Author Archives: Shannon


About Shannon

Alaskan homeschooling mama of eight sweet kids. Loves Jesus, writing, coffee, Dickens, and snapping a kitchen towel at my husband when he's not looking.

on repeat: the power of your mundane offerings

Posted on by May 2, 2022

If you’re super spiritual, you should just skip this post. I mean, if you read commentaries and offerings and begats for fun, and you have whole sections of the Pentateuch memorized, this probably isn’t for you. It’s for the rest of us.

on repeat: the power of your mundane offerings

If you had to look up the word “Pentateuch,” though, you’re in the right spot.

(Okay, is it safe yet? Because I’m getting ready to confess something. Deep breath.)

If you have ever read Numbers in the Old Testament, you know it can be a little…

Um…well…(cough)

Kinda boring. Right? A little repetitive.

Okay, a lot repetitive.

I’ve been reading chapters six and seven, and here’s what it says – just one very short example:

On the second day Nethanel the son of Zuar, the chief of Issachar, made an offering. He offered for his offering one silver plate whose weight was 130 shekels, one silver basin of 70 shekels, according to the shekel of the sanctuary, both of them full of fine flour mixed with oil for a grain offering; one golden dish of 10 shekels, full of incense; one bull from the herd, one ram, one male lamb a year old, for a burnt offering; one male goat for a sin offering; and for the sacrifice of peace offerings, two oxen, five rams, five male goats, and five male lambs a year old. This was the offering of Nethanel the son of Zuar.

– Number 7:18-23, ESV

FASCINATING.

No? What, you skimmed? You don’t want to hear all about the offerings? And you don’t want to hear them repeated verbatim twelve times (with the exception of different names of tribes, chiefs, and their fathers)?

Me neither. But here’s the deal: I was praying about it, and the Word never says “Blah, blah, blah” (you’ve heard me say that in Oh My Soul before) so I asked the Lord, Why do all the mundane details matter? Why are there so many of them in the Word and in our lives?

We do all these tasks that are never finished: the dishes, laundry, making the beds, teaching the kids, commuting to work. We repeat and repeat and repeat, and life is still full of them, never done.

And here’s what the Lord told me:

As you’re reading these mundane details, you are posturing yourself to hear Me. You are postured for Me to move in all these small things. You are postured to do a productive work even though you are “only” doing all those tiny, repetitive actions that don’t seem to go anywhere.

They are obedient to My calling for you, so they are going somewhere.

They are your offering.

And in the spirit of repetition, He keeps reminding me of it as I read parts of the Bible that are sticky, and as I deal with details in life that are sticky, too.

Repetition doesn’t have to equal boring and mundane. Sometimes we choose repetitive acts because they are relaxing and they help us focus on what is important – like taking communion or praying before meals, or going for a walk, or finding work for our hands so our minds can think clearly.

Earlier this year I started knitting again while I read. The movement helps me focus and it’s therapeutic for my hands. And as I’m getting ready to change colors, I’m right here:

Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you.
– 1 Thessalonians 4:11, ESV

If you don’t know, knitting tends to be slow work. You repeat and repeat and repeat – especially in garter stitch, especially when you’re using the same color, row after row after row.

But it produces something.

Just like pages read, prayers prayed, and Scripture spoken: They all do something.

They produce results. They create and refine things…and us.

But sometimes it takes a while to see that progress – which is all the more reason to start today.

When we start a project, whether it’s knitting, writing, building, reading, painting, teaching, or any other creative endeavor, we are working toward something we cannot see.

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion.

– Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

The woman weeding the garden, the neighbor changing the oil, the friend delivering dinner.

The officer driving, the receptionist answering the phone, the doctor prescribing a treatment.

The dad bathing the preschooler, the mom teaching the kid on the couch how to read.

A million steps of creative, mundane, prayerful, powerful faithfulness: lives lived in quiet, repetitive offering, standing for freedom and redeeming the culture.

We aren’t disgusted or despairing because the blanket isn’t complete yet after only a few rows of stitches. We know it’s a process. We see the unseen, and we work toward it.

And this is how prayer works, too.

If you are praying for some big situation or discouraged over huge current events — remember, we partner with God to work toward things that are unseen, and they change.

So we read books. We speak Scripture. We write words. We move in faithful obedience.

We are going somewhere as we obey Him in all these small things. And that includes reading the Bible – and not skipping the sticky parts, because He speaks to us in those, too.

We pray from victory, and we pray toward victory. And it works.

We make all these little stitches, and we know they make the Kingdom come. Pretty soon, we’ll see the colors start to change.

_____

Free printable download for you: Bookmark or 5×7 print.

the process: how we move forward faster

Posted on by July 25, 2022

Folks, it’s been quite the process, but a monumental event has occurred at our house:

We have mastered the art of making hash browns. You may applaud if you’d like.

the process: how we move forward faster

After many years of trial and error, I thought I already had hash browns figured out. But thanks to Gordon Ramsey, we have now seen the light – and even better, Vince and Afton have seen the light, and they can make them for me.

(Kav is still in training.)

And these hash browns are…how do I explain this? You know how excited an opera singer sounds in the middle of those high notes? It’s like that. It’s like fanfare and fireworks.

What made the experience even better was that I had my favorite fork. If you don’t own a favorite fork, I’m sorry; you’re missing the joy of having a collection that can only be curated from thrift store shopping. It’s been years in the making.

This fork is special because it’s light, the tines are the perfect width, and most important, the edges of the handle aren’t sharp. You’re probably thinking that most silverware handles aren’t sharp, but I have a painful skin condition that notices those things. So having a favorite fork isn’t weird; it’s practical.

Vince, however, has named the fork.

He calls it Penelope. And that is weird.

The skin condition, along with the lack of sleep and other health issues are slowly getting better, but they, too, are a work in progress. I wish it was instant. I hate that it’s not. But most things aren’t instant; almost everything worth doing requires a process.

Right from the get go, in the beginning, God created. The world was formless and void, dark, and God hovered. It, too, required a series of actions to achieve the final result. The God who made us to create, who made us like Him, designed us to require process.

But we want the finished work now.

Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and bring you to the place that I have prepared.

– Exodus 22:20

There’s this amazing part in Exodus (and later in Deuteronomy) when the Lord calls the Israelites to possess the land. He says He’ll help them, but He won’t do it in one year “lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply against you.”

And I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out the Hivites, the Canaanites, and the Hittites from before you. I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply against you. Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land. 

– Exodus 23:28-30

It fascinates me. The Lord told them to do something — He wanted them to do it, knew they couldn’t do it without Him – but then He promised that His help would only come little by little.

So annoying.

But He wanted them to grow. He knew they weren’t ready to possess the land fully yet.

He was teaching them that it was a process.

And maybe, like me, you are looking at things that seem to be taking way too long to come to completion. And like me, you need to hear that He is at work, both in clearing the land ahead of us, and also in clearing the land within us.

Or maybe, also like me, you are navigating situations that seem like a distraction from the work you ought to be doing.

A crisis comes up and it stalls progress – you can’t move forward and clear the land because now you’ve got to deal with this new situation, and it puts the real work on the back burner. We try to heal in one area but something just keeps knocking into it, constantly bruising it or tearing the wound open.

How can we move forward when we’ve got this new situation to deal with? How are we ever going to get this work done if it keeps getting pushed to the back burner?

And He says, I work on the back burner, too, Love.

I’m not limited to one location like you are.

While you think you are stalled, I am doing other work that must be done, that wouldn’t otherwise be done, if you were moving forward according to the ease of your own plans.

The distraction and the crisis are also productive. Deep work is being done so you can move forward faster when the time comes.

And I really want to move forward faster when the time comes. Sometimes I just want the time to come now. And there’s no shame in that, as long as we remember that His time will be the perfect time.

He has things to teach us in the mean time so the finished product will be so much better, the way it’s meant to be. For example, can you really have a great hash brown experience without accompanying it with jalepeno-chive aioli? I don’t think so.

Obedience to His process is the way forward. That doesn’t mean we have to sit back and take everything the enemy throws at us; it means we can stand in authority and identity in prayer, and we know that God is moving in spite of what things look like.

We keep our eyes on what He’s doing, and what He’s told us to do, and trust Him with the rest. Sometimes that looks like being still, which seems like no movement, no progress at all – just waiting, dealing with the new thing in front of us, no matter how annoyed we are that it showed up and interrupted our momentum.

He has a different momentum, and it is never interrupted. Yielded, we are always moving forward, regardless of how many things are on the back burner. 

He’s doing the work in both places as we trust Him for the perfect timing. Sometimes it’s only a minute away, and we have no idea it’s that close.

It will be a monumental event, like fanfare and fireworks.

______
*This is an excerpt from Work That God Sees, available here.

mapping our territory: how we gain ground when we read deep & wide

Posted on by June 21, 2024

It’s what I’ve always wanted to do here – I’m about to go all crazy bookish on you. In all fairness, you might’ve seen it coming. So stand back (or kick back on the couch), and maybe arm yourself with a fresh notebook and your favorite clicker pencil.

I spent most of the last weekend immersed in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. If that’s unfamiliar territory to you – and it is to many, I never even heard of it until a year ago – it’s by Anne Bronte, probably the least known of the famous Brontes. It wasn’t an easier read than her sisters’ more famous works. But I flew through it, probably for a couple of reasons.

mapping our territory: how we gain ground when we read deep and wide

First, I gave it a fair shot – which means when I sat down with it the first time, I read at least 15-20 pages, enough to get a little ways in and scope out the territory. And then I made sure to pick it up again before letting too many days pass, so I could get a little farther in and get familiar with what was going on before book entropy set in.

Don’t know what “book entropy” is? I made it up. But you’ve probably experienced it – you open a book, read a few pages, then set it down for a week or more, then try a few more pages, and abandon it again with the best of intentions. Before you know it, six months have passed and you’re only at page fifty, and you have no idea who Lizzie Hexam is, what her father is doing in the river retrieving corpses, or whether or not it’s important that he found that one body that one time. (It is. Of course it is.)

It’s the worst way to read anything. (Dickens, especially. Ask me how I know.) Might as well quit and start over later.

Second, I’ve gotten used to reading classics and don’t struggle through them so much anymore. In high school we read very few classics, and I used to be so intimidated by the unfamiliar territory, struggling with the language, customs, cultures, and terms. But as a young adult I started dipping my toes in, and muddled my way through a few on my own.

There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

We were in our early 20s, in our first apartment, and started our library with a bookshelf we bought from Fred Meyers for about $75 in quarters that we’d saved in a blue Arizona Iced Tea bottle. We sat on opposite ends of our hand-me-down couch and read quietly to ourselves and out loud to each other, eating our dinner of boxed PastaRoni because these were also the days before we learned how to cook.

In Sense and Sensibility, I had no idea why one daughter was “Miss Dashwood” and the other daughter was called by her first name. In Anna Karenina, I barely managed to untangle each character’s three separate names. (Really, are the nicknames that necessary? Tolstoy couldn’t have made it a little simpler?) I spent two years slogging through The Hunchback of Notre Dame and I don’t need to read about Parisian architecture or flying buttresses ever again. Please.

But then I started building on that scaffolding. And it started getting easier.

Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. You need to read.

— Charles Spurgeon

(Yikes. Spurgeon is a little harsh…but he’s not wrong.)

I moved over to Pride and Prejudice and things started to make sense. I tried Sense and Sensibility again, and this time things fell into place. And then I found Gone With the Wind, The Lord of the Rings, and Jane Eyre, and fell in love.

I was hooked. This was the deep part of my ocean. This is where I could keep exploring and never get tired.

But I hit bottom pretty quickly in other areas. I read three books by Kipling that convinced me we probably aren’t kindred spirits. I endured months of Dostoevsky’s rascally Karamazov brothers and hustled my way through Crime and Punishment, and those weren’t my favorites, either. Not too long ago I went back to Hugo and it still took me over two years to finish Les Mis. But I had to spend some time with them – a fair shot’s worth – to hold an opinion in the first place.

And this is where we go wide: we stretch out into the shallows, where we dip our toes in and maybe find the water isn’t to our liking. But at least it gives us an idea of what the terrain around that edge of the ocean looks like. The fog is lifted a little; we can draw in some curves on the map instead of leaving the entire area shrouded in mist. We gain ground.

I love, love, love, finding new territory. I love helping others grow deep and wide and find new territory, too. So I started Gaining Ground for those who want to expand their territory in literature, writing, and wholeness – you know, for the slightly nerdy deep thinkers, or those who want to be slightly nerdier, deeper thinkers. You guys are my people.

Contrary to general belief, writing isn’t something that only “writers” do; writing is a basic skill for getting through life. Yet most American adults are terrified of the prospect – ask a middle-aged engineer to write a report and you’ll see something close to panic. Writing, however, isn’t a special language that belongs to English teachers and a few other sensitive souls who have a “gift for words.” Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly – about any subject at all.

― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn

Life is different now, but Vin and I still sit on opposite ends of the couch, and we still read quietly to ourselves and out loud to each other. Somewhere along the way we learned to cook from scratch, and now we can make a mean chicken curry, homemade enchiladas, and bacon-wrapped jalapeños. I’m hoping this helps us live long enough to read all those books.

Because we’re still learning. We often read a book and tell the other person they absolutely must read this one next – and sometimes we actually follow those recommendations.

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”

― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

And sometimes it works. But other times, book entropy sets in, and Anna Karenina sits on Vin’s shelf for about two years.

The bookmark is on page 111. Or, eleventy-one, for you Middle Earth fans. It might be time for him to ditch it.

So if anyone wants to borrow a beautiful old copy of Anna Karenina and struggle through all the different Russian names, I’ve got one for you. He probably won’t even notice it’s gone – and if he does, I’ll let you know.