My brain seems to be in a loop. The words echo around and around because they don’t have anywhere else to go these days. Pursuing peace. Pursuing peace. Pursuing peace. Choo-choo.
We all have been on a new adventure together. But separate. Each morning opens up to a blank slate. My calendar that had been full for April suddenly was wiped clean. We all have opened our hands and let go. There has been loss. Some folks have had much harder loss than others.
Read MoreI am betting the followers of Jesus didn’t see it that way. Just days before they had followed him through the streets to shouts of ‘Hosanna!’ A song of adoration, shouts of salvation echoed along the way as he rode a donkey – the sign of a king, the sign of a Messiah, the sign of a savior – into a Holy City under martial law. He was there to deliver them. Hopes were high. Spirits soared.
Read MoreThe birth of Jesus on earth was announced with angel song declarations of coming joy and peace. Jesus left this earth declaring the same: “My peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”
Peace. Why are we so far from this peace that the angels announced and Jesus promised? Perhaps it is there in the disclaimer Jesus writes in black and white; “…not as the world gives.” Do we keep grasping for worldly peace instead of something much bigger, something much better? What is the difference here between the world’s version of ‘peace’ and this peace of Jesus?
Read MoreSunday, after on-line Andy and a walk around the neighborhood with my friend Jane, I tried to entice her into heading over to the neighborhood restaurant for brunch (I think restaurants were still open then – just discouraged). She suggested we just have coffee at my house. She has always been better at following the rules than me – so she keeps me out of a good bit of trouble.
Homemade muffins, honey, and coffee. Jane looked at the little green price tag still affixed to the yellow flip-top. “Oh my, are you going to share this with me? This stuff is the price of gold!” “I know!” I responded. “I decided it would be worth it since you just use a little at a time.” Probably the better response would have been, “I wanted to share it because you are worth it.” But Jane doesn’t care for mushy sentiments, so all was fine.
Read MoreDo you feel like you have woken up in a foreign world? I do. I spent the last four days in Birmingham, along with a morning adventure into Tuscaloosa, and that world is a world of beautiful southern women, gentle-men, labs lolling on the front porch and children’s toys waiting for them in the front yard. I was in heaven, despite the virus news that broke down the door and slowly streamed its way in. The sun was shining and the buds were breaking forth. Bees buzzed on the blueberry bushes at the side door. Let me say it again – heaven.
Read MoreI grew up in a house where the blessing was said before every meal. It was my Daddy's blessing; sort of a one-breath, every word running together blessing that went like this; "Lord-thank-you-for-these-and-all-blessings-Christ's-sake-Amen." We never ever started eating until that blessing was said. Occasionally my mother might say, “I don’t think we blessed the food,” as she suddenly put down her fork and looked around the table at us. I learned, even if I insisted that we had – we would all bow our heads and it would be blessed again.
Read MoreI grew up with the ghost of a man I never met. His name was Joe Farber. He was my mother's first husband, my older sisters' father. There were photo albums of him and my mother and my sisters traveling through the mountains of California or sitting on the front steps of their home in Los Angeles. Or my mother dancing with Joe with gardenias in her hair. The photographs were back and white with deckle edges. Or big and glossy in hand-tinted pastels. There was even a framed oil-painted portrait of their little family that Joe had commissioned when he was in Japan.
Growing up, I thought there was a very real possibility that one day Joe Farber would show up at our back door and my mother would leave us all to be with him again.
Read MoreI don’t have any original ideas. I really don’t. I trail around on the coat skirts of much smarter people. But they are pretty smart people so I really don’t mind clinging on.
I am in the nose-bleed section, cheering my heart out. They can’t hear me. That’s okay. They give me wonderful things to think about all day long. I thank God for these incredible, gifted people who write profound truths, sing beautiful words with a glorious melody or speak out with a fighter’s stance and rhinoceros skin.
“Go!” I whisper to them. “Go, and don’t let them knock you down!” And I say a prayer of gratitude that they are brave enough, bold enough to stand up and shout it out.
Read MoreI have not told you about this new thing God is doing. I have not told you about how sometimes God can show up at your door in the skin of a beautiful woman named Hannah and place music into your hands. “Listen to this… I am doing a great thing,” God whispers.
And there they are. Six perfect, beautiful songs, written in God’s voice. Telling of His unfailing, everlasting love. Offering rest within His arms. Encouraging you to come a little closer. Promising the darkness will not last forever, for He has already won the battle. The music fills the room. It fills your heart. It soothes your spirit.
Read MoreI have to admit – this whole idea of choosing a word for the year is new for me. I first heard of this only a few years ago in the small Christian circles where I roam. I couldn’t really get into it although I loved the concept. But last year – my year of slamming the car into reverse, turning the wheel a hard right and gunning the engine, I thought – why not? I am heading down this new curving road where I have never been before – why not throw a guiding word into the glove compartment in case I get lost?
True to my slightly dyslexic self… (and no, I have not been diagnosed except for strangers asking, “So you have a little trouble with transposing things, huh?) …I couldn’t pick one word. I needed two words to tell the story of where I thought I was heading.
Read MoreIt is in the night that the whispers come, lingering in the shadows, still quietly with me when the sun rises. “You are empty,” the voice tells me. “You have nothing to offer. Nothing anyone wants,” it taunts. As I pour my coffee with this uneasy cloud of worthlessness still hanging over me, I glance at the scripture that has found its home there in my kitchen for the past ten years:
"I am doing a great work and I cannot come down."
I think to myself, “I need to take that scripture down. I have no great work I am doing. I have nothing to accomplish.”
Read MoreThis I must remember. I must tattoo it onto the palms of my hands: ‘Dirty became the new holy when Jesus died covered in his own blood and your sin.’ This is my paraphrase of Andy Stanley in Irresistible.
I need to spend less time trying to keep my hands clean of wrongdoing and more time with my sleeves rolled up, reaching out to wash feet and carry another’s heavier burden.
There is no other religion that follows a crucified God. There is no natural inclination to wash the dirty feet of others. Washing, not because we are better or cleaner, but because we are servants. Not exactly the best-paid job in the classifieds.
Read MoreI just got a new car. But it isn’t really new of course. We always buy used cars in our family. Excuse me, ‘pre-owned’. It was something my parents did, and their parents did before them. They never bought on credit; they always saved and paid cash and taught me the value of a car drops like a rocket that first year or two and steadies out to a slower decline after that.
As I think about it, I realize we aren’t brand new sort of people anyway. Pretty much everything we have is used, recycled, handed down, or vintage found.
Read MoreThe fisherman at the edge of the water handed me a small lightning whelk that he had picked up earlier that morning. “I like the broken ones – I find them interesting.” This one wasn’t broken - it was perfect. A fluid curve tucking into itself. “You keep this one,” he continued. I’m here all the time.”
The back bed of his small covered pick-up was filled with fishing gear and sand-covered pieces of recently washed up trash. He nodded in the direction of two other men in four-wheelers who sat chatting in the early morning light; their version of meeting for coffee I supposed. "Those of us with vehicles pick up the trash that washes up,” he said, explaining the odd items of debris in his truck: broken sunglasses, rope, a shoe, a blue shard of plastic.
Read MoreFrom the time I was a little girl, I have loved the pretty things. Sitting on one of the twin beds in my older sisters' bedroom, I would watch in awe as they applied eyeliner and mascara, clothes for the evening laid out on the bed beside me; matching yellow shoes in their tissue-lined box. It was everything I wanted: perfect paint and sophistication.
These days I falter and pause. All the lovely layers are being stripped away to where the skin is raw and the emotions a bit ragged.
Read MoreWe love our superlatives. We love the warm glow of being the best, the most, the highest quality, surpassing all others, superior in all things, unusually good, outstanding, close to perfect. It is like a 13-year-old girl has high-jacked our brains and we have to create new endings to words to describe how amazing something is. (‘Super-superlative = bestest; as in you are my bestest friend.’ Yes, I found that in the dictionary.).
I have worked with a group of people who strive for excellence and the thought of it wears me out. I have seen grown women cry at the thought “You must always strive for excellence in all you do!” Phooey!
Read MoreWhy do we hold onto those old family photographs? You know the ones; everyone is in mid-movement, looking in different directions, a flare of light obscures a face while someone else falls off into the shadows. Heads chopped off; mouths open in conversation. Those really bad photographs. I have boxes of them.
My sister Ann went through every one of my mother’s photo albums and pulled out the pictures when we were cleaning out the house. She scanned many of them. We threw away the bulky old albums. All of the photographs went into large baggies to be distributed between the sisters. But the loose photographs still float around from Roanoke to Greenville to Atlanta waiting for who knows what to happen to them.
Read MoreSome days fear wells up in me from some deep place. It is quiet in its approach. I don’t realize it has come to visit me until it has crept in through the back door and taken a seat right there in my kitchen. Whispering in my ear. Telling me the saddest stories and the most insidious lies.
I will start feeling vaguely sad. And isolated. And slowly I realize it is because I am listening to this ongoing, monotonous voice that tells me really mean secrets about myself. Secrets everyone else knows already. Secrets about how foolish I am… what people really think about me – or worse, that they don’t think of me at all. I have no talent. I really have no worth. I am mean-spirited. Everything I think about myself is just a delusion, a lie, a big puff of smoke. And mirrors.
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