Category Archives: grandma

being the bride: how the church is equipped for battle

Posted on by April 16, 2026

Maybe like you, at the beginning of the Covid mayhem I went for weeks without seeing anyone outside my immediate family. But then the joke was over, the jig was up — and in a span of 48 hours, four different people stopped by the Lighthouse to either borrow books, return books, or purchase books.

One of those friends also dropped off a little bag of chocolates, at which point the sun broke through the clouds and angels started singing, almost.

being the bride: how the church is equipped for battle in the midst of the wilderness

I ate one of the chocolates at my desk that afternoon. Then, in the spirit of (cough) research, I tried another one to properly compare the varieties. And that one had almonds – and I thought, well, yes, I could use more protein right now.

So there went the neighborhood.

I’ve gone days, weeks, months, whole seasons without chocolate or any kind of sugar. But this wasn’t one of those seasons. Nope, this season was a weird one, when we all fasted from a bunch of things, but sugar probably wasn’t one of them.

We fasted from friends. From gatherings. From normal activities, from typical routines and appointments and meetings. From running to the grocery store whenever we felt like it for whatever we needed.

This was in the very beginning, before things got really suspicious; we didn’t really know where this was going, or when the fast would be over.

I called Grandma to check in on her, and she was good – watching for moose, watching the news, and watching her cat, mostly. Her church is small and doesn’t have online services, and she missed people.

“I haven’t seen your dad in ages,” she said. “He came by the other day to drop off fuel, but he didn’t come in. Just put the receipt in the door.” (Did I mention she misses people?)

“Grandma…he can’t visit with you,” I reminded her.

“Well, I know that,” she scoffed, “but I’d rather visit!” She’s super cute. She’s also totally related to my girls; I heard both Cham and Iree in her frustration.

She told me about quarantines when she was young. They were different, of course; you might say they were actually constitutional. They were specified to certain families and households, not a global lockdown that convinced, coerced, or manipulated everyone into house arrest. In the early ’40s when she was ten, Grandma’s family was quarantined because she had scarlatina.

“They put a big red sign on the door, telling people to stay away. I don’t think they do that anymore.”

Nope, they just tell us all to stay home, and nobody comes close enough to see a sign. But I thought of the red ribbon we tacked to our front door that year – maybe you hung one, too – for Passover and Easter. It, too, was a sign of sorts, representing the protection of the Lord from destruction.

And that is the season we are still in: a season of rest, protection, and healing. Of quiet waiting. Of trusting in the Lord’s covering and guidance, watching for His direction, and wondering what is coming next.

For the Israelites, what happened next was the Exodus. And here’s what happened:

When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near. For God said, “Lest the people change their minds when they see war and return to Egypt.” 

– Exodus 13:17, ESV

God didn’t show them the easy way out. He knew better.

But He didn’t only do it because the Israelites would’ve returned to slavery. And He didn’t only do it because the Israelites would’ve cowered from the war ahead.

He did it because they were called to something much bigger than they imagined, and they needed to learn how to live up to it.

But God led the people around by the way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea. And the people of Israel went up out of the land of Egypt equipped for battle.

– Exodus 13:18, ESV

They needed to learn who (and Who) they were dealing with. They needed to learn that children of God are a force to be reckoned with, not slaves to the expectations of others – or, sometimes worse, their own expectations. Sometimes our expectations are far too low.

This solitude from gathering for those weeks (or for some, months) was like a fast, realigning us, walking us through a wilderness that forced us to seek Him for direction. We can’t do things the way we’ve always done. In many ways, that is bringing long-needed correction.

How will we work without our office and coworkers? How will we learn without the school and the systems? How will we find information when we know we can’t trust the media?

How will we be the church outside the building?

We can rest and surrender, or push fruit and strive – but only one equips us for battle.

We talk a lot about “being the church” and yes, we need to be the church. But we don’t have to spend so much time thinking about how to be the church if we just focus on being the Bride, with our eyes on Him instead of trying to recreate the way we’re used to doing things. “Being the church” tends to move our focus outward: creating (or re-creating) programs, meetings, events, and those are all good things. But they are not the cornerstone; they are extra stones. They aren’t foundational, they are auxiliary.

It reminds me of when I first started homeschooling our oldest. We called it “homeschooling” but we weren’t truly homeschooling at all, because all I had ever known was public school. And that’s what we did at home: we re-created public schooling, from home. It sucked. It was not true homeschooling.

We didn’t start truly homeschooling until I got comfortable enough to buck all the preconceived ideas I had about how school ought to look and just start enjoying learning with our kids. Because school wasn’t the point; education was. And I was missing the forest for the trees.

If we just tweak our routines and programs rather than surrender entirely to what He is prompting us toward, we might be doing the same thing. We cannot be equipped for battle if we’re clinging so tightly to old ways that we cannot catch onto the new thing God is telling us to do.

And it’s hard; it takes time to learn new ways, to rip out old work. But it takes way more time to keep pushing through on something that bears fruit at 10% when it should be bearing fruit at 100%.

It takes even more time when we realize that we should’ve spent that time and effort in an entirely different direction. The best time to obey is when God first tells us. The second best time to obey is right now.

God led the Israelites – just like He’s leading us – by a winding way so they would start walking in their identity instead of returning to slavery. It was for their protection that they didn’t know where they were going. “Lest the people change their minds” – He still protects us from knowing what we can’t handle. The unknowing is for our good, and we can rest in that as long as our eyes are on Him first.

People notice the church being the church all the time. But they will stop what they’re doing to watch the church who is being the Bride, because the Bride knows who she is – protected, obedient, and surrendered, but she’s also equipped for battle.

with vision: reading with Grandma

Posted on by April 19, 2022

Kav’s hair was all tufted and feathery-soft after his bath, copper in some lights and red in others. I sniffed him and ruffled it, and before I knew what I was saying, these words came out of my mouth:

“His hair is so pretty.” I paused. “Listen to me, I sound just like Grandma.”

with vision: reading with Grandma

For nineteen years Grandma has called our babies’ hair pretty, and she doesn’t care whether it’s a boy or a girl she’s crooning over. Anyone under ten is fair game.

The next day, we drove the wavy road to her house in forty degree weather. Puddles from the last few days’ rain on the roadside trail were still glazed with ice in the early afternoon, and you could see their frozen lines crisscrossed on their surface. If you grew up in cold weather, you can imagine the perfect crunch these puddles must make if you walked on them. But no one had walked on these ones yet; through miles of the road, they were all still untouched.

Forgive me for going on about the puddles. We’ve been listening to an audio version of Nicholas Nickleby on these drives between Wasilla and Palmer, and Dickens makes me verbose.

It’s a forty minute drive all the way past the river, and Kav’s tolerance for car rides usually expires around the 25-30 minute mark (I don’t think this is Dickens’ fault). So since we don’t make it over as often as we’d like, we planned a two-for-one-deal this time: Stop at Grandma’s house before heading to Dad’s, where the kids were going to rake leaves while Vin put the winter tires on the Stagecoach.

Grandma turned 88 this month. She’s been losing her vision for years; her peripheral vision is still good, but faces are hard to see and reading is almost impossible. She misses driving and seeing people, but she especially misses reading.

And she doesn’t like audiobooks and I don’t blame her; we both must have similar attention spans.

But I was praying about it the week before and an idea struck me, so I asked her about it that day:

What if we could read to her from home? What if we recorded some of our school readings out loud, and burned them to a CD, and gave her a new one every time we came over?

It would be different than a normal audiobook. It would be us in all our mess and glory – Finnegan’s interruptions, questions from the kids, babbling from Kav and meowing from the cats – and it would be less like being alone or being read to by some stranger (professional though they may be), and more like we’re there with her.

And she liked that idea. She also liked knowing that it would be help us with school, motivating the kids to practice reading aloud.

So we’ve been filling the Voice Memo app on my phone with chapters and we’re halfway through several books now…and so far, only one of them is interspersed with me bossing a toddler to stop jumping on the couch, stop wrestling with his baby brother, and stop driving his racecar over the cat.

See? Like I said, it’s just like we’re there.

I called her again a few days ago – her number is the only one I still dial because it hasn’t ever changed – and gave her an update on our progress. Who’s reading what, what’s almost done, which characters get silly voices.

“Some people are just readers,” she said. “Other people read with vision.”

And then she started telling me about when she was a kid. They had poor light in the evening but she read in it anyway; she needed glasses long before she got them, and maybe that’s at least partly why her vision is gone now.

“It was a different world. People will never know what a different world it was back then.” She talked about the rationing in World War II. Sugar was rationed; it was a rare occasion when you could go to the store and see bags of sugar on the shelf. Paper products were hard to come by.

So many things are ever so much better, she said. Our lighting is so much better now. People have no excuse for not being readers these days. It was an altogether different world then.

But that day when we visited, it was the normal, familiar world of Grandma’s house: We dropped off cookies, the boys used her recliner as a merry-go-round, and we fortified ourselves with hugs before heading to Dad’s for yardwork.

And when Finn went up to her for his hug, these words came out of her mouth:

“Look at you, and your pretty hair!” she said, running her fingers through his blond tufts. But we saw that coming, I guess.

pace car: the forced pause when leaders want to run

Posted on by October 5, 2023

The day ahead was packed, and I was nervous.

The facility was secured, and after weeks of untangling the schedules of seventeen leaders to bring everything into alignment, the lineup was finally set: Seven chapters and twenty-one slots, over three days, to finally film the remaining portions of a book study we’d been working on all year.

pace car: the forced pause when leaders want to run

And it all started that night. But first, a completely unrelated meeting. No biggie.

Kavanagh is seven months old now and outgrew his ability to sleep through these meetings weeks ago. So halfway through, I checked to see if there was an urgent text from Vince summoning me home to feed him.

There were no texts of that nature, but I’d just missed a call from my dad. It was an odd time of day for him to call. And he’d also left a voicemail.

I stepped out of the meeting to listen to it, and immediately called him back.

He said Grandma was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. She’d collapsed while she was on the phone with the neighbor; the neighbor called my dad, who rushed over, used his key to get in the house, and found her. Called the paramedics. Called my uncle. Called me.

I wanted to rush to the hospital, too. Instead, I left the meeting and went the other way; I came home and nursed the baby. Tried to read the Bible but stared at the page without seeing words. I wanted to see her. Wanted to be there. Wanted to know what was happening. Wanted to know if this was anything like last time or if this was going to be the last time.

But I sat on the couch with Kavanagh and waited for him to fall asleep.

Once I was finally out the door and on the highway, the first few lights were in my favor and I caught up to the train running parallel, blaring its horn at every crossing. I got ahead of it for a minute and then stopped at a red light as it passed. Caught up to it again when the light turned green, then it got ahead again, leapfrog style, as I stopped at another intersection. Cars pulled up behind me while we waited for the light to change.

The light turned green and I hit the gas, and the train and I were even. But a white pickup had pulled onto the highway just ahead and was cruising at a cool 35 miles an hour when I wanted to go twice that. And maybe I could’ve gotten away with it. But maybe not.

It is your pace car, the Spirit said. Sometimes I put things in front of you to slow you down on purpose.

Getting there earlier wouldn’t have mattered. My dad and uncles were in the waiting room when I got there and they’d been there for a while. Grandma was sedated, getting a temporary pacemaker, and then she would be medivaced to Anchorage. And it wasn’t like the last time. This time we couldn’t be in the room with her.

So we waited. My uncle finished reading the paper and I took it from him and found the crossword puzzle. I started working on it as people came to the intake desk and talked way too loudly about intimate health issues for everyone in the waiting room to hear.

A young woman came in, hysterical and in pain. I tried to ignore her but she didn’t want to be ignored, and years of parenting flagged my extremely sensitive BS-o-meter. That, or I’m a terrible person (could be) but she didn’t sound genuine to me. And maybe I was wrong…but maybe not.

She sobbed and asked for a wheelchair. Asked the nurse to slow down as she wheeled her in front of my family. And then parked a few feet away and kept crying…loudly.

And I kept trying to ignore her. Tried to avoid looking in her direction. Just filled in all those little crossword boxes and tried not to hear her.

But I heard the Lord, and He said, Go pray for her.

And I said, You have got to be kidding me.

In a beautiful demonstration of His ways are not our ways, He did not take my iPhone, revoke my internet privileges, or strike me with lightning, which is what many of us parents wish we could do when our children talk back to us.

But no, He didn’t do any of those things. He just repeated Himself. Go pray for her.

And I said, She doesn’t need prayed for. She’s faking.

He said, She still needs prayed for.

And in a beautiful demonstration of petulant-but-resigned reluctance, I said, Fine. My uncles and cousin were across from me. My dad was next to me, helping with the crossword puzzle. And I asked, Can’t I just pray for her from here?

And He said, No. You go put your hands on her, and let Me touch her.

And I had nothing to argue to that. But in my heart I thought, Well, crap.

I let out one of those huffy, frustrated, scoffing breaths through my nose. Bad, bad Christian.

“Here,” I told Dad, throwing the pen down and pushing the crossword puzzle over to him. “I’m gonna go pray for this girl.” God help her.

I walked across the room and – set your mind at ease – I was a nice person. Truly. As soon as I decided to obey, ministry-mode kicked in and the Spirit took over.

I asked her if I could pray for her. She said yes (people usually do). I told her my name, asked her what hers was, and then I prayed for her healing. For her comfort. For her protection and wisdom. I said amen, and she said thank you. I asked if she wanted some water, and she said no. I said, “Well, I do,” and I left and got some.

Somewhere in there I missed the helicopter taking off. When I came back with my water, my uncle told me it left, and we all waited for the nurse to come out and tell us what we needed to know.

Grandma would get a real pacemaker that night. They would reassess in the morning. And as long as she responded well, she would probably stay in the ICU for a day or two, then come home.

And home is where I needed to be, too. Vin texted that Kavanagh was up and needing me, and a bazillion things still had to be done before the first night of filming.

I drove back up the highway and approached the biggest intersection in our little town as the light turned yellow. There was no time to get through it before it turned red, so I stopped. But a white pickup – probably not the same one as earlier – was in the lane next to me and blew right through it.

Cars pulled up behind me while we waited. And I heard the Lord say, Sometimes you lead by being the one who stops when it’s the right thing to do.

So, it’s like I already told you. I might be a terrible, awful, mean, unfeeling person…but maybe not.