Category Archives: Christmas

lay it on the table: how surrender solves the problems of the world

Posted on by December 30, 2024

Every December we shove other responsibilities aside and spend hours at the puzzle table, solving the problems of the world. It starts the weekend after Thanksgiving, when we smush furniture around to make room for the table and the Christmas tree, which is a cozy alternative to how we smush things around in the summer, when we have birds living in our bathroom for three months of the year.

(Sidenote: You may be progressing in your homesteading efforts if a friend visits and exclaims, “Oh! I’ve never used your bathroom when it didn’t have quail in it!” So fancy.)

lay it on the table: how surrender solves the problems of the world | Shannon Guerra

This last puzzle was difficult because at one point we had sections that started to connect from one side to the other, but there were odd gaps in one direction and tight spots on the other where the frame had warped a bit. We knew the pieces should fit, we just couldn’t figure out why they wouldn’t.

At one point I wondered if it was just a bad puzzle. There are some, you know – badly constructed, impossible to solve, and you only find out once you’re about halfway through. Then you have to decide if you’re going to keep going, or toss it and start over with something else.

Also, with pretty much every puzzle, there comes a point when I’m totally confounded and convinced that a certain piece must be a mistake because it has nowhere to go. This has to be a stem, but all the stems are finished…this one has to be a yellow flower, but there aren’t any yellow flowers left…we check and recheck, convinced the maker must’ve made a mistake and somehow this piece, which obviously doesn’t actually go with this puzzle, somehow got slipped into this box by accident.

But eventually, always, we find the place. OHHHHH, we exclaim as it clicks in, eureka. Suddenly it all makes sense: We couldn’t find it because we thought it was this color but it was actually the shading of that color, or we thought it couldn’t possibly attach and go there because of the lines in the drawing, but the cut of the jigsaw hid the transition from the stem to the leaf, or the edge where it changed from petal to background.

So as we sit here and exchange the pieces that confound us, we are recognizing more and more that what we think we’re looking at is sometimes not what it seems. We have the big picture but miss the small detail – or just as often, we have the small detail but miss the big picture.

Our work here, solving all the problems of the world, happens in small increments. With the puzzle that buckles, we have to make tiny shifts, move just a couple pieces at a time. It is gentle, steady work to make room for the sections that are supposed to fit.

We’ve tried it the other way; when we pulled the whole thing, sections tore away from the tension.

But there’s a thousand pieces, and so much needs to move, we think. Changing it all at once doesn’t work, though. We make room and move the loose, extra pieces out of the way, and it’s grace here, gentleness there, self control where we want to force our way…and we move a couple pieces at a time, realizing that tiny moves are the best influence on the big picture, because our forceful moves create disaster.

So this is a patient dance, one step here, one effort there; it helps to recognize every tiny victory, and overlook many forgivable imperfections. Our pieces need to shift and make room for each other, because there’s a gap here, and the space between is too big to fill. And that makes sense, because on the other side there’s not enough space for the other pieces that need to go in.

Washington had spent long hours talking to the officers, showing patience and tolerance, probing their sensitivities, hearing their complaints. It was subtle, had to be, the slow tilting of the level ground about which the men had so much pride.

As the officers themselves began to understand how they fit into the larger army, they began to have pride in their own units, in the behavior and deportment of their own men, in their own ability to command. They began to understand how discipline was of value after all, not just for convenience, but for each officer’s own value to the army.

– Jeff Shaara, Rise to Rebellion

On the other side of the table, Finn is sitting at the couch with a Rubik’s cube and confesses that he has solved it by peeling its stickers off and putting them back where he wanted them to go. I admit this is also how I’ve sometimes dealt with problems I couldn’t solve: We take the broken pieces and superglue them back on so everything looks fairly normal, as long as you don’t get too close and realize what a patch job it is.

But eventually, hopefully, there comes a time when we’re sick of the easy fix that was never good enough, and we want to be done with our inadequate coping skills. We want the real solution, and the real solution is always the work that needs to be done in us, not others, because it is inside us that all of our misperceptions and assumptions are made, our attitudes are born, our wounds are infected, and our potential for joy is hidden, however it is buried under difficult circumstances.

We need real healing, real freedom, and we’re willing to go through the pain or revelation we’ve been avoiding to face the One who knows how to put us back together the right way, because He’s the one who made us in the first place.

And this is where small moves will never be enough, because we’re no longer dealing with other people – I mean, external pieces – but with our own inward parts. Our own tiny efforts err in too much gentleness as we resign to just live with it and deal, and that can go on for a long time, maybe forever, unless we get impatient and move to the other extreme, creating disaster.

So we cannot do the effective work on our own pieces all by ourselves. When we’re broken enough to want real healing, we need to surrender to the Maker familiar with the big picture and all the details, who knows how our inward parts work, where the jigsaw needs to cut, and where all of our pieces go.

There’s a character in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader who, through a series of circumstances and bad choices, becomes something unexpected. He needs healing and he thinks he knows how to go about it, so he starts to cast his skin:

“I scratched a little deeper and, instead of just scales coming off here and there, my whole skin started coming off beautifully….But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before.”

Like we often discover, our own efforts don’t go deep enough. So we try the same thing, harder:

“Well, exactly the same thing happened again. And I thought to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take off?”

Eventually, depending on how stubborn – or evasive – we are, we realize the truth: We can’t do this. He has to be the one to heal us. And this is where surrender happens.

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right to my heart….he peeled the beastly stuff right off…and there is was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

He cuts our wrong edges off in precise curves, not taking anything that needs to stay and not leaving anything that needs to go. But He doesn’t do it the same way in each of us.

A few weeks ago in class we talked about how God moves us in surrender. For the chatty extrovert, sometimes surrender looks like waiting in uncomfortable silence; for the introvert, it looks like reaching out to the person who is new and starting a conversation. For the impatient mom, it looks like listening to the angsty rant of a teen rather than immediately giving the answer. For the overindulgent mom, it looks like setting a boundary and holding to it.

Whatever it is, overcoming our preferred comfort is how we die to self to become truly alive, and it’s the surgery we need, revealing the tender, raw perfection of His design underneath.

Our own vulnerability makes us walk more tenderly toward others. Simultaneously, as we realize how efficient His work is, it makes us want to surrender our stubborn ways faster, and we move in bolder freedom than ever before. Surrender is a cycle that continuously strengthens.

We cannot do the giant work in others. Our own efforts aren’t even enough to do the perfect work in ourselves. All we can do are the small everyday steps of obedience, finding where this piece goes, sorting out those other pieces, moving loose pieces out of the way so there’s room for the right ones to go in.

So we lay it all on the table – the pieces we think we know what to do with, the ones we have no idea what they’re for, and the ones we’ve been hiding in our pocket so no one else could touch them.

It’s all out there. The picture is coming together. We sit in the tension of seeking answers until we have the aha moment when it clicks, and we finally see it the way the Maker does — the details, the big picture, everything in place — and we unbend our twisted frame back into His alignment, making room for all the pieces He designed to be there.

bits and pieces: how we build the Kingdom with small offerings

Posted on by December 23, 2023

“You don’t need the light to go down the stairs,” I mumble as I flip the switch off. I do this at least once a day and the stairwell isn’t even dark; there’s a window at the bottom, and light from the kitchen filters in at the top.

And even if it were utterly dark (which it almost never is at our house), humans – even small humans – know how to walk on stairs. We’ve done it a million times, even carrying bags of groceries or dozens of eggs. It’s muscle memory. But the kids flip the light on just for the fun of it, I guess.

bits and pieces: how we build the Kingdom with small offerings

We like to see where we’re going, and we like the way to be clear. I was reminded of this last week when I drove to church through heavy snow and hated it with every mile, knowing I could do it but not liking it. In those times we kind of wish we had the cop-out of not being able to do something so we can beg off from the responsibility. But no, we can do hard things like driving on sloppy roads, and learning how to use cantankerous sewing machines, and going through the bureaucratic hoops of guardianship.

We were officially granted guardianship of Reagan on Tuesday, which is an odd thing because we’ve been her parents for over eleven years and she’s been 18 for a month already. So yay, that’s done – until next month, at least, when we repeat the process with Andrey. Now we just need to get used to all the new paperwork routines and deadlines (have I told you lately how much I hate paperwork? SO MUCH) and new adult-y things for her, like establishing her own bank account, which is also an odd thing because we’re supposed to get all this in place as soon as possible but we won’t even have the decree in hand to do so for 4-6 weeks, because this is the government we’re talking about.

Right, the sewing machine isn’t the only cantankerous one around here. Maybe we should switch subjects and talk about cheerful things, like how we didn’t die when we drove home in the ice fog last week.

It was the same day I mentioned a minute ago, when we were driving in the heavy snow to church. But on the way home, the snow had stopped and the roads were clearer, and I even told Cham she could turn on the radio to look for Christmas music.

And then four minutes later we hit the ice fog on the highway.

At first I thought it was fine, but then I quickly realized we were driving through a cloud that was adhering to us. Ice started building up at the top of the windshield, and then it crept lower. I flipped the wipers on and they helped a little, but within another mile they went right over the glaze that continued to spread downward.

“Turn off the radio,” I said, and flipped the heat to its highest setting. We were still four miles from home and all those little tiny particles kept building up on each other.

And I think this is when I repented of angrily flipping off the light switch to the stairwell, because seeing where we’re going is more than just a luxury sometimes. It’s one thing when you have muscle memory to walk down the stairs, but it’s a totally different thing when you’re on the highway in the dark, and ice is covering more and more of the windshield as it shrinks your view of the highway in front of you.

There was nowhere to pull over. The road was barely plowed, two lanes had shrunk to one and half, and there was no shoulder. Pulling over and putting on hazard lights meant blocking what was left of the slow lane, and surely we would’ve been hit in the fog.

So we did what we had to do, and kept going. The ice continued to crawl further down, and I continued to crouch further down so I could see the road out of the clear space left in the windshield. We were in this catch-22 – we had to drive slow because we couldn’t see far in the fog, but we also had to drive as fast as possible to get home before we couldn’t see anything at all.

Sometimes stopping and quitting isn’t an option. Sometimes we must keep going; we have to see it through, even when we can’t see ten feet in front of us. We know we’re in danger, we know God has to protect us, and we know that stopping doesn’t just mean rest or quitting, but something far worse.

And we made it, obviously, because I’m here writing to you about it. We barreled through the last intersection and pulled off the highway, drove up the hill, and then up our driveway, and the relief would’ve been complete if we hadn’t driven separately, because Vince and Afton were still out there behind us somewhere.

Eight minutes later they pulled in the driveway and pounded up the stairs and into the kitchen. Our conversations were all “Oh my gosh,” and “I’ve never seen it like that,” and gratitude that we pray over this highway every single day.

I wonder if those tiny daily prayers matched that ice fog granule for granule, keeping it at bay so we could get home in time. Because good and great things build up on themselves, too.

Over the last several months I’ve seen encouraging progress in prayer, and sometimes it surprises me in its suddenness: Oh yeah, I prayed for that, as I notice a kid making better media choices, and another kid having better sleeping patterns. I keep noticing small but visible victories, these little pieces that start adding up and instilling courage, reminding me that prayer is a powerful work that builds on itself, too. We don’t have to know what the answers or details are, we just need to agree with God’s will for goodness and healing and restoration.

And that brings me back to my efforts with the sewing machine, because I don’t really know what I’m doing with this fabric, either. I just know that I want to make something beautiful out of these bits and pieces.

I don’t have a pattern, and I don’t really want a pattern. Some people follow intricate geometric designs, and I admire their precision and planning. But I don’t want to do that; my brain space for precision and planning goes to writing, and this is play.

Why is it that it’s so much easier to not have a plan when it comes to this? With bigger life situations when I don’t see light on the next five steps, it’s not play; it’s frustration and fear and self-doubt. But here with these bits and pieces, I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m also not doubting myself. I know that if I mess up, I can seam rip; if I cut too many pieces, I can use them in something else.

That’s what I can do in your situations, too, the Holy Spirit keeps reminding me. That’s what grace is. Nothing is wasted.

We take things so seriously. A lot of our situations are serious, of course, but we fret over them as though we’re more attentive and concerned than God is, which is stupidly presumptuous. We spend a lot of our lives flying by the seat of our pants, and it seems like that’s by design because God does amazing things with our loaves and fishes, scraps and thread. He knows we don’t know what we’re doing half the time, and there’s huge comfort in that.

It’s not my job to create the material or know exactly what the finished product will look like. I’m just taking the material available and pulling certain pieces together, doing what I know to do – and when we know better, we do better – so these bits and pieces in front of me can become something beautiful, useful, and redeemed.

There’s a dark, moody scrap here, telling a kid no, they can’t go to a certain event. And there are lighter, brighter scraps over there, laughing together during movies and telling old family stories. Threads of abiding prayer weave through every day, holding pieces together. And I think, so far at least, this is all I need to really know.

We want to do something grand, but often all we have energy for is bits and pieces. Are the bits and pieces enough, though? They have to be, because it’s the only way things are made and accomplished. A book is read – or written – a word, a sentence, a page at a time. Relationships are built one interaction at a time. Breakthrough is achieved one steadfast, grace-filled, desperate day at a time.

Our obedient, faithful bits and pieces counter the ice fog of life, and it’s enough. We have vision for the next couple of small steps, we have strength for the one busy day ahead of us, we have patience for one more go-round with the kid who’s been cooking our grits. It’s all we can do. Like manna that cannot be hoarded for more than the day ahead, we cannot store the effort and strength and energy we need for all these things. We can only build the character that perseveres and comes out victorious with one small, obedient decision at a time.

It’s not about doing everything just right. We don’t always know if it’s working. We know if we’re obeying, though. And we also know when we’re procrastinating by praying for more guidance when the way is already clear, but just not as clear as we want it to be. We want undimmed light for all 17 steps, not just the first couple.

But if risky obedience is approached a little more like play, joy suddenly takes the place of anxiety. It all hinges on trust, though – Does He care? Does He have our best in mind? Is He big enough to cover my imperfections?

Yes, to all three.

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need. I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not destroy the fruits of your soil, and your vine in the field shall not fail to bear, says the Lord of hosts. Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says the Lord of hosts.

– Malachi 3:10-12

The angel of the Lord encamps
    around those who fear him, and delivers them.
Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!
    Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints,
    for those who fear him have no lack!

– Psalm 34:7-9

Joy and freedom and expansion are markers of the Kingdom. Fear and dread and anxiety are the enemy’s methods to waylay those.

Obedience, courage, and surrender are contagious. Sometimes people wait for the obedience of someone else to move. So your obedience creates a current that moves the less willing, and momentum sweeps through like a rising tide that lifts all boats and aligns many in the right direction. Our obedience isn’t just for ourselves; it changes the atmosphere and culture around us.

Is the dim light enough? Just enough for this step, and the next one, and then next one? Because these days, just those little steps might be all we have in us. And maybe that’s for a good reason.

Will you find your identity in your grand achievements and accomplishments, God asks us, or will you find it in Me?

I believe in the bits and pieces: Joy, freedom, expansion, obedience, courage, and surrender. He’s using these small steps of ours to make grand, beautiful things out of the scraps we have left.

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it’s not breaking down, it’s beginning: powerful perspective for your new year

Posted on by December 31, 2024

Hey friends,

This time last year I was sitting on my bed, tapping out words for the December newsletter, just like I’m doing now. But last year, I was frustrated because December had not gone according to how I had planned. I was stewing and praying and typing, and then Kav came into the room crying because he had crashed while sledding and broke his arm.

And then our December really didn’t go according to plan, because if you’ve been reading since then you know that our world changed that day when medical tyrants tried to hold our son’s emergency care hostage to force our capitulation to illegal pressure and abuse to him and our family.

Long story. Lots of trauma. Super eye-opening, too: We realized that not only was the medical establishment as corrupt as some said, but also that tons of self-proclaimed Christians are okay with that and happy to participate in it. We were even accused of child abuse by some for not simply caving to demands to relinquish our patient and parental rights. It is an upside down world when people somehow think they hold the moral high ground by abdicating both their critical thinking skills and their responsibility to protect their children – and demand that you do, too – in exchange for trusting a disgraced medical regime with every financial incentive to abuse both its authority and the children put in their care. We are not ignorant, unsuspecting, or weak-willed parents, and we will not become so just to make those who are feel better about their own decisions.

So anyway, I guess you can see I haven’t really softened my stance on this.

I bring it up though because anniversaries of trauma and pain can be hard to get through. For some reason many of us have almost a superstitious fear about them, as though something else bad might happen around the same time of the year or that we’ll somehow have to relive the ordeal. The memories carry deep pain laced with other feelings like betrayal, confusion, anger, regret, and fear. So much fear. Fear from the event, and fear of the future. We fight fears of repeated pain, or accumulated pain, and we brace ourselves for the next blow.

Right after we went through that last year, we had a major windstorm. Windstorms here aren’t unusual; we had another one just last week, so this time it came the week before Christmas instead of the week after. These were good ones, though, with gusts up to 85 miles an hour, zero degrees plus windchill.

Last week it shook our house and flexed the windows. In the upstairs bathroom during one of the biggest gusts, the mirror on an interior wall wobbled and rattled. The stovepipe, a new addition this year, whistled in varying keys as we sat around the table putting the latest Christmas puzzle together.

And the noise, oh my gosh. As a homeowner all you can think is, Is the roof okay? What is that weird sound? We prayed that none of the trees would fall on the house or the coops, and that nothing would blow into a window.

It was the same kind of anxiety I felt after the 7.2 earthquake a few years ago. We had aftershocks for months and I prayed for our foundation, the walls, and the future. We could see a little damage – we had cracks in our walls like everyone else – but I was more concerned about damage that we might not be able to see.

And isn’t that what trauma really does? Because it’s not just the memories and the pain, but it’s also the fear it creates of what we cannot see in the future. Usually, we didn’t see the trauma coming in the first place, and we worry that there’s more where it came from.

During a day full of aftershocks, the Lord confronted me about it. Hey Love, what if the shaking isn’t damaging the house? He asked. What if it’s actually making it stronger? What if it’s tightening things instead of loosening them?

What if your worrying is doing more damage than anything else?

Huh, I thought. That’s not how I’m used to looking at things; I’m used to expecting things to naturally deteriorate or depreciate. But He reminded me that He is the one who leads us from glory to glory, who led the Israelites through the desert and kept their clothing and shoes from wearing out, who tells us not to be anxious, and commands us repeatedly in the Bible to “fear not.”

His ways are not our ways, and He reminded me of it again during this windstorm. What if the shaking isn’t hurting the roof? What if, instead of picturing in my mind that the wind might be loosening things, I realized the wind might be driving things closer together?

What if, during emotional storms and trauma, the pain that makes us feel like we’re falling apart is actually adding newer, stronger elements to us? What if we believe in God’s goodness so strongly that we know He will take any attack from the enemy and use it for our good, and suddenly we look at the future with hope instead of fear?

You know what fear is? Fear is our willingness to take the weapon out of our enemy’s hand and attack ourselves with it, saving him the trouble.

So what if we stopped falling for it?

The fearless person is completely free. Nothing can threaten them.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.

– 1 John 4:18

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

– 2 Corinthians 3:17-18

We’re not ignoring reality. We’re influencing it, just like He told us to.

We’ve been listening to the wrong teachers and the wrong messages and the wrong thoughts for a long time. We’re used to decay, destruction, the next shoe dropping, the slow and steady unraveling of creation. But that’s not the Word says. If we walk in the attitude of It’s only going to get worse, we haven’t been paying attention to what’s actually in the Bible.

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
to grant to those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit;
that they may be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.
They shall build up the ancient ruins;
they shall raise up the former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
the devastations of many generations.

– Isaiah 61:1-4

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, it says. This is the same scripture Jesus read in the temple, declaring it fulfilled. And this is the same Spirit who is in us.

It’s not decay. It’s strength, He says. It’s not breaking down. It’s rebuilding.

It’s not a super easy way to look at things after a lifetime of assuming the worst. But the Lord told us His ways are different from ours, and over and over in the New Testament we read about the work of faith. Unbelief comes easy; falling for lies is easy. But aligning our thoughts and attitudes with God’s truth requires a discipline that we need to start walking in.

We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

– 1 Thessalonians 1:2-3

“But what if…” the enemy hisses. Don’t go there, though. Don’t take the bait. Thinking on those what ifs will never prepare you for anything but more devastation. The enemy is trying to get you to take the weapon and stab yourself with it. He’s holding out poison and hoping you’ll choose to drink it.

When we command our thoughts this way rather than letting them run amok with whatever fears the enemy tries to feed us, we are partnering with God in building up the ancient ruins, and raising up the former devastations.

And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia.

– 1 Thessalonians 1:6-7

How do we receive with joy in the midst of affliction? Maybe that’s the real question. We can’t deny the pain and pretend what happened didn’t matter. But we can change what we believe about it and thus change the power we give it. We can do the work of faith, agreeing with God that He is building, not destroying, no matter what the enemy throws at us. We can labor in the love that casts out fear, trusting Him, steadfast in hope knowing that He is good and is working things out for good on our behalf.

I’m thinking about this as we work on the huge 2000 piece puzzle late into the evening. I joke to my family that this is where we solve all the world’s problems, but it’s true: I complain about a piece having nowhere to go, but then realize I’ve been holding it upside down the whole time. I was trying to put it in the wrong way. So what happens when we set our pieces – our thoughts, that is – right again and start looking at things from God’s perspective of truth, power, and victory, instead of our traditional mindset of defeat and decay?

In many ways, we’ve been going about it all wrong. We’ve thought things were delayed when we were early. We’ve mislabeled things as breaking when they were actually just beginning. We’ve accused God of being slow when He is actually patient.

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

– 2 Peter 3:9

The stretching hurts and we wonder why things are not working out, why everything is fitting so badly. But this one shift might be the nudge that shows how the pieces were misaligned – we were close, we had the right pieces all along, but we were putting the wrong ones together.

It looks like the Church is breaking in a lot of areas. But the truth is, it’s reviving. The wound and bacteria have to be cleaned out before it can heal. The Lord has been teaching His people how to walk in His ways, and even though we’ve watered them down so they reflect our ways more than His in many areas, He is calling us to reexamine how we think about things so we can walk in holiness and wholeness, realigning our thoughts with truth instead of just tradition.

We see corruption in so many areas, and here’s the good news: We’re not seeing something new. It’s been there all along, hidden, and is now being exposed. It can’t hide in the dark any longer; it must be dealt with. The eucatastrophe is coming.

The pain we went through a year ago wasn’t a blow dealt to our family. It was a blow to the enemy. Evil agendas were exposed. Lazy, fake Christianity came out of the wood works. The winds shook and the rains fell and the attacks came, but we are stronger and louder because of it, grounded and founded on the rock.

The physical and emotional storm didn’t take anything away from us. As we keep our eyes on Jesus, every wave that tries to bowl us over only adds more strength to our foundation. The enemy always loses, and we always win. The only possible way we can lose is if we fall for his lies, and we know better.

We hold these pieces in our hand and we don’t have to know exactly what to do with them. We know they go somewhere, and we keep asking Him for eyes that see answers.

Often, His answers are beyond our expectations, and better than we ever could have imagined.

No, wait, we think, this piece can’t possibly fit there, I don’t even know what direction it goes.

Try, the Lord is saying. So you do. And even though it stretches you to reach all the way across the table, to believe for what seems impossible, you find that the other pieces are already there in place, shaped perfectly, ready to receive it.

Praying for you,

Shannon

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