Category Archives: marriage

under pressure: staying ahead when the chase is on

Posted on by June 16, 2023

Eight months pregnant, which means thirty-six weeks down, and four (maybe) to go. I’m at the clumsy stage, and I don’t mean cute-clumsy – I mean, I am JarJar Binks playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey after drinking three shots of espresso spiked with whiskey. I can barely put on socks without help, and attempting to put shoes or pants on while standing up is now prohibited.

under pressure: staying ahead when the chase is on

We’re also at the stage where the general public feels free to let loose with comments like, “Wow, you have got to be overdue by now” and “It doesn’t look like you could possibly get any bigger” and other thoughtful, sensitive, encouraging insights. But that’s okay, because it coincided with me losing my filter around the same time, and I don’t mind responding like an old woman who has lost all sense of manners, tact, and decorum…and let’s be honest, those already aren’t my strong suits. Sometimes the snark flies fast and furious.

Example: “Wow, this is your eighth child!! Don’t you know how that happens?”

Well, yes – 21 years of a (mostly) rocking marriage. Do you have any idea how many times we haven’t gotten pregnant? Thousands. Bless your heart…

But it’s a season of speeding up when it seems like things ought to be slowing down. We ought to be resting, nesting, and preparing before Kavanagh comes, but his birth coincides with the holidays and book launches and accelerating ministry. And none of those things are negotiables that fall into the “everything is permissible for me, but not all things are beneficial” category – they’re all good and necessary right now.

Everyone was much too tired to speak or eat. The Horses, without waiting to be unsaddled, lay down at once. So did Aravis and Shasta.

About ten minutes later the careful Hwin said, “But we mustn’t go to sleep. We’ve got to keep ahead of that Rabadash.”

‘No,” said Bree very slowly. “Mustn’t go to sleep. Just a little rest.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

This is my favorite of the Narnia books; I don’t know how many times I’ve read it or how many times I’ve quoted it in posts, chapters, and teachings. This is the story that speaks to me about His Presence in all of our seasons. And here, the two Humans and the two Horses are running ahead of an evil army, to bring warning in time to a kingdom that doesn’t know it is under attack.

“P-please,” said Hwin, very shyly, “I feel just like Bree that I can’t go on. But when Horses have humans (with spurs and things) on their backs, aren’t they often made to go on when they’re feeling like this? And then they find they can. I m-mean – oughtn’t we to be able to do more even, now that we’re free? It’s all for Narnia.”

And here, God is working on my expectations and shifting my paradigms of what ought to be, as things continue to ramp up even when we’d normally take it all down several notches.

….In reality she was quite right, and if Bree had had a Tarkaan on his back at that moment to make him go on, he would have found that he was good for several hours’ hard going. But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.

We often think that even the presence of pressure is wrong. My train of thought usually runs something like this: If I feel pressure, that means I’m stressed, and if I’m stressed, it means I’m not calm, and if I’m not calm, I’m not trusting God, and if I’m not trusting God, I must be fearful. It eventually equates pressure with fear or sin. But what if that’s not always the truth?

“I hope we’re in time,” murmured Hwin.

Then they began going up, slowly and zigzagging a good deal, for the hills were steep….

“Hullo!” he said suddenly. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” said Bree, turning round. Hwin and Aravis did the same.

“That,” said Shasta, pointing. “It looks like smoke. Is it a fire?”

“Sand-storm, I should say,” said Bree.

“Not much wind to raise it,” said Aravis.

“Oh!” exclaimed Hwin. “Look! There are things flashing in it. Look! They’re helmets – and armor. And it’s moving: moving this way.”

“By Tash!” said Aravis. “It’s the army. It’s Rabadash.”

“Of course it is,” said Hwin. “Just what I was afraid of. Quick! We must get to Anvard before it.”

We tend to interpret pressure as a lack of faith, or poor planning – and sometimes it is those things, but not always. Not right now in this season we’re in. Because sometimes the pressure is there to provide safety and margin so we can relax and rest later, so that having done all, we can stand.

This race was very grueling for the Horses. As they topped each ridge they found another valley and another ridge beyond it; and though they knew they were going in more or less the right direction, no one knew how far it was to Anvard….

“Quick! Quick!” shouted Aravis. “We might as well not have come at all  if we don’t reach Anvard in time. Gallop, Bree, gallop. Remember you’re a war horse.”

….And certainly both Horses were doing, if not all they could, all they thought they could; which is not quite the same thing.

We experience pressure in labor so we can deliver our babies. We go through pressure in labor to deliver anything else, also.

He’s teaching me to abide hard amid the increase in activity. To take every component and event and non-negotiable to Him, one thing at a time, and ask Him about it – keeping short accounts to continually communicate and hear His will in what to do.

At that moment everyone’s feelings were completely altered by a sound from behind. It was not the sound they had been expecting to hear – the noise of hoofs and jingling armor, mixed, perhaps, with Calormene battle-cries. Yet Shasta knew it at once. It was the same snarling roar he had heard that moonlit night when they first met Aravis and Hwin. Bree knew it too…And Bree now discovered that he had not really been going as fast – not quite as fast – as he could.

Seasons of pressure are no time to take things for granted, and we’re learning (again) to depend on Him and abide at a deeper level than we otherwise would if it was a more comfortable, slow time. It’s not that we’re not resting. But we’re not resting as much as we normally would.

 “It’s not fair,” thought Shasta. “I did think we’d be safe from lions here!”

He looked over his shoulder. Everything was only too clear. A huge tawny creature, its body low to the ground…was behind them. And it was nearer every second and half second.

In our house, in this season, we are writing, formatting, and finalizing the Companion Journal to Oh My Soul, and praying, discipling, and ministering. We are finishing a term of homeschool and pushing through a few last deadlines before December, when early labor will probably start in earnest. And amid All The Things, we’ll get a Christmas tree and lights up, spend days and evenings with friends, and nest the house into a frenzy as we prepare for a homebirth here at the Lighthouse.

And in your house, you’re doing All The Things, too. The trick is not to get out of as many things as possible, or to do as many things as possible, but to do everything He calls us to in His perfect time…which is often different from what we expect. Sometimes, harder than we expect. And sometimes, faster than we expect.

The Lion chases them and spurs them faster to safety; without His pressure they never would have made it in time.

He is the same Lion who chases us. Every time we’ve run with Him, we’ve been right on time. He’s leading us to birth and new life so we can rout and vanquish the enemy.

____

Related: How do we deal with the pressure and still find margin, creating a sustainable culture of rest and refilling? The November newsletter is all about this and it comes out next week. Subscribe here if you need to.

overtaken: what happens when we let go in surrender

Posted on by October 17, 2022

I didn’t know exactly where to put among non-fiction categories; it’s equal parts memoir, devotional, parenting, and snark. But it’s 100% lifeblood, poured out in manuscript form.

Vin quit his job in May after two months of revelation, preparation and planning. Three days before his last day at work we found out we were pregnant with our eighth kiddo, and there was no going back.

overtaken: what happens when we let go in surrender

The manna ceased. Stopped. All done, finis. There was no going back, no back-up plan – the water was rushing in the Jordan River behind them, and in front of them was a fortified city to conquer. In between, they were all in.

And this is where we’ve lived for the last five months. Learning publishing, distribution, formatting, cover design, formatting, even blankety-blank page numbers. Doing the homeschooling, ministry, morning sickness, home repairs, research, the whole shebang, all the stuff, any seventy hours of the week we want. We’ve been living the dream, but the dream is a ton of work.

We’ve swung up and down the spectrum of, “Oh, God, how can we do this?” to “Oh my word, I think it’s working!” and back again to “I have no idea what to do and I hate this part.” YouTube tutorials were made for such a time as this.

Maybe if the manna had kept coming, some of them might have thought to go back to the river, hoping that God would hold back the water again and let them return. But no, this was a sharp knife, cutting off any hesitation to obey – no manna meant they were invested, they were staying, and the only direction they were going was forward.

And my life needs this. A commitment I need to let go of, an unhealthy relationship that needs firm boundaries, that threshold I need to walk through: I’ve been using the blunt edge of a knife to whack at them every once in a while, but those things have been on the cutting board for a long time. Probably way too long, and we’re not getting anywhere.

Turn it over, He tells me. And I squirm a little about it, but He’s right there, saying, Don’t hesitate to obey, Love. You are invested, you are staying, the only direction you’re going is forward.

Before we were able to turn it over full time, we turned it over in weeks at a time, whenever Vince could take a chunk of time off work long enough to make some progress forward.

Vince took two weeks off so I could work on a special project while he homeschooled the kids. I cloistered upstairs in the Thinkery – just a small table by a window, covered in books, papers, a laptop, and a full pot of chai tea containing about 10 cups of caffeinated goodness.

This particular project was part of Vince and Shannon’s Christmas List that we wrote in the fall, and completing it directly related to obeying Him with the sharp knife and stepping through the threshold. But I’d been putting it off for over a year, and God sat me down for a talk.

He told me He had something wonderful for me if I would just hold out my hands and accept it. The problem was I was already holding onto something else, and I didn’t want to let go.

And He was patient with me – because He is like that – and He said, Whenever you’re ready for it, Love. But how long do you really want to wait for Me to bless you with this?

I realized I was being an idiot and stopped dragging my feet. I let go, grabbed hold, and hung on.

– Oh My Soul

Oh My Soul proof

I’ve learned since then that letting go happens in phases. He was preparing us then for what He offered last spring – and the letting go we did last spring was the sharp knife preparing us for whatever is ahead.

Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” And he’s right, though I recently read a book where the author trashed Hemingway because he misunderstood, thinking he was saying that writing is easy (sarcasm is totally lost on some people). He proceeded to argue for the same thing Hemingway actually meant, making it obvious that not only did he miss the point, but he rehashed it with more bumbling and less power.

Maybe he could’ve said it better if he’d bled more. Because rattling off a ton of words is one thing, but pouring out your lifeblood onto paper (or screen) for the world to see, judge, and interpret, well…there’s nothing easy about that.

But it’s good.

I went through some old journal entries last week, and came across this one that had been flagged with a yellow sticky note since I wrote it back in July of 2017:

And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God.

– Deuteronomy 28:2, ESV

Overtake. As in, catch up to you from behind, and go ahead of you. Those things you’ve striven for without seeing fruit – those blessings will catch up and go farther than you expect when you are faithful to obey.

I just laid Finn down for his nap, pulling the door shut behind me so the light wouldn’t wake him up. I watched his fluffy blond head disappear in the darkness and I covered him with his blanket.

And I knew he was there though I couldn’t see him.

I touched his forehead in the blackness and he was just as real as when the door was open and the light spilled in.

And God said, Those things you can’t see, that fruit you’ve been praying for, is just as real as Finnegan. The healing for your kids. The healing in your hearts. The writing career, the new home with space for kids who need it, having Vince home and doing work and ministry together – it’s just as real, even though you haven’t seen it yet. It’s just as real as this baby sleeping in his dark room. You can touch him and prove to yourself that what your eyes can’t see is still real.

Keep praying for what you can’t see, He said. Soon the light will come on and you’ll be amazed with what’s been there all along, waiting to emerge with vivid color and beauty.

And now we do see it – or, most of it, at least. Six months after I wrote that, we moved into the Lighthouse, two months later we found out Vince could quit his job to write full time, and as of this week, we’ve each published one of those books that spent years on the back burner. We’re seeing glimpses of healing and growth in our kids who desperately need it. We are working together, and last month we also started doing ministry together in ways we never expected.

It doesn’t look like what we dreamed of, or even what we planned for. And no, it doesn’t look opulent or magazine-perfect – but it looks like He’s had His hand upon us in ways that we never realized.

It looks like the threshold He asked us about several years ago.

A couple of weeks ago I was in the beginning of Acts, and read this:

He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

– Acts 1:7-8, ESV

And then I wrote about it on social media and heard God clearly say, “Do you want the plan? Or do you want power?” 

I have so badly wanted to know the times and seasons – but I am learning to bleed in surrender. When I don’t, I bumble over too many of my own words and miss the point in my efforts to control the blessing. And there’s nothing wrong with planning or preparing when it’s anchored in surrender – but He’s teaching me that, if given the choice between knowing the plan or having the power, I want power every time.

And that’s nothing to be ashamed of or shy about, because when we choose surrender over control, it’s what He wants for us, too.

______

Oh My Soul: Encountering God in Honest, Unconventional (and Sometimes Messy) Prayer is now available here on our site and everywhere books are sold.

great(er) expectations: when His ways are not our ways

Posted on by August 23, 2018

I think I forgot to mention it last time, so let’s pretend it was because I’m a good wife and didn’t want to rub in the fact that VINCE WAS WRONG IN GUESSING THE GENDER OF THE BABY (ahem) but for the record…we’re having a boy. Ta da!

gre

His name is Kavanagh and we’re at 23 weeks, and both of us are doing great – one morning I ate one bowl of vanilla ice cream, some stewed peaches, two shots of espresso with milk, three strips of bacon, two pieces of bread, some lettuce, tomato, mayo and pepper.

So, yes, that means I had coffee, ice cream with fruit, and a BLT for breakfast, and I’m eating like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Sometimes, most of the time, I go through these days like it’s no big deal because, well, this isn’t our first rodeo. I can feel him kicking right now, and usually it’s familiar enough to not pay attention to. But there are other times when I stop to think about it and realize we are having another baby, there is a tiny human in there, and I’m so stunned I hardly know what to think.

We never in a million years expected this little guy, but this year has shocked us with so many things we never expected, we should get used to it, I guess. His ways are not our ways.

Our expectations are wildly deceptive. I scrolled facebook and saw an ad that said, “Dream of being published?” featuring a gorgeous 20-something, tan, white-blonde girl in a heavy sweater, short-shorts, and messy bun; she sat in a pristine room with an airy curtain and smiled at her iPad. So glam. So attractive.

So false. Don’t fall for it.

Here I am, sitting on the bed with the laptop, next to two cats and a basket full of unfolded laundry (hashtag glamlife), staring at the screen for twenty minutes and getting nothing else accomplished. Let’s not talk about what my hair looks like.

The mission, should I choose to accept it, is to tweak an article. You know, just a couple of simple fixes – add a space for a link here, make a few statements about something there, no biggie – and the editor says, It won’t take you more than a few minutes.

Ha. You can always tell someone who’s not a writer by a statement like that.

He is sort of right; the actual typing will probably take all of 22 seconds. It’s the thinking part that takes at least 45 minutes of staring, typing, back spacing, and deleting until everything clarifies into the appropriate “tweak.” Yep. Piece of cake, no problem. Twenty minutes down, twenty-five minutes to go. Yay.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

– Thomas Mann

That girl in the ad was smiling at her tablet, for crying out loud – not throwing it across the room in utter and complete vexation at 224 pages of misloaded documents and jacked up indentations and formatting. Those lying marketers.

There was no mention of her messy kitchen heaped with dishes and neglected breakfast leftovers, or the piles of papers and to-do lists all over the desk and coffee table, or the computer cords stationed throughout the house so you can charge whenever the low battery alert comes on, or the stifled expletives when documents won’t load correctly on various platforms.

Maybe I should do something with my hair, I thought. Maybe that would make this feel more glam.

(Eh. It helps a little, but still doesn’t fix the formatting in Word for me.)

But we’re just as guilty of having wildly deceptive expectations at the other end of the spectrum, too. We aim too low, we expect too little, and we have not because we ask not because we doubt too much.

We think we will never get there (wherever “there” is). We think we’re not good enough. We think we have to settle. We think our child will never get their act together. We think too much of ourselves and too little of God, under the ruse of piously thinking we’re doing the right thing by not asking too much or expecting too much, because (insert pulpit voice) God’s ways are not our ways, when we forget that that is true because He is so much better than we are…not worse.

I just finished reading Job. This was also not my first rodeo.

I’ve probably read Job between 12-15 times in the last twenty years, but this time I finally realized why reading it has always been a drag for me (is it for you, too?).

It’s not because the subject is about suffering. We read about suffering in pretty much every other book in the Bible, and in most stories in general. But I realized I get frustrated because when I read the Bible, I’m going there to learn about God’s character, and Job primarily isn’t about God’s character – it’s about human nature. And us humans, we’re a piece of work.

These verses are about our presumptions, pride, know-it-all-ness, superiority, and desire to grasp for reason and accusation when life doesn’t make sense. The verses in Job are, for the most part, absolutely no good for a cute Instagram meme (be skeptical if you see one, and check to see what part of Job it’s from) for the same reason we wouldn’t quote the lies of Pharoah in Exodus or the threats of Tobiah and Sanballat in the book of Nehemiah. We can’t take these verses singly without first checking whom (or Whom) they apply to.

Taken alone, they are only half the truth. They are our ways, not His ways; they are the expectations at the low end of the spectrum.

Once I understood that, reading Job this time around was a joy. Well, maybe not a joy, but at least more encouraging, because human nature is fascinating, yes?

And the Lord said to Job: “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.”

– Job 40:1-2, ESV

Sometimes I’m a slow learner, which is why I’ve needed to read it so many times to understand even this much. It’s probably why He’s surprised us twice now: He is continually calling us to raise our expectations.

This is where God calibrates our nature against His.

Our ways would’ve had us done having kids before Finnegan. We would’ve missed out on his bright sunshine, and all the joy Kavanagh will bring with him.

Our ways would’ve struggled and striven for another ten, twenty years, never finishing books and wondering why hope deferred was a constant way of life. But Vince’s book releases next Tuesday, and my next one comes out in October.

Our ways would’ve ruined our marriage, our parenting, our friendships, and future ministry. But He has us growing and learning in each area.

Our ways are not His ways…and He says it as an assurance, not a threat or veiled burden, as it is sometimes communicated to be.

My way would have me throwing the laptop across the room when adding page numbers ruined the spacing of the last half of the manuscript.

But His way is to bring calm, so I can learn how to fix it, and approach the dilemma as writers have for centuries – which, of course, is researching Youtube videos until we get it figured out, and then watching funny cat videos on Facebook for stress reduction therapy.

Which, also for the record, is probably the real reason the lady was smiling at her tablet.