I know a dear woman living out her “mission field” from the assisted living center in which she resides. Each day, she walks down to the connected nursing home and spends time with the residents, talking and praying with them, or quietly singing the old hymns of their younger days. She brings them friendship and comfort in the ways she can, in the hope that now in the winter of life, they would see Jesus. Though limited herself, she sees the purpose of her life and the continued sense of calling to be a faithful disciple. There is still work to be done. And the joy and peace radiating from her are so evident.
When I leave from our all-too-infrequent visits, my soul is refreshed and encouraged to keep living faithfully and seize each little opportunity the Lord gives me to be a blessing to another person. I leave saying, “Lord, please, that’s how I want to be when I grow old.”
It seems growing old is a watershed, and one cannot stay neutral. We become wise and winsome or sharp-tongued curmudgeons. We seem to face the choice of joy or misery, and living out delight or bitterness.
Read moreI met two men coming out of church last Sunday. They were sitting on a bench, under the shade of a tree. Their worn backpacks rested on the wooden boards between them, and resting relaxed between their knees, their hands each grasped a well-worn walking stick, covered with names written in black marker. Their faces were weathered, framed by graying hair and long beards.
They had been out in the downpour that had swept through. I remembered the lights flickering, as tree branches bent and twisted in the wind outside the windows. I remembered realizing, as the rain pounded in erratic sheets, that our windows were open and had worried about the puddles of water we might find on our windowsill and floor. They were wet through, and held up their dirty flannel shirt sleeves and baggy pants to demonstrate.
“Do you go to that church?” they asked, gesturing across the street to the building I had just exited. I nodded.
The leader of the two said, “Some kids from your church talked to us last week. They gave us coffee. They signed my stick,” and with this, he pointed to one of the signatures on the thin piece of wood he held. “When they left, they told us they were going to bring us back sleeping bags and tents—but they never showed up. We even prayed together.” He said it in such a way as to suggest that praying had sealed the deal, like a handshake after a business arrangement.
“I thought Christians were supposed to be people who kept their word and stuff,” chimed in his buddy, “but I guess I was wrong. It’s okay—I’m learning now. You know, adjusting my expectations.”
Read moreDrinking the bitter cup that life sometimes offers us can be a painful endeavor. Dreams deferred do make our hearts sick, as do disappointments, heartbreaks, and pain of all flavors.
It can be a longing for companionship, a spouse to share life with, or aching for a child to fill empty arms. The echo of loneliness, the bite of failure or rejection, the sorrow of loss. In this place, we are tempted to wonder why the Lord’s smiling face seems turned toward everyone but us—tempted to think it seems He doesn’t love us as much as his other children.
We beg—Why Lord? How much longer? We can doubt his goodness or doubt his strength. We can complain like whiny teenagers about how life is unfair.
Or we let the pain quiet us, we settle into it, and stop fighting. We stop panicking and flailing, trusting that we will not drown in the murky waters surrounding us. And we become still enough to listen to God’s voice.
Read moreWe got a cat a couple weeks ago. If you would have asked me several years ago if I would ever utter that statement, I’m sure I would have said no. I’ve never been a cat person. Perhaps it’s the one that clawed my face the week before elementary school pictures. Perhaps it’s repeated examples of moodiness and stand-offishness. Give me a dog that I can train and will be my best friend forever. But my dear husband—the things you do for love. So now I am a cat owner, courtesy of the local humane society.
Her name is Agatha—yes, after Agatha Christie—and she may be one of the calmest and nicest cats I’ve ever met. This morning, when it was time to get to work, she followed me over to my desk, jumped up on it, to inspect what was going on, and then curled up on the top of the couch beside me to watch and snooze.
What delight from such a little, still-slightly-mangy creature.
Read moreI heard someone say recently that if you offered a continually rotating class at your church entitled “How to Know the Will of God,” you would have no end of attendees. It is a natural human tendency to want to figure things out, to know definitively what direction to take, or to peer into the future. It’s clear through the fascination with fortune tellers, mediums, and clairvoyants of all sorts. And I think in the Christian world, it appears with our continuous desire to “know God’s will.” We want certainty before we take a step.
While it's important to seek God's direction, it can become easy to forget that God is much more interested in our faithfulness and our communion with Him than He is with micromanaging our decisions. He invites us into a glorious uncertainty. He asks us to follow with the simple trust of a child. Our life with the Lord is an adventure, not a carefully scripted list of predetermined movements which we must somehow decipher or forfeit his favor.
Often, we can miss opportunities for simple obedience and everyday kingdom work that are under our noses—because our minds are too far up in the clouds with determining God’s will or looking for a grand-scale sign. He has given us a clear picture in the Bible of his will for our lives in the day to day. He invites us into the wide-open fields of following him, of partnering with his work in the world, of delighting in him. And this day-by-day discipleship invitation to “Come follow Me” often leads us to the smallest of daily decisions and moments. The conversation with an ill neighbor, an encouraging note, clean diapers and full little bellies, a gracious response, an offered prayer. It’s in these small moments that disciples are made.
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