Favorite Story of Persevering With a Heart Wide-Open to God This woman and her family have loved Him well. Though I have not met her in person, she and her husband were some of the first to meet our Hope, and they’ve been in Uganda ever since. Yep, that’s almost one year. Some might call the twists and turns of their road nightmarish, but they have chosen to see it as beauty and they haven’t stopped praising Him — while they fought for to one to whom He called them. This heart-stance has continued to keep me wrapped into their story. We all can learn from another who worships when they are pressed and pulled on every side. (And this family is coming home soon … finally!)

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Favorite Backdrop for my Writing Every Thursday afternoon, I tuck away in a coffee shop, after my stint in the prayer room, to write. The time is a little gift from my husband, manning the fort at home. I’ve found some new tunes to be my background and my inspiration. This recently released album is full of piano instrumentals inspired by His Word and, when I take a break from that, I set this piece on repeat (thank you Kelly!).

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Favorite Demonstration of (Sibling) Love My favorite weekend this month was spent celebrating the wedding of two friends, one old and one new, who both are crazy about Him and crazy in love. My favorite moment of the wedding (and possibly of all the weddings I’ve ever attended) was when the groom’s sister got up to read a piece of His Word she’d selected herself. A few lines in, and she was undone. The back-up plan they’d made in jest, for another sister to step up and in her stead, should she not be able to fulfill her role, became the plan. She stepped down and the rest of us marveled at the love of this all-grown-up sister for her no-longer-little brother. I want my children to love each other this way, even when life leads them out from under our roof. You can read the story over here on this sweet encouragement of a blog!

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Favorite Mommy Resources His Word and His whisper have been my go-to guides for motherhood. There is no rift in my child’s heart or actions which are beyond His reach. And part of my growth in this role has been to have confidence in His Spirit within me, waiting to guide my every move. Mamas, isn’t our biggest hang-up to believing we can hear from Him as it relates to our children: the lies that sit below the surface that we will somehow fail? He speaks another Word.

He’s also given me a wealth of Himself in others who have gone before. The gray hairs I’ve written about, who have invited us to dinner (or said yes when we invited ourselves!), who sat with me over tea and let me see their world, are invaluable. Ask Him to show you the mothers whose fruit is what you want your fruit to be and ask them what they did.* Take them out for tea and take notes. Since I probably can’t share the contact info of the half-dozen or so He’s brought my way , the next best thing is to share with you some of their suggestions that are finding their way into our February:

– This book is getting worn. Every morning after chores are finished but children are still pajama-footed, they curl up on his lap and next to him for “Daddy Bible Time.” (Forgive the name. It was a placeholder until we came up with something better. We never did. And it stuck.) This children’s version of the Bible is one of our favorites. Though not full of pictures, its descriptives paint the picture, even for little minds.

– And, hours later, in the minutes they fill their bellies with snacks, I page through my new favorite book on mommy-hood. Though it was a slow-start for me, the latter sections are filled with both biblical vision and the practical helps for getting your littles there. I am loving her perspective (His perspective through her words!). I highly recommend this read.

– Thursdays are high-tea for my girls and me, just a little bit early and not quite so high. My friend, the gift giver, sent me a tea set for Christmas that is now a Hagerty regular. We pull it out every week and sip from its cups as we read and chat about  manners and such. This book is our starting point and my girls love it. Practicing love through simple, discreet action, has become one of their favorite pastimes. (Jesus loves in the big and the small.)

February has been full of their firsts …and full of my favorites.

*For those of you who have been asking for these “gray hairs” to come around you, and He hasn’t yet revealed them: a woman I so respect in the Lord recently told of when she asked Him for a mentor, years ago when she was young. It seemed He didn’t respond, until she later realized that He became that mentor for her. His Spirit is the perfect counselor. His Word and His whisper were exactly what she needed. She now is leading scores of women to His feet as they maneuver their way through being wives, mothers … and daughters of Him. 

We had been home from Uganda for a few weeks, stewardship was something slightly foreign to my five year-old’s experience. She didn’t have much to steward on the streets. What I perceived as an opportunity to train little hands to keep carefully the things entrusted to them, was something for which He had planned even more.

After searching high and low for this accessory to her headband, to no avail, my little girl unraveled. She didn’t need to hear that it was her responsibility to have kept watch over it, her posture wore the understanding that her focus on play had trumped stewardship. Shame flooded her countenance. I spoke gently but it was clear there was another line of conversation happening internally.

Tears of years filled the hour-plus after that flower went missing. Her broken phrases, in between sobs, let me in. Though the naked eye might have called her street-wise ways unruly, wild, I knew my daughter had set a bar for herself of perfection which she would never meet. Forever missing the mark, was the lie she learned on the streets, the lie she believed.

And she lived out of that lie.

When you feel like you’re failing, you live failure.

It was our job to paint her walls anew. To tear down the old, dated wallpaper and renovate with color. Beauty. Parenthood makes us His proxy, briefly. We get to be His voice, His eyes, His hands, His heart and His Words against their clay.

What it looks like, practically, for us and Hope, is that we speak words that are strong Words — His Words — to and over her. She calls hours-worth of play-dough creations “not pretty” and we wrap our arms around her while we piece through the molds in front of us to point out the beauty.

We teach her a new language. We don’t change the standard for her, that’s the escape the shame of her life knows well. We give her His language, the emotions of His heart for her. Because the Truth of how He sees her calls her in, not away.

But, friends, we are not too far ahead of her. Because He is teaching us a new language, too.

Hours of thought in a given day, under His microscope, prove that many of my thoughts are like the peeling wall-paper. Unfiltered. They surround my life, but they are weak. They are not His thoughts about Him, about me, or about them. (And I wonder why I come up dry, unmotivated towards Him, wanting to draw back.) The tragedy of Christianity, in this hour, is that we are anorexic for the true knowledge of God, God’s knowledge about God.

The only way I can paint the color of His Truth around her is if I peel, scrape, and replace old thoughts, in me, with what His Word says about Him. To thrive in this life, His thoughts and His emotions– about Himself, first — then about my children, my husband and my neighbor — must pervade my thinking.

So I go to the Source. Hour after hour, forever reconstructing, I adore. Up the stairs and down, on the way to the mailbox, in line at the grocery. I make the language of His Word my language. (Even when I don’t feel it. Especially when I don’t feel it.) At thiry-four, I learn a new way. Everyday. I wake up expecting that 15 hours later the seeming baby-steps I’ve taken in making His Word my word and His thoughts my thoughts are expanding my soul to receive His Spirit more fully.

He is alive in His Word. And just like I’m training her to see herself the way He sees her — beauty untapped — He is training me through His Word.

So here we are, another Monday. Another chance to adore.

(Each Monday, the column of adoration to the right-side of my blog moves front-and-center, here, and I invite others who are doing the same — stretching their heart to lift God’s Word up and back to Him, despite every obstacle the day presents – to add their link below in the comments section. You can link people back here from your post by grabbing the code on the right side of my blog. If you don’t have a blog but are, yourself, a lover of words and of God and of God’s word, feel free to add an adoration of your own in the comment section. Whether there is one of us or one hundred — and even if the words are written “merely” on our hearts — we will give Him the praise** He’s due.)

And His countenance was like the sun shining in its strength. Revelation 1:16***

Sometimes I feel like I could spend days laying out in the summer sun, no interruptions. It doesn’t just warm me, it pierces me, it coerces me to feel underneath it, instead of just existing with it against my back.

This is You. You don’t just warm me, You pierce me. You dress me up in strength that is Your strength. I replace shame with the confidence of Your light because my inheritance is You and You are light.

Oh God who changes me just by my sitting in Your presence, I adore You.

All I know of myself is weakness — weakness all around and throughout me — until I come into Your presence. You don’t lord Your strength, You share it. You live humility and move me towards humility when I get a share in Your glory simply by gazing on You.

When I’m tempted to find You stale, You reveal a countenance that’s too strong for me to even stare through. I catch glimpses — in between looking away to protect my eyes, which have years of staring at all the wrong things. You are unending and my eyes crave You. 

Your countenance declares You to be not distant and detached, but warm and inviting, leaving a mark on anyone who sits under You. You don’t pull away from my weakness, You surround me with Your strength. The replacement which happens when I sit underneath your downspout makes me want to come back, again and again.

Oh Father of light, I love Your light. You penetrate parts of me I’ve written off as long-dead. Your light revives me. It highlights You in me and calls You forth from within me. How could I not want to spend days here, in this place?

When I look at You, when I really look into You, instead of inhaling shame over my darkness, I crave Your light to break through. 

I see You, shining in Your strength, and I can’t help but hunger. I was made to search You out, oh unsearchable One.

I adore You.

First and third photos compliments of Mandie Joy.

 **I absolutely treasure your stories. I love the memorials coming my way. What’s being erected over your lives is fuel in mine: He is good. With a life of four-being-restored and two of us not too far ahead of them, I don’t have as much time as I’d like to respond to every email, message and comment. Though the demands under my roof may not allow much time to respond to these, please know I am honored by what you’ve sent me and the time you took to tell me your story. They are gifts to me.

***For a context to this little space on my blog, read: Why I Adore. For a more detailed description of how to start adoring Him in your day-to-day, read: Showing Up. You can easily subscribe to these devotional meditations as they are delivered, by using this feed: http://www.EveryBitterThingisSweet.com/posts/chai/feed or by entering your email address in the second box on the right-hand side… (scroll up a bit).

She was five when she said it.

“When  I looked in the mirror just now, satan told me I was ugly,” she replied when I pressed.

This was not a conversation we’d had before and it came way too early, in my book. I wasn’t sure whether to feel relief that she was able to identify this vileness as being from a source other than herself, and other than God, or to mourn over the fact that my sweet little one had fallen prey to femininity’s curse … at five.

We get stopped on the street, often, with comments about her beauty. It’s not something we emphasize, and it’s hard to avoid when strangers spill words before I have time to re-route them. Sometimes even the walls we vigilantly erect around our girls aren’t high enough.

My mind flooded with questions. I could easily teach her to rebuke this, now, but what if this escalates, this voice of the enemy? How would she respond at ten? Twelve? Twenty-two?

Telling her she’s beautiful — that I  [Continue reading this post over here --->]

I didn’t pray by her bedside when she lost her first baby and she wasn’t there to cry with me when we hit our first year of expectation, childless.

It didn’t take long through the reacquainting to realize that we understood the other’s road, intimately. The parallels during our time apart were uncanny. We both were adopting from Ethiopia. And even the gift we gave to our bridesmaids had been the same. (We always did share a similar love for gift giving.) God wove our stories together in the big and the small.

And after finding her again, I was under-water. Stuck in a rut in my marriage. I had lost vision. We ran in circles with our issues, Nate and I. And though we’d made great progress, some of the deepest wounds were still left festering. I spent many days frustrated with what he wasn’t, while he graciously bore-up under the weight of a lifetime of my flesh-formed expectations, pent-up, but unmistakably leaking all over him in my immaturity.

Something was off, but couldn’t put my finger on it. And when you share a sink with someone, it’s subtle and quite easy to shift blame. I was willing to concede myself as a portion of the problem, but (BUT), in my mind’s eye, his role in our issues was the real problem. When he wakes up to his issues, we’ll move to a better place was my argument.

I had a gold mine under my roof but I spent most of my life seeing myself as a coal-miner — so I was missing it. I lived in the study of what he wasn’t. And the gap between our differences felt large.

I couldn’t fully wrap my life around this: the Maker of Marriage never intended two to be same, but to be one. So I built a case and he spent his days climbing walls around my heart to reach me.

Enter my friend, Beth. Friendship as God intended it, not to pacify, but to push, and call out.

“Let’s call it the Love Project,” I said, as any good co-founder would do. She had given the concept and I was bone-dry enough to only have energy for the name. If you’ve been there before, you know that weak place, where a marriage with issues untended to can take you. When a marriage is sick, every part of the world around you can look cloudy. I had grown despondent, wondering if I just needed to settle for this union as the thorn in my flesh that would never quite hit a stride.

Had I considered the implications of how a year attached to this project, with accountability, nonetheless, might stretch me I am certain I would have declined. But God, in His merciful way, had given me just enough hope to do something crazy.

It seems that desperation has a beautiful way of opening our hearts to the “I will never do that’s” we’ve declared.

So January 1^st kicked off our project. We had loose parameters, but the end goal was this: we would love. And we would love well. Despite their response, despite our measured outcome, despite all the resistance that was sure to arise around something so determinedly set towards Him, we would love.

We would not seek to change them, but to be changed. We would take eyes off of where they lacked and celebrate where they won. We would look for where they won. We would camp around the men He was making them into, not in the static place of wallowing in the dreams not yet fulfilled in them. We would be slow to nag and quick to praise. We would fight our flesh.

We would ask Him how He saw them and expect to find His secrets. We would call forth what was hidden deep. We would study them and be students of our God inside of them.

And we would do it so that our men never suspected a thing.

One year of conspiratorial love.

Because there was another, hundreds of miles away and sipping from this same crazy Kool-Aid, we would submit to this project and the Man behind it, even when it hurt. (It helped that, beyond bridesmaids gifts, Beth and I shared a competitive streak which added spice to this game).

“He wants hot dogs for dinner,” read her text. Yuck. But I knew that by the time I got it, she was off to the store. “He forgot to unload the dishwasher like he said he would,” my reply, “but I didn’t mention it and thanked him for his servant’s heart. And I really meant it.”

She surprised his law-school students with cupcakes — his favorite — interrupting his class. The ante was upped for me. I arranged for an overnight of skiing with Nate and his close friends and ignored that our recreation budget was thereby wiped for months.

We did things they noticed and loved in subtle ways that spoke more to our own hearts than theirs. We sowed into who they were becoming and against their “not yets.” She pushed me more than I pushed her. This friend of mine was clearly made for this and I was only learning to walk by following her footsteps. We loved in ways that were easy for us and submitted to the project — to the initiator of the project — when our flesh hurt.

“It was really his fault,” I said. “Clear as day to me, Beth,” I sought consolation. “But I asked God to show me my sin and all of a sudden it felt easy to be the first man down. What would have sent us spiraling for days launched us at least a step forward. Maybe two.” The reserves started to build, in each of our marriages.

It was as if having a reason to love — this silly project — forced us  into a freedom that years of habits in the opposite direction had led us to believe was impossible.

It’s no surprise that the stories we shared over secret conversations, months into The Love Project included movements in our husbands’ hearts about which we’d long dreamed. There was a goldmine in Nate’s frame that was waiting for me to discover.

All these years, and I thought I needed to feel it first before I called it out.

I had been misled into believing that he needed a coach, not a lover. And I feared that if I spoke to his fears, my words would become a crutch. Little did I know that most of the treasures within a person lay hidden below the surface, waiting for a voice to call it out.

Beauty in another requires participation.

As women, we fall prey to the lie that we either “won” in one category or another, or that we “lost” — as if marriage is really a lottery, and husbands are born not made. The 24 year-old mold that I married was never meant to be static, yet when I live with eyes on what he wasn’t yet, and where he failed, he’s bound to stay there. There are pieces of latent dreams, desires and callings in our husbands which are waiting for a God-touch from human fingers.

I was made to participate with God in the making of Nate Hagerty. And the water that softens clay is love.

One year later, our assessments were both the same. These men had changed. They really changed. They grew stronger, more confident, their hearts showed signs of even more hunger for Him. But the greatest change was in us. Me and Beth, we changed.

We knew Him more.

We got the choice prize.

The Love Project wasn’t about me and Nate. I had an encounter with Love, counter to my human construct of love. That’s what God initiated with me, when Beth initiated The Love Project. I am the least likely in a line-up to search out beauty. My flesh, prone to impatience, doesn’t do well with “not yets” in another. I have worn the disposition of distrust and scrutiny like a uniform. But God knew that we could do it — He in me.

He called forth the deep rest of a woman who’s safe in love from me, and enabled me to help call forth great strength out of a man who leads in Nate.

And He gave me a girlfriend with whom to do it.

 If I can convince her, my dear friend Beth will join me here in the upcoming weeks to get a little more practical. I’ve been her student – she’s tapped into Him here – and I’ve love to share her with you. In the meantime, grab a sister and make an ask of Him: do You have a challenge for us? Is there a Love Project in store for our marriages?

Photos compliments of Lucy O Photography and Mandie Joy.

What? I read it again. And again.

Her confession cracked open my day. It was His phrase, through her, over what He is doing in my life. I’ve lived a lifetime of “I can’t”, inhaling lies of the enemy spoken over me as if they would one day be declarations on my tombstone.

I had just unknowingly spent more than our budget, spoken unfiltered words to him, and now had a child unraveling at my bedroom door. Failure — it seeped under the doorframe of my heart. A small crack in the wall, untouched by the Father, and before I know it, I’m toxic.

The battle against my heart is for me to live out “I can’t.” And the One who is winning me back is doing so by imparting a new phrase: “I am.”

I am because He is. I am because He lives inside of me. I am because of my Father. We are old money, my Daddy — the King — and I. This inheritance has been set aside for me since before I was born. The only requirement is that I believe it. It starts with belief.

And what I believe, I will, then, do.

But in order to believe “I am” over me, I have to know who He is. Without His Word as my guide, I am lost.

So goes another Monday adoration. Is it too bold to call it a revolution? Your notes, emails and comments are telling the story**. Adoring the God-Man, according to what His Word says He is, changes things. It’s changing me. It’s changing you.

(Each Monday, the column of adoration to the right-side of my blog moves front-and-center, here, and I invite others who are doing the same — stretching their heart to lift God’s Word up and back to Him, despite every obstacle the day presents – to add their link below in the comments section. You can link people back here from your post by grabbing the code on the right side of my blog. If you don’t have a blog but are, yourself, a lover of words and of God and of God’s word, feel free to add an adoration of your own in the comment section. Whether there is one of us or one hundred — and even if the words are written “merely” on our hearts — we will give Him the praise He’s due.)

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His eyes like a flame of fire. Revelation 1:14***

 Your eyes that dreamed up the world before it was formed see through me. You create big, yet do not miss one of my small movements. Your eyes both fashion and restore.

 You see me through the lens of refining, and not just who I am now but who I will be. Your eyes pierce through the dark to find light. Your light, within me. You search me out.

 I worship You, God who heals as He sees, who sees as He heals. Your vision restores me.

 I love You, oh God of new vision. You take what is Yours and make it mine and I can, now, see me differently. Vision of refining, unto something. Unto You. Unto beauty.

 Years of fearing what I’m not melt away underneath Your fire-gaze. I find safety in seeing how You see. “I am dark but lovely” (Song of Songs 1:5) she said. You say it to me. Your fire burns away the dark in me. My dark crackles, it sparks and then fizzles. It becomes dust at the feet of Your newness. I am not marked by what will burn through Your refining, but by what I am becoming. Your eyes speak a better word over me.

The heat of Your fire, of Your eyes of fire, is a promise.

There is more. You aren’t finished, not disgusted or disturbed but hopeful. You see Yourself in me and Your vision leads the way to where I am going. Less of me, burned on the alter of Your eyesight, and more of Your beauty overtaking me.

 I love You, oh God of new perspective. Be thou my vision.

Photo compliments of Mandie Joy.

 **I absolutely treasure your stories. I love the memorials coming my way. What’s being erected over your lives is fuel in mine: He is good. With a life of four-being-restored and two of us not too far ahead of them, I don’t have as much time as I’d like to respond to every email, message and comment. Though the demands under my roof may not allow much time to respond to these, please know I am honored by what you’ve sent me and the time you took to tell me your story. They are gifts to me.

***For a context to this little space on my blog, read: Why I Adore. For a more detailed description of how to start adoring Him in your day-to-day, read: Showing Up. You can easily subscribe to these devotional meditations as they are delivered, by using this feed: http://www.EveryBitterThingisSweet.com/posts/chai/feed or by entering your email address in the second box on the right-hand side… (scroll up a bit).

I was made for more than the mundane.

At every stage of life, I’ve been haunted by a desire for something more, something bigger, something that would fulfill empty places within me. It’s made me feel unsettled, this discomfort festering under the surface. What’s wrong with me that I can’t quite ever get really happy?

In my late teens and early twenties, my stop-gap was impact. I saw the world’s great need and I wanted to be a part of the response. As my ministry grew, so did my vision. But I never did quite fit in those vision-sewn britches.

Then it was marriage. If we could only find stability, once we found stability, my heart would be free. Then, children, the question mark which hung like a cloud over my late twenties.

If only was the anthem of a decade-plus.

And, though I might be tempted to label myself as discontented, the Lord had another plan for that hunger. Because it wasn’t wrong — just misplaced.

Ironically enough, the itch of ages in my life is finally getting scratched, and at a time where the outside eye might say it was the most gritty. As I can’t get away from writing about, it’s adoring this God-Man which is taking me there. (The perspective I have on my children – it all comes from Him, from this place.) I’ve written several posts about why I adore but sometimes you need to just get a little more practical. And, though I love to live in story, there are times when that story has to find its way off the page and into your own story for it to do anything more than just warm you for a few minutes.

So friends, the summary of what I will, here, suggest about adoration is this: it’s all about showing up. Like dressing the part and starting the car down the street towards the gym before you have a chance to decide you don’t want to workout today, adoration — at first — requires a determined motion. Yes, even if you don’t feel it.

The battle in my own life has rarely (if ever) been against the 20 or 60 minute stint with my Bible cracked and pen in hand, or the Sunday-morning serving line. Instead, the fight has come against my finding Him when the dishwasher breaks and that friend just doesn’t get me and those wounds of my daughters continue to surface. I can show up, morning after morning for a marked “quiet time” with the Lord, without obstacle — but when my feet hit the stairs for the breakfast round-up, the barriers between me and the God-Man surmount.

There’s a war against our hearts finding adventure in the right now. Simmering below the surface of what appears to be circumstantial disruptions is a staged battle keeping me from communion, the minute-by-minute communion which makes me alive and makes Him known to me.

We were made to find joy in relating to Him across the whole span of our day.

But I can’t relate to a Man I don’t really know.

Adoration is my introduction.

So, after stumbling hundreds of times, I am learning the art of getting back up. And for me that means showing up. It means choosing, each day, that I will adore in any pocket of time I can find. If (and when) I fail the day before, I press delete and declare my morning a new day.

I will adore.

I’ve put together a few practical lifelines that I’ve clung to, these past few years in this journey towards adoration. This list is by no means complete — and I feel deep within myself this need to communicate to you, dear reader, that they have been birthed out of years of perplexity. My heart cries alongside the numb, the cynical, the disconnected and the ashamed. Because I’ve been all of those things.

But here is what I have been learning to do, even so. And here is what I am finding is changing my every-day experience and understanding of Him:

Prepare for those pockets of time, because winning a heart and life back to His perspective starts with the simple minutes. Take your Bible down from the dusty shelf, or from the prayer-closet where it typically stays, and onto your kitchen counter, or beside you at your desk, or propped up against the treadmill. We have a lot of ideas about God which aren’t actually God’s ideas about God. We see Him as boring because our method of pursuit has been boring. Try Him on against your most mundane minutes. Practice adoration over what used to be blank spaces, your mind’s graveyard.

Start with a word or phrase which resonates with your particular need that day. Pick up the Psalms (or purchase this book), choose one each day, and let your mind grab hold of a word or phrase within that Psalm which resonates with an irritant or particular pain in your life. Write it down or say it aloud. Practice telling Him who He is — it takes you beyond reading to receiving.

For example, if I’m caught in a mind-trap, condemning myself for failing in some area, there is no better time than this to remember that He is faithful. So that’s where I start. Psalm 36:5 “Your faithfulness reaches to the skies.” God, you are faithful. You are faithful when I am fearful. I can count on You. You will not leave me. I start here, and carry this conversation throughout my day. I scribble notes in my moleskin journal from a new phrase of adoration which came to me on my way down the stairs or in between peeling carrots at the sink.

I get comfortable with His words.

Take baby steps toward breathing adoration. Hagertys don’t often set goals, but we take small steps toward life-habits every day. Because whether we realize it or not, we are always habit-making. So bite-sized portions of adoration will soon lead to meals. Plan and pray towards a 5-minute adoration break over laundry, on the walk to lunch, or during your morning and evening commute. For one week. Then add another, and another. Before you know it, a habit of praise is being formed. It will feel awkward at first, as does any new practice. Push through the awkwardness with expectation.

Taking thoughts captive — I mean really winning your thoughts back to God — requires replacing them with the true knowledge of God. Without a replacement, they’ll forever taunt you. When His Words about Himself become a part of my everyday vernacular, something inside me shifts.

When your heart feels most hard to His Word, lean in. Just the other day, right before my husband had to leave on a trip for work, our Reverse Osmosis water tank fell from the basement ceiling, where it had been suspended, right onto the table below which held years of memories in the form of pictures and maps and documents — all waiting to be formed into baby books. This, after the overhead lights in our closet suddenly popped a fuse which we couldn’t remedy and our stereo refused to work. I sent texts, moaned to my husband, shed tears of frustration … and then remembered: there is treasure to be found here. 

My stubborn heart wanted to stay in the grumpy nest I’d nurtured for years, subtle but toxic. Adoration replaced frustration with expectation. God Almighty had Words to speak over that day.

When your feet are dragging to adore and you have a dozen excuses not to, take that as your signal: it’s time to win those minutes back.

Speak it, sing it, say it, write it. Adoration isn’t just one new way to wrap your arms around His Word, it’s an opportunity to inherit a new perspective in the knowledge of God. The phrases you’ve written in your moleskin journal and whispered under your breath on the way to the water cooler or in folding laundry can now be integrated into your everyday conversation. Talk to your kids about it, find a writing space to declare (you can share it, here, with us on Mondays), write songs with the phrases of adoration He’s given you from His word.

Steep yourself in who He is showing Himself to be, to you.

Communion can’t be compartmentalized.

Don’t let your objections speak louder than your hunger. We all have it, this hunger. It’s not a personality trait, it’s inherent in man. If you haven’t yet identified it in yourself, start searching. We were made for more. Even the most dedicated God-follower was made to know Him more. The “gospel” is but a doorway, not an endpoint. It opens into a vast, open field filled with the beauty, majesty and splendor of God’s character and thoughts.

We have been lulled into believing that this Book and the God-Man behind it is ornamental and separate from the cravings in our lives that we just can’t quench. But we were made to crave. Him. 

So when the objections come up (because they will), as do the opportunities to satisfy that craving with the broken thing you’ve come to expect will leave a sour aftertaste (though it feels so good in the moment), remember Who sourced the hunger. It may take weeks or months of pasting adoration, piece by piece, as the new backdrop of your life, but I promise that you won’t regret it.

From one who has spent years letting her mind and, subsequently, her life, dance around worst-case scenario expectations, making His Word my word is re-wiring my constitution.

And adoration is my introduction.

After all these years, I’m finally finding Him limitless.

You can easily subscribe to my Morning Chai adoration meditations as they are delivered, by using this feed: http://www.EveryBitterThingisSweet.com/posts/chai/feed or by entering your email address in the second box on the right-hand side… (scroll up a bit)

Additionally, all of the Morning Chai Posts can be seen, in the order of posting, by clicking here or adding this address to your reader: http://EveryBitterThingisSweet.com/posts/chai

Photos compliments of Mandie Joy and Lucy O’ Photography [I love having such beautifully talented friends!].

I didn’t know her well, but He meant for me to hear her story. I had an unrelenting curiosity about her coping. It touched on a nagging question deep within. That kind of tragedy set against whom, I had been told, was a good God. How? It had to be too much pain for the Father’s touch.

But, she was not disqualified from knowing Him as good. Instead, she was ushered into a whole new understanding of that goodness. Holiness happened by her fireplace. Evenings, once set aside for the mutual recounting of details in a day — the celebrating of a child’s victory, commiserating over heart set-backs — she gave them, now, to Him. Lights off upstairs and the last child tucked safely away, this woman found a home on her couch with her God.

She met with Him.

She carried her heavy-laden heart to those worn cushions and He cradled her. The day’s ups-and-downs were now received by the unseen. And that fireplace witnessed her reprieve.

Years later, my circumstances, though less severe, called for a cradling of their own. In those years which felt unforgiving I remember thinking several times: it couldn’t possibly get much worse than this, only to wake up the next day and find that one more cord wrapped around what had once been my secure life had snapped. Few areas of our lives went untouched during that season.

Her vignette came back to me. If He could meet even her, then, He can meet me, now.

This stranger taught me where to start.

Communion was conversation. Cadence. My pain for His Words. His Truth slowly infusing new understanding into me. I saw His flesh absorbing my tears and felt a lifting that went beyond the natural.

Sounds esoteric? It was. Since when did brushes with the God who chose to break through the membrane of the earth He created — with an infant Son– become normal?

He transcended my mind to touch my heart. And I let out the sigh of years’ longings. 

Gone was the obligatory Bible-open prayer and study time, I had a brush with a Person. He climbed off the page and into my reality. He was real.

Real enough to make me want to reorient my new normal around these moments of communion. My heart was being put back together, hearthside, and what I’d previously constructed as “relationship” wasn’t what was doctoring me.

He was.

His Word and His whisper weren’t intended for a handshake, they were meant to engulf me. Communion meant getting lost in Him — but my earlier version of christianity was far too buttoned-up for me to lose myself in all that was Him. So pain and life’s perplexity ushered me there.

Fast forward years and He has given me a fireplace off my bedroom. Just one of those sweet touches which my often impoverished heart resists but my Father doesn’t. She met with Him, then and there, and her story is still impacting me here.

My life is learning that I was made for this communion. In the day and age where  we offer up minutes here and there to that which never deeply satisfies, He doesn’t call me to stifle my cravings; He allures me to the Answer for every single one of them.

I want to commune with the God-Man living inside of me. Morning, noon, and night I want to find Him.

Hour-stretches without brushing up against His perspective are missed opportunities.

So, I’ve written this post in an effort to remind myself, again why I adore*.  These days, adoration is the introduction to that fireside conversation. And everyday, sometimes multiple times per day, I need reacquainting.

[For a simple way to turn minutes into conversation, take a look at the column on the right-hand side of my blog. Every Monday it is front-and-center here, and the days in-between, when I can move my adoration from my moleskin journal onto my computer, I post it there*.

I invite you to let Him introduce Himself to you -- to adore  with me.

You won't regret it.]

*You can easily subscribe to these devotional meditations as they are delivered, by using this feed: http://www.EveryBitterThingisSweet.com/posts/chai/feed or by entering your email address in the second box on the right-hand side… (scroll up a bit)

Additionally, all of the Morning Chai Posts can be seen, in the order of posting, by clicking here or adding this address to your reader: http://EveryBitterThingisSweet.com/posts/chai

Picture compliments of Mandie Joy.

Moments of insecurity reveal my street-raised daughter to have a bark louder than her bite. As we learn Him, He teaches us about her and it’s here that we’re finding her gentleness.

Months ago, we started praying into her the opposite of what we were perceiving from her behavior. We weren’t looking to directly oppose what we saw, but as we asked Him for understanding into her heart, we realized that much of the whirlwind around her was borne from inertia. She had a dormant beauty which never had reason to surface.

And I’ve had too many years taking gulps of worst-case scenario expectations, lived-out. This time, I would try His perspective, first. We prayed it, said it, spoke it over her, and to her. And to ourselves. He was bringing forth beauty, refinement, gentleness. All the things one might say she wasn’t is what we believed He was saying she is.

And His Word speaks a better way.

One particular morning, Eden crawled into my lap and confessed yet another grievance. Hope was “hurting her heart.” It was not a surprise; I’d witnessed some of what she was referencing.

We talked it out. God was clearly using this to develop compassion in Eden’s heart for the broken. As we wrapped up our conversation I said, “Let’s pray and ask God how He sees Hope. Let’s ask Him to give us His eyes for her.”

We prayed, waited, listened.

Eden broke the silence: “Elegant. The word ‘elegant’ came to me, Mommy.” Though tucked away in a book we’d read months ago, it’s not a part of our everyday vocabulary. He spoke through the mouth of a six year-old babe to confirm the course we’d charted in prayer. He was making Hope new and even telling her siblings about it. Beauty initiated by Him, before our naked eyes could see it.

And He is doing it, friends. Under our roof is a greenhouse. It’s messy at times, this workroom of ours, but I can’t ignore the growth. Dirt giving birth to life. New shoots are everywhere and before long it’ll be spring.

I’ve heard from many of you whose stories take on a different shape, but the plight is the same. We share the scars of motherhood, both  for children who have been adopted, and those home-grown. You’ve cultivated the dirt and are waiting for spring. You have a Hope in your home and your heart sits, tentative about how to respond. As you wait on her — that “her” for you — might I humbly share some of His counsel to me:

Talk about her beauty, even behind closed-doors. Make it a part of your vernacular. “I can’t say that,” Nate replied to my bleak assessment of the situation, one day. He saw the end, where I was taking stock of the beginning. Nate has been the gatekeeper of our language. I need this.

What we declare — out of fear — in private becomes much easier to believe in her presence. To be her advocate, even closed-door conversations need to come back to the beauty He is bringing forth. To be her advocate, our understanding of her future must be rooted in the promises of His Word. There is no true advocacy apart from Him.

And the power of life and death lies in the tongue. (Proverbs 18:21)

Pray up and in. Adoration was the tool He gave me, early, for this task. To tear down the walls of lies around her heart and life (maybe even spoken over her before her birth) you must first erect Truth in your own life. Battling this blind, is not knowing who He is over your life and your family.

The only perspective that will stand, is His perspective.

Pray His Word back to Him, say His Word back to Him, paste it over your life. And as it takes root in your heart, which it will — because it’s alive — you’ll find it easier to pray it into her.

His Word will be her reality if you just open the door. Morning, noon, and night. It’s waiting. He’s ready-available to re-write your understanding.

Ask Him how He sees her. All day long you will be tempted to be the thermometer on her life. Her behavior has calcified how she sees herself and the enemy is hot on your trail to make you believe the same. In your pain, do not indulge your fear. Much of what you “feel” may actually be in direct opposition to what His Word says is true.

There is no better time than now to sit cross-legged in front of your fireplace, with moleskin journal in hand and a perspective ready to be molded, and ask Him the question that will unlock her heart: Father, how do you see her? Be prepared to take note … with your life.

Tell her who she is and set up memorials around when she walks it out. Behind ten of Hope’s missteps is one heart-move towards beauty. We celebrate the one. When it comes, we acknowledge it, that night we recall it, the next morning we lift it up as the first step in a pattern that will come. “Hope, remember how you cleared Caleb’s plate for him yesterday? That was awesome! Are you ready to do that again today? Let’s ask Jesus to show you more opportunities to love your siblings well today.”

It’s likely she lives covered under a blanket of shame — she’s been telling herself or hearing others remind her what a problem she is. You get to be Jesus’ eyes and search below the dirt for early signs of growth.

Don’t be afraid to respond to and discipline for the ten. ”He disciplines those He loves.” (Hebrews 12:6). Teaching this kind of love — His kind of love — is not pretending there isn’t a chasm of sin to cross or fantasizing a person into reality. Love stares deep into dark and through dark to find beauty. She needs to know you know her dark, and that it will not stand, in order to trust you when you tell her you see beauty. Isn’t that so with us and the Lord?

She needs to know and expect your loving-but-firm response to her sin, as she’s desperate for another’s guardrails on her life. Kids long for guardrails — unchanging guardrails, the same ones yesterday as there will be tomorrow. Children were never intended by Him to control their surroundings.

Be consistently consistent, it’s her safety.

Treat her like the daughter she is, not the orphan she was is the motto in our home.

When her behavior makes you want to retreat, take that as your cue to engage. Restoration love isn’t threatened by sin, it’s activated. When you take a step towards pouring out what you don’t have, He pours in. Give her the love your flesh can’t conjure. Give her the love that requires His overshadowing. He will surprise you, I promise.

Press in. These days are not her days to grow if they aren’t, first, your days to grow. It isn’t “when you get through this” that you’ll find Him. Now is your greatest opportunity to thrive.

These incidents are not accidents and the heart-pain they reveal in you is bigger than your circumstances. As He heals her orphan heart, He is healing yours too. Both are on His radar.

Slow down. Pour out to Him; He can handle your chest-heaving cries. And receive. He has gold for you in this season. And that gold is a greater depth of communion with Him.

And, finally, tell the story. His story. His final word is never doubt, despair or destruction. The testimony of Jesus is being written on your watch. Speak it out as such. When you get the look of pity from a friend who doesn’t quite understand your pain, tell her you are blessed, because you are.

Mamas, these are not your worst days, these days are fodder for a work that will leave you forever changed.

Perspective is everything.

And we get to turn in our frail human constructs of God for His. This is the best of times.

Second photo compliments of Lucy O’ Photo.

Her lungs took their first swallow of earth’s air in the poor African’s version of a waiting room, while her mama held her place in line for a “free-clinic” bed — one that she never saw. Hope was welcomed by this world into the dirt, and it would indoctrinate her first five years of life.

And from what I can tell, she did street life well.

The skill set required to scavenge for food and beg (simply to get by) is quite different, even, than the one needed to slide into the masses of an orphanage food line. To move from streets to shanty-like slums and back again, over and over, makes one resourceful. Vigilant. Prudent.

And … nervous. Afraid.

Nearly six years there, in that life, and now just over six months home, Hope shows the wear-and-tear a child her age is much too young to have received. No government aid could touch the heart-wounds which come from a child fending and fearing during the years she was meant to be furrowing.

My sweet little girl has a heart that longs to live childlike-free, but which is trapped behind years of inertia. At times, she moves like a freight-train — unstopping, always racing, never able to rest. She didn’t stop then, so why now? Rest was danger; how could it, overnight, turn into safety?  She barrels through life and, at times, people. It’s what she has always done. It was her survival.

But tucked away behind 10 of her missteps is one move in the right direction, one sprig of beauty.

And I’m the mama He’s called to search it out.

One of the greatest dangers of adoption is believing for your child what your child already believes about themselves. It’s subtle. And easy, when the sum total of all their behaviors in a given day seems to point in one direction.

But we weren’t called to be the thermometer in the life of a child who has years of seeing themselves in only one light. We are here to tell them who they really are and, in light of who He is, that they are royalty.

They just don’t know it yet. They haven’t been told.

+++++

She scooted over on the couch: “Eden can sit here!”

She seemed to be offering her sister an olive branch, by way of the hotly-coveted seat next to Lily for read-aloud time. But, as Eden began to move, Hope’s intentions became clear to me (but not to the others). Instead of forfeiting her own seat next to Lily, she was finagling a way to squeeze, now, two bottoms in one spot. She stepped forward for a moment to re-adjust, so I took the initiative for her.

“Hope! Look at that,” I said, as I surreptitiously scooted her body to the other side of the couch. “You gave your sister the seat you wanted most. Sweetheart, that was beautiful.” 

Her face flashed remorse, for a second, before she tried on the new mantle I’d foisted on her. All of a sudden, her countenance changed. She adjusted her shoulders and her eyes sparkled. “Yes, Mommy, Eden can have it. I want her to have it.”

My little girl danced and pranced her way through the rest of that night, light-footed, light-hearted. It was as if she started to believe she might be something other than the tempestuous little girl she’s painted herself to be.

The next morning, I woke to find a different child in my home. She scampered downstairs to get waters for her siblings, without them knowing. She shared her colored pencils without being asked and snuggled closer and longer to all of us. “Mommy, I want to bless you,” she said, as I caught her carrying my running clothes from the floor where I’d left them to my hamper.

And this is how it goes. This is how He is winning her back. The age-old strategy of delight is the Father’s best-kept secret. He kneels, toes pressed against the ground, staring into dirt, and His fingers so tenderly search for that one shoot that says life is here. He wades through years of lies calcified against my heart to find His own Truths buried within, and He calls them forth. I call myself “messy” and He says beauty in the making.

And when I learn from Him, I can do it with her.

Perspective is everything.

No child born of God is forever lost. No doctor’s diagnosis or psychologist’s analysis is the final verdict.

The Father looks on my daughter not with eyes of hopelessness and fear. He stares into her deep and calls forth Himself, planted in her from before the day she met the streets. What the enemy calls misfit, He reclaims as heiress.

And as her now-mother, my role is to carry this torch over her life. I live advocacy in my flesh and in my spirit. My prayers and my words form the bridge of partnership between His promises and her reality. I partner. She is being made new and it’s my job to speak it loud and to believe it in my quiet.

It’s His job to impart it.

And mine to receive.

With all that I am and all that I have, to receive. And this is motherhood.

The streets — or the diagnoses, the fears, the setbacks and mistakes — these do not have to stand. We get to stand in their place.

[Tomorrow, I will have part two of this post -- one more story and a space where I get a little more practical.  And what a privilege to share this with you.]

* Photos courtesy of Mandie Joy

Eventually, we stopped counting the number of times we were forewarned about our lives “coming to an end” once the little ones entered our home.

Four children later, though, I now understand a little bit better the pain which might cause (what felt like) a curse to come out of the lips of others over our long-awaited family.

Life is all about surrender, at every pass. And whichever ones of life’s props we hold closest to our chest are the ones which cause us the most pain to relinquish. But the myth is that this pain is the final word over surrender. Though my greatest (felt) surrender may not be parenting, all day long I’m tempted to believe a lie that says: as I pour into their life’s starts, mind ends. No more long workouts, stretches of detoxing in the sauna,

sinking into my chair for hours in the prayer room. Loss just seems to weasel its slinky way into my vocabulary, even at this stage of a life I’ve welcomed.

The real truth is that surrender is like a gun shot. A burst of noise into clear air that says “go! now!” Me losing another part of me, means me finding another part of Another.

And for me, these days, that search must be active. My flesh is too stubborn to walk with new perspective passively.

So, I’m taking the charge I heard from the front of the room this past Sunday morning. Opportunities for adoration are popping up everywhere in all different shapes and sizes. I think I’m getting the hint.

In Revelation 1-3, John’s vision highlights 30 descriptions of Jesus’ majesty. Thirty. (Just enough to take me from today to March.) He doesn’t spoon feed us here; He allures us. A treasure hunt designed for the seeker, the hungry. The desperate. A phrase here, a word there, each one of them an invitation. To me, and to you, to not sit passively at the well of loss and despair and take subtle drags on death — but to find the treasure tucked away in this surrender.

He is the treasure and adoration makes it practical.

If you need a refresher on how to adore, read this post. 

(So, each Monday, the column of adoration to the right-side of my blog moves front-and-center, here, and I invite others who are doing the same — stretching their heart to lift God’s Word up and back to Him, despite every obstacle the day presents – to add their link below in the comments section. You can link people back here from your post by grabbing the code on the right side of my blog. If you don’t have a blog but are, yourself, a lover of words and of God and of God’s word, feel free to add an adoration of your own in the comment section. Whether there is one of us or one hundred — and even if the words are written “merely” on our hearts — we will give Him the praise He’s due.)

…and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness… Revelation 1:5**

You testified, You bore witness, You were the witness. You saw and spoke, but, really, You embodied.

A new kind of witness, clearing a path I’d one-day walk.

Not just a bystander, You wore the evidence by Your life. We saw Him because they saw You. You walked with them and glory of the unseen was unveiled.

Who is this God who sent a witness in flesh for my flesh to know Him?

I worship You, God of mystery, clothed in skin like mine. I adore You Father of access. You spoke the world into being with one word and that Word then walked the earth. How could I ever find You boring?

I praise You, God, for sending a witness. A faithful witness. Faithful to all You are, over the ages, and faithful to me, stumbling in my day-to-day. 

I get lost in what I’m not and You lift me out with what You were and who You are. You are not aloof, far-off or distant from my heart pains. You are near. Present. Watchful. You sent witness. You are a witness. He was the witness whose Spirit now puts a witness within me. I know You because You hide inside of me, now. I have all that I need to grow in You and know You within me. And when I seek You, I find more.

A life of witnessing for us was initiated by the faithfulness of this Witness. All that You have was in Him and all that was in Him is in me. So I can be a new kind of witness. He was a deposit and the return is exponential.

He ever lived as a witness so that I, today, right now can witness the beauty of His very gaze. His beginning-of-time gaze … of witness. 

**For a context to this little space on my blog, read: Why I Adore. You can easily subscribe to these devotional meditations as they are delivered, by using this feed: http://www.EveryBitterThingisSweet.com/posts/chai/feed or by entering your email address in the second box on the right-hand side… (scroll up a bit).

Photo compliments of Mandie Joy.