looking up

God isn't just the things I say about Him.

It is coming on to Easter. I am less ready for this than I was for Christmas, and I wasn't ready then. I hate the calendar. My life isn't happening in tandem with the seasons. The season I'm in is forever and no time at all.

I forget every single day that God lives outside of time. And every day, if I don't remember He lives, I go into a tailspin.

I haven't stopped running since I got back from my parents' house a month ago. And with two kids, I don't have any down time forcing me to think. But I feel. Oh do I feel. It is why I have been taking pictures lately. I barely have time for that, but it is the only way I can try to express some of what is happening in me. I don't write unless I can't sleep.

This is the hardest thing I have ever done. I'm not even sure what "this" is. Being a mother? Loving my children? Holding onto my sanity? Trusting God?

I'm not actively shutting Him out, but I'm barely running to Him right now. I'm barely doing anything beyond the immediate right now. I thought I'd been through it with my health issues before, but this stretching is unbelievable.

I think it is making room in me for love.

becoming - continuing the ramble

it is part of a becoming, isn't it?

i am not now, but I will be.

the words that spill out are so much dross from silver being refined.

...

i half wonder what my readers must think when i leave up posts such as i have written recently, when i so publicly display my questions and worries and doubts about God. if i have so many issues, it seems miraculous that i should believe Him at all.

or, that might be the point.

that i do believe Him, even when i feel i can't act on it. here i live, human, daring His wrath because i dare to trust His love that provides me such grace to fall. not that i want to fall. it is grace to fail too, grace for tired and trying to do too much in my own strength. grace to let me learn to look first to Him instead of wishing Him away.

which i spent much of yesterday doing as He reminded me to be gentle with pip, to not heap burden on burden - oh, how i want to hold things over her right now! i wished God away, wished His love away, because i wanted to be angry.

...

and i spent today in pursuit of an empty hope. it was so stupidly shallow i won't bother writing it here (do you see, there ARE things i hold back for embarrassment!). pete offered me more understanding than i could give myself - he said, "it's something you could look forward to that isn't what you always have right now."

i try not to duck. but i have been ducking. trying to perfect this and that and - did you notice that other thing? i've worked on everything from favicons to icons to buttons to watermarks in between discipline and nursing over the last few days. the shame of it is that i don't feel i've accomplished anything at all.

it is silly for this restless heart to try to force its own rest.

...

i have been shutting things out. trying to still the roaring in my head. trying not to look at ________ or at _________, trying to remember that they didn't start where they intimidate me now, realizing that they must have had some sort of becoming too.

tonight i let it go for a while. quit trying to think it out and make it better. went to "wommuhtt" with my family to pick up some dinner and a "huggabugga" (piper loves going to walmart; she saw a wendy's on the way and asked for a hamburger). i watched some scrubs with pete (when he wasn't policing piper) and talked with bredon for a bit (he loves his conversations with mama).

do you know, b has the sweetest poochie lip i've ever seen? when his daddy is holding him and he sees me, he pulls it out and lets me have it: "mommy, how can you let this man hold me when you're right here?!"

i value my dinner times. they are shorter than they used to be. i'm adjusting.

...

so i am neither here nor there; it has not yet been revealed what i will be when God is finished with me. the seed must fall to the ground and die before it can live again and bear much fruit.

i thought the dying was done. i hoped it was over, anyway. it's so... uncomfortable.

yet it is also beautiful, blown by Spirit-wind from the stem where i cling into the current of God-love known and God-love lived as i test this newest trust.

crucified, yet alive. a piercing paradox from a Master who became a servant, the Life who died, Love Himself who was hated by those He loved.

i don't have a heart for God, not lately, not most days. my own passion waxes and wanes, and i find it waning this week. He requires so much of me, it seems. still, i sense His heart for me, and i feel hope that i matter to Him, that He doesn't simply work in spite of me. i wonder if my prayers do make a difference to Him, if they are more than basic conversation or vending machine access, if He really wishes to take my heart into account in how He works out His plans for me.

you know. the plans for a hope and a future. the plans He has for His people.

plans. not wishes.

plans.

...

i'm not okay with sitting here, deciding i've arrived and this is the end, so i'd better conform to the highest ideals or accept my utter failure.

but i'm okay with becoming.

there's lots of room for hope in that. room for beauty. i feel silly admitting how i want that, how it has nothing to do with my outward appearance and everything to do with a quiet, God-stayed heart He is growing out of scar tissue.

my words seem to spill in what seems a long sigh - sometimes frustrated, sometimes tired, sometimes easing into rest.

He meets me here, too much for me, enough for me to approach Him for mercy, for love, for rest.

I Am who is I Am takes my dross makes me real like Him.

Yes, I am becoming.





(Image © Informal Moments Photography)

Something About Good

I've had so much time to think recently, and not so much time to process my thinking, to bring my scattered thoughts to real. But something is coming clear, something about inadequacy, my own God-gifted inadequacy.

The only solid thing that comes to me is this: that God has been very good to me and I have not deserved His goodness.

It is something about having a child whose high needs I can never fully meet. Something about her needing God too - for life, for help, for love, for discipline. It something about a place to begin teaching her of His care for her.



It is something about letting go, and about holding on, an almost-wish that these young, small days would last longer because I cannot get close enough to the smiles, the cooing, the giggles, the uncertainty, the pleas for time with Mama that will just never be enough.



This something is about a really big God. A really, really big God whose wrath is overpower, whose wrath will one day drive those who hate Him to curse His name without repentance. It is something about being held by this God, something about a strong love, eyes that burn like fire, a King on a white horse, a Gospel and a testimony that draws my eyes upward, outward, into Him who is Spirit and not like me.

Have I made Him too small in my need to justify myself, my life, my inadequacy?


It is my inadequacy that teaches me to embrace His power. It is my empty that begs His full. It is my dust that requires His glory.

I see so well where I have failed and where I must not fail. I try so hard to perfect myself, to be unbroken, to do the right thing every time. It is too much for me. I will never be enough. Not for this loving of my children, not for this serving of my powerful God. I can never cover all my bases.

If not for Christ, I would be destroyed. This something I cannot quite describe is at once terrible and comforting. It goes beyond all I have ever known, lives in a realm I cannot finger or photograph, draws me from the daily into the eternal and helps me trust a Person who provided for my redemption from this body of sin.

The uncontrollable pain I own in child-bearing, the transition and change in life that sends me spinning out of my comfort zone, the unrequited longing I know for my husband, time slipping through my fingers like so much sand - these are the gifts of His goodness to me, the painful, beautiful etchings of life under Adam redeemed in Jesus.


I cannot pretend to understand.

I can only be overwhelmed. Only offer up my thanks, wordless thanks that is more than emotion, that draws all of me up into Him, that bows me down before Him, and the eyes of my heart wonder beyond the dim reflection at the mystery that will be no more one day when I behold Him.

I can only taste this goodness that I will never be enough to earn.

...

Shared in the blog carnival hosted at Bridget Chumbley's One Word at a Time today.





(Images © Informal Moments Photography)

Love Stories: God and Me, Part III

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, But when the desire comes, it is a tree of life."

- Proverbs 13:12

I am told I met my Pete in February, 2004.

A coworker wanted me to go on a blind date with an online schoolmate of hers who was coming to town. There was no way I was going to subject myself to that. Not with everything that had already happened relating to boys and dates and the rest of my life spent waiting, because at the rate he was going, my friend was never getting married, and he sure wasn't coming back.

He told me so. I got the "never" to my face. And I was told not to expect God to change his mind.

I vaguely remember one day in the midst of the dark when I walked into the dining hall at the campus where I still worked after dropping out of school. I had a question for my coworker; really, I was looking for an excuse to be there. I knew I wasn't wanted by anyone in the room.

I asked my question; my coworker answered my question. I can remember a shadow behind her, someone moving quiet out of the light. I heard a familiar laugh across the room, too loud, too painful. I left as quickly as I could.

...

Pete told me much later that he went home to Connecticut and couldn't get me out of his mind. He said he'd never seen someone in so much pain. He said he'd prayed for me. I still say if I'd met him then, I'd never have fallen in love with him.

...

The spring came and went that year with me watching a calendar with silly hope. Each month had a focus on something beautiful, and for the life of me I can't tell you now what the themes of the months were, except June. I know what June was.

It was love.

Every month before, something had happened to fulfill the monthly theme. I was on a high with God, giddy that He cared to involve Himself in my life, giddy that anything could happen, that He could bring my friend back in spite of everything. He had told me to love him, after all.

There was only one thing that could happen in June that could meet the requirements of my love theme.

During the last week in June, I completely collapsed at the office with convulsions that sent me into the hospital. In the ER, I was given an IV containing what I was told was the same fluids that were in my body. I didn't realize it carried 5% dextrose into my bloodstream. I didn't realize it was going to make me weaker because of my sensitivity to sugar.

The first few days saw me accepting my suffering with hope. I read my Bible. I thanked God for the window in my room. I had landed in the old maternity ward. It was a safe place. I felt surrounded by love. I knew I was where God wanted me.

I had visitors, and the nurses were kind. They woke me every morning to draw blood, testing for God-knows-what. The person who got my room after I was moved was rather annoyed by all the callers for me.

Oh yes. I was moved.

And that is where the nightmare began.

...

I had known Pete for about a month at that point, but the month had opened such a friendship between us that I risked a call to him from the ER. I didn't know who else to call. I was still a kid in so many ways. I think it takes growing up to recognize how much you need your parents still, and too often, they're gone before you realize it.

He came. Every day except the three that he was gone on conference.

It was on one of those days that the hospital staff moved me. The nursing staff came in wearing masks at about 11:00 p.m. of the third day of what would be my nine-day stay. They were testing for something highly contagious, they said. I was being moved to isolation.

I was terrified. My sister had gone home that night, something she wouldn't do again for the rest of my stay.

Knowing he would still be up studying, I called Pete from my new room and talked until we were both too tired to stay awake. The room with a window that looked into a wall. The room on the hall where everyone was throwing up. I could hear them through the walls. It was in this room that I met Fear. It was in this room that he seared my soul with a perspective change that would forever challenge my childish view of God.

...

During my time at the hospital, I had been praying, begging God, really, to send my friend to see me. I asked Pete to ask him to come. I thought he might take it better from him than from me.

I wanted to ask his forgiveness. For what, I don't know. Loving him against his will? I still don't really know. I just wanted my friend back. At that point, I didn't care whether I "ended up" with him or not.

Every day I battled within myself over whether I should ask God for him to come. I expected him around every corner, waited for him to appear in my room - always looking, always waiting.

As I grew weaker and weaker with the dextrose in the IV compromising my blood, I began to wonder if I'd ever see him again. Finally one night, I fell to my knees, surrounded by fear, surrounded by the awful sounds of retching, by the weeping and the eerie hospital-quiet, and I begged. I begged God to send him. I turned my hands upward and surrendered my desire to God, for a final yes or no.

Pete found me beside the bed that night, too weak to climb back in. He helped me up and tucked me in as I faded into oblivion.

The last thing I remember from that night is his tender kiss on my forehead.

...

To my knowledge, my friend never came to the hospital. It was the closing of a door I didn't understand then, the opening of heart-questions for me that that simultaneously pulled me to God and drove me from Him.

How could He love me? What proof did I have that God really cared about me? What proof would I ever have?

In the weeks after the hospital, I cried through Job. I begged my friends for answers about God's love, about what it looked like, about what He meant. Pete stood firm that God loved me, that He didn't have to prove His love.

But how could I believe that?

...

I left the hospital with Fear, who would become my constant companion. Before I left, God had asked me to speak the name of Jesus to one of my doctors. I did. Before I left, one of my nurses came to me and told me that she was a Christian, that my witness had challenged her to live more loudly for Christ there in the hospital.

Before I left, the doctor told me I still had no diagnosis.

I left the hospital angry with God. How could He? How could He use me like that and leave me weaker, broken, without answers, without love?

The anger frightened me. As the days passed, I slowly shoved it away, behind the safer "Praise God, I'm out of the hospital. I'm in a wheelchair again, but it's okay. I'm not there anymore. My friend didn't come, but God is still bigger." The habits were there already. The patterns were set. I could act God, if I had to. And I had to, because nothing else made sense to me. "God" was all I had ever known.

I didn't know what else to do.

It would be years before the anger would surface again. It would be years before I faced those doubts and asked those questions, years before I opened my heart again.

It would be years before I faced God again.

I canned the calendar.

...

Love Stories: God and Me, Part I
Love Stories: God and Me, Part II

...

On Thursdays this month (because I never know quite what to post on Thursdays), I am writing out my love story. Not the one about my crushes or my first love or even my love for Pete - though those stories all play a part. Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista and Holley Gerth at (in)Courage challenged us to write out our God love stories, and I had one to share. BOY, do I have one to share.

So I know it's a little canned, being the "love month" and all, but I thought I'd take some time to write it out anyway. It's good for me to dwell on His love for me.





(Image © Informal Moments Photography)

Love Stories: God and Me, Part II

The journals.

They witnessed it all. They caught the tears, the dark-etched pencil (I never use pen for my handwriting), the play-by-play of my first love, my first deep heartbreak. I don't know now how many I filled.

...

As a teenager, I asked God to guard my heart for the man He had for me. I had as many (or more) crushes as the next girl, growing up. Maybe it was because we moved so often. There were plenty of new rooms with new faces for me to walk into and select which face to dream about. Dreaming about a Prince Charming is an occupational hazard for a teenage girl. At least it was for me.

During my first year at my second college, I got serious about God. More serious than I had been when I gave my life to Him for missionary work in the third grade. More serious than I had been when I rededicated my life for full-time Christian service at camp when I was eighteen. More serious about Him than I had been a full year at Bible college.

Wanna know why?

Because there were other people around me who were more serious about Him than I was. My competitive streak was up.

He'll use anything to draw us in.

But I was serious. So serious that September 12, 2001 saw me on my knees, finally giving my whole life to God for real, to do whatever, go wherever He would ask. At the time, I fancied New York City. A switch to a nursing career. Saving lives. Helping orphans. Even going to Africa. You know. The obvious ministry stuff. I was determined to want God more than I had wanted anything else, ever.

Two weeks later, I got my "whatever, wherever" from God when I started collapsing without explanation or diagnosis. There would be no glamorous occupation for me. Things were going to get messy.

...

Questions began to surface. The questions that come from suffering. The whys. The constant search for explanation. Little victories that I had performed well rejoicing in suffering crashed down as the suffering intensified. My circle of friends dwindled. They were tired of trying to answer my questions, I think. They were trying to survive their own Freshman year.

But there was one friendship in particular that would forever change my life. He was probably the fourth real guy friend I had ever had. And he was a good friend. A true friend. He was the first person I ever loved with God's love.

And my girl's heart fell in love with him. Hard.

He loved me too.

The logical end of the love that grew out of our friendship should have been a happily-ever-after.

I looked in the mirror one day after he left on a school trip, and I saw it there, the thing I'd read about but never quite believed. I was glowing. I looked in the mirror and I saw what he saw. I was sparkling. I was beautiful.

I never wanted to lose that feeling. I was amazed at the love God had given to me. Of course it had been Him. I had asked Him to guard my heart for the man He wanted for me. I simply assumed He had kept me for this one.

Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.

...

My second year at my second college was the loneliest year I have ever lived.

My friend who I loved, who loved me, rejected me out-of-hand. He ignored me. He "was over it now." He pursued my best girl friend.

His reasons were many and complicated, but I watched that year as he systematically destroyed every part of himself that reminded him of me. I felt as if he were deeply ashamed of me, of my feelings, of my love, of our friendship.

My heart shattered.

...

God asked me to love him anyway. He wanted me to speak to Him the truth that was in my heart about my feelings. He wanted me to love my friend as He loved him. He wanted me to see him as God saw me, to give him the same grace I was learning to receive myself.

My sister listened to numerous friends who questioned my choice to love, who questioned my motives and my confusion, but instead of counseling the end of it all, she encouraged me. It was the first time in the whole of our lives that she had seen me reach outside of my own self-centeredness to care for the heart of someone else.

And the love God placed in my heart for my friend was a lifeline that drew me through my pain and confusion into God's heart.

I learned that love doesn't always look like hearts and flowers and sparkling eyes and the honeymoon stage.

I learned how incredibly we can hurt God when we rebuff His offer of relationship.

I learned how deeply He could love someone. I learned how deeply He could love me.

I learned that love - real love - cannot be killed.

All these lessons I held to my heart, waiting until God would be finished teaching me what He wanted to teach me, waiting for Him to answer my prayer and bring my friend back to me, give me the love and the wedding I longed for.

I journaled and I journaled and I journaled, hoping that one day my friend would read the words that told the story of my walk with God through the pain, hoping that he would be able to see how much I'd loved him in spite of it all, praying that one day I would pick up a pencil and write on the page how amazing God had been to bring us together, finally.

I wanted to believe God would give me what I wanted. But I never could quite bring myself to it. Something inside could not be released.

...

God had told me to ask Him for my friend, so that He could say "no" to me if He wanted.

I really, really hoped He would say "yes" if I surrendered. I even made a vow to Him. My part of the bargain, if you will. Just so He'd know I was serious. I intended to keep it too.

I vowed that I would wait for my friend until he was married to someone else. I knew then what I'll admit now - I just didn't want to hurt him more than he'd already been hurt through his own choices. I hoped one day to offer him my love, full and free - no bitterness, no hard feelings.

Still, a vow was a vow, and keeping a vow made to the Lord was terribly important to me.

So I vowed. And I ached. Oh, I ached. And I waited.

I would still be waiting now, but for God.

I had learned much about His love, but I didn't know it. Not deep. Not yet. I needed to know Him.

...

NOTE: For some of you who read, this post will be quite a throwback to conversations and old places in my friendships with you. For some who didn't know, it may explain a bit why I was the way I was during this period of time in my life. Please bear with me. It is a part of my story I cannot erase. I have written as much from my own perspective as I can; I have shared here what I may not have shared with some of you. Thank you, real people who have walked with me, for being in my life on many sides of this.

...

Love Stories: God and Me, Part I

...

On Thursdays this month (because I never know quite what to post on Thursdays), I am writing out my love story. Not the one about my crushes or my first love or even my love for Pete - though those stories all play a part. Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista and Holley Gerth at (in)Courage challenged us to write out our God love stories, and I had one to share. BOY, do I have one to share.

So I know it's a little canned, being the "love month" and all, but I thought I'd take some time to write it out anyway. It's good for me to dwell on His love for me.





(Image © Informal Moments Photography)

Love Stories: God and Me, Part I

Once upon a time...

That's pretty much the way all good love stories begin, isn't it? The fairytale kind, the ones that star a beautiful princess and a handsome Prince Charming. (He is always "Prince Charming," because giving him a name humanizes him, and we can't have a Prince with flaws, now can we?)

Here I must dispense with my Dickensian rambling and begin my love story. Which does not require a once-upon-a-time. The princess is a normal gal with beauty issues, and the Prince - well, He has a name, a human name. "God with us."

...

I never know quite where to begin this story.

Sometimes, it seems that it must begin way back before I was ever born, in my mom's desire for a baby girl, in her long wait, the womb-knitting, and the beginning of her birth pains. Sometimes, it goes all the way back before the foundation of the world, with a Father's love for His Son, with a God-love for the world that gave.

But all of that happened long before I was aware of God, long before I was old enough to suspect His love. No, I first encountered the love of God between my year at Bible college and my Freshman year at the four-year school I attended until my health forced me to drop out.

Not that I hadn't been taught about its existence before. There is not a time in my life that I can pinpoint that I didn't know intellectually that God loved me. I grew up with God. I grew up with parents who loved me, and who taught me that God loved me. I grew up in church, and if there's one thing they teach you in Sunday School, it's that "God so loved the world..."

I memorized John 3:16 forty-eight times.

I knew that "the world" God loved was me.

But there is a difference between knowing someone loves you and knowing you are loved, and all the head knowledge in the world isn't enough to span that eighteen-inch gap of sermon-illustration fame.

I said a salvation prayer when I was a young child, on a day my parents never recorded, sometime around four years old. I remember kneeling beside a bed - it had a hush puppies bedspread; I remember the butterflies playing with the puppies on it - and asking Jesus to be my savior. I knew enough at that point to understand that sin was something I didn't want to have, so the expedient thing to do was ask Jesus to forgive me, which I figured would pretty much take care of things.

Such was my faith as a child.

It seems that from the beginning of my life, I was meant to be God's. I can't explain it, His pursuit of me that has spanned twenty-eight years and eternity past. In many ways, it has been for me a consistent deconstruction of what I thought I knew about God.

I used to think He displayed His love for me by answering my prayers.

There was the time I sat down under a tree on our 25 acres and asked God to send a deer walking by after dinner. I was putting out my fleece... or hunting for venison? The deer didn't come the first night, so giving God a second chance, I changed trees. I went a little further down the path toward the back of our 25 acres. Still no deer.

I figured at that point that God wasn't too interested in proving Himself by answering my prayers.

So I began to think that He loved me by indulging me. Maybe He wasn't actively answering my requests, but as long as He didn't interfere with what I wanted, I felt loved enough.

I never expected Him to let my heart break...

...

On Thursdays this month (because I never know quite what to post on Thursdays), I am going to write out my love story. Not the one about my crushes or my first love or even my love for Pete - though those stories all play a part. Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista and Holley Gerth at (in)Courage challenged us to write out our God love stories, and I had one to share. BOY, do I have one to share.

So I know it's a little canned, being the "love month" and all, but I thought I'd take some time to write it out anyway. It's good for me to dwell on His love for me.

...

Tomorrow will be my second "Leftovers" post, complete with a McLink-up for readers to share your own reposts.

NOTE - I am offering "Leftovers" as an opportunity to justify reposting a post you love. You're welcome to join this carnival of original unoriginality (since you've already said it!) here at my blog - just follow the steps below:

*REPOST a favorite blog post at your blog
*Please kindly INCLUDE A LINK to my blog in your explanation for your repost ;-)
*LINK the direct link for your repost (not the original post) into the McLinky I will provide here.
*LEAVE A COMMENT so I know you're there.

Hopefully, in two weeks, when I host "Leftovers" again (yeesh, people, if you have a nicer, more poetic, romantic name for it, leave a comment - NOBODY likes leftovers, right?), I will try and have an irresistible button for you (with CODE!) to add to your repost.





(Image © Informal Moments Photography)