making it: we rise above fear by changing our minds

Posted on by September 25, 2024

It seems like when you live with boys, your immune system has the choice to either toughen up and be stronger than average, or to keel over and just let you die. So far, five boys later, I think we’re making it.

making it: we rise above fear by changing our minds | Shannon Guerra

But here’s why it’s such a miracle: Boys do things – all kinds of things – except for washing their hands. Did you scrub the toilet? Check. Clean the catbox? Yes, ma’am. Scoop out the chicken coop? Uh huh.

And we, silly parents, ask these questions as we are watching them in the kitchen, spreading peanut butter on a tortilla. And then – and only then – do we remember to ask the obvious question, which should have been the first question, even though it’s too late anyway, the damage is done:

Did you wash your hands?

“Ummmmm….” Stalling is always a bad sign. Especially when it’s followed by an almost silently whispered, “nope.”

Serenity now, Lord Jesus.

Vince and I sit on the couch dumbfounded as the boy drops the lunch implements on the counter and runs to the bathroom. I consider donating the entire container of peanut butter to the chickens, and Vin quietly but dramatically pleads the blood of Jesus over our entire home, asking for a special consecration over the fridge and silverware drawer.

(Side note: This post might prevent any dinner guests from accepting invitations for the next three months.)

There are so many things that could go wrong, and it’s best not to think of them. It’s best just to be grateful for grace, for strong immune systems, for a life that allows for such activity, and for healthy boys who are (please God) learning good habits.

And this is good to remember at night, or more accurately, at 3 or 4 am, when panicked thoughts about chickens and homeschool and kids’ behavior and inflation and taxes and paperwork and vehicle woes and world events and a million other valid concerns start crowding in as you lay there, wide awake, wondering if you’re going to make it. There are so many things that could go wrong, and it’s best not to think of them.

But we do think of them. Many of them require action on our part – like making an appointment, or paying a bill, or filling out forms, or disciplining children, or disciplining ourselves, or being more frugal…and all these actions require thinking.

But what is not required is worrying, or partnering with fear, or expecting the worst. None of those have to be in our thinking, though they tend to be our default.

So we need to be rewired. We need to forge new pathways for better thoughts.

For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.

– 2 Corinthians 10:3-5

Have you ever considered that agreeing with fear – which is what worry is – is making a “lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God?” It is.

God is not worried or fearful. And we have the mind of Christ, and we can trust God…so we need to agree with Him. (Listen, self.)

Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

– Ephesians 4:17-19

This isn’t usually how we apply this scripture, but roll with me here: If we have a belief that truly sets us apart from our old ways, our thinking should demonstrate that. But worry is futile, a darkened understanding. Worries are ignorant of God’s love and trust; when we worry we are hardened in our old paths and ways of thinking.

And we wouldn’t normally associate it with making us callous or greedy, but consider…when we indulge in fretting and fears, are we not giving ourselves up to a sort of sensuality? Isn’t the distrust of God’s goodness and love an act of impurity?

Huh. Still thinking on this. It goes on:

But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires,

and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds,

and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

– Ephesians 4:20-24

We have lain there awake in seasons of waiting and waiting, crying out for breakthrough, telling God, “I know You’re good and faithful, but this is still so hard, so it must be that I’m not good and faithful.”

And He reminds us that victory is not a pass/fail test or a zero sum game because things are much more complicated than what we are seeing. We are seeing “if not this, then this” but reality is “not this or this or this, but all these other things in varying degrees and intensities.”

Many, many things are actively in the process of working out. Together. All at the same time, and all at different times. And in the meantime, it looks like a mess.

Will we make it, though? we ask in desperation.

Did you make it in 2004? He asks, turning the question around. Did you make it in 2007, and 2008, and 2011, and 2012, 2013, and every year since then? Did you make it when you didn’t know where you’d go in 2017? Did you make it when the rug was pulled out from under you in 2018? Did you make it through the chaos and stupidity of 2020, and the upheaval in 2022?

Did you make it last year, Love?

Yes. Over and over, in every crisis, real or perceived – we made it.

So we have something still to do:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 

Wait, this is me interrupting again. Is our mind – our brain – part of our bodies? Yes? So our thoughts also should be presented as a living sacrifice. This is where we make the sacrifice of praise even when it still doesn’t feel praiseworthy yet. We lay there in the midst of the flying fears and whisper Thank You because we know He’s in control and He loves us and He has this all covered, even when we don’t know what to do. (He knows how dumb we are, remember. And that is a huge comfort.)

Okay, carry on:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

– Romans 12:1-2

If agreeing with fear is an example of being conformed to this world (and it is, I’ll fight you over it) then rising above the fear and thanking God that we can trust Him while we let go of our regrets and insecurities and assumptions and negative imaginings…is one way we are transformed by the renewal of our mind.

We choose the thoughts that get to play. Fear wants us to just keel over and die, but God has made us to be stronger than average.

Has everything always turned out the way we wanted? No. It’s still a fallen world, a clean-up operation.

But so much has turned out better than we could’ve imagined. We’re all making it. And as we’re grateful to God and trusting Him, renewing our minds and offering the sacrifice of praise, we’ll continue to do so.

After car accidents and miscarriage and illness and grief and bank failures and huge expenses and big risks and unexpected pregnancies and medical corruption and corporate gaslighting and global deception and financial loss and leaving the familiar and starting over when it seemed like the most foolish thing to do… we made it. And you did, too.

We all made it. And here we are, by the mercies of God.

for those who weep

Posted on by September 12, 2024
for those who weep | Shannon Guerra (excerpt from Risk the Ocean)

I was surrounded by chocolates. Or, to be honest, I was surrounded by a variety of wrappers and a few leftover chocolates that barely escaped with their lives. We pitched up and down the waves, rocking and weeping until the wee hours.

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 was ever going to happen again.

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

That eerie calm settles on the heels of grief, and when the hits keep coming we look at the future and wonder if this is a pattern we need to just face with bleak resignation. My life as I knew it is long gone, and I don’t like the way this is heading.

I was reading the book of John and got to the part about Martha and Mary and the raising of Lazarus. And He caught me on that one little verse and kept me there: Jesus wept.

Why, though? He knew He was going to raise Lazarus in just a few minutes. If He knew it was going to be good, why did He give in to grief in the meantime?

I think it has to do with what Martha said to Him a little earlier: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” And a few minutes later, Mary came and said the same thing.

Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw Him, she fell at His feet, saying to Him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 

– John 11:32

They knew it, and He knew it. And I knew it, too. It was this: You could have prevented this.

In every loss we experience, it’s true. We’re aching and heaving, and He could have prevented it. Sometimes He does, more than we realize. And sometimes He doesn’t. And He weeps and rocks with us…more than we realize.

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in His spirit and greatly troubled.

– John 11:33

Then He does something else that seems odd.

And He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to Him, “Lord, come and see.”

– John 11:34

Where did they lay him? Why did He ask that? Didn’t Jesus, the God-man, already know? It was more than that, though. He wasn’t just asking where the dead man was.

He was saying, Show me where it hurts.

And that’s when He cried.

He weeps with Mary and Martha – and us – because He understands that sometimes we experience loss and pain for the sake of the expansion of the Kingdom. He knows we come under attack and we don’t know how to handle all the upheaval. He weeps with us because He knows we hurt and we often don’t understand why. He knows we rock in agony with no answers; He knows our ship swings between the violence and the lullaby.

In loss – whether it’s the death of a person, a pet, our plans, or something else entirely – we want certainty and explanation, but what we usually get first is refinement. We learn a little more about what it is to walk into the unknown, blank pages He sends us into. Please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not talking about accepting a hindrance, sickness, or other harassment from the enemy. We must not fall for his trick of casting righteous-sounding blame on God for attacks that come from the pit of hell. Denying ourselves and following Him is a mission, not a malady. The calling out of our comfort zone is our cross.

Sometimes, because He causes all things for good for those who love Him, grief and loss launch us farther and faster into His assignment for us. He knows it’s hard and it grieves Him, too. But He also knows what’s coming.

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

– John 11:40

We learn not to love our life so much – not because we’re ungrateful or bitter, but because we are unfettered and surrendered. We know this place isn’t permanent.

We’re not resigned. We’re reloading. And He’s not taking our life; He’s resurrecting it.

This is an excerpt from Risk the Ocean: An Adoptive Mom’s Memoir of Sinking and Sanctification.

Risk the Ocean: An Adoptive Mom's Memoir of Sinking and Sanctification "Vulnerably shares the blood, sweat, and tear that real sacrificial love requires." "Integrity beams up and out of every page."

New! Desk calendars for 2025 are in, with three styles to choose from. Get your ducks in a row early! Or ordered, at least. :)

out of thin air: how we make a living from grace and time

Posted on by September 5, 2024

After forty minutes of typing and deleting, I gave up and made lunch, discouraged. I threw a couple tacos together in the kitchen and came back upstairs, typed and deleted some more, and then shut the document.

I’ve learned by now that you can’t force a message out of thin air; it’s a balance between work and grace, and the Lord will reveal it when it’s time. So I moved to another project: sorting hundreds of pages of writings.

out of thin air: how we make a living from grace and time | Shannon Guerra

Copy a passage, paste to the new document. Highlight the original in red – or blue, or green, depending on the topic – scroll a little more, skim, repeat. I’m focused on the red words right now but I’ll get to the blue and green ones eventually, and once I find all the ones that ought to be red, I’ll categorize them into other documents to be rewritten.

Sometimes this is what writing a book looks like.

The initial work is already done, just like the garden out my window that’s already growing and producing, and the flowerbed that’s been blooming since late June. But if you want to reap a harvest you can’t stop there, because celery and peppers in the garden don’t automatically transform themselves into dinner any more than the 800,000 words I have in various files will turn themselves into a shelf full of books.

Projects like these have a million steps, and we can only do one small thing at a time. It does no good to wallow in the overwhelm or panic.

So I found my place again in the first document and skimmed – then stopped. Who knows how long ago I wrote it, but this was right there on page 168:

I’ve been reading Exodus. Almost done. The end is full of sticky pages and seemingly useless details about crafting the tabernacle, the ark of the covenant, and other accoutrements.

Here’s what I kept thinking of, though: Have you ever been overwhelmed with the tasks involved in a massive project? A quilt, a huge meal, a syllabus full of assignments, a house to be built, a book to be written? All the details, steps to be done in the right order. And then there are bigger things: We raise kids, we reform culture. We face hard pasts and need to heal.

And the details and timing are overwhelming.

But here’s what it says toward the end of Exodus:

And Moses saw all the work, and behold, they had done it; as the Lord had commanded, so had they done it. Then Moses blessed them.

— Exodus 39:43

People have paved the way in big projects before us, and God led them through. And He’s leading us, too.

Huh…right, I’m sure it was totally a coincidence.

But no, this too is the balance of work and grace – I wrote it forever ago, but it was the grace of God that gave it to me in the first place and then made me stumble on it again right when I needed it.

The day before, we’d spent an hour picking peas and came home with bags and bags of them, about 25 pounds. It took five of us another hour to shell them all into wide bowls as we crowded around the kitchen island. We ate some with dinner that night, and the next day I spent another forty minutes blanching and freezing the rest.

So much time, just for peas.

Just for a side dish for several meals.

But this is what provision and sustenance and our lives are made of: time, and a million tiny steps.

And also, grace. We didn’t plant the peas; a friend did.

Grace shows up in the things we didn’t work for and couldn’t have planned, like the violets that turned up as party crashers and took over my lettuce bed. They charmed me so much I didn’t even resent their invasion.

The violets’ existence is grace but making them useful is work, and every few days I go through the bed, clipping some to dry for tea while throwing others over the railing, littering our side yard with deadheaded violets.1 Not everything can be elevated to honorable use, of course; some things have to be composted.

And this is true of writings and other work, too – some are published and seen, and others are just destined to be humus. The bits of us poured into them break down to nourish other growth.

Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory—even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?

– Romans 9:21-24

In other homesteaderly endeavors, we usually have three containers of chicken and quail eggs on our counter at a time, and so far the worst casualty was when a friend’s baby grabbed the handle of one of the baskets and sent ten or so eggs to the floor in a messy, explosive demise. But considering that we keep unwashed eggs on one floor of the house and we store clean ones on another – and thus have to transport dozens at a time down a long stairwell at least twice a week – it’s amazing that that’s the worst that’s ever happened.

Every time I carry those eggs down the stairs, I pray. (Those stairs are probably the most interceded-for place in our house.) A few days ago I went down the stairs behind Kav, who was carrying a bucket of washed quail eggs while I had several crates of chicken eggs in a precariously stacked tower. I guess in your late forties, this is how some of us live on the edge. Every step is grace.

And I need that grace for every step, because I am 24 years into this parenting gig and I still struggle with getting kids bathed throughout the week, and their nails trimmed at frequent intervals, and making sure all the toilets are scrubbed before things start growing in there. It feels like I should be better at this by now or that we should have a routine or something, but life keeps changing and pulling the rug out from under our routines in process.

In these days that feel so full and uncertain and filled with alarming events and unknown implications, it is such a relief to know (or be reminded, because I forget) that it is not up to me to do everything. It is my job to show up and do my work, and that’s it. And (this is what I really need to hear – so listen, self) not everything is my work.

We don’t have to make everything, or learn everything, or produce everything, or figure everything out. We just need to show up and do our own work: at the desk, with the kids, in the garden, over the coffee with a friend, at the kitchen stove, on the phone with a client, in the meeting with other Kingdom builders.

We show up and surrender our time, effort, and attention. And when we do, we find that He’s already there, already at work, doing the parts we could never dream of.

If we could force it all to happen, we’d take too much credit for it. So He lets us sit in a little frustration, feeling the tension of effort dance with our growing character as we practice things like trust, patience, steadfastness, fortitude, and faith. We need to know that every step is grace, that He meets us in both the risk and the tedious labor, rewarding those efforts with light, color, and clarity. Fulfillment.

As long as we keep going, there it is: We make a living, we reap a harvest, right out of thin air.

  1. If anyone’s looking for a great band name, Vin thinks “the deadheaded violets” is a winner. We’ll take 1%, thanks. ↩︎

Subscribe here for more posts like this, right to your inbox.