God of the Big and the Little

by Stephanie Morrill

My Saturday had already been going poorly of when my phone rang. It was our four-year-old son's neurologist. She had reviewed some videos we had taken of Connor's recent seizures, and she was fairly sure that the 20-30 seizures we saw daily were a different type than what he was already being medicated for. To be sure, however, she would need to capture them on an EEG. "Would you be able to come this Monday for a 24 hour stay?" she asked.

I held it together through the call, jotting down notes of what our stay would be like, even though I already knew. Because we had done this same thing in January. We were supposed to be done with this by now, I thought. I thought we were done.

Connor enjoying a visit from his sister, McKenna, as he undergoes an extended EEG back in January

Later I would feel thankful that Connor's neurologist is the type who will pick up the phone and call. That she requested the videos in the first place. That this is epilepsy and not something terminal. But right then I didn't feel at all grateful. I felt scared, overwhelmed, and frustrated.

While tough or frustrating times often draw me closer to God, I wasn't thinking about spiritual things as I hung up the phone. Instead, I was thinking that my week had been hijacked. That I had a long to-do list, and I had better power through it. First on the list was a run over to Target to pick up a few random things we needed.

What a funny place to bump into God.

I arrived about 4:45, and I roamed the aisles because I needed items from all over the store. As I hunted for 9 volt batteries, the thought came out of nowhere: It's Saturday. The pharmacy closes at 5 on Saturday.

And it was 4:57.

I was on the other side of the store, and I managed to arrive just as the pharmacist was closing things down. She gave me my prescription with a smile and a, "Just in time!" The door rolled shut behind me as I walked away, marveling at God's attention to detail.

There was no reason why, as I debated Duracel or Energizer, it would have occurred to me "just in time" that I needed to get to the pharmacy counter before they closed. It felt so clear that God had shown up, had spared me a frustration.

You know every little thing, I thought as I finished up my shopping. But it didn't feel scary, it was comforting.

Ten or so minutes later I walked out of Target. The sky was ablaze with a sunset that sucked my breath away. Despite the chill in the air, the list waiting for me at home, I stood there and marveled. The moment felt reverent.

The camera never does His art justice, but I snapped a picture as a reminder of the lesson.

He cared about me getting to the pharmacy before they closed, but He's also the God who paints sunsets. He is both personal and so big He's beyond comprehension. Sometimes I make the mistake of limiting myself to asking God only for little things that might make my day-to-day life easier, and I forget about the majesty of Him.

Have a Radical Thanksgiving

"A personal revolution of gratitude turns everything around." 

Ann Voskamp at www.aholyexperience.com 

I love the idea of grace hijacking the darkness, that we can choose to bring thanksgiving to the unlikely, ugly, hurt places and be uplifted, comforted, and healed by this radical thanksgiving.  Read more HERE and scroll down for printable leaves for your Thanks Giving Tree and different ways to incorporate it into the rest of the month.

Have a blessed week with family, friends, and/or neighbors. I pray you find ways to practice radical thanksgiving!

Katrina K.

Too Good Not To Share...

Such wise perspective in these words, ladies.  We are genuinely wanted, welcome, and loved in our community and in God's kingdom!  I pray we are women loving with action, words, and thoughts...

http://www.aholyexperience.com/2014/11/how-to-get-over-cliques-get-real-community/


Jena

When You Need to Be Noticed and Your Faith is Failing

God shapes our faith like a U2 song, ordinarily and epically: The sea throws rocks together/But time leaves us polished stones. Like the table all strewn with the stuff that should have been put away Again. Like when you discipline your kid when you are pretty sure he's lying but you can't tell. Out of your mouth you hear, "Remember God knows if you are lying. Think about that!" Like the lights left on Again.

“He said, ‘Good servant! Great work! Because you’ve been trustworthy in this small job, I’m making you governor of ten towns.’ (‭Luke‬ ‭19‬:‭17‬ MSG)

You, the forgotten and neglected, fighting back the anxiety. You feel like you should be helping people who want to be helped, like serving at a Bible study, or having tea with a neighbor. Here you are mopping the floor furiously, exerting sweat and helpfulness only to be unnoticed again.

Thoughts swirl downward as every table scratch and dirty dish appear highlighted in neon. You sit with a magazine. The one highlighting a baby born in a trash heap. The next article, a 9-year old carrying 30 pounds of water, fatherless, dreaming dreams about a better life on meager cents. She knows more than you: what the Scripture says about her is true. God sees and knows. She knows. You should know.

You remember how the sweet little fibber brought you a picture of Jesus in the stable as you tried to escape the madness of your mind on the yoga mat.

By an act of faith, Rahab, the Jericho harlot, welcomed the spies and escaped the destruction that came on those who refused to trust God. I could go on and on, but I’ve run out of time.

There are so many more—Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, the prophets. . . .

Through acts of faith, they toppled kingdoms, made justice work, took the promises for themselves. (Hebrews‬ ‭11‬:‭31-33 MSG)

Today is just one day out of a lifetime of superbly ordinary moments, a chance to see beyond the wanting to be seen. Faith grows in the giving up on ourselves and falling into God's arms.

But you are...God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. (‭1 Peter‬ ‭2‬:‭9‬ NIV)

Faith means saying out loud, "I believe in this God whom I cannot see. I remember what he has done for me." Speak it out! Say it to your friends via text, email, in person, over and over and over. Tattoo it on your body with Sharpie.

Then give yourself a break and eat a Snickers. Or 1/2 c. semi-sweet chocolate chips. Whatever's on hand.

Open His Word and remember the people who came before you...

...stories of vagrants wandering the earth in animal skins, homeless, friendless, powerless—the world didn’t deserve them!—making their way as best they could on the cruel edges of the world. (‭Hebrews‬ ‭11‬:‭31:38‬ MSG)

The blessing of God with you when the world is forgetting. Those rock edges, tossed about and ever small, ever sharp, He will smooth until you shine in the sun.

It is precisely in the small tasks and hard, self-centered moments we can learn to see His provision, His grace. Oh, God, grow my faith as I strive to be faithful with the tasks you give me, the works you have set before me, unnoticed by the world, but noticed by You.

Christina H.

Your Story in Psalms

Writing your own psalm:

This week we are looking at the life of King David.  David's life is riddled with highs and lows...life and death, sorry and joy, sin and praise, but in both the good times and bad we get a picture of who David was before God.  We see how his relationship to God was personal, intimate, and at times challenging and painful.  Can anyone relate? One thing we know about David was that he was a psalmist...a writer of poetry and music.  These Hebrew poems were written for singing, praising, and praying to God, David's Heavenly Father and King.  What if you were to write your own psalm? Would it be a song of praise, of lament, of repentance and joy? We challenge you to try.  Even if you don't consider yourself a writer, just write from your heart.  Boil down your experiences, feelings, and thoughts until you get to the foundation of your beliefs and pour them out to God, your Heavenly Father and King.

Step One: Spend time in prayer contemplating what is weighing on your heart. Identify what your burden, joy or passion is that needs expressing.

Step Two: Praise God for who He is, thank him for what he has done, expressing fear or doubt. Praise for a specific blessing, remembering a special event, confession, etc.

Step Three: Make it Personal. Use “I, me and my”.

Step Four: Use Descriptive Language.  Try to say a lot without using a large number of words.   Use adjectives such as awesome, majestic, incredible...

Step Five: Try writing like the Hebrews…(ok this should be fun, right?). The psalmists used parallelism to express themselves in Psalms (do a web search to read about the types of parallelism in Psalms or see WU David Handout for more info)

Happy Writing!

Jena M. 

I Believe Your Trauma Will Die

My faith grew in a moment with a stranger new. 

I stood in line, selecting salad toppings, amongst throngs, but it felt like just we two. 

Freshly met with extended hands at a conference like few. 

To think if I had never turned and just withdrew.

I would have the missed the blessed moment of her story rare. 

Her eyes glinting, and the reddish curls in her hair. 

Strength and truth, in the air. 

She said passion sparked in my stare.

She simply spoke words she felt at the time, in a salad line. 

Peaceful wind to a bullet-ridden flag, its bearer weary of holding up against onslaught.

I have never known who I am. She said YES and YOU ARE. 

Blessed friend, what can five minutes of honesty do?

Under the questions and fears

The voices in our ears

We saw each other free as what we could be.

So we decided to say: I believe.

I believe you can surmount the scars

The lies in your head

The trauma you’ve seen

Cursed darkness and dread.

When we with words of kindness speak out, 

Connection, grace & faith scare

Down the doubt.

If you want to shake up this world.

Find someone unlovely, scared, or just caught.

Look deep in their eyes

See more than we’re taught.

See beauty turned out and upside down and in

On top of its head

Until you can’t stop the spin

You want radical love, you say that’s what’s true?

Find resurrection in death, death we can’t undo.

Find it in the dark when you can’t see the light

As you pray for them

On bruised knees, here tonight.

Your heart and mine empty right here

To what God sees.

I know He is near,

Not just in your life,

Not just in mine

But here in our dying and our living new words, when I say who you could be,

Because you can’t see,

The good you birth into this world---not on your terms, only on His.

Carrie, the girl this story’s about,

Gave me a gift of seeing God’s work I couldn’t see

It was all I could do not to shout it out.

I believe your trauma will die,

Your love and furrowed courage will rise up high.

I see you---alive and living this life full well.

Take me into the fray and fear,

Dear Jesus,

The passion tells me to.

- Christina H.

When Your Branches Are Breaking

Serving woman, loving woman,

Tree bending, swaying, season in, season out, in drought and in rain, holding tight to green. You give for seasons, years, like an ancient bristlecone pine,

Thousands of years old, still birthing seeds, expecting newness.

Were it not for shriveled soul, drying out in the desert sun.

Once you grew out full, reaching.

The autumn signals wintry rest arrival, the time for fattening up, storing up, physically, spiritually, emotionally.

Here in suburbia we are seasonal, but we have no real season to restore. Rest revives the weary in time for the coming life.

"Conscientiously 'wasting' time with God enables me to speak and act from greater strength, to forgive rather than nurse the latest bruise to my wounded ego...." -Brennan Manning, Abba's Child

Take the breath, Lord,

The one I keep spouting out, spitting itself into every conversation for affirmation, confirmation, answers.

What happens when it gets shut up?

What happens I wonder.

No more trying. Just listen.

Listen with a whole heart, not the half one.

Not the one that steps on everyone else because it can't hear itself think.

Take the Good book and a pen and yourself and shut yourself up away in a closet, a house, the great outdoors, your car.

You want to touch the Holy and feel His touch?

Retreat and lock the world out.

Even the people I want to help lift up. I want them to complete me.

I have to leave them behind. Because I must shut their voices out for a time and my own.

I want to be whole: to be available, to have an open door, to invite friends and strangers over, to do the good works my great God has prepared for my frail hands. I want to pour out love as wine into goblets for the poor in spirit. I want to enjoy squeezing my bum down the staticky slide and play with my little Spaceman and my wild Zebra girl.

I found an island once. I wandered. I prayed, then wrote. I wrote, then prayed. I tried to remember who I was. On a warm-watered beach in the North Atlantic, I realized I was empty-handed. All the expectations, all of my strivings, were dust---a centering place and moment that has brought me sanity, honesty, and home to worship and gratitude in the midst of panic attacks.

I come back to this moment in my mind. To the water, the waves, the emptiness I felt, the fullness. The being loved by a God who knows my bendings, swayings, and givings.

He asks nothing of me but to stay here, His, rooted and loved, and being and stop chasing. Stop chasing.

Serving woman, honest woman, loving, giving, pouring yourself out woman. Retreat and find rest for your weary weary soul.

Would you join me in consecrating half an hour of this week to be in absolute quiet with God? Only soft music if absolutely necessary. This is the practice of solitude, monkish and cavelike, deliberate and difficult. Be in His presence sparcely, a pen and paper to record any words He gives. No devo apps, no Bible study materials. Just God.

May He speak and restore.

- Christina H.

STAND Out

It was spring break two years ago and as a teacher, I couldn’t have been more thrilled to have a week off away from students! Many of my teacher friends (and a whole lot of my students’ families) were departing for warm, tropical destinations preluding the warm summer days to come. But I piled in a minivan with a bunch of women from Heartland and headed to Minneapolis for a long weekend of equipping at a 3DM women’s conference. We joked that it was the “reverse spring break” with Minnesota’s 10-below wind chill. So much for “spring”!

(Creative Commons)

I had decided to go at the last minute. I honestly didn’t even really know what I was signing up for.  I just felt like I wanted to spend time with these women and felt like I needed a little bit of God-focused time. Some of my fellow travelers were long-time friends. Some I barely knew. Some I wanted to get to know more deeply. Many of them had already been involved in a discipling leadership group and I was about to join one, but hadn’t yet begun. While most spring breakers were tanning themselves by the beach, we were diving head-first into new waters of our faith journeys.  I am so glad that I took the plunge for that experience. God used it to propel me into an amazing chapter of my life, to expand my spiritual identity and purpose, and to deepen friendships that have been a solid place for my soul.

Discipling another person can be a scary thought, but as Christ-followers, we are all called to do it. Go and make disciples.

“Jesus, undeterred, went right ahead and gave his charge: “God authorized and commanded me to commission you: Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life, marking them by baptism in the threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then instruct them in the practice of all I have commanded you. I’ll be with you as you do this, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19 The Message)

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like the call to go and make disciples is a job I’m not qualified for. What do I say? How do I reach out to people, but not come off as pushy? Would anyone really want to learn from me? Shouldn’t that be a job for someone in full time ministry?  But really, no matter what our background, whether we are new to faith in Jesus or have been walking with him for years, we are all leaders. We are all disciple-makers. We do it in our homes, in our workplaces, in every sphere of influence. We teach. We coach. We show people what we have learned and share our stories.

That was one of the biggest takeaways I had from my weekend in Minnesota. I learned that although sometimes evangelism (telling others about Jesus) and discipleship (helping others become more like Jesus) scare me, God created me with a natural bent toward sharing and teaching what I know. It comes out when I talk about a movie I love, a new album I’ve discovered, an excellent restaurant. It comes out when I talk about my college, about hiking in the mountains, or making music.

I can’t help but talk about the things that I love.

It reminds me of the illustration Steve Weatherford used in his sermon this past Sunday about the Holy Spirit “going viral.” <Watch It Here>  We all know those videos that get passed around the internet faster than fathomable. We pass them along because somehow they strike a chord with us whether humorous or poignant. We like it. We hit share. We pass it along. What would happen in my the lives of those around me -- and beyond in the Kingdom -- if I were as quick to talk about what Jesus is doing in my life as I am those other things that I love?

(Creative Commons)

And the best part is that He promises to be with us as we live out the Great Commission.

“I’ll be with you as you do this, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age.”

This weekend, Heartland will have the privilege of hosting 3DM’s STAND Conference for women. <Register Here> Wherever you are in your faith journey, I hope you will plan to join us. We will come together in worship, learn from other women, and gain some practical tools to help us walk out this mission of discipleship as we stand UP, stand IN, and stand OUT. It will be a great way to spend a November weekend -- and I’m fairly certain it will be warmer than my “reverse spring break”! Hope to see you there!

~Meredith M.