He Makes Beautiful Things [VIDEO]
To imagine my newly married days with an older child that we’ve just adopted, who also has some special needs, seems mind boggling. I’ve met a woman who knows the grace of God for this very moment. Mamas, when you eke out that “this is too hard” cry, remember there are stories emerging all around us of a God whose strength is made perfect in this ache.
Christina‘s is one of them.
I met her because she helped foster Lily in our waiting period. Our daughters shared a home for a few months and share a God who breathes promises over them every day, despite what the odds might say. I have a deep admiration for Christina, as she is one choosing to see His word over her daughter as the final word. Today you can read her words and watch her story on video. Grab your tissues.
(For the month of May and a week into June, I will be pressing pause on my online writing and this space will become a series of testimonies of what He births in the midst of delay, perplexity and pain. Author friends from around the world, who love words on a page and Him even more, will share, here, how they have seen Him make the bitter, sweet.)
In 2010 I realized that I was just going through the motions. … continue reading ‘He Makes Beautiful Things [VIDEO]‘…
Latest Morning Chai Devotion
Fierce Love
[ this post is a continuation of Love, Unnaturally, from yesterday]
The tears of years break surface when we least expect them.
We were all packed in, beginning our cross-country trip back home, the home they’d now known for months. Out of the blue the one most steady in our grip burst the silence of six sets of eyes absorbing the great-wide highway’s unfamiliarity with her cries.
“Why did she leave me?” she sobbed.
I absorbed the shock. This was a first for her. What triggered this?
“Why did my birth mommy leave me?” she bellowed, her tears turning to wails.
And while I was formulating my response the one behind her joined in, wet-cheeked already, himself. Sympathy or empathy, I wasn’t ..read more
Joy in the midst of waiting. Beauty from ashes. Seeing Jesus’ thread throughout every frame of life. That's what we've been exploring this past decade ... and along the way, we've added to our family -- former orphans, now a son and three daughters.
And in the midst of it all ... I am learning to look up.
Link back here …
Recent Postings
He Makes Beautiful Things [VIDEO]
To imagine my newly married days with an older child that we’ve just adopted, who also has some special needs, seems mind boggling. I’ve met a woman who knows the grace of God for this very moment. Mamas, when you eke out that “this is too hard” cry, remember there are stories emerging all around us of a God whose strength is made perfect in this ache.
Christina‘s is one of them.
I met her because she helped foster Lily in our waiting period. Our daughters shared a home for a few months and share a God who breathes promises over them every day, despite what the odds might say. I have a deep admiration for Christina, ..read more
When He Comes in the Hunger
We file into her basement every Wednesday night — underground, the place where fire often burns brightest. A few less than a dozen of us span a decade and a half, sprinkled across all stages of life. We have one thing in common: desire for this God-Man. I’m excited to share with you today a friend, this gatherer of our little motley crew, who makes me want to know Him more. Dana Candler is an author who leads to many to the place of hunger. I suspect this window into her writing, into her heart, will leave you wanting Him more. Her books are listed below this post and might just be the kick-start your ..read more
The Calling For Those Who Wait
Though we only just met this fall, this next author-friend feels like an old friend. Judy has been a beautiful encourager to me in my writing and her own story, that you’ll get a taste of here, is full of time spent in the waiting room and the richness that comes from life’s delays. To kick-off Mother’s Day weekend, a weekend I spent many years dreading, Judy Lewis raises a banner of vision for all woman.
(For the month of May and a week into June, I will be pressing pause on my online writing and this space will become a series of testimonies of what He births in the midst of delay, perplexity and pain. Author friends from around ..read more
Fruitful Vacancy
Mike and Anne Rizzo have blessed us so much here in Kansas City. After listening to their son pour his heart out as a singer and musician through the webstream on my computer for so many years, little did we know that when we moved here almost 2 years ago that his father and mother would become dear friends. Their life is a picture to us of true fruitfulness — they live in private what they speak and teach in public; they love Him. They have a soon-to-be published book, called Longing For Eden: Embracing God’s Vision in Your Marriage, and Mike has graciously agreed to offer an excerpt of his book here, for my readers. Enjoy!
For the month ..read more
Our Good and Perfect Gift
If you’ve been around my blog for a while, you’ve heard me mention Amy Julia Becker. This past fall, her book A Good and Perfect Gift – about how her experience with disappointment turned into overwhelming blessing — sat on my bedside table for a few weeks because I just didn’t want to finish it. I didn’t want my experience with her book to be over; it was that good. Her words, which you’ll hear a snippet of below, stretched both my mind and my heart. Amy Julia and I were, first, friends by default, as our husbands lived together in college. But since, we have formed a sweet (and separate) friendship. She has become a steady encourager to me as ..read more
Timing Is Everything
For the month of May and a week into June, I will be pressing pause on my online writing and this space will become a series of testimonies of what He births in the midst of delay, perplexity and pain. Author friends from around the world who love words on a page, and Him even more, will share, here, how they have seen Him make the bitter, sweet.
Today we get to hear from Randy Bohlender. Nate and I are blessed to share a prayer room and a community with this family, who have said “yes” to Him, despite the stretching that their “yes” has meant. Randy and his wife, Kelsey, went from 3 to 9 children in five ..read more
Hearing Him in a Story
The stairwell down to our basement has a mantel full of pictures from our past. From college days to wedding to pre-child ski trips and post-child trampings through fall leaves, we have nearly two decades covered.
There is one in particular that tells a certain story.
The night before our college graduation, we gathered, my girlfriends — who had shared bathrooms and books and boyfriend stories for 4 years –gathered with our parents to celebrate at a friends’ cabin home. The next day we would hide our identities behind matching caps and gowns and walk uniformly through what would be the last stage of life that I’ve known to be uniform.
This picture on my mantel is a ..read more
Fierce Love
[ this post is a continuation of Love, Unnaturally, from yesterday]
The tears of years break surface when we least expect them.
We were all packed in, beginning our cross-country trip back home, the home they’d now known for months. Out of the blue the one most steady in our grip burst the silence of six sets of eyes absorbing the great-wide highway’s unfamiliarity with her cries.
“Why did she leave me?” she sobbed.
I absorbed the shock. This was a first for her. What triggered this?
“Why did my birth mommy leave me?” she bellowed, her tears turning to wails.
And while I was formulating my response the one behind her joined in, wet-cheeked already, himself. Sympathy or empathy, I wasn’t ..read more
Love, Unnaturally
It happened.
I knew it would.
I’d been here before.
The most beautiful part of waiting is receiving His response after your heart chose expectation instead of fear. I’ve been in both shoes, frequently, and choosing the former always makes the bitter taste sweet.
She was in the middle of her contribution to our dinnertime banter, tentatively trying her hand at directing what she had, once, only just observed. Her “how about, Daddy, we …” wasn’t our typical fare but we jumped on board with her suggestion. She scootched herself against the back of her chair and sat up, tall. She wore ownership.
And as the quickened chatter (which happens when life just produced a day with oh-so-much to recount) continued, time ..read more
When Life is Paused
Forks clanked noisily to their plates as bare feet scampered across the floor and out the door, their mouths too full with food to squeal.
The moment we’d been awaiting for 10 days finally happened.
The nest we’d been fostering, unknowingly for some time, now housed a family. The incubation period was over, our robin’s eggs had hatched!
I watched the flesh stretched across these nascent babies wrinkle as their mouths released yawns their eyes couldn’t yet see. They were as small as my finger, some only hours old. They nestled, flesh against flesh, as if the shells that contained their frames never existed.
Their world was one I’d never stopped to consider.
My children marveled at a sight that was a ..read more
One Ember
“For our God is a consuming fire” Hebrews 12:29. It quietly tugged at me from where I’d scribbled it in my moleskine journal as I re-directed her vegetable-peeling strokes in the direction away from my Bible, already stained cucumber green.
This moment was humorous to me.
I pray in secret before the sun comes up to have a primal life-devotion which moves the heart of God — for His fire to consume all of me and for my life to spread His glory … and I spend my daylight hours separating laundry, cleaning toilets, training hands to peel cucumbers and teaching mouths to say “will you forgive me” and “thank you.”
The quick snapshot reveals anything but glamour in ..read more
What Love Looks Like in Mess
The scene was familiar, only slightly more intense than the last time. As our house becomes her home, what’s buried down deep begins to find its way to the surface. Pain has a buoyancy.
When I came upstairs he’d been holding her for nearly an hour, my child, unrelenting. She scratched his arms and resisted his hold with shame-infused adrenaline, fighting the very thing her body most craved. She wanted to reject him before he could reject her, the inevitable outcome in her mind to a misstep, corrected by Daddy. The undercurrent of her everyday outlook was loud today.
These are the days we are learning to celebrate, not avoid. The night of mourning always promises a new ..read more
Receiving
She shared my kitchen space with her monogrammed apron which, already, was too small for the body she’d grown up and out of months ago.
This moment reflected her heart.
She cut lettuce and stirred sauce and mimicked what she’d seen me do. She’d learned so much in 9 short months. But hours earlier, He’d pulled back the curtain on her mystery, to me. Her heart was too small for her body. Lanky limbs reflecting her age disguised a heart much younger in years. We poured out from the wells He was pouring in, but her heart could receive only droplets.
She couldn’t comprehend love. She wasn’t yet growing in love because she had never learned the art ..read more
My Dance
She spins and twirls and her chest heaves from sighs that aren’t tiredness, but little-girl devotion. I know my wee thing well enough to know that when her eyes clamp shut and her arms whisk unmethodically through the air, there is an auditorium she goes to with seating for One.
Occasionally, she’ll peek out from underneath her mind’s dance studio to see where I am. If I catch her eye, she stumbles with distraction like one caught in the shower singing. She loves it — her mama’s delighted eye — but she didn’t come for this.
Her dance is my writing. Though I am adult, seeking to regain my six year-old heart.
Muscle memory wants me to perform for an ..read more
God, Translated
My flesh, loud against the gentleness of the Father, is not the final word.
Wouldn’t you know it, the very thing set to derail me, is His opportunity to shine … in me. My weakness is His perfection. And a taste of Him, like this, in me makes me want to throw off the old and jump, bold, into His new.
And this perspective is what sparks my adoration.
If you haven’t yet, read my precursor to this Monday’s adoration**. This sweet God is using life’s most unlikely circumstances to scoot my chair right up next to His and give me a taste of His nearness.
While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them; and suddenly a voice came ..read more
Like No Other Monday
I spoke too quickly. I gushed. I said words about what’s been buried deep, but in a setting that was meant for laughter and easy fraternizing. And there it was, out there, that intimate expression lobbed into hands which couldn’t quite catch it.
I went under, internally.
Ashamed of my deep and unable to pull myself from the web now spinning in my mind. What will she think? was my first train of thought. Self-evaluation wrapped itself around my ankles and I was immobile. I exchanged fear of God for fear of His children — a toxic move. And not too long later, I came up for air with the next thought: oh Father, I did it again. ..read more
The Second Story Line
I drove aimlessly under the spring sky, my heart all holed-up in winter.
They’d gotten their court dates assigned, a whole group of them, but we’d heard nothing. Our children shared blankets and beds and nannies on another continent while we, previously strangers, were having our stories woven together stateside. We formed a fraternity in the waiting room of adoption.
I’m sure it will it come in a day or two, I’d thought. Our adoption we’d generously estimated would take eight months was now into month nineteen. This couldn’t possibly be as hard as the other hurdles we’d hit. I’d been assuming we’d still all fall in step but I had finally stopped flinching at every potential delay.
Until I ..read more
The Smell of His Skin
I ended my road run on the beach the morning after we arrived. Up the boardwalk stairs, I could smell it before I saw it.
I always loved that first look at the ocean after a year spent only viewing it in my memory.
I had forgotten, in that moment, that the last time I was at the beach was one of the last times I’d seen my father. And that my father was the one who’d indoctrinated me into loving the ocean and the clay-like sand between my fingers and the mystery of the world I didn’t know that brimmed below it’s surface.
Sometimes I’d mis-diagnose an ocean scent for the smell of his salty skin wrapped ..read more
My Life is Full of Favorites
It’s that time again. I love finding my favorites and sharing them. (The beauty of this God-Man shows up in His children.) And this month they are popping up among my friends. Though this list is by no means exhaustive! Here’s just a little early-taste of the people I love to celebrate. (There will be more of these to come ):
The Simple Ways Once a researcher, now one who, by sheer necessity, gleans from another, I jumped in on her class knowing that these would be the very cliff’s notes I need. And let me tell you, this was the right place to glean! My sweet friend was so professional and gave me just the information ..read more
Rooting Their Identity
“Remember when we would walk to the store to buy bananas, Daddy, and sometimes avocados!?” she said excitedly. She might as well have been saying “remember when those days we rode a whale in the ocean together.”
These golden moments of childhood were scrap-booked in her memory.
The six weeks we spent in Uganda adopting our most recent two seemed to threaten all I’d known of establishing family. Many of our days were spent, all of us and often a few others, cramped into the back seat of a small van driving dirt roads chasing paperwork. Our children had no routine. They were up late and often begrudged the needed nap because we had another affidavit to track ..read more
