Trading Your Message and Platform For The God-Sized Dream

January 18, 2013 by 48 Comments

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“Darn it, I forgot my camera,” I said to my son. I didn’t think I would need it. It looked cloudy and overcast out my dining room window while I was getting ready to take him to school. When I pulled out of the neighborhood and saw the pink backdrop illuminating a field of naked trees I felt God say, “It’s okay, you need to listen; take in what I’m going to show you today without the distraction of your camera.”

Dressed for a morning walk on the beach, I drove with the windows down, pulled in to my regular sandy spot on the way home. I don’t mind the stench of fish anymore. It smells like life to me now; of celebrating His creation. But today, the smell hangs unusually heavy in the air.

When I cross the threshold from parking lot to beach, I interrupt a seagull family reunion on the shoreline. A woman wearing sunglasses and running shoes holding a camera in her hand walks up behind me. “I forgot my real camera,” I tell her, trying to capture the family photo with my phone.

“So this is where the fish are, huh,” she replies.

That’s when I realize it. These aren’t just a few fish strewn on the beach, and this is no family reunion. There are spoils of fish to feed thousands of hungry birds.

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I zigzag my way around the silver carcasses, avoiding their bulging eyes and scarred bodies lying like wounded soldiers in the sand. And suddenly I remember what I said yesterday in my blog post, what He told me a few days earlier:

“We’re not meant to catch every fish, or the eye of every reader, or the heart of every man. Just those he gives us. And that is enough.”

My hand gapes over my mouth and tears drip down my cheek. His message wasn’t finished. He was giving me more.

“There are more than just a few fish to catch Shelly.”

And as I continue down the beach, my eye hooks on a stubby stick pushed in the sand marking a message. Really?  Two love letters in the sand in one week?

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The longer I walk, the smell of life transforms to the putrid smell of death. What I saw still haunts me.

Scattered silver scales and sawed off fins stretched in obscene piles as far as my eye can see; armies of seagulls standing still, yards away from the fish. As if the riches of their morning breakfast transforms to a plate of grief.

“They represent forgotten souls strangled by evil’s bony fingers,” he whispers. “Gasping for breath because no one told them I could save them.”

“The smell is horrible,” a beach walker calls out to me holding her arms open, shoulders pulled up to her ears. “Why do you think this happened, why are there so many fish on the beach? I’ve never seen this happen before.”

I wanted to tell her it is a message from God; He’s trying to get our attention. The smell of our sin reeks. But instead of that I say, “Maybe God wants to feed the birds this way today.”

Am I like one of those seagulls, stuffed full with the riches of His goodness, standing on the sidelines of lost souls while they die without hope? Walking among scattered carnage keeping the message of Truth to myself.

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What do you do when you realize your dream isn’t as much about a book, or a platform, puny words knocked out in a blog post or being known? It’s bigger than that. It’s God-sized.

Because lasting fulfillment isn’t in dollars, approval from others, a golden ticket, and the way favor found you one day, or in the numbers you anxiously seek. It comes from the welcome of those waiting with arms outstretched at heaven’s gate. The ones He sends to you today, to reveal His Kingdom now.

Fulfillment is in the Message, not the method.

Fish need catching. Many will die, pushed up on the shore of life’s frailties before they hear the message of hope. Are you willing to tell them, to be the messenger?

I sat down on a jagged rock, looking into the sun rising slow and shimmering over the water, watching the waves break over the groin, and surrendered. Surrendered perfect prose, saying the right thing, a platform, a book with my name on the spine, friendships, and being known or unknown. To deliver the message. His message to the hopeless from the life He gave me.

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Are you ready to catch some fish with me?

 

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Because Failure Is Not Your Fate

January 16, 2013 by 30 Comments

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I carried my yellow Tinkerbell cup of steamy tea back into the bedroom, sat down on the bed and pushed my pajama legs back under the sheets still warm with body heat. We slept in. H and I savored the moments of quiet under a halo of slanted light streaming dust particles through the slats on the shutters. And we watched CBS Sunday Morning together.

Do you believe God can speak to you through morning television? 

I do.

I listened to Nick Vujicic, the man without arms or legs tell about God’s goodness in the midst of his seemingly hopeless situation; heard how Scarlett Johansson overcame early rejection in her career due to her “unfeminine” husky voice. And just when I thought I understood the depth of God’s love, he said, “But there’s more.”

They chose to approach life with focused determination founded on what they have; instead of fate based on what they lack.

And I’m pondering what God is saying to me through their stories. How I can speak life into those people discarded by circumstance like dry bones the way Ezekiel did. Breathe life into my own dry places by believing in the power of God’s restoration.

So I prophesied, just as he commanded me. The breath entered them and they came alive! ~Ezekiel 37:10

I gently push my tea onto the bedside table with my reading glasses and phone, wipe away tears with the corner of my blue bed sheet. Then I lean over and kiss H, my Ezekiel.

On days of discouragement, he restores the pulse of my faith to hope again.

Who are your Ezekiels?

Tomorrow I will sit across from a young girl I’m mentoring and talk with her about destiny. She was chosen for me because of the dry bones she carries, but I believe there is life inside the sinews waiting to come alive.

“Watch this: I’m bringing the breath of life to you and you’ll come to life. I’ll attach sinews to you, put meat on your bones, cover you with skin, and breathe life into you. You’ll come alive and you’ll realize that I am God!” ~Ezekiel 37:5-6

Who needs you to speak life into their dry bones?

This post is inspired by Chapter 6, The Wonder of Restoration in Wonderstruck by Margaret Feinberg.

Linking with Ann, Laura and Jen.

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Why I’m Not Choosing a Word to Welcome the New Year

December 31, 2012 by 78 Comments

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I’m already seeing it around the web, people choosing one word to lean on as a theme for the New Year. I couldn’t choose one last year. Now I know why.

If I had to describe 2012 in one word it would be Loss. And no one wants that to be their word as they step off the precipice on to a clean slate of 365 days.

Isn’t that what entering a new year provides, a clean slate?

It’s why we pick words that carry hope and not dread. But I’m averse to choosing one word and maybe it has something to do with my evangelical, name it and claim it upbringing. It feels presumptuous, more like wishful thinking than a prophetic canopy to dwell beneath.

Oh, I prayed about a word and thought about choosing Hope. It stuck with me for days after Christmas. I even bought a shirt at Forever 21 in Phoenix while waiting for Murielle to return a gift. Hope studded in four letters stacked on black. I wore it hanging off my shoulder like Jessica Beals in Flash Dance, until it shrunk in the wash and revealed my mid-life belly fat.

And that’s how Hope began to feel just months into 2012, too small for my circumstances. So I left Hope lying like a sales receipt blowing bargains in the parking lot of dreams.  I wasn’t prepared to pay the full price of her meaning.

I lost my tail wagging companion of eight years to cancer the first month of the year, my brother to drugs in the eighth, my church to a vote in the eleventh, with sprinkles of lost relationships amid deceptive circumstance scattered on top of each of all the others. And the word repetitively spewed from my mouth changed from Hope to Why.

It wasn’t until the final loss of the year – my daughter’s collision with a semi weeks before Thanksgiving – that the full price of Hope seemed reasonable. All of my why’s, they ran away into the night sky, limping on shards of unanswered questions. And Why passed the baton to Who in the midst of the trauma. It’s the word God used in response to Job when he uttered why.

Where were you when I created the earth?

Tell me, since you know so much!

Who decided on its size? Certainly you’ll know that!

Who came up with the blueprints and measurements?

How was its foundation poured,

and who set the cornerstone,

While the morning stars sang in chorus

and all the angels shouted praise?

And who took charge of the ocean

when it gushed forth like a baby from the womb?

That was me! Job 38:4-8, MSG

Who was it that saved my daughter within an inch of her life? Who decides when someone takes their last breathe? Who does the church worship? Who joins friends together? Who determines the word to describe a year?

I haven’t picked one word for 2013 but if I did, I would christen the new year with Found. Because I’ve learned from 2012, whether groping through the dark night of the soul or radiant with rejoicing, I  am never lost along the journey.

And neither are you. In all of our losses we are perpetually found by Him.

Being found by Jesus, it is not presumptuous or wishful thinking, its unchangeable truth that enables me to open my hands to welcome a New Year. Are you opening your hands too?

Happy New Year Friends!

I’m looking forward to sharing some new things I’m dreaming about for us this year.

Q4U: What about you, have you chosen a word to welcome the New Year?

 

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Because You Can’t Make Miracles Happen, They Just Do

December 12, 2012 by 31 Comments

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We scooted into the two empty chairs in front of the end cap with Christmas doggy chews and portable dog baths. Under the red furry stocking hanging from the ceiling big enough for a puppy to fit inside. At least that’s what I told my daughter. She said I was rubbing it in, how I wouldn’t let her have another dog.

We were laughing about that when a lady wearing a broach on her  green coat walked by. She asked if we were waiting for our flu shots. “We’re waiting, I said, “but not for flu shots.”

She turned around and asked Murielle where to sign in to see the nurse. We both pointed to the kiosk she passed on the wall at the Minute Clinic.

Hunkered over, she picked up the pen attached to the screen and stared like a foreigner trying to read a Chinese menu.

Murielle got up and stood next to her to help. And a stranger relinquished the pen to my teenage daughter.

While Murielle read every page, showed her how to make selections, the lady fired off sarcastic jokes that made us both giggle. She struggled to remember her address, stood with her eyes slanted toward the ceiling in an uncomfortable pause about her phone number. Somewhere around the tenth question, she turned to Murielle and said, “Can I graduate now,” and sat down.

And throughout her second strep test, probing in her ears, and answering questions about how she felt, every time the nurse turned her back away from Murielle, she mouthed that she was worried about the lady sitting outside the door waiting for her flu shot. Concerned because she didn’t answer all the questions and feared a stranger was lost in the system.

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The next day Murielle came out of her bedroom wearing a black print dress with a belted blue cardigan on her way to school. On the day she would sit on a bus – next to someone in the providence of the alphabet – to a movie field trip. I told her to be careful about how she sits on the bus wearing a dress.

When she calls me after school, I ask her if she liked the movie. “It was good,” she said, “but I sat on the steps in the theater the whole time.”

It was her choice.

The school rents the entire theater but the staff inadvertently let a few elderly people in, leaving six people without seats. When she and a friend notice two teachers leaning next to the wall, they offer to give up their seats because one of them is pregnant.

All I can think about is the way God turns children into adults while their parents sleep. How He cupped His hands over the Light she carries into the world, before a semi snuffed it out.

In my barrenness, the incarnation of Christ came down in the unselfish kindness of my daughter toward others, daring me to believe He is present in the silence. I may be deaf but He is not mute. He withholds no good thing from us.

“You did awesome deeds beyond our highest expectations . . . .” (Isaiah 64:3)

Where is God breaking into your life, daring you to hope?

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On Fractured Friendship and Shouldering Hope

December 5, 2012 by 41 Comments

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I got her text a few days after the voting that devastated me. A vote that split our church family wide open. We voted differently. She asked me to lunch.

She and I, we’ve sat among peers in the same prayer circle for three years now, peeking inside our hearts when the Word tore open our ugly, offering consolation and the spoon of friendship stirring up faith. But we didn’t talk about the church vote.

No one asked me how it felt to have your church turn their back on what you’ve poured your heart into for twelve years. The church planting movement my husband helps to lead, the one I’d written hundreds of stories about, uprooted my family to move across the country for.

I said no to lunch. I couldn’t sweep all that pain under the rug and smile over salad. I’ve never been good at pretending. I’m the girl whose mother knew I hadn’t eaten well in college by the tone of my voice over the phone.

A few days later, sitting in my van trembling after midnight, thinking about who I could call for help to navigate the wreck my daughter had with a semi, I scrolled through all those church people in my mind. The families I wrote down on those forms for my children, you know, the people the school should call in case you aren’t available in an emergency.

I hadn’t talked to those people in months.

But I received her text.

So I called her.

She didn’t answer.

It was 1:30 in the morning.

I was relieved I didn’t wake her up.

She called me back, after two hours of sleep in my clothes. Said she saw my update on Facebook and my missed call on her phone and she was in a puddle, and so relieved to know Murielle was okay. And all that church stuff, it felt like chaff in the wind blowing tumbleweed down the street of my soul.

Sometimes perspective plummets like an elevator shaft unhooked from what you’ve always taken for granted.

She came to my door with foil covered containers filled with food, the salt from our tears and the presence of the holy. We sat on my couch shouldering hope under the cacophony of teens consoling my daughter, talking about everything and nothing. And I learned what it means to bare one another’s burdens.

I named the ache of my pain, opened the gift of receiving and I’m looking forward to going to lunch soon.

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In her book, Enuma Okoro says, “A believing community shoulders hope when circumstances seem hopeless. A believing community speaks boldly into despair and longing and suggests that things do not have to remain as they are in the presence of a holy, imaginative God.”

As we enter the season of Advent may we each find a sojourner to share the longings of our soul, one to receive the whispers of our pain in the wait. Not friends for fixing but for shouldering hope and shifting the weight.

Many of you come here with burdens like mountains you can’t see your way through and I just wanted you to know what a privilege it is to intercede on your behalf. Let’s bare one another’s burdens, shall we?

Linking with Jennifer and Emily.

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Why Healing Can’t Be Hurried Up

November 27, 2012 by 3 Comments

Sitting under the square hole in the mud wall, a window without glass or screen, I prop my voice recorder on the meager table and begin asking questions. I’m unprepared to hear the answers. How does one describe the horror of seeing their entire family mutilated and then go on to forgive their perpetrators?

Young Rwandans take turns on the couch across from me. Sit next to an interpreter and describe being orphaned, captured, beaten, raped, pillaged and wandering during the 1994 genocide. Then they share the redemption, how living in Hope Village changes their lives.

A five year effort fund raising for this child-headed village of 80 children brought me here. I can’t swallow their suffering stuck in my throat. I barely hold the recorder steady for the trembling emotion ready to tumble out.

I’ve never known this kind of suffering. Their stories cast light on the shadows of my own experience. Yet how do I feel more at home with my Rwandan friends than those in my own seaside southern community?

Please join me at Thorns and Gold to finish the story. I’m Tanya Marlow’s guest today on her series God and Suffering: Our Story and would be honored to see you there in the comments. I have a board on Pinterest called I live in England, in my heart and she’s one of the reasons I do.

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Illumination

October 21, 2012 by 11 Comments

The flame of truth wanes while we’re groping in the dark, trying to feel and taste and smell the familiar that leads to a door of understanding. And just about the time we let go, sit down cross-legged on the cold floor, he illuminates the room with hope. The door revealing truth was in arms reach the whole time, the handle and hinges just didn’t feel the way we expected.

Settling into Sunday and thankful for the Light.

This is #21 in the series 31 Days of Letting Go. You can read the collective here. If you are a writer, I invite you to link up any post you’ve written on the theme of letting go in the comments here on Friday. Subscribe to receive the series in your inbox or feed by adding your address in the side bar under Follow Redemptions Beauty.

 

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