God

How To Be Brave At The Dentist’s And Doctor’s

/ Lori Lawe / 1 Comment

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.

The Message

And God, may I be the comforting presence to another’s fears next.

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.

2. Practice picking up the clues of God’s presence in your life, and talk to a trusted friend about your questions and experiences.

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.

Stumbling Under The Burdens Of Life? Easiest Traveling Ahead

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

Our good-natured, fluffy golden doodle bared his teeth and lunged at our bunny.

Our bunny would have had significant injury had I not automatically reefed on his leash, so he bit the air next to the bunny instead.

Our dog had never before tried to bite our bunny. We were teaching our dog to lie submissively when the bunny was near. The two animals often touched noses, and sometimes, tail wagging, our dog licked the bunny.

But not on that day.

Immediately before this incident, I relayed a dream I had the night before to my husband and daughter. It was about a bunny mauled by a dog. The bunny was dead, or so I thought, but when I picked it up to bury it, I realized it was still breathing, but barely.

Was there a link between this odd dream I relayed and the bizarre, similar real-life event that happened only five minutes later?

We don’t want to be too quick to assume every dream is from God when processed pizza is the source most often.

But nor do we want to toss all our dreams, assuming God can’t speak through them.

How can we know when God may be speaking in a dream?

When we see something similar happening twice, it can be an indicator to stop, pray, and ask God.

For example, this happened in the ancient texts of spiritual wisdom.

When Pharoah had dreams of spiritual guidance, he had two dreams with a similar meaning, although the content was different. Same with Joseph. And God uses this pattern with me, I’ve noticed.

God says things twice to get our attention, sometimes.

So what was He saying through the bunny and dog dream, if indeed He was speaking?

In the whirlwind and confusion of my unprocessed thoughts, concerns, and worries, one person in my life seemed to be rushing into a situation, like a bunny, moving fast. And it was dangerous for her.

Help her, God seemed to be imploring me.

Help her to see the danger that she cannot see.

So I phoned her, and spoke my heart, and warned her.

And she listened.

Will she heed this warning and slow down? That is not a weight for me to carry. We all must live our own lives, choose our paths, and face our monsters we meet on the way.

Whenever you hear me say something, warn them for me. If . . . you warn [them] and they keep right on . . . You’ll have saved your life.

The Message

We held hands for a moment, walking together along our shared paths, her and I. And I spoke the words that seemed to be birthed by the heart of God through my lips; however garbled these words may have emerged, and however tainted with filth from my own life.

And we parted ways, with a wave, her and I.

So we look around in wonder as we journey because we don’t know who may touch our hearts with love next.

Because I wonder who will be burdened by God to blow like the wind so I move a little to the left or right, as God whispers to their souls? Who next must speak to me what it seems He is whispering to them about my life?

And life’s journey becomes a little easier to travel.

Roll A Dice or Ask God?

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

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.

The Fastest Way To Faith – Walk Through Doors Children Open

/ Lori Lawe / 5 Comments

“Mommy, Mommy!” she called out, running into the room.

She was an adorable three-year-old redhead. Her older sister is comparatively more excitable. The older sister would emotionally max out due to many stimuli, including re-noticing her pink fairy wand or anyone visiting, no matter how sullen and grumpy.

This three-year-old was more even keel at both ends of the excited-angry spectrum.

And I had very rarely seen this child so exuberant.

She grabbed my hand and led me to a run. Where were we going? I wondered with a smile. I tried to get my excited face on, not wanting to squelch whatever new joy she had discovered.

We ran hand in hand to their playroom, and she stopped in front of the window. She looked triumphantly at me. I looked around, trying to grasp what she was showing me.

“Angel!” she exclaimed with desperation, pointing to the window.

Oh! I nodded and smiled.

I didn’t want to correct her, to say, “Oh honey, there is no angel there.”

What if she was seeing an angel? I let her correct me instead. And so my spiritual journey was fueled anew.

We stood hand in hand, looking out the window for a minute or two.

“Oh! Angel gone!” she exclaimed. And just as suddenly, she sat on the floor nearby, re-stacking her blocks.

Kids usher us into the divine. And parenting, because it involves kids, is like steroids for the spiritual life. They violently remove our blinders to how we have stuffed God into the small box of our expectations.

Spend time with children, and we fall to the ground, our knowledge tripping us up. Everything we thought we understood about spirituality has been upended and we are on our rears with dirt in our hair. Our children offer to help us to our feet.

They simplify things for us.

Consider Diane M. Komp, MD, a pediatric oncologist from Yale who:

“found a personal faith while treating . . .. dying children”

A Window to Heaven

In Dr. Komp’s words, children are the “littlest of God’s giants.”

So, can children help us on our spiritual journeys? That depends on our heart’s reaction to the clues children show us – more on this next time. But let’s assume that children sometimes walk ahead of us in critical ways.

Whoever becomes simple and elemental again, like this child, will rank high in God’s kingdom

The Message

God, give us humility to be led by our children further and deeper into the essential truths of Your Kingdom, we pray.

I’ll continue this story next time.

Anger, Not Indifference, Expresses Love

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

The bible story pictures tend to most often portray Jesus sitting on the grass, Buddha style, with some children frolicking nearby, spewing truths that people fell over themselves trying to catch.

Which would be true.

But Jesus also got angry.

Anger fueled by love that erups within our souls like a volcano sometimes contains the seeds that can eventually heal culture.

TED: How To Make Peace? Get Angry by Kailash Satyarthi

Examples of the rumble in my soul:

  • Smartphones and other devices distract us from the search for God that stirs our souls. We yawn, and these devices sing us a lullaby and tuck us into bed. Hours and hours of these distractions put the raging monster, capable of transforming an entire cultural landscape to sleep with its soft coos and gentle caresses.  Sleep, little babe, sleep.  And we obey.
  • For those of us who claim to follow Jesus, which almost one-third of the people on earth claim to do, we are told we are part of God’s army of brave warriors. But we too often look at the armour next to us on the ground, asking “Isn’t it too heavy to lift, and how does one fasten these garments anyway?” We lamely look around and see some using their swords with skill, defeating the evil of the mind, and they beg us to join them in the fight. God whispers to us but we don’t hear Him. We are looking for something – our ears.
  • A generation of tots lined up in rows, and we calmly watch as they march in neat little rows, each one off the edge of the cliff. “What can we do anyway?” we mourn a bit to each other amidst sips of tea.  And so, a generation is led to the pit of pornography addiction and masochistic internet violence as a common cultural pastime.  They spend the next decades trying to struggle out of the steep-sided, sand-covered pit of secret sexual addictions*.  And we turn our backs so that we can’t see them fall.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOM

Are we ready, yet, to wake early and cry out from the fetal position, begging for wisdom, ears to hear, and a living heart in exchange for our hardened coal-shaped ones?

And as we are comforted by Jesus, is He asking us to comfort or to challenge our secular or church culture or to change our actions? He gives us a drink of His medicine that hurts us and then heals us of the diseases caught by our culture. Anyone thirsty?

What mountainside is He asking us to allow to be transformed by righteous anger spawned by love for God, ourselves, and others? 

How does God want to transform our righteous anger into love in action?

And volcanos affect others. And so another person picks up the ash-laden, dirty piece of paper spewed from one of these God-inspired volcanos.  Can they make out the letters, which are dirty and half missing? 

Yes, they read it . . . “Climate injustice is linked to poverty,” says one scrap of paper. And with a gentle nudge from our Saviour, a rub on the back, telling her it is okay to be angry, another explosion, and another and another, for the ash from one volcano encourages the next to explode. 

Love for God, for our fellow human sheep, those both lost and found, beget love in prayer and action.

And are we afraid?  

Afraid of who we would be, of what we would do if we stopped holding in our anger, stopping sucking in our stomach like a weightlifter, stopped smiling to show off artificial, TV-worthy teeth? 

What if we didn’t care what they thought of us or what we looked like?  What if we looked more like John the Baptist, eating whatever we distractedly found along the way, dressed in ripped rags from our fierce single-minded pursuit of God, and covered in ash from being so close to the explosions? 

Because when God looks at us, sometimes He is looking for the fruit that the seed of anger produces in our lives.

So we can exchange our anger for love in action.

And that is how culture is restored.

Jesus put together a whip out of strips of leather and chased them out of the Temple, stampeding the sheep and cattle, upending the tables of the loan sharks, spilling coins left and right. He told the dove merchants, “Get your things out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a shopping mall!”

The Message

Blogpost Footnotes:

*For a secular example, see Chapter 4 of The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge

Anger, Expressed As Love, Is Hope For Culture

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

God is very different from who I thought He would be.

I’m a lot different from who I thought I would eventually become when I first started longing to know more about God, too.

At Sunday school or elsewhere when we first heard about God, He often appeared as a “turn the other cheek” when an enemy tried to smack Him kind of a guy.

And since we are made in His image, I had a vague impression that the ultimate goal of the spiritual life is to become the kind of person who lies down so people can wipe their feet on us.

If that’s the case, then I was blown away by what God spoke into the recesses of my heart that day. God, are you who I think you are? 

Of course not,

is His inaudible answer, and in his fury at the audacity of the question, He erupts as a violent volcano, splashing the earth with ashes of his love.

A volcano . . . erupting . . . love? I can explain because I am a mini-volcano formed in His image.  I haven’t exploded yet. But I can feel the rumble, and I know it is coming. 

And he is edging me on.

Don’t be afraid of your anger,

He spoke gently into the recesses of my heart recently. He comforted me in empathy, the way my dad would rub my back when I was a child, just before I would throw up. You know that feeling just before you are sick when you remember you will feel much better to have the bile removed from inside of you? That’s how I have been feeling.

I had been covering up the threatening volcanic eruption with my best church bonnet and long white Sunday dress. 

Like the person who travels to a volcano that threatens eruption, and pours a bit of water, a shovel full at a time, on top of the huge mountain to pacify it a little bit, I placated my growing anger. 

I shoved the equivalent of a baby pacifier into my mouth at church, turned aside, and listened to relentless chatter. Another shovelful of water, please. Or she’s a gonna blow.

My anger terrifies me. 

I once climbed an active volcano in Costa Rica, la Rincon de la Vieja. Tourists would never have been allowed that close to an active volcano in ultra-safe Canada. They wouldn’t have been allowed within miles of that place. And as I stood at the top of that mountain and looked around, I was shocked at the scale of the devastation. 

An entire mountainside of bare rocks, with the jungle forest beginning abruptly in the valley far below.

Yet scientists know that after the initial devastation, volcanic ash enriches the soil with its dense nutrient load. 

Soil from this ash produces some of the lushest plant life on earth. 

So as God rubs my back, gently telling me it’s okay to be sick, I realize that holding in my anger only makes me feel sicker.

At that moment, the clerk at the checkout counter seemed to silently ask me as she wrapped my package with a smile, “Would you like modern-day slavery with that?¨

And my anger, rightly expressed as love, compels me to take one small step in a direction that opens the door to better alignment with my true identity.

And this anger, no longer stuffed inside but rightly expelled as love, contains the soil that can nourish the seed of hope.

Does anyone dare despise this day of small beginnings?

The Message

Stop Agonizing – 2 Unmissable Reasons To Homeschool (Or Not)

/ Lori Lawe / 5 Comments

For most of us, deciding whether to homeschool or not is an agonizing decision.

So, let’s say we choose to homeschool. What if we wake up one Saturday late because we are exhausted and realize with terror that we’ve ruined our kids? That they are irrevocably broken?

On the other hand, what if we put our kids through the cookie-cutter “everyone-else-is-doing-it” public school experience, and after confidently sipping lemonade with our feet up, discover the cookie-cutter is broken, and we have a different-shaped kid than we expected?

This parenting gig is not for the faint of heart.

But you must decide by Monday because school starts then, and you still don’t have your books (I’ve been there), if you will plunge into the homeschooling world – the beautiful, exhausting, messy, societally outcast-able (your kids do WHAT all day??) world of homeschooling.

So, to homeschool or not?

The cons of homeschooling and public schooling should be thoroughly evaluated to decide whether you should consider homeschooling.

First, let’s study the cons of homeschooling.

#1 – The number one con of homeschooling is that they are HOME. ALL the time. Wow. Need I say more? Before you grab a martini and try to forget that you were even considering this option, please read on.

#2 – The number two con of homeschooling is that you have to regularly flip through your Rolodex, or whatever, pick up the phone and CALL their friends so that they have a play date.

Well, of course, now we do all that in one swipe, but you get the point. It is ANNOYING. If you toss your kids in a room full of kids exactly the same age as them and leave them there every day for a year, you don’t NECESSARILY need to ensure they are spending even MORE time with these same kids. Enough said.

Now, let’s study the cons of public schooling.

#1 – The number one con of public schooling is that they are GONE. ALL the time. Wow. Need I say more? We shuffle the little snotty cuties off to dance or soccer practice after school and then to play dates or birthday parties. They NEED even MORE time with the same kids discussed in point #2 above so other kids don’t climb over them in the grade school pecking order.

Now, there are only drops of water in the jug of time the kids have left over for YOU. Before you grab a martini and try to forget that you were even considering this option, please read on.

#2 – The number two con of public schooling is the school system may put you in the equivalent of a dark closet and shut the door while your child is going through something that will affect them for the rest of their life*.

They will do this to you because they want to help your child. Whether they are right or not is a discussion for another time.

The point is that abdicating parental involvement in a life-altering event for your child is now part of what your signature indicates when you enroll them in kindergarten.

It’s worth considering this, at least, as you have tea and perhaps flip a coin to help choose a schooling option for your children.

And the point of this blogpost? Perhaps every involved parent should seriously consider homeschooling. Now, I do know that homeschooling is not an option for every family. And indeed, this is not the best choice for every family. And even if it were, most families aren’t crazy enough to try it.

God, as a parent Yourself, you empathize with us that parenting is not for the faint of heart. Please help us to confidently decide which schooling option is best for each child this year. Guide us as You see the future and know what is best for each unique child.

Cry for help and you’ll find it’s grace and more grace.

The Message

Do you sense that God may be nudging you toward homeschooling? What makes you want to move in this direction? If you are currently homeschooling and want to quit, we encourage you to keep sailing in the same direction until the skies clear, friend.

Blogpost Footnotes

*Parents from Mongomery County, for example, took the school system to court because “Parents should be in the loop” of a “decision that can have some very life-changing effects – and parents are principally in charge of helping their children through those types of situations.” Source: The Washington Post – Link to the full article

Make Your Homeschooled Kid Look Like An Idiot So They Ace The SAT

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

I was frothing at the mouth again, spewing words of dissent, grumbling to myself. My husband was sitting next to me in the car, waiting for my spaz to end. This tantrum was my regular 3-month routine.

I had gotten more report cards for my kids.

And I wasn’t happy.

Our kids excelled in some areas, according to these report cards. However, some of the grades reflected ME as a homeschool teacher more than my KIDS as students. I hadn’t been toeing the line again.

And my kids were getting the academic spanking.

However, if, as a homeschooling parent, we TRY to do every little thing that the school system asks, we will end up as blobs of discouragement, unable to get off the couch again. The system is designed for us to fail. As homeschooling parents, we must set sail in a new direction, slightly off-center from the true north the school system uses.

And so our kids may look like morons for a while.

For example, after I exited from the Canadian public school system in Grade 12, I had honor roll status and the coveted knowledge of about 200 years of European settler’s Canadian history, which had been drilled down my throat at least weekly for 12 years. I hadn’t realized that other countries had histories, too! And some of their histories were longer than 200 years!

So, I CHOSE to have my kids learn world history more often from a challenging, classically based curriculum.

Therefore, their Canadian social studies grades plummeted for a while.

However, their social studies grades were assigned assuming they hadn’t done ANY socials instead of reflecting that they hadn’t studied the EXACT socials curriculum recommended in that grade.

Whatever.

And it’s not just social studies that follow this pattern.

Our school systems are based on Greek methods of learning*, where we dissect learning down into thousands of pieces, and they divvy out hundreds of “goals” for a SPECIFIC age level to learn. Check out these PLOs (fancy word for goals) for Canadian students for each grade. Studied astronomy in Grade 4 when your kid was actually interested in it instead of in Grade 3? Zero on their report card.

And so I was frustrated.

We solved this little problem by not telling our kids what report cards were until high school. It’s surprising, in retrospect, how infrequently their public school friends mentioned report cards. So, our kids “skipped” viewing their report cards for about a decade.

After seeing their early report cards myself and having my little verbal spaz that my husband happened to be near enough to hear, I had a nice sugary iced latte (my therapy of choice), and then my husband and I talked about other things. This routine was just another homeschooling rhythm we observed. We didn’t have to discuss the details.

Years later, when our first child graduated from high school, she aced much of the SAT, an average score among her classically trained students. (The SAT is a standardized test taken by, generally the top 30% of academically achieving students. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of it either. I was public schooled, too.)

Dorothy Sayers wrote about this effect almost 80 years ago.

Classically trained children don’t do as well as other kids early on. They don’t have time to systematically jump through every hoop and complete every learning goal assigned to them. They are too busy learning to think.

Later on, they often do comparatively better academically than their peers.

Maybe encouraging our kids to read hard books** and then reading challenging books aloud really pays off in the long term.

And even though our kids LOOK like geeky academic superstars, we all know that academic prowess is not the PRIMARY goal for our homeschooled kids.

But if we do want their brains to flourish to their full potential, maybe encouraging them to look like idiots for a few years is not such a bad idea.

Sugary latte, anyone? (Sugar is one of my coping tactics to help me not follow the crowd. WEREN’T YOU LISTENING earlier in this post when I first mentioned my iced latte?! What? NOT EVERYONE listens to my every word? Oh well. I can feel a bit better about myself because at least my kids are smart.)

Sure, I’ll have a double caramel iced latte, too.

Thank you!

You’re welcome!

Good luck!

Blogpost Footnotes

*Much has been written comparing the Greek and Hebrew educational philosophies. For a brief summary, check out this talk.

**My daughter is reading The War with Hannibal by Livy (circa 200 BC) as I write this. Hey! Flaunting ego is the path to true success, remember!

When Easter Is A Noisy Cymbal Clanging

/ Lori Lawe / 1 Comment

Sometimes we mess up holidays.

For example, once a stranger at the Dollar Store asked me if I thought there was something not-quite-right about Hallowe’en. (I asked if it was perhaps the sweet little kids combined with creepy maiming imagery that seems off? Or is it just me?)

Similarly, could the way that we do Easter be not-quite-right?

For example, take Easter egg hunts.

Besides the fact that kids are searching for poison in the form of sugar, they have already been accustomed to, after staring comatose at thousands of industry-funded ads over their short lifetimes, promoting dumping the white substance over their breakfast cereals, crackers and drinks, besides that.

Are Easter egg hunts harmless?

My daughter participated in an Easter egg hunt. Several of the bigger, stronger, and more self-obsessed kids pushed others to the ground to gorge themselves even more, slobbering chocolate over the smaller kids sitting nearby, who were crying because they didn’t find any eggs.

But we tolerate this.

Why? It’s likely because the self-obsessed kids won’t listen to us, either. “Come on, Jimmy, why don’t you give some of your eggs to Sally?” we plead.

But they have already been eaten.

Compare this to the Xhosa culture in South Africa.

Kids were told whoever got to the fruit tree first won the sweet fruits. They held hands and ran together. Then they sat in a circle and ate together.

“Why?” the westerners asked. “UBUNTU, how can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?” UBUNTU in the Xhosa culture means: “I am because we are.”

And we are in culture shock again.

What are we teaching our children at the Easter egg hunt? We are the ones setting culture. The children are merely living up to our expectations.

The whole congregation of believers was united as one – one heart, one mind! 

The Message

And so, how do we hear a little less noise and a bit more of the wind blowing through the trees and our hearts this Easter?

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

Ancient Text

We find some love, the kind that has been deposited in our pockets when we were looking for something else, and place a handful in the Easter baskets of the people whose lives we stumble across.

And joy comes to us, too.

For that is His way.

When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us . . . God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word.

The Message

May you hear the sweet sound of His loving voice whispering to your heart ever more clearly this season, friend.

And may you find some love in your easter basket, too.

How To Rise From The Dead This Easter Season

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

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.

My gaze had become limited.

I moved the plant to where we put things going to the dump.

At the prayer meeting that week, we were reminded to ask God to bring to life the seeds He had planted in us long ago. The ones He spoke in the whispers of the early morning hours or through the words of a friend – the ones we can’t quite find faith to believe.

And we were reminded to pour out our disappointments and frustrations to God. And to beg Him to make life sprout from the barren soils of our hearts.

And then I added a drop of water, two, on a whim that day to the amaryllis that was placed en route to the garbage dump.

Maybe?

And life sprouted.

And buds came in the form of hope.

And my soul was watered every time I watered that plant because hope was sprouting in me, too.

When the forgotten bulb in the little brown pot that hadn’t flowered in 20 years burst forth in all its fullness this Easter, I gazed at it in wonder.

And I don’t give up on you, either, Jesus whispered.

Because I know what the soil of your heart is capable of if you let Me pour some water on the seeds I have planted in your life.

Are you ready yet, dear child, to dare to hope in the impossible?

Friend, are you?

God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!

The Message

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.

To God be the glory!

(Happy Easter.)