Breakfast Date

It was a mid-January morning, and as my mind meandered between sleeping and waking, thoughts began to jumble. I had just ended a job, and I was waking to a new season – with all the promise of new possibilities – but also to chaos and disorder and piles left over from the previous season.

So much to do, so much unstructured time stretching out before me.

My waking mind spooled up, struggling to make sense of it all…

If I could just bring order to this place…
Catch up on cleaning, organization, filing
Find a place for everything
Revisit goals

     And then keep that order by being disciplined…
     Establish routines, stick to them
     Keep everything in its place
     Prioritize what’s important

          Then I would have peace
          Ahhh, yes, peace

Almost drifting back to sleep, I hear it.
The voice the chaos tries to drown out.
HIS voice.

     Daughter, I am your Peace.

His words calm… and convict.

     If your peace is dependent on order and discipline, then it’s not MY Peace.

My spirit recalls His words to the disciples, shortly before the Cross:

     Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. (John 14:27)

As I consider my jumble of thoughts, I become aware of an unwanted presence: Fear. The fear of failing in this wide-open season. Failing to move forward, make progress, become a better me, run a better household, find the keys / have lunches packed / know where the second grader’s sneakers are before leaving the house in the morning!!!

Woah. I had felt troubled by all the chaos, but this fear came out of left field. He knows me better than I know myself. Of course!

Then deeper fears rise to the surface… Fear of failing to find a new ministry stream, to fulfill the calling He’s placed in me, to reach my full potential. The weight starts to feel like it will crush me.

     Hold on, I hear Him whisper. I’ve brought these up to free you. To take these burdens from you. To give you Peace instead. Let’s START there, not end there.

Start with Peace. Yes. How?

In The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer writes, “If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus” (p. 82, emphasis his).

Jesus was never in a hurry. And He spent a lot of time with His Father.

The invitation was clear:

     Daughter, start with Me. Abide with Me. Hear from Me. Receive my Peace. And with that my Love and Joy. Out of that, desire for the disciplines will grow. And the fruit of those disiplines will be order.

NOT  Order ➔ Discipline ➔ Peace

BUT  Peace ➔ Discipline ➔ Order

Yes, Lord. Re-baptize my heart. Retrain my spirit. Renew my mind. Reset my methods. To seek You first. To hear You above the noise.

To abide.

And to keep abiding when I go about making lunches and cleaning and job searches and dinners and organizing.

To see You.
 
And to see Your most prized possessions – people – and to prize them like You do, by taking time to pray for them, hear them, give them my undivided attention, rejoice and cry with them…

My husband, children, extended family, friends...

     Yes, friends. One of my gifts to you. When’s the last time you had lunch with a friend, Daughter?

Jesus always seemed to have time for a meal with people. Could it be that doing likewise would be the surer path to Peace, not to mention Love and Joy, than making a de-cluttering schedule and tracking my ministry goals?

Not that those things don’t have a place. It’s just not FIRST place.

My morning’s To Do list is suddenly short. I rise, pour a cup of coffee, and open up His Word. I have a breakfast date with the Prince of Peace. 

~~~~~

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Daddy's Little Girl

Recently, our church attendees have been invited to share their “elevator pitch” – a few-minute version of their testimony. On April 14, I had the privilege of sharing mine, and I want to share it with YOU!

You can access an audio recording of my testimony HERE. But if reading is more your style, I’ve included the text of what I spoke below. May these words reveal Truth about who God the Father is, and may that revelation forever change your understanding of who you are in Him.

~~~

I have a necklace I often wear that says “Daddy’s Little Girl.” I love being able to tell people when they ask that it’s actually about my Heavenly Father.

I started out this life with an earthly father who didn’t want me. But God did. So He gave my Mom and me neighbors who literally loved us into the Kingdom!

At age 4, I gave my heart to Jesus at Vacation Bible School and quickly came to love the Bible. Yet despite this growing relationship, there was a built-in angst inside of me throughout my childhood, a persistent nagging that I needed to earn my Father’s love.

When I hit my teenage years, I looked for that love in all the wrong places and found myself pregnant at age 16. But my Heavenly Father didn’t reject me. He said, “you’re still my little girl.” And He gave me the strength to make an adoption plan for my son because I wanted him to have a Mom AND a Dad.

You would think God’s grace to me in this situation would have broken my striving, but instead, I was even more determined to prove myself after such a big fall. God even gave me a Dad with skin on when my Mom married when I was 17, but by then the pattern of performing was established. Lauren Daigle’s song, “You Say,” captures the struggle I felt. It says

     I keep fighting voices in my mind that say I’m not enough
     Every single lie that tells me I will never measure up

But in His great kindness, my Heavenly Father didn’t leave me there. When I was in graduate school, He allowed me to enter a season of insomnia, like a two-year season because that’s just how stubborn I am, that’s how long it took for me to relinquish the fight, fall to my knees in surrender, and admit there is NOTHING I can do on my own to earn His love.

A peace and a rest settled over me, marking the beginning of a lifetime of discovering more and more how much He loves me, of freeing me to love others.

It was in that season of on-my-knees surrender that He called me. God called ME – striving, insignificant, fatherless me – out of a career in academia and into the ministry, to help others find freedom through the truth of Who He is and who we are in Him.

I don’t have to be perfect to walk in His calling, but every day I have to choose to die to the temptation to perform. When I find myself falling into a pattern of striving, it’s because I’m listening to the wrong voice, and the quickest way to calm the angst rising in my spirit is to pause and remember, as Lauren’s song continues, that

     The only thing that matters now is everything You think of me
     In You I find my worth, in You I find my identity.

Who is my Heavenly Father?

He is the one who defines me. He is the Daddy Who loves me and claims me as His own. I am His.

Autumn Hope

Today, as my husband David was driving to work, the bright autumn sunshine contradicted his heavy heart as he prayed for dear friends of ours who today are walking through the anniversary of their deepest loss.

This brought to his memory a poem I wrote in 1991, so he called me, and it was a beautiful moment as we paused to be in the same "space" for a moment, to remember the sadness, not only of the stories that long ago inspired the poem, but of the story our friends are living today.

And together, we wondered at the juxtaposition of light and loss.

We hung up, and I found my day detoured by a determination to find the poem. As it was written multiple platforms of computer technology ago, the task was daunting. I began my search...

our computer backups

     our bookcases

          our filing cabinet

               and finally

those small boxes in the back of the attic labeled "Jill's junk."

And that's where I found it! Thank God we never threw away that junk!

I wrote this poem on September 22, 1991, the day my birth son turned five. This poem touches on my story plus two others - of a friend from my college speech team, and of a young married couple in the communication department at GMU.


That date no longer brings me sadness. The Lord brought healing to my heart over time, and then He gave me the unexpected blessing of being reunited with my birth son, who is a wonderful man of 32, husband, and father to two beautiful children!

Through the years, I've lived through other losses, lesser than the ones my friends remember today, and I imagine there will be more, for I've lived long enough to know that loss is a common companion on the human journey, a universal part of the human condition.

It is likely so have you.

What is our remedy? The answer is a "Who" rather than a "What"...

Through Jesus, "we have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure" (Hebrews 6:19).

One day, October 24 will no longer bring sadness to the friends we stand with today, for they rest, in hope, on the Lord's promise of eternity in Revelation 21:4: "He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever."

Do you find yourself today in a loss so dark that the sunshine hurts? It may not feel like it today, but

There is Hope.

There is a Remedy.

There is a Light that heals our deepest losses.

There is Jesus.

Under Water

Happy Memorial Day! This post is part personal reflection, part audio blog. Thank you for reading and listening in!

School just ended for my girls (ages 14 and almost 6), and we are enjoying a visit to extended family before we settle into a summer routine. This summer will be different from previous ones because my employment takes me outside of our home regularly for the first time since I became a mom.

In February, I accepted a position as my church’s administration pastor, a position I would define as part office administrator, part junior executive pastor. Even though I planned my part-time hours around my girls’ school days, it was still a big adjustment for all of us, and I felt like I was “under water” for a while.

One place this has been evident is in my blogging. I began my blog with the New Year, planning to post twice a month; instead, I’ve posted twice. This year. Part of that was due to this adjustment. But part was due to my desire to meticulously prepare posts.

God called me to author this blog about the "biblical process of letting go" (see “About the Author”).

       And He’s also called me to be a staff pastor at my church.

              [He has clearly confirmed both of these paths in my life.]

                     And of course He’s still calling me to be a wife and mom.

But God has NOT given me the ability or the authority to accomplish these things the way I think they should be done. God is using this new season in my life to remind me that as the Author of my story, He has determined not only what He is calling me to, but how to live it out. When I follow Him in both the what and the how, He supplies both the ability and the authority to accomplish His purposes.

Interestingly, that is part of the message He gave me to share during the Mother’s Day presentation at our church. Here is the link to the brief (< 6 minutes) word of encouragement the Lord had me share:

Mantled with Authority: Word of Encouragement to Women

Once you listen, you’ll know why we handed out gladiolas to the women in attendance rather than traditional Mother’s Day flowers. (Hint: The root word for gladiolas is NOT the same root word for glad, but for… [you’ll have to listen to find out!])

Have you found yourself "under water" lately, unable to come up for air? Pause for a moment to consider: What has the Author of your story called you to do? And how is He leading you to go about doing it? As you follow Him in the what and the how, you will feel the angst of human effort fall away and find that you have everything (and all the time) you need.

Thank you for reading and listening. Please “follow” my blog to be notified when I post.