{because my heart is with all the folks living through all kinds of bad storms this spring…}

‘If God really works in everything — then why don’t we thank Him for everything?”

She asks me this straight out.

My daughter, Hope, and I, we sit in the truck on the field’s hem, waiting to give the Farmer his lunch.

The Farmer’s planting bean seeds into earth’s dark bed. The sky’s rising darker in the west.

He races rain.

“For every drop of rain You keep from falling on us planting— thank you, Lord…”

I had murmured the prayer, water splatting hard against the windshield of the pickup.

We need at least one more day of dry weather to plant a year’s worth of beans, our livelihood.

“And for every drop of rain that You do let fall — thank you, Lord…” My daughter, Hope, whispers her strange echo.

Really? I turn, searching her face.

She looks me right in the eye.

“If God really works in everything, why don’t we thank Him for everything? Why do we accept good from His hand — and not bad?”

This is hard. Maybe the hardest of all. She is young. She has much to come.

I have held dying babies. Eaten with those who live on the town garbage heap. Wept with women who’ve been violated, with the bankrupt, the heart crushed, the terminal.

And this never stops being true: Neglecting to give thanks only deepens the wound of the world.

Doesn’t God call His people to a non-discriminating response in all circumstances? “[G]iv[e] thanks always and for everything” (Ephesians 5:20 ESV).

This is the hardest of all.

If I only thank Him when the fig tree buds — is this “selective faith”? Practical atheism? What of faith in a God who wastes nothing? Who makes all into grace?

And yet — is thanking God for everything… thanking Him for evil?

Rivulets run down glass, blurring my husband and all our seeded prayers. What do I accurately see and know?

When we bought the enemy’s lie in the beginning and ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Satan hissed then that we’d really see and know what is good and evil.

But the father of lies, he’d duped us in the whole nine yards. Though we ate of that tree we did not become like God.

We have no knowledge of good and evil apart from God. My seeing, it is not omniscient.

It may definitely feel like it — but how can I really see the long-term outcome of a death, disaster, dilemma,? Mine is only to faithfully see His Word and wholly obey Him in this. Therein is the tree of life.

Is this why He commands “giv[e] thanks always and for everything”? Because to thank God in all is to refuse Satan’s relentless lure to be god-like in all.

To thank God in all is to bend the knee in allegiance to God Who alone knows all.

To thank God in all is to give God glory in all. Is this not our chief end?

When I only give thanks for some things, aren’t I likely to miss giving God glory in most things?

Murmuring thanks isn’t to deny that an event isn’t a tragedy and neither does it deny that there’s a cracking fissure straight across the heart.

Giving thanks is only this: making the canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God.

Our thanks to God is our witness to the goodness of God when Satan and all the world would sneer at us to recant.

I lay my hand on the rain-filmed windowpane and I see clearer. But this is the hardest of all:

That which I refuse to thank Christ for, I refuse to believe Christ can redeem.

The grey sky’s drumming steady on the truck’s tin roof.

His perfect love casts out all fears and leaves only thanks and I listen to her sing it, like a chorus with the rain:

Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord.

Like a song from the belly of the fish, like a Jonah refrain echoing off the walls of the whale: “But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you…” (Jonah 2:9 ESV)

Like a haunting, holy answer to what she asks, the song of the saints, always thanksgiving — practicing here the only song that will be sung at the very last of time, “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving… to our God” (Rev. 7:12 ESV).

Thank you, Lord.

I lilt it soft with her, the brazen song the faithful sing into the hardest storms….

The rain falling hard now.

::

::

::

This post is excerpted from:

One Thousand Gifts Devotional Journal: Reflections on Finding Everyday Graces

60 fresh & releasing devotional reflections, each one like a singular tree, invite you to take wing into a forest of graces. 60 Days of Devotional Reflections. 60 Days to Joy. Practical. Profound. Pen-worthy: includes the only numbered 1000 gifts journal, space for you from #1-#1000, to begin the radical habit of thanking God for your own one thousand gifts. Perfect for spring and life storms?

 
Join us? And happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts? Dare you to Joy! Take the dare to Fully Live!
1. Grab this month’s Free JOY DARE Calendar with 3 daily prompts to go on a scavenger hunt for God’ gifts … {or write down any gifts you choose. Use the free app.} 2. Count 3 gifts a day and you have over #1000gifts in 2013. Jot them down in the new numbered One Thousand Gifts devotional journal — The Farmer’s writing in his with a red pen and daily – the numbers in the journal already there! Motivating… 3. Share your gifts everyday in our beautiful Facebook community to enter everyday for the monthly $100 Amazon draw (or link to your blog post with your list of gifts). 4. Count #1000gifts in 2013 and enter to win a Nikon DSLR camera with lens. Slow Down. Savor Life. Give thanks. Believing something is one thing. But the Best only comes when you decide to Be Living it. Please, jump in, make your life about giving thanks to God! — Just add the direct URL to your specific 1000 gift list post… and if you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other in our refrain of thanks by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.
Give thanks to the Lord! His Love Endures Forever!

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Photo Credit: Jo Naylor

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

Just you or none of us ever get to know how long that will turn out to be.

So get to it. Because you woke up 18 this week.

You sat at the end of the table after barn chores, grinning like you were just getting stretched up for the starting blocks and the race of your life — and somewhere inside I felt this crossing of an invisible finish line, right through the stretched out tape.

And I want to go back.

I want to go back and hold the whole of you right in palm again and lay you in that kitchen scale and count your every gram, as if I could give you weight in this world.

I didn’t know that would happen until I started letting you go.

I want to go back and pull that boy with that bowl hair cut up on my lap again. Feel your chub fingers help me turn one more page, reach for one more crayon, hold my hand one more moment, and you have no idea how much I don’t care if that makes me a fool.

I want to go back to your sleep breathing on my shoulder and the way I didn’t want to move, to your bows and arrows and slung-on tool belts and well-envisioned, questionably-executed tree forts, to your buck teeth and big bravado and flipped up toilet lids and flipped out drive-me-mad attitude. I just want to go the whole ugly-beautiful way back and I want to get a do over.

Go back and shake up that 21 year old girl who brought you home and tell her that the best way to raise up a kid is to just loosen up. Nothing ever got raised up when held down tight. The Holy Spirit is a fluid grace and the wind is a carrying thing and you have to lean into it and let Him surprise if anything’s going to rise up and fly.

You grew up — and I want to go back and I want to go with you, but I can’t do either.

That’s a hard thing to sit with.

Hard to know I can’t fix any of the times I dented up your heart with my ridiculous white-knuckled steering-wheel control and big Buick idols. Yeah, you and I both remember how it got ugly and wild. You’ve got to know I’ll spend the rest of my life and pitiful wisdom trying to bang out those dents with presence and grace. Yeah, you and I both know I’ll probably make some more.

You made me get that: Grace isn’t some soft, ethereal notion. Grace is a noun, it’s a verb, it’s concrete, it’s like air. Just try living without it. Just try living without breathing. We all know how wrinkled hard lives like that are. You — you made me me breathe grace right down to the bottom of the lung. It was the only way we could live with each other. Inhaling, exhaling, giving and receiving grace.

It ended up beautiful, what all happened, and I don’t even think we realized it was happening at all.

So you’ll end up heading out.

Heading out down some back roads and long roads and roads I’d never pick for you and I wished I’d lived more backwards, backwards from the knowing that ends really do come.

Knowing that one day you’ll leave and I’ll be brave and wave. And you’ll go fall in love and you’ll feel it too and I can’t stop it for you — how a crush can crush you, how real love is never logical, how real love is always crazy love, and love is the most horrible and the most wonderful because it will make you strong and it will make you weak and it will make you vulnerable, which is the perfection of strong and weak together.

How Love will open you right up, then pull open your heart to let someone get into you and get to you and undo you and remake you and it’s everything terrifying and everything you ever wanted.

And I will nod and say yes.

That’s what you’ve done to me.

That’s what I’d go back to tell that new 21-year-old mother I was with her dangling kid, what I’m feeling as the woman falling over a finish line I don’t want to cross, what I’m saying to you, that new 18-year-old man done with being a kid — Don’t fight the hurt. Let the hurt make you real. Let go of the defenses and the shields and the tightfisted formulas for some life that doesn’t exist and give away beautiful pieces of yourself and feel the hurt, because the only way to own a life worth having is to give away your own life.

Give away the life of polished floors and gleamy sinks, of big hair and bigger bank accounts, and let love get in and mess with you and loosen you up and make you laugh and cry and really give and really hurt because is the only way to really live. Don’t waste a minute of your life on anything less than love.

Don’t waste a minute of your life on anything less than eternity.

And that’s. what. love. is.

I once heard the story of a preacher man with a PhD — whose mother died when he was two. When he was two and they were 5 kids in poor Kansas and she had grabbed hold of her husband’s hand and whispered her 5 last words: Always keep eternity before them.

Always keep eternity before them.

Think of eternity — and live backwards from that.

Don’t waste a minute of your life on anything less than eternity — and that’s. what. love is. Eternal, without end.

Let love happen to you. Don’t fight the hurt. It’s making you real.

You woke up to snow on your 18th.

“Crazy, for the 13th of May.” And you inhaled your plate of waffles, and said it again, “Snow — for my birthday in May!” And you downed the bacon and eggs I’d heaped up for you, and you pushed back your chair –

“I’ve got to go make a snowman. Before the sun makes it all go — ’cause who knows if it’ll ever happens like this again?”

And I get that. And it won’t.

And I stand at the window and watch you, the oldest, the child no more —

and your sister, the youngest, the child a bit longer, make a snowman out of spring.

And who would have known you’d be doing that on your big day when we found your gift weeks before — a watch.

A watch we had engraved with words that beg you to ask whatchya going to do with it:

“You have been given now. Romans 12:1.”

And all I can hear is the echo of a snowman melting in May: Seize the Day.

Just go do that: it’s never too late to love and there is always time to love and what else is a lifetime for?

You could see that snowman, right to the end, looking the loveliest real, giving itself away and unafraid to the sun.

Related Posts: How to be The Parent You Want to Be: 40 Things Your child Needs to Know Before they Leave Home
4 steps to Take When You are Not Ready For Change
After Steubenville: 25 Things Our Sons Need to Know About Manhood

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

How to make the Perfect Cup of Tea: George Orwell’s 11 Rules

The Best Moment of My Day… This. Slows your heart rate down, yes? What’s yours?

On living the Unhurried Life.… read. this. slow. What are your sheer acts of defiance?

Ten Inspiring Ways to Your Parenting – no matter where you live……

5 Minute Glory Holy-day -– the whole earth is full of the glory of God and this is nothing short of breathtaking. Like a mini vacation, hol-i-day— what a way to start the day, looking for His gifts…

Why you will remember what you read on the page — and not on the screen…. why reading books matters.

That post? Those 3 Simple Words for Every Day that are sort of rocking my world? “… then you came?”

Here is one way one man is doing just that — (inspires you to get thinking creatively, eh?)

82-year-old Barber offers Free Haircuts to the homeless — in exchange for a Hug:

“The 82-year-old Cymerys, who is known as Joe the Barber, began offering his services 25 years ago after retiring from a career in business. He had cut hair for his family but decided to put his clippers to work for the less fortunate after being inspired by a church sermon about the homeless.

“It really is love. I love these guys,” Cymerys said. He paused and turned to his client in the chair, “You know I love you, right?”
Full story and slideshow here

  A read for deep soul refreshment: Not by Sight: A Fresh Look at Old Stories of Walking by Faith

When Mr. Jon Bloom, President of Desiring God, sent me an early manuscript of his book to read, I read slowly. Captivated by the stories of Scripture all over again. I made notes. I re-read. The chapters, 35 imaginative retellings of Bible stories, made me hungrier for God, His Truth, the company of Christ. Mr. Bloom’s Scripture saturated lines stirred a trust in God’s promises instead of personal perceptions.

And when I met Mr. Bloom at his office this past winter — I was deeply struck, taken aback, by his humility, his genuine warmth and down-to-earth grace — this was a man who sincerely walked with Jesus.  Mr. John Piper writes the forward of Not by Sight: “Pick a chapters in this book whose title looks relevant for you. Listen as you read. Look through what you hear. And see if Jesus does not show himself to you in such a way that you do not trust Him more.” Mr. Bloom lives this.

And I offered my own endorsement: “Spurgeon said, “My books are my tools.” And this book is one wise match for the journey. Bloom’s stories and insights ignite– ignite fire in bones, ignite the best and old paths, ignite glimpses of God’s glory that makes you want to run this walk of faith.” I humbly encourage you to pick up Not by Sight… penned by a man who quietly, authentically lives what he so compellingly writes. Perfect devotional reading for your morning cup of espresso or tea!

In the morning when you rise…  (Consider clicking off music in the left sidebar?  Just click the speaker icon. And RSS readers, join us here to see this morning’s espresso videos…}

Worship.

Time for this… Let this have us on our knees:

Morning Verse for Today’s Living:

“He will have no fear of bad news;

his heart is steadfast, trusting in the LORD.”

~Psalm 112:7

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

He’d slept the rest of a Farmer on the Lord’s Day.

Then hauled to the fields in the pitch dark just as soon as Monday feebly birthed.

Before that sun finally dragged up, he had a whole field worked up and half a ton of dirt ground into his jeans.

By sun down, he was still ahead of the clouds skulking in on the edges of the radar.

And the back of his shirt stuck to him like a dirt crusted skin and he wore dust like he knew what he was and he was surrendered to it and he kept on going, steadied.

One of the boys, Levi, he fills the planter with his dad, hauls and lifts and empties out those bags of corn seed. Before getting back up into that tractor seat, they walk a bit of the earth together. They scratch back soil and poke about for a seed. I watch them do this.

I watch them, the father and the son and the seeking of a seed. Something grows in me and it doesn’t have words and it doesn’t ask for words. It asks only for witnessing. Only for gratitude.

Only for the living that lets the everyday dirt become the sacred everyday.

There are times it seems wrong to keep your shoes on, to do anything less than stand bare-heeled and bowed and broken wide open.

Them bent. The way a soul can grow any way it chooses.

“Think we planted deep enough, Dad?” Levi kneels across from him.

The Farmer pats the earth over the seed. “As long as it rains.”

As long as water comes, as long as there is a coming.

The Farmer gets back on the tractor.

Levi and I stand on the hem of the field and watch him move away in a cloud of lit dust, into the dusk.

Levi and I go home and find our beds. The Farmer keeps going, keeps laying seeds into beds.

Come 1 AM Tuesday, that alarm goes off again like a screeching banshee needing coffee.

So at 1 AM, I yank the screaming banshee cord out of the wall, drag out looking for a Farmer still planting loam with impossible small hope somewhere in the middle of the night.

I find him 2 roads over and nearly a mile and a quarter back, driving that tractor down into the dark and the dirt with a planter storming up a swirl of earth behind him and no mind of time only the task at hand.

When I roll up on the headland, he idles the tractor, walks straight through headlights, up through the ditch to the road.

“You need anything?” I roll the window down lower, night cold rushing in. Why in the world hadn’t I come with something warm for the man’s chill?

He leans in. “No… had a bunch of breakdowns. Gearbox on the auger. The marker arm on the planter. So I’ll still be a couple hours here yet before this field’s done.” He nods back at the tractor. “No… you get sleep. I’ll probably need your help sometime after 3 — move some of this home?”

“Okay. 3. I’ll go home and plug that alarm back in.” He nods and is gone again in the dark and why hadn’t I come with something?

At 3AM, I help him move the tractor and planter and wagon and truck back home and at 4:30, he finds the mattress for less than an hour and then he’s gone again in the greying light.

At 7AM, I bring orange juice and a muffin back out to him on the tractor, to him planting now on the home farm.

“Long night.” He takes the cup from my hand.

“Ah, I couldn’t keep my eyes open — just kept drifting off. For a while I had to stand up —” I can see that, how he’d do that.

How he’d stand up on that open tractor in the middle of the dark, a weary shadow in tractor lights and a fog of swirling dust, standing there fighting sleep and dust in the eyes and heaviness in the bones.

“…. and then how did I keep going the rest of the night?” He says it like a searching.

He looks across the field — as if trying to remember, trying to find the memory out there between the rows of seeds, of how he got through the dark, how he kept going when there was really no stand or vision left in the man.

And then he finds it in the back 40 of his mind and he lights, white teeth flashing across that dirt stained face.

“Oh, yeah — that’s what it was— ” he looks down at me.

“…. then you came.”

And then you came.

Just for a moment, I touch his cheek, his dust.

And you with only with a word, with only a smile, a hand, a yes, you with the gospel and you with His presence, then you came.

You who rubbed feet at the end of the day and you who massaged the tight crook of a neck and you who dropped off a bag of fruit just because they were on sale at the market for less than half price. You who got up in the middle of the night and came to the wretchedly sick and the deathly scared and to the one who just needed a face and hand to squeeze.

Then you came.

You shut off the screen, pushed back the chair, found your feet, didn’t come up with an excuse or a distraction or an eyeroll, but you simply came to the child, to the man, to the lost, with the name of Jesus on your tongue and the fire of Christ in your belly and the heat of your Savior in your bones and the thing is: When you’ve been saved, you can’t stay.

When your Savior is in you, you can’t stay still.

When you love God, you have got to go.

Yes, there is no other way to begin or become or be: Be still and know He is God. And once you know He is God… how can you not let other people know? Experience Him? Know. Him? There’s simplicity for a soul: Stilling. Knowing. Then Going.

And it comes unforced, like a reviving wind – When the gentle stillness of God fills you … the burning love of Christ fuels you.

To. Go.

Christianity means someone goes. Christianity means someone comes. SomeOne left heaven, SomeOne went to a manger, to a Cross, to the dying and trapped and the buried. And if no one goes across the room, across the house, the sidewalk, the street, the country, how many will grow cold and fall asleep and drift off and away?

How many will be held captive and chained and bound and who will go and break down doors and break down walls and break down small boxes and the only way for your life to yield anything is to go.

Take one step, reach out your hand.

You don’t have to have anything — but Christ.

Don’t let the Great Commission be your life omission by thinking it’s a function of distance — instead of going the distance right where you are.

You’ve just got to go down the hall, across the room, to the end of the street, across town, over high walls, across county and state and country lines and reach right across barbed wire fences. If we’re the hands of Christ — how can we just sit on them? If our feet are shod with gospel of good news — how can they not go where there’s bad news?

Isn’t this always the holiest work of all — to lay aside an agenda to carry a cross and the presence of Christ just. one. step. further.

He’s looking down at me, eyes tired and dirt-lined.

My hand rests a moment longer on his grizzled stubble.

And he says just those 3 words again like grace, the grace of rain —

Yeah –

then you came.

The way the presence of Christ is the gift wrapped in our skin.

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

The gift for yourself and everyone who loves you: Why we really have to take a walk everyday … physical inactivity is the #4 killer? {I’ll take a photo of my walk today and share on instagram and tag with #1000gifts — you take a photo of your walk too and tag it? Deal.}

The role of siblings in mental health — one to pray over… I can’t stop thinking of this.

Easy, calming handwork — How to knit an easy dishcloth…with video… I just am always so inspired by Edie

Simplified Chalkboard Tutorial … you have a chalkboard too? What if the kids helped with this too? Inspiring!

Hope Heals — this struck me hard.. what does love look like? What does hope look like?

An App to send your thank-you notes...  Voted best of the web by the New York Times… and I can see why? (free!)

The plan for the day? This:

Morning Verse for Today’s Living:

You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;

You have loosed my sackcloth and girded me with gladness,

that my soul may sing praise to You and not be silent O LORD my God,

I will give thanks to You forever … Psalm 30:11-12.

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

When the fog meandered in lost on a spring evening in May, she hung her apron up in the back mudroom.

She wandered down the back lane too.

Down in the woods, she could hear them, the frogs singing, an invisible symphony.

She knotted the one side of her skirt up to step over a pothole. She tried to make her way.

In a world of reaching, how do you rest? In a culture of numbers how do you kneel? In a world of ladders how do you go lower?

Somewhere a dog barked loud.

She looked across fields.

There’s always something barking loud in you that you need a bigger field.

A better kid, a bigger house, a greater life, a grander point.

There’s always part of you that wonders if anything you do matters enough.

And there’s always someone who makes sure you know how much smarter and wiser, bigger and better, known and greater they are.

There’s always someone who snatches the horn to sing too loud of their own tens of thousands.

She had to remember to tell herself that: The ones keeping tally in life just want to know they count.

Everyone wielding their own horn just wants to be held.

And Jesus, He stretched His arms out to the whole world — and He nailed His offer right there.

Who wants the love of a Messiah more than the lauding of men?

She stood at the top of the hill behind the barn.

She could do this: When the world strives — the wise still. It’s the only way to feel God’s embrace.

The whole world could compete to be heard and esteemed and known and get ahead. She didn’t have to. She could breathe deep and feel all of her filling with this calm sea of peace.

You can give up the need to compete in the world — when you accept being complete in Christ.

Sometimes the way to win is to never enter the race.

She stood there listening to the frogs croaking, song filling all the spring sky.

She just stood there….

There’s no need to keep up with the Jonses’ when you are keeping company with Jesus.

When she rambled back up to the house, up to the porch, she nearly didn’t hear them, the barely cry, the hardly-ness of new hatchlings.

She stood on the step and stretched.

Up in the leaves, up in a branch by the top stair, that’s where she found them. Found them hidden, found them cupped. She could see that this was the mattering part — that in hiddenness, we are held.

She stood there, rooted there, watching and witnessing it — the hatchlings, how they opened so wide, how without a sound, they opened so wide.

She could feel it in her — her heart imitating that one movement, doing just that — soundlessly doing just that.

This is all that would ever matter —- that she opened wide so He could fill her.

She needn’t be heard…. because she was known.

The hatchlings, they held themselves in this silent, fearless assurance.

The fog settled down in the hollow, a veil hiding the woods away. Behind it somewhere the frogs sang on…

She felt found.

She would be small. She would make her life small.

There on the stairs, there by the nest of hatchlings in the deepening twilight, she looked up.

She could see it all above her —

How the stars are always small…

::

Join us? And happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts? Please, jump in, make your life about giving thanks to God! — Just add the direct URL to your specific 1000 gift list post… and if you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other in our refrain of thanks by sharing the community’s graphic within your post. Give thanks to the Lord! His Love Endures Forever!

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Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

Genetic Portraits… crazy wonderful, eh?

A Snapshot in Time.. you too?

As she lay Dying... when it’s hard with your Mother today…

Why Mother’s Day is for the Birds…

The Truth about the real Mother’s Day Mothers

The impact of one mother and the Boston Marathon bombings — this.

Your Free Mother’s Day #1000gifts App! … for iPhone or iPad… the new (free!) #1000gifts app is like your own mobile gratitude journal to snap photos and record notes of your gifts from the Giver. We are loving it. And more fun things to come. Free! Happy Today, friend!

Mama? Mother’s Day may be for the birds, us living on the wings of His grace and a prayer – so sing it! — and sweet dreams are made of these — right where you are…. just a little laugh this morning? Sing!

{RSS Readers… click here to view these two wondrous little videos. Click off music in the left sidebar, by clicking the speaker icon}

Just. like. Me:

Morning Verse for Today’s Living:

“Like a shepherd, He will care for His flock,
    gathering the lambs in His arms,
Hugging them as He carries them,
    leading the mothers… and those with mothering hearts…  to good pasture.”

Amen.

~paraphrase of of Isa. 40:11 MSG

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

and none of us are, if we’re really truth-telling here.

If we’re honest– and what else is there really — there were burnt dinners and yelling mornings and neck strained words over lost shoes and scattered Legos and unfinished homework and there were crumpled tears behind bathroom doors.

Not to mention the frozen pizzas and no clean underwear and the wild words no one would want the cameras rolling for.

And the realization — that a mother’s labor and delivery never ends and you never stop having to remember to breathe.

I became a mother on the eve of Mother’s Day. The Saturday before the Sunday — at the oblivious age of twenty-one. And just seven days after I’d dropped my own fragile mama off at a locked psych ward. That Mother’s day eve baby, he turns 18 this year, day after Mother’s Day. And there’s no point kidding anyone — we’re all a bit crazy.

The deal is — Motherhood isn’t sainthood and we’re all a bunch of sinners here and don’t let anyone tell you any different — pushing something out of your womb doesn’t make you a better woman. Real Womanhood isn’t a function of becoming a great mother, but of being loved by your Great Father. Someone write that on a card with a bouquet of flowers. We all need that.

We all need that for the days that we hated our mothers — or hated being a mother.

When no room was big enough to find peace and no clock could tick fast enough to just get the day over with, and the truth is, facades only end up suffocating us all and it’s only telling the truth that lets you breathe –

and there really were days that felt pretty bad and looked pretty ugly.

And maybe that’s what it really was — maybe the days were pretty and ugly. Pretty…Ugly.

The ugly beautiful of reality and love and humanity and what it means to become real.

That was what was happening: the stacks of dishes and everests of laundry and the tantrums of toddlers and teenagers and tired mamas and all the scuffed up walls down the hall and through the heart, they were all wearing down the plastic of pride, wearing us down to the real wood of grace and the Cross. It really is okay.

To lose it and be found, to be rubbed the wrong way to be come the rightest way, to let all the hard times rub you down to real.

That’s just the pretty ugly of us — we’re not the Hallmark mother, just the Velveteen Mothers. The Velveteen Mothers who know when there’s a volleys of words and weary silences afterward and everything looks impossibly wrecked —

The angular, hard edges of perfection are being sanded down by all our scrapes and falls, till we’re round and soft and can get close enough to each other to just hold each other.

Only when you’re broken are you tender enough to wrap yourself around anyone.

Only the broken people can really embrace.

That’s us — could we just really hold onto each other?

Find each other and hold onto each other and offer the hug of the broken who know the relief that homemaking is about making a home, not perfection, that motherhood is a hallowed space because children aren’t commonplace, that anyone who fosters dreams and labor prayers is a mother to the child in us all.

We’ll be the holding-on-broken who know that it’s not that we won’t blow it but it’s what we’ll do with it afterwards, whose priorities aren’t things that get us noticed, but priorities are all Things Unseen, who keep praying to only speak words that make souls stronger and keep getting up when we fall down because this is always how things just fall together.

Just let them sell their truckloads of perfect Mother’s Day Cards.

There’s far more Velveteen Mothers who are broken into real and worn into beauty.

Who have busted the Balloon of Better Homes, Gardens and Women and live the Gospel of Grace and we’re done with perfection because we’re the Everyday Prodigals who are wasteful in love and extravagant in grace and recklessly spending our attention on the mercies of the Prodigal God.

God wants Prodigal Parents — not perfect parents.

Lavish in love, extravagant in truth, big spenders of grace.

There will be cake this weekend. And we will eat it too.

And there will be tears and there will be laughter — because what messes our life up most — is the expectation of what our life is supposed to look like — and there will be a mess of dishes in the sink and a ring of grime in the bathtub and the clock will just keep on ticking and we’ll grab onto someone right in the kitchen and just hold on and let go.

It won’t be perfect — but we’ll be prodigals.

Because can count on it: Mother’s Day is for the birds –

us who are flying on the wings of His grace and a prayer.

 

UPDATED!
Related:
A story for mothers, women, looking for Grace & Joy right where they are — One gift that’s 1000 gifts….
One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are …

**UPDATED… and we’ve been working on something crazy wonderful & robust & FREE, that has just been submitted to Apple today… so Lord willing, there will an exciting FREE gift later today, in time for Mother’s Day — that will literally offer the joy of 1000 gifts — right where you are! #STAYTUNED

Free Printables for Mothers Everywhere:
10 Point Manifest0 for Joyful Mothering
10 Helps for Really Busy Moms
Free Complete Printable Kit: Joy-in-A-Box… someone who needs joy this weekend?

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

{usually links are shared over there on the sidebar ‘ponderings’… trying something a little new and crazy today and we’ll see if it works? Regular, actual post for today to follow, maybe, we’ll see, Lord willing?}

Catalyst Atlanta 2013 … Grateful to be serving, Lord willing, with Priscilla Shirer, Lysa TerKeurst, John Piper, Andy Stanley, Bob Goff and so many more Jesus-clingers and praying God does in that place what He alone can do. Pray about joining us?

How to Reach a Wayward Child: Abraham Piper looks back at his youth and struggles and offer these firsthand and how his parents, John and Noel Piper, reached out to him.

Allume 2013 — The Vision — This Conference. These People. Sold out for Jesus and Kingdom come. Come Shine with us?

As North American Parents…. do we have it backwards? … fascinating commentary… and much food for thought.

The Ultimate Girlfriend Gift {with free printable} … your stories of what God’s doing? Let’s. keep. doing. this — God’s moving.

Thank you to every mom, every single person who nurtures and lives life-giving lives…. we need you:

Morning Verse for Today’s Living:

“Jesus… said,” Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how He has had mercy on you.” … ~Mark 5:19

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

I mean — after we’ve all been bloodied by stones, why not just start there?

Effie Bryce sat near Nan Marlin.

And Greta Vanderhoef and Darlene Finch, and 75 year-old Mrs. Margaret van Veen who led me to Jesus when I was a kid and the elderly Mrs. King who lives on the farm behind us and has brought Easter gifts to our kids for the last 16 years, we all sat in one room.

Us meeting for our own (in)RL gather --  all us and about 150 other women clutching their purses like fashionable armor.

And us with all our scars and bruises hidden, all our smiles big and bluffing, that’s where we began — we reached for stones first.

And this is what we did: we wrote on those stones one word, that which was really keeping us from friendship with women, and we named the stones that we were hauling around to build arrow-barriers around our heart.

Because it’s time women wrote it down and slipped it like a note through each others’ walls: The stones you stack to keep you safe – are the prisons that keep you alone.

And then just wait — and help each other tear down the walls.

There was a scratching of markers.

I have no idea what word Mrs. Margaret wrote. Or Mrs. King. But I saw words on stones afterward in the basket, words like Fear. And Trust. And Vulnerability. And Time.

And Not Enough.

I had whispered those two words — how the lie of Not Enough can keep you from the More than enough God has for you. The lie that no one wants you because you aren’t good enough. Smart enough, pretty enough, trendy enough, accomplished enough.

And that’s exactly what somebody had written on their stone: Not Enough. Never doubt that there are words that can cut right through stone.

I don’t know what filled her eyes when she wrote those two torched words.

Don’t know her name or if her chin trembled or if she felt ashamed or relieved or scared.

I picked up that stone, that Not Enough stone and her not enough heart, and I rolled it around in my hand. I may not know which woman in the room had written those words — but her and I have twin, twined hearts echoing one another, this beating, thrumming ache in the hollowing empty places and she is not alone.

There are sisters who will carry you and sisters who will bend with you and pray with you and sisters who help heave the stones off.

What if we lifted a burden off a woman, what she was carrying around only because she thought the bulk of it was part of her?

The first tactic of the enemy is always to distort your identity.

And it’s only when a woman knows her real identity that she can really defeat the enemy.

What if we carried away a sister’s lying stones so she could be carried away by loving Grace?

I whipped that Not Enough stone into the middle of the church pond.

Sometimes the way you get baptized into a new life is to drown the old lies.

And I ask if Greta can take a stone from the basket and Nan and Mrs. King and us each take one of our sisters’ stones and carry it right out to the edge of the church pond.

And we will help each other throw away the lies and the burdens and the weights that make us a heart of stone and alone.

And I had told Mrs. King and Mrs. Margaret and all 150 of them of the old lies and how Jody Miller called me butt ugly back in grade school and Lissa Turscott had laughed and threw a baseball at the back of my head.

And how I’ve made wide berths around women and skirted friendship because I didn’t trust and your heart can stay blue bruised for years.

But how it came like a gentle touch— that distrust costs you the very richest life.

And the price for being safe can be too expensive.

And how one woman just untied the millstone of “Not Good Enough” from around my aching neck and just said it right out loud and– I offer you the gift of friendship.

By His grace alone,
I offer you the gift of my friendship:
To accept you and affirm you.
To believe in you and be there for you.
To support your dreams and support your arms.
To give you the gift of knees in prayer
To give you the gift of hands in help
To give you the gift of heart in friendship.
I offer you the gift of being your Jonathan, your Barnabas, your Ruth,
by the grace of Jesus alone.

And I said it, what I didn’t think possible — that your bruised heart can start to rise and believe and reach out.

And I said how I’d whispered it back — my commitment for the hard times:

We will offer each other the gift of
forgiveness when we fail
grace when we fall down
mercy when we’re messy
because we’re the ones forgiven of much
lavished with His grace
freed into whole skies of mercy.

And I choked it how awkward, how there’s a certain tribe in Africa tribe, a tribe called the Himba, and when a woman of the Himba tribe knows she is pregnant, she goes out into the wilderness with a few friends and together they wait till they hear the song of the child to come.

Because they know that every heart has its own unique beat… it own wild purpose. And when the women attune to the song of the coming child, they sing it out loud.

Then they return to the tribe and teach this child’s unique song to everyone else.

And when the child is born, the Himba tribe gathers and sings the child’s song to him or her. Later, when the child begins school, the village gathers and chants the child’s song. And when the child passes through the initiation to adulthood, the Himba again come together and sing. And at the time of marriage, the person again hears the notes of her song.

To the African tribe there is one other occasion upon which the villagers sing to the child. If at any time during his or her life, the person commits sins, falls short, or loses her way, the individual is called to the center of the village and the people in the community form a circle around them. Then they sing their song to them.

They sing their song to them because the Himba believe that change most happens when we remember who we are — remember our identity — Whose we are…

And I told Darlene Finch and Mrs. King and Mrs. Margaret and all of them, they they were brave to come and sit in a circle of women.

And before they were born — there was a song sung over every single one of them — could you hear it?

“Body and soul, I am marvelously made…
You know me inside and out,you know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth;
all the stages of my life were spread out before you,
The days of my life all prepared
before I’d even lived one day.”
Psalm 139

And I had looked into the eyes of Effie Bryce and Nan Marlin and said it slow to all us wounded women –

That is the song, your song, sang over you in the beginning — but maybe of late — maybe your heart of late seems more wall than warm, your arms seem crossed more into a shield than open like a shelter.

Maybe you heart has thickened into this long, scared callous — and you’ve numbed yourself to getting hurt ever again by the friendship of women. And you’ll smile and you’ll laugh and you’ll nod — but you haven’t been letting anyone get too close.

Maybe you haven’t really been trusting and maybe you haven’t really been sharing and maybe you haven’t really let anyone in — not really in.

Maybe you’ve let your heart go a bit deaf to what it really needs — because you don’t want to know how alone you really feel?

But your sisters, us your sisters — we won’t let you lose your way — we all know your song.

Your sisters they know the beat of your heart when you have forgotten how to be.

Your sisters know the rhythm of your return when you don’t know the road back.

Your sisters know the lyrics of why you are loved — when you can’t remember quite how to live….

Your sisters will sing your song — God’s song for you — when you have long forgotten the words to His Word — to yourself.

When you feel like you are losing your way, that is what your sisters are here for — to sing your Father’s song to you, all of us singing it soft and strong and certain —

We your sisters, will sing your beauty when you see yourself ugly.

We your sisters, will sing you wanted when you see yourself broken.

We your sisters, will sing you hope when you only feel hurt.

We your sisters, will sing you Beloved — when you just can’t believe.

And we will sing who you are until you find your way, the Way again, you voice warbling like a rising, your voice singing like a brave winging, until you remember the notes of your song — That songs that says:

I am God’s masterpiece. (Ephesians 2:10)

I am forgiven (Eph. 1:7).

I am a new creature (II Cor. 5:17).

I am strong in the Lord (Eph. 6:10).

I am accepted in Christ (Eph. 1:6).

I am loved with an everlasting love (Jer. 31:3).

I am overtaken with blessings (Deut. 28:2).

— one thousand gifts, one thousand blessings, overtaken with blessings

And I looked into the eyes of women rejected and women betrayed, women wounded and women forgotten and women feeling unnoticed and unloved and unwanted and I cup each face with truth: This is your song, your inheritance if you are in Christ!

That is who you are in Christ and your sisters will sing Who you are and Whose you are until you remember, until you run like you are made to fly.

This is what the friendship of women could be:

Sisters will just keep singing your song

Till it perches in your lost places,

Tuning you to what grace is

and the lovesong of your Father

who never stops singing at all.

Your Father who says of you in Zephaniah 3:17:

I rejoice over her with gladness;

quieting her fears with My love

And we sang it all together, The Father’s Song, and  you could hear it in the space between Mrs. Margaret and Mrs. King and Effie Bryce and Nan Marlin and me and all of us — the stones falling away, falling down.

And all this loud singing echoing in the chambers of a thousand women’s hearts.

How to Make The Ultimate Girlfriend Gift:

1. Print out decorative feathers

2. Print out Bird Gift Tag

3. Print out Card Box Template: I used an Exacto knife and a cutting board to cut out the slots. Assemble. I had to fold over the corner of the pieces that go through the slot in order for them to fit. Just fold them back over afterwards.  (Visual Tutorial for folding box)

4. Print out the The Ultimate Girlfriend Gift Cards

Cut out each card — and on the back of the I am so thankful for you cards — write encouragements, memories, blessings, that which you are grateful for in your friend…  wrap up all the Friendship cards, including When Hard Times Come, Your Song, and Your Father’s Song, all with a bow — and slip into the folded box. Tag with a note.

Then tuck The Ultimate Girlfriend Gift into a bag with a treat (maybe even One Thousand Gifts? One gift that is actually 1000 gifts — a Father’s love song over His daughters) — and give The Ultimate Girlfriend Gift one woman this week who may be hurting, who needs encouragement, who needs to hear her Father’s song again… just. one. woman.

Just hit Print. Don’t let this Mother’s Day week go by — without letting one woman who really needs to know it — hear her Father’s Song again.

Resources:
Check out the amazing (in)RL 2013 DVD – The Challenge to Stay in Community & Friendship and the (in)courage Postcards that my mama and sister hung on our (in)RL banner and each woman took one to encourage just one another sister… (all 25% off through Friday May 10 using code INRL2013)

Related Posts: How Hurting Women Can Help Each Other … and If You’ve Ever Been Wounded by Women

This is what the friendship of women could be:
Sisters will just keep singing your song…Till it perches in your lost places,
Tuning you to what grace is… and the lovesong of your Father
who never stops singing at all.

 

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!} And if you are thinking Advent/Christmas — Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}