Different stage, different venue

As a little girl, I watched from the edge of the living room as my mother played her violin, hours and hours a day.  It was not "practicing" to her, but being absorbed into the music. Playing exercises, scales and difficult passages over and over again was anything but mundane to her.  She was energized by it.  Practice was not about how to play the notes better, but how she grew to love the music even more.

When she was practicing, she was in a different universe, oblivious to everything around her:  dogs barking, my brothers racing through the house, even something burning in the oven.  "Just give me a few more minutes," she would call out. "I'm almost done."  But she rarely was.

As she practiced and subsequently performed, she heard sounds and patterns that none of us would ever be aware of.  But she could also see, beyond our own vision of things, as I only found out after she had passed away.  She possessed a neurological condition called synesthesia, in which she could actually see colors associated with the notes.

At first, I wondered why she never talked about her synesthesia.  But one morning, I was suddenly struck by the realization that she never shared about synesthesia with me, because she must have thought everyone saw colors when they heard music.

From the time she was a little girl, being successful as a musician was how she was going to make it in this world.  She came from very humble beginnings.  Her father died after a long illness when she was still a teenager.  Her mother kept food on the table by teaching piano lessons.  Mom played live music on the radio to work her way through college.  She turned down an opportunity to come to Nashville as a member of the Grand Ol' Opry radio show, because her sights were set on a bigger stage.  She moved instead to New York City.

Through the years and four children and a few moves between Chicago and the East coast, God began using her music as her way of loving people.  God provided her a different kind of stage and different kinds of venues.  She kept her violin by her side and pulled it out in the most unexpected times and unlikely places to bless someone. She played in churches, nursing homes, hospitals, garden clubs, and elementary schools to encourage youngsters.  (She would not ask children, "Do you play an instrument?" but "What instrument do you play?"  Music was not an optional activity in her eyes.)

And when my dad was out of work for a long season, she taught violin to fledgling high school students in our living room, literally night and day.  She never made much money at it, but she kept us going, and she loved a lot of kids through the angst of life.

When she passed away almost fifteen years ago, as I was going through her piles of papers, I came across an index card on which she had written, "I always wanted to be famous, but a lot better things happened because I am not."

I was reminded of that message this morning, when I read this passage of Oswald Chambers from the early 1900s:  "We must never put our dreams of success as God's purpose for us;  His purpose may be exactly the opposite."  

What brings glory to God?  Watching my mom, I learned that nothing is insignificant in His sight.

Today, December 29, would have been mom's 100th birthday.

May I be faithful to what she taught me about life, how she loved God, and the soundtrack of grace  she engraved in the lives of so many. 


One generation shall commend
            Your works to another,
and shall declare
            Your mighty acts.

                       Psalm 145. 4

Happy birthday, Mom!

Just say it

After making a transaction at Costco, the clerk wished me, "Have a great day."
I responded, "Merry Christmas!"

She looked at me for a moment, surrounded in the store by decorations, gifts, even holiday music playing in the background, as if it hadn't occurred to her the reason for this stampede of customers.

And suddenly, it was as if great joy suddenly emerged and entered the equation, "Why, thank you!  You too!" she said.

For a brief moment, it was about Christmas.

A few days ago in church, we sang, "Go tell it on the mountain, that Jesus Christ is born!"

And yet, we are negligent in saying anything at all.  Has our culture become so secularized --indeed have we-- that blessing others with even the words "Merry Christmas!" is out of the ordinary?  Are we that afraid of being different? Or are we that oblivious to bearing witness to Him, even in this season?

In our corporate worship, we come before God to confess what we have done and what we have left undone.  Even what we say can make a difference in someone's life.  More than we can know.  "What if...?" I had said something?

Does my life, my vocabulary, what I do and say --even my salutations --embrace and reveal the reality of what Christ has done in me?

And all the shepherds returned,
glorifying and praising God
for all they had heard and seen...

                     Luke 2. 20

God never intended for us
       to keep His glory for ourselves.
And that goes far beyond
             how we decorate,
  but seeping radically in how we love others,
           what we do,
      and even infiltrates what we say.

What kind of overwhelmed?

What kind of overwhelmed
   do I choose this Christmas?

Shopping for presents?

Or seeking His Presence?

Behold a Virgin shall conceive
       and bear a son
and call His name Immanuel
  which means
           God with us.

            Matthew 1. 23

Whether I am aware of it ...or not

A few weeks ago, my husband and I found a pocket of time in the late afternoon, near the ending of the day.  It was not enough time to launch into yet another project, but there were still a few minutes to make the most of the day still lingering.

We jumped in the car and drove up to the highest point near us in the waning light of day.  It was getting dark, and it was getting cold and windy, but there was something we yearned to see.

When we arrived, others had the same idea and were already out of their cars and waiting.  The sun slipped slowly through the sky, the colors intensified, and even in this small gathering, no one could speak for the awe and the glory of God before us.

And I thought, "Oh, what we would have missed."  And then, almost immediately, "Oh, what we do miss most days, because we are just not looking."  God displays His magnificence twice a day, that which only He can do.  This immense beauty in the bookends of the day, sunrise and sunset, remind us of His goodness and His glory all the way through.

His Presence permeates the skies, and my life, whether I am aware of it....or not.  He reveals Himself throughout the day.  Am I seeking Him in it?  Do I even have an inkling of the extraordinary in the ordinary all around me?  Even in what I do not see, even in what I do not understand.

It is good to give thanks to the LORD,
to sing praises to Your name,
                      O Most High;
to declare Your steadfast love
                                 in the morning,
and Your faithfulness by night.

                            Psalm 92. 1-2

We are surrounded
        by His steadfast love
        and His faithfulness,

     knowing God is in this. 

No matter what.

He reminds us
                 day by day.



Pray continually.
Live faithfully.
Love well.
Practice grace.

Thank A Saint Day

There is still a half bag of chocolate candy in the pantry, left over from last evening's parade of neighborhood children knocking at our door.  When three actually-very-polite junior highers rang the bell at almost 8.30, the streets dark and the air in the frigid 30s, Bill lightened our remaining supply with huge handfuls into their bags.

Last night was Halloween, which historically was the "hallowed eve," that is, before America saw a great opportunity to sell more candy.  The hallowed eve is the eve of the holy, the night before All Saints Day, designed to commemorate the faithful people who have gone before us, those who have blazed the trails and shown us what following Christ looks like in real life.  This morning, all masks are off.

Think about the saints in your life, their stories, their writings, their witness, their journeys, their faithfulness no matter where God placed them.   Think about those amazing -- and very real-- people who have made a mark in your own life.  I have a shelves of underlined books that have helped me immensely through the years to point me to Jesus.  I have strong memories of those unsung --mostly unknown-- spiritual heroes in my life who showed me how to walk with Jesus, who prayed for me (even before I was born), who were faithful to God in what only appeared to be insignificant times and even when they thought no one was watching.

And if they are still alive, thank the saints in your life in some way today:  a written note, a phone call, a text, even praying for them.  Today, you are the CEO:  the Chief Encouragement Officer.  As the late Oswald Chambers (one of those on my list of departed saints) stated:  God rarely allows a person to see how great a blessing he is to others.

But we have the opportunity to let them know today, to encourage, to honor, to show them our gratefulness for their lives and their ongoing relationship with God. "God has used you incredibly in my life."

Therefore,
    encourage one another
and build one another up,
just as you are doing.

               1 Thessalonians 5. 11

What you have, what you know, what is right in front of you

A young writer pilgrimaged from the deep South to New York City, a place where in her wild imagination, mediocre writers were instantly transformed into renowned authors, just by being there.  She wrote what she knew, little vignettes about life in the South, which seemed disconnected and a bit ridiculous in the glaring lights of this city.  But yet so very faraway, her upbringing in a rural culture and almost foreign ways of life still pulsed through her thoughts, even as she was surrounded by skyscrapers, crowds of strangers, sour smells of the city, and concrete sidewalks in all directions.

After almost eight years of trying to pull together something publishable, in a moment of despair, she opened the window of her small apartment and threw the manuscript out, pages flying every which way through the air, down to the busy city street below.  Immediately regretting her rash decision, she ran down the many flights of stairs and retrieved the typed sheets of paper from oblivion, dodging taxis and pulling her story out of puddles.

Then, over the next three years, she dissected what she had written, reworked what she had, adding more details and dialog, rebuilding from the foundations, and transforming it into her first book, published in 1960 and winning the Pulitzer Prize for Literature the following year.

The 34-year-old author was Harper Lee.  And that manuscript, thrown out the window and then painstakingly revised, was her book To Kill A Mockingbird which has sold more than 40 million copies.

She wasn't just lucky.  That kind of accomplishment doesn't just happen.  The profound does not arrive on the doorstep with Amazon Prime.  What am I working hard on?

I read an interview this week about a multiple award-winning author who was once asked if she wrote every day.  She just shook her head incredulously and answered, "What do you think?"

In far more venues than writing, what do you have, what do you know, and what is right in front of you?  Work on it.  Work hard on it.  A downright mess, a bunch of loose unrelated ends, a rocky path instead of a shimmering open door?  What can I do with that?  

But as author Kevin DeYoung says, "Just Do Something."  Tape all the pieces together, work hard, and see what comes of it.  It may turn out to be nothing at all but training for something else, or even redirecting one's path.  Or simply bringing some beauty or sense into the world.  It may be a blessing to someone else you don't even know.  We cannot determine the outcome, but we can take the next step, and then another.

The pursuit is not about a prize.  But what is priceless is continually pouring into what the world may never even recognize as worthy of praise.  There is rarely an award ceremony at the end, but thick goodness in the journey.  A tangible achievement is no more valuable than the intangible.  More often than not, the relationships and what is invested in them are what produce pure gold.

Plant seeds.  Plant lots of them.  We never know which one grows into a towering tree.  We don't have a clue.

We may never see the forest our lives produces.  But I run through thick woods almost every day, awed by the vistas, thankful for the shade, and grateful to those who planted the trees a very long time ago, those who had that kind of vision.

God's glory lingers
         in what He has done.
May His beauty infiltrate
         in all we pursue.

Now to Him
who by the power at work within us
is able to do
       far more abundantly
than all that we ask or think,
to Him be glory...

              Ephesians 3. 20




Pray continually.
Live faithfully.
Love well.
Practice grace in this.
Bring the name of Jesus there.

One of the faithful ones

She was one of the last of her family and friends to get married, she was one of the first to lose a baby at birth, and then one of the first to become a widow, when her husband passed away after a long and debilitating illness, during the Great Depression.  As the mother of a five year old daughter, she was diagnosed at age 36 with rheumatoid arthritis and told by physicians that she would spend her life in a wheelchair.  I don't know how that conversation proceeded, but knowing her full resolve, she most likely told the doctor, "Not going to happen."  And it never did.

When there was no money, which was pretty much a daily occurrence, she was one of the most creative people on the planet.  As a single working mom, she did not offer condolences to her only daughter when college seemed laughably out of the question, but simply looked her in the eyes and said, "How can we make this happen?"  And they did.

She taught piano lessons to put food on the table.  For her students, she printed on the top of her lesson sheets, "It is not what you play, but how you play it."  That was the story of her life.

She left her home in Fort Worth, Texas, at 62, for a foreign country called New York City to be close to her married daughter, now a professional violinist, not to be cared for, but to care for them.   

When she entered a room, she brought ripples of joy into it.

I know, because for the first sixteen years of my life, she lived with our family.  We called her Mammy.  For many years, I didn't even know she had another name.  She was my grandmother and one of the most godly, loving, kind, and self-less women I have ever known.  Even now, I remember her vividly.  She would have been 131 years old today, and she passed from this life to the next, exactly fifty years ago on this day.

What did she love doing?  Whatever needed doing, not seeking happiness in what she did, but finding the LORD walking with her in how she did it.  Nothing but nothing was beneath her.

She hobbled a lot because of her rheumatism, and she leaned on God, even when circumstances were beyond explanation.  "Sometimes you just have to trust the LORD about it," she told me as a little girl, over and over, repeating it as if to say, if you remember anything, remember this. 

She was incredibly busy from before sun-up until long after evening set in.  As a child, it didn't appear that she ever slept. Sewing, cooking, painting, playing piano, loving four unruly grandkids, and listening.  She was always there, and always ready to put down what she was doing to listen.  Friends of ours and other young people flocked to her, because she loved them.  Not one had to ask if she was a believer.  She loved a lot of people to Jesus.  I am one of them.

The faithful ones do not grab the mike, nor command the spotlight, rarely found front and center on stage or a photograph, because they are just busy being faithful.  Even as a child, I often pondered about her life.  She was not famous or rich, nothing remarkable about her talents or appearance.  But she had a secret joy.  She knew exactly what she was doing.

I am convinced she knew that the decisions she had made, and every choice she was making, impacted not just her life, but her grandkids...and the children to the furthest generation. 

We will not hide them from their children,
but tell to the coming generation
the glorious deeds of the LORD,
                      and His might,
and the wonders which He has wrought.
...to teach to their children,
that the next generation might know them,
         the children yet unborn,
and arise and tell them to their children,
  so that they should
                    set their hope in God.

                            Psalm 78. 4, 6-7


When I think about faithfulness to God, I think about her.  What does that look like?  What does that look like in my own life?

And Jesus said,
Love the LORD your God
with all your heart
and with all your soul
         and with all your mind.
This is the great and first commandment. 
And the second is like it:
      Love your neighbor as yourself.

                           Matthew 22. 37-39

Love God every way you can,
                  in whatever you do.
Love everyone around you
           as you have been loved by Him.

I watched that unfold daily in her life.
For that, she is remembered.
She was not well-known,
         but she was found in Him.
And I am grateful to God
             for her life.

Happy birthday, Mammy.

What Changes Us

One of our little three-year-old grandsons a few weeks ago asked for a banana on an ordinary  afternoon.  In trying to help him learn manners, we often pace him through the words "May I please have a banana?"  And after his request has been fulfilled, we ask, "What do you say?"  so he will know politely how to respond: "Thank you!"

On this particular afternoon, as I handed this tiny little guy his requested piece of fruit, he intentionally looked up at me and said spontaneously, "Oh, thank you so much for this banana," gazing right into my eyes, and quite frankly, right into my heart.  No prompts needed.

He was not just repeating a socially correct set of words.  But responding with gratitude.

We are often all-too-silent, rarely verbally expressing our thankfulness in heart-felt words to those who give, to those who have given to us, and to God who has given us everything.  How often do we acknowledge, "I'm really grateful for that."     

Words make a greater difference than we can know, not just in a social construct of being polite, nor in gushy sentiment.  But words of thankfulness and gratitude actually change our hearts, rewire our brains, change our vision in a situation, and ultimately change the trajectory of our lives.  What kind of person am I becoming?

Am I seeking to be polite?  Or am I grateful?

How -- and if --I express gratitude changes how I see God, transforms how I view circumstances, and changes my interactions with all those around me.  

Though the fig tree may not blossom,
Nor fruit be on the vines,
Though the labor of the olive may fail,
And the fields yield no food,
Though the flock may be cut off from the fold,
And there be no herd in the stalls --
Yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.
The LORD God is my strength;
He will make my feet like deer's feet,
And He will make me walk on my high places.

                              Habakkuk 3. 16-19

Our daily choices, habits and practices develop how we think, what we think about, on what we set our minds, impacting radically how we live, how we love others, and how we see God.

A mind that is always focused on what is lacking is never satisfied, always looking for something else and something more.  Taking a given set of circumstances, favorable or not, the difference is not between seeing my cup as half-empty or half-full. But when I see my cup as overflowing, as it states in Psalm 23, that gratefulness spills out even in the lives of others.  God does not just give.  God multiplies.   God is already here providing for us, even in unexpected ways and unlikely situations.  

Find one thing today to be thankful for.  Being grateful will not change our circumstances, but that little exercise in verbalizing it, that change of heart, that way of seeing, changes us more than we can know.

It's still just a banana.  But it tastes differently.

Rejoice always,
pray constantly,
give thanks in all circumstances.

               1 Thessalonians 5. 16-18

The Abundance of Moving Slow

Many years ago, as my husband and I drove through this area to watch our daughters run in the state cross country meet, we remarked about the beauty of the hills and trees.  Little did we know at the time that we would, a decade later, be living a mile from that same city park.

When we moved here, I slowed my pace from driving through the trees on paved roads to running through the trees on long established dirt trails, following the faithfulness of those who have run before me.

And still now, years later, I look forward to that slower pace, running through the fellowship of trees, the emerging beauty in all seasons, the welcoming shade in the dead heat of summer.  Even in the dailiness of it, I still see this wilderness with different eyes, grasping a new perspective on my feet.  And as I run, I begin praying and thinking differently about what is before me in that day and what is on my heart.  I can enter the woods troubled or confused or overwhelmed, and when I emerge back home, I see things with a fresh angle.  Not that everything is suddenly solved or I master the difficulty, but God works a bit on my heart.

The other day, I was walking through the trees, an even slower pace, a different space even on trails I am so familiar.  Because I was walking, instead of running, I could see even more because I was not so occupied by ambushes along the way of tree roots, rocks and rough places that trip me up.

As I was coming down one stretch of trees as far as I could see, the beauty of God's creation stopped me in my tracks.  The sunlight was cutting through the deep green, the intense blue of the sky a backdrop of His glory showing through the branches and lighting up the woods.

The picture doesn't do it justice.

And a verse suddenly popped almost audibly in my thoughts:

Be still,
    and know I am God.

                  Psalm 46. 10

It also made me so thankful for the vision someone had so many decades ago, to set aside this land for the common good, to plant big trees, to plant a lot of trees, to allow them to grow unhindered, and to let God bring His glory to it.

We rarely see the fruitfulness of our work,
          but someone else
      is profoundly impacted by it,
sometimes for a brief moment,
sometimes for all eternity.

The point is this:
whoever sows sparingly
will also reap sparingly,
and whoever sows bountifully
will also reap bountifully.

              2 Corinthians 9. 6

Plant big trees.
Plant a lot of trees.
Even a simple kindness,
even an encouraging word,
even a forest,
    and let God bring the fruit.

Pray continually.
Live faithfully.
Love well.
Practice grace.

Progressive exercises

A strong memory was engraved in my childhood of my mother practicing her violin, not just pieces of beautiful music, but the scales and exercises she played over and over.  It seemed to me ludicrous at the time to pay so much attention to the scales when she could have been spending that time working on "real music."

But even the sonatas and concertos and other profoundly difficult works that she played and knew and had memorized decades before, she would practice both the hard passages and the easy, over and over and over again, until she mastered it.  And then, practiced it some more.  Because when she reached a difficult portion of a piece in a performance, she didn't just know how to play it;  she welcomed it, not as a foe or adversary, or even an awkward acquaintance, but as a passage she knew intimately, every cadence, every wrinkle.  She knew how to respond to it.

She did not just play the notes on the page, or play without mistakes, but she brought another awareness to the music.  Anyone can play notes.  A master touches hearts through it.

Indeed as a child, I watched her play her violin, but I also watched how she interacted with people.  She didn't just show love to people, she loved them.  Even those who were strangers, even those who didn't like her, even those who were hard to love.  Not just those on her path, but those she sought out.  And even in hurtful situations, you would never know it.  She practiced grace on a daily basis.

In an old book of progressive exercises for piano that used to be my grandmother's, the directions are simple:  "Do one exercise a week playing it five times daily.  While each new exercise is being mastered, keep reviewing the old ones once each day.  Do this until the entire book has been learned."

One exercise trains and builds up strength and agility for the next.  Master one response, move onto the next harder one, but never forget what came before.

Pray continually.
Live faithfully.
Love well.
Practice grace
        over and over again.

Grace is hard, or it would not be grace.  Practice "five times daily," not just mastering words or notes, but realizing the beauty that God manifests in it.  Grace is a progressive exercise in how to actually love other people, not just "love on them."  We may not get grace right at first, we will stumble, we will go pretty slow, but we can work on it.  In what first appears as a jumble of notes --what do I do with this?-- a thread emerges through it.  We can begin to grasp the patterns of what comes next.  We can know how to respond.  And eventually -- like my mom with her music and how she interacted with people -- the grace is engraved, not just in our minds but in our hearts.
     
And in those impossible situations --which we all are surrounded by-- we realize this is not just a difficulty, but an opportunity to practice grace in this.

Love one another
    with brotherly affection.
Outdo one another
    in showing honor.

              Romans 13. 10

A Trip to the Moon and Back

I have no photographs of the event, no snapshots except in my memories, but then again, we rarely do for our most profound moments.

Today July 20 commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong's dance on the surface of the moon.

For some reason, on that hot summer day in 1969, I was not working one of my many part time jobs as a teenager.  I was not quite 16, the legal working age at the time, but I had worked for years in a variety of tasks that I could find, including babysitting for 50 cents an hour.  My dad had been out of work at this point for a couple years, and after a while, when no jobs materialized, he decided to start his own company, cobbling things together in our basement, inventing in borrowed lab space from a church friend, and selling dental materials of the trunk of his car.   My mom contributed the best she could by teaching beginning violin students in our living room at all hours of the day, for five dollars per hour, and sometimes for the music alone. 

My grandmother, who had lived with us from before I was born, held us and the household together in more ways than one.  My grandmother cleaned, laundered, and creatively stretched every dollar, "making do" with whatever was in the cupboard.  We never went hungry, but we had some rather unusual meals, and she thought that we didn't notice when she watered down the milk to make it last longer.

But on that momentous day, she dropped all her daily urgent duties and hobbled down the linoleum tiled stairs to sit in the dark coolness of the basement with my youngest brother and me --the only ones home at the time -- to see the Apollo 11 spacecraft perilously land on the moon and see the astronauts walk on its surface.  We sat together, sometimes commenting on what we saw, sometimes in silence, sometimes in awe of what was happening like a suspense movie on the small screen of our only television, relegated to the shadowy dank basement.

But with all the drama played out before us, what stood out to me was sitting together with her.  As soon as we heard Armstrong's voice, "A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind," she was reluctant to leave and instead lingered, just being with us in those sacred moments.

When I look at Your heavens,
the work of Your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
      which You have set in place,
what is man
   that You are mindful of him,
and the son of man that You care for him?

                                      Psalm 8. 3-4



"And to think," she finally said in her gravelly voice, "I went from horse-drawn wagon to seeing a man walk on the moon.  Imagine that."  This wrinkled gracious woman, who could now barely walk with her arthritic knees, was born in 1882 in rural Kentucky.  As a girl of eight, she traveled with her family by wagon to dusty Fort Worth, Texas, which I am sure seemed the other side of the moon to her at the time.

What I remember most about that day in 1969 is that she didn't rush off when there were so many other pressing and visible needs calling for her attention.  She saw a different angle on significance.   

As I can see it now -- as a grandma myself-- one of her pressing needs was just being with me.  Over the few years I had with her, she had a profound impact on my life in the way she daily lived out her faith in God in word and deed and never with the remotest shadow of fanfare.  She lingered.  And that is what impacted me.  Just being together.

Little did I know that in just three short months, her heart would run out of beats one morning, and she would slip away suddenly to the Other Side of life.  And those ordinary daily moments when she'd stop everything to listen to me, help me with some impossible dilemma that seemed insurmountable at the time, or just to be there, those moments of incalculable value are still fresh in my mind and heart, fifty years later.

Two evenings ago when I was helping out at our daughter's home here in town, my four-year-old granddaughter, trying as usual to stretch out the day, chose two books to read before bed, one about Penny the mouse and the other about Pickles the fire cat.  We lay down on her little bed with its puffy blue and pink unicorn comforter, side by side, reading page after page past her bedtime.  And I thought:  What will she remember 50 years from now?

I hope the lingering.

Faithfulness means...

As I was running through the sweat of the forest this week, I began thinking about people I have known, even when I was a little girl, who I remember as the faithful ones.  I observed so many people working hard without fanfare, hearing snatches of conversations around the dinner table and in the church lobby, faces and names and experiences sneaking in and out of my thoughts as I climbed another hill and went around yet another bend.  And as I wandered, the incredible dimensions of faithfulness to God surrounded me.   

What does faithfulness look like?

Left out sometimes to be available for something else.
Being taken advantage of.
Standing out. Being silent. Covering the gaps.
Navigating it differently.
Bring grace to it. No matter what.
Praying anyway, and not giving up.
Assured this life is not all there is.
Willing to be used, willing to look ridiculous.
Another chapter, a different season, not the end at all.
Unencumbered.
"After you."
Let go of what doesn’t matter to grab hold of what does— and know the radical difference between them.
In the steep parts, knowing the other side.
Not a dead end, not a detour, but going through.
God never promised life is easy, but “I am with you.”
Watches for ambushes, steps carefully through mine fields, doesn’t quit in the miry bogs of which there are many.
A state of being, a foundation of doing.
Not esteemed, but doesn’t need it.
Rooted and holding fast.
Carrying on.
Not seeing results,
    but trusting His.
Doing the same thing over and over. Just because.
The glue of our faith.
Doing the right and kind thing anyway.
Willing. Ready to follow God in this. Shoes already tied.
The upper room always ready.
Not having to be the best, or perfect, or winning the race, but helping another cross the line before you.
Keeping on.
Be strong, courageous and kind even when everything in you says the opposite.
Knowing little things matter more.
Walking toward any available light in the darkness and in impossible situations.
Stickiness.
For His glory. For their good.

But this I call to mind,
    and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the LORD
                 never ceases,
His mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
        great is Your faithfulness.

                    Lamentations 3. 21-23

But during the night

an angel of the Lord

opened the prison doors

and brought them out...

                Acts 5. 19

(God specializes

in impossible situations.

Sometimes God 

literally opens locked doors

            for His purposes,

            for the gospel,

sometimes He keeps us

    right where we are,

    for the same reason.

His reality does not hinge

      always on what is next,

but the fullness 

                  of what is.)

O LORD,

Help me to remain 

  faithful to You

whatever,

wherever,

whenever,

however,

        and why,

to respond to You

   and follow You in it.

Even in the unexpected 

and the most unlikely,

   may Your purposes prevail.

The Hiddenness of Things

I can run the same loop in the woods a thousand times, the rote memorization of steps, like reciting a poem in seventh grade, the rhythms, the rhymes, but still be shaken awake by a newly scribbled stanza, or a word I need to look up, or a truth hobbling oddly across my path like an otter playing hooky out of the muddy river, finding his way home, or trying to escape. 

 

One morning, scanning the open field around me as I jogged past, a silent deer observed me, only his head visible above the tall grasses, like God watching, even when I don’t know it.  And the next day, feathers incredibly blending into the rotting base of an old tree, a barred owl not ten feet away, standing guard over his kingdom, my slowness enlarging my eyes to what is actually around me.  I hear the presence of invisible creatures rustling the leaves, no longer noises of fear but stirring my curiosity.

I know my four-year-old granddaughter Lu will not be asking, “Did you see anything on your run today?” but “What did you see?”  She expects wonders and what is precious embedded in every sunrise, around every corner, on the floor of the car, she who is reluctant to release the day for fear of missing something or letting go the lingering sweetness of what is left or what can be yet squeezed out and discovered, maybe what she was looking for hiding under the bed, or finding the missing pieces covered by the rug, or discovering one lone cookie in the bottom of a seemingly empty bag. 

What was that?  Did you hear that noise? She grabs at the thinnest ray of hope, even the most obscure, to stay awake a few moments longer, to stretch out the day.  Always more, always more. In an effort to slow down that sprint, we lay down side by side, watching the smoke detector light on the ceiling flash at intervals, and I hope that she falls asleep between those visible beeps of red, but she never does, just squirms some more, asking, asking, first of water and then of me when I was a little girl, stories I tell about the olden days, which to her would be last week, things that really happened to just another little girl, which was me before I got old like this, under another layer of paint every ten years or so, faded from my 40 days and nights on the ark.  We are two little girls. The number of my years do not matter to her, but the stories.

I am running differently now.  What will I see this day?  What will keep me awake tonight, reluctant to let go?  Live in Lu’s kind of wonder, the fullness of what is.

This is the LORD’s doing;

it is marvelous in our eyes.

This is the day

     that the LORD has made;

let us rejoice

     and be glad in it.

            Psalm 118. 23-24

Calling Card

Even as I am writing this morning, our front door is being repaired.  It had been crying visibly for some time to be scraped, sanded, re-stained and covered in a new coat of varnish.  Blistering hot, deep Southern sun had daily bombarded its finish, until it hung visibly distraught and vulnerable to further damage.

Sergio is the skilled individual who is doing the work.  It is obvious in how he does his job and how he approaches it that he views his work and himself, not as just a workman, but as an artisan.  This is not a mundane job to him, but a work of art.  He sees restoration in what he does. He does it with excellence.  And tomorrow, he will move onto another scheduled appointment.

But a painter of doors is not all who he is or to what he is called.

The world's idea of calling is that the one and only thing you are good at will bring you significance, happiness, and purpose to your life. And if you don't find that one thing, your life will not have meaning. You missed out. The world says "you were meant for this, and this alone."

But God says I am not called to a singular profession, nor any at all.  We are not called to something but to Someone. Our identity significance, meaning, and purpose are not manifest in what we do, but to be found in Him. 

From that point, His appointments are limitless, and every good endeavor, however small or big, visible or invisible, bears the mark of the Almighty. Everything fits together without seams. I don't have to understand something for it to carry profound purpose for untold numbers of people in manifold dimensions and for His glory.

The world says what you do
                        is who you are.
But God says,
               you are Mine.

God calls us to Himself.
He appoints us
  not necessarily to what we are good at,
        gifted for,
    or sometimes even like doing.
His purposes and power go way deeper than ourselves.
His capacity is not limited
                        by my capabilities.

Our life's work
              is worshiping the LORD,
no matter what that looks like,
      manifest in daily appointments. 
The most significant thing I can do today
                     is to be faithful to Him.
Not just what I do --no matter what--
 but how I do it with all my best,
                      and why I do it:
                                  to glorify Him.
His glory can't help but get all over everything, even the unexpected, the impossible, the not obvious at all.

I glorified You on earth,
having accomplished the work
that You gave me to do.

                     John 17. 4

In whatever appointment God places before me today,
             may I be faithful and fruitful.
Nothing but nothing, no one but no one,
      is insignificant in His kingdom.
I can bring Him glory in every detail of my day,
                            even in my attitude.

Please help me, O LORD, to see my work
                      as worship to You,
in the big stuff and even in what I can only see as mundane.
I am called to You.
My relationship with You impacts everything I do,
changes what I think,
and profoundly influences everyone around me.
Be glorified, O LORD, even in this day.

Years ago, when someone came to a house or office, they would leave behind a small card with one's name and address to reveal who had been there.  

May my calling card be not what bears my name,

                     but His.

 

On the other hand

Now, almost two months ago, I ran through the forest on a particularly beautiful spring afternoon. The trail was bordered by tiny wildflowers.  Sleepy trees groaned as they worked out the stiffness of their limbs, awakening from a long winter's nap.  It was glorious.

The route was easy to follow, having been pounded down by thousands of feet passing before me through the years, the path weaving its way over the hills and through the woods. Even the roots of trees artistically formed organic staircases up the slopes, not to block my way or hinder my steps, but to give me a foothold, a grip, and traction for my ascent.

But quite suddenly, on a rather flat non-descript part of the path, I tripped.  No rocks, no roots, nothing in my way, but I was lost in thought and not paying attention.  I fell hard like a bag of mulch, skidding full body in the dirt to a stop.  If I were a cartoon character, I would have had stars rotating above my head and X's on my eyes. I crawled up to my feet almost immediately, a little shaken and somewhat chagrined, but all movable parts still intact, my favorite leggings untorn, and both my knees scraped like a third grader on the school playground.  I brushed off the dust and twigs, and enjoyed the short remainder of the trail at a much slower pace.

But the next morning, swelling indicated something was not right.  A visit to the doctor revealed a broken bone in my right hand.  I was given a brace to constrain my range of motion to help with the healing, but limiting my mobility, more than I would have imagined.  Some ordinary things I could manage with this claw-like contraption strapped with Velcro to my hand.  But even in simple tasks, I was embarrassingly dependent on the help of others.

As a right handed writer, having my right hand incapacitated put a strait jacket on my writing.  With the brace wrapped around most of my hand, I was able to hold a pen precariously between my thumb and my index finger, but my handwriting was excruciatingly slow and almost indecipherable. 

I was never more aware of how much I do with my right hand, and how little I use my left.  Brushing my teeth with my other hand, trying to flip an egg with a spatula, or even pulling up my socks with my left hand only, should have qualified me for an Olympic sport.  Ordinary actions were not so ordinary anymore. 

Throughout those six weeks with the brace, I stopped throughout each day and considered "What is a different way to do this?"  Or out of sheer necessity, "How can I approach this differently?"

Instead of limiting me, I found my disability enlarging my thoughts.  I was not unlearning how to do things, but instead learning another way through. 

Automatically reaching out with my right hand was my default, as if that was the only way to do something, not even thinking about my actions or reactions.  Which is mostly the way I hurt myself in the first place --not thinking about what I was doing, where I was going, definitely a pothole of my own transgressions.

On what other things am I on automatic pilot?  How can I do this differently?  How can I think with another perspective on this?  Is my default limiting me? Is my attitude getting in the way of who, what, where, when, why and how I treat this work, this relationship, this problem to be solved or resolved?

All the while my hand was healing, even while the brace restricted my movement, new neural pathways were coming into existence in this old brain of mine, revealing new passages, open doors, incredible connections between unrelated things, not so much newly created as discovered.  Those new trailheads were always there, but I just didn't realize I could take another trail through that difficulty, taking me on a different journey toward another outcome.  There is something different here.  "Behold, I make all things new." (Revelation 21. 5)

I am no longer caught up in this one thing I do, but on the other hand.....What if I thought about this differently, approached this roadblock, traversed this boulder-strewn path, followed God's scarlet thread through this impenetrable thicket?  What if I tried....?  "But I have always done it this way," my thin excuses fade even more.  My "I can't" is revealed to be more like "I won't even try."

But this time, I was forced into a shattering of my deeply dug ruts.  Not "What are you going to do now?" but "How are you going to do it?"

A counselor friend once told me, "People do what works for them...until it doesn't work any more."

Even the smallest detail done differently shifts ever so slightly the tectonic plates of my heart.  And through those microscopic cracks in my stubborn pride, I begin to hear His quiet whisper, "Follow Me."

O LORD, what is Your way in this?

For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways My ways,
                           says the LORD.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are My ways higher than your ways
and My thoughts than your thoughts.

                                  Isaiah 55. 8-9