Challenge 15... ebola...

One time Kelsey gave Zack cholera for his birthday.

Not the disease... the plush microbe. In the basement of the UNC Student Stores, they had a line of common viruses and bacteria, and cholera was soft, fluffy and his favorite shade of blue. We've gotten a lot of mileage out of cholera-related puns.

Last night, though, our attention turned to Ebola. No laughing matter. Not. One. Bit. Hundreds of people in West Africa have already lost their lives to the disease. Two Samaritan's Purse medical professionals are fighting for their lives and are being flown back to Emory.  I was reading news links in my Twitter feed, and was aghast at the hard-hearted, cynical comments. Fear is an ugly thing.

I should know, I've battled microbe-related OCD since ~1995. In its depths, I could neither leave my house nor let anyone into my house without a decontamination process. It was a dark, dark time, and remnants are still with me, but thankfully it's not debilitating anymore. Truly the Lord has healed my mind and equipped me with tools to deal with the throwback moments.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to run up and hug someone with Ebola {which, by the way, would be a stupid thing to do}, but I'm equally sure that keeping our own doctor and nurse our of their own country is cruel and heartless.

I stand in awe of the stories of healthcare professionals who are serving on the front lines of danger, whether it's microbial danger or faith-based persecution or outright military war. Greater love has no man...

You all are in our prayers daily.

Last night I saw a video post on Facebook featuring a Samaritan's Purse doctor talking about the Ebola outbreak on West Africa. It just happened that the doctor on the video was a guy Jimmy went to high school with. The video was uploaded a few weeks ago, and the situation seems to have gotten decidedly worse.

Please pray and check out the video below:

So tired...

Do you ever get tired? So tired that you just sit and stare and think about the endless list of things you should get up and do, but you can't manage to actually move. So tired that you imagine you unload the dishwasher and put away the clean clothes, but there they still sit, loaded full and stacked high?

That's how I feel.

It was a long year. Long. I think back to September when my mom fell and November when my dad died. Forever ago. Mom is recovering well. Not without a few bumps in the road, but still recovering nonetheless.

Sometimes I forget Dad is gone, and then something happens that I would tell him about and I think about calling him and imagine how I'd start the conversation. And I remember. It was hard not having him at Kelsey's graduation. She is such a hard-worker. He would have been proud.

It seems forever ago, almost like it didn't even happen in this decade or even this millennium. It's weird.

Since all that happened, there have been countless hours of school and homework and grading and late-night chats and tears and laughter and cleaning and crafting and loading and unloading and folding and putting away.

School ended last Friday, and we rolled straight into graduation and graduation parties. Rolling, rolling, rolling.

Monday morning dawned. I suppose. I slept through dawn, thankfully. On Tuesday, Zane finished up his exams. Summer has officially begun, and we look like the wounded warriors' wing of some scholastic infirmary.

Rest. We need rest, and not just sleep--rest.

I need to watch this again. I'm going to tuck it here to remind myself to rest.

Zack's baptism...

What an incredible night we had a church last night! Wow! Just WOW!!!

Zack has been asking to get baptized for several weeks, and we were waiting for the "upcoming baptism weekend" announcement. We thought it might be next weekend, so on our "to do" list was contact the kid's ministry peeps and find out what we needed to do.

Then last night as we pulled up to church, we saw the baptism counseling tents. Zack about climbed out of his skin. At first Jimmy spoke to the kid's ministry coordinator and she gave us directions for next week. But during the sermon, JD talked about baptism being a step of obedience. Zack prayed to receive Christ when he was younger, but we delayed the baptism until we were certain he knew what it meant. It had been weighing on his heart that he hadn't been baptized. We had been praying the Lord would show us when the time was right.

During the service, I wrote Jimmy a note and asked it he thought Zack could be baptized tonight. He whispered to Zack, "Bud, do you want to see if you can be baptized tonight instead of next week." I thought the boy would leap out of his seat. He wrote in the little notebook he carries to church: "Baptism date: April 7, 2012."

The Lord has been working in his heart recently. Some of the things he's said have blown us away. He takes notes on the sermons and then comes home and talks about them in ways that leave us astounded. Wow again. Just WOW! That's not us, y'all. That's the Holy Spirit working in his life, by the grace of God.

I got just the main part of his baptism on video with my cell phone, but it was incredible.

The song we were singing was "It is Finished," one of our family favorites.

The line we were singing when Zack went under was, "Jesus went down in the cold of the grave."

The line we were singing when he came up: "Defeated the darkness when He overcame."

The lines we were singing as Zack climbed out of the water... "The keys of the Kingdom were placed into hands/ Of children and priests and of fishers of men."

[You can see the whole "It is Finished" video here.]


Wow. Just WOW!

Happy Easter, everybody! We love you all!

Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered—

to receive power and riches

and wisdom and strength

and honor and glory and blessing.

Revelation 5:12

What a day...

Today was a big, big day. We watched some new and dear friends get baptized. We were commissioned as covenant members at our new church, we had lunch and then dinner (broken up by an afternoon of car repairs) with our small group. We celebrated salvation and resurrection and community. It was awesome!

Moving to a new church was a huge deal for us. It came after approximately five years of prayer that started with "There's got to be something more," wandered through "Wait," and ended up with "Now's the time to go." We absolutely love the people at our old church, and we are thankful that the body of Christ is one. Otherwise, we never could have gone.

So why did we leave? Vision. Our new church has a decidedly "missional" view of ministry. The gospel is central. Jesus is THE most important thing of all. The Great Commission defines our role in the world in theory and practice. It's pretty simple.

We are part of a small group that meets on Sundays around 11:30. We have lunch together, kids play all over the place, the adults and sometime some of the teens sit around the table after lunch, eating dessert and sharing thoughts on the sermon. Then we pray for each other. It's discipleship in the most real, relational form I've ever experienced. It's full of love. It's family.

Then during the rest of the week we walk in the world where the Lord has planted us, we go to Bible study together, we text, we talk on the phone, we have coffee, we go to dinner, and we serve in community missions together.  We pray for lost friends and family, and when they visit our group, we love on them huge. Our two newest small group members visited the second week we were in the group. Within a month, both prayed to receive Christ. They were the ones baptized today. Amazing.

So at the end of this day, I sit here, simply grateful. God is so good.

I Peter

I suppose this has been quite the season for suffering in our house. It started last spring with some issues with one of our kids. Then it went into summer with some wrestling about our church. Then work was...different. And my mom fell. And my daddy passed away. It's been a long haul.

Everyone goes through seasons of suffering. As much as I wanted to avoid the pain, I have learned in all this to ask the Lord, if there must be suffering, that I will suffer well.

Last summer, the Sunday school class we worked with studied I Peter, so I began to read I Peter in my quiet time. This fall, the women's Bible study I go to is studying I Peter. And in October, our pastor began preaching a sermon series on I Peter: "I Am An Alien." I'm beginning to think the Lord has something for me to learn in I Peter. And I think that I've found at least one of the bigger lessons.

The passage speaking the loudest to me right now is this one:

Since Jesus went through everything you're going through and more, learn to think like him. Think of your sufferings as a weaning from that old sinful habit of always expecting to get your own way. Then you'll be able to live out your days free to pursue what God wants instead of being tyrannized by what you want. 
                                                                                                                I Peter 4:1-2 (The Message)


I am learning that what I go through is lovingly designed to make me more in the image of my Savior. Do I want to stay in the fire of suffering? Absolutely not. But am I resting in Him through the trial. Absolutely.


So, in case you have 45:00-ish minutes to spare and want to check out what we've been learning at church, below is the last sermon our lead pastor preached in the series. Skip on over to the 9:20 mark for the sermon. The first few minutes are "family business" announcements and prayer. If you do get to see it, I hope it blesses you big. 



The Mysterious Witness of Submission and Suffering from The Summit Church Sermons on Vimeo.

One thing...

Open Hands...

It is finished...

Blown away...

Tonight we went to a Sunday school social function for our oldest son. We appreciated the invitation for families to come, as well as kids. We were celebrating the end of the year, the class in general, and our friends' move to an awesome farm that has a pool and a pond and poultry and livestock. It's a great place.

To be honest, I didn't really think much about the pool being central to the event. I assumed that it being a church event, girls would dress modestly. I took for granted that the rules would be the same as they are in summer camp... one-pieces in the water, cover-ups when walking around. Somehow, it wasn't like that at all.

What I saw was girls who my son has gone to church with since he was three, dressed in skimpy bikinis, wandering around the property. They jumped in and out of the pool. They surrounded guys in the water and chatted with guys lying next to the pool. They played with chickens, jumped off the rope swing into the pond, and even stood talking to the host dad, a pastor, all the while scantily clad in string bikinis.

I can't remember a time when I've seen that many girls in that little fabric, including our recent family vacation at the beach. At the beach, girls donned shorts or shirts for the most part when they weren't in the water or lying in the sun. Yet tonight, I was totally, completely blown away. Of the approximately 20 girls there, four had on one-pieces/tankinis that sufficiently covered their chests and behinds. Wow. Just wow.

We are at a critical point in teaching our oldest son to respect women and to stay morally pure. Yet this event thrust him in the middle of an absolute nightmare. I am so sad at the fallenness of it all.

I was scared to say anything to anyone, and then another mom broached the subject with me. Then a wife of a ministry intern approached us about us, and another pastor's wife chimed in too. We all had sons or husbands who were standing out in the middle of all that... stuff.  As a volleyball game started, we decided someone needed to tell the girls to put on shirts or cover-ups if they were going to play. Amazingly, the hostess had to find several shirts and loan them to girls because they hadn't brought anything to put on over their bikinis. By the end of the evening, there seemed to be two groups of people: the parents who were mortified at the blatant disrespect the girls were showing for males in general, and the parents who were standing there talking to other parents while their daughters pranced around in skimpy swimwear.

My husband wanted to leave early, but because we were giving other students a ride home, we felt like we couldn't go. So we stood there talking and silently praying for the boys. Before the designated time was up, the boys' parents started calling them out of the water. We just couldn't watch anymore. I'm ashamed I didn't take my son home earlier, to be honest, but I was somewhat in a state of shock at the whole situation. I am still in a state of shock.

My oldest child is a girl. I have always felt a little guilty for making her choose modest over trendy, but tonight I looked at her and said, "You know that if this had been your class and you were swimming, you would have had on a one-piece or tankini, right?"

To which she replied, "Absolutely."

Her dad said, "Now do you see why we have been so strict about what you wear?"

And she said, "I've always done it. I've not always liked it, but I've always obeyed. And tonight I realized just how bad it does look to walk around with nothing on."

We are most assuredly not perfect and don't get the whole modesty thing right 100% of the time. One of my greatest regrets in life goes back to the bad choices I made in that area during high school and college. But we have to fight to be holy; we just have to.

We had a great family discussion... very open, very frank... all of us... 17-year-old girl, 15-year-old boy, 9-year-old boy, and mom and dad. And then we had a time of prayer. I'm grateful the Lord shone light in what could have easily been a dark place. I am overwhelmingly thankful for my husband's godly leadership, calling light, light and darkness, darkness and taking time to instruct our sons in the battle they will face all their lives.

I just had no idea they would have to fight it so fiercely in the church. My prayer is that the Lord will contend for the men in my life and be a help against their adversary. My prayer is also that my daughter and I will choose light and always lay down our right to wear whatever we want in order to protect our brothers in the Lord.

SBS 2011...

My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn't know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can't know him if you don't love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they've done to our relationship with God.

My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another, God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in us—perfect love!

This is how we know we're living steadily and deeply in him, and he in us: He's given us life from his life, from his very own Spirit. Also, we've seen for ourselves and continue to state openly that the Father sent his Son as Savior of the world. Everyone who confesses that Jesus is God's Son participates continuously in an intimate relationship with God. We know it so well, we've embraced it heart and soul, this love that comes from God.
God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we're free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ's. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.

We, though, are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first.

If anyone boasts, "I love God," and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won't love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can't see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You've got to love both.

I John 4:7-21 (The Message)

So long, TOMS...

And now I can't buy my beloved TOMS anymore. I really, truly hate that. Really. Truly.

You know, big Blake could have just said, "Many in our company and many of our supporters have views that differ with those of Focus on the Family, but here at TOMS, we are not about politics; we about helping people. No matter what your view on the issues, we hope you will do what you can to help end poverty and disease in the world."

I don't expect Blake Mycoskie to drop shoes and share the gospel. But I didn't expect him to slam my beliefs either. Well, wait a minute, maybe I did. We are not of this world, after all. But I just sort of thought Mycoskie was a little beyond the politics of it all, you know.

Now I feel like I can not only not buy TOMS anymore, I feel like I can't even wear the TOMS I have. 

It's made me rethink a lot about charitable donations. TOMS is NOT a charity. Not at all. I pay twice as much for the shoes than I should so that they will send a pair to someone in a Third World country. TOMS is still making a lovely little profit. Actually, as I think about it, I'm kind of embarrassed I bought such expensive shoes in the first place.

On the other hand, Samaritan's Purse takes hope to the hopeless. They meet needs, make repairs, comfort in crisis, bring healing, and most importantly, share the gospel. Of their budget, 6% goes to fundraising, 5% goes to general/administrative costs, and 89% goes to ministry. You can take a look at their financial report here.

I'm resolving to be more modest in my purchases. I don't have to buy from a Christian company, although that's always nice. I do need to be more careful what I support though, because each spending choice I make limits where my dollars can go, and there are a whole lot of people in the world who need food and clothes and medical care and families and love and most of all... Jesus.

So... so long, TOMS... you were amazingly comfortable, but now I realize it's not always about my comfort.

Loving well x 3...

Before all our kids hit the teen years and got busy beyond belief, I did Summer Bible study with the most amazing group of women ever. Life-changing studies; life-changing relationships. I'm pretty confident that in heaven, we'll hang out the front porch of the mansion and talk about what the Father did in our lives during that season. It was huge.

As I've gone through the struggle of missing Bible study after returning to work, I've realized just how essential my women's Bible study relationships were to keeping me in God's Word, off the street, and out of trouble. 

I was floundering as summer approached. We had a family crisis rearrange our lives in a major way. My heart was wounded, not only by the immediate crisis, but by some incidents that had happened several years ago. I had no idea how deeply those far-off events had cut into my heart or that instead of letting the Lord heal me, I'd taken my own spiritual duct tape and bound my own wounds... Out of sight? Wounds gone! Only not.

No, really they were festering untreated beneath the layers and layers and layers of figurative duct tape. The pain of this spring let me know that my heart had never healed.

In May, I decided... on what I thought was a whim... to ask in a couple of places online if anyone wanted to do SBS again. Several answered that they did. I did what all super-spiritual Bible study women do to find the study: I googled, and I found a four-session DVD study by Beth Moore called Loving Well. The picture I had in my mind was of people in my workplace I needed to love well. God's picture was a LOT bigger and more colorful than the one I'd imagined. I simply adore the way He shows His sovereignty. Life-changing on a daily basis.

We have one more session to go--one set of homework and a wrap-up dinner. It's been fun and it's been painful. Have YOU ever had duct tape wound tightly around your heart, only to have the Lord take it off? The is most definitely pain, but there is also healing.

I sat watching the last video, which I had no idea featured Beth telling the hairbrush story that I posted earlier this summer, and it all came together for me.

Loving well... doing a good job of loving others
Loving well... the spiritual source of love -- God Himself; all love pours from Him, the Loving Well
Loving well... loving others from a heart that God has healed

The English teacher in me is giddy about the way the Lord spoke three different definitions of well through Beth. I think He did that just for me... loving well x 3.

Copernican revolution...

As much as I love Ikea and get alternately amused and frustrated by my family and pool and job and life in general, this is really what it's all about. It's the One Thing.

Untitled from Alvin Reid on Vimeo.

Love, love, love...

SBS?

Any SBS chiquitas out there interested in having SBS this summer? Bible study? Book club? Craft club? Yogurt Mountain fan club?  Something that encompasses all of the above?

Inbox me on FB or DM me on Twitter if you are. I'm fixin' to make some summertime plans...

Love y'all!

Spring break reading...

Last year at one of my lovely annual check-ups, I sat in the office of my WHNP during the debriefing segment of the appointment. You know you have a great WHNP when you spend 1.5 minutes talking about the exam and 23.5 minutes talking about the gospel. She rocks.

She had just read a book by David Platt and was telling me that it had pretty much turned her world upside down. Mind you, she didn't really follow tradition to begin with, so seeing her get more radical was truly radical indeed.

I put Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream on my reading list and figured I'd get around to it within a year or so. Believe it or not, teaching English isn't too conducive to keeping up with my personal reading list. I have to be all literary and stuff.

Spring break rolled around, and I had, in unprecedented fashion, finished all my lesson plans and grading before the end of the last day before break. I decided to go ahead and start Radical. It is very good. Very solid. I think more than anything, I appreciate the humility in which Platt writes. Second to that, I appreciate his putting a proverbial finger on the reason why I've been so discontent in my own mundane walk with the Lord, as well as in my engagement (or lack thereof) in church for the past few years. I won't give away everything here -- it is well worth finding a copy online and ordering it yourself.

I do want to share a couple of paragraphs that I found especially meaningful, though. They had to be meaningful; I underlined the whole page.

... In our Christian version of the American dream, our plan ends up disinfecting Christians from the world more than discipling Christians in the world. Let me explain the difference.


Disinfecting Christians from the world involved isolating followers of Christ in a spiritual safe-deposit box called the church building and teaching them to be good. In this strategy, success in the church is defined by how big a building you have to house all the Christians, and the goal is to gather as many people as possible for a couple of hours each week in that place where we are isolated and insulated from the realities of the world aound us. When someone asks, "Where is your church?" we point them to a building or give them an address, and everything centers around what happens at that location.

When we gather at the building, we learn to be good. Being good is defined by what we avoid in the world. We are holy because of what we don't participate in (and at this point we may be the only organization in the world defining success by what we don't do.) We live decent lives in decent homes with decent jobs and decent families as decent citizens. We are decent church members with little more impact on the world than we had before we were saved. Though thousands may join us, ultimately we have turned a deaf ear to billions who haven't even heard his name.

Discipling is much different.

Whereas disinfecting Christians involved isolating them and teaching them to be good, discipling Christians involves propelling Christians into the world to risk their lives for the sake of others. Now the world is our focus, and we gauge success in the church not on the hundreds or thousands whom we can get into our buildings but on the hundreds or thousands who are leaving our building to take on the world with the disciples they are making. In this case, we would never think that the disciple-making plan of Jesus would take place in one service a week at one location led by one or two teachers. Disciple making takes place multiple times every week in multiple locations by an army of men and women sharing, showing, and teaching the Word of Christ and together serving a world in need of Christ. (Chapter 5: The Multiplying Community, 104-105)

Our family recently hit a rough patch that necessitated our stepping out from our disinfected world. Although from the outside it seemed like a decidedly fallen-world situation, we have seen the Lord already working out a plan that is far greater than we could have imagined. He has disciplined us, chastened us, stretched us, challenged us, undergirded us, gone before us, and blessed us. Only God could work all that into one situation.

As a result, we find our focus shifting a little from our disinfected culture to the world where we can actually share Jesus with others. It's a baby-step radical, but I think it's the beginning of something pretty special.

Ninth grade novel meets world news headlines...

When I was in ninth grade, we read the novel On the Beach by Nevil Shute. It's a post-apocalyptic story of what happens on Earth after a nuclear holocaust. All life in the northern hemisphere dies because of the massive impact (both instant impact and nuclear-fallout impact) of the bombs, and the only people left are in the extreme southern hemisphere. Yet even they aren't safe. The air currents are carrying the toxic radiation slowly southward, and  the survivors are simply waiting die from radiation exposure. The novel centers on how individuals handle the finite time they have remaining before the fallout arrives and what they do when it does finally descend on their part of the world.

Who on earth makes ninth-grade kids read this stuff?  I lived for weeks with the undercurrent of mortality running through everything I did. It was scary and very, very weird. I mentioned that I was 14 years old, right? Yeah.

Then last week I was talking to a good friend about Japan. It was a timely and relevant conversation not only because of the crisis that island nation is experiencing, but also because my friend's husband is a nuclear engineer. He specializes in nuclear fuel, and he works for our local power company. And he's really, really smart.

He's been on the professional blogs, reading about events at the Fukushima nuclear facility. I asked her what he thought about the situation, and I knew it wasn't good by the way she stopped everything she was doing, got a deadly serious look on her face and took a deep breath.  "He says it's bad. He says it's really, really bad." Understatement. That's never good from someone with the inside scoop on a crisis.

The bottom line (because I am not a nuclear scientist and don't understand the ins and outs of the whole thing) is that they have the most brilliant nuclear experts in the world over there working on the problem, and no one knows how to stabilize the situation. For the most part, the radiation is contained for now, but they if they continue to release pressure from the reactors, more radiation will escape into the air. Each release sends out radioactive particles that have to land somewhere.

"So what does he think will happen?" I asked.
"Japan is gone," she said.
"So it's as bad as Chernobyl?"
"Worse. Chernobyl had one reactor meltdown. There are six reactors in danger in Japan. Six. They should never put more than two or three reactors at a site. This one has SIX."

Now I admit I am one to go from A to Z in a hurry, so I took that to mean the whole nation, not just a few kilometers surrounding the facility. The irony is that the nuclear facility was built to withstand a 10.0 earthquake and 25' tsunami.  It did well through the 9.0 quake, but the tsunami was 30'.  The 30' tsunami ... less than my height more than the safety measures accounted for ... caused the nuclear crisis.

I read Thursday that Americans were advised to leave Japan. I read yesterday that the Japanese government has warned that they detected unsafe radiation levels in spinach and cow's milk from that region, so the food supply is already tainted. I read this morning that they are going to have to release more gases from reactor #3 today. They're trying to run it through suppression pools first, to lower radiation levels before it hits open air, but it that doesn't work and they have to release it directly into the open air, it'll increase the radioactive iodine level in the air 100 fold. It doesn't take nuclear brilliance to conclude that increasing radiation in the air is bad. It's not like the air goes into a container; it floats around the world, dropping radioactive particles in the lakes and streams and oceans and soil along the way.

As the events of On the Beach come to mind in pondering the magnitude of this disaster, I realize two things: 1) The events of Revelation 6 (or Matthew 24, for that matter) are quite fathomable; and 2) God is big enough to handle this crisis. It's an odd thing to witness something potentially apocalyptic. On the one hand, there's "Even so, Lord Jesus, come."  On the other hand, there's the knowledge that the end is The End, and there are no more chances for those who don't know Him.

So what's left to do? Pray and keep going. And that's where I've found myself this week... praying and going. Praying for wisdom for those in authority, for divine revelation of solutions to the nuclear crisis that our subduing-the-Earth efforts haven't discovered yet. Going with the tasks Jesus gave us before He left... go and make disciples, love one another as He has loved us, forgive as we have been forgiven, feed the hungry, heal the sick, be holy, etc.  I've been way too distracted from the game plan for way too long. You?

Lecrae...

Thanksgiving...

Promise...

All your children shall be taught by the LORD,
and great shall be the peace of your children.

Isaiah 54:13