All the trivialities are part of a bigger design. In and of themselves, they are pointless, but, in the context of a life gifted by a Maker for the purpose of relationship, every dish washed, every diaper changed, every paper filed, every song sung, every word written become designs in the grand tapestry of an intricate story between creator and creation. It’s not pointless. It’s not futile. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Even the most mundane of tasks become meaningful and infused with deep sense of understanding, joy, and love.
Tag Archive for 'life'
There’s no telling what God will do with you if you’ll sell out to him.
Dr. Allison
I love this photo . . . so much so that I put it up top.
Have a wonderful day.
My wife, Amanda (a.k.a. “Super Housemom”), does all the grocery shopping for the Promise House. There’s no doubt a lot of food gets eaten around here. So, grocery shopping usually includes 2 to 3 full carts and about $700 (without paying tax).
It’s a major operation.
Amanda takes several girls with her to help with the carts. Then, when they get back to the Promise House, everyone pitches in putting them up.
We’ve pretty much got it down to a fine art. We’re like a well-oiled machine . . . with robust stomachs.
Each week during the summer I meet with the girls one on one. We talk about how they are feeling about life and check up on their progress. During these meetings, I give them a new verse from the scriptures to be memorizing through out the week.
This week it’s Psalm 37:4.
Me: Here you go, Rachelle. Write this verse down in your notebook. It’s the verse of the week for you to memorize.
Rachelle: Ok.
[Rachelle pulls out her notebook and starts to write. A minute goes by.]
Rachelle: That’s bribery.
Me: What?
Rachelle: Bribery. What this verse says. It’s bribery.
Me: What do you mean?
Rachelle: It says that God will give you what you want if you love him.
Me: . . .
Eventually I was able to get my thoughts together and help her see this verse (and hopefully God) in a non-coercive, non-manipulative context. Just another slap in the face reminding me of the type of relationships in which these girls have been conditioned to function.
I started following Jesus when I was 17 years old (February 7, 1998 to be exact), almost ten years ago. In just under a month I’ll be a double-digit-disciple, a tenured Baptist. Thankfully, God is faithful and he has continually drawn me out to deeper water where it’s harder to reach bottom. That means life gets a little scarier at times, but what pervades everything is the unshakable peace, profound joy, and vigorous love that come with a life fully abandoned to its maker. In other words, life is good. Hard/scary/frustrating/daunting at times. But always good.
Can I get an amen on that?
We made a quick trip to Hot Springs with all the girls yesterday to visit Perrion. She lives in Shreveport, but is visiting family over the holidays. That’s Dennis she is holding, her son. He looks a lot different now. You can see him when he was just a few days old at the bottom of this page.
Life is hard. And for some folks, just where they are born and the family they are born into makes life really hard. Perrion seems to be doing pretty well though. At 15, with a ten month old, she is doing the best she knows.
The Lord your God is with you. He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you. He will quiet you with His love. He will rejoice over you with singing.
Zephaniah 3:17
Our compassionate efforts toward justice guarantee a deepened faith and prayer life. They will lead us to disciplines of the spirit and of the heart. By engaging with suffering, we learn true joy. By touching despair, we discover what it means to embrace hope. By coming to know Christ crucified, we participate in his resurrection. By pouring ourselves out, we gain our lives.- Joyce Hollyday
You have too large an army with you. I can’t turn Midian over to them like this — they’ll take all the credit, saying ‘I did it all by myself’ and forget about me.- Judges 7
Gideon had it tough. It’s one thing to say you trust God. It’s a whole other thing to march into battle with an army that had been whittled down from 32,000 to 300. God was teaching Gideon about trust, but there is something else going on here. It seems that God is wanting more than credit or even for Gideon to trust him. God wants to be known by him. Maybe God puts us in tough circumstances that force us to rely on him simply because he wants to be close to us and he wants us to learn to be close to him.
Think of it this way. I want Sophia to learn and grow and become strong. I want her to learn to walk on her own and feed herself and speak. But, at the same time, I long for her to be close to me, to need me. Yes, I want her to learn how to walk. But, when she comes upon a particularly precarious bump in the road and she looks at me and reaches out her hand for my help, I get this top-of-the-world, how-can-life-get-any-better feeling. Why? Because she is my child, and I want her to be close to me, to rely on me, and to need me.
En Pos de lo Supremo, Octubre 27
The challenge that faces a follower of Jesus is not the difficulty of getting wayward or indifferent people to turn around and start going in the right direction. The challenge is our own relationship with Jesus.
The right questions are these:
Do I know my resurrected Lord?
Do I know the power of his Spirit living in me?
Do I put enough faith in Jesus and what he said that my actions are seen as imprudent by the world?
Or am I abandoning the humble position of unlimited faith in my Jesus (that which is really my only call as his follower)?
People often ask me what it is that I do at the Promise House. Apparently, the term ‘housedad’ isn’t as self-explanatory as I would like to assume. I guess that is understandable because, truthfully, I usually have a difficult time fleshing it out myself. After a few seconds of half sentences I usually resort to “Well, I guess I am basically a dad.” And, in reality, that is the best way to put it: I am a dad.
Granted, I am not your typical, briefcase-carrying, off-to-work-every-morning, coffee-sipping, golf-playing dad (though, I do consider myself somewhat of a coffee connoisseur). I am no Mike Brady, not by a long shot. How many dads that you know have 9 pregnant teenage daughters?
But, nonetheless, I am a dad. And for the duration of each girl’s pregnancy at the Promise House, I am her dad. I make sure she gets up on time in the morning. I worry about her eating a good breakfast. I take her to school. I help her with her homework. I kill the occasional spider. I discipline, reward, confront, and encourage. I tell her goodnight. I am a dad.
And, whether they like it or not, the girls begins to depend on me. They look to me to be a constant in their life, and for a lot of the girls that come into our care, I am the most constant male figure they have ever had. Also, they begin to come to me for advice and counsel. One of the most meaningful things for me is being able to help them understand God’s love and plan for their lives, like the time Samera asked me how she could really know God.
All of the girls climbed into the van to ride to school, but two of them were just going along for the ride. They would not be attending school that day. One had not yet been enrolled and the other, Samera, had a doctor’s appointment. Samera was only a few weeks away from her due date and I had noticed that her countenance had changed.
Frankly, she had a lot to think about. Her mom was in jail and she barely knew her father. She had no real family to speak of. Samera wanted to look to the father of her unborn daughter for stability and a future, but the rumor was he already had another child on the way with someone else. That is a pretty bleak outlook for a seventeen-year-old who is just weeks away from having a baby.
“Mr. Ryan, how do I know that I know.” Samera asked as we drove back to the Promise House. A pretty vague question by any standard, but I knew what she meant. “How do you know that you know God?” I asked. “Yeah” she said. I hit the left turn signal. “We better stop for a donut.”
I knew this was an important conversation. Sarah had no one. So, when she asked me “How do I know that I know?” I knew that in her heart of hearts she was asking “How do I know God won’t leave me too?”
As we talked over sprinkled chocolate glazed donuts I started wondering, “How does someone who has never really been loved learn to be loved by God? What is my role, as her dad, in helping her to accept God’s love?” It seemed like a big job, too big for me at least. I was trained in CPR, First Aid, AED, Conflict Management, and Crisis Intervention, but how could I help this young lady understand that Jesus loves her for who she is? How could I show her that love doesn’t mean exploitation, degradation, and eventual abandonment? I never received training for that.
And then it hit me. “If I don’t help her to understand just how precious she is to Jesus, no one else will.” There was no one else. I was her dad. Apparently, it was God’s intention that I help her to understand. And there we sat, in a donut shop, talking about a personal relationship with God. I am sorry to say that I did nott have any profoundly eloquent statements to bring it all together for her. I simply told her about the unconditional, eternal love God had for her through Jesus. But, as I look back on it, I realize now that what I said to her did not speak half as loudly as the way in which I lived towards her.
I am a dad. And, the truth is, I have countless opportunities everyday to help my ‘daughters’ understand how God feels about them. And, I have realized that the only way for me to effectively demonstrate God’s love to them is to truly allow myself to be loved by him. Imagine that. To love, I have to let myself be loved. When I live a life that is fully submitted to Jesus, amazing things happen in my life and in the lives of those I come into contact with.
Jesus said he came for the humble, sick, and outcast. He came for the ‘least of these.’ Jesus put us right in the middle of ‘the least of these’ at the Promise House and told us to serve them.
Now that I’m a dad, I understand on a whole new level why abortion is so hotly debated.
The fact is abortion is not just an issue, it’s an injustice that is taking place right here, under our noses. Forget about the genocide in Darfur and the human trafficking in Thailand. What about the millions of lives that are destroyed by legal means right here in the U.S.?
Check out http://abort73.com. This site will reopen your eyes to this injustice that you might have grown accustomed to.
When Sophia started walking, it was like it all started happening in a matter of 24 hours. Well, now it’s talking. All of a sudden, she speaks! She has come a long way since she said “baby” to everything. Here’s a list of the the words she knows:
ball
manta (blanket)
milk
shoes
cat
dog
sapo (frog)
duck
mama
bob (as in bob the builder)
nanny (as in her great grandma)
ruff (the sound a dog makes)
baby
agua (water)
fish
book
pan (bread)
whereisit?
And the funniest of them all . . . . . “oh man!”
There’s a great article in Home Life magazine this week about living space, the lack of living space that is. This family of four starting out in a small trailer home 10 years ago. It wasn’t the plan to live there this long . . . but they still do. Here is an excerpt of what the mom had to say about it.
Sure, I dream of having a larger home where I can entertain and host family holiday gatherings . . . My family and friends continue to drop helpful hints about floor plans or affordable building options. We smile, thank them, and stay with the plan God has for us. When the time comes, we’ll have a new house. In the meantime, we’ll continue to tithe and give to build his kingdom. We will not sacrifice that part of our worship for any house, large or small.
I do not want to someday hear my Lord say, “Sherri, why were you so worried about your house on earth? Didn’t you know I was preparing a mansion for you?” . . .
Jesus talked about an eternal perspective. He talked about living life with a proper view of how short it really is . . . and how long eternity will be. It’s not about what we want. It’s not about comfort or all this stuff we spend so much time and energy on.
It’s weird. I really don’t understand why things go like this. I truly do want to follow Jesus and give him every corner of my life. And, there are days when I feel like I’m really close to him and I can see him working in my life and every conversation becomes a prayer and every movement becomes an act of worship.
Then, things change. I don’t feel him. I don’t see him working. Prayer is limited to a forced few minutes a day. Worship becomes an arduous chore.
Why?
Dave H. and I were talking about it. He said the same thing happens to him.
Why would something so satisfying and meaningful (walking with Jesus) get buried under daily routine?? Is walking with Jesus, practicing his presence, supposed to be forced sometimes? I’m really not sure. I don’t want to try to ‘recreate’ times like those just to feel good.
I don’t know . . . . it’s all kind of confusing to me at the moment.
Spirit of the living God, be the Gardener of my soul. For so long I have been waiting, silent and still — experiencing a winter of the soul. But now, in the strong name of Jesus Christ, I dare to ask:Clear away the dead growth of the past,
Break up the hard clods of custom and routine,
Stir in the rich compost of vision and challenge,
Bury deep in my soul the implanted Word,
Cultivate and water and tend my heart,
Until new life buds and opens and flowers
Amen.
- Richard Foster, Prayers from the Heart, p. 3.
Everybody always asks me this question in one form or another: “So, what are your plans? Are you going back to the mission field after you get your seminary?”
Hhhmmm. That’s a tough question.
First of all, I am on the “mission field”. So, I would never say that I am trying to get to the “mission field” or that I plan on going back to the “mission field.” People who follow Jesus are where they are because Jesus put them there . . . for a purpose . . . with a mission. I guess that makes you a missionary too.
The next tough part of this question is the word “plans”. The problem is . . . we don’t really have any plans. That’s not to say that there aren’t things that we’d like to do. And, we definitely have some options. But, the bottom line is this: Jesus has called us to the Promise House. It’s that simple. So, that’s where we are.
I guess we do have a plan . . . to do what Jesus tells us.
How long are you we going to work at the Promise House? We don’t know. 1 year or 50 years. We’re here until he says go.
Jesus lived in this broken, painful world, learning obedience, through the things that he suffered, tempted in all the ways we are, and yet remaining without sin. We are, to be sure, reconciled by God by Jesus’ death, but even more, we are “saved” by his life (Rom. 5.10) — saved in the sense of entering into his eternal kind of life, not just in some distant heaven but right now in the midst of our broken and sorrowful world. When we carefully consider how Jesus lived while among us in the flesh, we learn how we are to live — truly live – empowered by him who is with us always even to the end of the age. We then begin an intentional imitation of Christ, not in some slavish or literal fashion, but by catching the spirit and power in which he lived and by learning to walk in his steps.
- Richard Foster, Streams of Living Water. Pg. 1.
I am, O God, a jumbled mass of motives.
One moment I am adoring you, and the next I am shaking my fist at you.
I vacillate between mounting hope, and deepening despair.
I am full of faith and full of doubt.
I want the best for others and am jealous when they get it.
Even so, God, I will not run from your presence. Nor will I pretend to be what I am not. Thank you for accepting me with all my contradictions.Amen.
- Richard Foster, Prayers of the Heart. p. 4.
If you want to understand Christ’s words and relish them fully, you must strive to conform your entire life to His. What good does it do you to be able to give a learned discourse on the Trinity, while you are without humility and, thus, are displeasing to the Trinity? Esoteric words neither make us holy nor righteous; only a virtuous life makes us beloved of God. I would rather experience repentance in my soul than know how to define.
-Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ. Book 1, Ch. 1
If we were as diligent in uprooting vices and planting virtues as we are in debating abstruse questions, there would not be so many evils or scandals among us . . . Certainly, when Judgment Day comes we shall not be asked what books we have read, but what deeds we have done; we shall not be asked how well we have debated, but how devoutly we have lived.
-Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ. Book 1, Ch. 3.
Today the heart of God is an open wound of love. He aches over our distance and preoccupation. He mourns that we do not draw near to him. He grieves that we have forgotten him. He weeps over our obsession with muchness and manyness. He longs for our presence.
And he is inviting you - and me - to come home, to come home to where we belong, to come home to that for which we were created. His arms are stretched out wide to receive us. His heart is enlarged to take us in.
Sometimes I come across something (maybe a book or sermon or, in this case, an organization) that makes me say “Yes. This is good. This is right. This is what Jesus is all about.” And I want to get involved, because I know it is exactly what Jesus was talking about when he was walking around the middle east. The International Justice Mission has a four fold approach to fighting injustice around the world:
- Victim Relief - Relieve the victim of the abuse currently being committed.
- Perpetrator Accountability - Bring accountability and just consequences under the law to the specific perpetrator(s) of abuse.
- Structural Prevention - Prevent the abuse from being committed against others who are also at risk by strengthening community factors that are likely to deter potential oppressors, reduce the vulnerability of at-risk populations and empower local authorities to stop such abuses.
- Victim Aftercare - Provide access to services to help victims transition to their new lives and to encourage long-term success.
That all sounds kind of technical, but this is what it translates into. When I watch something like this, it makes all the things that I so often find myself preoccupied with insignificant and temporary.
Also, Relevant Magazine posted a very good article about IJM here. There are all kinds of ways to get involved listed on the IJM website.
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