Beauty in Unexpected Places

/

Sometimes the most beautiful things grow in unexpected places. I planted sunflowers our first summer in this house, and since then I haven’t sown any seeds. We just let some of the seeds fall, and usually they sprout up in the same flower bed to shade my summer lettuces. But sometimes we find them coming up in very unexpected places. This year, we found a late sunflower sprout coming up in our watermelon bed, but decided to leave it so we didn’t disturb the root system of our fledgeling plants. I didn’t think it would get very big where it was anyway. But apparently I was wrong, and this was the perfect place for this giant to flourish! It brought us so much joy to watch it get bigger and bigger. Every day we went out and exclaimed, “Wow! It’s even bigger today!” It turns out to be the biggest and tallest sunflower that has grown in our garden.

Sometimes life is like that sunflower. We find ourselves in an unexpected place thinking, “This isn’t where I’m supposed to be. All the other flowers are growing over there. This must be wrong.” But maybe that unexpected place is exactly the RIGHT place for us, and it’s where we’ll grow the most. I certainly didn’t set out to grow the biggest sunflower ever this year. I don’t know enough about soil composition or the particular make up of what lies underneath where it was planted. But God does. He knows what lies underneath of where we are and can give us the exact nourishment and resources we need to grow best. It’s so easy for me to see all the ways things “don’t make sense” to my mind, or for my mental attitude to be “I don’t see how this place can produce anything good.” Often God get’s us away from what is normal or expected because we grow best when we are dependent on Him. Being in an unexpected place can produce a deeper faith because it’s easier to see our need for God. I have a lot of this in my life right now, and I’m grateful for God’s gentle reminder to my heart: “Watch and see what I will grow here!” I look forward in faith that it will be the more beautiful than staying where we “should have been.” He always meant for me to grow here. And so, like the sunflower, I too will keep trying to grow towards the Son.

Contentment (The Anti-American Dream)

/
Contentment (The Anti-American Dream)

I don’t have to know where I’m going anymore. I’m fine with riding passenger. It’s taken a while to get rid of the bad theology of “The American Dream” (or most of it, I hope). I’m not the “master of my fate” or the “captain of my soul” as stated in Invictus. I’m content, joyful even, to know Jesus is leading me. Even with so many reasons to be discontented, I’ve found God has given me contentment. I’m less “in control” than I have ever been. I honestly don’t even know what this summer or next year will look like, what I’ll be doing, or if things will resolve in so many respects. Yet I know this is where God has led me. So how can I have contentment without any “game plan”?

Read More

How to Have Peace in Any Circumstance

/
How to Have Peace in Any Circumstance

I don’t think there has ever been a time in my life I haven’t been hoping for something. I’ve struggled throughout my life when there wasn’t something “to look forward to”. If there wasn’t anything, I planned something, anything. When things got hard I comforted myself by looking ahead and thinking, “But I just have to make it until ___ (something fun) comes.” My joy and contentment was very much controlled by the circumstances of my life. (Enter the difficult years.) It’s been a crazy past 4-5 years, full to the brim with difficult things. To name a few: a hurricane crushing our home, my mom dying after a sudden diagnosis of late-stage cancer, my husband having emergency heart surgery at 35, being homeless several times, PTSD, etc…Planning something to look forward to just stopped working for me at some point. When life is so hard you can’t look beyond the next few hours or when what you see ahead only brings more anxiety, you need something MORE. Better. Deeper.

Read More

Sabbath

/

In the Sabbath stillness
I look up as I look down
Hear the rain upon the window
Delight in the dewdrops on the ground
I’m reminded that the God who loves me
Doesn’t dwell upon a line
He is above, below, around me
He exists outside of time

So I slow and still my senses
Rush blinds the eyes of delight
Find stillness (be present), because He’s present
Don’t let seeing too much block true sight
For I often hurry past Your glory
Even though it’s right in front of my face
I’m often deaf to the symphony
When all You’ve made is a chorus of Your praise

Did I ever really know You,
God, woven in and through everything I see?
Have I ever thought of You rightly,
God, I find ever increasingly all around me?
When I am still I am more awe
That You see me, meet me, want know me
And You invite me to know You - God!
So deeper I wander into Your rest, Your mystery

When You Can't Tie Up the Year with a Bow

/
When You Can't Tie Up the Year with a Bow

It’s the time of year that many people look back on the year that is drawing to a close and highlight all the good or say “good riddance” and wish for a better year to come. I’ve thought often about what this year means to me in retrospect. It was certainly an “ebenezer” year, and I wish I had an actual stone to put somewhere in remembrance. It was a year I saw a true miracle: God spared my husband’s life when he had, at best, a 2% chance of survival. It was incredible, undeniable and I will never be the same or stop being grateful that we can all still be together as a family. But we can’t tie up our story with a nice bow. We can’t say “God saved Jonathan and this is why.” I can’t negate the dark valley I walked through afterwards or the fact that Jonathan still lives with a medical condition that gives him pain and hinders normal activity. He still can’t run around in the yard with our kids and he’s not back to 100%. The discouragement and limitations that continual nagging pain causes is hard for us both, especially because it looks like there may not be any resolution on the horizon apart from another miracle of God. 

Read More