Justice, Yes, But Also Forgiveness

The sound of careers--lives, really--crashing to the ground echoes out of my television every time I turn on the nightly news. One more movie star, artist, athlete, journalist, or politician is brought to trial in the courtroom of public opinion, and a guilty verdict is all but guaranteed. It doesn't matter if the statutes of limitations has passed by 20 years. It doesn't matter that whatever incident has placed them in this position wasn't even illegal. The only thing that matters is that someone has messed up, and justice must be served.

Justice is good. Justice is important to God. It's important in keeping a society safe, intact, and healthy. No one wants to live in a world without justice. But no one wants to live in a world without forgiveness either.

One of the most important parts of being human is our ability to be vulnerable and tell the truth about ourselves. We've all messed up. We all did something colossally stupid at some point in our lives. Our imperfections, mistakes, and failures unite us as human beings. No one's doing this life thing perfectly. We're all tripping all over ourselves, if not today then yesterday, and if not yesterday then tomorrow. Wisdom is hard won. The Bible says all we have to do is ask for wisdom and God will give it, but it doesn't usually come in a beautiful package wrapped in a bow. His gift of wisdom often comes on the other side of a mess we've made. Growth through mistakes is another uniting human force.

My concern, as I watch the evening news and hear the crumbling, is that people are going to stop telling the hard truth about themselves. We'll be denied their stories of growth and transformation because they're too afraid to admit they were flawed in the first place. 

My concern is that no decent, respectable person will ever run for public office again because of something foolish they did at 19.

My concern is that we're headed toward a world where justice is everything, and forgiveness is seen as weakness.

We need both. People need to be held accountable for their actions. We all need to know that what we do and say matters and has consequences. We need to become wise enough to recognize when "I'm so sorry" is the only acceptable thing to say. But we also need to forgive. We need to live graciously, understanding that people make mistakes, and that those mistakes don't necessarily represent the sum total of a person's life. A consistent pattern of bad behavior is one thing. A foolish, ill-timed comment is another. I made two yesterday. What about you? And aren't you thankful that your life didn't come crashing down as a result? What about a horrible act of bad judgment that hurt another person? Yes, I've done that as well. Thankfully, the acts have gotten less horrible, the judgment less bad, and the hurt less severe over the years, but if anyone wants to dig around my high school past, they'll find plenty to condemn me with. It may not be recorded on fuzzy 1980's video or plastered on my yearbook pages (especially since I was the yearbook editor), but that doesn't mean it's not there.

Oh, but the grace of God. The forgiveness of God and other people. These have transformed me. This is my story. If you want to know who I am today, who I really am, you're going to need to hear about who I used to be, and how grace changed me. How it's still changing me.

Can we be a society that upholds justice while leaving plenty of room for grace and forgiveness? I pray that we can.

No Getting Around Love

Anyone who's spent an hour in the New Testament knows that love is a big deal. You're only a few pages in when Jesus starts talking about love. Funny thing is, the first time Matthew quotes Jesus talking about love, it's about loving your enemies. Right off the bat, we can tell this love thing isn't going to be easy.

Three of Jesus's biographers quote what's come to be known as the Great Commandment: Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength--and if that's not challenging enough, love your neighbor as yourself. We've heard it so often we can quote it in our sleep. But do you ever pause and think about what it really means? Jesus is telling us to love Joe next door with his loud music and barky dogs, Mrs. Smith holding up the carpool line as she chats on her cell phone, and the 16-year-old girl in youth group who rolls her eyes at us with tangible disdain. To love your snoopy mother-in-law and the soccer coach who won't stop screaming at your kid. These are our neighbors. The ones we're supposed to love as we love ourselves. Oh, my.

And then there's the Apostle John, who lets us know that if we don't love our brothers and sisters, we don't love God. We don't even know God. And worse yet, if we say we love God but hate someone else, we're liars. I like to give myself a pass on this one. There's no one I actually hate. But would someone know that by the way I complain against Joe? The way I'm so easily irritated by Mrs. Smith? By the way I judge the hard-to-love girl I'm supposed to be discipling? Hate doesn't mean I'm cussing people out and slashing their tires. Hate can also look like judging, ignoring, grumbling, and slandering.

I've spent a lot more than an hour in the New Testament, and I've read all about the importance of loving other people. But until recently, I didn't quite get that this is what it's all about. Two books have redirected my attention to these commands on love. Commands. That's what they are. Not suggestions. Not "it would sure be nice" recommendations. Commands from God Himself.

In Letters to the Church, Francis Chan proposes that the greatest missionary strategy of all time and the only one necessary is for Christians to love one another. If we were to follow Christ's command to love one another and live in unity within the church, the world would: a) be dumbstruck, and b)see that Jesus was who He said He was.

The second book has stirred up plenty of controversy. Last year Andy Stanley created a firestorm by suggesting that believers "unhitch" their faith from the Old Testament. In Irresistible, he explains what he meant. While I resist his general premise and shock-and-awe strategy for getting his point across, what I got most from his book was vision for the priority and urgency of love. His unpacking of 1 John leaves no loopholes or work-arounds. God is love. We know God, grow in relationship with God, and love God by loving the people around us. I would so prefer to love God by sitting on my quiet deck reading a book about Him. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's also no biblical precedent for sequestering myself at home with the latest, greatest theology book. The precedent is washing my neighbor's stinky feet. Or at least enduring his barky dog with grace and patience.

As I read both of these books, the thought kept occurring to me that they're not talking about loving devil worshipers, bullying atheists, or ISIS recruiters. They're talking about loving other Christians, our brothers and sisters in the faith. It shouldn't be so hard.

It also occurred to me, repeatedly, that I don't have to pound the pavement looking for people to love. The people who need me to love them the most, and the ones who are sometimes the most challenging, live right inside my house.

I can't seem to get around the fact that love is what it's all about. And my excuses--"I'm just not good at love, I'm not wired for it the way others are"--aren't cutting it. When it comes to loving others, I may be a kindergartner, but I can't stay there. I've got so far to go. In His goodness, God has put people in my life who are love grad students. They give me a picture of what I'm shooting for. They give me hope that I can get out of kindergarten, that I can get serious about following the Great Commandment, that my hard heart can become soft and gooey.

When we love others, we pass from death to life (1 John 3:14). Anyone who does not love remains not only in kindergarten, but in death. That's motivating. Even more motivating is this example from Stanley's book: Is there anything that brings parents more joy than watching their children love, enjoy, and care for each other? I can't think of anything. What if that's just a hint of how God feels when we're loving His other children well?

2018 Book List

My book list this year is lengthy. Pace yourself, skim, or, if you're not a reader, come back next time.

CLASSIC FICTION (otherwise known as books my teenagers read in school this year)

Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

For years I’ve wanted to read the books my kids read in their high school lit classes, and because this book caused some controversy this year, I decided it was time to read it for myself. I was surprised, first of all, by its relative tameness. By today’s standards, it’s downright chaste. While I did not enjoy the book’s characters, I thought it was excellent fodder for conversation about morality. The premise is that a painting becomes a visual representation of the title character’s soul. While he stays young and beautiful, admired by everyone (at first), the painting bears the marks of his flagrant sins. The moral of the story: our actions have consequences, our friends rub off on us for better or worse, and we do have souls that are affected by the way we choose to live. These lessons were written on each page of the book, and in the hands of a good English teacher, Dorian Gray would lead to important conversation.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
This classic reminded me a little of The Bridges of Madison County without the sex. Except sadder. There’s not much here except hopelessness. The story is short and slow. Very little happens. I didn’t care about any of the characters. So what’s the point? Why do our high schoolers read this? Like Dorian Gray, it demonstrates that our actions have consequences, and sometimes we’ll live with those consequences the rest of our lives. We always have choices, even in desperate situations, and those choices should not be made impulsively. That’s what I got from it, but maybe a class full of AP students came up with a lot more.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin
When I talked to a group of high school students about this one, they brought up the contrast between rights and responsibility. I'm glad they've been taught to find something instructive in even the grimmest of novels. Written at the turn of the 20th century, this is a staple of the early feminism movement. Did that movement really wish to represent itself with a spoiled, selfish, indulgent narcissist of a woman who can’t find anything more meaningful to do with her time than contemplate how restless and unsatisfied she is with her husband and children? My suggestion to Edna, the main character, was to raise her own children, change some diapers, wash some dishes, and pursue gratitude. Life becomes a lot let restless when you have real work to do.


This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby was the book that made me fall in love with writing. Some of Fitzgerald’s literary genius is on display in Paradise, his first book, written when he was right out of college. Like Gatsby, there’s nothing uplifting here, and the characters are mostly unlikeable, especially the leads. But just about the time I thought I couldn’t take another page of it, I’d run across a sentence so well crafted that it gave me chills. This one, though, is probably only for the committed Fitzgerald readers.

MODERN FICTION

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
I don’t pick up a fiction book lightly. Because I only let myself read a handful a year, I do my research. Based on the reviews of the best books of 2017, this one was a clear choice. But once I started reading, I was reminded that fiction is full of people I don’t like. I’ve also noticed that as my kids have gotten older, I’m more critical of the way children and teens are portrayed in books. J.K. Rowling is brilliant, but 13-year-olds don’t talk like Harry Potter and Hermione Granger. And 15-and 16-year-olds (at least the ones I know) are not nearly as complex or predictable as the characters in this book.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
With most fiction books, you become engrossed in the lives of a small number of characters. Not this one. In Homegoing, a story that begins with two girls born to the same mother in an African village in the 1700s, characters’ whole lives begin and end in one chapter. Each chapter details the life of one of the descendants of the girls, taking us right into the present. I wouldn’t call this enjoyable reading, and certainly not easy reading. But it is another thought-provoking book on the horrors of slavery and its far-reaching consequences.

The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion
This sequal to The Rosie Project is light, far-fetched, quirky, a little inappropriate, and just plain fun.


NON-FICTION: My attempts to understand the world

Just Immigration: American Policy in Christian Perspective by Mark R. Amstutz
This recommendation from Christianity Today read like a doctoral dissertation. I’m sure there are better books that address this topic in a much more interesting, readable way. I did a lot of skimming but managed to get the point, one that I had already pretty much landed on for myself. The Bible does instruct us to care for the foreigner, but that does not entail opening up the borders and letting everyone in. It’s the church’s responsibility to care for those who are here, legally or illegally, and, perhaps more strategically, provide support for refugees in their own lands. It is the job of government to protect its people and its borders. The best argument Amstutz made was this: It is a person’s right to pull out of anything—a job, a club, a committee, a country. But it is not their right to receive automatic membership into something else. You don’t quit your job and then push your way into a new job. Companies have hiring procedures and due process. So do countries. There, I just saved you hours of difficult reading.

Choosing Donald Trump: Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him by Stephen Mansfield
I’ve been a bit obsessive in my quest to figure out what in the world happened in the last presidential election. Mansfield’s brief book—I read its 181 pages in a couple of days—is the most helpful book I’ve read so far. He enlightens us on Donald Trump’s own brand of “faith,” largely shaped by the pastor of his youth, the late Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking. Mansfield also unpacks the series of events that led evangelical Christians to overlook Trump’s obvious moral flaws and support him in droves. He urges those pastors and religious leaders who still have Trump’s ear to find and maintain a prophetic distance and speak words of life and truth tour president. The following quote is long, but it’s insightful. After writing about Trump’s lifelong admiration for religious teachers, and his respect for those who are willing to test and challenge him in order to make him better, Mansfield wrote: “Trump’s association with the nation’s leading ministers during the 2016 presidential campaign might have led to profound change for him and, ultimately, to a nobler president for the country. They might have called him to a more orthodox and full-bodied belief system. They might have challenged him about some of his extreme behaviors. When he swore, they might have reminded him of his younger listeners. When he called for violence against protestors or went on racist rants or spoke of women in disparaging terms, they might have reminded him of the example of Jesus and helped him recover his moral balance. They might have also whispered in his ear from time to time, ‘Always remember the poor.’ In short, had they maintained prophetic distance, had they been more interested in urging the candidate toward God and his ways and less interested in allying themselves to power at any moral cost, great good might have been done. It was largely not to be.” This book is certainly not letting Trump off the hook for his own bad behavior, but it also calls his supporters, those who call themselves followers of Christ, to their own responsibility. The religious conservatives who voted him into office “have taken responsibility for him now, and this may, in time, exact a very dear price.”

Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism by Drew Hart
This was the hardest book I read all year. I had to force myself to push beyond how it made me feel and swim through my sea of self-justifications to make it to the end. I have come to terms with the fact that I’m part of a dominant people group who have oppressed people for centuries. I’m in the process of learning why it’s important to be mindful and repentant of that and allowing it to shape the way I view people and the evening news. But oh it gets personal and hard when I’m awakened to my very own prejudices. It’s easier to take responsibility and repent for something your great-great grandfather did 150 years ago than what lies in your own heart today. Nothing fun or enjoyable about this read, and I had mental battles with the author throughout, but by the time I finished, I was glad I had allowed it to shape my perspective.


12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan Peterson
I felt like I deserved a trophy after finishing this 448-page book. If you’re not familiar with Jordan Peterson, Google him. He’s been called one of the most important thinkers of our day, and evangelicals have aligned with him because of his conservative viewpoint. He’s obviously a brilliant man, but he’s also pretty down-to-earth. His advice is solid: treat yourself like someone you’re responsible for helping; make friends with people who want the best for you; pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient; compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today; do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. The most interesting part of this book to me, though, was how someone can know the Bible inside and out and have a deep respect for God (or at least the idea of God) and completely miss the point about grace. What results is a skewed theology and a defeating conclusion: try to make the world a better place by being the best person you can be. He’s so close, and yet so far. Still, I was glad to have read his book. His words are mostly accessible and often clever, but this is not a book you can read in the living room while your kids play video games. It requires tremendous focus, and even with that, I felt like I only caught about half of what he was saying. It was worth the effort, though. I feel smarter for having read it. If you’re a serious reader and a deep thinker, you won’t want to miss this one. Otherwise, check out the much shorter summary version.


NON-FICTION: Topics relevant to my life right now

Letting Go: A Parent’s Guide to Understanding the College Years by Karen Levin Coburn and Madge Lawrence Treeger
This is supposedly the classic text book on releasing your child into the world of college. It’s been around a long time; the version I read was the sixth edition. I think I may have benefitted from an older version. This one focused a lot on issues of sexual identity and harassment and other buzz words of the day. While not all of it felt useful, I did take away some practical tips: leave right away (don’t dawdle on campus or even in town after you say goodbye to your student) and let your child propose the terms of his communication with the family. Ironically, I didn’t follow either of these, but I’ve still got three kids to go. Some good stuff nestled into these 500 pages, but not something I’d recommend for most people. Find something shorter.


Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? by Philip Yancey
I’ve always liked Yancey’s style, and he was a logical place to turn as I searched for wider perspectives on prayer. He includes interviews, scattered throughout the book, of people’s thoughts and experiences with prayer. This was a helpful book—though a bit long—and I particularly learned from his ideas on wrestling with God in prayer. Citing numerous examples, he encourages his readers to get in the trenches with God, to call out His qualities and ask Him to show up.


NON-FICTION: Some good and some great Christian topics

Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World by Eric Metaxas
I am the product of a rural education, which I like to blame for many of the educational gaps I seem to have. I knew a little about Martin Luther, but this book opened my eyes to just how significant his actions and writings were. I kept looking up to tell my kids what I thought were astounding things, to which they always responded, “Um, yes, mom. Did you not know that?” I relished every detail, and like anything Eric Metaxas writes, I hung on every word. Again, not a book for everyone, but if you’re at all interested in how Christianity moved from the Dark Ages into the modern world, and why we worship in so many of the ways we do, this book is immensely helpful. Metaxas connects the dots between Luther and the things we take for granted in the modern world. We assume the world has always been this way, but it hasn’t—not by a long stretch. The fact that Christians today don’t spend all our money on bone fragments believed to have come from the thumb of the Virgin Mary? Thank Martin Luther.

Letters to the Church by Francis Chan
I’ll read anything Chan writes, but this was especially good. It’s the kind of book that soaks down into your core. Very few days pass without one of Chan’s points returning to my mind. Could it really be that the greatest evangelism strategy of all time is simply that Christians love one another well? And is there anything simple about that? So much to chew on in this book. Required reading.

The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts by Joe Rigney
I’m going to recommend this one, even though I only made it halfway through. I tried reading it as a library loan on my Kindle but realized pretty quickly this is one of those rare books that I need to buy, read, and then read again. The theology is deep and thought provoking. The thesis is that everyday things—laughter, a good steak, a game with your kids—can be seen as holy and can draw us into deeper worship of God. This book came out in 2014, and I’m surprised I didn’t hear more about it. It’s good—even to the point of being a game changer in terms of my thinking. It’s more complex than I was expecting, but it’s the best kind of complex. I can’t wait to read more.

Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen
This is a staple of Christian nonfiction, and Nouwen has been on my list for a long time. I’ll definitely be reading more of his books. This one was written by Nouwen to a long-time friend, a nonbeliever, who asked Nouwen to explain the spiritual life in easily understandable terms. He answered with a discussion of four words: taken, blessed, broken, and given. I enjoyed reading the book and highlighted some profound statements, but I have to admit that five months later, I can’t remember much about it.

Keep Your Love On: Connection, Communication and Boundaries by Danny Silk
This book I read and discussed with a friend. Silk, a pastor, gives practical relationship tips that everyone can use. He includes a lot of marriage examples. That makes it extremely helpful for married couples, but it’s also applicable to other kinds of relationships. Most interesting to me was his discussion on what it means to be a powerful person. I don’t care for the term, but his explanation opened my eyes to myself and some of the tricky people around me. This is a great choice for anyone who wants to work on communicating clearly and setting good boundaries in relationships.

Uninvited: Living Loved When You Feel Less Than, Left Out, and Lonely by Lysa TerKeurst
This is a great book for certain people: those who have been divorced, dumped, unfriended, fired, or passed over. Or for those people who chronically struggle with feeling like they’re on the fringes of all the good stuff in life. For everyone else, skip ahead to a very useful chapter 14, which gives pages of truth speak for those times when you’re spinning out of control. My highlighter nearly ran out of ink on those pages.


LOOKING AHEAD: On my list for 2019
Falling Free
Irresistible: Reclaiming the New that Jesus Unleashed for the World
Feed the Mouth that Bites You
Your Teenager Isn’t Crazy
Letters to an American Christian
The Cost of Discipleship
Generous Justice
The Return of the Prodigal Son
Practice Resurrection
Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner
Before We Were Yours
Why We Sleep
How to Think

The Restoring Reign of God

My advent reading has pointed me to what is my new favorite passage of Scripture. (That will change in a week or two, as it always does, but it's my favorite today.) It's Isaiah's account of the great reversal that will occur when Jesus Christ reigns on earth. Isaiah 11:6-8 talks of things like wolves living peacefully beside lambs and small children making friends with vipers. It's nature the way God intended.

My mind has been running wild with its own pictures of this great reversal. Imagine a world with no failed marriages and no abandoned children. No pimples and no brain tumors. No bullets and no roadside bombs. No immigration battles and no government shutdowns. No lies and no fears. No rejection and no despair. No addiction and no suicide. No guilt and no shame. No starvation and no gluttony. No earthquake, hurricane, flood, wildfire, or avalanche. As Isaiah said, "They will neither harm nor destroy."

The most helpful definition I've heard for the kingdom of God is this: the saving, restoring reign of God on earth. Saving and restoring. In other words, what Isaiah was prophesying. What Jesus came to earth to do. What we so desperately need right now. 

As I ponder my new favorite passage, the thought that has come to my mind at least a thousand times returns again. Why, God? Why did you create the perfect world and then allow it to be corrupted? You knew we'd inhabit a world of brain tumors and starving children and murder. Why did you build that possibility into your glorious creation?

I'm sure the answer is way more complicated than I could ever understand. But I think part of it is that He had something even better in mind for us. The restoration of His creation is somehow better than the original creation. God sending His son to earth to pay for our sin is somehow better than if we had never known sin at all. It's a pale, hollow example, but I think of taking my kids to the ocean. If I'd told them there was an ocean, they would have believe it existed. They might have spent some time thinking about it, and they might have even grown to love the picture of it in their minds. But until we actually took them to the ocean, they never really experienced it. They needed to hear the roar of the tide coming in, feel the sand between their toes and the salt water on their lips, be nearly pulled under by the force of the waves to truly appreciate the ocean.

If I'd never experienced the ugliness of my sin, I would not understand the beauty of forgiveness. If I'd never been burned by my own self-sufficiency, I wouldn't know of my desperate dependence on God. If I'd never tasted grace, how could I possibly conceive of God's goodness? If He'd not sent His son, how would we know the depth of His mercy? Without His most costly sacrifice, how would we know how much we're loved?

My new favorite passage ends this way: "The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." As cool as it would be to pet a lion's mane or never again feel rejected, the greatest part of our restoration is the knowledge of the Lord. We weren't made to just know about God. He wants for us an experiential kind of knowing. 

I can't make sense of it--the tree in the Garden, God incarnate in a dirty animal trough, a bloody, humiliating crucifixion. Why did He do it that way? Because it was the best way. The perfect way. And some day, when I see lambs frolicking with wolves, it will all make sense.

"In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious." Isaiah 11:10

Waiting and Yearning

I am a Christmas girl through and through, but I have to admit that I haven't acknowledged advent much in the past. Beyond the lighting of the candles at church, it hasn't really registered in my mind. Of course I'm excited for Christmas, but I spend more time on Christmas cards and shopping than intentionally anticipating the coming of Christ.

Not this year. This year I'm all in. I'm expectant, eager, yearning. That's a funny word to me--yearning. I'm not much of a yearner. If I yearn for something, it's either for something easily attainable (a bowl of ice cream) or something impossibly unmeasurable (more faith). As a result, I don't usually yearn. But I've also never had a child living 1,500 miles away. I've never gone 3 1/2 months, or even 3 1/2 weeks, without seeing one of my children. Let me tell you, there's some yearning going on.

Many weeks ago, my youngest daughter made a paper chain counting down the days to Braden's return home. It went ceiling to floor. Today, it has two links. Two measly little links! We are so close. Except that the southeast is getting the storm of a generation. Charlotte, North Carolina, in particular, is getting dumped on. I've never given Charlotte a thought, but tonight, all of my thoughts and prayers are directed right there. Because the route from Virginia to Colorado goes straight through Charlotte, at least on American Airlines.

And so we wait with great expectation. This non-yearning mom finds herself yearning like never before. The last time I remember being so desperately eager for something was when this same child of mine was nine days overdue and I was so tired of being pregnant that I would have pulled him out through my nose if I thought it would have worked. Here I am again, 19 years later, praying that he will just get here already so the party can begin.

The anticipating, waiting, and longing are so present with me that they shape my thoughts and perspective. They have completely shaped my season of advent. I think of the Israelites, God's chosen people living as hostages in their own land, crying out for deliverance: "O come, o come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel. Come and cheer our spirits by thine advent here." That is yearning! Their hearts were ready, their eyes focused. Only their Savior would satisfy.

Only my Savior satisfies. My head has always known it, but today I feel it. As delightful as the ham and carols and presents and family will be on Christmas day, they can't begin to compare to Him. As much as my heart will race and my eyes will leak when I see Braden's face, even that can't hold a candle to what it will be like to see my Lord and Savoir some day.

Come home, my son. I can't wait to see you! Come soon, my Lord. I can't wait to be with you.

Thank you for the gift of yearning.

Word of the Year

I have a friend who chooses a word for every year. She puts a good amount of time into thinking and praying about it, and then she comes up with a great word to capture her anticipation of the year ahead. I thought this was such a good idea that I tried it myself last year.

Turns out, I'm not as good at it as my friend is. All I came up with was "BIG." Not very inspiring or descriptive. But at the end of last year, "big" was how everything in my life felt. I was asking God for some big things. We were also walking alongside our son in making his college decision, which felt very big. So "big" is where I landed, although it didn't really take. It sort of passed right out of my mind shortly after I chose it. As much as I love words, maybe this whole word-for-the-year thing wasn't for me.

Imagine my surprise when three-fourths of the way through the year, God gave me His own word. One day as I was praying, it just kept tumbling out of my mouth. Every day, it kept coming back. I couldn't get it out of my mind. STEADFAST. That was His word for me. (An improvement over "big," yes?)

It's a word I desperately needed. More like a whole mentality I needed. I have always been pretty even-keeled. I'm not given to mood swings or frequent outbursts of emotion. But this fall, I found myself all over the place, always with regard to my kids. Two of them had a really rough fall, and I was right in it with them. In fact, I have that magical mothering power to take what my kids are feeling and amp it up a hundred percent before owning it for myself. The picture I had in my mind was of my hands clenched to the back seat of a rollercoaster while my legs flew all helter-skelter out behind me, wind whipping me all over the place as I held on for dear life.

Into this picture, God spoke the word "steadfast." It didn't happen overnight, but the rollercoaster stopped taking the dips at 90 MPH, my legs found their footing, and my racing heart became, well, steadfast. I was reminded that my kids' experiences and emotions belong to them. I don't need to take them on myself. I've already done sixth grade. I've been through high school and college. I don't need to relive the emotion of those turbulent years. I need to be an adult. (I get to be an adult.) I get to be the one who's not tossed around by a bad day at school. I'm the one who gets to be steadfast, anchored in maturity and truth and the wisdom that comes from decades of walking with Christ.

Like David fleeing from Saul, I can say, "My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast!" (Psalm 57:7). And I can live like I believe it. It's amazing how one word can change your whole perspective. Over the past several weeks, especially, as I've struggled with Braden being so far away from us at Thanksgiving, as I've wrestled through ugly feelings of jealousy toward my friends whose kids are coming home, I've noticed that my anxious heart has become steadfast. The disappointment and jealousy just sort of disappeared. My desire to run and hide until Thanksgiving was long gone went away, too. Now I'm actually looking forward to Thursday, with genuine thanksgiving.

God has been writing steadfast love and faithfulness on the tablet of my heart (Proverbs 3:3). Isn't that a far better picture than the frantic woman on the crazy train?

My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast.

No Sting Here

"Where, o death, is your sting?"

Have any greater words ever been written? They may be my favorite in all the Bible.

Last week, I went to see a friend who is in the last days of her life. Younger than me and a mom of five kids, she was diagnosed with lung cancer a year ago. Though at first it looked as if she may have only a few months to live, she and her husband were able to award their son his high school diploma in May. Yesterday her oldest daughter got married. Some happy, milestone moments in the midst of a very hard situation.

Five days ago I sat with this sweet friend, who is long past fearing, worrying, regretting, or grieving. She's now in a simple, pure, beautiful child-like state. A month ago, I would have felt awkward and sad visiting her. I'm not touchy-feely, and I'm not good with sick people. But when sick people become dying people, and when dying people regress (or is it progress?) into their simplest selves, all that awkwardness melts away. The me who barely hugs my own mother sat at my friend's feet, holding onto her, even relishing the honor of feeding her.

Her words were jumbled, but her eyes were clear. On a few occasions, the gibberish was suddenly and incredibly interrupted by a moment of clarity. She would squeeze my hands, lock in on my eyes, and say the most wonderful things, things that made the hairs on my arm stand on end. "He just wants us to believe" was one of them. Another time it was, "He wants to put us back together, to make us whole." Simple statements spoken so quietly, yet they bore into my soul. These were words from God.They weren't booming prophet words, like Moses preaching to the Israelites. They were more the words of a little girl who's delivering a message from her daddy.

In all honesty, this is why I showed up. I did bring a meal, but I also brought expectation. I've been around the dying enough to know that there's something supernatural about it. This is holy ground. No sanctuary or cathedral can compare to the holy space occupied by one transitioning to heaven. With one foot on earth and the other in eternity, the veil between the two becomes almost transparent. And those who sit in the presence of the dying get just a glimpse of it. Such a sacred place. O, death, where is your sting?

When you look into the face of the dying, you have to ask yourself, "Do I really believe? Do I believe that in 12 hours or 12 days this friend of mine, the one whose feet I'm sitting at now, will be sitting like this at the feet of God? Creator of heaven and earth? Do I believe it's all true?"

Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. Any doubt I carry with me in regular life disappears in this sacred space. I look at her face and I see her doing holy business with the Lord. I know where she's headed. I know that some day I'll occupy the same space she's in now. And never have I said so certainly, "Oh, yes. I believe."