When Interruptions are God - Navigating Through the Extraordinary Unknown

I've home schooled for 17 years and these days it really takes God to motivate me. Don't get me wrong. I really do love teaching my kids. However, work is work for all of us no matter what our chosen vocation is. My 16 year old is a junior and will take 4 co-op classes this year. I'll teach him Music, Bible, and British Literature. I'm really looking forward to the spontaneous conversations that will spring up while he learns about the global prayer movement of the past 20 years, Classical composers, chord structures, and Ivanhoe. My new 1st grader and preschooler are getting used to our new Fall routine, which at this age, balances spontaneity with structure. Sometimes you just have to put the workbook aside and play an alternative form of the card game war: each player puts two cards down instead of one and the student has to use a math operation to determine which player has the bigger answer.

Today's morning routine has been weaved into the complex quilt called: my life. This week will go down in my personal history as the most thrilling yet most difficult week ever in my 46 years. I've sought to trust God will all my heart and lean not to my own understanding. I feel like the solder who is told to arm themselves then stand down, over and over again. We all go through these divine moments of stretching that hurt so much, yet are so necessary for our own personal growth. I'm so thankful to have a God....a heavenly Daddy, that I know is so present, so pleased, so comforting and so steady.

It's His steadiness that keeps us, as we balance the daily routine with Spirit-initiated interruptions.

"Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders
Let me walk upon the waters
Wherever You would call me
Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander
And my faith will be made stronger
In the presence of my Savior" (Oceans by Hillsongs United)

This lyric gives God permission to interrupt and to invade our mundane lives with the extraordinary unknown. Whether we are a stay-at-home mother, a business owner or a company employee, as Christians, God has so much more for us to do and to pursue that is outside of our usual routine.

A friend of mine was driving home from her 12 hours nursing shift when an accident happened a few cars beyond hers. It was no accident that she drove that route home. She comforted and waited with the accident victim and prayed quietly as the Spirit of God led. Last winter, my husband and older kids left the new movie theater when they saw a man laying on the icy sidewalk. After turning around and getting out of our Suburban, they invited the man to get into the car so that he would not have to walk to his destination on the icy sidewalk. One day last summer, I left a Walmart and noticed a woman putting grocery bags into her car which was parked in a handicapped space. Compelled beyond my usual comfort zone, I walked over to her and asked her if she was okay. Mind you, I'm the mother of six who is always going 70 mph to get 27 hours worth of goals accomplishes in 1 day! I ended up praying with her and to my surprised she prayed for me in turn. It was an unusual blessing as I allowed my feet to wander down God's path according to God's goal in that moment for me.

Those three items pale in comparison to the deeply divine waters that I found myself in this past week. I'm sure I'll share the details some day. This very emotionally and spiritually stretching situation, so surreal despite its Biblical basis made this unofficial first day of school startlingly calm.

I wrote a guest post last year for Grace & Faith 4 U. I ended the article with this:

In order for life to be on earth as it is in heaven, our lives must be invaded by the unexplainable, the wondrous, the unimaginable, the jaw-dropping display of God’s love that comes through His power and might....John 5:20 For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself does; and He will show Him greater works than these, that you may marvel.

The Slow Simmer of Grace

Chris Webb is a 20 year old senior at Virginia Commonwealth University majoring in Criminal Justice. He enjoys leading his Chi Alpha small group, watching movies, and reading books that enrich his faith.  In his recent blog post"The Goodness of the Lord in the Land of the Living" from This Mortal Body Has Grown Weak, I Need Sustenance, he writes: "my academic achievement had done nothing to address my deep-seated insecurities" and how gaining a true understanding of God's grace changed his life. Currently, he is working on his first crime fiction series.


When I started attended my community college four years ago I had one goal: graduate with a 4.0 (and thereby with a better GPA than my older sister, cause I had pride issues like that). I studied day and night, and outside of one classmate and playing a final year of high school basketball (which I was doing for very limited and selfish reasons), I didn’t really have a social life.  

Freshman year ended with a net total of 11 A’s, two new friends, lots of sleep deprivation and stress, as well as a second place finish in the HSPN East Coast championship game that led me to not pick up a basketball for months. I had obtained my academic goal (for a year) with rigorous self-effort but I had no joy.

My sophomore year, I was vice president of the Christian Student Fellowship at my community college (because that’s what extremely successful christian students do) and I continued to collect as many A’s as possible. I succeeded. To the outside, I was the poster child of success but my academic achievement had done nothing to address my deep-seated insecurities. I felt like a hypocrite because I was a Christian that struggled with addiction and couldn’t beat it with willpower (all you perfectionists know how much that sucks). I knew facts about God but I couldn’t have told you who He was to me. All I could do was obtain good grades and even that failed me when I didn’t get a full ride to VCU like I thought I deserved. 

God was distant, my athletic goals had gone up in flames, and when it came to the area of relationships it seemed the universe was conspiring against me. But God had a plan.

Fast forward to today. Getting me to stress about school is like trying to get me to go swing dancing (as in really, really hard). I have the closest group of friends I’ve ever had in my life and God and I talk everyday (I still do 75% of the talking but hey, progress is progress). I still have a 4.0 but I now understanding that it’s a blessing from God that He was generous enough to give me because I asked for it, not something I “earned” because I was smarter than everybody else.  

I’m still single (despite my best efforts) but I’ve had weeks where I truly understood what it means to experience a peace that transcends all understanding.

What caused this radical change, you ask? Grace. Gaining a true understanding of what God’s grace really is and what it means for me. It means that God loves me independent of anything I’ve ever done, am doing, or will do--a revolutionary discovery for me! It means that I have God’s unmerited favor impacting every area of life just because I’m His son and I’ve been adopted into His family. It means I’m greatly blessed, highly favored, and deeply loved. It means that I’m a successful person simply because God is with me. It means I’m holy, just, and good, not because of what I do but because I’m a new creation in Christ.

Now, this change didn’t just happen overnight. As I’ve learned, when God uses his grace to change you, it works really, really, REALLY, slow. But when grace changes you, it’s permanent. It starts with changing how you think waaaaaaay before it changes how you act.

Some of you might be wondering why I decided to share this in a public forum. Well, Proverbs 13:12 says “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, But when the desire comes, it is a tree of life”. Up until recently, I could only relate to the first part of this scripture; I was an expert in heart sickness, because I had it. But now, even though many of my hopes are still deferred, I’ve seen desire come and it truly is a tree of life.

I know far too well, what rock bottom looks like: despair, doubt, fear, anxiety, stress, shame, the whole nine yards. I have been intimately acquainted with them. You might think I can’t relate to what you’re going through or have gone through, and you’re right to some extent. I may not be able to relate to the details of your story because it’s your story. But trust me on this, when it comes to the aforementioned emotions…I get it. I wish I didn’t…but I do. 

I just want everyone to know that hope is out there, and you can always find it in Jesus. I know the change I experienced was not of myself because I tried changing myself for years and it didn’t work. If effort and hard work were the only factors, I would have done it (trust me, I have the Upwards Basketball Program blue stars to prove it). My problems seemed insurmountable, but to God they were like grains of sand. He is SO much bigger than anything we’ll ever come up against! He’s the beginning, middle, and end of my story and without him I am nothing.

Now, to be clear, I don’t act perfectly and I’ve not yet learned the breadth, and length, and depth, and height of God’s love for me (although I know much more than I used to). I don’t expect what I’ve written to change anyone’s life, because honestly, it wouldn’t have changed mine based on where I was four years ago. But here’s my hope: that in reading this, at least one person will come to a sense of peace about where they are in life, warts in all. If even one person reads this and comes away with a sense of relief that they aren’t responsible for changing themselves, it will have been worth it. No, the change won’t be instantaneous and yes, you’ll still struggle with stuff a lot longer than you think you should, but it’s OKAY. God has you and when God has you, EVERYTHING will be okay. As I end, I just want to leave you with this: In regards to Christianity, it’s not about what you do, it’s about "whose" you are. So "whose" are you?

 Philippians 1:6 “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine making request for you all with joy, for your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ”.

Psalm 27:13-14

“I would have lost heart, unless I had believed
That I would see the goodness of the Lord
In the land of the living.

¹⁴ Wait on the Lord;
Be of good courage,
And He shall strengthen your heart;
Wait, I say, on the Lord!”

Ages and Stages Part 5 Perfect Parent? Not!

Perfect Parent? Not!

It’s great to see the reception that this blog series, “Ages and Stages” has received.  The 4000+ views tell me that we, as parents, desire a sense of camaraderie and affirmation. We will never be perfect parents, but we can always be perfecting our parenting.

I wasn’t sure what to write for this last post, but sure enough a few conversations with my adult children brought to light a subject that all parents need to face at some time: wounds of the past.

Once my children became young adults I hoped that opportunities would become available for them to reconcile anything in their past that caused them struggle. I didn’t want them to carry baggage of childhood rejection or adolescent confusion into their adulthood. While we don’t have to do anything to guarantee our children’s physical maturity--nature does that—we do need to do a few things to guarantee our children’s emotional maturity.

Conversations this past week with my adult children were hard. To hear the stories of fear and loneliness; rejection and unclear teaching about relating to the opposite sex; and self-imposed isolation and emotional suppression shocked and saddened me. I never knew. This may seem hard to believe since I am a home educator who is pretty much around her kids all of the time.  How can a child be lonely in a house full of people?

Physical proximity does not mean emotional intimacy. In our culture we bond via internet and texting. Those on the other side cannot look into our eyes and see the reality of our souls. Another cultural challenge is our frenetic lifestyles. We can be so busy! I’ve learned that more often than not, we must take the time to knock on our child's or teen’s door, and enter their world.  We need to talk - no, listen to them, expecting at first to be met with the phrase, ‘I’m fine’. But we must keep knocking and making ourselves available; not just to be cheerleaders at sporting events or ballet recitals, but to be shoulders to cry on and hands to pray with.

Unfortunately, most of us did not get this as children and teens. We entered parenthood with handicaps and didn’t even realize it.

Long ago, I heard someone say that we can only do the best we can and we must trust God to fill in the rest. This is the truth. We are not perfect. Hopefully we will tell our kids that when they are young! Aging as a parent has to do less with our numerical ages and more with our emotional health. Do we react or do we respond? Do we admit when we are wrong or do we play the blame game? Do we suppress our own emotions and deny our own weaknesses, or do we present ourselves as clueless and thankful grace-recipients on a journey to learn how to love well.

Blessings to you and your family! Thanks for reading some snapshots of my life as a parent who is learning as she goes.

Psalm 27:10 When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.

Psalm 147:3 He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.

Malachi 4:2 But to you who fear My name the Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings; and you shall go out and grow fat like stall-fed calves.

Lord, You are Jehovah-Rapha, God our Healer. Heal the minds and emotions of our children so that they can move forward into the next stages of their lives without hindrance. Comfort our aching hearts as we acknowledge our failures and mistakes over the years. Remind us of Your promise that healing, restoration and satisfying life come to those who humble themselves before You. We love You God and we are thankful for Your tender mercies.