daring to hope again {on opening the lid}

May 9, 2012 By

This is the third post in a series sharing my story and the reason for this blog. Read when the power of prayer seems lost, and when radical faith goes in mourning first and then head back to this post. And welcome!

“If I wanted life at all, it would have to come through His hands. . .the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

#SurprisedByLife

When He Calls Your Name

Slowly but surely my heart returned to Jesus. So did Mary’s.

“When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary, saying in private, ‘The Teacher is here and is calling for you.’ And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him. . .Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ 

~John 11:28-32

Mary mustered enough strength to place her hope in Jesus one more time, and ran to meet Him. And even though her first words seemed to accuse Him of neglect, we can’t overlook the fact that she ran to Him at all.  Even in the midst of her pain, when she realized He was calling her by name, she went running.

So did I.

I stared at the box in my bedroom floor knowing what I had to do, and for the first time in over six months knew I could do it. There, on the top of the pile of my secret prayers, was a card that simply said, “Baby McGlothlin.” I felt my heart breathe as I picked it up and turned it over again and again in my trembling hands, and knew that Jesus had called me by name.

On a breezy, beautiful day, my family and I drove to a nearby lake. With the glorious water all around us, and the sun making us want to jump in, we took the pieces of our dream and released them. I watched the wind take the bits of paper into the water and finally felt at peace with the Lord.

Restoration

We live in a world where speed is everything and waiting is unthinkable. We want what we want, and we want it yesterday. Healing is no different. The world doesn’t stop for us to grieve. There are still bills to pay, laundry to be done, homework to be finished, meals to cook, children to parent. We have to keep living.

But healing can’t be forced. It simply takes time. And as with everything else in life, true healing comes as God leads us toward it, peeling back layer after layer of raw hurt, and breathing new life into our wounds.

Later in John, as Jesus inches closer and closer to his fate on the cross, we find Him once again taking respite in the home of Mary and Martha.

“Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. So they gave a dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table.  Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

~John 12:3

From withholding her heart, to offering Jesus the very best she had, Mary now humbles herself and expresses her love and gratitude toward Him who could raise the dead. Assured now of His love for her, she shows Jesus how much she loves Him and wipes his dirty, grimy feet with her own hair.

How precious He was to her, this man who had restored her family, restored her heart. Once closed to Jesus because of what she interpreted as neglect, abandonment, and pain, her heart was now fully open to Him as her King. I like to think that as Mary poured the expensive ointment over Jesus’s beautiful, but dirty feet, she also poured out all of the hurts and disappointments she had carried in her heart and entrusted them to her Savior once again. She opened the lid of her heart and walked in faith once again.

Friends, are there areas of your heart that you’ve closed off to the Lord? Areas that are just too painful, too disappointing, too devastating to open back up? Have you stopped hoping? Stopped praying? Stopped dreaming about what could be because the lid is closed and locked tight on your heart?

I think Jesus might be calling your name sweet one. I think He might be inviting you to take the first step back to Him, and welcoming you to pour out your hurts and disappointments so that He can show you who He truly is.

Will you take one step toward healing today friends? If there’s even the smallest amount of strength left in you, would you reach up and grab the hand of hope? Choose to trust again? 

If you’ll take the dare to hope again, share it. Tell me one thing you’ll do this very minute to say “yes” to God one more time. Open your heart. He’s there waiting.

Tuesday, we’ll finish up this series as I share what all of this has to do with my new blog!

****

I adore Logos Bible Software, and it helped me write today’s post. Check Logos out for yourself!

2 Comments

when radical faith goes in mourning

May 8, 2012 By

For the next few posts, I’ll be sharing a bit of my story with you, and the reason for this blog. You can read the first post in the series, when the power of prayer seems lost and then head back to this post. And welcome!

My miscarriage left me shaken, and no longer sure God would come when I called…

#SurprisedByLife

I imagine Mary must have felt a bit like that when Jesus finally came to her after Lazarus’s death. They’d sent word to Jesus four days prior that their brother was sick and needed the Savior’s attention. But he hadn’t come. By the time Jesus arrived Lazarus’s body had already started to rot, and in Mary’s eyes, all hope for his life was gone. This Mary who had once so eagerly embraced Jesus, just maybe found herself feeling abandoned by the Man she once believed could do anything. We read about it in John 11.

“So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary remained seated in the house.” ~John 11:20

Mary, the one Jesus once praised for sitting at His feet. Mary, the one who neglected serving to share in the Master’s teaching. Mary, the one who opened her heart to Jesus so deeply, now sat unmoved by His presence.

Why?

I believe it was because she no longer trusted Him with her heart. Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible states that Mary “was so overwhelmed with sorrow that she did not care to stir, choosing rather to indulge her sorrow, and to sit poring upon her affliction, and saying, I do well to mourn.”

I Do Well to Mourn

Mary had lost heart. And while scripture doesn’t give us an inside look at exactly what she felt, it’s easy to deduce that she felt abandoned, alone, and angry with her Jesus. I felt each of those emotions in the wake of my miscarriage. I still believed that God was good, but I closed off the place of radical belief in His desire to be good to me. I quit dreaming. Quit hoping. And just sat still, basking in what goodness He had already given, refusing to dream that He might give it again.

My radical faith had gone in mourning.

I’ve written about the losses my family endured during a particular season many times. In a span of just six years I lost two favorite uncles, my grandfather, a favorite aunt, and a friend. The miscarriage seemed to be the icing on the cake.

Maybe the lid to my prayer box had been slowly closing all that time, and the miscarriage locked it. After living a fairly uneventful life, losing six people in six years nearly did me in. Add to that the disciplines of daily life, homeschooling two rambunctious boys also born in that season of loss, and dealing with the stress of a husband who works shift-work, and you get an ugly but clear picture of all that lurked beneath the surface of my heart just waiting for whatever it took to put me over the edge.

It was a difficult, but necessary place for me to dwell, and losing so much in such a short span of time forced me to ask the tough questions about life. I looked deeply at the cross, and wondered again, “If God never answered another prayer for me, if He never met another need, would His gift of Jesus and my salvation be enough?”

I answered hard questions, like why anyone would want to serve a God who allows their pain, and decided that even if I felt like giving up on my faith I couldn’t, because I had come to know and believe that Jesus was the Christ and had the words of life. If I wanted life at all, it would have to come through His hands. . .the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Question: Have you ever doubted God? Ever found yourself so hurt by life that you quit dreaming? Quit hoping for answers to your prayers?

Come back tomorrow as we talk about opening the lid and choosing to believe one more time.

****

I adore Logos Bible Software, and it helped me write today’s post. Check Logos out for yourself!

15 Comments

finding fulfillment {on what is enough}

March 20, 2012 By

It took me thirty-three years to find my enough.

Mary Janes

 

In February of 2012 I announced to my followers a semi-planned writing sabbatical. After a year filled with loss, releasing four eBooks, and re-launching a large community, I was spent. My blog had become a place to make announcements, and little more. Every time I tried to sit down and write the keyboard mocked me. My heart had been poured out and my mind turned to mush. I had no direction for my writing and found myself wanting to walk away from it all. I simply could not write. So I stopped.

I thought leaving my online space to take a break would be hard. After all, I’d spent three years pouring out my heart and soul here. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t hard at all to walk away from A Life in Need of Change and immerse myself in life. It wasn’t hard at all to tune out the internet noise and pick up a book. It wasn’t hard. And that fact alone confirmed what my heart had been telling me for some time.

I need to close A Life in Need of Change. After three years of calling this beautiful space my writing home, it’s time to end the book, not just the chapter, and start a new one.

I’d like to tell you that I struggled and wrestled with God over a topic for my new blog. I’d like to tell you that I reconnected with my inner child and recovered the dream I lost somehow on the road to adulthood. But the truth is, while I did do those things, I already knew what I would write about. That part wasn’t the struggle. The wrestling, weeping and gnashing of teeth came over whether or not the blog would actually succeed.

Success

When I speak to writers, the first thing I always tell them they absolutely must do is define what success means for them. Success, I’ve found, has very different meanings for different people. As a writer, especially as an Indie writer, deciding ahead of time whether you’ll find fulfillment in 100 or 100,000 books sold has the power to make or break you. If you’re going to feel successful when you hit the big 1-0-0 well…then…amen! Create a plan that will help you meet your goal, and then work hard to meet it!

Pretty simple equation, right? Pick a number that feels right to you and meet it. Bam! You’re successful!

Or not.

Here’s where I let you in on a little secret friends. Some of you have referred to me as a “big” blogger, but I don’t see myself that way. I don’t look at myself in the mirror each morning and say, “there’s a woman who has a successful writing career!” You look at me and you see half of the MOB Society team, a blog that IS bigger and IS put together and IS focused. You see the woman behind Warrior Prayers and the 21 Days of Prayer for Sons challenge. The woman who knows a little about writing and marketing eBooks, and who has put together a tribe of boy moms who form an incredible and life-giving community. And those things are true. That IS who I am. That IS what God has done through me (and Erin, and the rest of the amazing MOB Society team…lest you think I did it alone).

But I’m really so small.

Enough

Isn’t it just like God to speak through the smallness? His voice is the breeze, isn’t it? Not the trumpet. Not the thunder. Not the roaring plane…but the fresh blowing breeze. The times where the noise isn’t so loud, and the emails aren’t so overwhelming, and the to-do list is still manageable.

It was in the small that the Lord brought me these words:

“Before you get hit with that first wave of success, sit down with a piece of paper … and define what your enough will look like.”

In Quitter, Jon Acuff describes a time right before his book Stuff Christians Like released. He was sitting outside with his wife watching a sunset when the following thoughts came to him:

“This is enough. I have a beautiful wife, a house to live in, two wonderful children, a job. This is enough. There’s no reason to chase money or material possessions when the book comes out. I have enough.”

As I read those words my heart was pierced straight through. The truth of my blessings in this life washed over me as I sat on my couch, late-day sun warming me on the outside as the truth warmed me on the inside. THIS is enough.

DSC_0181

My Jesus. My husband. My two precious boys. A lifestyle I adore. Friendships that run deep. THIS is enough.

I don’t need anything else to be successful in this life. My cup overfloweth as it is. I don’t live a perfect life…I sin, and I want more, and I lack grace, and I hurt others, and I make mistakes. I’ll always want my writing to bring comfort, grace, and peace to others. I’ll always have a dream in my heart to write a traditionally published book. But it doesn’t have to define me. This imperfect life of mine? It’s enough. For the first time…it is truly enough.

If God never gives you your secret dreams…if your job or your blog or your book or your {fill in the blank} never takes off (even if it does) will you always be seeking the next thing to make your life complete? I hope I won’t.

What is your enough?

 

 

Once you’ve seen it, tasted it, hang it in the deep parts of your heart so that when you’re tempted to need more, you’ll remember…

*********

When I realized my “enough,” the curtain that separated my heart from my writing lifted, and I was able to see a clear picture of what this new space needs to be. I’ll share more about my new direction with you over the next few weeks, and I’ll officially launch a entirely new community on May 8, 2012.

I hope you’ll join me.

*********

This post is linked to:

Write it Girl

A Holy Experience

The Better Mom Mondays

29 Comments
« Older Posts