When Freedom Walks In

The mind has 

Corners and crannies

Where hidden lie

Memories

The heart wants

Uncovering

From carrying

The burden 

Where can they meet?

Heart and mind

Like oil and water

Refuse to mix.

Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

Hebrews 4:13 NIV 

A child sat on the side of the road and saw the crashed cars. There was the bloodied man being held up by the ambulance drivers. There was her Father holding his chest, and there was her brother coming behind in his own car, rescuing her from the scene.

It was a memory locked in the recesses of my mind. Occasional nightmares and flashbacks from the scene would replay years later, but I would tell myself how thankful I should be that God preserved my life with only a chipped tooth, and my Dad only suffered a few cracked ribs.

But the heart knows when a fear takes root.

 

If you knew me in the '90s, you would have seen a self-sufficient Stay-At-Home-Mom who walked everywhere, and took the bus to the orthodontist for her teenage daughter's appointments. Grocery shopping was a family affair after my husband finished working. We worked out our schedules, and we thrived on our together times.  But when my younger son approached the time for getting his learner's permit, he said, "It's time Mom. You're coming with me and we're BOTH learning to drive together this time."

I had never enjoyed driving when I got my first license as a teenager. So, as a young wife, when we moved multiple times while our children were toddlers, it felt too hard to continue taking the tests and changing my license in every state. 

So I let the deep-settled fear gain more ground in my heart, and I allowed my license to expire.

Was my son correct?

Would I really be able to re-learn driving,

after almost 20 years?

Oh, I prayed and cried, and stormed my way through, as my husband had two "learners" practicing that year.  Just before the deadline for my permit expired, I passed the test, hearing the instructor tell me, "You're a very good driver, Ma'am, you really shouldn't be so nervous."  

What should have been a celebration, still felt like a chore to me, and despite what the instructor said, I had to sing my way into driving alone. every. single. time.

But God has a way of making sure 

that our hearts get laid bare, 

and He sees where fear takes root.

He gently pries and tugs

to bring to the surface

the long buried tendrils.

When we moved to Wisconsin, with a fresh new license in my hand, one of the first neighbors I met was my precious elderly Ukrainian friend who had just lost her husband.  While I was practicing my driving in this small town, her health was gradually declining. And in just a short time, she needed a driver to take her to Doctor's appointments and stores. My driving suddenly had to come up a notch.

God was still working to uncover the fear.

But yet I held back, until I gathered with dear friends for our church's first Ladies' Retreat, several years later. As I led my group that first night, the question went around the circle, and each one of us found our hearts being uncovered by a God who loves us too much to leave us to ourselves.  I heard myself speaking what I had not planned to say:

I still DESPISE driving, but I want to be free.

And with those precious friends, 

we all laid down burdens 

and found Jesus there

to meet us with the truth.

That very first Sunday after the retreat, as I drove to get coffee for a few friends, my normal "easy" route was blocked, and I had no choice but to take the scarier way that I always avoided.  I heard Him whisper His own words to me:

"You hem me in behind and before,
    and you lay your hand upon me."

Psalm 139:5 NIV 

And something shifted in my attitude 

that morning.

What was once a chore

became a place for God's power

to be shown, even within my own heart.


. . . . .

In these days, years later once again,
where weakness seems to reign,

And driving times are few

with pain following each one,

my heart is filled

with a gratitude

I never thought I could have.

When it's necessary for me to drive,

God chases all fear away.

He has redeemed the past

of that bloody nightmare

with His Holy Strength,

carrying my mind

as well as my heart

uniting as one

with praise.

Dear One,

May I ask a hard question?

Is there a long-buried 

pain in your heart?

There is ONE

who longs to meet you

with the LIGHT of HIS PRESENCE.

When you ask for freedom,

He will come to you too.




My dear friend, Anna Smit, blessed me with this song today, and I pray it blesses you also:

I am linking this week with:

Barbie Swihart, #Glimpsesofhisbeauty 
Jennifer Dukes Lee, #TellHisStory 
Debbie Kitterman, #TuneInThursday 



 

 

The Holiness of Grace

Some days breakfast with your devotions is a great idea. Other days, not so much.  Especially if the devotions you are reading are on your tablet, and the phone rings, and your oatmeal . . . well, you get the picture. Thankfully my keyboard has dried out enough that only a couple keys still remain sticky!  

I'm a mess, and I know it.

 Do you ever feel that messiness when you look at yourself? 

This Chronic Illness journey has taught me more about the state of my own "messiness" than I ever thought I could understand.  It seems that there are days that no matter how hard I try, I just can't "cut the mustard," as we used to say in my childhood small town.  


It wasn't always this way. People depended on me to be the strong one--the one who could be faithful to the end, and responsible to her core. And when I was thrown into situations beyond my understanding, I knew that in order to survive, I would have to find my strength in God's strength.  And He came through for me, for our family, again and again. He let me walk through troubled water, and through places and events that made no sense. He let me walk through places of Silence, when I doubted I would ever hear His voice again.  

He let me 

           voice my questions

                     share my struggles

                              come to the end of myself

And then He met me there to show me how He had never left my side, and was walking with me all along, through all of my doubting.

But what happens when God lets you know

that the path you are entering

is one where He will not

make you stronger?

In fact, walking the pathway

means that you

will become weaker?

Will my heart contain the

trembling?

Will my soul bear the

frailty?

 

I have been reading C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, as part of the online Book Study that Michele Morin is hosting at her site, Living Our Days. This week, while I am still absorbed in watching Orual's teacher, "The Fox" express his own heart, a continuing theme that keeps running throughout the story would not leave my mind. The book is a re-telling of the myth of Psyche, told through the eyes of the Princess Orual, Psyche's older sister. When Orual is approaching the end of her life, she begins our story with the very theme that has been filling my mind: she is angry at the gods, and she is convinced that the gods, themselves, hate her. 

Orual is someone who has never experienced any of God's Grace. 

I was someone who took that very Grace for granted.

But several years ago, when I stepped out of my comfort zone of Grace-filled-situations, and journeyed alongside those who had never known the comfort of Grace, my eyes began to open, and my heart began to feel how this very GOD, who is so dear to me, could feel too large and too HOLY for a mere human to approach.


From her earliest days, Orual had a fear of the gods, but when she was confronted by a situation beyond her control, and set in the room with the priest, who demanded horrific things of them all, Orual says, "the room was full of spirits, and the horror of holiness." 

My mind immediately knew that she was facing the darkness from the enemy of our souls. But then my heart remembered my own

eye-opening relationships, and my journey alongside those who had never known the God of Grace.

And I felt in my own soul

         the overwhelming bigness of a God that I could not approach,

                  the horror of a HOLINESS that contrasts

                             the messiness within my own soul.


Even if I looked into the longing of my heart for 

        SOMEONE bigger than myself,

                how could my trembling heart ever face HIM?


And yet . . .

Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness;
    tremble before him, all the earth.

Psalm 96:9 NIV







These very words from our God, 
Himself, 
speak to the
trembling
that my weak soul 
now carries.
But it is this very weakness
that has moved HIM
to compassion.

  

Here in this place of weakness,
I know that I have
NOTHING
to offer the God
who created
everything I see.


But He opened Heaven
and gave me everything
when HIS LOVE
sent Jesus.


I can no longer accept a
CHEAP GRACE.
my JESUS 
gave Himself,
the only
ONE,
who opened a way
for me to step into
the Holy Place. 



"For it is from God alone that you have your life through Christ Jesus. He showed us God’s plan of salvation; he was the one who made us acceptable to God; he made us pure and holy and gave himself to purchase our salvation"

1 Corinthians 1:30 TLB 


This path set before me?
I can say,
as I have never known before,
that these words hold new meaning
for me:

 "But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me."
2 Corinthians 12:9 


Where are you
on this path marked by Grace?
Are you in a place
that reeks of the 
"Horror of Holiness?"

There is a way
for you, my friend,
to plunge into that Comfort of Grace.

Jesus is that ONE,
and He longs to give
God's Grace to you as well.

If you are interested in checking out all of the posts pertaining to the book study of C.S. Lewis' "Till We Have Faces" you can find an index by clicking here.

 

I'm linking this week over at:
#TellHisStory, Jennifer Dukes Lee 

The Butterflies

The season of Butterflies . . . I get so excited when the summer heat brings in these fluttering beauties.  And usually, my heart starts to remembering ---


It was the fall of 1986, and my husband and I were preparing to move our family, (the 2 of us and our 6 year old and 1 year old sons) across the country. We were following the call of Jesus, as He asked us to come with Him to a new and different place.  Scary and exciting, sad and hope-filled, my emotions were all over the place then.  


This was before the day of internet easy connections, so stories were saved and gathered in my heart from family and friends and books and magazines. I had read a sweet story in Guideposts about a Mom and her daughter raising Monarch Butterflies, and having the joy of those beautiful creatures fluttering around them stirred a deep longing in my heart. I prayed that somehow God would give us the beauty that we needed to make this giant leap of faith into the unknown, hardly realizing the depth that He would go to just to show us how much He cared for us.


As the moving van was loading our furniture, I sat in the grass outside our inner-city home and thought of all of the memories we had gathered in those crowded years of college and babies and ministries-just-beginning.  When something fluttered over my head, I looked up to see a beautiful Monarch Butterfly floating overhead.  "Thank you, God," I whispered in awe, as it continued to flow back and forth around me the entire time I watched the movers.


I held onto that picture the next morning as we pulled away from our friend's driveway and headed towards the interstate. The miles gathered quickly as we crossed over the state line heading into Iowa. But something caught my eye, and we looked in amazement as first one Monarch Butterfly, then another, and another, until there were dozens and dozens of Monarchs making the same southwesterly journey that we were on.  We had been given the chance to join in with their yearly migration, as God was sending us on our own migration.  Every day of the trip they were with us, until the final day when we crossed the California state line, when they must have veered south into Mexico towards their resting place.  On that day, slightly disappointed that we had not seen a single Monarch, we opened one final card from a friend back home. She had told us to wait until we were in California to open it.  Not knowing my heart-held story of promise, she had chosen a card with, (you guessed it) a monarch butterfly on it.  The God who called us to follow Him was faithful to keep us in that journey.

"Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass."

I Thessalonians 5:24

Our California-Season was shorter than we had expected, but full of learning and stretching like no other time in our lives.  So as I entered this current season of stretching, hearing the voice of my Jesus saying, "Come with Me, here" my heart has been longing for those beautiful-moments-of-promise once again. 

On days when I see no sense or purpose, when weakness or pain threatens to steal my joy, He has saturated my heart with the Promise of His Presence again and again.

"The Lord's lovingkinesses indeed never cease. For His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; Great is Your FAITHFULNESS."

Lamentations 3:22-23

When my dear friend's young adult daughter asked for prayer as she was contemplating her own leap of faith, I gladly joined in to support her. She didn't know all of my stories, but she knew that God had been faithful to keep His promises to me through so many years. When she asked if she could paint a picture for my me and for my husband to show her thankfulness for our support, I eagerly looked forward to see the picture she would create.  

Did you guess the beauty that God wanted to bring to my remembrance?

"Seasons" by Kyrstin Schober

Are you on a Journey of Change?

 Has there been a Shift in the Seasons you are facing?  

I would love to pray for you as we walk these paths where Jesus calls us to follow Him.  He is waiting to show us His Faithfulness here.

I'm linking today with:

Meg Weyerbacher for #TeaAndWordTuesday

and Jennifer Dukes Lee at #TellHisStory

and Suzie Eller at #LiveFreeThursday