Category Archives: fighting fear

keep going: a ramble about perseverance & trust

Posted on by January 28, 2025

The cars went up and down the highway, headlights and taillights flickering through the trees. Dusk hits lately around 4 pm, and on this side of the window, my journal was open to page 360-something. I wasn’t sure what to write but I wrote anyway, words about mundane things, hoping something would spark – a theme, an idea, an analogy, a memory of something funny or profound. Just kept the pen moving, pushing it across the lines, because something usually reveals itself.

keep going: a ramble about perseverance & trust

I started this journal toward the end of 2020 and there’s only fifteen or so pages left. Every page doesn’t have to be profound, just like every day of life doesn’t have to be filled with something wildly spectacular. The slow, quiet, routine days are where most of our living is done.

So this journal entry, like the day, was meat and potatoes: books I’m reading, the project I’m working on, what we were planning to do that evening. A headline or two of what’s going on in the world. Nothing exciting but the ink filled the page, and some of it was even legible, so that’s a plus.

It’s the little things, and our attention to them, that really do add up. Like yesterday, when I put a few extra minutes into cleaning the kitchen – did anyone notice the front of the dishwasher wasn’t as streaky? Or that the dust inside the oven was cleaned out? (How do ovens get dust inside them, anyway?) Or that the stovetop was clean? Probably not. (Which is why I’m writing about it so I can get credit, she smirked.)

Those small things are so encouraging to me though, whether anyone else notices them or not. I like clean spaces – just don’t look at my desk – and haven’t always had the margin to notice and take care of those details. I look back on that other season where the air was thick, the noise was loud, and there were so many demands that sometimes only the absolute top-of-the-top priorities, like meals and safety, were taken care of. I can now see how I put figurative blinders on in certain areas, willfully ignoring many peripherals, because there were already too many essentials. It’s amazing how many essentials become peripherals when you’re in survival mode.

I remember telling a friend, a fellow adoptive mom, that I felt like I had some sort of survivor’s guilt as we began to walk out of that other season and into this one. Vin started working with me from home and we could tackle the demands together. There was less chaos, more sleep, and time to process. The kids were bigger and the special needs were less volatile. I had survived, was surviving; we had all made it and were slowly working back toward equilibrium even though we had no idea what that actually looked like anymore because so many things had changed. How do you rest and let go after years of trauma and hypervigilance? How do you know it’s really safe?

I didn’t have to be so strong anymore, and I wasn’t sure that was actually forward progress.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

– 2 Corinthians 12:9a

I felt guilty because there was a sense of ease I hadn’t experienced in years, but many parts of myself and our family had died in the process of getting there. Yes, we survived – but so many other things didn’t.

It was like we had made a trade but had no say in the details of the transaction, and the deal didn’t seem fair. It was too good in some ways, too hard in others.

That was three journals and several years ago, and I still don’t understand it; I’m obviously still working my way through it.

In many ways it’s best to not look too close. When we look at those details it can quickly lead to a naval-gazing, toxic cocktail of blame and regret. We have to surrender the past, the decisions we made and others made, and trust that God knows what to do with them. He knows what to do with each of our hearts in all the dynamics of memories and current choices and loss and grief and ideas of how things should have been, and the distance between that and how they actually happened.

So many details are still being worked out. So if it doesn’t look like that yet, don’t linger; keep going. He’s going to show us how those years resulted in honor instead of dishonor; beauty, not regret; healing and growth in the place of trauma and immaturity. Gain instead of loss.

He’s doing it. We don’t have to understand how that’s possible anymore than we know the starting place or destination of all the cars on the highway. And this, too, is surrender.

Vin and I sat on the couch the other night looking at a list of dreams we made a little over three years ago. The challenge was to write a hundred of them but we only got to thirty, and upon review, we’ve accomplished five so far. Publish Risk the Ocean. Finish book #4 in series. Replace the Stagecoach. A few other items were no longer dreams and we crossed them out, then added some more. Healing for my hand. Find a great assisted living situation for Andrey. And after editing, the list had only grown to 36. So it appears we need to work a little harder on this dreaming thing.

Some of the dreams, though, I don’t want to define. I don’t want to name them because they’re still too fuzzy and I don’t want to shoot in the dark, committing something to paper that I’ll have to cross out later. I have books without titles, ideas without structure, colors but no outlines. Or maybe it’s the other way around. And I feel like answers in many areas are on the way, but meanwhile there’s this strong sense of plodding on steadfastly, determinedly, knowing that the Lord is leading and the answers will come in time. Maybe sooner than we think. So we continue to invest, and not bury, the talents, while we wait for clarity to come.

In the beginning of this season – I think it’s still this season, at least; the one where we transitioned out of dark chaos and into a lighter, brighter version of chaos – we unexpectedly got pregnant and had Kavanagh around the same time friends our age were becoming grandparents. That was about six years ago and we were feeling the full range of parenthood with an adult kid out of the house, a high schooler, three 13-year-olds, an elementary schooler, and the two littlest littles, toddler and infant. Never would I have guessed this would be my life twenty years earlier. Or ten years ago. Or five years ago.

But it’s so good. I mean, mostly, of course – not perfect, and there are plenty of things that are expletive-worthy at times (we call this “writing material” in our house) – but overall, it’s so good.

During that other season, I didn’t know things could be good again. And I’m so glad I made it through to this side. I wish I could’ve told myself how good it would be. So instead, if you’re in that dark, painful place, where you never thought you’d see yourself, I’ll tell you: Give it a few years, friend. Or, just give it a week. And then another, and another.

Keep pushing the pen and filling those pages.

You can do this. Cling to Jesus and keep going forward. So much good is on the other side of steadfastness.

Also last week – I think it was around the same day we were working on our list of dreams, but it was definitely the same day I was journaling without knowing what to write about – I had to take all the kids to an appointment. And even though most of our kids are older now I still don’t miss those days of a small child screaming in the back of the vehicle loud enough for other cars to hear as we drive past them on the Parks Highway.

I mean, it’s been ages since that last happened…I think it was last September? But there we were, running late from the wrestle over seatbelts and sliding sideways to a stop at the foot of the icy driveway where I informed my youngest passenger through gritted teeth NO YOU ARE NOT STAYING HOME AND ALSO NO I AM NOT SUDDENLY GETTING THE GAME YOU WHINED ABOUT NOT WANTING TO TAKE FOR THE LAST TWELVE MINUTES BECAUSE WE ARE LEAVING AND YOU ARE COMING TOO so help me.

Eight kids and twenty-four years later, do we get better at this? I hope so.

So we went down the highway amid screaming louder than the traffic, louder than TobyMac, and I prayed in tongues and considered my options. We could turn around and cancel the appointment, but that would be giving in. So we had to keep going.

One thing I have learned and can remind myself in these moments is that even when the noise doesn’t diminish, or the pain stays the same, or the situation doesn’t look any different, God is still working. He is doing. Prayer is changing things whether I see those changes instantly or not.

If we are praying, He is working. And He is working anyway, even when we’re too weak or distracted or exhausted or, or, or…because it’s not about our feelings.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

– Romans 8:22-26

The tantrum continued all the way into town and finally stopped in the parking lot. We completed our appointment, went back home, assigned consequences, and moved on with the day.

A couple hours later I was chatting with a friend on the phone.

“I have a word for you,” she said. “Keep going. I’m not sure what that means, but I clearly hear that for you.” She didn’t know I had said the same thing in different words in my journal earlier that day, or that I had pondered a 180 on the highway just a few hours ago.

Just keep pushing the pen across the paper, Love. The words will come. And now, as I type this, I’m on page 370 in the journal. Just a few pages to go before this one is filled, and I’ll need to start a new one.

How did I get to page 370? The same way we got to the new year, and the same way we got to every year before this one: We kept going.

We just keep pushing the pen, filling the pages in front of us. We trust, and wait, and persevere, whether anyone notices or not.

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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.

taste and see, or run and hide

Posted on by December 9, 2024

While the boys tangled the tree in ribbon and bedecked it with shiny balls that would hopefully not shatter overnight from the cats’ meddling, I tucked my coffee behind the nativity set and rearranged Wodehouse books in the library.

“Do you know how many Wodehouse books we have?” I asked Vince, and he shook his head. Except for the passages I have read aloud to him while laughing so hard I gasped for air, he has never read Wodehouse.

taste and see, or run and hide: it's all about what we know | Shannon Guerra

“This stack here…” I pointed to a wobbly column over two feet high, and he began to laugh but stopped short when I continued, “and this stack here,” pointing to another stack behind the first one, which wasn’t as tall but probably kept the first column from collapsing, like a literary version of a flying buttress.

“How many books did Wodehouse write?” he asked – envy, inspiration, and disbelief, all in one question.

“Seventy or eighty, I think…not counting his plays and stuff. We only have about half of them.”

(Only, she said, and then wasted thirty minutes searching the internet for the exact number – it’s 71, if you’re only counting novels – and then another ten minutes adding his three autobiographies to her wishlist.)

I’ve spent money on bad books before but I’m more careful now; I didn’t start collecting Wodehouse books until I knew they were worth it. Now, though, I have tasted and seen – or, laughed and choked on my coffee – and I know they are good.

“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, ‘Do trousers matter?'”

“The mood will pass, sir.”

– P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

A few days later, the other part of our book order arrived. I cut the shipping bag open with kitchen scissors and pulled out the used paperbacks.

“More Wodehouse!” I grinned.

“More Wodehouse,” Vin repeated, with far less enthusiasm. “Like, more cowbell.“

“Hey. If you read Wodehouse, you’d be excited too,” I told him.

She laughed — a bit louder than I could have wished in my frail state of health, but then she is always a woman who tends to bring plaster falling from the ceiling when amused.

― P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

But he hasn’t tasted and seen yet. He’s only heard and marveled, off and on, as I’ve barely muffled hysterical laughter way too late at night, trying not to wake up the kids.

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 34:8-9

Vin is, however, grateful he married a thrifty woman who hates shopping, whose main addictions are classic lit and wool yarn, both of which can be found in practically new condition at secondhand stores. And they both give a good return, if stewarded well and not just hoarded.

“For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.

– Matthew 25:14-15

So we segue to the parable of the talents, a story of a king who entrusts his servants with varying amounts of wealth to steward for him. And you know what happens: The master returns, and the ones who had five and two doubled their talents and were rewarded, but the one who had only one talent…well, let’s see what it says:

He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, “Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.”

– Matthew 25:24-25

Huh. He knew, so he was afraid, so he hid. Where have we heard that before?

Oh, right. Here, in the very beginning:

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

– Genesis 2:15-17

In the beginning there was a certain amount of knowing that we weren’t supposed to have, because it would usurp our trust of God and make us focus on the wrong things. We began with a holy fear of God, which is trust and surrender. But in knowing the wrong things, we moved into an unholy fear that chose to walk in anxiety and control, which is just us saying, I know better than You do.

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

So the woman takes and eats the fruit, and she also gives some to her husband who was with her (side note: We can stop blaming the fall entirely on women, thanks), and he eats it, too.

They realize they’re…you know, nekkid. Fig leaves, loincloths, strategically placed locks of hair.

We pick up in verse 8:

And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”

And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”

– Genesis 3:8-10

Maybe it’s because when they did it their own way, they did it backwards. They didn’t taste and see; they saw and tasted – and then they knew something they were never intended to. They traded intimacy for exposure. They forfeited holy fear and got terror, shame, and separation instead.

We do this when we get things backwards, too. Recently I had a meeting coming up and I realized I was rehearsing information, asking myself possible questions and answers. I wondered if I was being too vulnerable, if I could trust this other person, if they would misunderstand my intentions.

Why am I nervous? I finally asked myself. Because I want this, and I don’t want to blow it.

Also, I felt exposed – like maybe I’d stepped forward where I should’ve held back; should’ve kept that talent under wraps where it would be safe, and do nothing.

Master, you gave me one book and I stuffed it under my mattress and did not read it, did not wrinkle the pages, did not bend the spine or dog-ear the corners, didn’t even take any notes. I did not get anything out of it, but also, look! It’s in pristine condition, so you won’t be mad at me for damaging it. Here you go. Thanks so much for the loan.

It’s the wrong kind of fear. That kind is the fear of man, and it’s all about impressing others, worrying about what someone else will think.

Surrender and honesty disarms it, though. So I asked myself these questions:

Do I want what I want, or do I want what He wants? Can I trust Him to know what I want better than I do, and know how to arrange it better than I could? Can I trust Him with the future, with relationships, with this conversation?

Do I trust Him to direct the situation and the timing? Do I trust Him to go ahead of me, and to give me the right words and wisdom?

Yes, yes, all yes. I have tasted and seen and I know He is good.

So suddenly the pressure is off, and there’s just joy and freedom. Just pleasant conversation and curiosity of what God does through it. The vulnerability doesn’t feel like exposure; it feels like faith that’s spelled risk, and it brings a return.

This is the talent surrendered that grows and multiplies, rather than runs and hides.

I used to know someone who was hurting and fighting and angry most of the time. Now I realize she literally just didn’t know what she was missing. She had not tasted and seen, so she ran and hid. What she knew made her feel exposed, and fear manifested as anger, so she rejected everything associated with God. I knew you to be a hard man…but she missed experiencing Him as the one who laughs and heals and walks in the garden, the one who made mercy triumph over judgment.

We only fight against goodness because we don’t realize how good it is. When we have no concept of real peace or freedom or joy, we think rebellion is better.

It’s changing the way I pray, because she – and everyone – needs to know His goodness. Because if they really knew His goodness, they’d recognize His love for them, and His worthiness of their love.

And their own desire would drive them to Him.

We all need to taste and see. We handle things (and relationships) differently when we know what (and whom) we’re dealing with.

We’re good at following our desires. Where we get it wrong is when our desires are out of alignment, fearful because we know so little, because ignorance breeds fear.

But once we know, there’s freedom and joy and peace, and we bear much fruit, reaping a harvest.

We know what we’re getting into, and we can’t get enough of it.

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‘What ho!’ I said.
‘What ho!’ said Motty.
‘What ho! What ho!’
‘What ho! What ho! What ho!’
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.

– P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves