Moments in Grace

  This week my youngest brother flew off in a plane to spend the next nine months in Africa, a place designated as the "hottest place on earth".  He said goodbye to his brand new fiancée, his friends, his family, to go and serve our country in a place most of us would hope to never go to.  I'm proud to call him family. And today is my day to fly. This step of faith, this flying leap, I'm off to Costa Rica with the team from church to go and make disciples in another corner of this vastly small world.  To go and see what God might do there with our little bit of nothing and just this... Love. And this backpack that I've had since I was eighteen, it went with me to college and was there when I gave my life to Christ that September night of freshman year, and the day after I chose to follow Christ, I bought that key chain,  the one that says, Love. And it reminds me that all we have and all we are is all of the love of God.  And we go to gi...

“Do you think there are oceans in heaven?”   He asks the question to our daughter. “Well, God made the oceans, so he must like them.   And where else would he put the dolphins and whales?” Because this place, it’s about as close to heaven as we’ve been. This place feels almost like home, tasting salt spray and sunshine-warm skin and glorious blue ocean-sky days.   All our family is gathered here, twenty-eight of us, gathered in this house by the sea sharing time away and together.   Four generations of us drinking in awestruck sunrises and sandy sun-filled afternoons and dusky crab sleuthing evenings. Card games and craft time and boogie boarding, surfing and sand castles.   We came to celebrate life. After a year of losses, both grandmothers passing, we came to remember the joys of family.   Great-grandpa, he’s 87, he came too, not even a year since the loss of his wife of more than fifty years...

We plant the seeds, row after row and put them into the ground covered by the dark soil.                 The third son and his daddy, planting our little garden bed.   Baby hands growing into child, they gently lay them down, then roll the earth back over, tuck them in tight.   Pat them down and water them in, seeds in their soil slumber.   We place them there tenderly and wait and hope for life to come up out of that dark place. In just a few days we see rows of tiny green shoots popping.   Some don’t.   Some are eaten by chipmunks.   Some come up twisted, weak.   Some are healthy, strong, beautiful. As I watch this ground give harvest, produce its life, I see my planting, itself harvesting before my very eyes.   I watch as this oldest son, oldest of the four boys, is before my very eyes becoming man.   Yielding life.   How very fast ...

Just when the money was due for the mission trip to Costa Rica, our big van needed tires and hadn’t had an oil change in a year.   One week later Jon’s car kicked the bucket in the middle of an intersection and couldn’t be raised from the dead. It always happens that way. We were down to one car for our family of eight which made it hard when one of us had to be somewhere at the same time someone else had to be somewhere else, and it wasn’t working out so well.     Then one morning we got a call. Our friends offered to let us borrow their car for a few months.   They weren’t going to need it since Jay would be traveling out of state to donate his kidney to a relative and would be gone for a few months. What? Who does stuff like that?   I mean, who travels across country to have their body cut open and part of it taken out and given to someone else, not because they had to but because they wanted to. To save a life.   Who risks this even...

So, there we were.     My six olive shoots and I around the table, trying to have morning devotions. It had started out bad and was filtering into ugly. Child one had woken up cranky and annoyed and everyone who opened their mouth in this child’s presence was feeling the irritation. Child four and five were bickering over Legos in an argument that was coming to blows. Child two was enjoying irritating child one. Child three was complaining in a tone nearing temper tantrum force, about breakfast not suiting their preferences. Child six was just screaming at the top of their lungs about nothing in particular. And I am still trying to read Hebrews 4:12-13 over the swell and crash of noise but no one can hear me. And I read for the fifth time, “For the word of God is living and active.   Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart....

To all those who serve and who have served our country, Thank You. We remember. We remember your sacrifice.   We remember your risk.   We remember your gift. Your self-less giving for us all, that we might taste the freedom so many others long to. We take it for granted.   Can we really appreciate your gift for us?   Freedom isn’t free. And the cost is often the very lives of those who seek to give freedom to others.   And for all of you who have counted the cost of laying down your life for others, We say,   Thank you.   May you not be forgotten. God sees.   He knows.   And whatever you have given for the sake of Christ, to serve Him in your calling as a soldier, it is a sacrifice worthy, because Christ is worthy.   And if those who have gone before us had not considered their very lives to be worth the cost of taking the gospel to this America, then freedom would not ring throughout the earth t...

Safe is a place I've clung to all too often. Avoiding conflict, avoiding difficulty, avoiding pain. But safe is just a mirage in this life.  We run to it only to find it evaporate through our fingers. There is only one safe place in all this sin-stained world, and that is in the arms of Jesus.  Today my blog is posted over on Incourage, an inspirational site for women.  A place for women to gather and tell their God stories; to share encouragement and faith.  To tell the story of His grace.  I'm so thankful and blessed for this opportunity to lend my voice to chorus of amazing women at Incourage who are boldly telling His story through the everyday moments of their lives.  To read my story at Incourage click here. "For God works all things together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purposes." Romans 8:28