Christianity Archives - Page 14 of 41

{1} 31 Days of Blogging Martyrdom

If you’ve been around the blogging world for a bit, you may have noticed some of your favorite writers participating in a blogging challenge every October called 31 Days. It is an opportunity for normal, busy men and women to inflict pain upon themselves for the sake of community. It is blogging martyrdom, pure and simple. Fall on your pens, folks!

I was not about to do it.

Last year, when I had not even been blogging for a full twelve months, I stumbled upon this whole thirty-one-days-of-group-torment a little too late. Posts started popping up on October first and I had no idea why. “Huh, running a series must be a great way to grow a blog,” I thought.

Then I found out the real reason. It was like a blogging version of an Ironman competition, and I had just missed the starting gun.

“Whew,” I said to myself. “That was close.”

Still, the idea intrigued me: thirty-one days of straight writing, thirty-one days of posting brilliant content. At the end of thirty-one days, I would have so many words. I would have disciplined myself to write and post content every single day. Since I am not very disciplined, I couldn’t help but think, “This will be so great!”

November rolled around and all my blogging buddies were sleeping off their thirty-one day comas, and I began a series of my own.

It was only thirty posts, and that’s as close as I came to replicating the kind of diligent writing my friends had accomplished the month before.

See, I wasn’t very far into the first week of writing when I discovered that I am incapable of posting brilliant content every single day for thirty-one days. I have a two, maybe three-day brilliance capacity, max. My thirty-one day series turned into a six-week series, which turned into a two-month series. I think I managed to wrap things up before Christmas but I’m not really sure. Everything that happened after Thanksgiving is kind of fuzzy due to blogging toxemia.

But then the series came to an end. I slept again. I ate again. Actually, I ate all along it’s just that I was now conscious of the fact.

I reflected. I realized that I was not the same writer who sat down at her laptop on Day One. That series changed me. When I think back to that time, when every spare second of my day was spent wrestling with the truth of the Scripture and pinning it down into paragraphs and coherent sentences, I realize it was one of the sweetest, most difficult times of growth I have had in my adult life.

And I never wanted to do it again.

But I am.

Because it is October, and I believe God has something He wants me to write. I have trembled about it and made up all kinds of excuses because I don’t really like hard things, especially thirty-one days of hard things. I consulted the wisdom of my husband who confirmed that this whole idea is nuts. After all, October is a very busy month. We have extra responsibilities this month, and I’m already not doing very well at the responsibilities I have.

I am afraid.

I am afraid of failure. I am afraid of getting to Day 2 and running out of steam. I am afraid of writing at 3 am and sticking commas in all the wrong places and having you all know that I am not a very good writer after all. I am afraid of neglecting my family and the house and forgetting to feed the fish.

Most of all, I am afraid of writing words that are not His just so I have something to fill up the screen.

But then I think about burying talents, and I don’t think God likes it much. It seems to me that if I have the choice between a shovel and a keyboard, I’d better pick the keyboard. Because there is no failure like the failure to try. There is no sin like refusing to step out on the waves if He calls.

I doubt. I falter. But that’s part of walking, and I am marching to the cadence of the Word pounding in my ears:

“His divine power has given us everything we need

for life and godliness through our knowledge of him

who called us by his own glory and goodness.”

–2 Peter 1:3

Do I believe it? I’ve spoken on this very verse so many times. I’ve gone to MOPS groups and said it loud over the noises of the babies. I’ve stood in front of high school students and quoted it to crossed arms and slouched bodies. Every time, the crowd presses in, hungry, because this is promise that is almost too good to believe.

Is it true?

Think about it. God’s Word says He has given us everything we need for life and godliness. Everything. It’s almost too much to comprehend.

Sometimes, the best way to understand truth is to put it into story. Jesus did that for us when he told parables. I like to think about him gathering the big kids around and making profound things simple with a “Once upon a time…”

For the next thirty-one days, or however long it takes my frail self to get the words out, we are going to spin a tale so we can see the truth of what it means to be rich in Christ like Peter tells us we are.

Like any good story, it’s going to begin like this: “Once upon a time…”

Join me tomorrow for Day 2.

My House: A War Zone

It is 8:42 pm, and my house looks like a bomb went off. Inside-out and mismatched socks litter the living room floor, library books sprawl lazily across the couches, and thirty-two fingerprinty water glasses gather for a conference on the kitchen counters. The dishwasher needs filling and the laundry needs folding and five sets of teeth need to be inspected before they are sent off to bed.

When the last child has asked the last question before finally acquiescing to bedtime, I stand in my living room in a state of shell-shocked exhaustion, assessing the damages. Every surface of my home looks like it has suffered a direct hit, and I feel responsible, as if my home wouldn’t look so much like Ground Zero if I was just…better at this.

I didn’t keep up very well today. The house looks like a war zone, I sigh.

It looks like a war zone because it is a war zone.

The words crowd out my thoughts before I can stop them. It is a war zone, and you are at war.

I gasp, because I have forgotten. In my self-criticizing, I have forgotten all that I have done today to raise up a mighty little army and to equip them for battle. Now, at the end of the day, my house reflects the effort that has gone in to the more important task of preparing my children for war.

It’s just that it doesn’t seem like war when I hold my children on my lap and sit with them at their desks and serve them at the table. But it is. I do not like to look into their sweet, innocent little faces and think that they are engaged in a battle for their souls. But they are. I do not like to think that our enemy will stoop so low as to rob the cradle. But he does.

It is a war, and I must spend my days pouring truth into my babies, demonstrating love, and fighting against sin—both mine and theirs—because I only get one chance to arm them well. Already the enemy is noticing weaknesses, looking for chinks, and hoping I’m too busy cleaning the kitchen to notice them myself.

But I know that one day, they’ll have to face him alone. One day, I won’t be there to gird them up. So every day, we’re hauling out the armor, messing with swords, and building up defenses.

It makes an awful mess of the living room.

But then, war isn’t pretty. It is messy and exhausting. It requires so much focus, dedication, and perseverance that other things simply cannot get done. We don’t always have time to put the tanks back where we found them because we are just too busy keeping them loaded.

Some days, it’s all we can do to make sure everyone makes it out alive.

If my house looks like a war zone on those days, then let it be. Those are shields and swords littering the living room floor, not sippy cups and Nerf guns. This is a battleground, and I am raising an army.

Today, it just happens to look like it.

100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood, #? I have so lost track of numbers.

Rain Like Horses

The clouds mount up, dark and ominous, like great muscled stallions, ready for war. I stand in my yard on my dead grass and watch them, waiting.

A lightning bold jabs swiftly into the wounded sky, but I am too far away to hear it groan. All around me, those horses circle, thundering to the back of me and charging like a single, solid sheet to the front of me.

But my yard opens its yellowed mouth and not a drop falls in.

“That’s the thing about the desert,” I say to the kids. “It can be flooding in one part of town while the other part is bone dry.”

A single fat rain drop plummets to the ground and vaporizes on the burning cement. At least it could have fallen on the grass, I mumble to myself. I gaze up at the burning yellow orb hovering just above my house and I think about how much I really don’t want to water my lawn that night, and how much everything would be so much better if it would just rain, even a little.

I have lived in the desert just long enough to know that here, the earth holds its breath for rain. Days and weeks go by without a drop, then all of a sudden God throws open the gates of heaven and lets his steeds run free. They thunder down to the earth with the sound of a thousand hoof beats, and are gone.

The grass is watered and the cacti flower and the people in the puddles are reminded that there is a God in heaven who causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike. But on the other side of town, where the horses didn’t run, the people stand on parched ground and wonder why God held back the reigns for them.

I looked at the spot where the raindrop fizzled. “I should be grateful for that drop,” I chastise myself. Even one drop is better than nothing.

Another drop falls. It is not exactly a war horse, but I get out a wash bin and put it under the eaves as an act of faith. Maybe it will rain enough to drip off the shingles so I can water the flowers tucked under the roof, close to the house.

Then the horses come, slowly at first, as if to find their way, then charging in at full force. The waters fill my pathetic little wash bin and trample the thirsty grass. I put another bucket out, and another, but those are overflowing before I can grab any more.

God has let his cavalry run right through my backyard.

I run too, trying to collect all the water I can because tomorrow, it will be dry again. Tomorrow, the rain will stop and I’d better be smart enough to get it while I can.

But I can’t contain it. I do not have enough empty containers to fill with the water that is pouring down on my house. I dump hand-me-down shoes out of plastic storage bins and fill those too, but the rain keeps coming and I am soaked.

It rains all day. Then the next. And the next. Great pools of water form in the hollows of the desert. The horses rush together in a foaming frenzy and course through dry riverbeds in a blur of motion. Everything that was empty has been filled up; everything that was dry has been saturated.

And I am out in my yard with buckets and bins, looking every bit like a widow who has cared for a growing boy through famine years, who thinks her son might die even while filling every last vessel in her home with oil while a prophet pours.

I am ashamed, just a little, at my attempts to hoard God’s provision as if I would run out. The water drips down my hair and off my chin, it gathers in herds in my yard, and there I stand in the rain, trying to save a bit of it in a blue plastic bin.

Here I am, with all my jars filled, and I realize something about God that I should have known before: I should fear overflowing more than I fear running out. God does not run out.

I do.

I have limited his hand because my mind tells me what God can do and my faith doesn’t have the guts to disagree.

I stand in the rain, drenched to the core, and I am reminded that God is not limited by my limitations. He is able to do exceedingly, abundantly, more than I could ever ask or imagine. He can command the horses of heaven to charge swiftly through the desert. He can make oil flow from clay jars.

He can even refine a rain-soaked child with just one lick of fire.

The rain is still coming, and I nothing to put out except the jar that is cracked and brittle, the one that I hold back because I don’t believe it can ever really be full. But it’s under the eaves today, and the rain is coming faster than the cracks can let it out.

It is raining horses, and I am overflowing.

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