Rocks, Rails, and The Bible--They're All Hard

As you read last week, I've had some health challenges in the last year. Or so. 

Funny thing is, once approximately 27 doctors, 478 blood tests, and 3500 random guesses/unsolicited advice/WebMd visits were all involved? The answer was something no one expected. One of the drugs I've been taking for eight years to keep my body from rejecting my donor kidney was causing my body to reject basically everything else. Like food.

Food is important. I think I learned that in health class at some point. But now I'm quite certain of it. Nutrients contained in food keep us alive. And my body was having none of them. For a long time.

So . . . something meant to make me healthy and well ended up poisoning me. It happens, to a select few.

Spiritual Poison

Hard, hard rocks

Spiritually, I'm afraid it happens to many of us. I think automatically of the Pharisees that Jesus confronted time and again. His basic message to them? You have a good foundation. You want to know how to please God. But you've taken it so far from its purpose that you're poisoning yourselves. And everyone else.

The Pharisees had rules. Lots of them. They began well enough—with a desire to obey and follow God. They began in Scripture. But they got a tad out of hand. Anytime there are 613 rules for getting through your day, things are a tad out of hand.

My medication began well. It was intended to keep my body from killing a life-saving donor kidney. And it did that. But along the way, it started killing me instead. That's a little out of hand. A bit of straying from the original intent.

I fear--no, I know--we've done that, too. We've looked at the guardrails God set up for life as He intended and, instead of being grateful for their life-saving capacity, we've used them to beat others into anything but life. Too often, we've poisoned the body with something that was supposed to help it.

Bedrock is Hard Stuff--Be Careful

We've taken the basic moral bedrock and, instead of standing on it with arms outstretched to heaven in gratitude, we've smacked peoples' heads on it. Not always. Often Christians are awesomely gracious, and I have been witness to that beauty so many times. But enough for some to feel poisoned by the people God meant to be good news. This is not good news. For anyone.

Gratitude is November's watchword.

The way to respond to God's guardrails is with gratitude, not self-righteousness. 

And the beautiful life they give.
When God does it his way.

I am grateful for the chance to live with fewer consequences for my dumb choices if I live by the rules. But I am not free to glibly inform others that their consequences are their own dumb fault. I'm not even free to decide that this is true. Only God can decide if an effect is a result of some cause. It's not in my bandwidth. It's not up to me to call a tsunami or an earthquake or AIDS God's judgment because I don't get to be God. The complex nuances of cause and effect in my own body turned out difficult enough to navigate, let alone believing I can judge those effects on a cosmic basis.

Gratitude dictates that I fall on my knees in worship and then rise in service. Not judgment. Gratitude that I have what is life-giving should make me a life-giving conduit, not an arbiter of who gets to be in and who is out.

Making God's life-giving Word into something that poisons those it comes in contact with is something for which we will surely answer.  [tweet this].The last year and a half have taught me a great deal about turning something good into a weapon rather than a balm.

 “I tell you, her sins—and they are many—have been forgiven, so she has shown me much love. But a person who is forgiven little shows only little love.” (Luke 7.47)

(Even better, read the whole story from Jesus here.)


In what ways can we use God's life-giving words to give life this week? How can we guard ourselves from the opposite? Let's talk about it.

(Don't) Clean up Your Mess

Hey, what's wrong with messes? We look great, right?

The more I live with people instead of just coexisting in proximity, the more I recognize something—there are a of of messed up people out there. Even more messed up than I am. Yes, true story.

The other thing I've come to recognize is that being messed up is not necessarily a bad thing. Neat lives are often a sign of lives so carefully curated that they are museum dioramas, not lives. And the thing about museum dioramas? They're full of dead things. Stuffed dead things. This is not appealing to most of us as an environment.

A little bit of mess signals a life that's lived in, like a couch with graham cracker crumbs welded to the underside of the cushions. That life has taken risks, known joy, and has the stains to prove it. Some messes are dangerous, toxic spills that needs to be cleaned up out of our lives. But others? We need them to prove we're alive.

I never wanted or imagined the mess of a loved one with mental illness and attendant self-destructive behavior. Given the choice, I'd have picked the carefully curated life. Having chosen that, I would have missed out on a lot that has made me alive.

I had no idea I was living amid dead things.

Sometimes messes just mean something better is coming.

Because of that experience, I've been able to share a lot with people whose lives are broken in various ways, and similar variations on a theme keep returning. It's hard. It hurts. But we have learned so much. When you're in the slime and mud of the mess, though, you really want to know what exactly people have learned. What could possibly make this worthwhile? What could anyone tell me to make me appreciate this wrenching time of uncertainty?

I'm not sure. I suspect that when people are slogging through those times is not always the best opportunity to offer sage advice. Most of us aren't ready to hear it when the pain is shrieking louder than the wisdom. But people ask. What do you find out about life, and yourself, when your world is a mess? How do you even survive?

The answer to the second question is easy: God's grace and insistent love. Nothing more or less.

The answer to the first could go on a while. But here are a few thoughts.

I learned that grace was a choice I didn't make often enough. 

I had theoretically believed in grace, but operationally, I extended it mostly to those who didn't look like they needed it. For those with rough edges and incomprehensible, annoying behavior? Maybe when they got themselves together. My reality of grace was not even close to God's dream of it for me. I had no idea that grace looked a lot more like hugging a drug addict than praying for lunch at Panera.

“Grace got out of hand the moment the God of the universe hung on a Roman cross and with outstretched hands looked out upon those who had hung him there and declared, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' Grace has been out of hand for more than two thousand years now. We best get used to it.” (Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday)

I never understood that before. I didn't really want to. Now, I don't want anything else.

I learned that love is always a good thing to decide. 

You might get hurt. You will be taken advantage of. But love reserved for those who deserve it and won't tamper with it is not love at all. It's a calculated investment. CS Lewis said, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.”

I didn't understand that until I had to choose to love not only my loved one in a mess but the people it brought into our lives. It seemed God put them there despite what I wanted, so the only real choice was to love them. And they did, indeed, break my heart. But broken hearts are the best kind for letting others inside.   [tweet this]. God's dream for me was to lavish unconditional love, as He did. My reality had been fearful half loving.

I learned to honestly believe that He loves us. 

He loves our messes. Really.
He can handle them.

Driving with a loved one to a potential prison sentence is about as messy as it gets. Until in the middle of praying you hear those words on the radio, “If His grace is an ocean we're all sinking; oh, how He loves us so.” And you realize for perhaps the first, or at least the most profound, time that they are true. Not just for you but for the person sitting next to you. And all those other persons out there who have messes in their lives and need that grace like an ocean. He loves. Beyond our imagination.

He takes care of the messes, beyond our imagination. All the worries and terrors and anxieties about them do nothing helpful, while putting the mess in His hands and leaving it there always does. Because He Loves are the most needed and true words you will ever hear, and they are bedrock when life feels more like a mudslide than a picnic.

I don't know if you're feeling messy right now, and I don't know if it helps to be told those things. Maybe you have to learn them yourself in the fire. I think, though, that at least it helps to know someone else has been in that mess, and it has not won.

Something better is still coming.
We still have not finished this mess.

Have you seen the sign some people hang in their kitchen that reads “God Bless This Mess”? Yeah. That's about right. Ask Him to. He will.

Screaming Comets, Hot Messes, and Grace

I have been blessed for the last several months to be a part of the launch team for Jen Hatmaker's new book, For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards (available here on Amazon).

But guys, the wild unpredictable can be gorgeous.

This is the final installment of my series taking chapters of the book that spoke to my work and discussing them. Thus far,we've covered crazy self-imposed expectations of parenting, responding to the millennial generation, and allowing the gospel of Jesus to be what He said it was.

This week: grace. That's it. Just grace. The topic of my seminary thesis, so you know, it is just a tad important to me. However, that thesis was written twenty years ago, and you know what? I had no idea what the word meant.

Oh, theologically, sure. We were told to choose one word that defined what we believed and described God and the gospel, or something like that. I chose grace. Somehow, I knew it would be a very important word for me. Or God knew. But really? I hadn't a clue.

More life had to be lived before I would have any idea what grace meant. Far more hurt had to be experienced, far more gratitude realized, and far more pride peeled away before I could even get a start on a kindergarten comprehension of that word.

See, I was a high school debater. I was also high school valedictorian. You know what all that means, in addition to being facts I can trot out to impress approximately no one at this point? I specialized in persuasion. I knew how to argue, I knew how to research, and I knew how to get it right. When I became a Christian, I took those skills with me into the brave new world of belief.

I soon discovered they could be used as weapons.

I believed in grace, but it was mostly grace for those who had already repented. My concept of grace looked more like forgiveness for those who already had figured out how to get it right.

Now, I understand the truth of what Jen says about that line of thinking.

“We tend to formulize the mysterious, opting for a more manageable gospel than the wild, unpredictable one we have. We’d like one with clearer edges and better boundaries, because who can fathom a Savior born in a barn who washed the feet of His followers before dying for people who hated Him?

It is no wonder humanity has long preferred legalism, which involves much cleaner territory. Give me a rule any day. Give me a clear “in” and “out” because boundaries make me feel safe. If I can clearly mark the borders, then I am assured of my insider status—the position I feel compelled to defend, the one thing I can be sure of. I want to stand before God having gotten it right. Doctrine is tidier terrain than flesh and blood.”

I wanted life, and grace, to be manageable. It wasn't until life got so unmanageable for me, beyond the capabilities of my valedictorian credentials, that grace screamed in, stunning and electrifying, like a comet with a star-streamed tail across my dark sky. Disorienting like that, too.

The God who spoke from a flaming bush and pushed his way into a cattle stall swaddled in blood and fluid never offered us clean lines. He brazenly led the way to coloring outside the clean lines when he dined with prostitutes and called tax collectors out of treetops.

God led us into the wild terrain of unmitigated, incomprehensible grace. And sometimes, we don't like it.  [tweet this].It messes with our clean lines. It defies our borders. It threatens our safe standing.

Grace forces us to stare at the depths of our own capacity for sin. Honestly, I'd far rather stare at the depths of someone else's.

Looking at our own forces us to look at those others differently, as folks just like us. The place this is the most difficult, sometimes, is right in the chair next to us on a Sunday morning. Because if anyone should have it right by now, it should be those other church people, right?

Wrong.

Church can sometimes be like this, right? And this is FUN.

“Church people are regular old sinners too. If I could fix this, I would. As it turns out, the church isn’t a gathering of shiny new pennies. It lets anyone in the door! All sorts of hooligans fill the sanctuaries: kind and good ones, angry and cynical ones, mean and judgmental ones, smart and funny ones, broken and sad ones, weird and awkward ones, precious and loving ones, scared and wounded ones, brave and passionate ones, insiders and outliers, newbies and lifers and trying-one-more-timers. Just a whole bunch of human people. Every church has all these folks. It is just the hottest mess, but clearly you belong here because everyone does.”

Grace. A church throwing open its doors and admitting to the world that it is what it is. Not a bunch of people who have it all right and are waiting for the world outside to realize it. A bunch of people who, like the Israelites of old, have gotten it wrong time and again but who still show up, still try, still ask God to take them just one step closer to what He wants them to be. People who do not cover up their awkwardness to welcome the awkward into their world.

We don't see it often. But when we do, we recognize it immediately. It's grace.

“The breadth of God’s family is mercifully wide. Grace has no discernment, apparently. Jesus created a motley crew, plucking us from every context and inaugurating a piecemeal clan that has only ever functioned with mercy. We should be grabbing hands, throwing our heads back, and laughing that God saved us all, because surely this is the messiest family ever and He loves us anyway. Our shared redemption should keep us grateful and kind, because what other response even makes sense?”

That last line. That's grace. 

A favorite quote from another great book.

For the Love of Five Great Quotes

As I mentioned in Monday's blog, I've been blessed to be a part of the launch team for Jen Hatmaker's new book, For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards, (officially releasing next week!). It has been a ride I won't forget for a book that should be on everyone's bookshelf and heart. This Friday, we are linking up to share our favorite five quotes from the book. Let me tell you, this was tough. Five? Five???? I have, like, five hundred. But here we are. I whittled it down. Here is a quick taste of why I love her words.

"If it isn’t also true for a poor single Christian mom in Haiti, it isn’t true. 

Theology is either true everywhere or it isn’t true anywhere. This helps untangle us from the American God Narrative and sets God free to be God instead of the My-God-in-a-Pocket I carried for so long. It lends restraint when declaring what God does or does not think, because sometimes my portrayal of God’s ways sounds suspiciously like the American Dream and I had better check myself. Because of the Haitian single mom. Maybe I should speak less for God." 

This one has gone into a sermon already. And will again. Amen, sister. Soooo amen.

"May I suggest a starting place as truth receivers? It is okay for someone else to struggle. Furthermore, it is okay to not fix it/solve it/answer it/discredit it. Another believer can experience tension, say something true that makes people uncomfortable, and God will not fall off His throne. It is not our responsibility to fix every mess. If someone steps onto the scary ledge of truth, it is enough to acknowledge her courage and make this promise: I am here with you as your friend, not your Savior. 

We are not good gods over one another; we are better humans beside each other."

"Are we arrogant and judgmental? Do we subtly (or overtly) teach our children to suspect anyone “other”? Do we put mainly defensive spiritual tools in our kids’ hands, fostering an “against them” rather than “for them” posture? Do we emphasize behavior over character? Because good behavior won't guarantee anything. If they don’t love Jesus and people, it matters zero if they remain virgins and don’t say the F-word. 

We must shepherd their hearts, not just their hemlines. 

The best we can do is give them Jesus. Not rules, not behaviors, not entertainment, not shame. I have no confidence in myself but every confidence in Jesus."

"You’ll never regret parting with grace, but you might deeply regret burning a bridge that might one day be safe to venture back over again."

"The breadth of God’s family is mercifully wide. Grace has no discernment, apparently. Jesus created a motley crew, plucking us from every context and inaugurating a piecemeal clan that has only ever functioned with mercy. We should be grabbing hands, throwing our heads back, and laughing that God saved us all, because surely this is the messiest family ever and He loves us anyway. 

Our shared redemption should keep us grateful and kind, because what other response even makes sense?"

Is this enough to make you preorder the book? Take a look on Amazon? Well, you can right here. Be back Monday with more.

Mostly Good Is a Raging Success

I have been blessed beyond expectations for the last several months to be a part o the launch team for Jen Hatmaker's new book, For the Love (available for preorder now on Amazon).

Beyond expectation, because beside the opportunity to read a fantastic book before anyone else (I am slightly competitive?), the community that has formed among the launch team members has been phenomenal. Advice, weeping with those who weep, laughter, and discussions about online dating have been just a few of the things discussed. You may not want to know. We hang it all out there, and it feels like community. Which is kind of what this book is all about.

For the next few weeks, I'll be taking chapters of the book that meant a lot to me and discussing them. Please, chime in.

Chapters 1,9,10:

Worst Beam Ever, Hope for Spicy Families, and Surviving School

Because balance beams are for gymnasts, not parents.

Raising kids. In a Pinterest world. Can I get an amen on that dilemma? The subtitle of the book says it all here: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards.

There is a reason my talk “The Enemy of Good Enough” is popular among MOPS groups. (Though not as popular as the anger management for moms one. That's a ringer anywhere.) We all feel “not good enough.” We all doubt ourselves. No matter how many birthday parties we throw, how many classrooms we volunteer in, how many times we read Good Night Moon together (and it is a lot of times), we still feel there is more we should be doing to ensure our kids will grow up safe, sane, and with a low likelihood of criminal activity.

Not enough. Not enough. Never. Enough.

The funny thing is, as Jen points out, no generation of parents has ever done more to effect that guarantee.

“Condemnation is a trick of the enemy, not the language of the heavens. Shame is not God’s tool, so if we are slaves to it, we’re way off the beaten path. And it is harsh out there, debilitating actually. If your inner monologue is critical, endlessly degrading, it’s time to move back to grace. Then we can breathe and assess our own parenting with the same kindness we extend to others. Only our overly-critical, overly-involved generation could engineer such carefully curated childhood environments and still declare ourselves failures. We are loving, capable mothers reading the room all wrong. . . .We no longer assess our lives with any accuracy. We have lost the ability to declare a job well-done. We measure our performance against an invented standard and come up wanting, and it is destroying our joy. 

We need to quit trying to be awesome and instead be wise.”

You know what a huge part of the problem with not letting ourselves off the hook is? We truly think that, if we remain on this self-manufactured hook, we can control the outcome. The problem is, there is no guarantee. Ever. No amount of quality parental hoop-jumping will ever ensure your kids turn out perfect. They will never be totally safe from either harm in the world or their own bad choices. And that kills us. So we try to control it with every little pinterest-approved healthy meal or bonding craft we can muster. We will get it right. Enough will ensure the future.

Enough never is. It never will be. Stop trying to be awesome. Rest in the grace of knowing, really knowing, that the One who is in control has this. No promises of safety. But abundant promises of care and provision and loving arms that wrap around you in all heartaches and fears.

Because this is just not real life.

We can't ensure the future, and in fact, we shouldn't. Our kids do not need to grow up expecting mom to create wonderful experiences every time something scary or threatening or sad happens. They need us to hold their hands and bring them before the One who can get them through the sad/threatening/scary times. The times they will face someday without mommy around. They need us to teach them how to handle sad and scary. All by themselves. Without dolphin sandwiches. (You'll just have to read the book to understand that one.)

I love this quote that lets us all off that terrible hook we put ourselves on:

“Can I tell you my goal for my kids? That their childhood is mostly good. People, I declare “mostly good” a raging success. If I am mostly patient and they are mostly obedient, great. If we are mostly nurturing and they turn out mostly well-adjusted, super.”

Isn't that freeing? Isn't mostly good truly good enough? Can we give ourselves grace to be mostly good? Our kids will thank us.

Find Jen's book here. Trust me, this is so worth it. I'll keep telling you why for the next couple weeks!

A Letter To Me: What I Wish I Had Known about "Different" Kids (and parents)

We interrupt this series on the book 7 to bring you . . . something else.

The truth is, I don't have time to write The Things right now.  This means that 1) I also don't have time to clean the house right now, which means 2) I have nothing to purge from my life per the 7 book rules for June. I will get back to it. I promise. And maybe, I'll get back to cleaning the house, too. But, well, let's not go overboard.

So today, I am linking to  a post I did for a friend over at her fun blog called Mrs. Disciple. She is doing a series on letters we could write to ourselves at a younger age. Oh yes, all those things we wish we had known. All those things we wish we had done differently. All those things we know God has covered with grace anyway, in spite of us.

If you have been the parent of a special needs child, or you know one, you know. Those moms need special grace. They need some things I wish I had known all those years ago. I hope and pray that these small words might help just one be supplied with that encouragement.

So please, click on the post above. (It's the word "post." Or it's here again.) Enjoy, share, whatever. And have a great Monday.

laughter, joy, and making poopy soap

The sun is setting on another cold day (who knew?), and I should have written a blog post hours ago. But I didn't. I didn't feel like it. Like that excuse would fly in the real world.

Then I remembered the Monday Joy Dare, and I thought, maybe. Maybe that's just what  need on another cold (though warm relative to the last month of Mondays) day of no motivation. I've been playing with the idea of joining in on the Joy Dare for a while, but honestly, time. Just . . . time. One more thing to add, and anyway, I already blogged on Mondays.

Still, today of all Mondays, I need to take some time to discover joy. To be grateful. To drop kick thoughts of anything other than joy in my Savior and the abundant life he's given me for no good reason except that he loves me, also for no good reason that I can come up with. Theologically or personally. Some things as huge as grace defy our tiny clinical reasons.

Just take my word for it--I need this today. Maybe you do, too.

The Joy Dare asks people to count their blessings, basically. Then chronicle them, because, hey, we all know no one will ever remember what she thought of five minutes later if it isn't written down. Let alone five weeks later when we really need something to be grateful for to get us through. Thus, chronicling. In any way you like.

Its funny, because before I saw this dare, this is the assignment I gave my friend Wally. Write down three things you're grateful for every day. He texts them to me. And no matter how little you think you have to be thankful for, let me tell you, Wally probably has you beat. When I told him to do this, he was fresh out of prison with nothing to his name, homeless, jobless, and facing threats to toss him back in because he had no permanent address. Hard to have one when you have no way to pay the rent. Did I mention all the blizzards they've been having on the Northeast?

See, I knew that if Wally could find three things every day now, at his worst, he could find them anytime. I also knew that doing it would make him look for, and FIND, three things. It's magic, I tell you.

Right now, I need three things. So today's joy prompt is "Three times you laughed today." I can't remember the details of why I may have laughed today. (See? That's why we write things down. I told you.) But I know they most likely had something to do with my kids. They are excellent laugh-creators. So my laughter is tied to them, and that is good.

I laughed making soap with my oldest last night. She invited me to share in her passion for what she loves to do. Instead of huddling in a reading a book, which I had planned, I made soap. I definitely remember laughing when we both realized it was going to turn out reminiscent of the color of pooh, and I made her promise it would not color my face. "It won't. I promise. It shouldn't."

It's beautiful soap. I won't remember the book later, even after I finish it. But I'll remember that hour of soap making. It was worth a laugh of enjoyment.

I laughed when our middle child came in with her whirlwind trademark style, looking for food, picking up mail, and offering up love. In the midst of the whirlwind, she stopped to try to explain to her California-raised roommate that licking an icicle just meant it melted, not that it stuck to your tongue a la Christmas Story flag poles. I definitely laughed.

She isn't just here for the food. I'm blessed to know that. It's worth a laugh of joy.

I laughed when youngest tried to explain to our exchange student why American Valentine's Day doesn't have to be about boyfriends and girlfriends but can just be about love. Some things don't translate well. But I am blessed that she knows her value doesn't come from being loved by a boy. And I'm doubly blessed that she's got the courage and the spirit to open her home and status as the only child left to a stranger from another country who has become dear to us all.

The sheer joy of knowing a kid I gave birth to, with all my flaws and fears, could be that adventurous and giving is worth a laugh of amazement.

Have you laughed today? Have you felt plain, unadulterated joy and the healing force it is? Have you been grateful? It's the key. Look around, Find your things. Take the joy dare even. You don't have anything to lose, and you could gain a good dose of joy.