Wouldn’t it be amazing if someone we trust could suddenly appear in each of these circumstances, offer us their hand and point us to the best path?
Wouldn’t it be outstanding if that person never tired or gave up on us but offered grace and strength and sometimes even rubbed our aching feet as we rested?
Wouldn’t it be wondrous if this person was always by our side, could be leaned on when we lacked strength and helped to calm the chaos in our lives?
Any of us would give the world to find someone like this.
The substitute people that we esteem so highly instead, including movie stars, sports heroes, self-help experts and billionaires, eventually fall off their pedestals, and we trample them in our disappointment.
But wait . . .
Before we choose another human we highly esteem to take their place (someone with eventual skeletons in their closet, too), let’s pause and reassess . . . for just a moment.
Is there anyone who can be trusted, admired and in some ways, even followed?
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.
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?
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:
We fix our spiritual eyes on God, the master gardener of hope, instead of keeping our eyes closed by focusing on our bareness.
We open our eyes to the fact that harvest will come for every field, including that unwatered corner of our hearts if we allow the Master Gardener to work His ways within.
We wait, not passively, but prayerfully, with anticipation, like a farmer planting seed in fertile soil.
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?
I was shocked when the notification blared its announcement.
I was in the top 3% of users of a new nutrition app I was using.
The TOP 3%.
Everyone else (or 97% of people – whatever! – stay with me!) had already given up.
Now, I have to back up a bit to explain.
As you know, and have been forever changed by, I wrote a riveting blog post series last fall on weight loss. (To my editor: Why DIDN’T anyone read those posts, anyway?)
I have been (more or less) within the healthy weight range (basically – okay!) for my entire life, which has been no small feat.
However, when following my advice failed me, I decided to switch it up and buy a nutrition app. Truthfully, I am constantly trying new approaches and programs and learning a bit more about implementing healthy habits, which is the point of this post. But I’m not talking about that right now.
I’m talking about the notification that startled me.
I thought I was the ultimate failure in using this nutrition app. Check this out. The photo below is an actual graph of my progress over two months, showing NO improvement in achieving my ideal weight.
None.
There are normal fluctuations, but the graph of this line is flat.
Same, same, samers.
I immediately unsubscribed to the “encouragement” texts accompanying this app because so many people complained in a way I could not comprehend.
“I only lost 5 pounds this month!” they would complain.
Huh?
I hadn’t lost anything, so I could not relate.
But I kept going with the program.
And the results EVENTUALLY paid off. EVENTUALLY. I lost 10 pounds recently and feel a lot better.
And I believe the results would have also paid off for many, many other app users.
If only they kept trying.
And now, we’ll switch gears to talk about God, but it’s not changing gears, because the concept is the same.
MOST PEOPLE GIVE UP TOO SOON IN THEIR SEARCH FOR GOD
Is it annoying people that keep you away from your search for God? Get over them! (Get over yourself too, but that’s for when you are MUCH more spiritually sanctified and you realize that you are a loser too!)
Is God distant, just out of reach? You’re on the right path. God hides Himself as a critical component of his character.
He is not a dictator, shouting orders and wanting us to go off somewhere and obey every minute detail of his complicated directives. He longs to walk WITH us on this journey we call life. He wants us to WANT to want Him.
And so, right now, He is bending down low but right next to you. Will you reach out, tag his back, and say, “Gotcha!”
Will you seek Him?
If we don’t give up, even though most people do, and keep walking forward, following where we last saw his footsteps and carving out time in our busy day to sit with Him, unhurried, if we read his word, and ask others what it means even when we don’t understand it, then we will find God.
He’s waiting for you right now, holding out His hand to you.
And so, what is the one valuable ingredient to lose weight and find God?
Perseverance.
There’s more to come . . . keeping us alert for whatever God will do next.
Hunger for Jesus attracts the manifest (felt) presence of His Spirit. Does your hunger for God outweigh your discouragement? He’ll help you up, point you in a new direction, lighten the weight on your feet, help you soar.
Don’t give up just before your breakthrough, friend.
“Well, there is a bit more,” she explained. The plant was in the winter season. All that could be seen were a few branches poking above the ground.
Sounded like my life at that moment.
“But spring is coming,” she encouraged me. I picked up my discouragement and continued walking on this ill-marked path that it seemed God was leading me down, wondering if, in the future, sometime, there would be fruit.
Come here every morning, God seemed to whisper.
So I sat each day in my office chair, which seemed to be on fire because it was so uncomfortable to sit in. You want me to write, I clarified? I don’t see myself the way God sees me.
How do you want to work within my life, Jesus?
It seemed I had to follow Him to find out.
But I was learning to walk in obedience, even if I was blind to where we were going. I sat with Him each day long enough for my discouragement to be appeased by a God who knows who I was created to be. Could I learn to trust that if he can use other losers He can use my tattered, edited pages, too?
God can do anything, you know – far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it . . . by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.
I look back in awe at where He has been leading me. People from 23 countries so far have read the neurotic ramblings of a spiritually intense person, walking in circles but seeking God and falling and getting up again. And since people from so many countries are reading this blog, this is how we can know my life has meaning!
But He does take our pathetic gardening efforts and redeem them to give strength to each other.
God saw to it that I was equipped, but you can be sure it had nothing to do with my natural abilities. And so here I am . . . writing about things that are way over my head . . .
And he reminds us that spring, the season of blooming and life, follows winter, the season of rest, as we work with the master gardener to see life bloom as He leads.
Where is He leading you, friend?
May you soar on the wind as He leads you deeper into the wormhole of His purposes that always lead to life, growth and joy as we take one tentative step and another in the direction He is travelling, holding his hand as we go.
God, help each of us to see further than we could before, using your glasses.
While listening to the song below, consider quieting your heart, being thankful, and asking God, “What is one next step you are asking me to take that will eventually lead to blooming in my life?”
It was a mundane circumstance for those without eyes to appreciate it.
But my heart quickened many beats. God whispered, calling me to see something more profound than this mundane object. Would I have ears to hear? Did I have time to listen? Was I too busy to notice?
Here’s what happened.
At least ten years ago, I decided to plant two lilac bushes.
My husband encouraged me to plant the lilac bushes in our yard because they are my favourite flower. I love lilacs because they confidently fill the air with their scent. You can smell them from a distance.
Because of Christ, we give off a sweet scent rising to God
They are the only flowers I have planted in our twelve years of living in this house.
Unfortunately, I made a classic mistake when I planted them. I planted them at the edge of our lawn, where two lovely bare spots were in the grass. I found out later that these two spots were bare because our automatic sprinklers didn’t reach that far.
I watered these plants by hand once or twice and then forgot about them.
Every spring, I (perhaps pathetically) mourned these lilacs, thinking I wish I would have loved on them, poured into them and helped them get established. When I drove past our neighbour’s wall of lilac bushes this spring, I was startled at their beauty and again mourned that my lilac bushes had died. I didn’t get around to buying more lilac bushes and planting them again.
And then last week I saw it.
One little lilac blooming in the exact place where I had planted that lilac bush over a decade ago.
God seemed to whisper that we are like this lilac blooming.
Huh?
I stared at the lilac, trying to figure out if God was speaking and what he could possibly be saying through the life of this flower.
My mind wandered a bit as I stood staring at the lilac, waiting. I found myself impatient for next year. “This small flower, on an established plant, ushers in hope for more flowers next year and even more the year after that!” I found myself thinking.
And this is what I am saying to you, God seemed to whisper.
Where I had thought there was death, God was silently, patiently growing life. And my pathetic, misguided gardening efforts were enough for the master gardener to redeem. The lilac’s foliage blended with the background foliage of the nearby leaves, so I hadn’t noticed the bush was still alive.
Do you feel hope rising?
How is God growing hope in you?
What do you need hope for? How may God be offering you hope? Can we use the hidden winter season to store hope deep in our roots, waiting for spring to blossom?
That was God’s message to me last season.
He had asked me to plant, and to establish a habit in my life that would eventually bear fruit.
It seemed that God wasn’t finished speaking to this clerk at Tim Hortons yet, but I had some pressing paperwork to do. Would I trust Him to interrupt my more essential tasks again? Was I too busy?
My bagel was burned.
I could eat a bagel, slightly dark at the edges. Tell them it seemed God may have been saying. Really?
I already had one interaction where God somehow fed this young man a crumb.
Why did I have to ruin it by criticizing the food? I obeyed, and co-incidentally, perhaps, it was the same young man whose turn it was to speak to me. Several others were working the till.
I showed him my bagel and explained that I recently learned that burned food contains carcinogens, substances capable of causing cancer.
I apologized for the nuisance. “Maybe I should come to you for advice,” the clerk called loudly across the restaurant, as I walked away. I smiled.
He thinks he is drawn to me, but he is drawn to You in me.
May he learn the difference.
As I was about to leave, I thought the Lord said to buy another coffee. But I didn’t want another coffee! “Maybe my life is not entirely about what I want,” I reminded myself.
I stood in line.
Clerks were running everywhere, and many different people were taking orders. Again, I wasn’t surprised when I got the same clerk because this felt like a God appointment. Ask him about his church, God seemed to nudge as I ordered coffee.
“Hey, you said you are a Christian. Have you found a good group of people at a church around here to belong to?”
I wasn’t surprised when he said no. Theology that revolved around the type and frequency of product he smoked, the topic of our earlier conversation, didn’t seem completely orthodox. “Even though my mom is an atheist, I used to go to church. But I don’t have a ride right now,” he said as he gave me my change.
Again, a nudge from the Lord.
Do you have a car? God seemed to ask me, tongue in cheek. I offered him a ride to our thriving church. He declined, and I presumed there were deeper reasons why He wasn’t in a church community.
I walked away, carrying a bagel I was too full to eat.
Use me, Lord. There is so much food here at Your table. I pray this young man’s hunger pains will be satisfied one day.
May he truly know he is accepted and thus seek his next step in a relationship with You and other believers.
May he find another who can lead him to the feast.
Teach us more clearly to scatter a bounty of crumbs from Your voice, and with Your love, we pray.
After gabbing it up with my teenage daughter as they waited in line that day, the stranger grabbed my arm and whispered, “You did a great job with her. She is so kind. Well done, Mama.”
After I picked my ego up off the floor, where it has been the last two decades, trampled by societal expectations for a productive life (Hint – Homeschooling is not a candidate in this employment contest), I pinned my self-esteem back onto my chest, and thought, “Yes! You are right! She IS amazing!”
Even after 10,893,231 conversations in which I turned blue in the face and explained how to fit into society (i.e. NOT by wearing pasta in our hair when in a restaurant), she STILL wasn’t that easy to be around.
The POINT is that homeschooled kids are often well-adjusted because:
(1) Parents KNOW what is going on, in terms of that naughty behaviour we would rather not deal with, but that we have to address because we are spending 10,000 minutes (almost all the time) with them again this week,
(2) Parents can’t ship them off on a bus every morning, even BECAUSE they know what is going on (They would say “Thank God” if they would go on a bus SOMETIMES), and,
(3) Parents are confronted day after day, hour after hour, minute after long minute some days with the FACT that they are spending INORDINATE amounts of time with unsanctified humans.
Worse, parents are confronted with the reality of OUR need for sanctification, and this is humiliating for us. So, we run to God and beg for help on our knees BECAUSE we are ALL such desperate losers. But the sweat and tears of our prayers eventually sanctify our kids BECAUSE they receive this message of grace through our lives, as God sanctifies us.
Translation:We ADMIT we parents are losers, and then we gently reveal the truth to our child that she, too, did the wrong thing again when she smacked that kid on the head with her firetruck because she wanted HIS cupcake too.
But this grace in our lives, this deep understanding of our need for forgiveness, softens our speech a little.
do not provoke your children . . . by the way you treat them
Pick some fruit from the tree of your life and enjoy it today.
Well done, Mom and Dad.
God sees your investment in your kids. His praise that you followed His lead is the food that truly satisfies. Nothing good comes without sweat and handing over our fears to God.
Her child stood next to her. The girl look worried for her mother. She wanted to help.
The girl held a wildflower she had just picked and extended her arm to her mom with this offering.
It was all she had.
The flower drooped in her hand. This child desperately longed for her mother to feel better. Would this flower help, as hope extended from her heart through her arm?
The girl’s dress shone bright, pure, like her unhidden love for her mother.
She didn’t have much to offer. Only a wilted flower and a heart of need and love. Would it be enough?
It was.
The mother wrapped her arms around her daughter, drawing her in close, inhaling the fresh air scent. The aroma of this love strengthened her and gave her the courage to get up, to continue journeying hand in hand with this little one.
And Jesus walked next to them, though he couldn’t be seen.
He spoke to the daughter of ways to love her mother – a gentle touch here, an eye connection there, a wilted flower at the right moment, laughter in her play. And the mother’s heart was strengthened.
And Jesus also spoke to this tired and worn mother, in a whisper, a nudge, urging her to use the language of love that this child could receive – a game here, some good food there, given with eye connection and a silent “I love you.”
The mom’s movements, the swaying of her skirt as she walked, reminded the child that someone more significant, someone with more wisdom, someone who loved deeply, could be trusted to be followed.
The mom remembered this, too. She held Jesus’ hand with her free hand as she journeyed, following the path set before her. Someone else walked with her, had more wisdom than her and loved with a depth that surpassed her strength for love.
And remembering this lightened the load she carried on her back. As she walked, the gentle squeeze from his hand reminded her to turn this way, not that, on the path of life.
Some dangers were avoided, but not all. Some dangers drew her closer to the arms of Jesus as she drew her child next to her. On that scary stormy night outside, they heard the strange animals howling and felt the beating of their hearts.
But their trust grew more robust.
. . . if you’ll only get to know and trust me. Call me and I’ll answer, be at your side in bad times
Was that a whisper or a nudge from God as we live our lives in the mundane ordinary? Will we listen? He speaks, and it can seem so small and easy to ignore.
Will we obey?
The Father trusts those with big things to those who have been faithful in the small stuff.
Make some for yourself, too, God seemed to whisper to me that day several years ago. God had been nudging me to make fleece pants with my kids and their friends. Now, he seemed to be nudging to make fleece pants for me, too.
So, I was online ordering fleece fabric.
A particular type of fabric seemed to stand out to me as joy bubbled from the inside. I bought the fabric with the golden retrievers stamped all over them (true story). I made my pants.
And now, I will try to convey something challenging to articulate.
These doggy fleece pants are like a key opening a door between another culture and me. Once, someone exclaimed jubilantly that she loved my pants and then recounted a surprising quantity of her life story as I stood listening, stunned and speechless, my to-go coffee cup waiting in my hand mid-air for her to finish. This kind of thing happens often.
It happened today.
The teenage guy working at Tim Horton’s spent five minutes before he took my order telling me he loved my pants, told me a story about his dog, and then spoke with the lady next to him about whether she liked dogs or cats better.
I listened mutely and smiled.
My table was laden with crumbs, so I asked for a napkin to clean it. The young man leaned in to confide that they are understaffed but insisted on cleaning the table for me. As he wiped, he said, “People really surprise me sometimes.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
He was quiet, so I offered, “You mean how people are always making messes?”
He nodded.
I wondered what I could say in the several seconds left of our interaction that could be like a crumb to feed him just a little. “Well, it’s a good thing that God forgives us after we create our messes.” I looked innocently away, waiting for the metaphor to nourish his soul.
The crumb nourished, and his hunger pangs caused him to sputter forcefully.
“I can’t believe people don’t know I’m a Christian,” he exclaimed. “I don’t smoke.” My brain was overheating as I was trying to deduce the connection between not smoking and being a Christian.
He was in his own world, however, and felt the need, for some reason, to be honest with me, a perfect stranger.
“Well, I do smoke weed.”
Where do we go from here, God? Clearly, he was being nourished, somehow, by the crumbs from Your table. What do I say in the 30 nanoseconds before he departs?
I settled on, “Well, if we can truly understand that God loves us, that’s the important part, right?”
He stared at me, fumbled, and then dropped his cleaning cloth. His hat fell off as he bent over to pick up the fabric. He stared at me a moment before picking that up, too.
He was deep in thought.
Eye contact one more time before he walked away.
Was there a nanosecond of redemption, a glimpse of light lit for a moment, so that You redeemed this ordinary day for the clerk at Tim Horton’s, God? May this generation find messy tables wherever they go, we pray. And may the crumbs somehow, by your grace, be multiplied to nourish the soul.
There is more, there is more, there is more, He is saying to the teenage boy working at Tim Hortons.
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!”
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?
Restoring Life 