Forget about what’s happened; don’t keep going over old history. Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new. It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it?
When I was a child, I learned of a true story of a married couple fighting about
. . . wait for it…
whether the toilet paper roll should go on THIS way
or THAT way.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what they were fighting about had nothing to do with toilet paper.
They were fighting about control.
Unfortunately, even WHAT they had control over, at this level of debasement, ceased to have meaning. They just both needed THEIR WAY. It sounds a bit like hell on earth, and in fact, it is.
A fictional demon character states his goal of hell on earth this way: “All the healthy . . . activities . . . which we want [them] to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return. ..”
As a young adult, I had seen many relationships that ended up this way.
I wanted to learn how to have healthy relationships, so I prayed I would be transformed. I asked God to make me a perfect person who could find a perfect spouse and we could live happily ever after. But in God’s frequent way, He did offer one key
not in a flash of deep, fervent prayer, but by using real life to sanctify me.
This path was a more painful route.
Here’s what happened.
I was journaling one day, and in that season, I tended to journal about my problems to process them. I felt God asking me to journal for another 10 minutes after I would have normally finished journaling. And God asked me to do this every time I journaled that season. At first, I didn’t know why I was doing this, but I obeyed. And very soon, a painful pattern emerged.
I had many unrelated problems that I was journaling about, but each situation had the same root that caused frustration, anger, or irritation.
Control.
Everything I was upset about ultimately boiled down to “How can I get my way?”
Ouch.
Now, I am from a good, Matriarchal Italian family, and let’s say that I knew how to choose my friends and boyfriends so that I could get my way. For example, when I was a child, my dad, in despair over his inability to live harmoniously with my mom, once asked for advice. “How do you and your friend Amy get along so well?” he asked. I effused the wisdom I had intuitively gleaned from 10 years of watching my female relatives and responded with this sage advice: “Sometimes, I let us do what Amy wants.”
I liked having my way all the time.
Here’s the kicker – In that season as a young adult after examining my journaling, I realized that I had to CHOOSE to give up a good thing for me – getting my way almost all the time – for a BETTER thing – having a CHANCE at having a healthy marriage.
And I must stress that it was NOT EASY for me to not have my way all the time.
More often than I’d like to admit, it’s still not easy to lay down my way when Jesus speaks softly to me, directing me and showing me a better path. However, I want to trust Jesus more fully because He longs for me to soar into my fullest potential.
And somehow, this continues to be the place where, against all expectations, I flourish.
Our human desire for power is never to be underestimated. Our compulsive desire for control is never to be swept under the rug. Our fleshly desire for influence, ascendency, and dominion should never be ignored. If you don’t know that you hold a sword in your hands, you will wound someone. And the one who becomes wounded may be you.
God, help us to have the wisdom to exchange what we cling to for something better, the gifts You long to give. Help us to unclench our hands long enough to receive Your gifts.
The amaryllis is slowing diminishing in size and splendour, and shrinking back to that mysterious place in its pot where life begins.
My amaryllis blossom will be no more very soon.
You plant a “dead” seed; soon there is a flourishing plant.
The Message
And like all death, the point is not that there has been a death but that a new season is beginning for those who carry on.
Plants take time to grow. He has time to wait. And though this amaryllis flower has no voice, God spoke quietly, inaudibly to human ears, through the life of this ordinary bulb when it flowered for the first time in twenty years, as described here.
This flower is a megaphone, taking the inaudible sound of the voice of Jesus from deep, deep within the earth and transforming His words into a glorious flower that our eyes can perceive.
The flower has no mouth to magnify the words spoken by God, and yet its life points us to Jesus, to the place in His heart where inaudible sounds are translated to the muffled sounds that we pick up and examine and ask each other to help us translate.
This flower is another clue on the journey.
Are you ready to go on an adventure with me, dear friend, and to try to unpack what God may be whispering through the life of an ordinary plant, one that blooms for as long as we can stare at our watches, unhurried, before it’s life is consumed, once more in darkness?
This flower teaches us how we should live, our lives erupting as a firework from below ground, to just as quickly be extinguished as the fire of our lives burns out, and we return to dust.
And this silent flower has spoken so loudly to my soul that an awakening has occurred deep, deep within. Do you sense it, too? Come with me, friend, on a journey of waking up, sitting up, opening our ears, getting our legs to move and run, and learning to fly.
And as is the case, whenever the most important lessons are to be grasped, we find our most significant clues in the things the world ignores. I sent this plant on its last stop before the garbage dump, not once but twice. I didn’t have patience for the things that required me to be transformed before I could perceive them.
This amaryllis plant became my teacher.
A series of blog posts (if I remember to write them) will describe what this plant taught me so far, including:
1. It’s not our lives that matter, dear friend, and we comfort each other once we have the strength to recognize this truth. And yet, when our lives produce an aroma like fresh bread, that strengthens another, God’s orchestra produced from the instruments of each life overwhelms the darkness. This symbolic orchestra is our hope.
2. Sometimes, God upturns the soil of our lives. This uprooting is chaotic for us and disorienting. But this is also where we find hope.
3. Where is God about to grow a new leaf in your life? We can never tell exactly where the amaryllis will sprout leaves, only that it will, eventually, despite all apparent odds, sprout. Everything living must grow.
Can you remove the rocks where He may be hovering over the waters or the soil, about to spout new life in you?
4. Do you need a friend who can help you lift the rocky burden that stops the new life from flourishing, where His Spirit is hovering? We need those who see in the Spirit when we are looking for our eyes on the ground next to us. We need a doula or a medical doctor to help us give birth. Journeying with others is safer for the life we carry. Who is on your team?
5. The thing that kept me awake at night back then, that my community and I pleaded with God to change, is the amaryllis that has grown through my softened heart this season. Noticing how God watered, tended and then showed us a new leaf sprouting in our past hopeless situations or dry amaryllis pots gives us faith for the next impossible thing He whispers.
God, give us faith for the hope you long to spring forth from our dry amaryllis pots. You have enough breaths from Your Spirit of guidance and encouragement for every seemingly hopeless situation. Give us eyes to see further than the mundane ordinary.
I woke up this morning, and couldn’t find the fire within me.
It had been smothered again.
I dug through the ashes and discarded dead branches, frantically looking.
I know there is a spark somewhere inside, still burning.
I couldn’t find it.
I looked to heaven, asking for His fire to fall on my life again, to ignite the areas around my life so that I could see the smoke and notice the clues. So I can see where I need to remove the wet branches of our best ideas and where we can lie on the ground, blowing to life that which You have begun.
I called in a friend to help and we took turns, one keeping watch. Dangers lurk nearby. This beginning fire will be snuffed if our backs are turned even momentarily. That is how fear works.
I take off my backpack and my firefighting suit. I was never meant to wear it anyway. But I like to be safe.
It’s cold out here without my extra layers on. I don’t have enough to feel comfortable. But shedding the outer layer has increased my urgency to get this fire burning brighter.
Will you help me?
Our very lives, our joie de vivre, our hope, depend on it.
Can you take a turn blowing on these embers while I do some jumping jacks to get warm? Following His way is not the path of comfort. Our discomfort draws us to Him, to the flame, hoping for some heat from these smoking embers.
When our lives turn to desperation, breakthrough is near.
Do you stand nearby, fully dressed in firefighter’s gear, back to the embers, standing alert to open the fire extinguisher on the embers lest real flames burst forth? It’s dangerous having our backs to the fire.
How is your heart? Do you explain away the unexplainable? Do you say, “I’ll ponder that later,” to the hints of the divine you encounter in another’s life, in your own life?
Are you, too, one of the ones standing watch, back to the fire of what God wants to do through your life? Do your ankles quake, and your whole body shake as you stand, back to the flame, prepared for the inevitable? How are you doing, deep down?
Did our diligence with the fire extinguisher, smothering fires from heaven as they leap outside the bounds of a campfire, leave you exhausted and weary?
Come, friend. Come and sit by this fire. Let’s take off your firefighter’s suit, too.
You don’t need it anymore. Yes, you will be cold and uncomfortable. Let this discomfort push us closer to the embers, to the fires of where His spirit is moving as we seek our and each other’s breakthroughs.
And when you find some warmth, let it spark the kindling in your heart afresh.
Only then does real life begin.
[Jesus] will ignite the kingdom life, a fire, the Holy Spirit within you, changing you from the inside out. He’s going to clean house—make a clean sweep of your lives. He’ll place everything true in its proper place before God; everything false he’ll put out with the trash to be burned.
Fast forward about seven years. We had moved to another house by that time. The subject of angels came up over lunch.
“You saw an angel once,” I ventured to that same child, now about ten years old.
I wondered if she would remember.
“WHAATT?” Her older sister demanded. She prided herself, as an older sister’s right, to know ALL of the family stories. How had she never heard this one?
I hadn’t mentioned it in all those years except for telling one friend and my husband what happened immediately afterward.
Who would have believed her anyway?
Children don’t have many words when they are three years old. Would she remember the incident now? And if so, could put more words around the experience? As much as possible, I wanted the conversation to come from her, not directed by me or influenced by my memory.
“Do you remember seeing an angel?” I ventured.
She said, “Yes”
I wanted to test her, to see if she was speaking accurately.
“Where were you when you saw the angel?”
“At the other house.”
I was startled.
Yes.
“And where was the angel?”
She said, “Outside”.
Oh no, I thought, she doesn’t remember. This event happened in the playroom. I was about to clean up the dishes when she continued, explaining more, “The angel was outside”.
Oh! Yes, I thought, the angel was outside the window we were staring at. That made sense.
Without my prompting, she explained that she was looking out the window in the playroom at the time.
She had remembered this very incident, which brought me shivers. This child was officially diagnosed with memory challenges a short time after this event*.
And yet she remembered the details of this event from many years earlier.
“What did you see?” I asked gently.
“The angel was singing. It had gold shoes and a gold sash.”
Everyone should allow divine moments, either our own or others, to propel them further along God’s spiritual path for them. But how? The softness of our heart, exposed as one of three common responses, will determine whether we stay stuck in the mud spiritually or whether we are launched further and deeper along our spiritual paths.
In the next post, we will evaluate these most common heart responses after God interrupts the mundane.
He ordered his angels to guard you wherever you go.
God, thank you that sometimes, for a brief moment, You open our eyes to the possibility of the divine through our or others’ experiences.
Help us wake up to grasp what is right before us when our eyes are opened and our ears can hear. Help us to speak openly about what we have heard and seen. May the unusual become commonplace in each of our lives, we pray.
While we do not place our faith directly in angels, we should place it in the God who rules the angels; then we can have peace.
Billy Graham
What unusual divine moments have you experienced? Or what is a sacred moment that another has told you about that seemed plausible? Has this moment or a curiosity about this experience propelled your spiritual journey?
Blogpost Footnotes
*These cognitive challenges were later healed years after this event through diet, but that is a story for another day.
I was having considerable dental work done, about a 3-hour appointment.
I brought my audiobook so “I can pretend I’m somewhere else,” I told the dentist. I was listening to a dramatization of people who were persecuted and even martyred for their faith. That audiobook helped to put my own relatively minor suffering in perspective.
And yet, as the dentist said, “This is the part when I’m like a woodpecker,” and placed a metal rod on my teeth which he then proceeded to hammer on like a mallet, I felt slightly… uncomfortable.
I sensed Holy Spirit in the room, almost like He was sitting beside me, wanting to hold my hand.
It used to be surprising to me when God wanted to speak or envelope me in His love.
But not anymore.
At that moment, I briefly remembered some ridiculous things my daughter feared. One summer, for example, she was scared of house flies and would not go to the park or eat outside without screaming as this terrifying flying animal approached her. I brushed off her fears and told her to move on.
And yet that’s not how Holy Spirit treated me with my concerns, which are so tiny in the scope of life.
Every time the dentist gently smashed me in my face, I could sense my adrenaline rise, and then I could sense Jesus comforting me. Like a roller coaster constantly about to head uphill, he smoothed out the hills and valleys of this experience so that my roller coaster ride was less bumpy. As I fearfully clutched His hand, He calmed me repeatedly so that the essence of this experience was the peace of His comfort.
He seemed to be holding my hand.
When the ordeal was over, the dentist and dental assistant commented that dental work would be much easier if more patients were as calm as I was.
I couldn’t have been more shocked.
“Who, me?” I wondered, looking around.
God of all healing counsel! He comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us.
And God, may I be the comforting presence to another’s fearsnext.
And so, what are the easiest ways to be brave at the dentist’s or doctor’s?
I have no idea, unfortunately, however three clues we can glean from this recent experience are:
1. Listen to audiobooks about people who die for a cause they believe in while people are deliberately maiming you. It helps! Try this one to get you started.
3. Ask Him to comfort you and hold on tight when Jesus surprises you by showing up in your life.
God, may You comfort everyone reading this at their upcoming medical appointments more intimately with your soothing words, voice, and tangible arms of love. We pray for strength for today with the challenges each of us faces. Help us to learn how to more fully lean on You when life’s challenges come, we pray.
The amaryllis opened its two enormous blossoms this week, revealing pink and white splendour and raising the scent profile of the room to a higher level.
And I am that amaryllis.
And so are you.
Let me explain.
About two decades ago, a neighbour gave us an amaryllis bulb in a cardboard package. “Water is all that is needed!” the box guaranteed. Beauty was promised to erupt from within this dry soil and ordinary pot.
I was excited about this, but I forgot about the plant in its little cardboard box in the rush of moving to another city. I felt guilty when I noticed it again a couple of years later. It was strewn between other forgotten items in our garage.
I gave it a few drops of water half-heartedly, looking at my watch as I waited for it to sprout life.
Then I got distracted.
“Well, I gave that a try, at least,” I thought, many years later when I saw the pot, out of its box now at least, but perched precariously on some items that needed sorting in the bowels of our garage. At least my guilt at not having TRIED to bring it to life was dissipated. “But I should give it another try,” I thought on my lunch break one day years later.
But when lunch was over, to-do items kept me running in circles. Days stretched to weeks and months. Another decade passed.
Our kids outgrew even more clothes, and I returned their small clothing items to the garage to deal with later.
“Remember me?” the amaryllis seemed to ask that year as I dumped a pile of too-small clothes on the floor beside it.
“We sometimes have to admit defeat,” I thought to myself, my advancing years having created a deep wisdom, called complacency, within. My few strands of grey hair had made me more rational and truthful. I didn’t look up from the floor as I spoke to myself.
What impossible seed has He planted that you have forgotten about or nearly given up on? Does He want to plant an impossible seed in you today? Can you squeeze a few drops of Easter hope from dry soil to water this seed?
Consider asking for the strength to ponder this question, clean ears to hear His love, a heart to trust His goodness, and hope from the water of His Spirit.
And may your life blossom in great fullness against all expectations too, friend.
So, I saw a Psychotherapist for the first time this week.
Oh, shut up! You need to see a Psychotherapist, too! You’re just too afraid of what may be dragged up from the depths to step near her office.
So I thought I would teach you what she taught me so you can save $160.
Yup. Psychotherapists get paid $160 PER HOUR.
I thought there must be a decimal error somewhere, too.
Nope.
So she taught me a “Tapping” technique called EFT Tapping.
I’ll teach it to you!
Now, in case you didn’t know, a caveat is that I am NOT a Psychotherapist! In fact, I have no idea what Psychotherapy even is! Psychotherapy has the root word “psycho” in it, which is a bit concerning, if I’m honest.
But, hey! What can go wrong? I’m teaching you what I learned for free!
If you try this technique and accidentally go more nuts or something, then sorry! Full refund! Haha!
(Since this is free . . . get it? Never mind.)
And we’re off!
So you Tap. Using two fingers, you gently Tap on the places where we usually rub our heads when overwhelmed. Yes! It’s easy!
I’ll tell you what happened in my appointment so you can get the FULL experience.
She asked me how I was feeling RIGHT THEN. A little overwhelmed, frantic, and busy. Aren’t we all?
I mentioned why I thought this was the case, and she said, in an I’m-not-really-listening way, “Oh, that’s too bad!”
So I won’t listen to you as you answer that question either!
You’re welcome!
Then, she switched gears and said we could try “Tapping.” I thought it was a little insensitive of her not to talk through much of what I said, as most often, the reason we pay people is so they’ll listen to us. (Wait. Does that mean I should pay you for listening to me on this blog? Never mind.)
Anyway, I’m giving this a shot, trusting her.
And now, since I learned from her, you can trust me!
So we Tap the beginning of one eyebrow, the end of the eyebrow, under the eye. You know how we naturally rub our temples or under our eyes when overwhelmed?
Other places are under the nose, the little divot on our chin, below our collarbone, and armpits.
As I was Tapping, I was thinking, who in the world has TIME for this?
This thought reminded me of a story about my good friend. She was told about some new scientific research. When a dog is happy, it wags its tail slightly MORE on the right than the left.
My friend had a blank look and replied, “Who the *** has time to study that ***?”
I was connecting with her feelings of time frustration as I Tapped.
However, remembering that my body shut down on me when I ran it into the ground a few months ago, I shut up and Tapped. (This is only a slight exaggeration of the truth of why my body shut down here, but who CARES about truth anymore, anyway?).
Are you Tapping?
Good!
Then, I found some tears sliding down my cheek, which was a little weird. I’m not a frequent crier. (My husband says I’m lying here again. No comment.) My motto is: Life is too funny for tears!
But when I slowed down, here’s the thing:
I could hear the voice of God speaking to the depths, healing me a little more.
I think the biggest key to learning to hear from God is SLOWING DOWN.
And what did He say? Good question.
What did He say to you when you slowed down for a minute to be still?
In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength
Another time, I’ll write up the part about what God seemed to whisper, so you’ll pay me that 99 cents for the information you CAN’T WAIT another day for!
Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it? . . .
In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions.
Looking for a way out of another winter that suffocates?
A pika was lost in a snowstorm.
She looks around her. Which direction to turn? She is cold, alone, afraid and doesn’t have much time before the cold winter chills her to the bone. Death arrives quickly out in nature.
And that pika is me.
(You, too?)
Why a pika? Because who knows what a pika is? (And how known do you feel?)
We look around us, seeking a direction to follow or something solid to hold onto.
The days of our lives are thrown in the garbage can like the pages on our daily calendars. There goes another day, week, decade.
We find our first and then our 100th gray hair. Do we continue to pull these hairs out? At what point are we defeating ourselves, even harming ourselves, by pretending that the clock of time isn’t ravaging us?
What do we hold onto?
What direction do we travel next?
Who can lead us?
Do we hunker down, curl into the fetal position for warmth, and hope for spring?
Will the joy in our souls remain at the end of this winter?
Where is the warming hut, the cup of hot chocolate, and the friend with the listening ear?
Restoring Life 