The amaryllis opened its two enormous blossoms this week, revealing pink and white splendor and raising the scent profile of the room to a higher level.
And I am that amaryllis.
And so are you.
Let me explain.
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So we decided to take surfing lessons in our summer holidays this year.
I had never tried surfing on the ocean before, but as you know, I tried surfing for the first time behind a surf boat on a lake this summer.
As I was putting on my wetsuit for my first ocean surfing lesson yesterday, I was surprised that our group consisted of about two dozen teenagers, with my husband and me. We have kids their age. There were three parents nearby.
“I’m glad at least there are a few parents,” I whispered to my husband.
He nodded appreciatively. The parents didn’t suit up. They were there to watch.
“Should we be concerned about that?” my huband and I asked each other silently.
I wasn’t quite sure of the wisdom of this whole surfing gig, even without the fact that this seemed to be a teen activity. As you know, I spent a month this fall in bed with a back problem. Was this really wise?
I felt God whisper to try, to do less of the lesson, but to give it a go.
Also, the pain specialist said that often, people get stuck and won’t do anything new after their injury. Their backs freeze up, and they get stuck in cycles of every-more-limited mobility.
I don’t want to be constrained by fear.
The surfing lesson was super fun! Except I did have to ask one of the teens to help me carry my surfboard down to the beach because it was too heavy for me, and I didn’t want to explain about having a sore back last fall lest one of them ask, “Lady, what the heck are you doing in a surf lesson then???” But apart from the minor hiccups, it was great fun!
My husband said we should continue to do this kind of stuff, meaning that we should push ourselves outside of the limits that we set for ourselves, i.e. as non-surfers. I agree with his philosophy. Before the trip, he said, “This will be a great trip because we have aspirin!”
But this got me thinking about midlife crises.
The teen instructor asked us, “What made you want to get into surfing?”
“Trying to avoid a midlife crisis?” I offered.
But there may be some truth in expanding our horizons a little bit and in allowing ourselves some room to grow to avoid a midlife crisis.
So here are some thoughts on avoiding a midlife crisis:
Why be satisfied with our old identities and a boring turkey sandwich when God offers us His world to soar into, friend?
Ready yet for adventure?
I woke up one morning and realized with a start that I was also alive spiritually. I poked myself to be sure I was awake. I was the same on the outside.
What had caused this inner transformation?
My circumstances were the same. I lived in the exact physical location as many years ago. But undoubtedly, something had shifted recently.
Like all births, the growth had begun unnoticed in the hidden places long before.
My story of waking up is a long story of twisting paths, walking in circles, and many falls.
Just like your spiritual story.
And I’m still walking.
(You? That’s good. Very good.)
This morning, my rear felt particularly sore from all the falls recently. Jesus held his hand to me again today, offering to help me get up.
I’ll start there.
I woke this morning in a cyclical funk created by my discouragement. I was spiralling down, ready to flush the new thing God had been stirring in my heart down the toilet of my despair again. Then I heard a quiet thought encouraging me.
You are in the fight of your life.
(Would I jump into the battle or claim immediate defeat, like usual, keeping my soul asleep?)
I was in a fight for God’s whisperings to be brought forth like a new babe into the world. But I had to surrender my half-eaten lunch. Would I obey?
God had been whispering, waking, urging my soul towards the new life he wanted to see sprouting in my heart.
Would I throw away my hope that God can grow something beautiful through the dry depleted soil of my life again today?
Would my discouragement win?
The question is not how big is our faith. The question is, how big is our God? I shrunk God, again, into my image.
And so I was asleep.
I awoke when reminded in a time of prayer this morning of this truth:
The impossible thing He whisperers that he wants to bring forth in our lives is easy for Him.
How exactly this discouragement transformed into hope is a story for another time.
But for now, suffice it to say that I was reminded that God made an amaryllis bloom after twenty years or more of bareness.
And He made a lilac bloom after ten years or more of barrenness.
And so He can make our lives bloom after seasons of bareness, too.
We begin to wake spiritually every day by opening our spiritual eyes.
Here’s how:
This subtle shift in my thinking helped me soar on the wind of hope I found this morning. I picked up the hope. I carried it next to my heart.
For as the sky soars high above earth, so the way I work surpasses the way you work, and the way I think is beyond the way you think.
Just as rain and snow descend from the skies and don’t go back until they’ve watered the earth, doing their work of making things grow and blossom, producing seed for farmers and food for the hungry, so will the words that come out of my mouth not come back empty-handed.
They’ll do the work I sent them to do, they’ll complete the assignment I gave them.
God is standing next to us with seeds, a shovel and a watering can. He wants to dig deep, exposing old roots to create room for new growth. I want to get out of the way to allow Him to do his work.
You?
While waiting for life to sprout, consider praying along to this song.
This song begins like the prayer of a person who doesn’t honestly believe what they’re praying (like many of many prayers over the years):
You make beautiful things out of the dust.
The song ends in a loud declaration of the exact words, daring the soul to believe.
Time for a battle for you, too, as you pray along to this song?
What is He saying to you through the pages of His book, asking you to have faith to believe?
May your eyes be opened, your soul awake.
We were discussing the more profound things of life, unearthing the cultural assumptions that keep us in bondage.
And this is what she said: “Homeschooling gave me the confidence to try new things.”
She said it matter-of-factly, confidently, as if she believed it. She was homeschooled, and then homeschooled her kids. So she had many years to mull over homeschooling.
I was struck by her confidence and creativity to try new things, but she brushed me off, attributing these traits to being homeschooled. For example, she is a self-taught photographer and took these photos of our daughter, assuring us that her red dress would “pop” in the pictures at this location. She was right.
She explained her homeschooling philosophy to me as her camera clicked, “When you are homeschooled, there aren’t as many kids hovering over you, making fun of you for trying something different. So I felt free to try new things.”
She painted her family’s camping trailer with flowers and a mountain scene and then was commissioned by her city to paint a mural.
“I’m mostly self-taught,” she explains, but she’s having fun, exploring the talents God endowed her with, instead of burying them in fear, as so many of us accidentally do.
“I was afraid I might disappoint you . . .”
(Jesus) was furious. ‘That’s a terrible way to live!”
But we’d rarely seen another way.
She reminds me of my kids, who are also homeschooled.
For example, today, our family is in Salt Lake City, Utah, attending a “Reborn” doll conference.
Our 15-year-old daughter had the confidence and time to explore the God-given gifts endowed to her, too
Last week, she sold one of her dolls overseas for over $400.
“I didn’t know you could do that!” I exclaimed from my public-schooled worldview.
She didn’t know either.
But she’s not afraid to try.
Our other daughter wrote and self-published a novel by the time she was 15 years old.
What would we do if we weren’t afraid to try?
I would keep writing even though you may laugh at me. How is God calling you to awaken? What do you imagine the next step is on the life adventure He has mapped out for you?
Ready to take another step, friend?
Let’s hold hands because I’m afraid, too.
I prayed to the Lord, and he answered me. He freed me from all my fears.
The definition of courage is NOT “Not being afraid” but “Doing it anyway.”
What is God whispering to you?
What’s the next step?
Let’s go!
That meadow in the sunlight. The place where we dance and feel free. The place outside that smells of wildflowers and the freshest air.
Where is it?
I lost it in the busyness of life.
Instead, I am inside, head down, working on my computer. Was that a rat scurrying in the distance? I didn’t have as much weekend time to deep clean as I would have liked.
Where did my dream of what life was supposed to be like vanish?
I live in this tiny apartment created by my fear.
What if?
I don’t have time to wander outside with my backpack, eating the apple I distractedly packed along the way. How can we stumble upon life’s meadows if we don’t have time to look for them? What does it look like for my eyes to search the most distant horizon?
I forgot.
Jesus opens the door in this stuffy room. The open door beckons me outside. Come for a walk with me, He offers.
And the pile of to-dos stays on the desk as I walk and then run outside with my friend, Jesus.
My legs felt weak, and I stumbled as I laughed, breaking into to run.
I haven’t used my legs for a while.
All that sitting and worrying has caused my muscles to atrophy a bit.
But as I run with Jesus in that place of rest, I feel my legs, arms and lungs growing more robust.
The Lord replied, “I will personally go with you . . . and I will give you rest
I can see further when He beckons me to look at the far, far distant horizons. My eyes hurt from the strain. I hadn’t lifted my vision beyond my overwhelming concerns for a while.
I can sense my muscles are more substantial, my bones sturdier, my thoughts sharper. I feel more like the human I am meant to be after spending time in the spiritual clouds.
And it’s going to be okay.
Because when I walk, hand in hand, back to that tiny apartment with Jesus, he holds a button attached to a long cord that snakes to my apartment. The button can ignite the fuse attached to the dynamite that explodes the tiny apartment I used to live in, the one confining me by my fears.
It’s not that my fears have left me but that I have left them.
Jesus gives me enough food for today to live in freedom.
And I’m snatching up this food and eating my fill.
I’d rather fly.
You?
Our pastor is unusual.
And one aspect of his life, the part he doesn’t notice, points at the reality of what my life could look like.
If I can only find my freedom.
I look desperately in my closet for a flying suit.
For something to make me look like one of those flying squirrels.
Flying squirrels DON’T, in fact, fly.
They take longer to land because of the large flaps of skin under their armpits.
But even counterfeit flying is more than I have the strength to hope for.
No luck.
No squirrel costumes were tucked away in my closet or my mind.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fly.
I sit down to my lunch again and to my thousands of notifications online. I’m busy. I forgot that I lost my hope.
And then, through his example, this pastor opened the window in that stale room where I placed my discouragement.
Maybe there is hope I can shake this fear after all? Fear follows me when I try to fly like a rock tied to my foot. I try to shake it off.
When I don’t rise very high on the spiritual adventure God bids me to take with him, I shrug my shoulders and move on.
Because we all carry rocks, don’t we? Time to sit back down and enjoy my lunch and … wait! What did the pastor say?
He told us, “Be careful walking to your car. There are some interesting characters out.”
He warns us to be careful in our sleepy, mostly nonviolent town. There are indeed some guys on bikes doing who knows what. But these ruffians are harmless for the most part when they interact with strangers passing by.
The surprising part is this pastor’s grace extended to OUR fears compared to his OWN freedom in response to fear.
On the one hand, he warns us, protects us, and wants to ensure we feel comfortable in the most minuscule place of danger.
On the other hand, he just returned from another lone trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo last week, where civil unrest and bloodshed are as commonplace as the birds singing each morning here in our tiny town.
He is genuinely concerned about our fears – real or imagined. However, fear is not a significant factor in limiting his obedience to the voice of God. The opposite extremes startle me.
The “I don’t want you to feel unsafe” and “I travel to nutso places 99.999% of us wishy-washy first-world types would never dream of going of our own volition” is jarring.
He’s not a cowboy type, swaggering his bravado and making fun of us skinny wimps in the corner, afraid to speak at the high school dance. He takes our fears, real or imagined, seriously.
Kind of like God does with us.
And, of course, this pastor is a human, and so he is also annoying like us. But this one aspect of his life is an enigma that gives me hope.
Can I take my fears seriously and still not be imprisoned by them?
It feels like the rock is about to fall off my foot, allowing me, finally, to be light enough to learn to fly.
I can smell freedom, like fresh air, in a stale room.
Do you need help untying that rock from your foot, too?
I wonder how high in the spiritual realm God will lead us.
Come on! Let’s give it a try, friend.
Our destinies are waiting for us. Wearing this layer of hope, like a parachute, is enough to give us strength to rise into a spiritual adventure. And what do you sense Holy Spirit nudging you to begin?
There’s a big pile of rocks or fear that we’ve placed over there on that table.
Ready to untie the rock of fear still attached to your foot and place it on the pile, too?
Jesus is comforting you as you do this, like our pastor is, through his example.
How are you an example in another’s life of how God can use an ordinary person to soar?
What is He saying when you have time to listen and through the community that encourages you?
It sure beats eating more snacks and waiting for text notifications to BING again.
Ready yet, friend, for the adventure of a lifetime?
Can’t find a map? Let’s talk about that next time.
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.
What is the best way to make decisions? Does God play a part in our future decision-making? And if so, how?
Do we sit alone in our bedroom, eyes tightly closed and hope for a magic genie or an angel to answer questions about our careers or other important life decisions?
Or do we say a quick prayer and then do what seems right in our eyes, ignoring God until Sunday morning?
Or is there a middle way, where He sometimes speaks and where we sometimes hear Him?
I choose the rolling a dice option.
Roll the dice. My degree major is . . .
Four years later, I exited college, holding that degree certificate and wondering whether to turn left or right at the next fork in the road.
Can I borrow your dice?
We expect to make decisions this way.
This is mostly because we’d never heard of strolling through life any other way.
The chatty stranger I met yesterday recalled that when he was in his late teens, his mom announced that she wouldn’t have a son of hers playing video games in the basement! (There may have been an interesting story there, but he skipped that part.)
Regardless, it was time for him to find a job.
He flipped through the local college career guide like a Sears catalogue and chose “Millwright.”
The term had a nice ring to it.
Thirty working years later, he was sitting in a local coffee shop recounting this story to me.
It was time for his daughter to flip through an updated Sears catalogue, close her eyes, point to a career option and . . . BINGO! What career lay under her finger when she opened her eyes? Better dedicate the next 40 years to that option….!
What if there is a better way?
There is.
I recently chatted with two local teens from our church at a sledding party. We discussed their futures between the “Yahoo!” and crashes.
For a few minutes.
I had been thinking recently of offering to pray for discernment with her, to sort out the youth’s fears from her passions, to think through whether red herring motives, such as a desire for excessive money, praise of others, or prestige, were the sneaky drivers in their car, leading eventually to a crash when these idols failed 5 or 15 or 20 years later.
To pray and listen together.
We didn’t make the time for that, but it was on my to-do list. Way, way down on my to-do list. But on my heart.
When I spoke to one of them yesterday, I felt Holy Spirit guiding the questions.
And then, as she spoke about something else, Holy Spirit whispered, teacher. She’s a teacher.
I was startled.
So was she.
Fear of being good enough at explaining things had been holding her back. However, she was offered a part-time teaching assistant job at a local school she hadn’t applied to yet. I encouraged her to update her resume, apply for this part-time job and check it out.
She had been procrastinating, letting fear hold her back.
Then the teen confided that many years ago, while praying, a young girl told her that she thought God was saying she would be a teacher, also.
Hmmm . . . maybe God IS like the potter, shaping us, moulding us, knowing who we are.
It sure beats rolling a dice.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, pray to the Father. He loves to help.
The Message
Whether she chooses to work through her fears is her decision. My role was only to plant a seed. She may dig up the plant and toss it aside or water and nurture it if she senses God also guiding her in this direction.
And if I was wrong, then she can slap me in the face and we move on! (Actually she doesn’t slap me in the face. She has to love me!) But if I got it wrong, as I strain to understand and practice listening to God with my broken ears, I chalk it up to a learning experience and try again tomorrow.
We’re learning together how to walk in faith.
And sometimes, when we pray for and love one another, what He says is amazing.
Like the time God directed my career through the prayer of a friend.
Thank you, Jesus, for loving to answer us when we call to You! Help us let You steer our cars. We pray you blow your healing wind on our ears so the muffled sounds make sense to our hearts with broken motives and unhealed desires.
She sat on the grass, picking wildflowers.
She danced alone in that grassy place.
Free.
My choice is you, God, first and only.
The Message
And now I find I’m your choice!
You set me up with a house and yard.
And then you made me your heir!
I waited in the lineup, laughing.
Then I danced on the speakers at the bar.
Free.
Love me, hold me, ‘cause I’m free to do what I want any old time. And I’m free to be who I choose any old time
The Soup Dragons and Junior Reid
What is true freedom, then?
The freedom we danced and sang of when I was a youth at the bar left many of us imprisoned, wrapped so tightly in our bondage that joy dissipated.
The constraints God defines for us bring us to that grassy place where true freedom and joy are found.
And I danced alone, outside in the field, to the music God sang in my heart again this morning.
Your God is present among you . . .
The Message
Happy to have you back, he’ll calm you with his love
and delight you with his songs.
And so, what is best for the woman, dear friend?
Come.
I beckon you to this side of the fence, where true freedom and joy are found.
Have you found your dancing shoes yet?
Put them on! Come – let’s dance together, friend!
Joy awaits!
What are you waiting for?
God longs to delight in you, too, as you put your hand in his and follow Him on a journey.
The term Hephzibah is Hebrew for “my delight is in her.”
You’ll be called Hephzibah, my delight
The Message
Come and dance with us!
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.
Timothy Keller, The Reason For God
Is time clasping its fingers around your neck, too?
Does it tighten its grip so you struggle for breath now and then, too?
Do the fingers around your neck create fear that makes your every breath panicked, too?
And so, how do we fight the enemy of time?
Openly discussing our fears is the hand that removes this snake from around our neck for a while.
Why is time so scary?
We watch the snake slither next to us as we sit here on the sidelines, pondering the game of life.
It doesn’t look so big anymore as we see it now, here beside us.
It is not the kind of snake that can choke the life from us, a constrictor. It is a harmless, small snake, but its pressure, when wrapped around our necks, feels suffocating.
And so, how is your life going?
Let’s chat, be honest.
Did you shoot and nail every basketball into the hoops you aimed for when you were younger and your dreams were less tarnished?
If you did, how are you doing now, after the applause ended?
Just another one of us, a straggler in old rags, sitting by the side of the court, wondering what the game is all about?
Yeah, I hear you. I put my arm around you. Got any wisdom for the rest of us – the confused, discouraged, and hungry?
I’ve got one story. Here it is:
A dilemma confronted her. The dilemma woke her in the middle of the night. It was the calm, clear voice of her Lord.
Invite him to stay here, He said.
She was supposed to invite him to stay at her home. Nothing too extraordinary. Except that he was the leader of one of the most savage street gangs in New York. He was a bad guy, rotten to the core.
Or so everyone knew, and the track record of his life proved.
And she was the proverbial sweet old lady, tough as nails inside, under the veneer of an opulent mansion, her world in order.
Invite him to stay here.
No one else would let him into their home.
But she did.
This one act, this time at her home, was the safe respite, like a rest in Rivendell, that he needed as he journeyed away from Mordor. (Apologies to non-Lord of the Rings fans for this sentence).
He couldn’t go back to the streets. His old gang would kill him. But he was forging a new path that would lead him toward Jesus and to an international ministry speaking about his life’s events.
But this story isn’t about him.
It’s about the woman who invited him into her home.
She took a risk.
She obeyed God.
[He] protested, “Master, you can’t be serious. Everybody’s talking about this man and the terrible things he’s been doing, his reign of terror . . . !”
But the Master said, “Don’t argue. Go!”
The Message
Of course, we can never know this, but as a thought experiment, what if this ONE ACT redeemed an entire life?
This ONE ACT allowed millions to be touched and inspired by a life that otherwise could have vanished in the wind.
Poof.
It’s possible, again as a thought experiment, that in this ONE ACT of obedience, the fruit from a life was as expansive as the sand on a seashore.
And I step on the snake next to me, crush its head.
God told the serpent:
The Message
“Because you’ve done this, you’re cursed . . .
I’m declaring war between you and the Woman,
between your offspring and hers.
He’ll wound your head,
you’ll wound his heel.”
Time is no longer around my neck, squeezing me, leaving me gasping for breath.
I obey God.
I leave the results of my life up to Him.
I fly.
You?
Restoring Life 