Middle of June.Leaves are full on the trees, the sky is blue, and the deck is covered in pots of dirt with various green things sprouting. Unless you know your plants, most of them aren’t even identifiable yet.
So when my best buddy in the States sent me photos of her glorious peonies in full bloom, it was a sign of things to come. Hers look like this:
And ours currently look like this:
Do you SEE how gorgeous ours are?
Of course not. You can’t even tell what color they’ll be. (Light pink. Here.)
But it’s not time for them yet, because this is Alaska. Spring lasts for about two weeks, summer gets a late start, and peonies don’t bloom here until July. If you have anything impressive in your garden this early, you probably bought starts from a nursery.
I shared this photo online last week with a scripture verse, and if you’ve read about some odd reactions I’ve gotten to those, let me assure you that at least the comment I got on this one was probably well meaning and wasn’t from a religious weirdo (I don’t think so, at least):
The comment was, “I feel sorry for your houseplant.”
My initial thought was, What houseplant? This is a photo of my desk. But then I looked again, and oh yes, there’s that little snake plant on the floor that has taken forever to grow from cuttings I got from a friend.
It does look sort of pathetic in the photo, but it wasn’t the focus of the post. In reality it looks almost as pathetic has five shoots that have grown up from the dirt, and only two of them show in the picture.
This plant is a slow grower and doesn’t like full sun. So it sits in the corner by my desk and quietly endures judgement and pity from strangers online, listening to Einaudi with me while I write.
But it’s doing its thing; it doesn’t need anyone’s pity.
It doesn’t edit, doesn’t create graphics, doesn’t check email or answer phone calls for me. But it’s not meant to do any of those things. It’s meant to sit there and grow, and there’s no deadline or competition.
It is doing what it’s meant to do, and minding its own business.
Or, can we rephrase that, and say it’s obeying its calling? Because it is.
Out of my distress I called on the Lord; the Lord answered me and set me in a broad place. With the Lord on my side I do not fear. What can mortals do to me? The Lord is on my side to help me; I shall look in triumph on those who hate me. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to put confidence in mortals.
— Psalm 118:5-8
Lots of things (and people) look funny while they’re growing, and deal with the ignorant judgment from others who only take a quick look and have no idea what the full story is.
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly, while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.
— Titus 2:11-13
It reminded me of a conversation I had at church last weekend, when someone asked me if I ever wondered about what other people thought of my special needs kids, and why they’re not healed.
And yeah, I have thought that. Vince and I have been in and led prayer ministry for years, and I have no doubt people have looked at us and wondered if we were really qualified to lead or minister or pray for healing because some of our kids’ issues have been super obvious.
But what’s not obvious is where our kids came from, or what they’ve been through, or how far they’ve come. In our local church, only two other people have seen our journey from the beginning.
How many times have we judged others when we had no idea how many hurdles they’ve already overcome?
How many times have we judged ourselves or others for not doing things that we’re not even meant to do? For not looking like everyone else? For not having the same timeline? For having a different starting line and growing season?
He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.
— Titus 2:14
We are not all organic heirloom seeds, planted in perfect loamy soil with a long head start in spring, watered on a scheduled timer.
Some of us are just doing the best we can in the clay and the climate we were planted in. We don’t have as much time, and halfway through the year it still looks like we just started.
But if you are obeying in that, it is enough.
We have this horrible habit of setting expectations and rushing timelines that have nothing to do with what God calls us to.
There are glad songs of victory in the tents of the righteous: “The right hand of the Lord does valiantly.”
— Psalm 118:15
So here, a word for the one who is looking at their progress and wondering why there’s still so little to show for it:
Your early growth doesn’t define your success. Don’t let someone else’s greenhouse beginning diminish your efforts from seed.
It’s not a competition until we try to make it one, and when we do, everyone loses. It’s better to just refuse that game, mind our own business, and obey in our own calling.
Your friend’s Pacific Northwest climate doesn’t diminish your Alaskan rate of growth. So don’t judge your June growth by your August expectations; you’ll know what color you are soon enough.
You are allowed to be the late bloomer. The dark horse. The sleeper whom no one expects, and then wakes with a roar.
Before we worked from home together, Vin commuted to Anchorage and was gone about 60 hours a week. For most of those years he drove a small pickup. It’s Alaska; everyone has a pickup here.
Handy things they are, except for when it comes to highway mileage. A pickup has a tailgate and a bed, and unless you have a canopy or cover on it – we didn’t – you get drag.
Resistance. Opposition to forward motion. You spend more gas trying to get where you’re going just because that truck bed and tailgate are cupping the wind at highway speed.
For years, people told us we should get a commuter car. We knew we should, too, but buying a new vehicle and selling an old one is a pain. Those were desperate days, too much going on, who needs one more thing to do?
So we avoided the change and stuck with the little pickup until January of 2014, when Vin rolled it on the highway during a snowstorm, totaling it.
Then we had no choice: A commuter car it was. And you know what we started saving in gas?
Five hundred dollars a month.
We knew it would make a difference, but we had no idea it was costing us that much. What could we have done with an extra $6000 a year, for those six years?
What else is our avoidance (stubbornness, laziness, resistance, denial, or any other drag) costing us?
Here’s the big question that might save you a ton of time, money, emotional investment, and other resources:
What am I ignoring or putting off that will actually be for my overwhelming good?
Sometimes lost things are found when we let go.
Our days are no longer desperate like they were then. Or, maybe they are, but in different ways: The kids are calmer, but our scope is broader, there’s no steady paycheck, and our schedule is often out the window because our work is way different and almost always changing.
Those days make me wonder if I still am who I was, or if I lost something. Did I drop my calling? Why is it so hard to shift back and forth sometimes? Am I walking in neglect or disobedience? Or am I just tired? (Stupid question. Don’t answer that.)
A single day of feeling supremely off kilter can make me wonder all those things, because I am fragile and human.
That’s the wrong kind of wonder to have. It’s drag, and it’s far more expensive than commuting to Anchorage in a little pickup, because if not caught it leads to brooding, which in turn often leads to all sorts of leading questions and bad conclusions.
The cost is high because it’s our identity and vision at stake.
So here, too, is where we ask: What am I ignoring or putting off that will actually be for my overwhelming good?
And in this case, the answer (for me, at least) is pretty much the same every time: Abiding. 1
If I were abiding in this situation, I wouldn’t be doing the wrong kind of wondering. I wouldn’t be questioning my calling or ability, wondering if I lost it or if it was just a long season that’s over.
I’d have real answers, instead. I’d have peace and grace for the day, instead of anxiety and discouragement.
When I finally confront the issue head on, rather than avoiding it for days on end, striving and struggling needlessly in angst, it takes a whopping five seconds of concentrated abiding to realize what’s going on.
Be honest, Shannon. Ask the question. Put it into words and confess it.
You haven’t dropped or lost or neglected anything, Love. But you are not always meant to tell and translate. You also need to soak and receive.
Oh. Duh. Well, that sounds so obvious.
But I’ve gotten so used to the feeling of pressure that I didn’t even recognize it. This happens with all sorts of mindsets, and they become like refrigerator noise in the background of our lives that we don’t even hear anymore.
So listen: What is the noise you’ve been ignoring, or that you’ve gotten used to? We can’t deal with it until we identify it.
When I let go of the pressure to write, that’s often when a torrent of words rush out. Onto the screen, in my phone memo, on any scrap of paper I can find.
Like I said earlier, sometimes lost things are found when we let go.
Oh, that’s where I am. That’s the me that thrives the way You made me to – because I finally looked for where You are in this. I missed the forest for the trees, but You were here all along.
To be fair to myself and honest with you, I can abide in all sorts of things while avoiding the main issue I really need to talk to the Lord about.
I think it’s a common ploy of intercessors; we can procrastinate and distract ourselves by praying for a million other things, and still feel pretty good about our abiding. A friend of ours who led worship for years said it’s the same on that side of the coin, too: If he didn’t want to deal with something, he would worship, instead.
Isn’t it funny how we can use righteous things to avoid becoming more righteous?
And isn’t God gracious to still meet us in our avoidance, and wait for our honesty? Even our ability to face things is grace from Him.
It would be nice to have more grace and peace, though, and get back on track faster.
May grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.
– 2 Peter 1:2
We tend to overuse and gloss over those terms. What do they really mean in the messy situations we’re dealing with?
Grace and peace look like solutions, resolution, revelation, and certainty. They look like security in our identity, steadiness in our calling, and boldness in our obedience.
May those things be yours and mine in abundance. And may we cooperate with receiving them, because God’s generally not going to force them on us while we’re ignoring the issue He wants to address.
To defeat the drag and make forward progress, we’ll need to sell the truck, make the move, call the person, spend the money, ask the question, admit our weakness, acknowledge the problem, confess the sin, set the boundary, etcetera, etcetera. It could be anything. It’s probably on your mind as you’re reading this.
Anyway, whatever it is, if we’re not willing to do it because we’d rather feel the drag against our tailgate (ahem), then He’s generally not going to force that particular answer upon us.
Good news, though: He’s made us for the answer. He knows how weak, exhausted, angry, wounded, confused, overwhelmed, or whatever we are that seems like it’s holding us back.
Seriously, He knows how whatever you are. And He did all the heavy lifting to make us like Him:
His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and excellence.
Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust and may become participants of the divine nature.
– 2 Peter 1:3-4
You and I cannot participate in the divine nature if we neglect to abide. Abiding is the participation: This is how we know, hear, act, and become more like Him.
It’s how Peter, who wrote those words, went from being an impulsive loudmouth you probably wouldn’t want speaking at your funeral to becoming an older and wiser heavyweight who could handle the spotlight. Both versions were forces to be reckoned with, but only one was fully surrendered and thus able to lead others in that same transformation.
So we don’t want to waste gas, too focused on the problem to do anything to actually solve it.
If we’re putting off abiding – or any other prompting of the Holy Spirit – we’re not changing anything for the better.
Such a bummer. I’m so sorry.
What can we do, then?
First, if this rings a bell, we need to acknowledge our avoidance and confess it. It’s not a huge, drawn out thing. It’s a reality check, and it’s instant: “Yep, I’ve been doing that.”
Then there are several things we can do. But to work smarter and not harder, the best first thing is to ask God: What do I need to do now? And then do it.
I know, the best time to do it would’ve been a long time ago. But the next best time is now.
And one more question to ask Him: How do You want me to see this situation? Because we want to see it the way He does. He’s not discouraged or dismayed over this. He’s not overwhelmed, overwrought, or doing the wrong kind of wondering.
When we’re looking at Him and seeing things the way He does, we see possibilities instead of limits. We stop partnering with fear, agreeing with the enemy, making blanket statements and accusations and assumptions. We stop doing the things that make it worse, and start doing the things that make it better.
Bemoaning that the enemy is winning in different areas or how we feel like we are losing in other areas is a poor strategy for defeating him. It’s a total drag, wasting our resources.
But quick cooperation with His promptings brings momentum. Obedience to God is spiritual warfare. And this is how we win.
Sign up here to get these posts to your inbox for free. (Upgrading to a paid subscription is a huge support to our ministry, thank you!) You can read more about what we do here.
P.S. We’ve had a big change at our house, and we’ve also got a big prayer and provision need. Here’s our monthly update.
P.P.S. Our pastor gave a great message here that relates to this topic (starts at 1:09). Bonus: Vin is in a couple of dangerousaggressive super awkward sermon illustrations. 😅
Often for me, writing IS abiding. Journaling, praying, all the thoughts going on paper or screen…I’m talking to and with Him more than anyone else. But after years of writing as vocation and ministry, writing is also work, and there’s the struggle. Maybe there’s a post on that coming soon. ↩︎
I like to tell people that I’ve overcome insomnia. What I have not overcome is Dasher, our adorable 24-toed cat, who has developed a habit of singing the song of her people in the wee hours.
She does this in the stairwell, which makes sense because it has the best acoustics.
So even after being evicted, insomnia likes to come back for visits. It opens the door without knocking, waves to its friend menopause (it’s a crowded house here lately), and then kicks back, waiting for Dash to start performing her favorite solo from Aida.
Sometimes I beat them all and fall back to sleep. Other times, my brain starts opening all the tabs, alternating between praying about the price of gas to pondering the cost of misunderstandings, and all things between. Grandma takes up more and more tabs lately (filed under Memories, Changes, and Grief) as her dementia has progressed. Which means she is regressing, and it feels like the exact opposite of progress.
I lay there in the dark, thinking on conversations and concerns. Another tab opens, reminding me of Barbara O’Neill’s teaching on sleep where she warns that the lack of it is related to dementia.
Irony and pressure are terrible sedatives, you know.
The next morning I stumbled on a post about biphasic sleep, a concept I first heard about years ago because insomnia and I are old frenemies. It means sleeping in two phases, often called “first sleep” and “second sleep,” separated by a two-ish hour waking period in the middle of the night, whether or not your cat is attempting opera. It was common (some say standard) before the Industrial Revolution, and now that you know about it, you’ll see it mentioned in everything from history books to Dickens novels.
In theory, I’d love to lean into it and utilize those extra couple hours in fruitful ways. I’ve done it before when our schedule allowed and it’s a much better alternative than staring at the ceiling and fretting about the rapidly diminishing hours of possible sleep left.
But often our schedule doesn’t allow for it, like last night (er, this morning) when I went back to bed around 6 am and then wanted to sleep in until tomorrow.
Maybe some day it’ll work, though. Our schedule changed significantly four times in the last year, and at this point what’s left is more of a loose structure wrapped around a few big commitments, and held together with prayer, coffee, and a Jeep that is happy to zip back and forth across the MatSu as long as we keep filling its tank.
On the way home one evening last week, I passed our friends’ shop and saw our red-haired son at work, backing into a bay. He didn’t notice me but my heart stretched from its tether a little as I drove past. It is these small moments of recognition that anchor us, making a broad, wide Valley into a small town we belong in.
Now that she’s moved, it’s 21 minutes to Grandma’s new home on weekdays but only 18 on Sunday afternoons. So far, she does not understand the change, and every day she seems confused anew about why she’s there. She does not have those small moments of recognition yet, or anymore; her anchor was lifted up and she’s been moored in an unfamiliar place.
“I am so far away from my home…it must be forty miles.” She calculates highway time and neighborhood roads. Sometimes she thinks she’s in Anchorage.
“It’s only 20 minutes, Grandma. You’re right in the middle of all of us.” She looks at me in disbelief, like I answered in a foreign language.
“All I can do is look out this window. There’s no activity out there.”
But there is, though she can’t see it. A house is being built right next door and equipment has been running every day. When I walked up to her new front door, I distinctly heard one of the construction workers articulate the same expletive she shocked us with last week.
Four times so far I’ve had the same heartbreaking conversation with her, trying to explain, wondering how to answer so many of her concerns. I need to be home. I was active there, and here I do nothing. I haven’t seen a soul all day; I think I’ve only had one small meal and it’s horrible hospital food. No one has come to see me, I’ve just been left here, alone. And who is going to take care of my cat?
People visit almost every day. The staff is kind, with her all the time, giving her one-on-one attention. It is a home, not a hospital, and the food – three meals plus snacks – is homemade and amazing. She was mostly chair-bound at her house and slept much of the day, but now she is awake more, even playing the piano. And her cat died a month ago.
Before, she was tired but mostly content; now she is awake more, and feels like she’s in exile. It is a horrible disease that demands caregivers to constantly choose between comforting, condescending lies and heartbreaking truth.
So there is a difference between reality and perception, and I do not know how to help her bridge that gap.
But she’s talking again, more than she has been. When she’s not focused on the grief, she still tells repetitive stories from her childhood.
Last month, back at her house, she told us again about working at a store when she was a kid:
“Somebody would come in for something that was only a dollar or two. They might give you a twenty dollar bill, or they might even give you a hundred, and you had to be able to make the change for whatever it was they gave you. I learned.”
My daughter and my cousin sat on the couch to her left, and I crocheted granny squares in the rocking chair to her right. I hit the Record button on my phone so I can go back and hear her voice when I need it.
“I was pretty good with the dollars, and I could make the change.”
The kids were on the floor, at the table, across the room, all doing schoolwork.
“Our floor walker was an older lady and I think she kind of liked me. She was the one who trained me, and then she trained me to train others. So I had a pretty good little job there in that store. I got along pretty well with all of them…I learned to make change, learned how to handle hundred dollar bills. You could carry a certain amount on yourself in a money belt to make change with.”
This is the challenge we all face when we find ourselves in a place we never would have chosen, with bills that are too big for us, with the situation that is out of our control: Will we make the change? Will we get along with others, and navigate with grace and trust? Or will we cling to denial, and keep getting our heart broken when reality confronts us with every new day?
Also: What can we carry on ourselves to help us (and others) make change?
“I worked there for a number of years and I really enjoyed it. I got several raises there along the way. I didn’t have a way to go home, but usually the Greyhound bus ran and I could get off in time to get to the bus station and get on the Greyhound; I rode ten miles home.”
She often talks about the journey: the bus, her mom driving her back and forth to work, and about her first bike.
“In the winter time I worked in the store, and sometimes I worked up on the farm, but mostly I learned to work in the stores and rode that Greyhound bus home every night. They’d ring that bell and he knew right where I lived, and he’d let me off right where the gate was. God was good to me. I was very grateful.”
This right here is the key in all our changes: Gratitude, which is based in trust.
In this hard space – in debt, in betrayal, in regret, in the ICU, in grief, or in a place where no one speaks our language – can we trust God and rejoice anyway? Not because the awful stuff is His will (it’s not) but because He is able to bring good from these hard things?
He likes us, and He is training us. Not just for ourselves, but so we can also train others.
He knows where we are, where we need to be, and how to get us there.
We would not have chosen this, but God is busy with us, at work in us and for us, so He must be doing things we could not or would not have done on our own.
Grandma was long-winded that day and her memories kept coming.
“Then one year I got terribly sick and had quite a bit of time in the hospital. I don’t remember what it was I had…whatever it was, eventually I got over it.”
“Was it scarletina?” I asked. “Scarlet fever?” Grandma didn’t answer; her hearing aid was on the other side. I looked at my cousin. “She told me about it in 2020, because she had been quarantined when she was young.”
Ohh, he nodded. Grandma was quiet for a minute, slowing down.
“But God was good to me,” she finally said. “I got over it, eventually.”
Friend, hear me: God is good to us whether we get over it or not. We are better to ourselves, though, if we do.
At that point, that day, she was talked out. Shortly after, she wanted us to leave – at first with a subtle hints, then later with anxiety, thinking she needed to start making dinner and get her kitchen cleaned up. But I had already cleaned her kitchen, dinner was taken care of, and she hasn’t made a meal in I don’t know how long.
And she could not be left alone, so we had to stay with her in her restlessness.
She has made change before, so many times. This time it’s much bigger than just a small shift in schedules or overcoming insomnia or learning a new job, but I want her to remember that she can do this, too.
Whenever we are uprooted or navigating some other big change, we tend to feel like our struggle is a sign of failure. But that is an agreement we make with the enemy, not God. It is a spiral of self-fulfilling discouragement: We focus on the negative, and that negative becomes our new reality.
But how can we deal with whatever life gives us? How do we survive the place we didn’t choose?
Here’s the truth, if we can accept it: The struggle and feeling of ineptitude is progress. Feeling bad about our abilities and our current situation – as long as that feeling is temporary and we don’t stay there – is a sign of growth.
We don’t grow in the ease of the comfort zone; we grow in the struggle. The feelings of learning to do this specific task or navigate this particular season are temporary. They are not our permanent identity.
We must reframe our assessment: I currently feel terrible at this rather than “I’m just bad at this and I’ll never be good at it.” I don’t feel happy here, rather than “Happiness doesn’t exist here.”
We go through this in every big change: Having more kids, learning a language, reading classics, acquiring a new skill, developing new routines, systems, or habits. We are face to face with our own imperfections and weakness, and must let go of our illusions.
We must release the idolatry of our own control, the myopia of mastering our own tiny domain where everything is in the order we established.
When we do that, we make room for the wild of the Kingdom.
But if we are still not wanting to make change in this hard place, the Lord is never just asking us to get over it. We often want that for ourselves, or for each other, because grief is inconvenient. But He is staying with us – never dismissing us, never blowing us off, never rushing us to gloss over pain and pretend we’re happy when we’ve been completely unmoored.
He sits with us in our bewilderment, much more patient with us than we are with ourselves, or each other.
As I sit with Grandma in her grief and confusion, even though I have no answers for her and feel almost as confused as she is, I know I am growing in this. It is hard and I hate it; I hate watching her regress and accuse and be less than who I’ve always known her to be. But this is training. If you’ve paid any attention to basic demographics, you know our generation is just beginning to see what may be an avalanche of care needed in the years to come.
As Grandma looks out the window at all the things she cannot see, she is growing, too. Even when the progress is regress and none of it feels good, she is rising above, alert in ways she hasn’t been for months. Even in her grief, she is so sweet to the staff at the new home and they love her. Even in her anger, she is digging deep into memories and logic and reasoning in ways that I thought went dormant months ago.
We stretch our tent pegs to allow God to show us that in our weakness He is strong. In our inability, He is able, and making us able, too.
It is how we overcome, how we beat them all.
Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for indeed our God is a consuming fire.
— Hebrews 12:28-29
He has not abandoned us, dropped us off in an unfamiliar place to be alone and die.
He has not removed us from our home.
He is preparing us for it, and taking us there.
Subscribe here for free to receive these posts right to your inbox. Curious about what we do? You can read more about our ministry here.
