Category Archives: purpose

carrying fire: when obedience takes us outside the comfort zone

Posted on by March 30, 2023

The Lord gave me this amazing idea, and I was so excited to follow through…until it was time to actually do it.

As responsible people do, I came up with a lot of excuses. I hadn’t showered the night before; my hair was a mess and in no condition for video. And, as writers do, I found the most productive ways to procrastinate. Suddenly, cleaning my desk was of utmost priority. I put away the tape and scissors, filed a few papers, and stacked the books. Considered sweeping the floor, or washing the windows. I mean, it was that bad.

Add all of this to the fact that I have the technical skills of a Chihuahua.

So when the Lord asked me to start praying online every week – which, as I type it, sounds like the easiest thing ever and nothing to be intimidated by – I had no idea what was the best way to go about it.

carrying fire: when obedience takes us outside the comfort zone

When I finally did do it, it was in two parts – first, in hands-free mode, until I ran out of space and had to add the rest in selfie mode after figuring out how to splice and trim the video (gah). Because, like a Chihuahua, I told you.

Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress.

– 1 Timothy 4:13-15, ESV

But the opportunity to pray with and for anyone who wanted to join me on a weekly basis was a no brainer. Until my brain kicked in and started making excuses for me, of course.

Isn’t that the way it is with going forward, though? He calls us outside the comfort zone, but somehow we’d rather put it off or just not bother because we don’t understand how much breakthrough is at stake in going there.

Too risky. Too scary. Too unfamiliar. Too unknown.

I’m confessing to you right off the bat so you know you’re not alone in this. I don’t usually think of myself as a risk taker but when I look back at my life I realize I am one – but little things like praying online can still make me pause and squirm. Sounds stupid, yes?

We ask Him for direction, to light our way, and often the way He does that is by lighting a fire under us. We often respond by extinguishing those fires in any number of ways instead of having the boldness to pick up the fire and carry it.

We are our very own wet blanket, smothering our own growth.

We pooh-pooh it, telling ourselves it was just a silly idea and not Him at all, when in reality these steps of obedience are the key to unlocking answers we’ve been searching for.

Or we put it off. And our delay, like most symptoms of laziness, makes us work harder and longer in the long run.

And sometimes we give up before we start because it won’t be perfect, and we can’t control how people will respond to us. So we sacrifice our breakthrough on the altar of perfectionism and control – which is really just a monument to ourselves and our pride. If that altar were made into an idol, it would look like us.

But we usually need to accelerate our pain to accelerate our progress, so we might as well jump in and start doing it, whatever it is.

Starting that business. Filling out the adoption paperwork. Making that phone call. Researching that ministry opportunity. Writing that book.

Going on that mission. Taking that leap.

Saying yes.

Once the words leave your lips, they no longer belong to you. We have a monopoly only on our own thoughts. The act of speaking is not a conquest, but a surrender. When we open our mouths, we are sharing with the world – and the world inevitably interprets, indeed sometimes shifts and distorts, our original meaning.

– Frank Luntz, Words That Work

We wrestle with the feeling of exposure and tension after being vulnerable and laying it all out there, in teaching, writing, speaking, mentoring, moving — however you are leading others as they watch you follow Jesus.

But it turns out, the best way to go about anything is usually forward.

Going. Doing. Obeying. As opposed to stalling, fretting, and backsliding. Because life has a current to it, and every moment we are either moving further up and further in, or drifting back downstream. There is no neutral.

What answer can human intelligence make to God’s love for the world? What answer, for that matter, can it make to our own love for the world? If a person loved the world – really loved it and forgave its wrongs and so might have his own wrongs forgiven – what would be next?

And so how was a human to pray? I didn’t know, and yet I prayed. I prayed the terrible prayer: “Thy will be done.” Having so prayed, I prayed for strength.

– Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

There is a cost to disobedience, and it is much higher than just going outside our comfort zone.

He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

– Genesis 3:24, ESV

When we move in obedience, we go in freedom – bringing light, making progress, carrying His Presence as fire. But when we are forced to move by our own disobedience, we are pushed out in slavery.

The truth is, we move outside the comfort zone either way.

When we say yes, facing our fears and excuses, we’re no longer afraid of what the fire will do to us. We are invincible to burning when we learn to carry it.

____________

This is an excerpt from ABIDE volume 5: Obedience to Move Forward, available here.

dark to light: change that does a work in us

Posted on by May 21, 2019

It is officially spring in Alaska: The willow trees erupted in stars, change is everywhere, and Vince is painting the kitchen. Don’t rub it in, though.

The man hates painting, but the jagged four-foot long tear in the sheetrock from last winter’s earthquake necessitated it. The kitchen walls were dark brown, the crack was stark white, and there’s no hiding it without addressing it – it must be mudded, retextured, and repainted.

dark to light: change that does a work in us

I think he’s cute in his painting clothes, with his hat flipped backwards. I also think I’m cute with a screwdriver, taking out the switch covers to help prep, easing my conscience before leaving him with all the real work while I escape upstairs to write.

The kitchen is going from brown to white, from dark to light, but the change is everywhere else, too, a sense of transition that feels like impending birth. We’ve been here before. Different times and circumstances but the same level of stress and uncertainty, and we survived. Thrived, even, and sometimes saw miracles and breakthrough. Other times, we just muddled through. In some ways we’re still muddling, still waiting for the resolution at the end of the story, praying the story ends well.

There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging how hard it is. The shifting ground, the earthquake, the trauma – we don’t pretend it was a little breeze when it knocked over trees, and we don’t pretend something was just a little tremor when it shook our foundations. We recognize the threat, and we inspect for damage so that damage can be dealt with.

Just as it is no big deal when we love those who love us back, it is also no big thing to be at peace when life is calm. But it is an entirely different thing to love without return, just as it is also an entirely different thing to feel peace and fight for calm when the world is shaking.

Whatever it is, we know He moves in the midst of it. These uncomfortable seasons bring questions to the surface and draw things out of us, and it’s productive.

No, really. Change does a work in us, as long as we don’t give way to fear.

And isn’t that the hardest part? I don’t think we ever graduate from fighting fear. Every time we up the ante and leave our comfort zone, we just graduate to new phases of fear and new ways to win over it. We feel the knots writhe in our gut over what’s going to happen. We wait for the news, the diagnosis, the prognosis. We wait for anything that’s certain, in the midst of weeks that feel saturated with uncertainty.

Fear, at its root, is often more than just being afraid of an outcome. Often it is fear that we failed – we failed to heal, we failed to fix that thing, we failed to protect that person, we failed to predict the future so that event didn’t occur, we failed to accomplish what we wanted to do.

We lost. Game over.

We failed to be God. And when this is the case, admitting as much means also admitting that maybe, just maybe, we’ve made ourselves into an idol.

And this stupid sheetrock is preaching to me. Listen:

Did the sheetrock fail in the shaking? Yes, and no. It cracked, but held. It wasn’t meant to do the foundation’s job and hold up everything. It was meant to do its own job, and bear the weight it was given, and let any failure be used for good – because change, and even failure, does a work in us when we let it. We go from dark to light, too.

We want perfection, and when we don’t achieve it (because we are, of course, imperfect humans) instead of glorying in what we did reach, we feel the lack and the loss. We feel the distance between where we got to and where we wanted to be.

And the enemy throws it right at us, taking it a step further: Not only did we fail, he hisses, but we are failures. The gap widens. The bad hand seems worse.

He’s a liar, we know. But knowing doesn’t always fix our feelings.

Our feelings are harder to reign in and correct. The only thing that fixes feelings is facing them, and that doesn’t seem like good news at first because we know that behind these Big Feelings are some even Bigger Feelings that we’d rather not admit. (We don’t just paint over the crack; we must also retexture. Gah.) In fact, ignoring those Bigger Feelings is often what allows the lie to creep in and hurt so bad in the first place.

It is the crack in our facade, and there’s no hiding it. It must be dealt with.

Facing these things is hard. So much pain. Ignoring it only allows it to build up for later, the pressure creating strain and damage on souls who were never meant to bear the weight of perfection, and denial, and holding it all in.

I recently read that you have to accelerate your pain to accelerate your progress. And I believe it’s true – one of the ways we accelerate both pain and progress is to face those fears we’d rather ignore, the grief we’d rather stuff, and the failures caused by our own imperfection.

There’s no help for failing. We all fail. None of us are perfect. But we wanted to be. So finally admitting failure is actually healthy, and good, and right – a victory in itself.

If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.

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

The victory comes the morning after the deep grief of facing it all — the change, the imperfections and uncertainties, and the potential clean-up operation — when you look at yourself in the mirror and see resigned peace. And it hurts. But denial hurts worse, because refusing to acknowledge what is broken denies the healing that needs to seep into our cracked areas.

The consequences and what-ifs were all laid on the table. And instead of folding, you put everything in, because you know that in the end, you win. It is the only way we go from dark to light.

in the fog: what we do when we can’t see where we’re going

Posted on by December 20, 2023

Kavanagh napping. Finn playing sweetly, but he’s loud enough to trigger neighborhood car alarms. Vin and I bossing him. Baby waking up after a refreshing 90-second power nap. Repeat until dinnertime.

And this, at least, has not changed in eighteen years of parenting – only then, it was two different kids who are both now in high school, and we are now old…er. Older. Oldish? Whatever. You get it.

in the fog: what we do when we can't see where we're going

It is a night for an easy dinner after a day of not getting nearly enough done and cringing from loud noises. Leftover pasta, leftover salad; sauté some broccoli to go over the top and give myself something to be proud of. Because somedays feel like nothing to be proud of.

Not enough time for everyone and everything. Heaviness in the chest. A sense of swelling behind the eyes that hints at tears, but no thank you, we don’t want that, we don’t have time for that. In this season, ain’t nobody got time for that.

I know what it is. It feels a little like PMS but it isn’t – it’s spiritual attack threatening to spiral into depression, the barrage of lies that shout failure from the rooftops in every area. Loud noises on the outside spike against the loud thoughts inside. The body hurts, the mind and spirit hurt.

And I can be a slow learner, but now I know the drill when it hits: Do the small things, the necessary things that fight the lies and the feelings and the oversensitive body processes.

Drink a glass of water. Take a dose of vitamin D. Rebuke the lie.

And find something easy to clean.

People sometimes seem surprised at how (relatively) clean our house is in spite of seven kids living here, and usually the credit goes to regular chores and a highly efficient husband. But every once in a while it’s something else entirely.

Every once in a while, the house is clean because the mama almost lost her ever-loving mind but narrowly escaped by taking it out on the kitchen.

Because order on the outside helps bring order to the inside.

And wiping down counters is easy, so much easier than the stressful intangibles that have no end. Clean counters help bring sanity and white space.

I cannot clean everything. Just like I cannot do everything. But I can clean this counter in front of me, and see the difference.

In so many areas, we can believe and hope and trust that what we do matters, but we cannot see it yet and the enemy takes advantage of that.

So doing something that we can see is important. It becomes prayer and prophecy; we see movement and change and impact. A clean counter can represent so much more as we pray.

The edge of the sink is covered in coffee grounds and water droplets. One wipe, and it’s clean. Perfect. Rinse the sponge. Done.

There’s a clear before-and-after here, unlike most of the other work with words, and situations, and people. And my own attitude.

For many of us it’s a season of refining, pressing further than we thought we could go, pushing through pain, taking maturity to the next level. And it hurts, like a muscle being strengthened.

We are refining character and relationships, habits, skills, and communication, for a great plan ahead that we cannot see, praying for rain but not yet seeing the cloud the size of a hand.

He sees what we cannot see – and sometimes, often, He lets us see these things for each other.

A close friend of ours had a surprise party last week. She was blindfolded; she didn’t know where she was going, or when she would arrive. But we knew, and we couldn’t wait for her to get there.

…As Christians, we will always live in tension between what we understand and what remains a mystery….We cannot afford to live only in what we understand because then we don’t grow or progress anymore; we just travel the same familiar roads we have traveled all of our Christian life. It is important that we expose ourselves to impossibilities that force us to have questions that we cannot answer.

– Bill Johnson, The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind

In the deep searching, trusting God when it feels like you have no choice but to trust Him (and is that really trust at all?) we’re pressed into voicing those gut-honest questions – the ones He’s not afraid of, but that we’re usually afraid to ask.

These questions lay us open, vulnerable to legalistic blind spots in our past, and the enemy hisses things like, If you really trusted God, you wouldn’t feel that way/need to ask that question/feel so uncertain. We think that Really Good Christians are supposed to find some kind of bliss in the pressure of not knowing, but that’s only because the enemy is liar.

Fire tests the purity of silver and gold, but the LORD tests the heart.

– Proverbs 17:3, NLT

God knows these seasons are not easy. He’s not mad at us for feeling the fire and asking the hard questions.

He’s not mad at us when we ask repeatedly for the cloud the size of a hand.

He’s right there with the truth – He knows the destination, and these questions are the sweet spot, the brave willingness to stare fears in the face and name them aloud, willing to surrender those fears to Him.

Here’s the root of it: If it really is that bad and our fears come to pass, will we still trust Him? Will we still talk to Him?

Of course we will. There is no one left. He is the only one who knows how to take us where we’re supposed to be going. Regardless of what the weather or the circumstances look like, He is rubbing His hands in anticipation, leaning forward, telling us, Just wait, you’re going to love this. I can’t wait to show you where you’re going.

Those who fear You shall see me and rejoice, because I have hoped in Your word.

– Psalm 119:74

And these curveballs, these situations of unknowing, and what-in-the-world-are-You-doing, prove that surrender is beautiful, and powerful, and victorious, and He knows what we want better than we do. He’s not afraid to give it to us, even when we’re afraid to ask for it or take it.

The unknowing and waiting are a lot like writing. Here too, we usually do not know where we are going:

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then – and only then – it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way.

….You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this.

– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Bread crumbs from lunch cover the island. Scoop them into my hand, throw them off the deck for the birds, or maybe the mice, but with four cats I’m not worried. Easy, done. Moving on.

It’s hard to see outside of ourselves from the chaos and stress – it presses in, closing in on us just like the fog around the windows, obscuring mountains, neighbors, and the river of traffic going up and down the highway.

We ask for a cloud the size of a hand, and in perfect time He sends the fog rolling in, pressing us into questions and answers and growth we could not or would not have pursued otherwise. And sometimes in our own density, we don’t recognize that that, too, is an answer.

________________________

This is an excerpt from Work That God Sees .