A Must-Read for Anyone in Pain

Have you ever hurt? Physical pain or emotional pain? Maybe both at the same time? Are you hurting now? Or do you think it might happen some day? Yeah, I’m thinking that covers just about everyone. Then stop what you’re doing! Now! (Please.) And investigate this book. It’s called Don’t Waste the Pain, a book I got to edit last fall. It’s the best book I’ve ever worked on and one of the best I’ve ever read. I eagerly set my alarm clock for 4:30 a.m., even earlier sometimes, so I could dig in before I started my day. I needed this like some people need coffee. It filled me with the truth and grace of God. It also made me weep, nearly every morning.

One of my earliest blog posts was called Stewarding the Pain. My friends David and Linda have written a whole book on this topic. They’ve lived this topic. They’ve changed me, and many, many others, because of the way they lived it.

If my endorsement doesn’t convince you, take it from Larry Crabb. He writes this in the foreword to Don’t Waste the Pain:

“Do not expect my foreword to offer either a critique of this book or an easily marketed endorsement. I was far too personally caught up in what I read on every page to respond from an evaluative distance or to cheerily advertise its message. The two authors, brother and sister, wouldn’t let me hide from the fear that I know is rumbling somewhere inside me, the fear that I prefer to leave buried beneath promises God hasn’t made.

“Worse, they stripped away whatever remnants remain of naïve “Christian” optimism and fluffy “biblical” theology that tell me to believe God will somehow numb the pain of whatever suffering He calls me to endure. After reading only a few pages, I put the book down, looked nowhere in particular, and with a freshness I didn’t much like, acknowledged what I’d rather deny: I’m scared and pain hurts. God offers no guarantee that what I dread will never happen, not to me; and He makes no promise to provide anesthesia if it does. . . . David and Linda make the outrageous claim—no, they live the unpopular truth—that life-giving hope grows in the raw realism of suffering. In undiluted pain, the God who is there becomes slowly recognized as the God who is here.”

Convinced? If you live in town and want to borrow a copy, let me know. Or take a chance and buy your own!

Waiting for Bread and Water

All summer, I’ve been praying for two miracles. They may not seem like miracles to anyone else, but they are to me. One is big and life-altering, one is small but very important to me. I’ve asked God to sell our house—quickly, supernaturally, in a way we know couldn’t have happened by any other means—and to resurface my lost camera that holds pictures from the past 18 months of our lives.

Prayed. Faithfully. Expectantly. All summer. The great discouragement managed to stay away until August. It settled in and put down roots by Labor Day. That weekend, our church sermon centered on this question from Exodus 17: “Will I trust God when there’s no bread and water?”

It’s easy to judge the Israelites for their lack of vision and patience. We think, “C’mon, guys, God just parted the Red Sea and delivered you from slavery, for Pete’s sake. Stop your whining and show a little perseverance, a little faith.” Perspective is a wonderful thing. But when it’s our own story, we don’t have that kind of perspective. All we can feel is the dryness in our throats and the grumbling in our bellies. (Or, in my case, another looming house payment and a year’s worth of lost memories.)

Moses asked the whining Israelites, “ Why do you put the Lord to the test?” We only need to look at the story of Ananias and Sapphira to understand how God feels about being put to a test. (“How could you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord?” Peter asked Sapphira, just before she dropped dead.) I wondered if my prayers for miracles were actually more of a test. Would God come through for me like I wanted Him to? Could I convince Him with my prayers to act on my behalf the way I wanted? Or was my heart pure, just desperate to tangibly feel His favor?

It seems to me there’s a fine line between praying expectantly and praying with demands. This isn’t one of those entries where I get it all figured out and wrap it up with a bow at the end. I don’t have this figured out. I’m not sure I ever will. We did get an offer on our house this week, which we accepted, but a sea of hoops and obstacles looms before we successfully close on this house. It’s certainly not the miracle I was hoping for, which looked more like someone proclaiming, “God told me to buy this house from you, and I don’t care how much work it needs. Name your price!”

I may need to look a little harder for miracles. They might not be as obvious as I had hoped. I also need to do the hard work of surrendering my expectations and more faithfully pray, “Not my will but yours be done, Lord.” Will I trust Him without grumbling if we have this house in another year? If I never see my camera again? Will I trust Him when there’s no bread and water?

Recognizing That Ugly Entitlement Attitude

A former neighbor and I were talking a few days ago about the feedback we’ve gotten on our still-for-sale house. “No yard, no views,” said one person of the house we bought for the yard and the views. One perspective buyer’s only comment was that it was odd there was a garage door opener in the crawl space. Yes, it is odd, but did you happen to see the rest of the house? The part one would actually live in?

My neighbor was not surprised by the nitpicky comments. She works at Pottery Barn and sees it all day long. “People nitpick because they believe they deserve something more, something better.” She cited examples like customers requesting a discount because they were paying with cash or because they bought four of the same item. What?!

We all decry the younger generations and their entitlement attitude, but do we stop to take a good look at ourselves? This attitude didn’t just pop up overnight in 1986.

An older lady came to my husband’s shop, and things didn’t go according to her schedule. She believes she was delayed and inconvenienced, and apparently she was the first person in history to experience this. She has demanded $200 for her time or she will go to the ends of the earth to tear down our good name. (Along with irrational entitlement, the word “extortion” comes to mind.)

Yet as I say good riddance to another too-hard, not-enough-fun summer, I see the same entitlement attitude in myself. I didn’t go so far as to write God a letter demanding $200 for my pain and suffering, but I might as well have. Somewhere along the way, I got the idea that summers were supposed to be fun. That I was supposed to have a good time and enjoy myself. That I deserved to have a good summer. But the fact is, I don’t deserve a good summer (or any other season for that matter) any more than my children deserve a treat for finishing their homework. Despite the advertising industry’s best efforts to convince us otherwise, we don’t deserve anything. Good summers and days that go according to our plans—and hey, while we’re at it, let’s add fulfilling jobs, good health, and functional families to the list—are blessings from God and nothing else. They’re not things we can earn or demand. It’s startling to realize that this unconscious expectation that things go our way is the exact same sense of entitlement that we despise in other people.

God gave me what I needed this summer, and whether I enjoyed it or not, I need to find the maturity to simply thank Him for it. Gratitude may well be the best antidote for entitlement.

Lord, Make Me Drano

Our pastor talks a lot about “plumbing theology,” or, in other words, what we do with the grace and love God pours into us. Do we catch it and store it up for ourselves like buckets? Or do we let it flow out of us into other people like pipes?

This week we talked about what happens when our pipes get blocked. We want to be pipes; we’re trying our hardest to be pipes. But we’ve got some sort of blockage that’s keeping the love and grace from flowing through us. Our pastor asked us to identify that blockage for ourselves. For some people, it’s their own woundedness. For some it’s a reoccurring sin issue. For many people, it’s just something in their past that they cannot shake.

I don’t ever want to put a plug in my kids’ pipes. One of my biggest goals as a mom is to introduce new adults into the world who hit the ground ready to give and love and serve. I don’t want them to have to spend half their adult life in counseling trying to correct the damage from their childhood. I want to be the one who greases up their pipes so love flows forcefully, passionately out of them. I wanna be their Drano.

But it’s not just things from our past that block our pipes. When I thought hard about the biggest blockage in my own pipe, one simple phrase came to mind:

The self-centered pursuit of my own agenda.

I’ve got so much I want to do—places I want to visit, things I want to buy, books I want to read, hobbies I want to pursue, people I want to hang out with, dear Lord, naps I want to take! But rarely do these things include serving anyone but myself. These are not bad things on their own, just like a single strand of hair is not so bad for your pipes. But they can entwine together to form a gigantic hairball that lodges firmly, unbudgingly, in my pipe. That’s my plug, alright, and the only way to push it out is to keep doing the hard, inconvenient work of serving and loving other people. Not just people who can love me and serve me back, mind you, but the kind who are difficult and messy and often unappreciative. How I pray I'll get better at this.

It's not just the woundedness hairball I have to keep out of my kids’ pipes. I can dedicate the next 15 years of my life to protecting them from physical and psychological damage, but if I’ve not taught them how to lavish God’s grace and love on others, I’ve done nothing for them. And the only way to teach them something so important is to show them.

Why Johnny Can Read and Mommy’s Lost Her Mind

And just like that, the kids are back to school this week. I am always equal parts sad and giddy this time of year. Sad to lose the laziness, the sleeping in, the break from packing lunches and hurrying off more kids and bags than I can fit through the door, but giddy to get a little break from the 24-hour parenting I've done all summer. This year I send three to school full time and one off to preschool for six hours a week. What on earth will I do with myself?!

The best part about returning to school is that I usually have this “all-is-right-with-the-world” sense as I pull out of the parking lot. Daddy’s working, kids are at school learning and playing, and I’m doing whatever it is that I do; it feels like everyone is where they’re supposed to be. It’s not a feeling that I take for granted. I know how over-the-top blessed and unusual we are to have our kids in a school in which we have 100 percent confidence.

Five years ago this week, I was agonizing over where my children would go to school. (One wasn’t even born, but I agonized for them all.) I had put them on the waitlist for a charter school a year earlier, but with thousands of other kids on the list—most put there by a mother holding her newborn in a hospital room—I figured Braden probably wouldn’t even get in. We were all set to go to our neighborhood elementary school. We had our teacher and room assignment. I had prayer-walked around the building. We had hid a special rock on the playground so Braden could dig it up on the first day of school and know we were thinking of him. And then we got the call.

There was one spot left at the charter school. Instead of walking a few blocks to school, we would be driving 25 minutes. We wouldn't know a soul there. This was a big emotional transition for someone who doesn’t transition well, and I had about four hours to do it. (And another four to buy a year’s worth of school uniforms.) The neighborhood school would have been fine, but I know we made the best choice for Braden and for our other kids.

And that’s the thing that’s overwhelming. Choice. I don’t know anyone my age whose parents made a choice about their schooling. We turned five, they sent us to school, and that was that. The only choice was whether to go with the Shaun Cassidy or the Rick Springfield lunchbox. You likely didn’t know anything about the school’s educational philosophy, its safety record, or its policy on bullying. If you didn’t like Mrs. Hoodenpyle in the second grade, you got over it. I realize our mothers had other concerns—the Cold War, how to work that newfangled microwave, who shot J.R.—but choosing a school was not one of them.

And now the children of those mothers agonize over school choice: private school, Christian school, home school, charter school, online school, or good, ol’ fashioned neighborhood school. Some of us try them all. Some choose one for one child and something different for their sibling. All of us wonder if we’re doing the right thing and are bombarded by friends, acquaintances, and radio ads to change our minds. It’s enough to make us stark-raving mad.

So that peaceful, easy feeling I'll have as I pull out of the parking lot tomorrow is definitely not something I take for granted. Our school is not perfect, but it is home.

Words to Live By (At Least for This Week)

A few quotes to share this week, both of which deeply resonate with me while at the same time make me a bit nervous. Both are from Larry Crabb’s book, Shattered Dreams, which you may be happy to know I have almost completed!

“Oh! [God’s] grace and goodness toward us is so immeasurably great, that without great assaults and trials it cannot be understood.” —Martin Luther

Crabb expounds on this: “Good friends make our lives easier, not harder, so we think. . . . The problem is with our blessing-based, happiness-centered understanding of goodness. It is too small. . . . If Luther is right—that only in suffering do we learn to fully delight in God’s goodness—then it becomes immediately clear why our enjoyment of God is so shallow. We don’t like to suffer. We see no value in suffering. We arrange our lives to minimize suffering. And we believe Christianity offers a God who will cooperate with that plan.”

Note my own emphasis on the words “fully delight.” I believe we can delight in God when life is going just as we like. But can we fully delight in Him under such good circumstances? I’m not sure we’ve experienced the fullness of God until we’ve been with Him in times of suffering. It’s then that we begin to more fully understand His mercy, His sovereignty, His enoughness. And through these things, our delight in Him grows.

Crabb also quotes a friend in the midst of his own shattered dream:

“Faith, as I am growing to understand it more, is about looking beyond my circumstances to a person. To have faith in better circumstances, even in God creating better circumstances, is not true faith. I want to be the kind of man who can watch every dream go down in flames and still yearn to be intimately involved in kingdom living, intimately involved with my friend the King, and still be willing to take another risk just because it delights Him for me to do so. And my flesh shivers to think about it.”

In the past two years, I have made so many grand plans that have gone nowhere. But I, too, want to be the kind of person this paragraph describes. To keep dreaming, to keep risking, to choose doing "crazy" things for Christ over safety and comfort every time. I’m not that person today, and I’m painfully aware of it at times. But I keep dreaming that's who He'll help me become.

Recovering Suburban Snob

I’ve never understood the appeal of living downtown. I’m a suburbs girl—big houses, big yards, big garages, supermarkets on every other corner.

After our move, I still don’t live “downtown” exactly (though that’s how I describe it to people I don’t know very well; it’s my euphemism for “run-down” and “high-crime”), but I’m starting to get it. My early-morning runs are beginning to convince me.

First, after using two keys to get through two doors to make it to the street (no quick garage-door exits here), I pass by the homespun businesses on my street. The lady across the street sells western wear and has a larger-than-lifesize, anatomically-correct horse reared up on the top of her building. (That would never fly in our old covenant community.) We have only one real house near us, and after a month, I already know the woman who lives there better than I did any of my suburban neighbors.

A few blocks away, I glance in the window of the daycare center, whose workers are already, at 5:30, getting their rooms ready. That’s one of the interesting things about this part of town. There’s so much life going on at sunrise! Not just old people walking their dogs, which I used to see occasionally in my old neighborhood, but men, women, and children waiting at bus stops, shop keepers putting their wares out on the street, lots of folks in scrubs walking to the hospital nearby. It’s 5:45, but it feels hours later.

A young woman waiting at a bus stop yells out, “Hello!” to me from across the street. Is she crazy, I wonder, or just friendly? It’s a little like being from Massachusetts and visiting Texas. People in the suburbs don’t holler out to strangers. And even if they did, the strangers are wearing headphones and wouldn’t hear them.

I continue west, crossing over Union Boulevard to where the “nice” kicks in. But it’s different from suburban nice. It’s at least $100K cheaper than suburban nice, too. Who knew?! (Except for you, Tim and Camilla.) Here I pass by yards that suburban dwellers dream of. I don’t so much care about horticulture or architecture, but even I am amazed by what I see. The houses, no two remotely alike, are so old and so interesting that I’m reminded of my little 1,000-resident hometown that was hitting its heyday in the early 40s. Nearly every house has an inviting front porch, an air-conditioner in the window, and cars parked in front. This is the land of single-car garages. Yet people still seem to be thriving here, even without all that room to store their stuff! Imagine! Jog strollers rest on several of the porches, reminding me that people here are just like me. They’re not the Volvo-driving, child-hating, pot-smoking weirdos we tend to imagine living downtown. They’re just living smaller and quainter than most of the other people I know.

Still finding my way around, I get lost often. The streets start to look alike—though the houses are still so different—and then out of nowhere, on a perfectly residential street, I run by a market/deli/organic health food store. Or a coffee shop. Or an antiques store. Right in there with all the houses. Not a strip mall or a Chic-fil-A in site! I love that there are literally picket fences here, and I can picture the women swapping homegrown tomatoes and zucchini over the fence. It’s all so tranquil, so frozen in time, that you’d never believe you’re just a half-mile away from people being gunned down in their meth labs.

I guess that’s all part of the variety of downtown. And I’m starting to really like it.