{A word of caution: this post contains offensive language…}

I heard a crash behind me, the snap of branches breaking, scatter of gravel. When I looked over my shoulder, I saw his bike on its side, front wheel still spinning. He was crying, heaving, gulping sobs. But not because he’d crashed and not because he’d gotten hurt.

“I have something horrible to tell you,” he blurted, still sprawled on the sidewalk, “something really, really bad, the worst thing you could ever imagine.” I kneeled next to him, my breathing shallow and quick. “Ok honey, you can tell me. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

He wasn’t ready. “I’ll tell you when we get home,” he said. “In my bedroom. With the door closed.” We brushed the grit from our pant legs and pedaled the final mile toward home. My mind reeled through every worst possibility. I prayed begging prayers, “Please God, not that … or that … or that.”

We sat on the edge of his bed. “However bad it is, you can tell me,” I reassured him. “I won’t be mad, I promise.” I lay my hand on his back and felt his spine, bony and delicate beneath his cotton shirt.

Turns out, Noah had overheard a conversation at school – two boys talking about “the absolute worst thing you could ever say.” “F_ _ _ing God,” Noah heard one of the boys say. The other boy nodded. That was bad, the boy agreed. The worst. The boys laughed and repeated the curse a few more times.

I was so relieved, I almost laughed. Sure, it was startling to hear those two words strung together.  But it wasn’t one of the “the very worst things” I had imagined. Not even close.

But Noah wasn’t laughing. The trouble was, he finally admitted, ever since he’d heard those two words, he couldn’t get them out of his head. “It pops into my head the first thing in the morning,” he said, tears soaking the crew neck of his tee-shirt. “And I can’t get it out of my head. It’s still there when I go to bed at night. It’s like my brain can’t stop saying the very worst thing. I’m cursing the very worst curse at God all day long!”

We talked for a long time that afternoon. I explained to Noah that words, even the very worst words, are meaningless. “We humans have given meaning to random sounds strung together,” I explained. “Plus,” I added, “God loves you no matter what. Even if you meant what you said, which I know you don’t, God would still love you and forgive you. There is no very worst thing you can say to God.”

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that I’ve been in Noah’s shoes. I’ve done a few things in my life that I am deeply ashamed of – actions that seemed unforgiveable, occasions when it’s felt like I’ve crossed the line for good. I’ve felt broken beyond repair. Unredeemable. Beyond hope. There have been times in my life when I’ve felt like “a bad person,” even the very worst person. Times when I’ve felt like God wouldn’t want anything to do with me. I knew exactly how Noah felt.

Three days after we talked I asked Noah if the God-curse was still cycling on auto-repeat in his head. He paused for a moment, considering, and then looked me straight in the eye and smiled. “I didn’t think it once today,” he said, amazed. I wasn’t surprised. Noah got what it had taken me years to understand.

With God, there is no very worst thing.

The Holy Spirit first spoke to me in the middle of a church sermon. The irony is that I didn’t believe in God at the time.

You might wonder why I was sitting in a church pew on Sunday morning if I didn’t believe in God. Two reasons. One: I wanted to believe in God, but I didn’t know how to get there. And two (the primary reason): Brad and I had agreed to enroll our son Noah, who was four at the time, in Sunday school. On most Sundays it was simply easier for me to sit in church while Noah was in class, instead of in my car or in the café of the nearby Barnes and Noble. Brad and I took turns each Sunday – one of us brought Noah to Sunday school while the other stayed home with Rowan, who, as a toddler, had a less-than-churchy disposition.

It would have been cool if the Holy Spirit had worked in me that Sunday like he worked in the disciples on Pentecost, when he arrived at the gathering “like the roaring of a mighty windstorm,” settling onto the disciples in “flames and tongues of fire.” (Acts 2:2-3). Frankly, that sort of dramatic display, though terrifying, would have convinced me of the presence of God in a New York minute.

But that’s not the way the Holy Spirit worked in me. In fact, I didn’t even realize it had been the Holy Spirit at work until more than two years later, when I looked back at that Sunday and thought, “Huh … would you look at that.”

What happened that morning in church was that Pastor Greg preached a sermon called “Just Walk across the Room.” It was a message about evangelizing – a call to the congregation to reach out and invite what he called “unchurched” friends, relatives, neighbors and acquaintances to experience God.

The irony, of course, is that while I was sitting in an actual pew in an actual church, I was as unchurched and faithless as any unbeliever on the street.

After I got home from church that morning, I walked immediately downstairs to our basement office, sat at the computer and typed a vague email to Pastor Greg. I simply told him that the morning’s sermon had grabbed my attention, and that perhaps I should stop by his office to talk sometime. The following week I met Pastor Greg in his office and we talked. I admitted to him that I didn’t think I believed in God, but that I wanted to and didn’t know how.

“I believe that God’s with you, that the Holy Spirit is in you, working in you, and has brought you here today,” Pastor Greg had answered that day, looking me straight in the eye as I squirmed in my chair. “And I believe that’s evidence that you’re not as far lost as you think you are.”

I’d like to tell you that when I heard those words, I broke into a rousing chorus of Alleluias and heard the voice of God thunder through the roof of the church.

But the truth is, nothing happened.

While I was relieved to have finally unburdened myself, I also frankly thought Pastor Greg was full of baloney. I simply didn’t believe him. I didn’t even know how to respond to his confident declaration, so I nodded a lot, muttered something along the lines of, “Wow, that’s great, good news, thank you.” And then I drove to the mall and bought a pair of sandals.

But as it turned out, Pastor Greg was right. The Holy Spirit was at work in me. Not in a roaring wind or in tongues of fire. Not in a way that was obvious to me at the time. But working indeed. It just took me another two years to recognize it.

Has the Holy Spirit ever worked in unexpected ways in you? Think back over your life for a minute. Can you think of an experience you’ve always brushed off that might, in fact, be the result of the Holy Spirit’s work?

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God can do anything you know –
far more than you could ever imagine or guess
in your wildest dreams!
He does it not by pushing us around
but by working within us,
his Spirit deeply and gently within us.

(Ephesians 3:20-21, Msg.)

When Holley Gerth asked us to put our dream down on paper a few weeks ago at the Jumping Tandem Retreat, I didn’t do it. After all, I figured I already have a dream, this writing/publishing dream. I’m still working on that one, right? I don’t need another dream, do I? So I sat quietly in my seat with my pen in my lap and watched as everyone else in the room wrote out their dream on paper.

Later that weekend I listened in the third row as Jennifer Dukes Lee spoke about the feeling of not being “enough.” She asked us to write a word on a rock – a word that signified what was holding us back, what was gripping us with fear like a gloved hand around our throats in the dark of night. I wrote “comparison” on my rock.

Comparison.

Comparing my words with others’.

Comparing my number of readers, my number of Facebook likes.

Comparing how many speaking engagements I have lined up on my schedule compared to her or her or her. 

Jennifer told us she and her daughters were going to hurl each of those rocks to the bottom of an Iowa lake. She would drown my comparison beneath ten feet of water, bury it under a mound of pond sludge. I was good with that.

Home from the conference, I cracked open my Bible. It had been a while. I’d left off in Second Corinthians.

“I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life,” I read. “…The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way … Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively.”(2 Corinthians 6:11-13)

And there it was: my dream. The one I didn’t even know I had, laid out in black and white where I never expected to find it.

I wanted what was written right there on the pages of my Bible. I didn’t want to live in a small way anymore. I wanted to live openly and expansively. I wanted to enter the wide-open, spacious life. THAT was my dream.

I’ve been living small, friends. Cramped and crumpled into myself, turned inward, caught up in comparison, crowded by expectations, lured by the enticements of this world: sales, success, being known, being valued.

This inward-focus? It’s not a spacious place. It’s not a wide-open, expansive place. It’s a small, cold, lonely, bitter place.

After I read those verses from Second Corinthians and I stared my dream in the face, my dream of living not small and crumpled inward, but openly and expansively, I wondered what that might look like and feel like, in real, everyday life.

Here’s what I came up with. Here the list I made in my journal that day:

Wide-open, spacious living feels: Free. Secure. Joyful. Light. Unburdened. Enough. Content. Not heavy with guilt or “not enough.” Hopeful. God-focused. Like an open prairie, rather than a crushing crowd.

And then, beneath that, I made second list: steps to take when I find myself turning inward again, when I revert, as Paul says, to living life in a small way:

1. Turn off: from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and all social media. Physically shut down the mechanisms that are fueling comparison and smallness and “not enough.”

2. Turn outward: Shine the spotlight via praise or kind words on someone else, either online or in real life.

3. Turn to now: Focus on the right now — your family, your husband, your friends, the small moments. Enjoy the beauty of your place right now. Enjoy what’s happening in your writing and publishing journey right now. Focus on what you can do today and know that it is enough.

4. Turn to God: In gratitude, prayer and thanksgiving. Thankfulness is the seed of satisfaction.

That’s it. My four steps to living a wide-open, spacious life:

Turn off.

Turn outward.

Turn to now.

Turn to God. 

I’m trying it. I’m committed to it. This wide-open, spacious life sounds too good to miss.

So what about you? What’s keeping you from living the wide-open, spacious life God wants for you? Can you make your own list of steps to take when you find yourself living small and cramped? Do you want to be brave and maybe say out loud, right here, what’s holding you back from living wide-open? I’m with you. You know that, right?

There were vows and rings. A best man and a maid of honor. Toasts and hugs and kisses. Brats and burgers, stories and laughter.

And there was love. Abundant love.  Exuberant love. Joyful, celebratory, smiling, laughing, weeping, I-want-to-spend-the-rest-of-my-life-with-you love.

The ceremony took place on a dock next to a pond. The couple wore tee-shirts and shorts, sneakers and flip flops. The preacher tucked his dress shirt into a pair of farmer’s overalls.

Two friends of mine, two women, got married on a dock in a small town in Iowa on Friday night. They slipped rings on each other’s fingers and vowed to love and cherish one another in sickness and in health, until death does them part. Their loved ones gathered around, teary and smiling, as the orange sun slipped behind the pine trees and a pair of geese honked and flapped into the azure sky.

The brief ceremony complete, my friends stepped into a wicker basket and were lifted into the Iowa sky beneath a roaring flame and a canopy of color. They rode off, gliding over the rolling cornfields and into the sunset. It was like something out of a movie.

I stood on the edge of the woods smiling like a fool. And I watched the balloon float soundlessly away, until it was just a speck in the vast, vast sky.

“Mommy,” he says, stopping me just as I cross the threshold of his dark bedroom, “is it okay sometimes if I go right to sleep without praying first? Because sometimes I just feel too sleepy to pray before bed.”

I step from the bright hallway back into Noah’s dim bedroom. “Of course it’s okay,” I whisper. “Nothing or no one says you have to pray at a certain time of day. God knows when you’re sleepy, and he cares about you and wants you to rest when you need to. Go to sleep, honey, and don’t worry. You can save your prayers for tomorrow.”

I step into the hallway again, but then turn back to face the dark shape under the navy-blue comforter. “Plus, Noah, God knows your heart,” I remind him. “God already knows the prayers of your heart. You don’t even need to think them or say them out loud. ”

“Okay, good,” he says. “Because I’m just so sleepy.”

Oh, Noah. He’s so much like me. A rule-follower. A pleaser. He wants to do everything right, make everyone happy. Including God.

Isn’t there a little bit of this in all of us? Go to church, volunteer at the soup kitchen, bake cookies for the neighbor, sing the hymns, bow our heads, pray because we feel like we should, even when we can’t keep our eyes open. Obligations, responsibilities, good deeds — all done in the good name of the Lord.

I love how Paul tough-talks with the Galatians about this. Because honestly? I need the tough-talk sometimes.

“How foolish can you be? After starting your Christian lives in the Spirit, why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human efforts? Have you experienced so much for nothing? Surely it was not in vain, was it?” (Galatians 3:3-4)

Here’s the deal, here’s what I realized when I stood in the darkened doorway of my son’s bedroom. Here’s what Paul was trying to pound into those Galatians’ (and my) thick heads:

God loves us. Period.  Not because we follow the rules. Not because we serve the poor or love our neighbor or pray well or pray every single night before bed. But just because.

Nothing is required of us in order to bask in that love.

No obligations.

No sign-on-the-dotted line.

No strings attached.

No red tape.

Nothing.

Isn’t that the craziest, most mind-boggling, most over-the-top notion you’ve ever heard?

Isn’t that the purest, most generous, most gracious, most life-changing gift you have ever received?

That’s love, all wrapped up in grace.

“For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:26).

Like Noah, do you ever find yourself trying to please God? How might you remind yourself of God’s grace?

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Welcome to the “Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday” community, a place where we share what we are hearing from God and his Word.

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Let my teaching fall like rain
and my words descend like dew,
like showers on new grass,
like abundant rain on tender plants.

Deuteronomy 32:2 (NIV)

I baked a cake last Saturday. A lemon bundt cake with lemon glaze. When I saw the recipe at Katrina Kenison’s place, I knew I had to make this cake, in part because I admire Katrina Kenison and I want to be just like her, and in part because it was a cake-baking kind of day, all drizzly and cool and gray.

I bake a cake about once a decade. Brad is the baker around here – he makes the boys a homemade birthday cake every year, in fantastical shapes like Thomas the Train and Nemo and Bowser Jr. I’m the birthday cake dish-washer. Twice a year I sigh at the eight bowls of frosting in every color of the rainbow scattered across the kitchen and I wonder why we can’t just head to the bakery department at Hy-Vee. For Rowan’s second birthday Brad worked on a Winnie the Pooh cake for about five hours, and when he lifted Rowan up to the counter for his first glimpse of the masterpiece, Rowan yelled, “Elmo!!!” We still laugh about that.

Katrina claimed the lemon bundt cake was super easy to make. But I think that might be a relative term. Maybe super-easy for a person who makes a cake more than once a decade. Still, even though my glaze looked a little funky, in a slightly curdled kind of way, and even though Brad and Rowan sucked the juice from the lemon and made lemon rind lips before I realized I still needed the freshly squeezed juice for the glaze, the cake tasted good. So good, in fact, I ate two slices one right after the other, and then promptly cut a generous slab, wrapped it in tin foil and gave it to a friend. Some cakes, especially those with two and a half sticks of butter, are simply too good to have around.

Katrina wrote a beautiful story about her cake. She baked it every day when a friend was dying. He couldn’t eat much toward the end, just a forkful or two of this cake, but that was enough to keep Katrina baking and delivering cakes to his door until she didn’t need to anymore.

My cake story is a little more mundane. I made a cake on Saturday, and as it baked we read our books, curled into the couch, the sweet aroma settling into every corner of the house, the rain pattering on the windowpanes. We admired the cake as it cooled on the rack. I took pictures, because that’s what you do when you make a cake once every ten years. And then we cut huge slices when it was still faintly warm, and sat at the kitchen counter eating cake in the middle of the afternoon. I even made a pot of coffee, because you can’t eat two slices of lemon cake one right after the other without a cup of coffee in your favorite mug to go along with it.

And as I pressed the back of my fork to the crumbs on my plate and let the last remnants dissolve on my tongue, I leaned back on the kitchen stool, satisfied. Because sometimes, once every ten years or so, you have to make a cake for no reason.

So tell me, what was the last fun or decadent thing you did for no reason? 

{And about those multiple birthday cake pictures … I apologize – I got way carried away on the cake nostalgia!}

My friend Evi has a brand-new link-up, and I’m sharing this post over there,
because I’m sure God smiles when we bake a cake for no reason:

“I still don’t know why I went,” he said, genuinely puzzled. “I know why you went,” I answered my dad. “You don’t just go to Haiti for fun. You go because the Holy Spirit tells you to go.”

My dad and my brother-in-law Matt recently traveled to Haiti with the Haitian Health Foundation, an organization that provides healthcare, education, food and shelter to more than 200,000 Haitians living in the city of Jeremie and in rural mountain villages. Matt and my dad went with a team of dentists from Connecticut. They helped pull rotten teeth and dispensed medicine and food for five days straight.

I admit, I was shocked when he announced earlier in the year that he had signed up to travel with the Foundation. Like me, my dad is a somewhat troubled believer. Traveling to Haiti at age 70 on a mission trip was unexpected, to say the least.

My dad came home sick. Not physically ill, but heart-sick. And a little bit spiritually sick, too. He talked for a long time, sitting on my red couch, tucked into our cozy living room with the lights burning bright and clean water from the faucet and cabinets stocked full of food. He described what he had seen in Haiti, what he kept seeing when he closed his eyes at night, comfortable in his king-sized bed.

Children scavenging for food amid garbage, playing in the stream of raw sewage that flowed by their shacks.

Orphans, their bellies grossly distended from malnutrition.

Families lined up at sunrise for the chance to see a dentist.

Mouths full of sores, swollen gums and rotting teeth.

Fathers selling bits of junk and charcoal on the street.

A mother who held out her sick infant, begging “Take, take.”

“No, no,” my dad had said, shaking his head at the woman who thrust her child at him. “No doctor, no, I’m not a doctor.” He stood outside of the orphanage in the blazing sun. “I just couldn’t do it,” he said. ‘I just couldn’t look at those kids for another second.”

I don’t know what the answers are. I don’t know about the solutions, or even whether there’s really hope for Haiti. But I do know this. The Holy Spirit sent my dad to Haiti. He doesn’t know why and neither do I. But there was a reason. That I know for sure.

How YOU Can Help:
More than 92 percent of funds collected by the Haitian Health Foundation go directly to services for the poor in Jeremie and the surrounding mountain villages. Relief programs include healthcare, Feed-A-Child, Save-A-Family, housing construction projects, latrine building projects, education sponsorships and more.

Please visit the Haitian Health Foundation for more information or to make a donation.

*Photos taken by my brother-in-law Matt (pictured in the black glasses and the baseball cap). I’m just so proud of my dad, who went on his very first mission trip at the age of 70 – what a leap! 

Last Sunday after church, I mentioned to my husband that I needed to stop at Target to pick up a bag of chocolate chips. I wanted to make cookies for a new neighbor who had moved in three houses up the street. But I stopped mid-sentence as I explained my plans to Brad. “Oh,” I said.  “I’m not supposed to shop or work on the Sabbath. So stopping at Target and baking cookies breaks the Sabbath. Twice.”  [I’ve been practicing keeping the Sabbath for about five months now, and my “rules” include no shopping, no writing, no technology and no housework]

“That’s not breaking the Sabbath,” Brad answered as walked across the parking lot to the car. “Remember what Jesus did? He broke the Sabbath when he healed the man’s hand. He was making a point about helping and healing being more important than following all the rules. Doing something nice for someone isn’t breaking the Sabbath.”

I thought about what Brad said for a few minutes. I know it was only a bag of Tollhouse chips and a mixing bowl of dough, but it felt a little risky to me, breaking the Sabbath to bake. I’m a rule follower, you see. Rules keep me on the right path. They’re black and white. You’re never surprised if you know the rules. Rule-following might be boring, it might be routine. But scary? Unknown? Unexpected? Never. You know what’s coming when you follow the rules.

What I realized though, as I stood in the church parking lot with the keys in my hand, was that Jesus wasn’t ruled by the black-and-white. Jesus was a radical rule-breaker. He befriended the outcasts. He ate with the sinners. He healed on the Sabbath. Jesus was far less concerned about rules than he was about love. For Jesus, love decided everything. Love was the bottom line.

So I stopped at Target and bought the chocolate chips. And later that evening Noah and I walked up the street to the white bungalow with the empty boxes piled at the end of the driveway. We stood on the front porch and rang the doorbell, and when the young woman answered, we handed over a paper plate of cookies still warm from the oven. We welcomed her to the neighborhood with a plate piled high with love.

“For when I tried to keep the law, it condemned me. So I died to the law – I stopped trying to meet all its requirements – so that I might live for God.”  (Galatians 2:19)

Questions for Reflection:
Are you a rule-follower or a rule-breaker? Have you ever broken a rule – Sabbath or other – in favor of acting in loving kindness? What’s one rule you might break this week in order to help, heal or love someone else? 

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Welcome to the “Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday” community, a place where we share what we are hearing from God and his Word.

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Please also try to visit and leave some friendly encouragement in the comment box of at least one other Hear It, Use It participant. And if you want to tweet about the community, please use the #HearItUseIt hashtag.

Thank you — I am so grateful that you are here!

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