book is a demonstration of the subtle ways the devil works his way into our lives to destroy.

So as we begin a new year, I challenge you to think about the ways you might be straddling the fence…..reflect on the moments where you start to feel peace exiting your body, when you start to feel your priorities shifting, what brings out the temptation to take control. God wants our full attention and our full affection, and when we have that in order, all else falls into perfect place.
Faith + Works = Salvation

September 27th, 2024

Going through Courtney Doctor’s devotional bible study on the book of James entitled “Steadfast,” chapter 3 was based on James 2:14-26. One of the questions asked to circle “which of the following you think best represents James’s understanding of the relationship between faith, works, and salvation (the arrow means ‘results in’):

Works = Salvation

Faith + Works = Salvation

Faith = Salvation

Faith = Salvation + Works

The next question asked: “How do verses 2:17-18 inform your choice above?” Well what 2:17-18 teaches is that faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. This means faith AND works need to be on the LEFT side of the = sign! Bear with me as I break it down farther.

Faith + Works = Salvation……….We are SAVED by faith – footnote being that it’s a faith wherein WORKS are attached, if the faith is real and deep and wide. Faith that is real and deep and wide is proclaiming the gospel, fully. What is proclaiming the gospel? I’m going to quote an article that nails it, in my opinion. The central truth of the gospel:

that Jesus Christ gave His life as a sacrifice for us. He died a cruel death on the cross, but ultimately overcame death and rose from the grave on the third day. His mission and purpose were fully accomplished to give us the gift of redemption and to bridge the gap between us and the Father. His ultimate sacrifice was also to give us life, and life in abundance. By taking on all of our sins, Jesus offered us the opportunity to be reconciled with the Father and to experience a life of joy and fulfillment. He did this so that we could be free from the bondage of sin and be able to experience the fullness of life that God intended for us. His death was a demonstration of His unconditional love and mercy for us, and a reminder of the power of grace and redemption. Jesus died on the cross to make the impossible possible, to reunite us with the Father, and to give us the gift of eternal life.

And if we allow this life-changing acknowledgement to sink in daily, works will automatically follow. Let that sink in. I am looking at the fourth option above as the trap I tend to continue falling into: Faith = Salvation + Works. In other words, WORKS being on the wrong side of equation when it comes to my FAITH! Believing it’s not enough to just believe in God’s sacrifice for me and love for me – believing the works are still up to me somehow, or at least acting like that’s what I believe. Continual useless striving. Striving as a branch not connected to the vine will die. To say it still another way, the wrong equation of Faith = Salvation + Works is to REJECT that salvation rests in Him and being close to the vine in all our works! I continually tend to let my works be SEPARATE from my faith…as if my works are what I do in the moments BETWEEN my moments of praying to the vine and “gazing” into His Word – gazing being defined in this Steadfast book as “reading it, thinking about it, memorizing it, understanding it, and then applying it–or as James says, doing it.”

HEAR ME OUT. What it comes down to is being close to the vine and getting all the nutrients needed to flourish from the vine – those are the works James speaks about. Those are the works that sprout from genuine faith – that’s the picture perfect image of salvation.

My vine reference comes from John 15:5

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”

If we truly embraced the IMMENSE love God has and feels for us, our actions would reflect that. They (our works) would reflect that (God’s love) because His love would be the IMPETUS of our works, impetus being defined as “the force or energy with which a body moves.”

So let’s remember what comes first. It’s not our works, it’s God’s love. God’s love propels our works to embody His love – it’s a continual beautiful cycle if we get the order correct.

I am going to close with the main idea behind an article that my friend Marcie shared with me.

Hundreds of college athletes were asked to think back: “What is the worst memory from playing youth and high school sports? Their overwhelming response: “The ride home from games with my parents.” Those same college athletes were asked what their parents said that made them feel great, that amplified their joy during and after a ballgame. Their overwhelming response: “I love to watch you play.”

Wow, that packs a punch, doesn’t it? Marcie said this immediately made her think of us with God, and how God is thinking “I love to watch you _______,” whether that’s live or love or parent or whatever! And how that is the truest motivation for our works. His overwhelming feeling for us is LOVE – He’s not wagging a finger at us, rolling eyes at us messing up again. What kind of motivation is that for us? Get rid of that kind of thinking because it’s not from Him. What is from Him is LOVE. Embrace it. Draw near to the vine and He will draw near to you.
Discipling Children Through Vocal Self-Reflection

June 29th, 2024

I was reading a devotional to my boys….well let me stop right there. My oldest (P) is almost 8, my second-born is newly 6 (A), and my third is almost 4 (R). Any serious discussions we have, I’m usually talking mostly to P, A catches some of it, and R is simply present in body, haha. But anyways, the Scripture we were focusing on was incredibly hard to explain to young kids!! It was Luke 9:23-25 (NLT):

“Then he said to the crowd, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross daily, and follow me. ²⁴If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. ²⁵And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but are yourself lost or destroyed?

Oh my, how on Earth do you speak of its application to such young kids? I asked A what he cares about most, and he settled on “family and friends.” I said, “Well, Dad and I let you down at times, right? We can be harsh with our words or tone sometimes and it makes you sad. That would be a good time to pray and thank God that He never lets you down, that he loves you perfectly. And that might help you not be so upset, and you can ask God to help you focus on loving Him and loving others, no matter what hard circumstances are around you.” (Not to be confused with thinking this is our way out of apologizing, ha! We do apologize when appropriate 😉 ) That still felt like it might have been hard to grasp, but you never know what sticks and what doesn’t. I was trying to explain that even good things that are good to love cannot take the place of loving God – everything and everyone besides God are BROKEN. True restoration comes only from God.

The author of the devotional (Dave Buehring) explained it this way: “Dying to self is when we choose to lay aside our selfishness to serve God and others.” Well, we had some real life application help with that one later that day! We were all in the pool with my sister and her kids, and my cousin and her kids. We were playing Monkey in the Middle, kids vs. adults, and at one point, we adults were in a conversation and not playing quite as attentively, and P was starting to get irritated, asking us with impatience if we’re still playing. And this was not the first time that day that he was not a fan of how things were playing out. In the car, I gently applied this situation to the Luke verses we studied together, not to criticize, but what good is our time learning from the Lord without trying to actually apply it? I told him that when we feel ourselves losing peace and wanting to lash out at others, it’s a good time to stop and reframe the situation. It would have been a good time for him to pause and think to himself, “I do not like how they are playing right now, but I’m going to put aside my own wishes for this moment, and I’m going to take up an attitude of serving others.” I told him that’s not to say you always need to just let others dominate – but P really doesn’t need help in the category of speaking up about feeling wronged, haha. In fact, I right then and there brought up how A tends to have the opposite weaknesses in this area – that I’m often having to coach him to speak up and stand up for himself. I told him strengths can often also have weaknesses attached, how strengths can get taken too far, becoming a weakness. How a strength of his brother’s- going with the flow and showing kindness to others and their desires – has a weakness attached when he gets upset when others are making all the calls, leaving him feeling like he’s not being cared for – not standing up for what HE wants. I just wanted to remind P that though we are discussing a weakness of his in that moment, not to forget this is often a strength of his, so I’m not trying to come down too hard on him, but rather, wanting to help him through the weakness side of this strength.

Well, isn’t it interesting that, fast forward to the next day, when the woman who commissioned a painting from me was going to pick it up a mere two hours after this moment I’m sharing with you. And I was frantically adding to it and trying to fix things I didn’t like – which is a bad habit of mine! The day of due date is not the day to make changes, yet I just can’t seem to help myself! It’s always a frantic energy, too. So by doing this, I was literally making it worse, and time was ticking, and it’s not like I was in a vacuum…we never are!! We still have people and life around us when we are in these stressful moments, and we are called to love others, not take out our inside stress out on them; even non-believers know this to be true. Well, I was failing the test, because ANY words uttered by my kids to me were automatically given the title “nuisance” to my spastic self and I was not responding in love. And we had to leave for an event we were supposed to attend, and even in the car when the paintbrush was no longer in hand, I was just so agitated. P asked me to put a song on and I barked back that I didn’t want to.

The themes from “Show Them Jesus” continually ring out in my head, especially in these moments when I want to just call it a bad day and move on. How can I do that when I am continually bringing up my own kids’ areas of needed improvement?? So I turned off my own music and sighed heavily. And I said to my boy, “Okay. Now I need to do my own application of the study, don’t I? Remember P, how I was just talking to you about having to reframe your thinking when you feel yourself losing peace and lashing out? Well, I am having a hard day with my art. I was obsessing over it, it wasn’t going well, and I could tell I was losing my peace, know what I mean?” And P said, “yeah, when we take it out on others.” I said, “Exacty. I was making an idol out of my painting looking good. It’s okay to want my painting to look good, that’s a good thing in and of itself, but it’s important to stop and recalculate when we start noticing ourselves lacking love and speaking angrily. So I need to continually be identifying idols, as well. I am sorry.”

And wow, it’s amazing how quickly a moment like that causes your anger and frustration to dissipate. THAT is the power of the Holy Spirit inside of us. And I don’t know about you, but if I were a kid, I’d want to know my parents are constantly getting it wrong, too, and needing prayer and needing God’s transformative power.

I want to close with Curtis Chang’s words in “The Anxiety Opportunity” that defines and describes these themes in a helpful way:

“Jesus underlines the fruitlessness of striving to avoid loss by saying, ‘If you love your life, you’ll lose it. ‘Love your life’ doesn’t refer to the way God wants us to properly value life and its many treasures—the people we love, thoughts we have, and experiences we feel. Read the Gospels, and you see in Jesus a human being fully alive and loving life in all its manifold and embodied glories. ‘Love your life’ in this passage means idolatry—the way I was so committed to avoiding the loss of provision that I threw my anxious arms around my company instead of God. If you try to preserve your life by relying on idolatrous ‘love,’ Jesus is warning, you will lose everything. Avoidance via idols won’t work, and you’ll waste a great deal of your life. You will ‘lose your life’ trying.

Like a good poet, Jesus employs dramatic contrast to depict an alternative to the false and fruitless ‘love’ of our idols. He promises in John 12:25, ‘If you hate your life in this world, you’ll keep it for the life of the coming age’ (NTE). Jesus often uses the word ‘hate’ as poetic hyperbole for repentance from ‘false loves,’ where we have elevated otherwise good things to idols. For example, when he says his followers must ‘hate father and mother’ (Luke 14:26), he’s talking about rejecting the way that fear of losing parental approval (which was especially powerful in ancient Jewish culture) can supplant allegiance to God. He wants our love of parents and everything else in our present life to be properly ordered loves and not be elevated into idols. To ‘hate your life in this world’ means you can tolerate the loss of your idols.

Some parents lead well by being a good example – exhibiting the fruits of the Spirit….getting it RIGHT, because God helps us get it right. And I pray for more of that. But I see God using me when I get it wrong, because I sure do, a lot. Having kids has really highlighted to me, that I can be such a flawed individual. Thank God for grace.
Freedom through Conquest…..But Whose?

June 7th, 2024
“Freedom” and “conquer” are two words that keep coming up for me lately, which I always pay attention to for blog content, among other things 🙂 So let’s look at these two words – themes – together.

There is a song – “This is My Shepherd” – that has really been speaking to me lately. [Here is the song via Youtube if you don’t have Spotify]

The two words (themes) I mentioned – FREEDOM and CONQUER are both included in this song; let’s start with CONQUER:

You said “Fear cannot conquer me”, (yeah) for you already have, ha-ha
I’ve been conquered by something else, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
And fear, you cannot conquer me, I’ve been conquered by someone else
I’ve been conquered by someone else

Now let’s look at the three dictionary definitions of the word “conquer”:
1. overcome and take control of (a place or people) by use of military force ~ “the Magyars conquered Hungary in the Middle Ages”
2. successfully overcome (a problem or weakness) ~“a fear she never managed to conquer”
3. climb (a mountain) successfully ~“the second American to conquer Everest”
So look here in the second definition. Even the example sentence discusses the topic of conquering in relationship to fear just as the song does: fear being something this person never was able to conquer. Do you feel like that about your fears ever?

What do the song lyrics say about the relationship between fear and conquering? It says that “fear cannot conquer me.” So fear is the SUBJECT in the sentence; fear does not conquer. Interesting, because the dictionary definition discusses fear as the OBJECT of the subject – something she, the subject, isn’t able to conquer.

So which is it – we conquer (or fail to conquer) our fears or our fears conquer (or fail to conquer) us? “We conquer fear” denotes OUR greatness, or lack of greatness if we fail to conquer fear. “Fears conquer us” implies the greatness of our FEARS – or the LACK of greatness our fears have if they do not conquer us.

The dictionary definition – she failed to conquer her fears – implies a failure that has no hope attached. Whereas, the song speaks of fear as something that cannot do the conquering, because fear is not the subject. God is the subject, and God does the conquering – of our fears, of our failures, of our victories, of the WORLD (John 16:33)! We and the fears we hold become the object of what God conquers. If we surrender our fears to God, fear is conquered. Let me say that again: IF WE SURRENDER OUR FEARS TO GOD, FEAR IS CONQUERED. Not maybe, possibly, probably conquered. Done deal – conquered!

So let’s look for this word FREEDOM in the song lyrics now:

It’s my shelter
It’s your shelter, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Just lift your hands as we sing this
It’s all good, just read scripture, you guys good?
Stay connected, there’s freedom for you

WHOO-WEE this song sends me! So back up, what’s the “it” here, you might ask? These lyrics come DIRECTLY after the lyrics I discussed above – so the “it” refers to the act of being conquered by someone else (GOD)……fear not conquering me, because I have been conquered by someone else – that’s the “it.” So it is this VERY fact I discussed above that fear CANNOT conquer us because God himself has conquered us, that is our shelter. It’s what we can take cover under. Reading scripture, staying connected……brings us FREEDOM – that last line. Stay connected, there’s freedom for you.

This song is essentially an anthem for freedom in the one who conquers fears. The laughing sprinkled throughout the song is a surprising and strange element when you’re first listening to this – especially when it’s played as background music to the chaotic lives we live. But it’s when we take it out of the background and allow ourselves to BASK in the TRUTH here that we actually understand the laughing and FEEL IT ourselves!! Hearing this song once I had shifted into the mode of grasping its truth and the freedom evoked from its truth is when I started laughing alongside her and just feeling that weight lifted! That weight we put on ourselves at all times, to grind and produce and accomplish and succeed. It’s’ a serious and daunting matter when we take on life this way. But it’s when we LET GO that we can relax our shoulders and laugh!! Laugh at the useless energy we continually invest.

Of course I’m not saying we shouldn’t work hard or take on responsibility – of course we should! But where is the power coming from when we do this? When the work and responsibility starts becoming the object that we the subject are trying to conquer, we have to pause. We have to pause and remember that the subject is GOD, not us. And God does the conquering of US – did conquer, does conquer, will continue to conquer, forever! Past, present and future conquering of us and all that we hold. Therefore, fear cannot conquer us. It’s His authority that is our strength, and His authority that is our peace. It’s the comfort of His love, that takes away our fear. And the comfort of your love, takes away my fear. Why would I fear the future? For your goodness and love pursues me, all the days of my life. This is my shepherd…..let these lyrics soak in. Close your eyes and laugh alongside me, friends.
Be the Light

March 5th, 2024

God speaks to us when we pray.

Just wait for it. It doesn’t necessarily happen the moment we start to pray. Just wait for it.

I am in a ten-week intensive study with some friends and last night we had prayer night – a couple hours of first group prayer and then individual prayer. And I want to share what the Lord spoke to me in case it brings YOU closer to God or to God’s amazing truths in your own walk.

There are blinding lights scattered throughout the church sanctuary above me as I lay down to pray that I was trying to avoid at the beginning of my prayer time….couldn’t get comfortable, kept squirming to find the right position that would successfully and comfortably block out the light. But as I kept squirming, I also kept praying. And as I kept praying, my effort to block out the light became useless and no longer of value to me….I began letting the light shine right on down.

I continued praying. Tears were coming in for no specific reason other than I was simply feeling God’s closeness and recognizing God’s greatness. That’s often what prayer does. I opened my eyes and began picturing the bright light being God. God’s strong eye contact and God’s loving nature. God’s bright presence shining down on me, smiling down on me. Because we know this to be true, that God DELIGHTS in us and CRAVES that intimacy with us. That intimacy I was trying to avoid. But wherever I was in this process that I just laid out – whether squirming against God’s presence at the beginning or coming around to recognizing it as God’s presence and being in awe of it, welcoming it and embracing it…..GOD WAS THERE JUST THE SAME. In the same way, same exact posture of shining down/smiling down on me. His posture towards us never changes.

This was part 1 of what God was revealing to me – the moment the lights above me took on a different form. God continued revealing Himself to me as I continued praying, and I am going to share that, as well. Maybe God will use it in your own life and faith. This second revelation is what the title of this post refers to: BE THE LIGHT.

Earlier in the prayer time with God, when still trying to avoid the bright lights, I felt on my heart a time to confess the times I feel irritated or even worse, point irritation towards my children, especially when it’s them being CHILDREN – beautiful, in-the-moment, not-distracted-or-burdened-by-the-serpents-we-are-as-adults children, wanting to share what they find funny or interesting, what’s on their lovely, present-minded brains….but because it’s interrupting MY serpent-littered-adult mind that’s concentrating on all the WRONG things…..I’m annoyed. I’m impatient. I’m gritting my teeth trying to sound nicer than I feel.

So anyways, now here I am, my train of thought being interrupted by a change of heart with these lights. Interesting how NOW my train of thought being interrupted is not a bad thing….it takes me TO the fruits of the Spirit instead of away from it. And God started hitting me over the head with further reflection.

LORD, I WANT TO BETHE LIGHT FOR MY CHILDREN. We as Christians talk about being the light. And scripture does too….Matthew 5: 15-16 says: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” But what I LOVE about Scripture is that we are consistently faced with different ways to see it and read it and feel it as we journey through life. So how am I coming to understand it now? Here is how:

Forget trying to shut out my idols when my kids are interrupting my train of thought or mundane tasks, FORGET TRYING TO BE NICER. Tara Leigh Cobble, host of the Bible Recap, said it just today in my ears: “STRIVING IS CUMBERSOME, EXHAUSTING WORK.” Oh how I yearn to stop striving!!

Lord, help me QUIT striving to sound less harsh, to quit striving to emit a more loving tone….it’s no wonder this is a continual struggle!! I have to get to the ROOTS of this ongoing struggle of wanting to be kinder. And here are the roots:

Lord, I want to be the light – that blinding, never-changing, shining-down-on, smiling-down-on, ever-present light to my children that I wrote about above, THAT I FEEL YOU BEING TO ME. I want to be EAGER to hear from them. I want to WAIT to hear from them. I want to be that warm and approachable light that they can count on that whenever and however they seek me, they have a warm, shining, smiling presence who DESIRES to be close to them and wants to hear from them.

And Lord, I’m sorry for how wrong I have it. How wrong I’ve always had it. But let me also cling to the TRUTH that RIGHT NOW, you want to transform me and IT’S NEVER TOO LATE. You told the woman in John 8:11: “Go, and sin no more.” He wants us NOW an He wants us to leave our pasts behind, to just drop everything and follow Him. Follow what He is speaking to us NOW. Forget the past.

Lord, I will continue to be impatient and irritable because that’s what we do. It’s our human nature. But let me not FORGET this new framing I felt coming directly from You tonight, that you shone down on me. That when we pray, you speak. And tonight, you spoke.

And let me come back to this again and again. Lights from above are always present, whether inside or outside, so let that be a consistent reminder to me to BE THE LIGHT to others. To my children and to all.

May you all be the light to everyone in your life, too. Pray for that.

“I’m not leaving the same way I came in” (“At the Altar” by Anna Golden ) – that’s IT right there, what happens when we pray. Set-aside, laser-focused prayer.

It’s absolutely no coincidence that the song I chose to sing (karaoke-style so I can read the words on my phone as the song plays, a nightly routine!) to Penn last night after this prayer time, which was “Never Lost” by Cece Winans, began and ended with the image of a spotlight, which I’ve never ever noticed (screenshot below). That was God right there….confirming to me what He is teaching me. As my friend Mary says……”Holy Spirit chills!”
Prayer: The Promise Pleaded

December 15th, 2023

Since launching this blog, this is my first post that actually IS about our journey with our third son River – another emergency surgery for a shunt malfunction this past week (read my h ome page for an understanding of this statement). This post is not about the stormy seas, but rather, the heart staying steady despite them (borrowed from Sanctus Real – “All Along”)

A quick fast forward to now, people look at us wondering and asking how on earth we got through a surprise brain surgery with such strength. Well, this is how God is good. “God never gives us more than we can handle” is a phrase Christians like to criticize, but what IS true is that when we have a chance to COMPLETELY SUBMIT ourselves to the Lord and His plan, God PREPARES US. When we look to God and ask that He provides us with His armor (Ephesians 6:10-18), we are UNFLAPPABLE. The problem is that we tend not to live like this! We don’t look to the Word like we look to air. I think we do tend to look up when trouble is on the horizon, and what blows my mind is that God doesn’t hold this against us – He embraces us just the same!! No matter how lost we are, no matter how far we are, no matter how many times we seize the control in our day-to-day as we set time with Him on a shelf of stuff we know we need to get to soon, He holds us and He comforts us and He follows through on His promises. What promises? The promise to never leave us or forsake us, the promise to give us this day our daily bread, the promise of comfort even in the valley of death, the promise of the fruits of the spirit coming alive in us when we seek first His kingdom…..are you picking up what I’m putting down? Stay with me…….

A friend of mine named Marilyn – she started as a friend of my mom’s, but my mom’s friends became MY friends when we first embarked on this journey with River – she sent me a screenshot of a page from the book “Songs of Suffering” by Joni Eareckson Tada the other day, way before we had any problems with River on our radar. ***If you don’t have friends who regularly remind you of your child-of-God-status – get you some of those!!!*** I didn’t totally understand the context, but honestly the context isn’t needed!

“If I stand firm to the end, you promise you’ll save me; you give strength to the weary; I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” I was now shouting, “God, I’m running to you; your name is a strong tower. Jesus, you say that everything is possible with your grace, so please help me do the impossible. Help me get through this.” I kept repeating Bible promises for the next five miles.

When we arrived at the office, something was different. My anguish had not lessened, but I had courage. Now, some people might say my rapid-fire litany only served to distract me from my misery. But I knew better. God came through on his promises. He renewed me. Refreshed me. Encouraged me. His promises helped me to the impossible, and I no longer felt defeated.

I got out of the van, wheeled through the office door, and sang as I went up the ramp. Everyone on the first floor could hear me belting out “Standing on the Promises” like a happy Baptist at Saturday night revival. To me, Charles Spurgeon nails what happened that day:

“The precious promises of our great God are distinctly intended to be taken to him and exchanged for the blessings which they guarantee….Take care how you pray. Make real business of it….[Some] do not plead the promise in a truthful….way. What is prayer but the promise pleaded? A promise, is, so to speak, the raw material of prayer. Prayer irrigates the fields of life with the waters which are stored up in the reservoirs of promise. The promise is the power of prayer. We go to God, and we say to him, “Do as you have said. O Lord, here is your Word; we ask you to fulfill it.”

WOW. That last paragraph by Charles Spurgeon, read that again!!

This was sent to me weeks ago…..but this past Saturday, my husband found the first sign that something was wrong with River’s shunt, and it felt like a physical launch back into the traumatic waters we had with River two years ago (three brain surgeries in 2021). Nate said all the right things to slow down my spinning mind with an action plan and how we had to let it go, but when does the worry creep back in but the hours you wake in the middle of the night?? And this text from Marilyn is what came to mind, and my mind was just so lazer-focused on this concept that I never really heard put this way – that prayer is the promise pleaded. This exchange we have with God, where we take what He speaks to us, that He wants us to own, and how do we own it? By handing it right back to Him. That is prayer. That is so beautifully, so simply……prayer.

And the rest of this week is history because I had the Lord by my side. “My anguish had not lessened, but I had courage.”

You don’t risk Jesus not bringing you back into His mighty arms and fulfilling His promises when we put him at bay. What you risk is anguish that is without courage. I’m going to quote When Harry Met Sally here to conclude this post: “I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” If we know and believe how rich and plentiful our lives are when seeking first His Word and His closeness, we don’t seek Him out of obligation. We seek out of desire, and we do it NOW; we don’t shelf it. Lord, forgive us when we forget or ignore Your promises, which we know you do and you will, and transform our hearts to desire You, to reach out and touch your cloak out of our own desperation for You. The scene from Passion of the Christ where Mary crawls on the ground towards Jesus….the way He looks at her and lifts her up – OH MAN. This is the picture I am trying to paint in this post- see it here: “In Christ Alone”

Lord, give our hearts this song – “This is the Gospel” by Elevation Rhythm !!!! Let this be our anthem this week.
Jesus Cries

October 13th, 2023

I’ve had in my mind for months the topic I wanted to focus on for this blog post, but I’ve been overthinking it and adding too many words….until I heard a song by Riley Clemmons called Jesus Cries that melted away the need to make this topic of PAIN AND SUFFERING more academic than it should be.

My mother-in-law was the one who supplied me (unknowingly) to what this blog post would be about a few months back, with her thoughts following reading my last blog post (Compelled Vs. Attracted Attention). She appreciated the hammering home of God’s ways being bigger than ours and sometimes more incomprehensible than we can ever understand, but noted also that as a trauma therapist, she has always been strangely comforted by the very human cry of Jesus on the cross, that the cries of God on the cross are the raw and honest questions that so many devastated people experience when the bottom falls out of life. She said, “I am deeply comforted by the sense that Jesus knows us at our most despairing moments and He has experienced even these.”

Before I got around to posting on this topic, I was rocked by some tragic news. I had been trying to get ahold of a high school friend whose cousin’s wife was a major blessing to me when I was going through the wild unknowns of what we could be facing with River. She had a daughter born with a fatal heart defect but was fighting hard for her little warrior and doing all she could in helping her fight for life, and her faith was INCREDIBLE – the way she talked about her faith and of her understanding of His goodness when she had a daughter who might die (and she had other children at home she was frequently away from because of being in the hospital), was life-changing to me! She was who influenced me to live out my journey with River like she did. It was the combination of her influence which already had my heart softened to this calling and a specific calling I felt through music in the middle of the night as I lay shuddering in my bed one night amidst the trial that was ongoing – a calling to share our story, gather an army of people praying for us, and testify about our good God walking beside us in the trenches. Well, I finally did hear from that high school friend, who reported that the girl had died a couple years back after her body began rejecting her new heart.

I was rocked. Emotions of all kinds swirled around me, especially in dealing with my own feeling of guilt if you can even call it that, that my son was doing so well. It’s so unfair, and I know it. And with how much sadness I felt, it felt unbearable–the pain the family must feel. And these are the moments that all the pain you’ve known around you gets magnified, and you just feel helpless, know what I mean? All the major trials happening among my family members and friends just became giant before me. I didn’t even know where to start in prayer. So I just started. And I was reminded through prayer, that prayer is all we have in moments like these. We can’t “good-thoughts” our way out of a devastation like this. We can’t make sense of it. We can’t reach a point of feeling okay about it, even. It’s not okay. Praying doesn’t make it a pill we can swallow. Prayer just gets us through the night. Keeps us from literally dying of misery or fear sometimes or completely crumbling to the point of feeling unable to function as you did before.

PRAY. Please, if you are paralyzed by your own pain right now, please start there before even continuing to read this. Get down on your knees and visit with Jesus, who cries with you. You will see Scripture in a new way once you’ve been down on your knees in desperation. Here is what has been highlighted for me following my time crying to the Lord about all the pain surrounding me.

Isaiah 61: 1-3

And in the New Testament, we see Jesus fulfilling this Scripture in Luke 4:16-21!! Literally, the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Jesus, he unrolled it and read these exact verses I just dropped above, and He proclaimed them being fulfilled then and there. Tears are rolling down my cheek as I type this out, because this is what we have to clutch onto. Unlike any other religion, Jesus became fully human to bear our grief and pain and sin – Isaiah 53:3-4 – that is the Jesus who cries.
Compelled vs. Attracted Attention

July 21st, 2023

“What is your relationship with the Bible?” was the “icebreaker” recently posed to a faith group I’m part of…..there were two women leading the group and they instantly laughed that they fought over what this icebreaker should be, as the other leader just wanted to know what our favorite road trip snacks are!! Because what a loaded question this is, and one that for me, at least, ebbs and flows.

I love a good devotional or sermon–something that is based on Scripture, sure, but the Scripture is more used as a launching pad before some additional motivation or catchy prompts add a bit more of a punch. But lately, I’m finding fault with this preference towards requiring anything added to the Word for it to really get my attention.

The fantastic book that my colleagues are currently reading through called “The Seven Laws of Teaching” discusses the difference between attracted attention vs. compelled attention. Attracted attention is when the teacher wears a funny hat or has a monkey on his shoulder or something to get the students’ attention for learning, whereas compelled attention comes down to interest in the content being taught in and of itself. We (teachers) need to train their attention to not need gimmicks. See where I’m going with this connection?

Compelled attention when it comes to the Word is what I know I need to be after.

And just in time, Genesis 39 appeared in my view–it demanded my focus and appreciation without any gimmicks or cute lists or motivational phrases. The story of Joseph is an incredible one that you must get to know, but to summarize what happened prior to Genesis 39, Joseph was one of Jacob’s 12 sons, and his father preferred him to his other sons and gave him a colored cloak. The brothers, who were seeing red over this, sold him into slavery and lied to their father that he had been devoured by animals. He was taken to Egypt and became the slave of Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh’s guard. He quickly found favor in his master’s eyes, and he was appointed head of the household; Potiphar entrusted to his care everything he owned. Things were looking up for him after some brutally unfair and unfortunate circumstances.

UNTIL Potiphar’s wife hit the scene. Her desire to be intimate with him was strong, and she flat-out asked him, day after day, to come to bed with her. He refused time and time again, saying, “My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?” One day when no one was around, she actually tugged on his cloak to get to him, and he literally RAN from this temptation. She took advantage of having his cloak in hand and lied to her husband that he was the one trying to seduce her and naturally, he burned with anger and threw Joseph into prison!

How on earth would you make sense of this if you were Joseph? After all he has already been through, he was actually doing the right thing and resisting sin and yet he is falsely accused and pays a sentence he does not deserve (sounds like another story we know! Jesus, people). What comes next blows me away:

“But while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden.”

My attention–instantly compelled. How exactly is favor and kindness coming into play IN PRISON? But it’s written right there and it’s real. Haven’t you had times in your own walk with God, where there is a real beauty amidst the pain, a richness coinciding with brokenness, an unexplained calm that is beyond our understanding, a shift in perspective that suddenly appears? How is that so? Can we get to the bottom of this here and now? Is there something here in these verses about Joseph that is compelling your attention like it is mine? Is there something other than a “good” we tend to strive for that God desires for us? Because I don’t see the kind of good we seek in the unfolding of this story.

Northway Church recently did a sermon series called “Somehow God is Good” and I just scrolled back to find it and write down the weekly intro word for word that absolutely applies here, for it basically describes exactly what this part of Genesis illustrated for me:

“All things. God works all things together for our good. Not some, not just the easy parts, not just the parts we like to talk about. All things. We serve a God who is moving in our lives to bring about HIS purpose, yet so often we question just how good he really is. We forget it when we’re suffering, when we’re stuck in the waiting, when devastation comes, when disaster strikes, when it seems like everything is changing, when we get looked over, when the relationship fails, when the unthinkable happens. Life looks like nothing I thought it would. Face down, tears streaming, we scream, “God! How can this be good?
Good? Who defines good, us or God? OUR good, the one we decide for ourselves…..NEVER FULLY SATISFIED. What if there’s a new type of good to be found? Good that is grounded in the God whose very nature is ultimate good. Good that doesn’t sway with the changing of the times but remains steady and unwavering. What if instead, we began to see good from an eternal perspective? What would that mean for you, and for me?”

I want to close with another part of Scripture that recently stood out to me from the book of Job. Life as Job knew it was completely unraveling before his eyes and at first, his faith remained intact and he did not blame God, but he began wavering. His three friends showed up and offered the perspective that he must be doing something wrong, because God is just, He runs the world according to justice, and therefore Job must be blameworthy. Job’s assumption is that God is just, but also assumes himself to be blameless, so therefore, he began seeing God as unjust and incompetent at running the universe. So there exists a deeper assumption that Job holds that he has enough perspective to make such a claim.

Read God’s response. GAH, I love this!

God’s response deconstructs all of the above assumptions. I am going to quote “The Bible Project’s Book of Job Summary” here:

“It first of all shows that the universe is a vast, complex place, and that God has his eyes on all of it, every detail. Job, on the other hand, has only the small horizon of his life experience to draw from; his view of the world is very limited. And so what looks like divine injustice, from Job’s point of view, needs to be seen in an infinitely larger context: Job is simply not in a position to make such a huge accusation about God. After the virtual tour, God asks Job if HE would like to micromanage the world for a day, according to the strict principle of justice that Job and his friends assume–punishing every evil deed of every person at every moment with precise retribution. The fact is that carrying out justice in a world like ours…it’s extremely complex, it’s never black and white like Job and the friends seem to think.”

Job’s response–fantastic!!

“I am unworthy—how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, but I have no answer—twice, but I will say no more.”

“God doesn’t explain why [there is suffering]. What he says is that we live in an extremely complex, amazing world that at this stage, at least, is not designed to prevent suffering. And that’s God’s response. Job challenged God’s justice, God responds that Job doesn’t have sufficient knowledge about our universe to make such a claim, Job demanded a full explanation from God, and what God asked Job for is trust in his wisdom and character. And so Job responds with humility and repentance. He apologizes for accusing God and he acknowledges that he’s overstepped his bounds. Then all of a sudden, the book concludes with a short epilogue. First God says that the friends were wrong, that their ideas of about God’s justice were just too simple, not true to the complexity of the world or God’s wisdom. And then God says that Job has spoken rightly about Him. Now, this is surprising, because it can’t apply to everything that Job has said. I mean, we know Job drew hasty and wrong conclusions, but God still approves of Job’s wrestling: how Job came honestly before God with all of his emotion and pain and simply wanted to talk to God himself. And God says that is the right way to process through all of this–through the struggle of prayer.

The book concludes with Job having his health, his family, his wealth–all restored….not as a reward for good behavior, but simply as a generous gift from God. And that’s the end of the book.

So the book of Job….it doesn’t unlock the puzzle of why bad things happen to good people. Rather, it does invite us to trust God’s wisdom when we do encounter suffering, rather than try and figure out the reasons for it. When we search for reasons, we tend to either simplify God, like the friends, or like Job, accuse God, but based on limited evidence. And so the book is inviting us to honestly bring our pain and our grief to God, and to trust that God actually cares, and that He knows what He’s doing. And that is what the book of Job is all about.”

Now tell me. Is your attention compelled? Scripture SPEAKS, y’all!