Letter to My Mother on Her Birthday

Dear Mom,
When I think of my earliest memories of you, they are of how beautiful you are.  I remember being little and loving the smell of your perfume in the air and standing small, in awe of the rows of shoes in your closet.  I loved to try on your heels that had the bow with the big rhinestone inside.  Didn't you have those in 3 colors?  And you had tall boots in taupe, tan and black, and I loved to wear them in your big closet and pretend to be Wonderwoman.

Thank you for making me tithe, even when I was little.  I remember my $2.50 allowance each week, and I always took my quarter to church.  Giving to God first has become a habit, and I credit you with that.  You also taught me to avoid credit card debt, and that is something I am thankful for (and so is Selden!).  I hope we can teach our kids those same financial disciplines as well as you taught them to me.

You also are to blame for my highly type-A but very efficient way of making a weekly grocery list that is laid out in order of the aisles in the grocery store.  I thought you were so strange for all you organizational quirks, but now I have them too, so I think they are quite brilliant.

Thank you for always welcoming my friends and our messes into the house.  You saw the genius of play and making art without having lines to stay inside of and encouraged me to wallpaper the inside of my wooden bookshelf as an addition to Barbie's "Dream House."  You let me grow up with a sense of enterprise and possibility, and I know that's something God wants us all to develop in our children.  You gave me a shelf to sell my handmade earrings on in your salon, and you taught me about profit margins and invested in all of my dreams.

I love how you made every excuse to celebrate.  You set the table with candles and flowers, just because sitting down as a family to eat is something to be treasured.  And you cooked me fried eggs and toast for breakfast and woke me up with foot rubs until I graduated high school. (Have I told you recently that you are a much better person than I am?  It's true.  My kids use alarms to wake up and make their own breakfasts.  Please don't tell them about the fried eggs and the foot rubs.  Thanks.)

You threw the best spiral with a football of anyone in the neighborhood, boys included.  And you never pushed me to be all the things you loved.  When I didn't really love sports, and I liked art more, you were the biggest art fan on earth.

Thank you for bringing me along to serve others.  You lived out a life of ministry in front of me, and I now hope to live that with my kids.  I remember crouching in the car, hoping not to get shot driving through unsafe parts of town (for those who don't live in cities where this happens, yes, this is a normal part of life in some areas, not that many car jackers rush to steal Datsun 510's, so we were probably very safe, but that's another matter altogether) to deliver Thanksgiving gifts to a teenage mom and her little babies who lived in a two-room shotgun house.  I remember the kids licking Spaghettio's off the bare mattress when we walked in.  You taught me to seek out what others need, not what I think they need.  And you learned that as you went.  We took a turkey that day, and she didn't have an oven.  So you took a list of all the things she needed more than turkey, and we came back with curtains and diapers and other things.  And you took me to visit people who were sick.  And you invited the families of all the prisoners to our church for a special Christmas and made sure they went home with Christmas trees decorated and gifts and that they knew Jesus came for each of them and loves them.

I can't give you a birthday gift that could ever come close to being able to repay you for any of the riches you've cultivated in my life.  You've given me courage and determination and tenderness and Jesus.  And those things are worth everything.

Happy birthday to a mom I can never repay.
I love you to Jesus!

Shannon

This is for Us

How do I write about the cross?  How do I write about a God whose love for us is so personal, so intimate, that He would come to this dusty earth and walk among us?  And not only to come to earth but to come disguised as someone so ordinary.... a builder, a worker, a man without wealth or acclaim.  Jesus, seeking out relationships, spending time connecting intentionally with people who need him, with people who didn't seem important to anyone else.  Him,  God Almighty, in human skin, serving flawed, needy, hurting people...

How can the God of heaven and earth, Creator of the universe, One with no beginning and no end possibly be willing to leave the splendor of heaven to walk unnoticed for years on this hurting, broken planet?

It's because He desires a relationship with us.  This always blows my mind.

Our sin, our shortcomings, our flaws - all of this makes it impossible for us to stand in His presence.  This God Almighty chose to wash us in His own blood - the blood of Jesus, God as man, His Son.  Every single bit of flesh torn from the body of Jesus on the day He was crucified should have been my flesh.  Every time the whip landed on His back, it should have been me.  Every bit of shame and indignity and torture my Lord Jesus endured was rightfully mine.  And because He longs to be in relationship with me, He chose to die for me.  And you.

This blood shed, this sacrifice offered up to God the day the sky split and the darkness covered earth, this is for us.  This is our gift of love from God's own heart, so we can call Him Father.  So we can let go of shame we've earned the weight of carrying, and instead we can carry hearts filled with peace and love and grace.  So we can have eternal life.  Because God desperately wants us to spend eternity in His presence.  Because He treasures us... us with all our faults and weakness and fears... us with all the questions and pride and years we've spent living life as though there is no God at all... us, made in the image of God, formed in the womb by His great design, knit together by Him and set apart by Him and able to do all things through Him.

Us, whose names are engraved on His hands.

This cross.  This Savior's side pierced, spilling blood and water.  This conquering of the grave.  This freedom from the grip of sin.  This unearned gift of grace and forgiveness and relationship.  This washing white as snow.  This eternal life in heaven and abundant life on earth.

This is for us.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."  John 3:16

Measuring My Life with God's Ruler

Converting measurements is not my thing.  I'm a word girl, not a numbers girl.  I measure in inches, and in Ukraine, measurements are in centimeters.  So, when I'm shopping for my heart-son, I always get a kick out of having to Google the conversion of measurements, so I get the sizes right.  I mean, I can't even think in centimeters!

It's like this in my relationship with the Lord, too.  He measures things differently than I do.  He measures time, progress, prosperity and success by standards that are not natural to me.  And He is faithful to teach me how to convert my measuring tape so I see my life more like He does.

When I think things aren't happening quickly enough, I am reminded "For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by." (Psalm 90:4)

When I'm not sure things are turning out as they should, He whispers, "For my thoughts are not your thhoughts, neither are your ways my ways... As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8,9)

When I've sought out abundance in terms of owning nice things, Jesus says, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.  But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven...For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." (Matthew 6:19)


When I've seen success at times as something people achieve through financial security or things I can see, I'm corrected by the words of my Lord, spoken to a man who had attained every measure of success as society would define it.  "Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, 'Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?'...Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.  Then come, follow me.'  When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth." (Matthew 19:16, 20-21)  Jesus himself is clear that being willing to let go of our "stuff" is far more a measure of success in his eyes than being able to aquire it.

God's Word indeed pierces right through to the division of the bone and marrow (Hebrews 4:12)!  Every word of God shoots Truth and conviction straight into my spirit, and I cannot hear this Truth and remain unchanged.  I cannot spend time with a Savior who abandoned the splendor of heaven to suffer consequences of sin I earned and walk away with anything but a very clear understanding that I cannot be the one who decides how things are done or what is valuable.  I cannot measure my life by comforts or possessions or feeling a certain way.  I can only hold up as my standard a life lived in emptying out of love undeserved and yet freely given.

I'm not sure I'm ever going to become really good at figuring out sneaker sizes using centimeters, although my boy is worth every moment I'll spend trying to figure that one out!  And as I work on my centimeters-to-inches conversion for things like shoe shopping, the Lord is very faithfully about the task of changing the way my heart measures.

When You Need to be Filled

Some days, I am depleted.  I feel fragmented.  Spread too thin.  It's part of living life as a "jar of clay."  We are filled.  Then we are emptied.

There are seasons of battle, when the enemy tries to use exhaustion to make us throw our hands up in defeat.

Be encouraged.  It is only when we are emptied of ourselves, that we can be filled with Jesus.  It is only when we are encroaching on precious territory for the Lord that we are so fiercely targeted.  The bombardment and the emptying are both good, when we know how to receive soul-quenching fullness and fear-quieting resilience in the Lord.

I am imagining Jesus, the day he slept on the boat in the midst of the stormy sea.  I think that is a picture he painted for each of us to illustrate the rest our souls can find in Christ, regardless of the stormy circumstances around us.  Our peace does not come from the conditions of our lives.  It comes despite them.

For those of you who are engaged in battle, remember that the battle is the Lord's.  For those of you who are stepping out in faith, taking risks for Christ, paying dearly for your faithfulness to the Lord, keep up the good work - following Jesus is dangerous and costly and right.  For those of you who are at a crossroads, I am praying for you to hear the voice of the Lord telling you which way to turn.  For those of you who are tired, remember Jesus said to come to him for rest.  For those of you who are needing to be filled, you are not alone, and the Lord sees your need, and He will fill you back up.

"I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strenthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.  And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fulness of God."  Ephesians 3:16-19