I used to pray my kids would grow up to do great things for God. I grew up and didn’t do anything great for God, but maybe my role was to be the MOTHER of people who did great things for God. So I prayed for that. What my kids do for God isn’t what burns in my belly anymore.
“The healing path plunges us into the depths of our doubt, where a new faith can be born. This faith, birthed in the desert and the valley, frees us to remember a past not only with loss, but with redemption. It leads us to a perspective that is full of God, therefore deepening our trust that redemption will dawn tomorrow as it did once before. First, however, this process often confronts us with who or what we really have been trusting rather than God.”
Dan Allender
The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You Into a More Abundant Life (Waterbrook Press, 2000)
I took my daughter to visit my alma mater yesterday. She wants to do music education, so we toured the buildings, including the performing arts center where the sights and smells popped a cork, and a thousand memories exploded on my brain. I had to catch my breath.
I don’t think God speaks to us in audible words, like, “Hey George – hope you’re enjoying the nice breeze tonight. Love ya, Bud.” He just touches us at our core, and if we’re paying attention, we hear it.
I think the reason I can’t seem to publish anything lately is because the truth of my life is brutal right now. And I want to be able to understand it myself first. Organize it in meaningful categories – each one with a cool, totally-makes-sense solution.
Today I read Self Harmers in the Church by Sharon Dickens, and I remembered my close brush with becoming a cutter just 18 months ago. I’m not super excited to share this with you. It’s something I’d like to pretend I never thought about. But my experience gave me some personal insights into this subject, […]
What’s the purpose of that 22-year-old’s life cut from all his potential just as he was being launched from his parent’s nest? What’s the purpose of a young mother who doesn’t live to see her offspring grow up? What’s the purpose of the millions of tiny babies nobody knew? What’s the purpose of all the old people who will die in obscurity, never having made history?
We sang this in church on Sunday. It was like a cool balm on a hot, festering wound. I hope it comforts someone (you!) as much as it comforted me. XOXOXO
It’s been a month of marinating in Buechner’s Telling the Truth. Oh my. It’s delish. So I wrote a little bit about how Beuchner presents the gospel as tragedy HERE. But he makes an argument for the gospel as comedy as well. Comedy is that genre in literature that takes a situation of (often) exaggerated […]
I’m reading Telling the Truth by Frederick Buechner. I don’t know why I’ve never heard of him or read anything by him before, but I know I’ve found a kindred spirit. This book is about the gospel and how it is like a tragedy, a comedy, and a fairy tale. So far I’m on the […]
