Yield!

Since I started spending a good percentage of my waking hours on the highway, I’ve implemented a new driving strategy. Merging into highway traffic has never been a favorite maneuver of mine, and when the rare driver slows down to make a place for me, it doesn’t just make for an easier merge, it actually brightens my day. So I started being intentional about slowing down to let other drivers in—on the highway, exiting a parking lot, wherever I see an opportunity. Yielding, this is called.

Isn’t it funny how God sometimes prepares you for a lesson before actually teaching it to you?

We discussed yielding this week in Bible study. Not the highway kind but the heart kind. One of the best definitions I found described yielding as “giving up one’s place for another.” Jesus’ teachings are all radically counter-cultural, but this one just might take the cake. When does our society ever reward the act of stepping aside for the promotion of another? Stepping out of the limelight so that another might shine? I’m pretty sure this message was not part of my formative years. I used to be a sprinter, and I fought with every muscle and every ounce of will power to keep others from passing me up. I’m not one who likes to be slowed down in any area of life, and stepping aside for someone else comes about as naturally for me as taking a shower with all my clothes on.

Am I doing any better teaching my kids this? Truly, I don’t think I’ve given it a thought before now. I harp endlessly about serving others, but sometimes our greatest act of service is when we do nothing but step aside. Quietly. Without drawing attention to ourselves. Can they let someone else deliver the birthday card? Let someone else take their turn first? Let someone else do the singing on center stage or make the winning basket? And can they do this—here’s the clincher—with a joyful heart and without jealousy? Can I?

On the cross, Jesus “yielded” his spirit. He surrendered to the will of his Father. He put aside his status as Lord of the universe and made a place for sinners like me—a place in heaven. Kinda gives you a whole different mental picture as you’re yielding on the highway, doesn’t it?

A Night to Be Humbled

I don’t normally feel hypocritical. I especially don’t feel hypocritical when I’m praising God. Even when I’m not feeling it, I can still push the words out of my mouth, carry a (mostly) pretty tune, and somehow feel good about myself. Not tonight. Tonight I was too humbled to sing. I’m pretty sure that’s a first.

I was sitting in a women’s event at church alongside many who are the mothers of special needs kids. When I saw the ad in our church bulletin for this particular topic, raising disabled kids, I thought, “There’s one I don’t need to go to.” Then I found out my dear friend was speaking. Jill could speak on eyeball dissections and I would go.

It’s not like I haven’t heard her story of having a baby with Down Syndrome before, but somehow it was different this time. Maybe it was the context. The uncomfortable, random cries that came from the back of the room (this was a place these mothers could bring their special needs kids, after all). The dad cradling his 11-year-old—smaller than my 4-year-old and a child I would be scared to even touch—and calling her his princess. The woman who’s cared for more than 200 foster kids, many of them with special needs, and is now tending to her husband with Alzheimer’s. I was humbled by their stories. Leveled, actually. To the point where I couldn’t even sing the words, “Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus” without feeling unworthy, hypocritical.

I consider myself a person of strong faith. Driving to the meeting tonight, I would have given myself a 9 out of 10 on the faith scale. I intentionally try to live each day with open hands, praying that God’s will and not mine be done. I don’t live in fear. I don’t feel an urgent need to control things. I have called this faith. But driving home, my number dropped to a 1. I didn’t lose faith this evening; I just realized how little faith my life has required. I’ve had losses and grief, but they’ve come and gone. I can’t think of anything I’ve had to trust God for over the course of a lifetime. I can picture all of my birdies not only flying out of my little nest some day, but soaring to heights I’ve never reached. I’m not wondering who will care for one of them when I die. I’m not wondering how we’ll ever have the money to fill in the gaps insurance won’t cover. Yes, I am humbled.

And then of course the mind goes to all sorts of dark places. “Why didn’t you choose this road for me, God? Was I too weak? Did I lack the faith? Could I not have handled it?” And then a step further: “Maybe this is our path. What if we’re just one freak rollerblading accident away from a life like this?”

But that is not where my mind stays. I won’t let it. Those thoughts, along with a false sense of unworthiness, only keep me focused on myself and distract me from what God's trying to teach me. All I can know is what He has chosen for me today, and all I can do is love the people who are walking that road, give thanks for what He has chosen for me, and have the good sense not to resist this lesson in humility.

In the Company of Sufferers

I’m in a group Bible study for the first time in, oh, 18 or so years, and my eyes are popping open to all sorts of things. It’s Beth Moore’s new study on the book of James, and in the midst of all those confusing opening words about the poor and the rich in James 1, she unleashes these insightful words:

“The only time I feel a vivid fellowship with suffering believers in other parts of the world is when I am humbled by extreme difficulty of my own. Otherwise I wonder how in Heaven’s name I will stand next to them around the throne of God and have any crowns at all to cast. Without frequent humblings, I am a cushy, lightweight Christian who doesn’t know the first thing about denying myself and carrying my cross.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever read something that made me want to be humbled, until now. I write stories all the time, for Compassion, about Christians whose lives have been nothing but a web of trials and suffering, and while I’ve been overwhelmed with sympathy and sadness for them, I’ve never wanted to join their club. Closer to home, I have a dear friend, a man in his late 60s, who has dealt with horrible physical pain for decades. I’ve heard it said of him, “He has the gift of suffering.” That makes me cringe. How can that be a spiritual gift, I’ve wondered. Yet he’s the last person on earth I’d call a cushy, lightweight Christian. I can almost see his cross dragging behind him, and still he’s one of my favorite people to be around.

I’ve never pictured myself standing around the throne of God with those who have suffered so greatly in this life. But I will. That gives me great pause. Heaven won’t be a place where we compare our woes. It’s not a competition where the one with the saddest life story wins at the end. But I think there’s a good chance the measure of our faith in God and the size of our character will be on full display. When are those things better shaped in us than through trials of many kinds?

My trials are so tiny, so small that it’s a stretch to even call them trials most of the time. But when I feel the pressure of them, I think I will find it a little easier to consider them pure joy as I consider the company I’ll have in heaven.

Getting It Together—Or Not

“If I could just get it together.”

Have you ever noticed how often women say this? Maybe not publically, but if you could listen in on small groups, phone conversations, counseling sessions, I think you’d hear this a lot. At a small-group meeting in November, I heard it come out of the mouths of all five women there, including myself. If we could only . . . just . . . get . . . it . . .together.

Everyone’s “together” looks a little different: losing weight, improving relationships, balancing the checkbook, parenting with consistency, running a household, getting dinner on the table. I struggle with all of these, but my big one is organization. I can organize words and ideas with precision, but give me a closet or a cupboard, and I’m a disaster. If I could only get it together maybe my house wouldn’t be such a mess. Maybe I could actually find all those missing things. Maybe we could stop living in fear of people dropping by unexpectedly. If only I could get it together.

It doesn’t help that everyone else appears to be so together. That’s one of the good things about age and maturity—you realize nothing is as it seems. No one has it together, at least not completely. There’s some area in all of our lives that we’re ashamed of, that we feel helpless to change, that we try to hide from everyone else. On some level, we all know we’re a mess.

I am consoled by the fact that God loves messes. This isn’t just something we tell ourselves to make us feel better; we have biblical evidence that Jesus came specifically for the messes of this world. The woman caught in adultery from John 8 had her mess publically displayed. She was about to be killed for it. The religious leaders drag her to some teacher—she likely didn’t even know who He was if she was too caught up in her mess to notice—who’s playing in the dirt. What was she thinking? “Why couldn’t I get it together? How did I let myself get to this place? And what’s this man going to say about it?” She had to be surprised when He called out everyone else’s mess instead of her own.

What was the Samaritan woman thinking (John 4) as she drew up water from the well? Was she pondering how well her life was going, how proud she was to be living the way she was? My bet is that at that exact moment she was thinking, “If only I could get it together.” Then up walks a stranger who tells her “everything she ever did,” but He doesn’t focus on her mess. He focuses on His truth, His power to satisfy her deepest longings. It’s not the mess that matters, it’s the One who cleans it up.

So here, on January 22, 2012, I publically state that I do not have it together. I’ll never have it together. If by some miracle I get beautifully organized in 2012, I’ll just become more aware of some other mess in my life. The same is true for you. We weren’t made to get it all together. Even if we could, we live in a world that specializes in our unraveling. That’s why the Savior came—to save us from our messes, to love us in spite of ourselves, to offer us a future in which we’ll finally be the people we long to be.

God's Goodness in the Face of Loss

Kevin’s out of town, so the kids and I watched the slaughter, I mean the game, tonight at our friends’ house. The kids had such a great time they barely noticed the score, so I was surprised that my sleepy 4-year-old burst out crying on the way home.

Camryn: But mom, (sob, sob), why did God let Tim Tebow lose the game?

Me: Well, honey, just because God’s favor is on someone doesn’t mean that things always go their way. Think of David running from King Saul, sleeping in caves, scared for his life.

More sobs.

Me: If we won everything we tried, we wouldn’t have to trust in God. We’d just trust in ourselves. God has to let us lose sometimes to make us better.

Nothing I say is helping, so Braden chimes in with some examples. Still, the weeping continues. Then a new song comes on. It’s a kids’ CD, and the song is “God is so good.”

Me: Camryn, I can promise you this. No matter how bad Tim Tebow feels right now, he is singing this song in his heart right now.

Camryn: How do (sob) you know?

Me: Because Tim Tebow thinks about God like I do, and this is what I was singing the night your sister Catherine died.

Camryn: Oh.

Two minutes later, she was asleep.

May you somehow sleep well tonight, too, Tim Tebow. And in your wins and your losses, may your life continue screaming of the goodness of God.

Advice I'll Live By

I have something written and ready to post, but then I saw this, and it's much, much better. I think these are the most profoundly soothing words I've ever read on the internet. You'll enjoy it even if you don't have kids or are far removed from the days when a trip to the grocery store was like an episode of Survivor. Enjoy, and I'll be back in a few days.

http://momastery.com/blog/2012/01/04/2011-lesson-2-dont-carpe-diem/

My 2011 Book List

I spent most of 2011 reading, but you wouldn’t know it from my book list. Six months of the year I read short entries for a devotional book—640 of them—written by Compassion International staff from around the world. Here are quick reviews of the books I managed to finish the rest of the year:

My older kids and I finished the fourth and fifth Harry Potter books, The Goblet of Fire and The Order of the Phoenix. Five down, two to go, and my kids are still bribing me with snacks and neck massages so I’ll keep reading to them. Also finished the last three books of the Narnia series with the older kids and can’t wait to start again at the beginning with the younger ones in a year or two. Though I swore my allegiance to The Magician’s Nephew, it doesn’t get any better than The Last Battle’s description of the afterlife. I will read it again and again. I also started Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, but it’s so mind-boggling that I can only read about a page at a time. Was there ever anyone more brilliant than C.S. Lewis? I think not.

Although if anyone could come close to filling Lewis’s creative-genius shoes (at least in the Christian arena), I vote for Eugene Peterson. I know I’m biased because he published The Message with The Navigators, but listen to this, from A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, which I finally read this year:

“Every day I put love on the line. There is nothing I am less good at than love. I am far better in competition than in love. I am far better at responding to my instincts and ambitions to get ahead and make my mark than I am at figuring out how to love another. I am schooled and trained in acquisitive skills, in getting my own way. And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily—open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.”

That one’s a must-read, along with another book I should’ve read a long time ago, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons. The chapter on homosexuality is worth the price of the book. I’ll go ahead and call this one my favorite of the year.

But also in contention were Nicholas Carr’s two books, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains and The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. Though the former has gotten loads of press (deservedly), I actually found The Big Switch even more fascinating. If you’ve ever wondered if the internet is held together with nothing more than paperclips and chewing gum, this is the book for you.

On the recommendation of Carr, I read The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Written in 1994, this book was not so much out-of-date as it was eerie at predicting the future technology to come and how it would affect our reading. (And no, I don’t have a Kindle.)

So I’ll now read anything Nicholas Carr writes, just as I’m committed to anything Francis Chan writes. This year he wrote on hell. Umm, OK. Erasing Hell was definitely not the feel-good book of the year, but it did challenge me deeply in my view of God. And if Francis writes a book on geology, I’m gonna buy it. I just am.

Predictably enough, I added some new parenting books to my arsenal:

• Spiritual Parenting by Michelle Anthony (which equipped me with the go-to question, “What needs to be done here?”),

• Five Conversations You Must Have with Your Daughter by Vicki Courtney,

• Six Ways to Keep the ‘Little’ in Your Girl by Dannah Gresh, and

• Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids by Kara Powell and Chap Clark.

All were worth reading, though none was as helpful as Sticky Faith. I highly recommend this one to parents who are looking for practical ways to pass down lasting faith to their children. More on this in future blog posts.

And finally, in the “just-for-fun” category, I picked up Heaven Is for Real by Todd Burpo, not at all intending to read it, but I finished it in one night. I’m a believer. And last, and least, actually, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy was mildly interesting in places, but really not worth the time it took to get from the inter-library loan. More than anything, it was eye-opening to see how much things have changed in 50 years.

On my list for 2012:

The Hunger Games (We’ll see if I make it through the whole series)

The Search for Significance

Unbroken

More C.S. Lewis

More The History of the Ancient World (Will I ever find out why Rome fell?!)