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Speaking Up for Grace

May 9, 2013 by 8 Comments

This post is one of several you will see around the internet in coming months about a unique gathering of believers in Austin, TX this September called The Idea Camp. I’ll be there. I’d love for you to join me.

I’ll be honest I feel so inadequate.

I’m no Chris Marlow, and I’m no Lindsey Nobles or Kristen Howerton. I don’t have my hands and arms deep into the orphan care crisis or the homelessness epidemic. I’m not rolling up my sleeves weekly to fight for the rights of foster children or the elderly.

Instead, I have my hands in deep in the dishwater of my kitchen sink helping my seven year old finish her math homework and walking through the spelling of “Pennsylvania” with my fifth grader for a school project. When I’m making lunches and shuttling kids to soccer practices, I feel about as far away from the big Human Care issues as someone can.

I am inadequate. I really am.

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But I’m sure if you asked Chris or Lindsey or Kristen, they would tell you they feel the same. At some level, we are all human and not a one of us can fix the problems of the world.

The point is we are ALL inadequate.

But we all, each, in our spaces and worlds do what we can. And I firmly believe that God fills in the gaps of our inadequacies.

It could stop here. I could finish the dishes, wipe off my hands and kiss my children as they lay their recently-showered-heads down to sleep. I could grab my iPad and watch the latest show that makes the worries of the day numb in my head.

Or I could write.

My passion is grace: to write and speak up for those who’ve been given none. There is some crazy, holy fire that has been placed deep within me to fight for the un-graced and the dis-graced.  And this, I believe, is human care at it’s finest.

Without love, the rest of what we do is a clanging cymbal. Without grace, the rest of it is legalism.

I will do well with the resources that I’ve been given. So I have a laptop and words that flow and fingers that can type. I have a mouth that can string words together that make sense.IC-Banner3

This is how I dig my arms in deep to the human care crisis today. I roll up my sleeves and speak up for grace.

And I teach my children this same grace. I don’t care if I raise children who are the best at their sport or who will get into the best university but I do want to bring up girls who are lovers of people and deep lovers of the wide grace of God.

And there will be time for the rest of it.

I am inadequate. And so are you. But even so, God allows us to help Him knit to wholeness the broken places in the world.

What do you think? Do you speak up for grace? How has God filled in the gaps in your life? Do you have a “holy fire” in  your heart for something/someone?

Please join us this fall at Idea Camp: Human Care, an “unconference” of sorts. September 20,21 in Austin.

Register HERE for only $99.

Prices go up after May 31, 2103

What is Idea Camp?

See what Chris, Lindsey and I have to say about it.

 

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Filed Under: on grace, Uncategorized

Kneeling in the Dirt

April 5, 2013 by 31 Comments

obedience

In John 8 Jesus kneels in the dirt and writes something for the woman caught in adultery and the scribes and the Pharisees all to see.

“Let him who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

One by one the religious leaders walk from the scene and I wonder if they all look down at the dirt as they shuffle away. They are shamed but it is not Jesus who is shaming them. They can’t bear the weight of their own brokenness.

It is only Jesus and the woman now.

When I read this I don’t see him yelling at her. I don’t see him talking to her about all the various and intricate ways she has sinned. I don’t see him shaking his head at her and “Tsk, Tsk.” When I read this I don’t see him shaming her.

Instead, he gently tells her to move on. Don’t make this a part of your life from here on forward. Stop doing this, he seems to say, this thing that makes you broken. The thing that makes US broken.

And that is where the story ends.

We don’t know if she listened to Jesus or if she continued in her life of sin. We always assume, I think, that she walked on in freedom and in newness but we don’t really know that.

It’s the attitude toward the person, not their choice that is important.

What would Jesus have done had she been caught again the next week? Do you think he would have said, “Ah, well, second time’s the charm.” And do you think he would have stood back and let the mob tear her limbs apart?

No. I don’t believe so.

I believe he would have knelt again in the sand and dirtied his knees doing the same thing, maybe with a little more sadness in his eyes. And I believe that he would have lifted her face and told her once again not to live this way.

But what do we do to friends or our Christian leaders when they fail. To be honest, they are lucky if they get a first chance from us, more or less a second one.

So let us love others regardless of what they do with that love.

Let us move inside and through grace as if we are made from it. Let us let this grace-love shine from the corners of even our broken hearts as we help heal others of their brokenness.

When I was younger I asked my father (after he had handed a homeless man a few dollars), “Why do you do this when you know he’ll go and buy something to drink?”

He said, “I don’t have any say over the gift once it is given. It is me doing the giving that is the obedience.”

Yes. This.

It is us giving the grace that is the obedience. It is us kneeling in the dirt that is the obedience. What someone does with that? If they choose to love or to thank me or if they choose to understand? That isn’t my business.

It is me giving the grace. It is us kneeling in the dirt. This is where it is.

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Filed Under: on God, on grace, on love

Emotional Martyrdom

March 25, 2013 by 25 Comments

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A few years I fractured my left foot. I dropped a five pound dumbbell on it from about nose height. Don’t ask.

If you don’t understand how a teeny-tiny little dumbbell could do much harm you I dare you to drop one on your bare foot. Needless to explain, the pain was so intense I could no longer stand.

Fetal position, big tears like I was five-years-old, and there was cursing. Oh, was there was cursing. And then I called my husband.

“Drive yourself to the ER,” he told me.

“I can’t actually stand right now,” I said. “When you come home from work I’ll go to the urgent care.”

I hung up and shoved my foot in a bucket of ice.

That whole day I hobbled around in wild pain. I did end up going to the Urgent Care later that night. It wasn’t fractured badly enough for anything more than a “boot” but I wasn’t able to put any weight on it for a week without pain.

I didn’t say,

Oh no big deal. I’m a martyr. I can handle it.

Because we usually don’t do that with physical injuries. My husband said to go to the doctor. He was right and I listened to him. I got my injury looked at and cared for. I got help for my pain.

But we do that so easily with emotional pain. We say that it’s no big deal. It doesn’t hurt that bad. I can heal on my own. I don’t need help.

I can speak from personal experience when I say, what-a-load-of-crap.

We do need help. Whether we actually need professional help or simply help from friends and people who support us, we do need help. Gone should be the martyr mentality for emotional and spiritual struggle. Yet so many of us neglect this part of our lives.

When I wrote about our house loss a few weeks ago I talked about the idea of the disparity between what I felt and what I thought I should feel. A part of me really didn’t think my house loss was that big of a loss so I really shouldn’t need help.

It’s like my foot. I hurt my foot but I could still drive the kids to school and I got by on some 2 or 3 or 4 extra strength Tylenol. When I consider someone down the road who might be recovering from a broken leg, the rational part of me says that my pain is no big deal.

Not only can she not go to work but she can’t drive or exercise or vacuum her floors. She is seriously handicapped by her injury, way more than me, and it takes a lot longer than me to heal. We are both in pain but maybe hers is more than mine.

But, does her injury negate mine? Not at all. My foot still must heal and there is legitimate pain involved with an injury, even like that.

Does her injury make mine any less important? No. Not at all.

Our injuries, whether physical or emotional, are not connected beyond the fact that we are asked to bear one another’s burdens and help carry the loads of others in our life. 

But here’s what I’m learning. We must care for our injuries, however small, because when we don’t we cannot carry the burdens of others. And further, when we neglect our emotional or spiritual pain, we are legitimately neglecting a part of us that needs real types of care and real healing.

Go to a therapist.

Get your girls around you to talk.

Ask your spouse or mother for support.

But do something. Be honest with someone about your emotional or spiritual pain and then move toward healing. We only hurt ourselves more when we don’t get help.

What do you think? Do you neglect or care for yourself spiritually or emotionally? What kind of help have you gotten in this area? Why are we prone to care for ourselves physically but not emotionally?

 

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Filed Under: on forgiveness, On Freedom, on grace, on honesty, Uncategorized

Teaching Our Children About Grace

March 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment

grace

I’ve had a week full of incredible freedom for me.

Writing those two posts this week about honesty and transparency and with so many of my fears laced inside and through those words was so absolutely freeing for me. (Click here to read the first one and the second one).

Thank you for supporting me and joining me in that. You have no idea how loved and embraced I feel by this community.

Today I have a post up on (in)courage about teaching our children how to embrace grace. I wrote it several weeks ago but if you read carefully, you’ll see how some of my thoughts were percolating and then how it led up to this week.

I’d be honored if you joined me over there this weekend.

Teaching Our Kids to Embrace Grace

I grew up without a clear understanding of the grace of God.

I knew God saved and that he forgave, but grace, this undeserved thing? It was like liquid through my hands.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I believe I began my journey to understand this vast part of God and I’m still learning every day. However as a mother, I want to raise a family who embraces a grace-filled lifestyle. I’ve been thinking about how we can actually do this in a church that still shoots it’s wounded.

Here are five real world ways that we can begin to raise kids who embrace the idea of a grace-filled God…

Click here to read five of my ideas about how we can model (and teach) grace to our children.

And if you haven’t taken the time to subscribe to to this blog, I’d love to have you on board. I promise, I won’t inundate your inbox. My Facebook community is also a great place to see one another. Click here to subscribe and click here to join my community.

How do you teach your kids about grace?

 

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Filed Under: on family, on grace

Patience

February 25, 2013 by 20 Comments

freedom

 

And then there’s the time when you run into that one person you didn’t want to see at Target on a Thursday morning. She’s the one who hurt you. And she’s the one of the ones it hurts to even think about it.

You see her at the checkout lane and you hope to God she hasn’t seen you.

You finish and then you think you’re walking out ahead of her. You dare not look over your left shoulder so you square your jaw and pick up your step.

It’s been over two years and she doesn’t look at all different. You wonder if you do. You try to adjust your jeans as you push your cart past the rows of white and blue and silver minivans.

When you get to your car you see her across the parking lot. She’s made it out before you somehow and as you are moving plastic spoons and orange juice and the replacement curling iron from your cart to the trunk you wonder if you should go and talk to her. Maybe you should break the problem wide open over you knee. Right there on a weekday morning crash niceties to the ground.

Or maybe you should just say “hello” and she would be kind, no doubt. We would all act like there is nothing. And then that would be that.

Usually you listen to the voice that tells you to talk to someone, that divulges secrets and whispers to you to make the 50 yard walk between the minivans to speak to her. Whether it’s God or your own conscience it doesn’t matter because today you ignore it.

And you apologize to Jesus as you finish putting the bread and the milk into your car and you shake your head as you return the cart to the appropriate spot like a good citizen and you apologize again as you swing your purse across and climb into the drivers seat.

You put your hands on the steering wheel and just sit.

Is it that you don’t forgive? You begin to feel bad and wonder if it really is that. You wonder if it’s too late.

But then that same smallish voice whispers grace into your ear. It whispers things like it’s-okay and when-you’re-ready-there-will-still-be-grace.

“I’m not ready.” I say it out loud.

And there it is again. Grace. Grace is love and patience and forgiveness wrapped up in a paradoxical package.

You call your husband as your drive toward home because you don’t know what else to do and over the distress in your voice he speaks the same grace as you heard a few seconds earlier.

“When you’re ready, Sarah.”

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Filed Under: on forgiveness, on grace

Building Cushions and Writing in Margins

February 6, 2013 by 25 Comments

IMG_2204As school was beginning last autumn I started to listen to myself: I was actually screaming at my kids. The transition from summer to school year in our house was not an easy one.

“Get dressed!!” “Why aren’t you ready yet?” “Your shoes aren’t on!” “This van is driving to school. Will you be on it?”

And it wasn’t just the wild time between 6:50 and 7:25 in the morning. It was during every other time of the day when there was a place to be and we weren’t anywhere near ready to be there.

I was stressed. My husband was stressed. The kids were out of their minds, and rightly so. All the negativity in the house was funneling down directly to them and when I began to actually hear myself as I yelled I understood that a lot of the stress was directly tied back to me and my attitude.

I made a decision: If my family’s “crazy” was in some part due to my inability to function well, I needed to make some changes. So I did. I fixed a lot of things about my life that needed some major overhaul, but one of the things I did was I began to get up at 5. Now I know that a lot of you already greet the world during the early hours to get a head start on the day, but I had been sleeping until I had just enough time to get up, get dressed and then wake up my kids.

It just wasn’t working.

I began to build a cushion into my {our} mornings so that the mood in the house would be more relaxed. This margin for error changed things almost immediately.

I was more calm because I was getting things done before the sun and the children woke up. The children were more calm because Mama was more calm and life had the chance to move naturally along as it needed to.

Since then I’ve begun to build more cushions and write more margins into the story of my life. Not just time ones: but emotional ones, spiritual ones, and physical ones.

I’m getting into bed before I’m tired because I want to be there to fall asleep when I should. I’m spending time in prayer before I “feel the need” or before I get desperate. I’m emailing close friends when I need extra prayer or emotional support when things get tough in my life. And I’m trying to be more transparent and open with friends about how I’m “really doing.”

Cushions are so important because it takes the irrational and the crazy and gives it a soft place to land. Margins help us because it gives us “white space” in a sea of wall to wall words.

Not only is it okay to create these margin spaces in our lives, but I think it’s necessary.

Cushions are the short naps I schedule during the day, even when I’m too busy to blink. Cushions are the easy coffee hours with friends who love without judgment and just need love in return. Cushions are the early bedtimes and early risings because a new day sometimes is better than the last one. Maybe at their core, cushions are grace embodied in daily life.

What do you think? What cushions or margins can you create today? What have you done that you find works to keep your feet on the ground?

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Filed Under: on family, on grace, Uncategorized

Giving God Grace

December 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Join me over at a Deeper Church today. I’m tackling the idea of separating our love for God from how the church has wounded us. Can we begin to divorce our hurt feelings from who God is? Can we give God the same grace he gives us each day?

Giving God Grace

It takes courage to separate God from the wounds of the church.

There is nothing easy about it. Not in a world where priests molest children and where pastors drive 16 year old girls across state lines to have sex with them. It isn’t even easy in a world where church politics becomes the governing force behind the life of a community and where sins of leadership are overlooked because of calling and position.

There is nothing easy about separating God from the sins of the church.

And we almost don’t want to…

Read the rest here.

 

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Filed Under: on church, on grace, Uncategorized

Breakfast for Dinner

December 10, 2012 by 19 Comments

It happened in the kitchen.

Around a skillet of cheesy eggs and another one full of turkey bacon. Breakfast for dinner only happens when Daddy is home late from work.

Everything else in my life has been calling so loudly. The children’s homework. The house that does not clean itself. The laundry baskets and Christmas trip-planning, the holiday parties that need wrapped hostess gifts and the school programs. The other job I do each day even when I don’t have time.

It all screams so big and loud so that even my own brain cannot fix itself on anything for more than a moment.

And I must write. I must. Not for my blog or my {unwritten} book or for anyone else. But for my own sanity.

And there hasn’t been a stitch of time. Each stolen minute is filled with the loud calls from everything else in my life.

I sat for an hour with a blinking cursor while I answered everyone else’s calls except the ones that would calm the urgency inside.

Tonight I lost all sense of adulthood and crumpled once again into a folded mess of a cardigan, jeans and boots in the dining room. It was then I decided that breakfast for dinner was just as good as anything.

I asked the ten year old to make the eggs and the six year old to empty the dishwasher. And they sensed I was needy. I’d already apologized forty-five-thousand times in the last hour. So they obeyed with wide, empathetic eyes.

I pulled the bacon out of the refrigerator and retrieved the skillets from where I’d hidden them inside the oven.

“Maybe you need a few minutes by yourself, Mama.” The oldest said as she swept crumbs from the counter. “I can make dinner.”

My heart. My grief at my own brokenness. My whole spirit begging not to be a failure as a mother.

It was all that it took to break my sense of urgency and mania.

“No. Let’s do it together.” Burners on. Skillets hot. Bacon dropped onto the heat.

And we moved in the kitchen together. All three of us, two generations of sensitivity and womanhood and youth as we worked together to create a simple meal. She beat the eggs.

“Like this, Mama?” She used a fork instead of a whisk.

“Yes, now add a bit of milk.”

The six-year-old found a step stool to reach the high cabinet. She put the glasses away while her little voice sang a happy song she’d heard on the way to school this morning.

“The princess and the frog…” she sang while her sister poured eggs into the skillet.

There was peace in the making, in the creating and even in the working tonight, beauty in the simplicity of a meal made and a meal eaten together.  There was redemption in the whisking of yolk and white and in the sizzling of meat on a stovetop. There was grace in the teaching and in the praise and in the song.

And these girls teach me over and over again what it means to be a woman.

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Filed Under: on forgiveness, on grace, on parenting

Five Steps to Forgiving Ourselves

December 5, 2012 by 2 Comments

Forgiving ourselves might be one of the hardest things about failing. There is always something about not living up to the standards we set for our own selves that is harder to get by than when someone else doesn’t live up to what we expect.

I’m writing about that today on {in}courage. And about how we really can forgive ourselves when we really do fail.

Five Steps to Forgiving Yourself

“I’m just so stupid!!” One of my daughters face-palms herself after a mistake she’s made. And I’ll admit, it’s a big one.

“No you aren’t. You just made a poor choice.” I go to her, gather her and do my best to infuse truth into her heart and somehow layer it over the lies that have begun to reside there.

I have never told her she is stupid or bad or unlovable. To the contrary. I try to combat those outside influences each day of their lives.

You know you’re amazing.

You are so smart.

You’ve done your best, that’s all you can do!

But even my girls are prime examples of just how hard we are on ourselves…

To read the rest, click here.

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Filed Under: on forgiveness, on grace, Uncategorized

On Loving the Haters

August 6, 2012 by 20 Comments

Sometimes I wonder if Jesus was aware of all the people that hated Him and who were out to get Him. Really get Him.

If He worried about the blunt force of their aggression and their words and all the religious testosterone being stirred up around Him for simply telling the truth.

Or if He simply decided not to allow the swirling masses of hatred to bother Him.

If He went about his daily business doing “His Father’s work” and focused on the woman who touched his robe or the child who needed healed. Maybe He was the Great Compartmentalizer and was able to put aside the “haters” in His mind and do what was right and needed and good for the people He walked with and for the people of the world.

I’m sure He loved the haters. I know He loved the haters. But did He let them bother Him? I don’t know if He did.

Maybe He allowed their words and actions to infiltrate His mind as He saw them as scared and wounded and as products of their religion. Maybe His compassion for them went so far as to forgive before they’d even begun to do the hateful things they did.

Maybe he was generous with grace and overflowing with love for even the haters of His day.

Can we be as generous?

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Filed Under: on God, on grace
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