life

As My Foot Slips

/ shawnheather96 / Leave a comment

This weekend I dropped one of my favorite people in the whole world off at college for her Senior year after our whole family being together for the last year and a half of Covid. It was 18 months of craziness, hardship, uncertainty, fear, anger, and loss for most of us. But for our family it was also a time of redemption of loss from when we lived overseas and had to break our family up across the world. Suddenly we were all together, living life, eating meals together, working through the hard as a unit rather than individuals going a million different ways – and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It was beautiful, messy, sometimes hard, but also such a time of full circle closure. I am thankful.

But life moves on, as it does, and she is back at school. Next year our oldest gets married and moves out and our second son will go to college. Both wonderful, right things. Yet we continue the cycle of holding our kids lightly, as we were told when they were babies and we dedicated them to Him. It’s hard.

But as I drove home naming the grief of not having my daughter there when I got home, I cried. Then suddenly those simple tears became deep, gutteral groans and sobs – to the point where I almost had to pull over. Grief after grief after loss started pouring through my mind.

I thought it must be spiritual attack. I think I am pretty good at naming losses and surrendering them to healing. In fact, many of the things that were crossing my mind were things I had spent much time in the counsel of friends and in prayer about. I had seen beautiful things come from them. But as I started to rebuke this sudden attack of sadness and anger and all the emotions that roll around together in grief, I felt the Holy Spirit tell me to be quiet and listen. This wasn’t about me not being able to move on or sitting in the middle of broken, hurtful things. It wasn’t even about trying to name the good things I have seen in the midst of it all. It was simply about me sitting with my Jesus, the Savior who understand first hand all the complications that come from living on this earth.

The older I get, the more loss I experience. Yes, there are SO many good and beautiful things. But the losses are numerous. Some of them are like when the wind blows a piece of gravel and it smacks you on the leg. It stings and maybe leaves a little scratch, but you don’t think about it a lot later. But some of them have taken chunks from my heart, to the point where I feel like I am walking around with more scar tissue than good muscle some days. This world does that.

My mom and dad’s deaths. Loss of a life I loved in Kenya. Evacuation from South Sudan and loss of a long-term dream. Every time I took another child to college, knowing that life would look different from that moment on. Yet another new house. Friends who died from covid or cancer or malaria or an accident. Marriages I have watched dissolve in unrecognizable puddles around me. Loss of relationship with families that were part of my every day messy, beautiful life every time we moved.

SO many moves… Which means loss of stability. Loss of home base. Loss of security. Whoever said, “Home is where your heart is,” was not part of a military or ministry family.

How do I keep my footing when everything around me feels like it changes – or could change quickly – at any given moment and without warning?

So this morning my prayer is this:

Psalm 94:18-19

When I said, “My foot is slipping,”
    your unfailing love, Lord, supported me.
When anxiety was great within me,
    your consolation brought me joy.

Lord, as things change, as the world feels slippery and we can’t grip it anymore, would you catch my foot? Help me not to run from things and want to hide away in my own false fortress; a sense of security built by my own hands and heart but that won’t withstand the reality. Help me not to let anxiety rule when I don’t understand, or I come back to a thing I thought I had finally left behind. Help me to trust in the only One whose consolation can truly bring joy. Amen.

Feasting

/ shawnheather96 / Leave a comment

Jesus answered, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes form the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4

As I do my devotions this morning, I am waiting on the coffee to brew and the smell makes me want bacon and eggs. I’m hungry! My stomach is growling, and I am looking forward to a hearty breakfast to start my day.

About six months ago I found myself making a deal with God that if he woke me up in the early morning without an alarm, I would get up and spend time with him. I hate alarms – they make me so grumpy, and I spend much of the night waking up and checking the clock, afraid that I am missing whatever I am supposed to be up for. I understand it’s a bit childish to make a deal with God, but I figured, I AM his child, so he would be ok with that.

And he has.

More often than not I find myself naturally waking up a couple hours earlier than most of my family and remembering, “the deal.” Sometimes I am a little grumpy about it still, doing it only out of obligation. But usually – more and more as I continue this pattern- I find myself waking up and anticipating this time with my Father before the day becomes busy and hurried. I pour my coffee, sit on my porch, and listen to the birds worshipping or the rain soothing, and I feast on the words of God.

Food has always been my addiction. Of course we all need food. But I have struggled over the years with the binging (and at times purging) of it to try to console, to celebrate, to mourn, to rejoice, to relieve burdens…you name it. Food was my go-to.

One day I realized, after pouring my heart out to God, that maybe I could use this impulse. God can redeem anything. As I find myself experiencing one of these impulses, I try to remind myself (and ask the Spirit to make me aware) that I might want to binge on the Word first. It satisfies me in a more complete and whole way than gorging on chocolate and eating a bag of chips. And because I believe God transforms our minds and hearts, occasionally I enjoy the chocolate after the feast of the Word. I think God likes desserts! 😉

Can I encourage you to figure out the rhythms that work for you to be filled with the life-giving word of our Father, who loves you and desires to make you healthy and whole? You won’t be sorry.

The Kingdom of Light

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“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)

Have you ever been in pitch-black darkness? The kind where light pollution does not exist and you literally cannot see your hand directly in front of your face? South Sudan was like that at night. Rural, no electricity for anyone except and occasional generator. We had solar, but when you walked far enough away from our houses, the dim light coming from them did nothing to dispel the deep darkness of the night. I had never experienced anything like that previous, and I have not again.

Often I would find myself walking back from the church office to our compound in the dark on just a tiny dirt path that had been hacked away by the man we hired to keep the “nature” of the compound under control. I knew there were snakes – lots of them and many of those poisonous. There we also scorpions and safari ants – both super small, yet excruciating if you stepped on them. Some of the other, bigger wildlife around were not things I wanted to see in daylight, let alone meet in the dark.

While I was usually on high alert, and I would use my phone or a head lamp for light, my view in front of and around me was limited. I would always feel a sense of relief as I stepped into the small beam of light coming from one of our windows.

We put up solar powered lights all around the house – hanging from the roof like little twinkling stars beckoning us home into safety. From a distance you could see them barely twinkling, but as you moved closer they looked like magic in the darkness. They were the talk of the town when we first put them up! Many people loved them and asked us to give them some!

I was walking in darkness- pitch black, inky, all-enfolding. Real dangers were all around. Sometimes I feel that way here – in the middle of the city or at camp – everywhere we go has dark spilling in and overtaking, it seems. Sometimes as I look at my kids and my loved ones I feel as though we might be in danger of being swallowed up in it, with no way out; all hope gone.

When I feel this way, I have one of two choices. I can allow the circumstances around me and the emotions they bring up to define who I think God is. I admit that this is often my initial response. It causes me to sink deeper into my anxiety and stay in bondage for much longer. Or I can believe his word. “Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light for my path.” (Psalm 119:105) If I choose this way, then I am turning it back around and allowing God’s very word to define who he is. Then truth starts to settle in, dispel the dark and the lies, and peace takes root. The circumstances may not have changed, but I am seeing the light in the middle of the darkness.

Sometimes that light is a little bit like the twinkling fairy lights in the distance of a dark landscape littered with danger. I keep walking forward knowing that I am heading in the right direction. Other times it is a bit like I’ve been sitting in a pitch-black room and a spotlight is suddenly turned on directly in my face. I am startled, blinded by the sudden brightness, but slowly my eyes adjust and I can see the reality around me. Nothing is hidden, and I am safe and there isn’t a speck of darkness anywhere.

“In him was the life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:4-5) I am so thankful I serve God, who is the ruler of the Kingdom of Light.

The blog From a a Year Ago

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I was going through my blog in the “drafts” section to see what things I had started and then never finished to try to clean it up.  I came upon this blog that I had started a year ago – the night before Anna was coming back from Kenya unexpectedly early and we were getting ready to go on what we thought would be a singular lock-down just to make sure she wasn’t sick.  By the time I reached the store the news of Europe closing it’s borders was hitting and people were starting to panic, so I walked into a jam-packed store (that was pre-mask and social distance order) and this is what played out:

“It’s real…That knot in your chest.  The lump that you try really hard to swallow.  The short, fast breaths that make you tell yourself to breathe deep and count slowly.

In this time of uncertainty I feel it pressing in constantly.  Last night I was in the store and it was as though I was walking through a movie scene for a dystopian movie.  The lines were all the way to the back.  People’s carts were full of whatever they could put in.  The store had no milk, bread, eggs, toilet paper, flour…the shelves were empty.  I had only gone in to get a few key things, but as I sat and watched others I started to panic and anxiety crept in.  Maybe I should stand in line for the next couple of hours and buy all the cheese, pasta, and peanut butter I could find. Or maybe I really do need all the gatorade I can fit in my cart.  Or maybe I should buy all the medicine I could find because we are bound to get this virus and have fevers and might run out of gatorade but Tylenol would take the fevers down, but RJ can’t swallow a lot of pills so I should buy a bunch of kinds so that I could be sure of having something he could take, but then what if he still can’t and then he’s really sick and we have no food and people have gone crazy…kind of like my mind in that moment.

Last night in the store I came across a few people that reminded me of something important – this life is not all about me.  I stood as I was waiting (patiently, I promise!) for a store employee to move his cart that he was stocking shelves with and I looked around me.  There was a young man about my oldest son’s age.  He looked a little shell shocked, honestly.  He had some pasta, some granola bars, and a box of milk in his hands.  He was looking at Tuna but seemed a bit like he had no clue what he should be doing.  I wanted to tell him to walk alongside me and let me help him figure this out, that he wasn’t alone. I wanted to give him some sort of assurance that he was doing the right thing in buying a little extra, but that he should not give into the fear that was pulsing through the store.  I wanted to – but I didn’t.  Because in the moment I was scared and panicky.  I was thinking of my own son and wondering if someone would help him in this situation, because how does a 22 year old young man on his own for the first time know how to react and prepare when it seems like the world has gone mad?

I also saw an older woman trying to get a few things.  I helped get something off a shelf for her as people rushed by ignoring her because by this point I was starting to get my senses back.  As I prayed against the fear I felt my own panic subsiding.

I think we are going to be facing some new, uncharted things here in the next couple of months.  We are not a country that really knows how to do crisis well. We’ve lived in places where we had to evacuate from war and go on lock down due to election instability, and I never saw the chaos that I saw last night in the grocery store.  May God show us clearly what he wants us to learn from this. “

Did you catch your breath as you read? I know that now, on this side of things, I can see how scared we were as a country. We have seen half a million deaths in the US during this pandemic that were related to the virus. Probably no one reading this was spared knowing someone personally who suffered greatly in some way because of it. Jobs have been lost, houses lost, marriages and families that were already taxed disintegrated during quarantine, and some people who lived on their own spent months never seeing another person or having any sort of human touch.

Yet here we are at what seems to be the end of it. What did we learn? Or better yet, what are we learning?

This weekend I saw my newborn nephew. I had been considering and reconsidering going, worried about if I would bring something to him unknowingly. But my sister really wanted me there, and as I sat and cuddled him and I stroked his fuzzy, perfect little head and breathed in newborn baby, I felt hope again. My niece who had come as well fell in love with him and said he was a powerful baby. I had to agree – there was something almost intoxicating about this new little, extremely miraculous life that we were holding. He reminded me that God was not absent from the events surrounding us this last year, but that even in those he showed himself powerful, merciful, and redemptive.

See, my sister and her husband had tried for over a decade to have kids. Hope sprung up a time or two only to be dashed violently in the pain of miscarriage. Then Lincoln happened. In the middle of trauma and chaos and pandemic and pain, a new life was formed. He was not the “Covid” baby – ones that were birthed from the extra time at home that we are seeing happen all around us (not that those are any less miraculous or full of hope!) But here was a living, breathing, beautiful, seven-and-a-half-pound bundle of life that we had prayed for over and over again for years. God chose to answer that prayer in the middle of one of the darkest times our world has seen in recently.

It makes me think of another baby born into chaos, darkness, and hopelessness. One who came and brought joy, healing, and True Life with His birth. So what have I learned this year? I have learned (and forgotten and relearned many times) that no matter how dark it seems my God has not forsaken me. He leans in and listens. He catches my tears. He hems me in, behind and before. And when it seems darkest, he brings redemption and life that starts to seep into the cracks of the walls I have built up around me and he reminds me of the true victory that is mine through him. I am so thankful for that.