Category Archives: miracles

losing no time: how we make up for past choices

Posted on by September 27, 2023

The days are long, but the summers around here are short and this one is gone. We were a month late in planting the garden this spring because of morning sickness and all sorts of I-couldn’t-even, so here in the middle of September we finally have zucchini blossoms galore…and three miniscule zucchinis, smaller than my pinky finger.

losing no time: how we make up for past choices

Did we miss out on the growing season? Yes, and no. We did what we could. There’s always next year. And we grew plenty, just not veggies.

My belly is growing. People seem skeptical when I tell them Kavanagh’s not due until December – the other day I almost knocked myself over just trying to put my socks on while standing up.

Oh My Soul, the book I started four or five years ago and spent the last four or five months finishing, launches October 16th. The Kindle edition just came available for preorder, and the paperback and hardback should follow next week.

(And now it makes sense that so many people teased us about having twins earlier in the summer because, yes, all these babies – it’s just that some of these babies were books.)

We’re ordering school materials, and to Chamberlain’s delight she discovered only three assignments left in her math book and I completely forgot to order the next level, leaving her math-less for a minimum of three weeks until the next ones ship up here. But I made a quick phone call to our umbrella school, and to my delight, we discovered they had an entire set on hand and we won’t miss a beat. Sorry, kiddo.

So much of what we do is not on an academic plan. Reagan’s language arts involves reading story books and picture books, and I document that it’s for “learning sentence structure and speaking in full sentences” but it’s also for understanding the relationships between birds and trees and seasons, how people interact with each other, and constant repetition of simple concepts we take for granted that fall through the holes in her memory.

Andrey has art on his curriculum, and the materials include cross stitch – not because he loves it (though he doesn’t hate it), but because it is good practice at following instructions and obeying, and gives an almost immediate reward or consequence for whether or not he does so. Botched string and knots to untangle are a remarkable illustration of not following directions; clean stitches that match the picture are clear rewards for obeying.

A few nights ago we talked with a new friend who worries that certain choices he made before he was following Jesus were the wrong ones – and he wasn’t talking about the easy, cut-and-dry kinds of choices. These were the kind with no obvious answer, the kind that people still struggle with even after surrendering to Jesus. They were the kind that force us to lean in hard and listen close, and even after the choice is made we wonder what would’ve happened if we’d chosen differently.

Did he miss out on the growing season? Yes, and no. He didn’t have the intimacy with God to move forward confidently when he had to make the call. But is he growing in that intimacy now, and losing no time in his forward progress? Sure looks like it.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity,
and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

– Psalm 32:1-2, ESV

God is above time, and yet still in time, and on time, and never wasting time. He knows our weakness and where we’ve dug in our heels against correction, and where we’ve been moldable and allowed Him to move us. He’s not a parent like me, looking at a child still dealing with the same stuff from years ago and shaking my head, desperately wanting to say, If you had dealt with this earlier instead of shoving it under the rug – which has long outgrown the ability to hide the pile of detritus underneath it – you wouldn’t be dealing with it now, and the last several years would’ve been more pleasant for yourself, and for all of us.

I’ve been in Psalms. It’s a long book, I’m only forty-some chapters in out of 150, so I’ll be here a while. But last week I was in Psalm 32, and I keep going back to it.

For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long. (verse 3)

For when I pushed things under the rug and refused to deal with my issues, refused to repent, to apologize, to make amends, to acknowledge the truth of my actions, I diminished into an ever-shrinking ball until sparks shot out of me from the friction of my choices.

And I’ve been here, too; I’ve dug in my heels and been the stubbornest of sinners. Maturity isn’t shown by perfection, but by the ability to recognize sin and turn from it earlier than we were willing to before.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. (verse 4)

He wouldn’t let me get away with it; He loved me too much to leave me shrinking and imploding. He held my feet to His fire, and when I burned myself with my own behavior He gave me reason to move. And now as parents, He’s teaching us to hold our kids’ feet to the fire, too.

I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not cover my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. (verse 5)

The pain forced me to admit reality. When I confessed and repented of the ways that had never worked for me, His light broke through and irrigated the stench of infection. Fear, doubt, shame, despair, vanished when I agreed with Him.

Therefore let everyone who is godly
offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found;
surely in the rush of great waters,
they shall not reach him. (verse 6)

We don’t have to drown in the fire of our choices; we can yield to His presence before we’re in over our heads. He pulls us out when we admit our need for Him and our inability to save ourselves.

There is no shame in the turning, only in our insistence to keep drowning – to stay tied to the millstone while sinking, to stay behind the gravestone He wants to move out of our way.

Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.”  

Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”

– John 11:38-40, ESV

Martha is just like us. We look at our hard hearts, our hard situations, our hard children, and we ask, Do You not know how impossible this is?

Don’t you know that we’re out of time?

Are You not aware of how deep this hole is that we’ve dug for ourselves?

Do you not see how his heart is like that stone?

Do You not know that her brain was repeatedly blanched with alcohol while she was in utero and the damage to her memory, speech, cognition, and intellectual and social maturity are said to be incurable?

And He answers, Have you heard of what I can do with stones?

Did you forget that I am above time, outside of time, but never out of time?

Do you not yet know that I’m in the business of doing the impossible?

In spite of everything in her past and every diagnosis against her, Reagan is learning to read.

You are a hiding place for me;
you preserve me from trouble;
you surround me with shouts of deliverance.

– Psalm 32:7, ESV

He is the shelter, the Savior, and the celebration. And He tells us, Hey Love, the impossible is what I do.

_____________________

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how we do it all

Posted on by May 25, 2022

The sun blazed with enthusiasm this morning, but by the afternoon storm clouds rolled over and we had rain pouring off the roof in sheets, and hail pounded the windows on the north side of the house. Alaska was showing off, trying to do it all in the same day. But after about 30 minutes it wore itself out and cleared again, like a toddler after tantrum…or, like a mama whose caffeine-driven spurt of productivity has worn off, and she collapses on the couch for a breather.

how we do it all

It is a year of surprises. The night before I sent the last newsletter, when Vince had only three days left at the business he’d worked for 21 years, we found out we are pregnant.

No, nope, we didn’t see that coming at all. To say we were shocked would be a gross understatement.

But yes, in case you were wondering, we know how this happens, and we like it, but this is still, ahem, another miracle that must’ve involved supernatural intervention, like the one we had a few years ago. You know, the adorable blond one named Finnegan.

So in that newsletter when God had been teaching me for weeks about stretching our tent pegs, I wrote it thinking He was mostly talking specifically to me about writing and business. But when I proofread it before sending it off and He said, You know how to do this, you’ve done it before. You’ve just never seen it like this, I knew He was talking about this gift, which, I’ll be honest, I did not feel ready for.

But Vince has been home for three weeks, and he hit the ground running – putting in a lawn, redoing the kitchen floor, finishing his book, working on cover design, and starting to convert the former garage to a rec room, since the Stagecoach couldn’t fit in it anyway.

I, on the other hand, hit the ground and sunk in up to my waist with all day morning sickness and fatigue, taking two naps a day and stumbling around the house in a nauseous haze. My deadlines are not my own; they are not the priority right now. Right now is for resting and getting through this first trimester, and I’m reconciled to be behind schedule by at least a month or two because we are unexpectedly ahead with a baby.

The night after I sent the newsletter, I sat in the bottom of the shower and poured it all out to God, ready to be honest with Him and myself. I didn’t know how we were going to do this. And, since we’re being honest, I still don’t know how we are going to do this.

But I know that we are. Because really, do we ever know how we’re going to do it? I don’t think so.

…Our false self demands a formula before he’ll engage; he wants a guarantee of success, and mister, you aren’t going to get one. So there comes a time in a man’s life when he’s got to break away from all that and head off into the unknown with God. This is a vital part of our journey and if we balk here, the journey ends.

– John Eldredge, Wild at Heart

I don’t know how I did everything when I was in my early twenties and overwhelmed with one baby – that hard transition we go through when suddenly our life is not our own. Did you? I don’t know how I did everything in the transition from one child to two anymore than I know how I did it when we went from two to three, to four, to six when we adopted two at once and life went completely upside down.

I remember doing the math when I was pregnant with Iree and I braced myself, assuming that two kids would be twice the work. And it ended up being easier than I expected. And then I thought, Well, heck, the transition from one to two was so much easier than I expected that, hey, going from two kids to three kids ought to be a piece of cake. Right? But, au contraire! Not for me, at least. That was a rude shock.

Because there is no formula.

But there is a ridiculously impossible rule of opposites that goes something like this: Kid #2 will be the opposite of Kid #1 (so far, so good), and then Kid #3 will be the opposite of both of them (wait, what?), and every succeeding child will still be another contradicting paradox, resulting in a parenting dynamic that looks like a huge polygon with lines connecting all of its vertices, like so.

This is why we were all mostly perfect parents when we only had one kid to figure out, and then as our families grew, it felt like we were being promoted to a new level of discovering our own ineptitude.

We want answers to fix everything and everyone, and He reminds us that we don’t have those answers, and we are confounded.

Naturally, we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing…Certainty is the mark of the common-sense life; gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should rather be an expression of breathless expectation.

– Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

It is not what we expected. Our floor is in a constant state of looking like a scene from Home Alone – where it isn’t padded with Nerf darts, it is carpeted with giant 24-piece puzzles.

It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.

– Proverbs 25:2, ESV

One of the phrases I hear most (aside from Wow, you sure have your hands full, ugh, so help me) is “I don’t know how you do it.” I don’t know how I do it either. But I don’t know how any of us do it. I don’t think we’re supposed to know. If we knew, we’d take the credit, and it doesn’t belong to us.

That credit goes to the Day Maker who has always done it all and brings miracles even when we don’t think to ask for them, and He will keep doing it.

something out of nothing: how He moves us

Posted on by April 29, 2024

Our thoughts turn into prayers, and I don’t know if they were our thoughts first or His. But when our thoughts are His thoughts, our prayers become reality because He is such a troublemaker sometimes.

something out of nothing: how He moves us

There was no railroad there now, but someday the long steel tracks would lie level on the fills and through the cuts, and trains would come roaring, steaming and smoking with speed. The tracks and the trains were not there now, but Laura could see them almost as if they were there.

Suddenly she asked, “Pa, was that what made the very first railroad?”

“What are you talking about?” Pa asked.

“Are there railroads because people think of them first when they aren’t there?”

Pa thought a minute. “That’s right,” he said. “Yes, that’s what makes things happen, people think of them first.”

– Laura Ingalls Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake

Two years ago I wrote a list of things I would do if I had more time – all the millions of things we couldn’t do because Vince commuted (and did all of our family shopping) for almost 60 hours a week – and none of them were ambitious. They were pathetically in the vein of survival mode.

Find a therapist for one of the kids. Attend FreshStart with one of the other kids. Read all the books and watch all the videos and resources and trainings for our kids’ special needs. Buy pajamas for Finnegan, and get a haircut, and start putting effort into cooking better meals again. Clean the bathroom, and eat breakfast before noon.

Most of them never got done. Well, sometimes I cleaned the bathroom. And the older kids learned to cook.

Many of those things, looking back, I wish we could have done somehow. Seems like we would have benefited from them, but for crying out loud, we must breathe sometime. And there was no time.

We wanted to be together more, and together less. We needed one-on-one time with each of the kids and each other. Vince needed to be home more for the kids, and I needed to be out of the house more for my own sanity.

But other things were on that list, too. We both wanted to be more involved in ministry. I wanted to visit my grandma more often. I wanted to write daily, and study, and not feel guilty about it because there was always something else I should be doing.

I wanted to finish the books I’d started. And Vince did, too.

And maybe you noticed – I purposefully left that goal vague when I wrote it, unsure if I meant the books I’d started reading or the books I’d started writing. Because I wanted both, but was afraid to hope that big.

It was a someday-but-probably-never kind of daydream.

Until about five weeks ago.

What results is almost miraculous. We create new alternatives – something that wasn’t there before….What is synergy? Simply defined, it means the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means that the relationship which the parts have to each other is a part in and of itself. It is not only a part, but the most catalytic, the most empowering, the most unifying, and the most exciting part.

– Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Five weeks ago, Vince went back to work after taking a month off to finish some backburner projects we’d been praying about for years. On the last day of his vacation, we closed on this house. And we felt strongly that even though he was going back to work, it was only temporary.

We had no idea how it could possibly be temporary; we only knew that God had been talking to us for a long time about a big move and it didn’t just mean our physical location.

We asked Him for years for this move, and He finally said, How bad do you want it? If I give it to you, will you really take it?

The next day was the day of the fridge and the frenulum, and in that post I mentioned a phone meeting with our insurance guy. What I didn’t mention was that during that discussion we learned that a smallish, forgotten nest egg we’d plugged away at for years had actually made itself useful.  And God asked us, Do you believe Me now?

The creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen or where it is going to lead. You don’t know what new dangers and challenges you’ll find. It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, the spirit of discovery, the spirit of creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness.

– Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

And it’s sort of like when we got married: We eloped, but we talked to my dad ahead of time. Just like then, Vin was a little terrified to tell him, but also just like then, Dad was full of encouragement and good counsel. He said, in so many words, you have to take the risk to know if you can make it.

So, friends: Vince has worked for the same company for 21 years, and he put in his notice this week.

We’ll be home together, out and about together, and working together and separately. His first book is already off to the editor and should launch early this summer. My second book is a month or two behind his (can’t wait to show you the cover!), and the third should come out this fall.

We have a kid who’s on his last year home with us, and we want to do this thing together. We have six other kids we want to make great memories with, and we want to show them what’s beyond the fifty mile radius around us. We haven’t ventured past that in over five years.

We have a bazillion other ideas involving print and publishing, business and ministry, fellowship and community, deep and wide. But mostly, we are available for whatever He has for us, because He is always making something out of nothing. And He’s still moving us.