Moments in Grace

On the day that the international mom’s Bible study starts up, I’m there with my own six week old son, strapped to my chest like I’m Sacagawea ascending the mountain with Lewis and Clark.     Maybe I feel a little like her, this woman who embraced these visitors to her nation and showed them the way to map out a new land.   And isn’t that what we’re here to do, to study the map leading to new life?   Life in Christ is what we are seeking, and these, my fellow sojourners, are looking for new and better Land and I don’t mean America.   There is a map to Heaven, and it is found in this book.  The Bible isn't just for Sundays.  The Bible is your everyday map and who really wants to walk this wild world without one? As I look around the table at these faces, breathtaking beauty, I catch a glimpse of wonder, Heaven touching earth.  Because when we behold Heaven this is what we are going to see: people of every skin color, language, nat...

My momma always told me, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Yeah, well, I guess lately I’ve taken that to heart. I haven’t been able to write, to talk, to process much because the ugly truth is, I think I’ve been afraid if I opened my mouth, not too much nice was going to come out.   The ugly truth is, sometimes you can struggle through and put on a brave smile and hold back the spewing lava behind your eyes but it still burns you up from the inside.   It still burns.   Bitterness never leads to betterness. And here I am, this very, very pregnant mama, pregnant with this seventh baby, skin splitting ready,   any day now, ready, and feeling very unready to actually deliver this most precious cargo into the light of this broken world.   Maybe it’s because I’ve spent the last nine months contemplating whether his delivery day will be my dying day.   And sure, I shouldn’t be thinking those thoughts, I shouldn’t be focusin...

The way of the cross is not an easy way. It is the way of dying that leads to life and greatest fruitfulness.   When I came to know Christ I understood the cost but had no idea what it would mean for me. How God takes those who seek to follow Him and a time comes when he asks them to lay down everything that they hold most dear to their hearts so that they would   find that He alone is the true treasure worth seeking. I just didn’t know. I didn’t know how hard this path would be.   But I was willing to count the cost, whatever it may be, even if it cost me my life. But, can I be honest and say, there have been times I’ve struggled with resenting the hardness of this? There are times that I have struggled to keep my heart in the place of full surrender.   Maybe outwardly I was obeying but inwardly sometimes I have been angry, depressed, confused.   And the prosperity gospel of the Western world that says if you follow Jes...

So the kid down the street, the teenager we bring to church, he punches my son in the face….again. And this kid with no mother, and hardly a father, this kid who gets suspended from school at the drop of a hat because he….well, he punches everyone in the face who gets in his way, and how do you keep reaching the lost and the broken when they beat you up over and over again? This dilemma is not new. This is the struggle of every person who has ever set out to love lost and broken people in Jesus' name. Sometimes you get your nose bloodied. Sometimes you get wounded, because hurting people will hurt you .   It is not a matter of maybe.   It is only a matter of when and how.   It doesn’t mean that it is not hard.   Oh, yes it will be hard to love unlovely people.   It will be painful.   It will cost you something.   It will be ugly at times.   You will wonder if it is worth it.   You will want to quit. You will ...

So maybe the winter that never ends is really starting to get to you.   And after four solid months, now becoming five, of snow on the ground and biting wind and temperatures below freezing, you are longing for sun and trips to the park and just some warmth again.   It can be easy to start to complain.   It can be easy to start to whine a little. It can be easy to think of all the things you wish were different. And in these March days, maybe like me, you are reading through the Bible in a year and once again you come across this story in Numbers, this story of a people who found themselves complaining. And maybe you read these words and see yourself for a moment.   You look into the mirror of the Word and you see the ugly and the true and you realize that these words are an alarm for maybe…you. Because right there in the book of Numbers, is the story of the Israelites and their trip into the wilderness and how they got deliv...

When I met her for the first time, she looked ordinary to me, unassuming, like any grandmother, anywhere, with salt and pepper hair and a soft, generous smile.   How could I have known that I had met a hero?   On that very first mission trip, into the high Mexican desert, up the winding dirt roads to land of cactus and cattle and smiling children living in structures made of sticks tied together with twine, how could I have known that there was a gem buried in those desert mountains?   That there was a gem of a woman tucked away in the sparsely dotted folds of those mountains, a hero of a woman with a name like a gemstone.   Her name was Garnet. And this gem of a grandmother, she led our team up these winding mountain roads and we bounced and jarred over rocks and packed dirt in a white twelve-passenger van, she told us her stories. The stories of a life lived full out for Jesus. She told us that she had come to this desert land when she w...

  So maybe you’ve been fighting the dark and the cold like some kind of polar vortex epic battle. And maybe you’ve been feeling like maybe the dark was winning. I think I can relate. Maybe your days have been hard and depression has been lurking like some kind of stealthy snow fox and maybe for a while you might have lost your way in all that blinding blurring snow.   Well, there is hope for people like us. People who sometimes get lost, and sometimes fall off the map, and sometimes can’t even remember what grace is let alone write about it and sometimes can’t even remember who they are. There is hope. When life turns you upside down and you can’t quite remember how to get back up, you can remember this….hope will find you. When, the day before Thanksgiving, I found out I was pregnant with our seventh child, I have to be honest and say, the wind was knocked out of me. And even for me who spent years working in the pro-lif...