A New Year's Choice

What if God walked into my house on New Year’s Eve and gave me two options for 2010?

I heard something like this in a Francis Chan sermon, and it really made me think. Option A is that I have a fun, easy year in which everything goes my way, everything I attempt succeeds, every prayer I pray is answered just the way I want. Option B is a year full of struggle in which nothing goes my way, but at the end of it, I have much deeper knowledge of God and fellowship with Him. Which would I take?

I love easy. Easy sounds so nice (and rare). And who doesn’t love to get their way? This is not a simple decision for me. But still, I would choose B. Do I really just want my life to be easy? Or do I want it to have great purpose, the kind of purpose I can only find by following God all out?

One of my mom friends talks about confidence-building years and character-building years at school. Sometimes kids get the teacher they want, the friends they want, the desk they want, and everything comes easy. That’s a confidence year. Other years are a struggle—relationships are hard, assignments are hard—but it’s those years that build their character.

You know what, God? For 2010, I’m gonna muster up all my courage and choose character. Because here’s the deal. I’m also going to get confidence out of it—only my confidence won’t be misplaced. It will be rooted in someone much greater than myself, the one I trust most with my life.

How Christmas Ought to Be

Dizzy yet?

Everyone I know, including myself, is running on empty right now, yet still dashing a hundred miles an hour in a hundred directions. That’s December for you. So why is it that we’re doing as much as we can as well as we can, yet things still don’t seem quite the way they ought to be?

My best friend Kendra and I were pondering this the other day. (At least we’re doing the pondering thing right.) Kendra is, in my estimation, a domestic goddess, who believes gifts, treats, and meals should all be homemade. Hers aren’t this year—at least not all of them—and that makes her feel like Christmas isn’t what it ought to be. I make nothing from scratch (except children) and avoid cooking and crafts as much as possible, yet I have my own Christmas expectations for myself. If I don’t send out a fun-to-read Christmas letter—in a hand-addressed envelope—in a timely manner, Christmas to me isn’t what it ought to be.

You can tell a lot about what a woman believes about herself if you follow her around during the month of December. The women who have to give the best gifts are shopping all the time. The decorators are decorating. The bakers are baking. The Christmas program directors are directing. The best-moms-ever are sitting in the front row at every party and pageant. And Kendra and I are trying our best to do what we do, but feeling disappointed that we’re not living up to our expectations of ourselves.

And the worshipers? Hmmm. I don’t know many of them. I’d like to know more. They’re the ones whose identities are not rooted in what they do or what other people think of them; they’re rooted in the truth of who God created them to be. I think they may be the “faithful” ones of “O, Come, All Ye Faithful” fame, joyful and triumphant, not tired and disappointed. And what are they doing this December? Adoring Jesus. The way they “ought” to be.

Now why didn’t I think of that?

Aiming at Amazement

I may use the word “amazing” all the time, but rarely do I experience true amazement. Life is routine. I take most things for granted. I spend very little time genuinely amazed.

That’s no way to live.

I’ve been trying to live differently, to cultivate some sense of amazement. And as if to confirm this lofty goal, our pastor started a series this month on amazement. Go figure. How amazing is that? We’ve been traversing through the Christmas story recorded in Luke 2, and this week we landed on one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible. “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”

Amazement starts with treasuring and pondering. Aren’t those the greatest words? They’re so rich with meaning. They’re also not something you can do on the fly, while zipping through the mall or racing across town in your minivan. Treasuring means appreciating every moment, sitting in it and savoring it—even when it’s painful or inconvenient. I am faced with choices all day long to either treasure the words my little children say or cut them off because they’re talking too much and I’ve got things to do. It’s a hard choice in the moment, but I feel so much better when I treasure.

Pondering is taking all those treasured moments and doing something with them. Understanding them. Connecting them. Letting them change you. I can race from one thing to the next with no time for reflection, or I can take a moment to sit and ponder what it all means. That may seem like a waste of time sometimes, but when I ponder, when I allow myself to process and feel and care, I feel like I’m living life to the fullest. We moved our “baby” to a big-girl bed this weekend, and as much as I wanted to think of it as an ordinary, meaningless task, I couldn’t. I had to ponder the significance of this event in my life—the end of a 10 ½-year baby era. That crib holds a lot of symbolism for me, and I let myself ponder it for a while, even though it made me cry. I have a hunch that crying and amazement are pretty good friends.

Mary must have been so overwhelmed by it all—people questioning her story, the long journey to Bethlehem, dreadful contractions, the birth of a baby in a strange, smelly place. Surely this wasn’t how she had pictured motherhood. Then shepherds and kings started showing up and making all sorts of grand pronouncements about her baby. I’d be doing well just to endure it. But Mary did more than endure; she treasured and pondered. I bet she was pretty amazed by it all.

Help me, Lord, to know this kind of amazement.

Soul Worthy

“He appeared and the soul felt its worth.”

O Holy Night has been my favorite Christmas song for about a decade. Before that, it was just that song with the huge range that was very hard to sing. Then one night as I was driving, it came on the radio and I really heard the words for the first time. Long lay the world in sin and error pining, till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.

And a weary world rejoiced.

Could any words written in 1847 be more relevant in 2009? We’re still a world pining away in disobedience to God, dealing with the consequences of our errors. And have we ever been more weary? But God broke through, brought us Truth and Hope in the person of Jesus, and now our souls can feel their worth. In other words, this is why we were created. I picture a Christmas bulb—the big 1970’s kind that still hangs from my in-law’s porch—fine enough without anything glowing inside of it, but not doing what it was created to do. It’s not until you plug it in and it actually shines that the bulb is doing what its creator intended.

One holy night, Jesus came, and light filled our empty bulbs. Our empty souls were brought to life, doing what they were made to do.

We’ve heard the song a thousand times. Almost as many times as we’ve heard the Christmas story itself. If I try really hard, I can almost imagine what it would be like to hear it for the first time. Not just to hear it—but to actually get it. To understand that it happened just for me, so that my soul, my little soul in 2009, could feel its worth.

Is your soul feeling its worth today?

What David Can Teach Us About Obama

Here’s an alternative to the “Pray for Obama, Psalm 109:8” slogan that’s been going around. These words also come from David, a man running for his life from a jealous king who wants to kill him. It’s 1 Samuel 26:9. Not as catchy on a t-shirt, maybe, but we can learn a lot from David’s attitude toward people in authority.

David had two easy opportunities to destroy Saul. (The other comes a few chapters earlier, in 1 Samuel 24—as good a read as any Hollywood screenplay.) His friends were telling him to just do it already. Here was a man who was making his life miserable, making poor decisions as a king, and it seemed like God was just handing him over to David to bring down. But this is how David responded to his friends:

“Don’t destroy him! Who can lay a land on the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?”

Saul may not have been a model for upright governing, but he was still the king. The Lord had put him into that position, and David said that it was only God who would remove him. Either the Lord would strike him Himself or his time would come in battle, but the king’s demise would not come at the hand of David. He even went so far as to call out to Saul’s bodyguard, Abner (Sounds like an imposing figure, doesn’t he?), and tell him what a loser he was for not doing a better job protecting the king.

I don’t know if President Obama is “the Lord’s anointed.” What I do know is that God’s sovereignty is alive and well, even in the United States. And that he “sets up kings and deposes them” (Daniel 2:21). Nothing slips by Him. He didn’t fall down on His watch the day Obama was elected, and He’s not now wringing His hands, hoping His people on earth will help undo His mistake.

There’s really not any reason to pray Psalm 109:8 for our president. His days will be few. In God’s economy, even eight years is the blink of an eye. And another will take his place of leadership. That’s guaranteed by our constitution. Not only does it seem like an unnecessary prayer, its context makes it downright nasty. The following verses go on to say, “May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes. May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.”

I don’t know if anyone is actually wearing the Psalm 109:8 t-shirt. Maybe someone was just trying to be clever and make a buck, and the media picked up on it to stir up controversy. Still, it’s no secret that some of Obama’s most outspoken critics have been evangelical Christians. While I value the privilege of living under free speech, I think we would be wise to review 1 Samuel 26 and stop destroying our president with our words. We don’t have to love what he’s doing, but if we believe God’s got it under control, we don’t have to spend our days angry and mad, trying to bring him down, either.

“Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a job, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you” (Hebrews 13:17).

She Gets It

I was much better at following God’s command to serve the poor when I understood that to mean on my own schedule and at my own convenience. Now that I’m trying to cultivate a lifestyle of serving the poor at every opportunity, I don’t do it well. I grumble a lot. I’m not sure I’ll ever do it well or stop complaining about the inconvenience of it all. But I’m hoping that serving will come as naturally for my kids as complaining comes to me. I pray it will be a given for them, not something they struggle against.

Last week we put together a Thanksgiving food basket for a needy family in town, and Wednesday was shopping day. We got to Walmart at 8:15 and left at 10. (I'm sorry to anyone who is offended that we shop at Walmart. Talk to me when I don't have cereal to buy for four children.) We had to find items that I’ve never heard of, in addition to all the regular household stuff we needed. The aisles were full of people—and how fun for me that many of them were people I knew, especially since I was wearing my fat-girl sweatpants and my five-year-old was doing the pee-pee dance. (You know the one.)

Our cart was flowing over when we at last made it to the check-out lane, where ten other lovely people stood ahead of us with their overflowing carts. How handy that at least we were only a few yards from the bathroom. Except that it was closed for cleaning. The pee-pee dance intensified until at last we pushed our way past the cleaning lady out of desperation. A half hour later, we were on our way out of the store and on the road again. It’s that bittersweet moment in which you celebrate the conclusion of another Walmart trip, but realize all the work that lies ahead as you attempt to find a home for all these new items in your over-crowded pantry. Ah, life in America.

I asked Brooka if she would be extra helpful and carry in some of the bajillion bags for me, then piled her up to her eyebrows. As we waddled in the house, she peaked out from under her load and said with cheery determination, “It’s like I’m carrying this for Jesus.”

At that point, I did everything you would imagine. I dropped to my knees. I hugged her hard. I thanked God profusely. “You get it!” I cried. “You get it, Brooka! Oh, I can’t believe you get it. Thank you, God!” I prayed some of that would rub off on me. Then I followed her gaze across the room, wondering why she was giggling. Our ancient relic of a dog—all shriveled 80 pounds of him—was laying on the “good” couch with the newspaper open, looking all caught up on the day’s events.

And somehow, putting all those groceries away wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

When Moving On Means Staying Put

Eleven months ago, we planted a for-sale sign in our yard and buckled in for a wild adventure. We weren’t sure where we’d land, but we were full of faith and following God with reckless (some would say) abandon.

And how’d that work out for us? After scrubbing my kitchen floor more times than I thought humanly possible, we’re right where we started—except with new carpet and a new screen door.

It looks like we’re in the same place, but are we really? Fortunately, no. God made me, and He knows I’ve got to be able to find some purpose in hard things or I’ll just fall over and die. So as I meet with Him, He’s giving me some hint of what these 11 months may have been about:

Faithfulness. I’m very faithful to the things I want to do. But to things that take discipline, sacrifice, and selflessness? Not so much. I think God may have been testing my faithfulness through the little things. Some days I’d be home alone with the kids and have just an hour’s notice to stash the piles, make the beds, load the dishwasher (after unloading it), and everything else involved in showing a respectable home. I’d spend the first five minutes throwing the mother of all fits, screaming (in my head) at God, “I am SO DONE. I can’t keep doing this.” And every time I would hear the same answer: “Yes you can.” And every time it would get done, and I’d feel like a foolish toddler who had just thrown a pointless, selfish fit in front of my Father. It’s easy for me to be faithful to my husband, my children, my TV shows. But God wants us to be faithful in the little things—with the right attitude—before He trusts us with bigger things.

Risk-taking. When we planted that sign in the yard, we had no place to go. We had only a peaceful knowledge that when the time came, God would make a place for us. This is the complete opposite of how I prefer to live my life. I like to know what my kids are wearing to school three days from now, yet I wasn’t even sure where they would be sleeping in the next month. God didn’t call us on it, but I truly think I would have been OK if He had. There’s something about flying without a safety net that makes life richer, that makes relationship with God more urgent.

Surrender. In the past three months, my prayers have gone from bossy requests for God to sell our house (“You put us up to this, Lord, so you better do your part!”) to complete surrender to His will. I thought surrender meant selling our house and giving up our cushy suburban life. But now I believe that surrender only came when I threw up my hands, stopped telling God all my grand plans to serve Him, and finally said, “Whatever.” I think it’s in that whatever place that God can truly work in us. That’s the place I want to stay.

The realtor’s coming to take down the sign this week; we're calling it quits for now (because a sane Christmas is a merry Christmas). Do we feel defeated? Confused? Frustrated? Yeah, a little of all those things. But we also feel pretty certain that we’re right where God wants us, and it’s not a bad place to wait, especially with the new carpet.

The Zone

Illumination came crashing down on me in the middle of a burger joint. It came with such force that Cherry Coke squirted out my nose.

Kevin was out of town, and I took the kids out to dinner. Putting all thoughts of coupons and food sharing aside, I let them go wild with burgers and shakes for everyone. We were there for about an hour, having a jolly time, when I decided it was time to go. Then we stayed for 10 more minutes, and I was REALLY ready to go. Kids were getting squirly, uneaten food was flying through the air, and mommy was done. That’s when I entered The Zone. It looks something like this: I have an agenda. I’m ready to get on with it already. Quickly and efficiently. The kids have an agenda (to have fun) pulling with equal force in the opposite direction of my agenda. I become hyper-focused and irritable and fall more deeply into The Zone. It’s now to the point at which someone could be holding their bleeding, severed toe between their fingers and I wouldn’t even see it. I am blinded and consumed by my own agenda.

My agenda was to leave the restaurant. Brooka’s agenda was to find a mint in my purse. So while I’m picking up trash and hosing down the chocolate-faced two-year-old, out come my wallet, my keys, my phone, my lipstick, and various and sundry other personal items from my purse. The dialogue goes something like this:

Brooka: Do you have any mints in here?
Me: I-don’t-know-wipe-your-face.
Brooka: But I want a mint. Don’t you have any?
Me (now working on the ketchup layer that was hiding under the chocolate layer on the two-year-old’s face): I-don’t-know-wipe-your-face.
Brooka: Why can’t I find any mints?
Me: I-DON’T-KNOW-WIPE-YOUR-FACE!!!

Now here’s the scary thing. I don’t actually recall saying anything about the mint or her face. I remember the face chiseling and passing out wipes all around, but I had no idea what words—or, more important, what tone—was coming out of my mouth. Braden, my 10-year-old, was kind enough to help me. He said something like this:

Braden: “What’s your phone number?” “I-don’t-know-wipe-your-face!”
“What’s the capital of Argentina?” “I-don’t-know-wipe-your-face!”
“What’s the square root of 91?” “I-don’t-know-wipe-your-face!”

I laughed hard enough to induce my own style of Coke snorting. I laughed so hard that I cried, so hard that my kids thought I had lost my mind because to them, it wasn’t all that funny. Truthfully, while it was funny, it was sad more than anything else. It was a sad revelation that jerked me out of The Zone and brought me face to face with the ugly truth of it: I want what I want. I want people to do what I want them to do. I want it done now.

But that’s not the way the world works. God is too kind to give us our way. He’d rather make us better than satisfied. Ouch.

Ironic end to the story: As we made our way to the van (picture me carrying five drinks and a kicking toddler with an agenda of her own), a young mom came up to me and said, “I was watching you inside. You’re really good with them.” Ugh.

People are watching. My kids are watching. God is watching. It’s time to get out of The Zone.

One in a Billion

Have you ever seen a billion of anything? All at once?

Maybe I have, but blades of grass and grains of sand all just run together; I’ve never been aware that I was seeing a billion of anything before. And then I went to Fort Myers Beach in southwest Florida. I’m a beach girl and I’ve been to quite a few of them, but I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s made up almost entirely of seashells. The great majority are just fragments, but if you scoop up a handful of “beach,” you’re going to end up with dozens of whole shells, too. And the beach goes on and on for miles. Billions of shells, all there for the crunching or collecting, whatever your preference.

We saw lots of people walking with bags and buckets, gazing intently at the ground for just the right find. They all looked sort of the same to me, but apparently not to the hard-core shellers. I’d see a collector picking up a fragment of a shell, examining it and smiling as she held it in her hand like it was the only one in the world. “What’s so special about that one?” I thought.

Then I started thinking about all the people in the world. What if each of these shells represented one person on earth today? This is what we’d all look like if we could be shrunken down, stacked up, one on top of the other, and compressed into one tiny area. The feeling of insignificance was a little disheartening. But then I pictured God rooting through the millions and billions and pulling out just one. Me. God chose me. He somehow distinguished me from all the rest and selected me for His own.

I met a guy a year ago who said something I’ll never forget. He said that sometimes he tries to imagine that there are only a couple hundred people on the whole earth. He imagines what it would be like to bump into another human being. What if that janitor in the hallway was the first person you’d seen in many months? How would you respond? You’d probably grab him, hug him, and ask him all sorts of questions. That janitor, that three-year-old child in the park, that toothless beggar on the street would be precious to us.

I love it. I don’t know how you could go through life treating everyone that way, but I love that he even came up with the idea of it. And actually, it was God’s idea first. To Him, I’m not one of billions. I’m special. And I’m all His.

Ten Things I've Learned (Plus Two)

Limited by time this week (and preparing to leave four children and their busy lives at home with grandma for five days while Kevin and I are in Florida), I’m posting a list I wrote a few years ago. Prompted by my wise friend Becky to share ten things that I’ve learned—from the simple to the life-altering—I pounded out this list in about 10 minutes. With a few more years of living behind me, I’ve made a few additions. Here are some of the things I've learned:

1. I moved 18 times before my 18th birthday, and I learned that it’s good to be flexible, even when it hurts, and not to get too attached to your stuff.

2. When I was a senior in high school, I found out that my parents “had” to get married, and I learned that I’m bad at math and that the consequences of your actions follow you the rest of your life.

3. I am still close to at least one friend from every place I’ve ever lived, and I learned that friendships mean the world to me.

4. I witnessed the 1992 L.A. riots firsthand, and I learned that I prefer to watch breaking news from my couch and that perhaps I wasn’t cut out to be a journalist.

5. I married the best looking man I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I learned that not all blond jocks are what they appear to be.

6. I wrote 100 pages of a novel, and I learned that published novelists deserve the money they make.

7. Although I’ve never met another person with my name, I do share my name with a town in New South Wales, Australia. I haven’t really learned anything from this, but it’s still sorta cool.

8. I inherited close to a half-million dollars from a sad drunk, and I learned that God can choose to bless and provide for us any way He wants.

9. For three hours, I tried unsuccessfully to push my first baby out, and I learned the definition of unconditional love, even when someone is hurting you badly. I also learned that planned C-sections are good. Very good.

10. I’ve held the hands of two people as they died, and I learned that although I fiercely love life, I’m not too afraid of death.

11. I’ve discovered how important the poor, the oppressed, the widows and the orphans are to God, and I’ve learned that I cannot live the same.

12. I delivered a stillborn baby, and I learned that the promise of heaven is somehow even sweeter when you know you have a child waiting for you there.

Celebrating Diversity

One of the things I miss most about the working world is the exposure to people in different stages of life. Stay-at-home mom life is fairly homogeneous, at least for me. As I look at the other people in the carpool line, almost all of them are female, almost all within five years of my age, and they usually have lives pretty similar to my own.

There are times when I need the fellowship of a woman sitting next to me in the cry room at church, to talk about whether to get flu shots and how to make it through another sleepless night with sick kids. There are times when I leave a restaurant with a bunch of other moms feeling understood and less alone. And few things bring me more comfort than the sorority of women racing toward 40 right alongside me.

But then there are times when I’m just really kinda sick of that world and crave something different. And that’s when I really miss office life. I miss the daily closeness of my 50-year-old hero on the other side of the cubicle wall who is raising incredible teenagers and will tell me honestly if my copy sucks. And the 25-year-old who’s planning her wedding. And the deep conversations with my guy friends who are tiptoeing around midlife crisis and helping me understand the pressures my own husband feels.

It’s pretty hard to find this kind of diversity anymore, which is one of the reasons why I work so hard to maintain the relationships I have. Earlier this week I had lunch with one of my favorite people—a dapper 65 year old who seems 45 to me. Actually, two of my dearest friends are men in their 60s. One gave me my first job and taught me everything I know about editing and publishing books. He’s also tutored me in philosophy and Kirkagaard and rheumatoid arthritis and how to suffer greatly without losing faith. The other friend and I have collaborated on three of his books. He has shared nuggets of wisdom with me that I will never forget, while making me laugh so hard my side aches.

Thanks to my work, I also have a 70-year-old Iranian buddy and a nearly-70 Lebanese friend who’s an expert in Islamic fundamentalism. Not people I’m going to go shopping or clubbing with, but friends whose perspective and experience make my life richer. (OK, I haven’t been clubbing since the early 90s, but the thought of clubbing with Nabeel was too funny to leave out.)

So, yeah, while nearly all of the work clothes have been given away and the books and articles are all packed away in boxes somewhere, the diverse relationships were the biggest treasure I smuggled out of the work world. And thankfully, those endure.

I Don't Drink Tea But I Sure Liked This

The bandwagon, as usual, was well down the street when I lunged forward and jumped on. The book came out three years ago, and I’ve heard constant chatter about it ever since. Finally, I read it for myself: Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time. It was as good as the hype.

Up to this point, everything I’ve known about Afghanistan’s political history came from The Kite Runner. In 1989, I was the salutatorian of my class and couldn’t have found Afghanistan on a map, let alone told you that it had been occupied for the past decade by the Soviets. More recently, I’ve known it only as the suspected home of Al Qaeda and the place where many American soldiers lose their lives.

Greg Mortensen gave me a quick education. Three Cups of Tea is his story about stumbling, quite accidentally, on the poorest of the poor in the farthest reaches of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The picture he paints is hard to imagine. These are people who could only make it to the nearest city by traversing a canyon with a zipline and a basket. And their poverty, along with a cultural hesitancy toward education—especially of girls—left these remote villages with illiterate leaders and children with little hope for a better life.

In the past 15 years, Mortensen and the Central Asia Institute that he founded have raised up 128 schools across two nations known for breeding and training terrorists. His work also includes building women’s centers and medical facilities as well as feeding and caring for refuges and other victims of war. I don’t know where Mortensen’s spiritual allegiances lie, but I know this: One of my heroes, Kit Danley, says that the journey into the center of God’s heart lands you among the poor and the afflicted. In this book, I met a man who eats, sleeps, and breathes there.

I recently caught a snippet of director Michael Moore publicizing his new movie. Speaking about world politics, he said that a war in Afghanistan could not be won. I’m sure that many—including Michael Moore himself—would argue that this rogue movie maker is affecting the world by changing minds. Greg Mortensen, by redirecting the paths of those most vulnerable to the lure of power and terror, is affecting the world by changing lives. Try telling him that a war can't be won there. 

Goosebump Moments

When I started this blog, my intention was to write about what I’m walking through with God—what I’m wondering and what He’s showing me. What I did not want to do was create another Mommy Blog. I’m a mommy through and through, but I hear enough about other people’s kids, and I’m sure most people feel the same way. If it’s mom stories you want, they’re readily available, and they’re told by women who can write circles around me.

But sometimes what I’m wondering and what God is showing me comes from my kids. And then I have to write about it.

I don’t do surface conversation well. I thrive at the gut level, where people’s deepest thoughts are stirred and released. It’s hard to find this level very often with a young kid. It’s not that they’re trying to be superficial; to them, the road kill rotting in the front yard is the most profound discovery in the universe. It’s just not something I care to talk about for more than 20 seconds.

But the other night, I plunged head first into gut-level conversation with two of my girls. We were driving home in the pitch dark, just the three of us, and we went from talking about the really tall people we know to Goliath to “Was there really a Goliath?” to “How do we know the Bible is true?” in about half a mile. One daughter confessed that she questioned God’s very existence. While surprised to hear this, I was even more surprised (happily) when He gave me the words to respond: “God is big enough to handle your questions. They don’t make Him love you any less.”

And then from the mouth of a light-hearted five-year-old, I heard, “Mommy, I have some big questions about my life, too.” Intrigued and amused, I asked what they were. “Well, sometimes I wonder if I’m just a person in a book. Or on a show. Or if maybe I’m just a toy someone’s playing with.”

Check the rearview mirror and pull the car over!! And God, please give me the words. Don’t let me mess this up! One of my favorite word pictures of God is that He’s the author of my story. He writes the plot, the ups and the downs, but I fill in the details. And no matter what, I can trust that the author is good and that He loves me. Somehow, all those words managed to tumble out of my mouth in a way she seemed to understand.

Finally, we made it home. One daughter ran off to the bathroom, while the other stayed close by me. “Mom?” she asked, “If Goliath’s purpose was to be used to demonstrate God’s glory, what’s your purpose?” At this point, I am floating. I live for this stuff, and my daughter keeps coming back for more! Does it get any better than this? I got to explain to her that my purpose is the same as Goliath’s, it just looks a little different. We talked for several more minutes, and she made a few more astute, stunningly mature observations. Goose bumps had long overtaken my body. I had that crazy sensation that we stumble upon every once in a great while, the kind that says, “This is why you are alive.”

And then little Brooka beckoned me into the bathroom at the top of her lungs. “Mom! You gotta come here!” Turning toward her, I’m thinking, “What, God? What’s next? How are you going to top this? Is she going to ask me the meaning of life? Bring it on! I am so ready!”

Barely able to contain herself, she squealed, “My poodoo just came out of my bottom and slid right down the hole into the potty, and THEN it slithered right back out just like a snake!”

And the magic was gone. Slithering off like a snake.

But for about half an hour on a random Friday night, the magic was there, and it was beautiful. Parenting is 99 percent poodoo and roadkill and jungle animals and begging for fruit snacks. But every once in awhile, the magic is there, and then you know why you are alive.

Reformation, Part II

When you’re praying for reformation, to hear God’s voice fresh, to meet Him all over again, Isaiah is a good place to start. Long suspecting this was my favorite Old Testament book, I’ve been camped out there for several weeks.

If you want to hear what God Himself thinks, what His voice sounds like, go to Isaiah. The Israelites’ captivity in Babylon serves as the context, and God has some pretty strong feelings about it. Even though His words to Isaiah were specific to that time and that place, God’s character doesn’t change. I can learn a lot about who He is today, in my life, as I read about who He was then.

Here are a few of my favorites from Isaiah:

Isaiah 14:24 “The Lord Almighty has sworn, ‘Surely as I have planned, so it will be, and as I have purposed, so it will stand.” The world is not spinning out of control. God’s got a plan, it is good, and it cannot be changed, no matter how many Osama bin Ladens there are in the world. This is how I can sleep at night.

Isaiah 45:6b–7 “ ‘I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things.’ ” This is a pretty bold response to those who don’t believe God is ever responsible for the world’s disasters. He creates them. He uses them. Most important, He is good enough to be trusted with them.

Isaiah 8:12–14 “ ‘Do not call conspiracy everything that these people call conspiracy; do not fear what they fear, and do not dread it. The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread, and he will be a sanctuary.’ ” Swine flu, global warming, global economic crisis, killer bees, terrorists, sexual predators—I think they all fall into this category. God tells me not to fear or dread any of them. My fear—my respect and awe of His power—are reserved for Him alone. 

Isaiah 40:12–14 “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in the balance? Who has understood the mind of the Lord, or instructed him as his counselor? Whom did the Lord consult to enlighten him, and who taught him the right way? Who was it that taught him knowledge or showed him the path of understanding?” Call me crazy, but I like being put in my place now and then. Like God’s response to Job, this passage reminds me that God is God and I am not. He doesn’t need me as His counselor. He doesn’t need me to enlighten Him about how I think the world ought to work. He formed the world just fine without my help, thank you very much. And if He can hold the dust of the earth in a basket, He’s probably got my issues all under control.

And finally, when I’m at the end of my rope—feeling lost, invisible, and completely wiped out—does it get any better than this?

Isaiah 40:27–29 “Why do you say, O Jacob, and complain O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord; my cause is disregarded by my God’? Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.” He understands me. And He goes on to promise that if I hope in Him, He will renew my strength and He will make me soar. Thanks, God. I’m ready to soar.

Reformation, Part I

I’m in need of Reformation.

When you begin to feel like you totally get God, like you know how He thinks and can anticipate His every move, you’re in trouble. And delusional.

 More and more things don’t work out the way I think they will, the way it seems they ought to. I’m seeing that what God does—or doesn’t do—doesn’t always mesh with who I think God is and how I think He works. Resolute in my belief that God doesn’t change, I am left with only one conclusion: My perception of God is off. And that’s a bummer, because I’ve got a lot invested in it. But I think God might be telling me that for this season, instead of running around like a crazy woman trying to do things for Him, I should sit still and get to know Him. All over again.

 Reformation means to improve what is wrong, corrupt, or unsatisfactory. My ideas about God are not corrupt, but I think some of them may be wrong, unsatisfactory, incomplete. They’ve been formed by three decades of church teaching, family, college professors, song writers, book writers, speakers, The Navigators, friends, strangers, all in the small context of American evangelical Christianity.

 I am thankful for all of these influences in my life, but during my Reformation, I want to listen much less to people and much more to God Himself. My recent prayer has been for God to strip away all my preconceived notions, to take me back to square one, to meet Him as if for the first time. A missionary friend of mine illustrates getting to the heart of the Gospel by wrapping an orange in paper until it’s the size of a volleyball. Then he peels off the western Christian wrappings, one by one, until he gets to the orange. Just when you think you’ve finally gotten to it, he rips off the peel itself; only after all the layers of wrappings (and trappings) have been removed can you clearly see the Gospel.

I believe there are layers and layers separating me from who God actually is. The thickest layer, the one that’s hardest to peel off, may very well be my picture of who I want God to be. But I don’t want to serve a God I construct in my head. I want to serve the God Who Is.

 Lord, please give me Reformation. 

Grown-Up Eyes

I’m approaching 40, the age at which many people begin losing their ability to see close up. But God is merciful and compensates for this by giving us a new kind of eyesight. It’s called perspective.

When we’re little, we think that whatever is going on around us must be all there is. We assume that everyone’s mother must start drinking before 8 a.m. if that’s what ours did, or that all parents must stomp around for days without speaking because that’s what is normal in our house. Sometimes it’s the opposite; we have it so good that we don’t realize there are kids who regularly go to bed hungry or who don’t have a mom who tucks them in every night. We hold onto our own “normal” for a remarkably long time, until adolescence and at last adulthood push us out into stark reality.

I had a similar experience recently. I returned to the place I used to work for a celebration of two veteran staff who are now in their mid 90s. The event was well done and the staff we honored are two of the most inspiring people I’ve ever known. It was a privilege just to be among the standing-room-only crowd. But as I sat in the back row of the balcony of a room that held such huge memories for me, I got a shift in perspective. This room, in fact, this whole building, which was the site of my first foray into public-speaking, in which I attended numerous meetings that impacted my life, and in which I was even married—well, it’s just a room. Being that it’s in a castle and all, it’s fairly magnificent, but it’s not necessarily any more hallowed ground than my living room.

And the people sitting in the chairs below me? The mostly gray-haired people I have revered as God’s most chosen ambassadors? Lovely, godly people, yes, but no more so than the moms from preschool. Sitting in this room were people who have struggled with divorce, drugs, alcoholism, wayward children, and faith-shattering doubts just like everyone else. They’re not saints. They’re just people. And the mission to which they all are called? The mission that so strongly bound me together with them? It’s a beautiful one, and they do it very well, but it’s not the only way to advance the Gospel and make disciples. I used to think we had the market on discipleship, that no one did it like we did. Now I see that God is much too big to be confined to one particular method or mission.

What used to seem to me as the Best Way I now see as merely one way. How weird is it that it took 16 years and heartbreaking separation to give me this perspective? But that’s maturity’s job, I guess. To knock things off pedestals and put things in right perspective. Growing up is a good thing, even if it means living the rest of our lives with a pair of reading glasses perched on our heads.

Midway

This year marks the midway point between my college graduation and my youngest child’s high school graduation. In other words, halfway between right-out-of-the-nest and empty-nester. I graduated in 1993; Camryn turns 18 in 2025. (I figured this out all by myself. Who says I can’t do math?) 1993 doesn’t sound like it was all that long ago, at least not to me. But when you consider that most of us had never heard of the Internet and Bill Clinton was just beginning his first term, it seems a bit more remote.

I was telling my teenage niece and nephew recently about my one and only hitchhiking adventure. I was in college, driving from northern to southern California, when my car broke down. When they wondered why I didn’t just call someone for help, I had to explain that in 1992, no one but the super rich or the super eccentric had a phone in their car. Yeah, it was a long time ago.

But 2025 sounds even further away. It even sounds science-fictiony to me to write it. And Camryn 18? The child who still sleeps in a crib and regularly reminds us, “I’m a beebee”? Almost impossible to imagine her in a cap and gown.

When I was a little girl growing up in Akron, the nearest town was a half-hour away. It was another one-stoplight town not much different from ours except it was notoriously windy and it had a steakhouse that we occasionally visited. When you’re seven and never ride more than a few blocks at a time in a car, thirty miles is a long, long way. There was a little landmark halfway between the two towns called Midway, nothing more than a dilapidated house and some rusting farm equipment, but to me it represented progress. It took forever to get to Midway, but once we got there, the rest of the trip went twice as fast. We were there before you knew it.

I have a hunch my life might be a little like that. The 16 years since my college graduation were monopolized by one big job and four small children. (And you, too, my Big Handsome Stud!) The demands of the four little children have pretty much consumed every waking moment of the past 10 years. I’ve loved nearly every minute of it (some I’d choose to forget), but it’s not exactly like they’ve flown by.

And now I’m at Midway. Uh-oh.

I can almost hear Pomp and Circumstance now.

Less Rabbit, More Pooh

Which Hundred Acre Woods character are you?

(From sex to Winnie the Pooh? Seriously?)

The kids and I are reading, for the fiftieth time, or something like that, The House on Pooh Corner. It’s my favorite children’s book of all time. It is one of my favorite pieces of literature of all time. The writing is some of the best you’ll ever find. It inspires me in my own writing to be real and quirky and thoughtful and deep without trying very hard to really be deep at all. And the character study there? Nearly enough to earn you a psychology degree.

There’s gloomy, poor-me Eeyore (the name alone is genius); unruly Tigger; wise and revered Owl; nurturing, common-sense Kanga; wide-eyed Roo who hates being too young to miss out on things; timid, insecure Piglet; and Pooh himself, A Bear of No Brain At All who humbly ponders life in the most simplistic and profound of ways. Christopher Robin, creator of this world, walks among them all, reminding me a little of God in the Garden of Eden.

And then there’s Rabbit: “It was going to be one of Rabbit’s busy days. As soon as he woke up he felt important, as if everything depended upon him. It was just the day for Organizing Something, or for Writing a Notice Signed Rabbit, or for Seeing What Everybody Else Thought About It. It was the perfect morning for hurrying round.”

There's more:

“ ‘After all,’ said Rabbit to himself, ‘Christopher Robin depends on Me. He’s fond of Pooh and Piglet and Eeyore, and so am I, but they haven’t any Brain. And he respects Owl, because you can’t help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn’t spell it right; but spelling isn’t everything. And Kanga is too busy looking after Roo, and Roo is too young and Tigger is too bouncy to be any help, so there’s really nobody but Me, when you come to look at it.’ ”

I’m afraid I’m Rabbit. Bother! In fact, sometimes when Milne’s writing about Rabbit, it’s like he plucked The Thoughts Right Out Of My Brain. I wouldn’t come right out and say the things Rabbit says, but deep down, those kinds of thoughts are there. Maybe there’s a little Rabbit in all of us.

So when I read Pooh Corner to my kids, playing up all the voices and reading the very long sentences without taking a breath and emphasizing certain parts to be sure that they catch the subtle yet brilliant humor, I’m also thinking to myself, “God, as much as I love Rabbit, I don’t want to be like him. I wanna be more like Pooh.”

“And while he waited for Piglet not to answer, he jumped up and down to keep warm, and a hum came suddenly into his head, which seemed to him a Good Hum, such as is Hummed Hopefully to Others.”

That’s Pooh—one who hums hopefully to others. That’s who I want to be.

The Final Frontier

Let’s talk about sex, baby!

If that line made you blush, this might not be the post for you. (Or maybe you’re just not a fan of Salt ’n’Pepa?) Tune in next week for a more mundane topic. But this week—and this summer, actually—I’m talking about sex. Married, Christian sex. And ladies, we’ve got issues.

We’re just not talking about them.

Women talk about everything. We share the intricate details of spats with our husbands, our childbirth horror stories, and the consistency of our kid’s poop. But our sex lives? Huh-uh. That’s sacred, taboo territory, especially for good Christian girls who were raised to keep that hush-hush. But what I’m finding, as I’ve gotten brave enough to broach the subject, is that many, many of us—especially us good Christian girls—are suffering in silence. Whether they’re physical, emotional, or psychological, we’ve got problems. And we think we’re alone. Surely no one else has these embarrassing kinds of problems—certainly not the Desperate Housewives or the women we read about in books. And my neighbor across the street—the one with six children? If that isn’t a sign of a perfect sex life, what is?

It’s fiction, that’s what it is. We’re not alone. Time and time again I talk to women whose sex lives are one of the biggest struggles of their married lives. They’ve been married five, ten, twenty years, have beautiful families and healthy marriages, yet this is their secret sadness.

This summer, a friend and I have pulled together a group of these women to begin talking. We have no magic formula, but we know there is hope and strength in bringing your secret pain and disappointments into the light. (No, it’s nothing like that scene in Fried Green Tomatoes if that’s what you’re thinking.) We talk about things that would shock our mothers and sometimes shock us. But we’ve found that when you provide a safe, comfortable environment and share your own struggles, women will talk. They’ll purge the most intimate, hidden details of their lives in a way that’s constructive and honoring to God. We don’t allow gossip, crudeness, or sex-bashing. We remember that what we’re talking about is a gift from God, whether we’re experiencing it that way or not.

Some are further along than others, and with that comes hope. Some bring years of counseling with them, and that brings new insight. And the Bible—which has a lot to say about sex—brings God’s voice into a subject that most Christian women would rather avoid talking about.

It can be intimidating, awkward, and down-right scary initially. One woman joining us for the first time walked up my friend’s long driveway feeling shakier and sicker by the step. She says it was the power of God and sheer obedience that got her to ring the doorbell, and there were times later in the evening when I thought we might have to heave her jaw up off the carpet. But like the rest of us, she walked away feeling more hopeful and less alone. My friend and I dream of Christian women all over the city getting together in groups like this. Please e-mail me if you’d like some ideas about starting your own group.

This is our final frontier, ladies. Let’s get talking.

100

This is my 100th post. Release confetti. Cue guest stars. Roll out the cake. You guys deserve a party.

Thanks for sticking with me the past 100 weeks or so. There are a million other blogs you could be reading—and 999,990 are cooler, funkier, wittier, and flashier than mine. I am so not a blogger’s blogger. I’m not really a blogger at all. I’m just a person who thinks and writes. And I desperately want to believe there’s still a place in this world for quiet reflection and honest, thoughtful writing.

The online world scares the bejeebers out of me. First, it’s made me a 38-year-old dinosaur. I’m just a few wrinkles away from being one of those old ladies who has to call her children just to send a photo attachment. But I’m OK with that. I accept the fact that if I were an eager learner, I could keep up with the rest of the world. And maybe my bumbling hours of inefficiency will one day give me the kick in the pants I need to make online photo albums and upload my own videos onto YouTube. I sorta doubt it though.

My own technological extinction takes a backseat to my biggest fear about the online world. What I most fear are the effects of a world that communicates primarily for the purposes of self-promotion. Or a generation that mindlessly types code into a phone with no regard for well-formulated thoughts or good sentence structure. What will become of a society in which face-to-face communication is awkward, dull, and inconvenient?

I'm not all gloom and doom. Actually, I like the challenge it offers. 

As much as possible, we are choosing a tech-free lifestyle for our children. We have no intention of getting them iPods, cell phones, or Facebook accounts. I know it sounds self-righteous (not to mention impractical), but hear me out. I want their questions to be answered from the library as often as the Internet. I hope their friendships will grow through soul-searching, eyeball-to-eyeball conversations and shared experiences rather than text messages. I hope their teachers will explain Shakespeare to them in person rather than on a classroom blog. I pray they’ll be able to find friends who value the person in the room with them more than a plastic piece of equipment.

Yeah, easy for me to say. My oldest just turned 10. Who knows what technology will throw at us in the next 10 years? Internet access may be required for breathing. But until then, we’ll give it our best shot.

Encouraging Freaks

Ever notice that the word “encourage” has the word “courage” in it? I went my whole life without noticing this, but I’ve heard it about ten times in the past six months. A simple definition of “encourage” is to put courage into another person. Who doesn’t need a little more courage?

Encouragement is one of my spiritual gifts, but not one I practice nearly as often as my gift of prophecy (not the telling-the-future kind of prophecy—helpful as that would be—but the hosing-people-down-with-truth kind). I’m still trying to figure out how these two work in tandem: “Can I just slam you with truth for a minute, and then I promise to encourage you”?

I want to focus more on encouragement. Christians, it seems, don’t have a problem encouraging each other until one of them wants to do something wild for God. Then all of a sudden we start talking about reality, responsibility, being sensible. Here, the prophet in me and the encourager in me have a tense encounter. Yes, people need to be rooted in biblical truth and practicality, but what if encouragement stepped up first?

Hebrews 10:25 says, “Let us encourage one another.” In other words, let’s put courage into one another. Let’s cheer people on. Let’s say, “Go for it! With God’s calling and His Spirit in you, you can do anything. You really can change the world.” Instead, most of us are quick to say, “Um, what about your mortgage payment?” “What about your kids?”

I used to think that people who did radical things for God were freaks. I still do, only now I want to be like them. I want to be a freak, and I want to be an encourager of freaks. In a world that does its best to suck the courage right out of us, I love the idea of putting courage into anyone who’s got a wild idea about serving God.

The Big Reunion Decision

Can anyone convince me that I should go to my 20th high school reunion? It would be no problem for me to convince someone else to go to theirs. I’ve encouraged countless people to attend reunions with simple rationale: It’s lame not to go.

Who wants to be lame? Not me. But I also don’t want to revisit the person I was in high school—and I’m not sure how to avoid that in such a situation. It’s not like I was the pot head or the class hussy. I wasn't much of anything, actually, except self-righteous and self-absorbed.

Somehow, I managed to leave high school with some good relationships. I’ve stayed in contact with my closest friends. One I talk to several times a week. But I’d much rather meet those friends one-on-one at Chili’s without the pressure to lose five pounds, get a cute new haircut, and coach my children in the art of polite conversation.

Here’s a refreshing idea for a reunion: Come as you are! The only requirement is that you have be honest about who you are. (Could anything be more opposite from high school?)

“I had to double up on my Xanax just to be here.”

“Yeah, I married a babe, but you should hear her snore.”

“My house is being foreclosed on as we speak.”

“It cost me $120 to be this blonde.”

“These size 6 jeans are cutting into my stomach flab so badly that I want to cry.”

“I’m bribing my children with candy and a trip to Waterworld to appear this charming.”

“My resume’s impressive, but I’ve never felt lonelier in my life.”

“I’ve been in counseling for 10 years and am still so angry.”

“My marriage is on the brink of divorce.”

Or how about this one: "We feel called to live among the poor." Now there's a party starter.

The older I get, the less I can stomach superficiality. Can a high school reunion be anything but superficial?

Probably I’ll end up going, trying just as hard to impress as everyone else, and having a few pleasant conversations in the midst of dozens I can’t really hear and wouldn't care about even if I could. If all goes well, my husband won’t collapse from boredom and my children won’t whack anyone. And if it goes really well, maybe I’ll be surprised at how transparent and mature we've all become in our old age.

Or maybe I’ll just be lame and stay home.

Waiting Still

Back in October—OCTOBER, nine months ago—I wrote this in a post called “Waiting for a Miracle”:

“Despite what my eyes and the newspaper tell me, I believe God will bring us a buyer [for our house]. I believe it in some indescribable, way-down-deep, all-is-right-with-the-world sort of way. Or, as I read in a book recently, I know it in my knower. The hard work—getting a family of flawed, harried, self-absorbed, fearful people to change the course of their lives and follow Him wherever He leads—has already been done. Compared to flesh and blood, a little brick and mortar are a piece of cake.”

And here we sit. In July. Still scrubbing those kitchen cabinets. Chasing our children around with a vacuum cleaner and scolding them about crumbs. Stressing out about fingerprints on the windows. Spending more time with Mr. Clean than with anyone else in my life. This is SO not the woman I want to be. But it sure looks like this is the life God has for me, at least for right now.

Why is it that He gives us a vision for something, lights a fire in our hearts, and then makes us wait? A friend of mine wrote in a card to me recently that “patience fruit” is one of the hardest to allow God to grow in us. This summer I have seen how truly hard practicing patience is and how very bad I am at it. Make me practice jumping out of a plane or walking on hot coals, just please don’t make me sit and wait!

So here I sit and wait. The vision is still there, although sitting has a way of dulling its clarity some. I’ve tried to be an active sitter; that is, venturing out into new territory even though I don’t live there yet. I’m also trying to pick up some good habits from all of this. If it only takes 21 days for an action to become habit, then I should be keeping a spotless kitchen floor for the rest of my life.

I still believe God will bring a buyer for our house. No matter how many times I read, “The house is too old,” or “The floorplan is awkward,” I still believe this is part of God’s plan and He will sell this house at just the right time. It would have been fun to see that happen in some cool, supernatural way instead of by sweating it out over every showing like everyone else does. But that’s OK. If this is what builds the patience fruit, I’m in.

From Psalm 37 to the King of Pop: Where Else Can You Find This Kind of Variety?

OK, I’ll just come right out and say it. I was a Michael Jackson fan. I am a true product of 1980’s teen culture—I’ve got the senior picture to prove it—and the Thriller album was our soundtrack. It was the first cassette tape I bought with my own money. (I nodded at this quote from Wikipedia: “At some point, Thriller stopped selling like a leisure item—like a magazine, a toy, tickets to a hit movie—and started selling like a household staple.”)

I got my Thriller tape the summer between sixth and seventh grades. Those were pinnacle years of my youth, spent in a little town in southwestern Oklahoma. We were about as far off the cultural radar screen as a town could be, but Thriller still managed to find us. I will never forget watching the video debut on MTV, a marvel of modern technology that had made its way to the sticks. I sat around the TV with a room full of pubescent girls. We screamed. We cried. We watched over and over again, sometimes in slow motion. We formed a Michael Jackson fan club on the spot. No matter that it was slightly creepy and we were clueless about the historical impact of a video full of African-Americans appearing on MTV for the first time. We just thought it was cool.

Up to that point, I’d never actually known a black person. I’m not even sure I knew Michael Jackson was black (and he still was in the early 80s). It didn’t matter if I did. I’d never heard of the Jackson Five, Motown, or the Apollo theater. I thought Paul McCartney was just that funny old guy who sang along on Michael’s song “The Girl Is Mine.” My world was small, but I knew every word to “We Are the World,” how to fake the moonwalk, how to strut my stuff to “Beat It” in my polyester cheerleading skirt.

By the time I got to college in the ’90s, my childhood crush was gone, and Michael was well on his way to becoming Wacko Jacko. Still, one night at a square dance at my very, very white Christian college, I watched a group of very, very white college students break out into Thriller dance moves, totally in sync, totally from memory. No one who grew up in the ’80s escaped its influence.

I bet I wasn’t the only middle-aged mom who shed a few tears last week as I watched tributes to one who so powerfully shaped my generation. I was in seventh grade all over again, remembering who I was with and what I was wearing (ee-gads!) when those Michael Jackson songs played continually on every boom box. I sat my kids down for a two-minute tutorial on this man whose death is all over the news. I didn’t try to explain how a black man becomes white or the freaky behavior or his unprecedented cultural influence. I just told them that when I think of Michael Jackson, I remember a lot of really good days, big hair and all.

Simple Instructions

I think I may have a new favorite psalm. My lifelong allegiance to Psalm 139 makes me feel like a traitor for even considering a new favorite. It’s hard to beat that description of being knit together in the womb—especially when you’ve got a womb that’s seen as much action as mine. And that psalm ends with one of my life’s most consistent prayers: “Search me, O God, and know my heart. . . . See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.”

But about 100 chapters earlier, I’ve found gentle words that hit me like a bulldozer. In the midst of all my mental wrestling and questioning and wondering, here I find simple instructions for living.

“Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun. Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret.”

In my previous encounters with this passage, I was all over the rewards: getting the desires of my heart, shining like the dawn. Bring ’em on, God! Even the safe pasture thing sounds lovely, though I haven’t actually been in a pasture since 1979.

But today I read this chapter with more mature eyes. There are commands attached to those rewards. Hello! The commands are short and clear:

Trust in the Lord.
Do good.
Delight in the Lord.
Commit your ways to Him.
Be still and wait patiently.
Do not fret.

Doesn’t that pretty much sum up everything He wants from us? The word “love” doesn’t appear there, but surely it can be assumed in the command to “do good.” If you’re not doing good out of love, it’s probably not all that good.

What if this were my checklist; how would I be doing? I don’t struggle much with trusting and committing, but delighting? Hmmm. Being still and patient? Yeah, that’s a problem. And what about fretting? That’s most easily answered by what I find myself doing about 4:30 each morning—laying in bed, wide awake, my restless mind bombarded with thoughts. Let’s just call it what it is—fretting.

So while I love you Psalm 139 and you’ll always have a special place in my heart, Psalm 37 has chased me down, lassoed me in, and is staring me down eyeball to eyeball: Trust. Delight. Be patient. Do not fret.

Where Are the Miracles?

So here’s what I’ve been wondering about this week. Why does it seem like things always turn out the way they’re supposed to? Why don’t we see more Great Interventions from God? More unquestionable miracles?

We got a history lesson in church on Sunday from a man who spent his 50th wedding anniversary touring all the famed Roman locations where Christians were fed to lions and burned at the stake. (Note to self: Not how I want to spend my 50th anniversary.) He told us about Polycarp, a second-century bishop who was burned at the stake. The good news is that he was 86 and faithful to the very end; the bad news is that faithful or not, it had to hurt. Now surely God could have rescued Polycarp in some dramatic fashion. You may be thinking, “Well if He didn’t rescue Jesus, what makes you think He’d rescue this guy?” I have to go with the obvious answer—that Polycarp wasn’t key to the whole salvation of mankind. I mean, what’s the impact on all eternity if God swoops down with an angel or two or even a couple dozen pigeons and pulls Polycarp out of the fire? Couldn’t He have done this for the old guy—and for His own glory? Instead, Polycarp died. Sure enough. Just what everyone expected. The pagan crowds probably all cheered as he went up in flames.

And then there’s my friends’ son, who died of a disease that has a 98 percent mortality rate. Doctors told them he would die. Friends all hoped for a miracle, but very few were all that surprised when he died. Why no miracle, God? Think how you could have shaken up the medical community! What a mark it would have made in the research journals.

I know that miracles happen every day. I’m just wondering why we don’t get to see many of them, especially the big ones. Why isn’t God more flamboyant?

All I can come up with is this: He must think the greatest miracle of all is when His children suffer greatly and yet continue to glorify His name.

What Happens in Vegas

Kevin and I were out for a late-night stroll Sunday when Elvis drove by, all sparkly and spangly. We smiled nonchalantly, then Kevin added, “If we were anyplace else . . . ”

But we were in Vegas, where Elvises are a dime a dozen.

For the second year in a row, as we huffed and puffed to the end of another school year, Kevin and I decided we needed a mental health get-away. We considered several different places, but Las Vegas beckoned to us once again, luring us in with its cheap prices, short plane ride, and guaranteed sunshine. While I couldn’t care less about gambling, Vegas is home to some of the things I love dearly: Cheap rooms in hotels with marble floors, jetted tubs, and spectacular pools. Dancing fountains at the Bellagio that move me like very few things on earth. Chihuly blown glass and an indoor garden that make me actually care about art and flowers. Endless buffets where the food is just as much artistry as necessity. Desert temperatures. Donny and Marie.

The weekend served its purpose well. Kevin and I got luxurious, restful time together. We poured no juice, listened to no whining, and cared for no one but ourselves for two glorious days. We laughed and lounged and experienced weird things that can only happen in Vegas—like having a quiet time under an advertisement for a stripper or watching a wedding in our swimming suits. Oh, yeah, and waving to Elvis at 10 o’clock on a Sunday night.

But as is always the case, after 48 hours I was Vegased out. The excess of everything in Vegas—skin, smoke, noise, people, waste, hedonism—gets old fast. So does the desensitization. When your heart ceases to break over the weary, weathered, hollow-eyed Hispanic woman standing on the hot street trying to thrust porn in your face, it’s time to leave. What happens in Vegas may stay there, but I’m glad I get to go home.

The Gang's All Here—Oh, No!

Though you’d never know it by our schizophrenic Colorado weather, summer has arrived here at our house. The field days, classroom parties, and nonstop activity of the past two weeks have given way to lazy mornings and the unending search for something to do. I’ve heard that boredom is a child’s best friend. It’s when they’re bored that they write, draw, imagine, create. I love this idea in theory, but in my experience, it’s also when they fight.

If it didn’t require potty-training a toddler or breaking up fights between hair-pulling siblings, parenting would be pure joy. But the incessant bickering, blaming, poking, tattling, squabbling, and screeching wears me down. A child’s home may be the laboratory in which they learn to get along with others and resolve conflict, but we’re one stolen Lego away from thermonuclear meltdown. And I’m the mad scientist running around with all sorts of theories and formulas trying to make order out of this chaos.

This summer, I vow to turn the corner. This is the summer that will be different, the one the kids will remember, for better or for worse. We will learn to harness all that energy for good instead of evil, getting over ourselves in pursuit of loving and serving others. We will work as a team, realizing and applauding each other’s unique contributions. Brooka’s older siblings will see her friendliness as a gift instead of a constant embarrassment. The girls will see Braden’s need for structure as useful instead of bossy and confining. Addison, the middle child who fights in both directions, will somehow be the glue that holds us all together.

And by the end of the summer, maybe that toddler will have potty-trained herself.

A mom can always hope.

Obedience

In Crazy Love, Francis Chan tells the story of a friend of his who was speaking at a church. Afterward, a guy came up and told the speaker, “I’d go serve God as a missionary overseas, but honestly, right now, I’d only be doing it out of obedience.” His friend’s response? “Yes, so . . .?”

I totally relate to this would-be missionary. God’s been showing me pretty clearly how He feels about the poor and that I need to be part of the solution to their plight. You could say that’s a “calling.” But it’s not like I’m suddenly real comfortable with people who are a lot different from me. Or that I’m excited to spend my days in a neighborhood that seems worlds away from my own. (In reality, they’re about ten miles apart.) I don’t necessarily feel a surge of love for the poor. I’m pretty sure if I took one of those nifty five-minute “Identify Your Spiritual Gifts” tests on the Internet, mercy would still be sitting at the bottom of my list. I wish I could say my Republican-leaning heart has totally changed. It has, a little. But it’s not my heart that’s propelling me to action. It’s simple obedience.

Chan writes: “Jesus said, ‘If you love me, you will obey what I command’ (John 14:15). Jesus did not say, ‘If you love me, you will obey me when you feel called or good about doing so.’ If we love, then we obey. Period.”

Just recently, our family has been challenged with some practical opportunities to serve the poor. None of them is something I would choose. They’re inconvenient and costly. They make us uncomfortable. They come at a time when we’re trying to sell our house and I’m trying to finish up a book project. They interfere with the baby’s nap.

Yes, so . . . ?

I initially responded by trying to rationalize my way out of them. I didn’t get very far on that road before Obedience stepped in. So we act—not out of passionate calling or great love and compassion for the poor, as much as I wish I could say that’s what it is—but out of obedience. And my hunch is that feelings really do follow actions. I’ll let you know.

Finding Time

Time management is not my strongest skill. As I fall into bed every night, my ears ring with Annie Dillard’s famous quote: “How you spend your days is how you spend your life.” It’s a little depressing to think I’m spending my life folding clothes, giving baths, and watching American Idol.

The sermon I heard this weekend provided some good perspective. The Greek language has two types of “time.” One is chronos, meaning calendar-type time, and the other is kairos, meaning seasonal-type of time. (OK, you throngs of Greek scholars reading this will know that’s Greek for preschoolers, but since I spend all my time with preschoolers, you shouldn’t expect anything more from me.) It’s a 21st-century western-culture phenomenon that we spend more time planning the hours of our lives than the seasons of our lives. But the pastor encouraged us to take a step back from our DayTimers and consider how to use our time at this particular season of life.

My season is easily defined: young kids and transition. So the question becomes, how do I honor God, worship Him with my whole life, in the little-kid season of life? That one’s pretty easy for me. Ten years spent hanging out in Kidville have taught me a thing or two, and it’s not hard to see that introducing new God-honoring, God-worshiping, God-serving adults into the world is pretty significant, not to mention time-consuming.

The transition phase—complete with words like “wait,” “sit,” and “trust”—is harder. What does worshiping God look like here? Yeah, probably a lot of waiting, sitting, and trusting—only without the grumbling.

The speaker also talked about putting the “big rocks” in the jar first, because if you first fill it with sand and pebbles, the big important rocks can’t squeeze in. I’m challenged to figure out what the big rocks of my life are—both ideally (what I want them to be) and realistically (what they actually are). If you followed me around for a week, you might think my big rocks are reading People magazine, picking up toys, and standing at the counter grazing on whatever food remnants happen to be there. But you’d also see some Bible reading, journaling, relationship-building, exercising, and a whole lot of kid-cuddling. A transition season is a good time to figure out this big-rock business.

I’ve got a lot of work to do. Better manage my time well.

True Confessions about Germs

I was sliding my toddler into a restaurant high chair the other day when one of the women I was with offered me hand sanitizer and antibacterial wipes. I shrugged and said, “Nah, I don’t pay much attention to germs.” You would have thought I’d said I don’t pay attention to my children. Or my weight. The preschool moms all looked at me like I was a public menace.

I use public restrooms without a thought. I take my children to the McDonald’s play area in January. I freely share lipstick and group desserts. I’m not even remotely concerned about the Swine Flu. Is there something wrong with me—or is it everyone else?

I have several close friends who are germophobes. One has teenage children who have still never seen the inside of a public restroom. I once used 17 public toilets in less than 36 hours—while pregnant. Another friend travels to hotels with her own sheets and once rode a motorcycle from Las Vegas to Moab with a bottle of Clorox between her knees. She knew she’d need it eventually. I jump into hotel sheets thinking, “Cool! This is probably the cleanest bed I’ve slept in all year!”

It’s not that I enjoy contact with other people’s bodily fluids; I really just don’t think about it. And it’s not that I’m an unclean person. I get grouchy without a daily shower and find it hard to function without clean hair. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get worked up over germs. I have learned to fake it, however, in order to find my place in this germophobic world and avoid being ostracized by preschool moms everywhere.

I feel comfortable gauging one’s stance on germs strictly by the number of children they have. Two or especially one: CODE RED! Feign germ concern. Bring out that rarely-used bottle of hand sanitizer. Inactivate the three-second rule. (These are also the people with which you do not send your four-year-old to the bathroom with her seven-year-old sister. Under Code Red protocol, you must accompany them yourself.) Three kids: Code orange. It could go either way, so best to play it safe. Avoid overt offenses such as sharing utensils or crawling on the floor. Four or more kids: No code necessary. If you manage to get out of the place without leaving anyone behind, who cares if they took a few extra germs with them?

Admirer or Follower?

I listened to a message awhile back that described the difference between being an admirer and a follower. Michael Phelps has a lot of admirers—people who follow his swimming career, root for him in the Olympics, buy his book that will inevitably appear in stores one day. But a follower of Michael Phelps—someone who wants to be just like Michael Phelps—gets up at 5 seven mornings a week to train in the pool. They spend more time in the pool than with their family and friends. They learn every detail of Phelps’s training routine and rigidly follow it. The gap between admiring and following, simply put, is commitment, and putting action behind that commitment.

Another word for “follower” is “disciple.” Francis Chan writes in Crazy Love, “The last thing Jesus told us was to go into the world and make disciples, teaching them to obey all He commanded. He didn’t add, ‘But hey, if that’s too much to ask, tell them just to become Christians—you know, the people who get to go to heaven without having to commit to anything.’”

I’ve been a “Christian” all my life (and the “born again” variety since I was 10), but it's taken me awhile to comprehend the depth of this whole “follower” thing. Following costs. It costs control, security, comfort—and other things I’m quite chummy with. Jesus says, “Pick up your cross and follow me.” I wish it were something more fun—like “Pick up your new Nike running shoes” or your “sweet silver convertible,” but it’s not. It’s a cross. In other words, it’s hard. But the longer I live, I see that control is highly overrated, security is an illusion, and comfort gets boring after awhile. Instead of being bummed about the hardship of wholehearted discipleship, I’m pretty stoked about the commitment of it.

When you’re following Jesus with complete commitment, the way He requires, your life becomes an object of little concern. (I’m paraphrasing author Dallas Willard there.) What a radical concept! My Big Important Life? An object of little concern? What a relief.

When I’m focused on God’s big picture and how I fit into it—instead of on all my little frustrations and concerns—moving through life feels, I imagine, like what it feels like for Michael Phelps to move through water. It’s what I was born to do.

A Story Worth Reading

Every once in a while you hear a story that changes you. It affects the things you think about, the choices you make. It pulls you out of your own little existence and elevates your perspective. Every once in a while, you get a glimpse into another family’s life that is so intimate, so personal, that you feel like a voyeur—yet you can’t tear your eyes away. There’s something there so intriguing, so real, that you have to stick around to see how it all ends. Every once in a while you are so drawn to the story that you become a small part of it.

I’ve been touched by such a story the past 14 months. It’s the story of a 13-year-old boy with one of the rarest forms of cancer. It’s the story of a family of nine, and how they choose to walk this very personal journey publicly. More than anything, it’s the story of real faith in a real God in the midst of real crisis.

These are real people, a family I have grown to know and love in the past year. I’ve known David, the dad, for a decade, but this year I’ve gotten to know his wife Renee. In attempting to help them, we’ve been blessed to get to know their youngest son, who has become one of Braden’s closest friends. And about a month ago, I got to meet Ian, the star of this story.

The story came to a climax yesterday morning when Ian died. But a good story never ends with the climax. It ends with the epilogue, defined as “a short section at the end of a literary work, sometimes detailing the fate of its characters.” There’s no wondering about Ian’s fate. We know exactly where he is, and it is a very happy ending (“beginning” is a more accurate word). But God is still writing the story of the rest of this family. I invite you to join with the hundreds—thousands, maybe—who are following it. If you start from the beginning (clicking on the headline of this entry will take you to their Caring Bridge site), expect to spend at least a day reading. And expect to be changed.

If You Don't Get It, You're Not from a Small Town

Between the late 1800s and mid-1900s, both sides of my family tree took root in northeastern Colorado, in a one-stoplight town called Akron (yes, perpetually confused with its more famous namesake in Ohio). My parents met at Akron High School in the sixties. My dad’s parents owned the only clothing store in town, and my granddad served as the town mayor for years. My mom’s father ran the family business he married into, a grain elevator, while his wife taught music lessons. My parents married right out of high school and attempted to move away for a time, but family and farmland soon brought them back, allowing my brother and me six or seven years surrounded by grandparents, extended family, and small-town life. My dad was the high school football coach; my mom taught—you guessed it—piano lessons. Although we moved to Oklahoma by the time I started fifth grade, Akron was my home, too, just as it had been for my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and even one great-great grandparent who lived long enough to pose for a rare five-generation picture with my brother.

Our stint in Oklahoma was short lived, and I started eighth grade in another small town just 90 miles from Akron. I returned to Akron for long weekends, holidays, and large chunks of the summer. I went to football games there and attended their prom with a childhood friend. I cruised Main Street and drove 100-miles-an-hour down the single runway at the Akron airport late at night with a car full of Akron teenagers. Eight years later, the maid of honor in my wedding was the freckle-faced girl who came up to me the first day of kindergarten, at Akron Elementary, and asked if I wanted to be her best friend. (I took that commitment seriously!)

In the past twenty years, my trips to Akron have been limited mostly to funerals. I buried my dad and grandparents one by one, enduring the blazing heat, blowing snow, and tireless winds so common on the plains of Colorado. The cemetery sits on the west side of town, and a couple times a year, when the wind and the clouds are feeling cooperative, you can sort of make out the Rockies, a reminder that you’re actually still in Colorado.

I returned to that cemetery again last week, this time accompanied by a husband and four children of my own. The children said goodbye to their last great-grandparent, the only one any of them have ever known, the one who sent generous Christmas and birthday checks, signed simply, “Love, Great-Grandpa” in beautiful script. We learned that day that my grandpa—known only to me as a farmer, a golfer, and a lover of horse races—also loved poetry and opera. We learned that as a kid, the third-oldest of eleven children, he was instructed to sit out on the porch after dinner and wait for Jesus to return. When that didn’t happen, and when life threw its curveballs as life always does, my grandpa lost his way for a while. But death has a funny way of bringing us full circle, and my grandpa spent the last weeks of his life doing little besides waiting for Jesus. He’d wake up from a sound sleep and holler out, “When?! When am I gonna die already?” He was actually willing Jesus to come get him, and with his affairs in order and his goodbyes said, he got what he longed for. He died peacefully in his sleep last Wednesday at the age of 88.

Grandpa chose to be cremated, so there was no cemetery burial. Still, I wasn’t going to miss a chance to drive through the Akron Cemetery. After the service, my family trekked out there with my mom and my uncle and aunt from Los Angeles. There we experienced small-town life at its finest, chatting about the townsfolk, comparing burial plots, reminiscing, noting things like, “Wow! Aunt Kate’s been gone almost twenty years?” and remembering. I took pictures of my sweet little girls sitting on my dad’s headstone in their flowery Easter dresses. But mostly the kids ran wild, tumbling and hurdling over strangers’ graves, horrifying Kevin, who finds cemetery entertainment an anomaly. But this is Akron. This is what you do here. It’s what I grew up doing.

I love being from a small town.

The Draw of Heaven

I love thinking about heaven, and I find myself doing more of it. Last week my mind was brought back to heaven by the death of my grandpa and my friend’s miscarriage, which happened within hours of each other. This man who had seen 88 years of living and this baby who never even tasted life on earth journeyed to heaven just before Easter, and I can’t help but wonder what they found there.

In his book God Is the Gospel, John Piper asks this interesting question:

“If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ was not there?”

Sounds pretty appealing, doesn’t it? I’m looking forward to all of these things, especially the end to all the physical suffering that we experience here on earth. I am so aware of how frail our earthly bodies are, and I can’t wait for my upgrade. And yeah, I think about what the food will be like (please let there be Rice Krispies), the weather (80 degrees?), the smells (like my little girls’ freshly-washed hair, I imagine).

But when I think of my dad there, my grandparents, and especially my baby girl, I’m not thinking about all those things. I’m picturing them hanging out with Jesus. I don’t know what they’re doing exactly—singing? running? dancing? tossing a football?—but they’re radiant from soaking up His presence. It's all about Him.

I have to believe that heaven’s not just a better version of earth. I think it’s going to be wholly different, different because Jesus is not just my Lord or my Savior there, but my companion. I’m fuzzy on what, exactly, we’ll find encounter entering heaven, but I’m crystal clear on who we'll encounter—and that’s the part I love thinking about the most.

Nine Going on Nineteen

I’m not done with Francis Chan yet, but I digress for a bit with a more indulgent post. (Yeah, like all blogging’s not indulgent.)

This weekend, I took my son my to college. He was invited to a gifted-and-talented program at the university here in town, where he’ll spend the next six Saturday mornings learning about archeology, ancient Egypt, mummies, and the preservation of artifacts. Not exactly how I’d want to spend a Saturday, but he does school really well and has a new-found, Indiana Jones-inspired passion for archeology, so he couldn’t be happier. A few of my observations from our time on campus:

1. As much as I’ve always hoped my kids would go away to college, now that it’s not that far off, I’m thinking a university 10 minutes from our house is not such a bad thing.

2. Going to college in Southern California was one of my smarter moves. As I walked through the bitter cold and blowing snow to Braden’s building, I tried to remember if I ever wore a coat on either of my college campuses. Probably, but my college memories are mostly of shorts, flip-flops, and catnaps in the warm sunshine. In January.

3. God cares about our little personal interests. We found out about this class late in the game, and by the time I called to sign Braden up, the class and the waitlist were both full. I asked to be kept on the list anyway, and a week later, Braden somehow made it in. This is the boy who has checked out 20 books on ancient Egypt in the past month. Who offers classes to his sisters on how to make hieroglyphics. Who taught me what a Canopic jar was. (I could've lived without knowing that.) And God opened up a spot in this particular class just for him. How personal is that?

4. I’ve always prayed that at a young age, my kids would find out what they love and what they’re good at. Granted, Braden’s gone through phases where he loved Pooh Bear, Blue’s Clues, Spiderman, Star Wars, and bullwhips—and grew out of all but the last one. Who knows how long this archaeology thing will last? But today when I told him about my prayer, he said, “Well I really love this.” I am buoyed by the fact that he loves anything at this point beyond video games and antagonizing his sisters. 

5. And finally, the obvious. I am old. I have become one of those old people who says (insert whiny voice), “I just can’t believe how fast the time is going.” This was never the case when I was young. I thought I’d be 14 for the rest of my life and was decidedly unhappy at that prospect. But now that I’ve got kids of my own, I understand what all those gray-haired people have been talking about. One day you’re tying their shoes, and the next you’re paying for an SAT course and applying for financial aid. It’s all going so fast. I love every bit of it, but it really is just too fast.

Leftovers

I’m a fan of leftovers. I eat so few foods that when I find something I enjoy, I need to make the most of it. I also prefer leftovers to cooking. I can usually follow a recipe (leaving out anything green and overtly healthy, of course), but that’s the extent of my cooking excellence.

But what if God was coming to dinner? Could I do my best for Him? Or would I serve Him whatever I had left in the fridge?

I’ve never thought much about God and leftovers, but author Francis Chan is changing that. In his book, Crazy Love, he writes:

“God wants our best, deserves our best, and demands our best. Some offerings are acceptable to Him and others are not. (Just ask Cain.) For years I gave God leftovers and felt no shame. I simply took my eyes off Scripture and compared myself to others.
The bones I threw at God had more meat on them than the bones others threw, so I figured I was doing fine. It’s easy to fill ourselves up with other things and then give God whatever is left. God gets a scrap or two only because we feel guilty. A mumbled three-minute prayer at the end of the day, when we are already half asleep. Two crumpled-up dollar bills thrown as an afterthought into the church’s fund for the poor. Fetch, God!”

If that’s not enough to get my attention, a few pages later he adds, “In heaven exists a Being who decides whether or not I take another breath. This holy God deserves excellence, the very best I have.”

One of the (very few) reasons I looked forward to leaving my job was so that my family would get the very best of me. I’m afraid that for years they got a lot of leftovers outta me, literally and figuratively. Mindful of this, sometimes at the end of a long day of work and driving kids all over town, I would purposefully focus on trying to recover the best of who I am to give to the people in my home. I failed a lot, but at least I was aware and usually gave it my best shot.

But God? Does He get my best? Honestly, I don’t think that crosses my mind. He gets a lot of leftovers, and I, like Francis Chan, think, “Well, a five-minute quiet time with a kid on my lap is better than nothing.” Or, more recently, “At least I have good intentions about serving other people, even though I don’t have time to act on them.” Ugh. I certainly don’t underestimate the power of grace, but even that doesn’t cover up the wilty lettuce and day-old bread I’ve dished out for God.

I have a little boy in AWANA, Caleb, who could easily rattle off every Scripture in his book after only a few weeks of practice. But last year, as a first grader, he took it slowly, reciting each one carefully and perfectly before moving on to the next verse. When I asked him why he had slowed down, he answered, “My mom wants me to do my verses with excellence.” And so he did. Caleb’s mom was showing him how to serve God a gourmet meal made with intentionality, diligence, and faithfulness. No leftovers there.

Fire Damage

I’ve known a few people who lost all their childhood memories and possessions to fire. None of them actually lived there at the time, but it’s still pretty horrible to watch the structure of your formative years disintegrate into nothing.

By the age of 18, I had moved 19 times. The first two-thirds (roughly) of my life were void of permanent structure. This in contrast with my husband, whose childhood was enshrined in a basement room of his parents’ house up until a few years ago. Picture Larry Bird posters and yellowing homecoming photos on a background of 70’s wallpaper.

I didn’t find “home” until I was 22. Sure, it might have looked like an 8 x 10 cubicle in an office building like any other. But to me, it was the place where I fit. It was where I met people who invested in me and changed my life (one I even married), where I learned who I am and what I do best. In short, it was the place where I grew up. It was my little department in a big Christian ministry, where I lived and loved life for 14 years.

Earlier this month, that department was “re-imagined” (now there’s a euphemism for you), and all my friends either lost their jobs or were reassigned somewhere else. What was once my family is being dispersed; what was once my home feels as if it has burned to the ground.

As resistant as I am to change, I realize that sometimes it has to happen. Sometimes it’s good. There are things about this change that are good. But “good” doesn’t make it hurt any less. I hurt for my friends who are forced to search for jobs when there are so few to be found. I hurt for the brilliant work that was created there that will be buried and forgotten. I hurt for the stories that will go untold (we were nothing if not great storytellers!). I hurt for the relationships that will surely change as people go their separate ways. And truth be told, I hurt for the young girl in me who is losing a piece of her permanent structure. Although it’s not been a part of my life for the past year, it’s a huge part of my history, and history is huge for me.

Fortunately, personal growth can’t burn—it’s with me as long as I live. And personal growth is what I took away in buckets from that job, from those experiences and relationships. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nothing has shaped my adult life more than The Navigators. And all the re-imagining in the world can’t take that away.