Two Words and I’m Wonderstruck

April 3, 2013 by 36 Comments

rbtwowords

It really is more of a blessing to give than to receive, and Jesus wept. Those two phrases float through my mind in the first moments I awaken, like an airplane pulling a message in morning sky. I roll over to look at the time blurred on my clock. It’s 7:30 on Saturday morning.

This happens to me often, hearing Jesus’ words clearly in those first few moments awakening from slumber, before the busyness of life pushes them below the surface, swirling like murky dishwater down the drain. But today, I’m slowing for Sabbath. Those words brew as I linger on the pillow.

I realize it only takes two words to know that Jesus understands me.

*******

I pick the small grocery cart on purpose. We’re only buying what we need during Lent. I hadn’t planned on going to the grocery store and fighting weekend crowds, until I realized I had no plans for dinner. I only need one bottle of root beer for the recipe but I have to buy six. And the cart is suddenly full, top to bottom, when I check out.

The man in front of me pushes his bag of rice and lesser cuts of meat wrapped in cellophane up further on the conveyor belt, making room as I swallow the guilt, laying out the muffins I don’t really need. He wears a white sweater embroidered with golfers on the chest underneath a tired black coat, sleeves below his fingers, tentative eyes shielded by a ball cap. I notice kinky grays dotting his hairline, how he’s sneaking a sideways glance at my cart, avoiding eye contact.

Maybe you should give him a bottle of root beer, I hear myself think. Just like those phrases I heard earlier on my pillow.

“Do you have your Food Lion card,” the cashier asks him leaning her chest into the buttons. His almond shaped, pink nails curl around the familiar yellow card faded to dirty mustard, worn down white on the edges.

“That will be $10.38,” she says. And he swipes a credit card through the kiosk.

“It says insufficient funds,” the cashier reads through her glasses tilting her head down to see. Momentarily silent, he leans over and whispers that he just used it next door, then rifles through the bag deciding which item from the four to put back.

Now I know it’s not root beer that he needs.

“How about this,” I say wisking my card through the kiosk, “I’ll pay for your groceries.” And he stops what he’s doing to get a closer look at me.

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” he says quietly.

“You didn’t ask me, I want to do it,” I reply grabbing his bulky right arm while patting it. And now he’s mumbling something about washing my car. “Oh no, this is a free gift, you don’t have to earn it,” I tell him, “enjoy it.”

As I look up to see two women wiping tears from their eyes thanking me repeatedly and smiling, I turn back to him and say it again. It’s a free gift.  And then I realize, it only takes two words to know Jesus understands our plight. How an interruption of a grocery trip is an opportunity to be wonderstruck. That it really is more of a blessing to give than to receive.

When have you taken a risk and been wonderstruck by God in the process?

rbtwowords1

Today Duane Scott and I are launching a book club, co-hosting a discussion on Wonderstruck by Margaret Feinberg on our blogs. Link up your posts on finding the wonder of God in the everyday (they’ll show up on both our sites) and join the discussion in the comments and on our Facebook page throughout the week, Redemptions Beauty Book Club. 

BOOK CLUB SCHEDULE

April 3: Chapter 000 – 001

April 10:  Chapter 002-003

April 17: Chapter 004-005

April 24: Chapter 006-007

May 1: Chapter 008-009

May 8: Chapter 010-Final Thoughts

Every Monday in April, I’ll be giving away a copy of Wonderstruck to one lucky person who leaves a comment at Living the Story, my column at BibleDude.net.

Linking with Emily for Imperfect Prose.



Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Diving Into The Deep End

August 27, 2012 by 41 Comments

We’re standing in front of the computer screen when H turns to me and asks if I still feel good about the decision we just made to buy the couch. I tell him I have a knot in my stomach and that while he was talking to the salesman about protective sprays, I was trying to self-diagnose my feelings.

Not the answer he hoped to hear.

We’ve had “if we win the lottery conversations” about re-modeling our hodge-podge family room for years. Now that we’re finally moving forward, I realize that I can’t change my mind like returning a pair of shoes that don’t fit right. The weight of it sobers me.

I’m thinking about how the money we’re spending on a couch will feed some friends in Rwanda for months. How this seemingly small decision will lead to more seemingly small decisions, about paint color and window treatments and more thoughts about how we could be helping people that sit on cardboard boxes and use magazine pages for toilet paper. My stomach hurts.

The couch decision, it’s a small portal into a new season of God asking me to dream big and trust Him for the outcome. To stand on the high dive and jump off when I can’t see to the bottom of the pool. I like to know what I’m getting myself into before I take the leap. Can anyone relate?

But this isn’t just about a couch or new paint color, it’s about wandering through a wintering of the soul long enough that you can’t imagine what spring feels like anymore. It’s like snow falling in the middle of summer and Jesus sitting on the edge coaxing me to dive in.

My dreams lay stretched out asleep on the diving board of circumstance. Fingers let go of clenched hope somewhere in the midst of waiting for everyone else to dive off first. Hope about friendships and community, ministry and belonging.

Standing up and bouncing on the end of the board, buying a couch, calling a friend, walking into a new church when you wish you didn’t have to, it all starts with commitment. A commitment to risk and feel and fail and succeed.

And sometimes all He’s looking for is commitment. He doesn’t need my preparedness to deliver a dream.

A friend calls to say that she knows someone who can use my old couch. When she comes with a family to pick it up, they step over boxes and bags waiting at the door. I open one of them to reveal the load of crayons, markers and pencils inside. Their faces light up like a candelabra flaming on an opera stage.

She tells me about how they were just talking in the car about all the kids that still need school supplies. How they intend to sew backpacks for some that use plastic bags to hold their books.

I walk over to the pile, hold up another bag to show them it’s full of fabric scraps. We high-five each other in the surprise of it all and load everything in the back of their truck.

Because sometimes when you take a leap into the deep end of your dreams, the water splashes on to the ones standing at the edge with Jesus.

Counting gifts with Ann:

  • My son’s impromptu comedic monologues that make me laugh – every day.
  • Picking out paint colors, easier than expected.
  • Cards and e-messages from friends holding me up in prayer over the loss of my brother last week.
  • The way God answered every question I pondered on the way to church in the sermon from Ezekiel, to remind me He hasn’t forgotten.
  • A phone call from a friend, like no time passed in between.
  • No class changes or surprises on the first week back to school (except for the forgotten lunch on the counter.)

Also linking with Playdates With God, Hear it, Use it, Miscellany Monday, Into the Beautiful and Soli Deo Gloria, Faith Barista Jam.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What It Means to Live a Good Story

May 23, 2012 by 66 Comments

“If I’m boring you, just flake off,” Patrick says to the crowd following him along the grassy terrace for a garden tour. We giggle over his blunt honesty.  Not a single person turns around and walks away from the 90-year old man with the handmade scarf around his neck, cane in his hand.  The mischievous man that changes his name to Pennington for his wife, moves into Muncaster Castle, gives up a career to cultivate the beauty that envelopes us in a time warp.

He trudges up the pathway, points to the towering rhododendron on the right side of a ravine, says it’s been there since 1866. My mouth drops open in the wonder, like I’m covered in fairy dust.  He stops to touch one of the blooms on another one, tells us the vibrant pink color reminds him of the “psychedelic tidily winks his mother-in-law wore on her ears when she was alive.”

Patrick talks about how he abhors politics and writes poetry to deal with authorities. He stops walking, turns around and recites a poem to the branches overhead. The disparaging rhymes about a troublesome politician raises a few eyebrows.  

And because I ask him to sign his book of poetry beforehand, tell him I am a writer too, he looks at me through the maze of heads throughout the tour, directs remarks toward me about writing as if we know each other long. Then he asks H if he might be interested in taking the pastor’s position at the church on the grounds.

I’ve just met Patrick. Somehow we’re related.  I’ve traveled over the seas to walk the grounds of Muncaster Castle in Ravenglass, England – where I’ve traced my ancestry back to the Pennington’s more than 1,000 years ago.

I wouldn’t miss this garden tour by the man who knows every crevice, branch and bloom on this loamy expanse of beauty that whisper the secrets of life for anything. He’s telling me how to live a good story with every step.

Be Honest

With every joke, innuendo, eyebrow arched comment he reminds me that blunt honesty spoken in love removes the mirage of the perfected life. It helps to define the landscape for all its panoramic scars and imperfections, to remind us of who we are in the deep underground of the soul.

Surpass Your Circumstances

His slow, confident, methodic steps pressed firmly into ancient soil remind that age and circumstance are mutually exclusive to calling. That to live a good story means understanding who wrote it. That there will be hills and valleys along the way, but they don’t change the course written in the book of life with our name on the spine. Even when taking a detour from time to time.

Give Generously

As people parade through his home, see his clothes cloaked over a radiator in the bedroom; interrupt his bowl of pea soup on the picnic table of the public, he responds to each one with dignity and broad smile. To sacrifice time, reputation and privacy for the sake of something greater than yourself is the kind of story that sticks to your skin like honey. It tastes sweet, leaves you longing for more.

Be Confidently You

When I look out the window, over the wide expanse of planted history waving her branches of welcome, I can hardly breathe. Because when I think about those early years of wondering tearful in the bedroom of safety, just outside the smoky room of depravity and empty cans of sorrow, I didn’t know this. That His arm would extend across the seas to show me how to live a good story.  That I have been living one all along.

How do you live a good story? I’m joining the group of writers at Prodigal Magazine to find out how. You can share your story too.

Linking with  God Bumps, Imperfect Prose, WLWW, Life in Bloom, Thought Provoking Thursday

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Regarding Happily Ever After

April 25, 2012 by 57 Comments

Squeezed together on the bench seat of an old van, Speciose and I couldn’t help knocking into each other as we bounced over potholes, swerved around pedestrians crowding the red clay roads of Kigali, Rwanda.   She speaks Kinyarwanda to someone on her cell phone, clothed in vibrant African dress, hair braided like a piece of art. 

I only know one language and this woman, living in a third world country, can speak four.  I am one of several visiting Americans shifting through her world, fascinated by her skill in translation and bartering. 

We eat lunch at separate tables on a crowded terrace overlooking the metal roof skyline of the city. I notice a faraway look; she picks at her food quietly. It leaves me curious. 

On my last day in Rwanda, during a final embrace she reveals what haunts her.  “The children are starving and we have no way to feed them.  Do you think you can help,” she asks hesitantly.

I accept the challenge and together, over five years, we manage to help sustain eighty children – orphaned in the genocide and living in a village of child-headed households. Her courageous question is the seed for our blooming friendship.

Years later, on her first visit to America she sleeps in my guest room, soaks in her first bubble bath, and learns how to load a dishwasher. We share concerns for our children, laugh about picking up after our husbands, shop at Target. Surprised by what we share in common despite our individual circumstances.

Last fall, I find myself seated across from Speciose sharing a meal at her own dining room table, surrounded by her three children. But before we sit down, I ask to wash my hands. 

She brings an empty coffee pot with water and asks me to follow her down a narrow hallway, outside to a dusty back yard. On the way, I notice she has no kitchen sink, refrigerator or stove, just a small burner over hot coals lying on the floor.

She gently pours water over my cupped hands and I rub them together. The precious water she carries in a plastic jug for a few miles on foot.

Today, I turn on the faucet to fill my electric kettle, open the cupboard for a tea bag and notice the Rwandan tea I bought with Speciose at the market.  I think about how tea makes the list of necessities we purchased for the orphans. Remember asking her, “What about toilet paper, do they have any,” and how she laughs in response, “They are fine to use old magazine pages.”

The day before I leave Rwanda, we’re bouncing over potholes again when she taps my shoulder from the back seat. I turn around to see her smile as if she has a secret to share.  She tells me how she finally receives a visa to visit her sister in Canada and thanks me.

They approve a visa because I brought her to the United States and her passport stamps show that she returned to Rwanda, unlike others looking for a way to escape poverty.

She takes flight a few days later, and never returns. Our friendship freezes in that truck like a movie on pause during an interruption that lasts over a year now. And it haunts me like a dream I can’t figure out.

Have you ever had a friendship end abruptly, without explanation?

Some of you may recognize the first half of this story as my essay selected as a finalist for Real Simple’s Simply Stated Blog Contest about unexpected friendship. I decided to share it here with a postscript as I think about how many things in life happen without explanation or happy ending.  How faith resides in the the tension of unresolved acceptance.

He reveals deep and mysterious things and knows what lies hidden in darkness, though he is surrounded by light. ~Daniel 2:22
 

Linking with God Bumps and God Incidences, Word Filled Wednesday, Walk With Him Wednesday, Imperfect Prose, Thought Provoking Thursday

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The Ache of Empathy that Grows Redemption

March 2, 2012 by 36 Comments

She said it in the comments on my last post, “oh my heart aches for that little girl-you. i’m so glad God gave you him.”  I’m glad too, for the redemption.

This empathy ache, it comes from one who carries a cheery bundle on her hip, watches the other scoot around on plastic car and then says yes, I will be a surrogate mother to two more.  Two seeds sprouted from a mother whose well ran dry, capacity to parent served its last drop.

These souls, they mirror my own young life. When my aunt says, “She can live with me.”

A single teacher agrees to take her teenage niece in the second half of my third year of high school. Because the family my mother leaves me with, they decide it isn’t prudent to foster a girl without legal rights.

I sleep on a cot, next to her bed in the one bedroom apartment with the avocado carpet and plaid couch.  We croon Barry Manilow in the mirror of makeup, pick up taco salad after school, shop at JC Penney, practice driving in the Toyota Celica that becomes my first car.

The heart rests in the security of belonging to one who loves true. Spreads out it branches and roots deep in the waters of acceptance.

And yesterday, when a friend mentions that the nurse at the high school knows of many who live at home but suffer without proper care or necessities. Asks if we might help with the riches of what He gives .

My heart aches empathy, says yes, because I know this kind of poverty.

Aren’t we all surrogate mothers to the ones who walk long with the God sized ache to be loved and belong? To be conduits of Jesus that fill in the emptiness, the ache of poverty.

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?  

1 Corinthians 3:16

Writing for five minutes (maybe a few more) in community with Lisa Jo on the one word prompt: Ache.

Filed Under: Five Minute Friday Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

When Love Spills Delight

February 17, 2012 by 20 Comments

I hear her car pull in the garage so I linger a while longer in the kitchen. She walks in through the garage after school, book bag over her shoulder, grocery bag dangling from her right arm, flowers wrapped in clear plastic in the left.

“I wanted this to be surprise for you,” she admits when she hands the flowers to me. “It’s hard to surprise you when you are already home.”

She puts the bag down on the table, pulls out a square brown box with Godiva embossed gold on the lid, hands them it to me and says, “Happy Valentine’s Day. And I picked these flowers because they smell so good.”

I pull her into me, kiss her cheek and say thank you. It isn’t often that a mother gets flowers and candy from her teenage daughter. But really, she teaches me about delight in generosity on most days of the week, not just on the day to express love.

She takes the contents remaining in the grocery bag – pretzels, fruit and nuts covered in colorful chocolate – and sits on the floor.  Surrounded by a roll of red cellophane, scissors, and curly ribbon, she crafts goody bags for twelve of her friends.

The money she spent, almost ten hours of working behind the counter after school.

And I think this is how Jesus delights in us, his children. He lavishes love all over us just because he wants to, not because of what we have done or deserve or because he expects something from us in return.

My daughter illustrates the way we come to Him, like children, and I am undone. (Matthew 18:3)

How about you, have you ever been the recipient of someone’s delight?

 For the LORD your God is living among you. He is a mighty savior. He will take delight in you with gladness. With his love, he will calm all your fears. He will rejoice over you with joyful songs. ~Zephaniah 3:17

 

Filed Under: Five Minute Friday Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

For When You Wonder: Remember This

January 18, 2012 by 27 Comments

She approaches from the line that stretches long through the middle of the ballroom.  The frail women among the souls strung waiting for prayer. She wears tired like a bathrobe, eyes half-mast, gait slow and steady.  Huddling in close, she shares the prayer request.  It isn’t what I expect.

With palms open, fingers lined boney, she looks at her hands, asks if we could pray that God would somehow anoint them. Breathe healing into the sinews and hold it there until she can touch her three friends back home with cerebral palsy. Because she wants to be a conduit of comfort, healing, restoration to the ones she loves.

And when I think this is perhaps a smoke screen – because asking for someone else is sometimes easier than exposing your own needs – I ask her if she wants us to pray for anything personally. She whispers quiet, “No, just this one thing for my friends. I want them to feel better.”

I wrap one arm around her boney shoulder the size of a child and like the widow giving her last mite she opens her hands expectant. And as we pray I touch her hand and those fingers curl tight with faith.

We ask Jesus for this one thing.

To impart healing to those hands because it’s all she has to give.

Open hands to touch lives with His grace.

When I wonder about my place in this world, if what I do makes a difference to anyone, I think about the woman with the outstretched hands. Hands that hold tight to Jesus, not for what she wants for herself, but what she can give away to the ones she loves.

And as the sea of turmoil rages wild, people turn chameleon to save themselves, sickness hangs its chains on the beloved, lies whisper loud to mask the truth, vows break like a changing lunch menu, my head turns swift toward perspective.

My eyes, my heart, my ears, my thoughts roam free from the distractions that swirl tornadic to these words of Jesus that bring me safely home like a boat resting on still water:

“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” ~Matthew 22:37-40

Everything else flows tributary from these two commands to find our place in the world. That place carved out that looks just like you.

He sent that aged, frail woman with the open palms to remind me. And I am thankful.

 Linking today with Ann, Jennifer and Emily.

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,