When in Need of a Good Grounding

Today, I have been in need of a day that is gentle to and with my soul. I’ve needed a day where I recognize my own brokenness and yet I call myself to courage in God to interact and engage with the things that still need to be done. (Because life doesn’t stop when our emotions swell!) Not much will be accomplished in a tangible way today; but I am learning that what will be accomplished will give me the strength to meet tomorrow with all the things it holds; good or bad, faithful and true or full of lies and destruction.

Are You Willing to Receive Help?

Many of you who have journeyed with me and my blog for a number of years (10 in 2017!) know that my husband was in the Army and did a tour in Afghanistan. That was a pivotal time in our life and in the life of our family. We grew and changed, we were stretched and challenged, we were poured out and built up and then poured out and built up again.

Sharing Stories of Loss

This was a hard week. By Friday, I found myself crying off and on throughout the day. I finally asked myself, “Why am I so weepy this week?”. As I looked back over the last 7 days, over each one and all that it held, I realized all the hard and sad news that was shared. It was as if I hadn’t noticed things stacked up in a pile in the corner due to all the daily life happening around me.

Each day it seemed there were new people reaching out for prayer. Sorrow and heaviness for sickness and trials, loneliness, a lack of community. As each new story was unwrapped, my heart sank.

Saturday morning, as I got ready to visit dear friends whose son is at Children’s Hospital right now, I read Psalm 126.

“Restore our fortunes, LORD, as streams renew the desert.

Those who plant in tears will harvest with shouts of joy.

They weep as they go to plant their seed, but they sing as they return with the harvest.”

I love agricultural imagery because it is so tangible and easy for me to understand. The analogy was so beautiful to see. Many times I have planted in tears. There are times in life where we think our tears are for nothing. But I had a picture after reading this psalm of tears watering a seed. It grows up and it produces an abundance out of sorrow. Joy out of sadness.

These things my friends are bearing are so heavy. They are planting in tears. They are weeping as they prepare the soil for what they long to see grow. And they will wait. But as we share those stories together, what joy will be there when that harvest is collected.

 

Rx for A Soft Heart; for You and for Me

Occasionally, life sneaks up on you. At least, that happens to me. There I am, trudging along distracted by my list of things I want to accomplish, and BAM! I come to an epiphany about an obstacle that has been blocking my forward progress; one which I didn’t even realize I was continuously butting up against.

About two years ago, I read Brene Brown’s book, “Daring Greatly”. It challenged me in a lot of ways-so much so that I find myself rediscovering many things years later. One such thing is in regards to experiencing and stifling joy in our lives. Brown describes the way that young mothers often sneak into their sleeping babe’s bedrooms at night. They gaze at their precious children and feel overwhelmed with all the emotions motherhood can bring. Then, suddenly, they envision something horrible happening to their child. The joy is stifled and fear comes over them. “Something could happen to my child and all I love would be gone” begins to run through the young Mother’s mind when just seconds before, she was standing in a place of overwhelming joy. But now? That joy has been replaced by anxiety and fear of the unknown. The joy is gone.

Brown’s point is that we can easily get stuck in living life with the thought, “when’s the other shoe going to drop” at the forefront of our minds. The problem is that the more we do this, the more we squash our ability to experience joy. If our hearts are hardened against pain, then they are also hardened against joy! The shutting down of one is the shutting down of the other.

That spoke to me. Her challenge was to stop those thoughts in their tracks and go back to the joy. To push those thoughts out and fight for the good. It reminded me of something I heard John Eldredge say many, many years ago when I was a college student. At a seminar for Campus Crusade for Christ, Eldredge told us that Jesus Christ is the only God who will ask us to lean in and remain vulnerable in the midst of pain. Suffering is a key element of Christianity.

And why? Because if we can’t experience pain, we won’t experience joy. Our hearts will be too hard.

In a quiet reading time recently, I came across something along these same lines from Isaiah 6:9b-10. God is speaking to the prophet Isaiah and he says something to him that is so profound, as he is about to send Isaiah out to the people (who are engaged in idol worship) to warn them. He says,

“Listen carefully, but do not understand.

Watch closely, but learn nothing.

Harden the hearts of these people. Plug their ears and shut their eyes. 

That way, they will not see with their eyes, nor hear with their ears, nor understand with their hearts and turn to me for healing.”

As I prayed and meditated on these verses, I realized that if you switch it to the positive it is

“To turn to the Lord and receive healing, you need a soft heart to understand, listening ears to hear and open eyes to see.” I would even add to that “humility to learn”.

Hardened hearts block our healing.

As Brown explained, when our hearts are shut down to pain, they are also shut down to joy. I love to laugh and have often told my husband in hard times that what I really need is a good sleep and a loud and long laugh. Joy is what makes life beautiful. So isn’t it interesting that a hard heart,a lack of vulnerability, is what steals our joy and shuts down our experience of a joyful life?

Opening ourselves up to pain, to suffering, sounds wrong, costly and counter-intuitive. But what a shocking thing to learn how self protection leads us down the very wrong path in the wrong direction; it shuts down the joy we are offered each day and the path to a life of understanding, eyes to see and ears to hear. The price is high, but the risk of a hard heart and a life without joy isn’t exactly worth that price.