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.
And so, children sometimes peel back the curtain of heaven for us to quickly glimpse before the curtain is closed again. All we have left is a memory. What is our response to hearing stories that seem to push us into the realm of the divine, whether we want to go there or not?
Will the divine moments that we hear about be wasted on us?
There are three typical responses to another’s spiritual experiences: we become blind, jealous, or thirsty.
Most commonly, we become blind. Like a beautiful pristine camping spot, one mountain range further than we usually travel on our summer holidays, we won’t go there. It is not within the realm of our routine.
And so we are unable to see.
WAS there ever a pristine camping spot one mountain range over, we wonder, years later? WAS it an angel she said she saw? And then we are distracted again by our lunch.
The second most frequent response to stories of divine encounters is jealousy.
Instead of falling on our knees in worship and petitioning for a similar outpouring of the divine in our parched lives, some of us will compare. The soil of our hearts hardens just a little bit. That didn’t happen to ME.
They must think they are SPECIAL, we reason. They must assume they are MORE SPECIAL than ME. Often, that idea hadn’t crossed their minds.
But we’ve already tossed the implications of the divine moment in self-righteous indignation.
The third response, that very few travel, is a recognition of our spiritual thirst.
This heart response is gas for our car. We understand that each of us is offered an adoption certificate into the family of God, which comes with a royal inheritance. And from that identity, we can petition the Father, on our knees before Him, and ask, “Can You please pour out the divine in my life, God?”
We can beg Him for water because we see another who seems to have found a drink.
He always has more water.
I want you woven into a tapestry of love, in touch with everything there is to know of God.
God, soften the soil of our hearts equally through the encounters we experience in ourselves and those we hear about from others. Thank you that we can come to You with our doubts too and that You meet us exactly where we are. I pray we stop trying to stuff You into a box.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*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
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.
Restoring Life 