Tag: God with us

Together on the Journey

I’ve heard it said that the Gospel is “one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.” I love this quote, because it acknowledges that everyone is on the same level and that we have the same spiritual needs. This quote does away with the idea of “I’ve got it all together and now I will tell you how to get your life together.”

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Instead this quote is the equivalent of “Hey! I’m going through that too, and here’s what I’ve discovered. Here’s the hope I’ve found.” When people can see God’s mercy and grace working in our lives they will be drawn to Him.

And that is what this 31 days of Truths That Make Life Beautiful has been about. These truths have made a difference in my life, and I wanted to tell others about them.

These are also truths that I have to keep reminding myself of. There are times when I feel alone, and I act like I’m alone. And it’s not pretty. I have to remind myself, or, more often “my people” respond to my rants with I’m with you. You are not alone in this. This is not the end. God is still good.

Thank you for going on this 31 day journey with me. I’m looking forward to continuing the journey as we point each other to the truths that make life beautiful, because we say what we think but we live what we believe.

You are loved. You are not alone. You have purpose.

We Were Made for Remembering

The interstate was packed with people trying to get home after a long day of work. I was one of those people, but my mind wasn’t on driving. I was struggling with the loss of a friendship, the sting of betrayal, and the fear of being alone. As the road curved a gorgeous sunset filled my windshield, breaking through the gloomy thoughts surrounding me.

And with the sunset, a spark of hope broke through the darkness.

“Even if I can’t rely on their faithfulness, I can rely on yours,” I told the Lord. “Every time I see a sunset, it will be a reminder that your faithfulness never ends, that your faithfulness stretches to the heavens, that you have promised to never leave me.”

And whenever I see a sunset, I am reminded of God’s faithfulness and I feel an overwhelming sense of being loved and held by God.

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The sunset helps me remember the depth of God’s faithfulness. And it is good for me to remember, because  I easily forget.

As my children grow, I want them to remember the same truths we’ve talked about in this 31 days of writing: You are loved. You are not alone. You have purpose.

Made to Love by TobyMac speaks these truths with a really catchy tune. I love hearing my children belting out the chorus.

I was made to love You, I was made to find You,

I was made just for You, Made to adore You,

I was made to love, and be loved by You.

You were here before me, You were waiting on me,

And you said You’d keep me, Never would You leave me,

I was made to love, and be loved by You.

I wanted us to remember these truths, so I filled canvases with these words and let the kids loose with the paint.

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God reminds us of these truths throughout His Word, from Genesis to Revelation. He says them over and over because He knows we are easily distracted, easily discouraged, and likely to forget these beautiful truths: You are loved. You are not alone. You have purpose.
These truths remind us that we are His.

We Were Made For Wonder

I loved the television series Monk. Although he was a bit extreme in his long list of fears, I could relate to some of them, to a point.

In one episode, he and Natalie, his assistant, arrived at a crime scene where a double rainbow filled the sky.  Monk couldn’t understand Natalie’s enthusiastic response to the rainbow.

His response was typical Monk.

“Not really a double rainbow, is it? “Double” implies equal. The top one is 40% smaller.”

Natalie looked at him, incredulously. “Don’t you have any sense of wonder?”

We were made for wonder. We were made to celebrate tiny details, experience tiny moments of pause in our fast-paced lives. We were made to see God’s fingerprints all over our lives.

And yet we lose this sense of wonder when our days fill up with projects and deadlines, tasks and events, when we are too busy doing to see wonder in the world around us.

Children are good at finding wonder. No matter what is going on, my children will stop what they are doing to look at the smallest bug. “Mama! You’ve GOT to see this!” When I don’t stop and look, I see the incredulous looks on their faces. They might as well be saying “Don’t you have any sense of wonder?”

We recently went to the Institute of Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, MS. On the tour, we went to a petting zoo, of sorts, where we could watch and lightly touch sting rays, crabs and sea stars.

I watched the sting rays swimming non-stop in the oval tank in the middle of the room. I noticed a little boy bending down at a section in the glass where you could see the sting rays underwater. He watched for so long that I grew curious. I bent down to see what he saw.  Instead of swimming, the sting rays were gliding gracefully through the water. It was beautiful. “You’ve GOT to see this!” I grabbed my husband’s hand and pulled him down to share in a moment of wonder.

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Nature often gives me moments of wonder. With animals, I’m amazed at the details, the color, the ways they act and survive. With the mountains or pictures from space, I’m amazed at the beauty. I feel small in the face of such grandeur, and, at the same time, I feel loved. God created the beauty around us and yet He knows the deepest parts of our hearts. And that thought fills me with wonder.

Indescribable also captures this sense of wonder

We Were Made For Hope

Here we are!  Day 22 of Truths That Make Life Beautiful.

Your “likes” and your comments have encouraged me to keep plugging away at this series. (Thank you!) I’ve enjoyed walking with you through the first two truths: You are loved and You are not alone.

I believe that the more we allow these truths to soak into our bones and permeate our lives, the more readily we will believe the third truth: You have purpose.

You have purpose. You matter. You were made for wonderful things. Let’s explore a few of these wonderful things in the remaining days of this series.

We were made for hope.

The Hope We Were Made For And The Hope We Settle for.

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We Can Trust Him, Because of Who He Is

Life is hard to figure out.

In a session at a recent writing conference, Kaylan Adair, editor at Candlewick Press, spoke on middle grade novels.She defined them as stories where the characters stick their foot into the adult world for the first time. They are on an exploratory mission and don’t plan to stay. In these stories, the character discovers that life is complex and complicated.

There are days when I wish I lived in the chapter before the beginning of a middle grade novel – where life is easy to understand.

In reality, we live in the midst of layers of life, where things are happening simultaneously around us, to us, and by us, while we try to make sense of it all. We tend to default to a formula where our life experiences shape our definition of who God is and whether or not He loves us.

Good things happening=God is good and happy with us. Bad things happening= God is bad, weak, or mad at us.

This formula looks simple and easy to follow. But life can’t be lived through a formula. Life is complex and complicated, a mix of joy and sorrow at any given moment.

God is constant and unchanging, and life around us swirls in chaos.

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Instead of letting our life experiences shape our definition of who God is and whether or not He loves us, what would it look like if we let who God is and His love for us shape our definition of our life experiences? It’s more than playing around with words. The difference between these two is the difference between hope and despair. I’ve experienced it in my own life.

When I was in 8th grade my grandfather died of a heart attack. I had a vague notion of  who God was but I had no idea that He was with me or that He loved me. I felt alone and my grief was dark and hopeless. That same year a friend from school committed suicide. Again, I swam in dark and hopeless grief.

Years later my grandmother passed away after a horrendous struggle with cancer. At this point I had a closer relationship with God. I struggled with her suffering. I pleaded with God to take away her pain. I yelled at God and wrestled with the complex truth that He loved her and He was allowing her to suffer. But it was not dark and hopeless because who God is was my filter. My grandmother was his precious child. He loved her even more than I did. He was getting her heart and soul ready to spend eternity with Him and He would not let her suffer one second longer than necessary to accomplish that.

If I had interpreted who God is through this difficult circumstance, the logical conclusion would have been that God was either helpless or too cruel to alleviate her pain.  However, the truth is that God’s greatest desire for my grandmother was for her to know Him and He loved her enough to do whatever was necessary to accomplish that purpose.

What made the difference in these two reactions?

Trust.

I filtered my sorrow, my anger, my frustration through the filter of who God is. I searched His Word to find out about His steadfast love, His faithfulness, His being with His people. And I clung to who He is as we walked through this battlefield of cancer. 

The more I know Him, the more I trust His steady, constant Hand in the midst of the constantly changing circumstances swirling around me.

If your eyes are on the storm
You’ll wonder if I love you still
But if your eyes are on the cross
You’ll know I always have and I always will – Casting Crowns, Just Be Held

Picture by Angela Ewing
Photo by Angela Ewing

Even When We Feel Helpless, We Are Not Alone

We sat in the school hallway with 30 other people, waiting for the tornado.

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I tried to keep conversation light to mask my own worry. Anderson played a board game nearby with a friend. Maggie watched Frozen with a group of girls huddled around a tablet screen. But Ellen stayed by my side and asked the hard questions.

“Is the tornado close?” she whispered. I put my arm around her as we leaned against the wall. “It’s about 10 minutes away. You don’t have to worry. We are in a safe place. We are in the safest place we can be. ”

“Will it hit us?” She asked.

“I don’t know, sweetie, but we are in a safe place if it does.”

“Mama, do people die in tornados?”

In  the 25 zillion parenting books I’d read, not a single book had a chapter on Speaking Truth During Tornados. I was not going to lie to my child, and yet I didn’t want to multiply her fears.

“Sometimes that happens, sweetheart. But we are in the safest place we can be right now.” I kept using the word safe hoping it would make her feel safe.

The wind howled. The rain pelted. And my husband walked past us, a grim look on his face. Ellen and I watched as he wrapped an extension cord around the handles of the double doors at the end of the hallway – the doors that could fly open if a tornado hit.

I felt the muscles tighten in Ellen’s little body.

“Are we going to die?” she whispered, her voice trembling in my ear.

Fear. Pure fear.

These circumstances were totally out of my control, and my child knew it. She immediately felt alone and helpless, and I could identify with that.

It is not unusual to feel alone when we feel helpless.

God knows what it is like to live in this broken world. He knows that we will face circumstances that we can’t change or control. And He knows we need Him to remind us that we are not alone.

Do not fear, for I am with you. Isaiah 41:10

His Word gives us assurance of His presence. We are not alone, because He is with us.

I did not want my child to feel alone, because we were not alone or abandoned.

The truth was that the tornado could hit. We could be injured or die. And God would still be good. He would still use it in our lives for something beautiful.

But how could I explain this to my 6 year-old who was gripped with fear, when I don’t even fully understand it myself? I’ve seen God bring beauty from bad things in my life. I’ve seen Him work in people’s hearts through the most difficult and horrible circumstances. I don’t understand it, but I trust His hand.

I pulled Ellen into my lap, held her, and said, “I’m not sure what will happen. But I know that God will do what is best, and I trust Him.”

The tornado went over us without touching down and Ellen and I whispered prayers of thankfulness for His protection.

God did protect us that day. But even if He had allowed the tornado to hit, it wouldn’t have been because He took His Hand away from us. As His children, we are secure in the palm of His Hand. He is with us.

I’m still not sure how to convey this complicated truth to my children. Maybe it’s enough to teach them to trust Him, because He is with us, even when we are sitting in the dark.

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Even When We Feel Alone, We Are Not Alone

Flashpoint is a television series about a fictional elite tactical unit called the Strategic Response Unit (SRU). They are an emergency response team.  In each episode, this team faces a threatening situation that requires them to swing into action. Often, when the negotiator of the group talks to the person creating the emergency, he tries to figure out what brought this person to this point of extreme action. And when he gets behind the reason for the extreme emotions, I’ve noticed that he says. “I get it. You aren’t alone.”

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Through very intense, fictional situations, Flashpoint fleshes out this truth: When we feel alone, we make very bad decisions.

In my book, Angkura: The Fight for Hope, the main character is a 16 year-old who feels alone. And she makes a poor relationship choice because she doesn’t want to feel alone. But throughout the story, as she learns how deeply she is loved, and that she is not alone, she begins making choices motivated by courage instead of fear – the fear of being alone.

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We all have a fear of being alone, of being misunderstood, of not being valued, of feeling disconnected.

And when we feel those things, we often make our own poor choices in order to avoid feeling those things. We may seek to numb the pain, or we grasp at any relationship that we think will help us not feel that way.

This is the basic, broken, human condition.

The beautiful, glorious truth is that we are not alone. We are of great value to the God who formed us, and we are only disconnected as long as we keep Him at a distance.

It isn’t surprising that the enemy of our souls works overtime to make sure we feel alone. We were created for fellowship with God and with other people, and that is where the enemy strikes.

It’s a very effective strategy. And we can only fight his strategy with truth.

Psalm 139:1-18 paints a beautiful picture of the way God knows us and cares for us, intimately, gently, completely.

O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
    you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down
    and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
    behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.
You hem me in, behind and before,
    and lay your hand upon me.
 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
    it is high; I cannot attain it.

Where shall I go from your Spirit?
    Or where shall I flee from your presence?
 If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
    If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
 If I take the wings of the morning
    and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me.
 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
    and the light about me be night,”
 even the darkness is not dark to you;
    the night is bright as the day,
    for darkness is as light with you.

For you formed my inward parts;
    you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
    my soul knows it very well.
 My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
    intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
 Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
    the days that were formed for me,
    when as yet there was none of them.

 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
    How vast is the sum of them!
 If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
    I awake, and I am still with you.

I get it. You are not alone.  These words are such a comfort, and there is good reason for this. We weren’t meant to be alone. And we aren’t.