grace note

Me: Stop bossing your brother.

Child: I’m not bossing him, I’m telling him!

Oh, of course. So sorry.

grace note: pursuing harmony without preaching to the choir

We’re still working on teamwork, teaching our kids to be encouragers instead of critics, and to get the plank out of their own eyes and mind their own business. It’s hard to model this as a mom because, well, I’m bossing them about not bossing each other. After almost fourteen years of parenthood, I’m still learning when to step back – to wait before interfering, intervening, stepping in, or advising, and just let them have at each other. (Also known as “taking it outside.”)

I mean, teaching them to problem-solve and work through conflict. Yeah, that’s it.

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It happens, though, when the Spirit takes over the rooms of our house and we step into our calling. It’s dangerous. It gets crowded with growing pains. It might wreck any preconceived notion we ever had about what our lives might look like.

“Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Sometimes the unexpected happens, and sometimes we have a hard time getting along with each other.

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Frustration and bickering can bluster the day away, and criticism chills in hearts that should love each other. Maybe we just want to give the answer and fix things quickly. Or, maybe we want to be seen as someone who has all the answers, overflowing with unwanted advice and unsought counsel. Sometimes it’s out of fear or lack of control, but more often it’s from insecurity or pride, which are just different sides of the same coin. That person is doing things differently than I would do them. I would never do it that way. Since they are not doing things the way I would do them, they must need my input.

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

– Philippians 2:1-4

In nothing is the power of the dark lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all who still oppose him.

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

One of the slimiest tricks of the enemy is getting us — kids and adults — to attack each other with discouragement, misunderstanding, ignorant judgment, or anger. He’s constantly on the lookout to divide and conquer God’s people so we will take each other out, and when we fall for it, we all lose.

Anytime someone asks what the greatest difference in our life is, my #1 answer is church. That is what we gave up in order to answer the call to adopt. It is also what I hear over and over again from families….church is what they miss the most. It is very sad that the one place/group of people that should be the greatest support and most welcoming place is the one we’re often isolated from the most.

– anonymous adoptive mom

A friend of mine wrote that, and they are hard words to read. So much is at stake.

We’re made to win this, though. As an adoptive family working through attachment issues, we’re learning to live this daily:

We look at our fellow men far too much from the standpoint of our own prejudices. They may be wrong, they may have their faults and foibles, they may call out all the meanest and most hateful in us. But they are not all wrong; they have their virtues, and when they excite our bad passions by their own, they may be as ashamed and sorry as we are irritated. And I think some of the best, most contrite, most useful of men and women, whose prayers prevail with God and bring down blessings into the homes in which they dwell, often possess unlovely traits that furnish them with their best discipline. The very fact that they are ashamed of themselves drives them to God; they feel safe in His presence. And while they lie in the very dust of self-confusion at His feet, they are dear to Him and have power with Him.

– Elizabeth Prentiss, Stepping Heavenward

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.

– Philippians 2:5-9

We must be savvy…and be kind, not forgetting that we’re on the same side.

God, I’m praying tonight for protection over relationships — in families, in friendships, in work and ministry, that we would be so secure in Your love for us that we wouldn’t be insecure in our love for each other. We pray for an increase in unity, and conviction over divisiveness and friendly fire. Forgive us for being arrogant, insensitive, and critical. Help us to know how to support, how to ask, how to serve, how to encourage. 

Heaps of grace on each of us, to each other. The battle is won when we have each other’s back.

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This is day 28 of Without Ceasing: 31 Days of Relentless Prayer. Find the other posts here. To get new posts right in your inbox, subscribe here.

a union full of grace

It’s our 17th anniversary. We have the day off, but nothing planned – I think we’re hoping for an extra midweek Sabbath, of sorts. I love this man and our life together; our success has been hard-fought and full of grace, and little credit goes to either of us because we messed up right and left in our first several years of marriage, and spent the next several trying to detangle it all.

a union full of grace: truth about rejoicing and mourning

We are so grateful, and yet we know that there are others close to us that are hurting and raw in this area. How do you celebrate anything without rubbing salt in the wounds of others who are in pain?

For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us.

– Romans 12:3-6a

We praise the achievements of advanced students while we recognize the struggle of those who fight hard just to remember the process of long division. We cheer for families who experience great triumph while we honor those who are still in the trial of their lives. We rejoice at healings, while holding the hands of those who are still in the hospital bed.

Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.

– Romans 12:10-12

As I finished writing last night’s post, we learned that cancer took a family member with the finality that left my beautiful cousin without her husband. We celebrate our anniversary this year with sobriety in the awareness that life is far too short sometimes.

Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.

– Romans 12:13-15

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Lord, I’m praying tonight for those who are hurting – that You would comfort them and protect them from the lies of the enemy; that those who are going through loss would know that You are not done with them yet, that their story is not finished, and that Your plans for them are wondrous and good in spite of anything the enemy has thrown at them. I’m praying for hope, for encouragement, for truth, for healing…for purity in marriages and health in families everywhere.

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Life is messy and full of hurt sometimes. We think beauty resides in the ideal – the poster-child family, the picturesque life – and it does, but that beauty is surface deep and often fleeting. We look, we admire, and we walk away. We move on, as through a shop full of beautiful curios.

We look twice, though, at the beauty forged in life’s gritty crucible, that grace that makes us stop in our tracks: the child who learns to read in spite of multiple diagnoses, the couple who makes it through infidelity and scandal to ministering to other marriages, the grieving spouse who climbs out of devastating loss to find joy again. We admire the tenacity and steadfastness of those who turned shame on its head and walked out warriors. We pause, we think, we stop and stare, as in a museum of heroes and heirlooms – none flawless, all scarred from age and wear, having earned their stripes in the trenches. Full of grace, they display the awful truth that rejoicing and mourning go together, creating the alloy called victory.

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This is day 14 of Without Ceasing: 31 Days of Relentless Prayer. Find the other posts here. To get new posts right in your inbox, subscribe here.

without ceasing: 31 days of relentless prayer

without ceasing: relentless prayer (31 days series from Copperlight Wood)

*Most of this series is now found in Oh My Soul: Encountering God in Honest, Unconventional (and Sometimes Messy) Prayer and is available for purchase at Amazon and anywhere books are sold.

day 2: every second

day 3: gentle dynamite

day 4: lighting a fire

day 5: prepared for us

day 6: stirred, not shaken

day 7: this peace is for you

day 8: storming the castle

day 9: battleground

day 10: leap, and trust

day 11: give me a sign

day 12: wait

day 13: aloud

day 14: a union full of grace

day 15: before Jericho

day 16: turn it over

day 17: tell me where to go

day 18: a path which few can tell

day 19: steadfast

day 20: all things for good

day 21: on our watch

day 22: for a generation to come

day 23: about time

day 24: behold, we live

day 25: patience with joy

day 26: finishing well

day 27: filling the house

day 28: grace note

day 29: epic: when God redeems your story

day 30: called: who we are at the end of our story

day 31: redirect: He speaks in the surrender