This week we briefly discuss the interesting experience that I blogged about yesterday, and how it happened right after we had the discussion last week about being more open to the Holy Spirit. We also talk about some strange dreams we’ve had lately, and we explore this piece of marriage advice: Men, just let your wives decorate!
We could hear the woman wailing before we saw her. Chad and I were wandering around the store, browsing while Emerald was in dance class down the street. We had had an easy, leisurely morning, enjoying Chad’s day off. Emerald had looked adorable in her little dance leotard, with unreasonably long braids hanging down her back, skipping into her class just a few moments earlier. The older kids had smiled in spite of themselves on a Monday morning before they left for school. And, Chad and I were happily chatting about whatever came to mind while we roamed the aisles of the grocery store.
Then we heard the unmistakable sound of human anguish.
We walked over a few aisles and saw her sitting there, surrounded by a small crowd. Her weathered hands covered her face, and beneath her fingers, twisted with age, she cried out. A tall man came toward us, pushing his cart. He could see that we were concerned. I think she just got a phone call, he said. Someone has died. She’s okay. He smiled at us wearily and continued with his shopping. Still she moaned there on the bench, rocking back and forth like a mama trying to soothe an inconsolable child.
Chad walked over and sat down beside her. She was shaking her head in disbelief. She sobbed, He can’t be dead! He can’t be dead! Her grief poured out. Her eighteen year old grandson had been found dead in his home. Oh, I can’t believe it! she groaned, and Chad patted her arm. I’m a pastor, he said, Would you mind if I pray with you?
She begged him to pray. And, right there in the grocery store, a broken old woman, a pastor and his wife, some store employees, and a couple more strangers circled up and cried out to the God of all Life in this moment of unspeakable pain. The grieving woman nodded in agreement while Chad spoke, yet every few seconds she would stop and cover her face, shaking her head no, willing her own tired mind to realize that this was really happening. She had outlived her precious grandson.
The prayer ended, and the store employees ushered her to a back office where she could wait for her daughter to come and take her home. She never did stop sobbing. But, when Chad said amen, she looked up at him and said through her tears, I know God will get me through it somehow.
Chad and I picked up the few little items that we had been carrying in our arms when we heard her cries, and we walked away, back to a good day. Back to a reality that is all cute kids and funny stories and dance leotards. But, I couldn’t get the wounded grandmother off my mind. I kept wondering how many times in her long life that God has already proven that He will get her through this. Somehow.
In the next few days, she will comfort her grieving son. She will cook for her family. She will think of things that no one else has thought of yet. Things that need to be done. She will care for her frail husband. She will stand beside her grandson’s casket, and she will mourn. Deeply. With a pain that is only known by those who have wailed next to the gaping grave of a child.
I will be playing Chutes and Ladders with Emerald. Picking up the kids from school. I’ll be looking for new crockpot recipes and waiting with anticipation for Chad to come home from work. God willing. But, there is a certain privilege that God grants us sometimes: the privilege of being there during someone’s worst moment. Of witnessing what it looks like when Christian people face trials of all kinds—the very worst kinds—and choose to trust God through it all. It’s an honor and a wonder to be present when someone’s faith is forced to grow and stretch beyond what we think it’s capable of. Yet, today we saw it, on a cold metal bench in the back of the grocery store, in the trembling voice of a terribly distraught white-haired grandmother: I know God will get me through it. I doubt that her mind really believed that in the moment. The brain inside her head, that little white head that kept shaking no in disbelief, couldn’t know for sure that she is going to survive this. But, her soul knows it well. Because the Holy Spirit was already whispering this truth to her in ways that only He can. And, she chose to believe it, soul-deep. God will get me through it.
I doubt she will ever know how much it meant to this naive little pastor’s wife today, watching an old woman’s faith grow. And, I doubt she will ever see how being there caused my faith to grow, too. One more leaf sprouted on a still small and tender tree. I thank God for the privilege of being there. And, for the ways that He never fails to show me how good it is to know Him, on our best days and on our worst.
Chad is on his way home from Ecuador. For me, it’s been a long, long week.
It’s funny what you don’t appreciate about your husband when he’s right in front of you.
Like the fact that he’s a talker. He wakes up talking, and he goes to bed talking, and there really is no time in the day when his head isn’t filled with ideas, plans, dreams, and questions.
Or the fact that he’s a protector. When he’s home, I rest. I fall asleep knowing that if anything happens in the middle of the night he will jump up and try to stand between me and disaster.
The truth is that there are a million different things about Chad that I fail to appreciate on a daily basis. I get in terrible ruts where I focus only on what he isn’t doing that I wish he would do. Or I wish that he would say no to a few things. Or that he would quit answering his phone. Or that he would write me daily love letters.
But, the things that I miss the most when he is gone are just the regular things. His shoes on our bedroom floor. His body heat at night. The sound of the door closing when he comes home for lunch. The way he can make me laugh until I cry. The thousands of memories we have collected. The inside jokes.
My dear friend lost her husband today. They have been married for over sixty years. Today she begins the task of learning to live a new life, one that she has never before encountered. She will miss so many things. She tells a hilarious story of the day when they were fairly newly married, and she went to grab a gun and shot it in his direction just to get his attention. It’s hard for anyone who knows her sweet spirit now to imagine her doing such a thing. Together they grew up, they grew in God’s love and grace, they learned who He is. And, sixty years later, she begins a new chapter without her lifetime love. She will be okay. She isn’t alone. She has a Savior who will carry her and friends and family who adore her.
But, she will miss him. She will long to hear the door open as he comes in from coffee with his buddies. She will wish that his shoes were in the floor of her bedroom. An artist, she will think about calling him in to look at her latest painting, and then she will remember that he is with Jesus.
Today Chad comes home, and a crazy week looms ahead. There will be no time to escape together and sit and talk for hours. But, as we lie close tonight in our bed, we will talk quietly about how this week went, and he will tell me some incredible stories. I’ll fill him in on how the dance classes and social studies tests and piano lessons went. I hope tomorrow when we wake up I will still be thinking of all the things that I remembered to appreciate about him while he was gone.
And, tomorrow when my sweet friend wakes up and remembers that her husband now resides in Heaven, I pray that she will be able to take all of the things that she misses about him and hand them over to God as a praise offering for the incredible lifetime of love that they shared. I know she will. She praises Him with every breath.
Love your spouse. Stop to recognize how amazing it is that every day the door opens and he walks through it. We don’t all get a lifetime with our spouse. But, we do get some time. Fill the time with love and admiration and respect and appreciation. Fill the time with awe over the blessing of a lifetime love. Fill the time with devotion to Christ, which leads to devotion to your spouse. Fill the time with peace and not silly arguments. Just ask my precious friend–sixty years later, she’ll tell you that the time flies by. Don’t waste it.
I vividly remember, sitting in our living room one night at the ripe old age of 16, trying to teach my dad a thing or two about Christianity. We spent many late nights during that phase discussing a whole world of Christian zeal that my youth group had introduced into my life. The man has patience like I’ve never seen, and although I’m sure he would’ve loved to roll his eyes at me, he never did. He listened, and then he talked. And, then he listened more as I tried to enlighten him out of my vast life experience.
On this particular evening, I was fresh off a stint at youth camp, so I was in ultimate super godly girl mode. I had been riding the emotional high of an experience that was catered to me for an entire week, and I came home prepared to explain to my dad just how the Christian life ought to be. The whole of life, for Christians, I argued, should be a mountaintop experience.
I’m not sure exactly where I picked up that phrase, mountaintop experience. But, I was pretty sure I had just had one. I felt like Moses. I was certain that I had just seen God, right there in the middle of Steven Curtis Chapman’s “Great Adventure” album, which played on a continuous loop at camp. I had had an experience. An encounter. And, I had no intention of ever going back to my old ways or being satisfied with the usual day-to-day, trigonometry getting me down type of existence.
I told my dad so.
He laughed. Gently, in a kind, but slightly pitying type of way. Looking back on it now, I recognize the fatherly sorrow in his patient chuckle and heavy sigh. He must’ve been thinking of all the life that I had yet to live. He knew that heartbreak was coming. That life would knock me down. That my own sin would trip me up again and again. He knew that not every day of Christianity is a glorious, shining example of how to live for Christ. Some days are just putting one foot in front of the other, holding onto to a thin thread of hope in what Jesus said, even when it looks like nothing good could possibly be around the bend. My dad, a man who had buried his mother when he was only 17, who had already watched his father and his brother die. He sat there, looking into the face of his slightly arrogant teenaged daughter, knowing that the human existence is filled with never-ending pitfalls, some of which will shake your faith to its very core.
I have learned it now, Dad.
I have learned that no one can stay there, hidden away on the top of the mountain with God forever. Not even Moses could do it. Eventually he had to come back down and deal with the huge pain in the neck called the Israelites. He got so mad about their disobedience that he threw down the tablets that God had written for him, the tablets that had been so precious a little while ago on the mountain that he had carried them with tender care all the way down, floating on the wings of a glorious encounter with God. Suddenly they lay in pieces at the feet of the idolators. Moses’ mountaintop experience didn’t last three minutes after the realities of his life punched him in the gut. Imagine how often during his wanderings with those stiff-necked people that he closed his eyes and tried to remember what it felt like there, on the mountain, when his singular focus was God and His word. When he wasn’t having to deal with stubborn people or his own tendency to fail.
And, every once in awhile, I’ll bet he could do it. I’ll bet he could remember exactly what it felt like, trembling there in the presence of the God of the Universe, completely consumed by His goodness, His might, His love. And, the memory of that very real encounter sustained him. It kept him going. It kept him humble. And, it reminded him of the truth of God’s promises.
I still have a mountaintop experience here and there. I still have moments when I feel His presence in such a real way that it changes me. I have days when I feel like I have seen His face. But, the rest of life? Well, it’s more like a series of valleys. Some peaceful and serene. Some stormy and tumultuous. Most somewhat unremarkable. I see now that my dad was right. All of the Christian life can’t be a mountaintop experience. But every single day, no matter how amazing or how horrific, can be lived with hope, because His promises are true, even when we are stumbling.
I’m grateful for times on the mountain with a good and gracious God, and when I feel like I’m bogged down in the valleys of the Christian life, I close my eyes and remember how real He is. How close my encounters with Him have been. And, I thank God for the hope that no one can ever snatch me out of His hand. I have been a mountaintop climber and I have been a valley dweller. And, I have learned, Dad. I have. God is just as real in the low places.
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We’re still trying to recover from a wild and heartbreaking few weeks of deaths and funerals in our little community. It’s strange how these things tend to come in waves sometimes. I’m still thinking through everything that’s gone on in the past two weeks, and I’ll probably write a little bit more about some of those things soon. But, I would say that I have been completely blown away by the way that the church (specifically our church) can really be the hands and feet of Christ. I just love watching people love each other. That’s what I’ve been experiencing lately. It’s amazing.
I hope you’ve seen and felt some of that in your own life. Get into a good church, and love people!
In other news, we decided, weirdly, to have our carpet cleaned while I was right in the middle of decorating our house for Christmas. This meant that we had to move all of the kids’ toys and junk and all of the boxes filled with Christmas stuff into the kitchen and bathrooms. It’s been… interesting. Now I’m trying to finish the decorating and get everything back in its place. It’s never cool to have to climb over piles of toys just to get to your toilet. Trust me.
So, while all of this unusual stuff has been going on we also managed to make it to both sets of parents’ houses for Thanksgiving. And, since Thanksgiving is now DONE, that means it’s Christmastime!!! My favorite time of the year. And, if I ever get the rest of these decorations up and all of the toys back in their proper places I am totally going to enjoy the season.
To get us all off to a great start on Christmas 2014, I want to share with you the world famous Dude-olph video that Chad and the kids and I made several years ago. It has literally had tens of views, so I know that you don’t want to miss it. Have a great Monday!
Tonight we pulled boxes from high shelves. We blew dust from the tops and sat together, pulling out memories one by one. Remember this one? we asked each other over and over again. And, we did remember. We held each shiny ornament by its silky ribbon and dangled it in front of Emerald’s tiny face, telling her stories and explaining where we got each one. Her blue eyes blinked wide with wonder. She gasped each and every time. Ooh, I love it! It’s my favorite! We laughed at her enthusiasm, and we smiled at each other with delight because we all knew that each of us felt the same way she did.
The tree is up, still unlit. Still sitting crooked and scraggly, straight from a storage shed and looking like it will never be beautiful. It hasn’t been fluffed or straightened or sparkled or laden with pretty gifts. The kids have already plotted spots for hanging their favorites. And, I have already filed away some precious memories of this season.
Each day of living is a gift.
At the beginning of another week in our small town with more funerals to plan, more sweet people to comfort and love. On an evening filled with stories of riots and looters and the all-wrong way that human beings tend to deal with our human-ness. On a day that saw both sunshine and rain, beautiful blessings of mercy and the terrible pain of loss, on this day, and on all days, we can say that this moment, this breath, this dusty box filled with ornaments, this heartache, this breath-taking feeling of simultaneous smallness and endlessness, yes all of this, and much, much more, is a gift.
In the Bible the Israelites often built markers as reminders of how God blessed. How He loved. How He demonstrated His power and His mercy and His goodness. And, maybe that’s one reason that I write this blog.
Because little Emerald, she won’t even remember this night a year from now. She won’t tear up thinking about how sweet the time was. But, tonight, in our living room in her bare feet and her hand-me-down outfit that was just a little too big, she was happy.
I’ll keep that memory for her. And, I’ll send her little messages here and there, setting scraggly tree markers in her life and mine, reminding us both that His gifts are everywhere, in the good and the bad, in the birth and the death, in the giggles and the tears, in the beginning, the end, and the middle parts that twist together like last year’s Christmas lights.
He is in it all. And, I don’t want to forget it.
I will remember the works of His hands.
Today has been a day of mourning for people all over this big and diverse world of ours. It has been a day of whys and hows, of what-nows and which-way-from-heres. Today, precious people in my town and in yours woke up next to a husband or wife and will lie down tonight alone, empty, shocked, and wondering where God is. Today, mothers buried children. Sons sat by dying mothers’ bedsides. Today, the grief was overwhelming, in doctors’ offices and hospital rooms and cold white hallways and living rooms.
Today, death and dying and loneliness hurt deeply.
But, God draws near to the broken-hearted and crushed in spirit. And, He is just as trustworthy today as He was yesterday. Things changed in a matter of minutes. Things changed forever. But, one thing is sure: He never changes. He is in control, He is working, and He is good. He is so, so good, even when we face despair and desolation on all sides.
He is hope. He is love. And He is comfort.
Mourners, He will gather your broken pieces.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Matthew 5:4
Keener minds than mine are currently formulating all sorts of philosophies and theories, figuring out the implications of today’s events, and determining how to move forward. I feel underqualified, yet compelled, to add my voice to all of the chatter, the wailing, the hushed and woeful wondering that is happening across our country tonight . I suppose my qualifications are that I am a human, I am a mother, and I am a Christian.
As a human, I feel tonight the weight of the evil that resides in the heart of each one of us. It’s difficult for us to identify with the kind of wickedness that would lead someone to enter a school and ruthlessly murder sweet and precocious and shy and unruly and funny and tender children. It seems impossible that our own hearts bear the marks of that kind of hate for God and humanity. Yet, the Bible tells us that “every inclination of the human heart is evil.” (Genesis 8:21) I am just as desperate for salvation from my own sinful nature and desires as one who commits all kinds of atrocities that I consider unforgiveable. Any good at all that may exist within me is only God, who, in His great mercy, infiltrated the pitch black corners of my heart with his light of love and truth. If not for His incredible, undeserved grace, I would be just as hell-bound as the most horrific criminals that have existed on this earth. When I am reminded, like I was today, of just how deep the wickedness in our hearts runs, I wonder why God chooses to deal with us at all. And I wonder why He chose to rescue me from my sin. These are the mysteries of life and faith, made even more mysterious on a day like this. But, I was jolted into remembering the urgency with which we need to share Christ’s love. Evil hearts can be made new.
As a mother, I am broken. I am clueless. I am wondering tonight how devastated parents are still drawing breath moment by moment. I am prayerful. But, the prayers that I try to pray seem insufficient. I really don’t know how to pray for these families. I am trusting that the Holy Spirit is interceding on their behalf. I know that they must not have words either. They must barely be sitting where they are sitting. Their hearts must barely be beating. Their memories must be searing and hot, like their tears. They must be thinking of what this morning was like before school. They must be wondering if they loved enough, if they smiled today, if the rush kept them from saying what was in their hearts. They must feel dead. They must feel alone in their sorrow, even though they share it with so many others. And then there is God. He is there. He sees. He hears the cries of their broken hearts. He is working. That I am sure of.
As a Christian, I can’t stop the questions from surfacing. Why did this have to happen? Why children? Why today? What is the purpose? What do we say? How do we respond to a world demanding answers from a God it doesn’t even believe in? The answers are hard. They speak to the sovereignty of God. They remind us that this, yes, even this, will bring Him glory. The how is impossible for us to know. But, there is comfort in knowing that the little children who went to live with Jesus today already know. They are experiencing His glory in all its fullness.
As we move on, debates will ensue. Arguments will continue over guns and school safety measures. Political parties will try to use this tragedy to bolster their positions. And more questions will surface. More horrors will be revealed. And more heartache is coming. The only hope for this confusing, chaotic, dangerous, wicked, angry, selfish world is Jesus Christ. May He heal. May He reveal Himself. May He be glorified.