Advent week 4: Peace

We have spent the last four weeks looking for Christ. Our verse for the time has been: "Keep watch, for you do not know on what day your Lord will come." Matthew 24:42. During this particular Advent season, while feeling called to really look for Jesus, so much not-Jesus has been shoved in our faces. Tragedies of various kinds have affected our country and our congregation. Yet the word is still the same: Keep watch for Jesus. He could show up anywhere, at any time, whether for His second coming or for his visits into our daily lives. We look for Him to come.

So today, we are going to spend some time looking for Jesus's peace to come. Following is a reading of the story of God bringing peace to earth that goes from the Old Testament, through the life of Jesus, and after Jesus left us with His spirit. Through all time, God has been bringing peace on earth.

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Isaiah 54:10
Though the mountains be shaken
    and the hills be removed,
yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken
    nor my covenant of peace be removed,”
    says the Lord, who has compassion on you.

Psalm 34:14
Seek peace and pursue it.

Isaiah 52:8,7
Listen! Your watchmen lift up their voices;
    together they shout for joy.
When the Lord returns to Zion,
    they will see it with their own eyes.
How beautiful on the mountains
    are the feet of those who bring good news,
who proclaim peace,

Luke 2:14
“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

Isaiah 9:6
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given…And He will be called…Prince of Peace.

John 16:33
[Jesus said, “…I]n me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

John 14:27
^“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.

John 20:21-22
Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” ²² And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

2 Thessalonians 3:16
Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times and in every way. The Lord be with all of you.

2 Corinthians 13:11
Finally, brothers and sisters, rejoice! Strive for full restoration, encourage one another, be of one mind, live in peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you.

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To these, I would only add a couple of verses that have encouraged me this week as I have been thinking about Peace. 

Isaiah 32
¹⁶ The Lord’s justice will dwell in the desert,
    his righteousness live in the fertile field.
¹⁷ The fruit of that righteousness will be peace;
    its effect will be quietness and confidence forever.

That phrase, "quietness and confidence forever," is what I want to lay hold of. The righteousness of God is what ushers it in. And I can be confident in Him. Who he is replaces the turmoil in our souls with quietness. I can be confident in his unfailing love and can be sure that nothing can take that away form me.

Also over this time of Advent, I have seen those in our midst who have been affected by the darkness of this world letting Christ's light shine through them. I have seen a girl badly wronged turning to Christ for her way forward. I have seen those who mourn claiming Jesus as the center of their joy. These things are great sources of encouragement to me. They help light the way for us all. And so the next verse comes to mind. It brings me peace because I can see the truth of it coming to be right before my eyes as I look around at all us messed up people finding God right where we are.

Philippians 1:6
[I am] confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

And so we know that those of us He has begun forming into His children, He will keep forming until He is finished. That brings me quiet confidence today.

Lastly, let's observe a time of quiet today. After a time of silence, we will have a prayer.

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Heavenly Father,
The same God who created peace in the beginning and who has ever since promised its return,
The same God whose gift to a power-hungry, sin-occupied world was a baby
who remained just as innocent as the day He was born,
who promised to share with us His peace.
You are the God we need.

Prince of Peace,
We have been looking for you for a long time.
We love you because you have overcome the troubles in this world.
Thank you for enduring violence to share with us your peace.
We ask you to bring peace to our hearts
and to our land.

Spirit of the Living Christ,
Helper, Comforter.
Live in us.
Help us to find your peace in our world.
Let it grow in our lives.
Give us the beautiful words that proclaim its coming
to a world that needs to hear.

We want to see you with our own eyes.
We want to shout for joy.
We want go running with the news.
Make us beautiful as we shout it from the mountains.
We want to live at peace with each other,
to be fully restored.
In you, we have peace. You yourself are our Peace.
Be with us, Jesus, both now and forever.
 
Amen. 

unbroken

Though this whole process with Lia's family being united under one roof is far from a done deal, I have to say at least I am greatly encouraged by the progress I know of. Since this is a case currently being heard in the courts, details of who is saying what are just not available, so I wait with just as many unknowns as the rest of you and likely just slightly different set of unknowns than the Frank family is experiencing themselves. I often break off trying to imagine what they must be going through. I can't imagine.

Someone asked, and I don't know the exact timeline, but sometime this summer, God healed Lia. I don't know how it happened. I don't know if the medical community has a way of explaining this or if the healing was just as enigmatic as the entire rest of her life until then. But I know that where there was once hurt, brokenness, and a kind of hopelessness, there is now wholeness and the promise of a much-less-painful future. And I know that it doesn't matter to me whether the medical community has a way of explaining it or not -- this sort of a break-through after so many years searching for one is a great miracle. I am in awe of it. It's the sort of miraculous healing that I doubt I could comprehend, even if it were explained to me by the best medical professional or even an angel.

And this second healing -- of Lia's family -- that we're asking for involves its own hurt, brokenness, and kind of hopelessness. If healing is going to take place for this, it's going to take a miracle. Much will need to happen to bind up this family and Rhys in particular, I'd imagine. It's the sort of thing that calls into question the very core of who a person is. I wince at the thought of anyone calling me into question, much less a person with the authority to tear my loving family apart. Healing from that will take a miracle. It will take God stepping in.

The hope that presents itself is that He is stepping in. When Lia's body was broken, I found hope in the love I could see within her family and in the persistent faith and constant assertion of God's goodness in the middle of it all. Now, I find hope in how I see the Body of Christ sweeping in to protect and support this part that is broken. Somehow, word is getting out and people are being prompted to support. Some have opened their homes. Some have taken to fasting and prayer. Some have given money. Some have given of their time. Others have offered up their skills. It will take all these things -- serious commitment from friends and kindness of strangers and the favor of God over it all. This is the sort of healing we feel we can comprehend, since we understand talk of relationships and money and generosity. One person has this or that and gives it to someone else. But for all of these people and resources and unseen agents being at the right place at the right time to hear and respond...it is and will be a miracle.

That said, the most easily quantifiable sign of hope we have is the money. The money is not what will solve this problem or heal this family, but as it is going to pay for legal representation, it opens up the road ahead of the Frank family. It's an expensive key. They have to pay $12k to their lawyers by Sept. 11. And this without having a source of income (that was lost when Dave had to stop working to be the adult staying with their kids). Many of us have dealt with losing income. I've never had to deal with it at a time when bills like this were mounting. But yesterday I read from Rhys's mom....

Great news! We are now at approximately $11,276 and are within striking distance of our first goal of $12,000!. Thanks to everyone for their generosity. The Lord is good.

and I am reassured that nothing is impossible for God. This is the first goal. I would imagine some of what is to come depends on how hearings go and how long this is expected to be in the courts. But we're almost to the first goal...maybe EARLY! (Wouldn't that be great?!)

I didn't set up the account to raise the funds, so I have no idea who gives and when, but thank you because I'm sure some of you did. Thanks to all who have been praying and praying and doing whatever it is within your power to do. I'm sure it encourages Rhys; I know it encourages me. We serve a God who is limitless and whose love for us remains unbroken. We know and hope and rely on it being so.

on worms and little girls

not my picture, but it seemed a good illustration.

Life seems more full of great (or, you know, not-so-great) moments these days than trains of thought, but there is a very sweet moment I have to share from today.

     Eden and I were walking home and she happened upon a dead worm on the sidewalk. It was hard and flat. And dead. She picked it up, turning its two dimensions around, trying to figure out why it wasn't the way it was supposed to be, I guess. I didn't wait for her to ask.
     "It's dead," I told her.
     "We can put it in the shade," she said, since that's what we do with worms when we dig them up. We bury them in our compost pile. It makes for all kinds of small "good" in the world. I've taught her well.
     "No, don't touch it. You're going to need to wash your hands. It's dead."
     I took her hand to keep walking so she wouldn't stick her dead-worm-toting fingers straight into her mouth. She made some other hopeful sort of suggestion.
     "No, it's DEAD," I said, again. "It's not going to come back alive again. Dead things don't come back alive."
     "But people come back alive," she said in her matter-of-fact way.
     We just finished learning the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the grave. And we talk about Jesus giving us new bodies when these die. And I've made up and taught the kids a song on the verse "All things are possible with God." I guess me saying that dead things don't come back alive sent these recent contradictory snippets running through both our minds. However, it's not generally the way things work. The girl is going to have to know that. But in a way that doesn't cancel out the truth of all those things I've taught her. How is it God works, anyway? I don't really know. What can I say?
     "Well, people only come back alive because Jesus makes them."
     We kept walking. Eden made another effort: "We could put water on it."
     I realized I had two choices. I could proclaim to her that there is never any hope for dead, dried-up things. We could leave the worm there and it would most certainly stay dead. Or we could take the worm back to our yard, stick it in some wet dirt, and let the conversation continue on its own without me having to drill into her the ugly truths about dead worms and dead things in general. I went with Option B.
     We went back to the worm. Eden remembered exactly where it was as I was still searching for it. Looking at it, I had to admit that, though it was completely dried up, it wasn't completely hard and flat. It had one little spot on it that looked like it might bend instead of break if you forced the issue.
     I let her pick it up again and I carried it home in a discarded McDonald's cup. We put it in the peat moss under our apple tree, poured some water on it, and buried it with a thin layer of the watered ground. Water. Shade. That's all we could do. I put the cup we had used to carry it home upside-down over it to mark the spot so we could check on it later. I didn't want the false hope offered by a bird finding it first or something.
     After naptime, I decided to have the first look. I took the cup away and the worm was gone. I dug around and spread out the dirt. Yep. Gone.
     What happened to the worm? I guess I can't say for sure. There's always some chance I'm wrong, but I told Eden it crawled away. (Wouldn't you know she was sad about this, crying that she wanted to keep it?)
     There are plenty of unpleasant things I'm going to have to teach my kids. Plenty of unpleasant things and downright horrible things I've already had to tell them about the world. But on this day, in this moment with my sweet little girl, she has taught me well.

Salt in the Mountains

God made the earth. We live in it. We fill it up. We use it. It is a gift. Sometimes we think about being stewards of it, taking good care of it; sometimes we don't. There are all kinds of groups that talk about the use of land, but we don't often see the church involved in the discussion -- at least not the church as such. And I think that's too bad. Individuals in the church may participate or have opinions, but often we think of ourselves as people with opinions instead of as God's people who are given a distinct role as the salt of the earth in the places where we live. Given that we believe earth itself was the first of all the good gifts God gave us, we deserve a place to encourage, pray about, and give thanks for the land we call home.

Anyone I know who was born in Appalachia, no matter how long ago or how far they've been removed from the area, considers that place home. If Mary and Joseph traveled back to Bethlehem for their census, we'd travel there. It is the place we answer to. It is also a place we will answer for.

Because Christians have personal relationships with the creator of the universe, it makes sense that we would have a uniquely valuable voice in conversations about the blessings He has given us. And, though we often praise God as creator, the image conjured up (at least in my mind) is often of the entire cosmos. Just as it would be strange for me to praise God for his overall goodness without praising Him for his specific goodness in my life, so it is strange to praise God for his overall creation without praising Him for the very land we call home. This is a relatively new idea to me, though it is a very old idea -- from as far back as our relationship goes. Maybe it's an idea forgotten to many, since I have yet to run across a forum on the subject. And so I begin the discussion. Well, not I...we.

I have started a new blog: God's Mountain People. I have a couple other contributors already and we are excited to work together on this project. We hope you'll join us. Together, we will be celebrating our heritage and God's gifts that are unique to Appalachia. We welcome all God's Mountain People to join in the discussion. I will be happy to edit and post your stories, thoughts, and words of praise as their own entries to the blog. We welcome all interested in learning more about what it means to be a Christian from a particular local place and time to listen in and comment away! Please share the link and tell your friends. We want as many readers and participants as we can get!

dreams take flight

We are working on adjusting to the time change we will encounter in Idaho. It feels a little surreal that it's actually going to happen. We're to the final preparations stage. We are almost better -- just a lingering cough for the kids and lingering sinus issues for me. They have a few days to go away. Please pray that they do.

I'm told Zaya is planning a party. There is much to celebrate.

Eden is content knowing Lia and Zaya have toys they will share. The girl has her priorities in line.

Israel is busy finding every scrap of paper he can to cut it to bits and make it into a "collage" for Lia and Zaya. It's his latest invention. Every one of them looks like a small firework stuck to a single piece of clear tape. Every one of them is actually some really specific thing with specific parts to do specific jobs that are dreamt up after the collage is assembled.

So many pieces have come together to make this possible -- anonymous people giving their bits (or chunks!) of money, prayers, and other assistance to make such discussion possible.

After so much blunt honesty with the kids about Lia and her condition, I was initially hesitant to talk with the kids about the trip. For it little while, it seemed Lia might not be around by the time we could visit her. Maybe she would still be in the hospital. Maybe not. But she's home and as well as she's been in quite some time. I was also afraid that perhaps the money might not come in and I knew there was no way we could make up any deficit. Then I realized pieces were coming together to make it work. This bit stuck; that piece landed just so. One bit was a friend asking the kids about the trip before I had told them about it. That was the push I needed to go ahead and let the kids know this is something I believed would happen, but wasn't sure of yet. (I wish we didn't need to teach our kids about faith; it's scary. Ah, well. Someday that won't be necessary.) With the whole thing being assembled, we are now free to dream up exactly what this will be, leaving plenty of room for the artistic freedom of the other dreamers. These days, part of us lives up above the clouds. We talk about what it will be like.

Thank you.

"[Abraham] is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed -- the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were."

Romans 4:17

God calls things that are not as though they were. He gives life to the dead.

"Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, 'So shall your offspring be.' Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead -- since he was about a hundred years old -- and that Sarah's womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God."

Romans 4:18-20

Abraham believed and hoped against all hope.
Without weakening in his faith.
He looked the facts square in the face.
And he believed the promise of God, anyway.

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When Pat and I were officially NOT dating (that totally awkward time after we told each other we knew we were supposed to be married when he broke up with me and dated another girl...) I kind of hated thinking about the promise God had given me about Him. It just made me mad. It didn't line up with the facts. And I faced the fact of no relationship with Pat just about every day, since we studied together every day in a group of about 12. One day, at the end of class, he met me in a doorway, looked at me, and said, "Hope."

I could have killed him. How dare the one killing, or delaying, or preventing, or stepping all over the promise ever think he is in the right place to demand hope of me!

Still, it was the right thing to do. Even though it hurt. Especially coming from him. Hope. Not try and make it happen. Not figure out how to make it sound good on paper (or on a blog entry). Just hope and believe and wait in the face of the facts.

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This advent and Christmas season, my thoughts around Jesus were taken over with the story of my friend's little girl, Lia. I've never met her in person (since she lives far away), but I have known her through my friend's blogs (click to read it) since she was a newborn and Eden was kicking around in my belly. Lia has had a rough time from the start, with surgeries, lung problems, G-I problems, developmental anomalies, and all kinds of things no one understands going awry in her beautiful little body. I want for my friend's daughter everything I want for my own daughter and it is hard to see her robbed of her own health.

Lately, she has been losing weight and is losing many of the abilities she had worked so hard to gain, such as speech, walking, being alert, and eating. And no one knows why. What we don't say outright is that we are afraid she is just wasting away and will die without ever being given a fighting chance. Test after test yields no result and no diagnosis. It feels hopeless in terms of her longevity.

One night, I laid in bed crying and praying for her and I felt like God had something to say to me about the situation. It wasn't a promise that everything would be just as I'd like. It was a directive to pray believing that God CAN make everything just as I'd like. Not because it's important that God can do my will, but because it's important for me to recognize that I pray to the God who can do more than I can ask or imagine. To that point, I had been acting as though His power in the situation was pretty much the same as everyone else's. But it's not. When I pray, I'm praying to the God who really can give life to the dead and call things that are not as though they were.

More often than not, I try to hedge my bet in prayers and assure myself with reasons why it will still be okay and I will still trust God when He doesn't come through like I want Him to. But I found myself faced with a decision one day. I was looking through pictures of Lia when Israel eavesdropped and decided to make her the topic of a string of questions. And I had to decide: Do I introduce this girl to my kids? Do I encourage them to pray for her, as we do for others we know who are sick? What if she dies? What will my kids believe about God then?

I realized then that I was trying to hedge my bet. It's not my job to explain or tidy up God's plan for the world. And why would I think it's a good idea to keep my kids from getting to know anyone they may lose in life? Are we only supposed to pray for things we know are going to turn out alright, anyway? No! This precious little girl and her family are people. They are people who hurt and who laugh and who fight and win and fight and lose just like we do. They are people of prayer and courage who need prayer and people of courage, which is just what I want my children to be. So we're not going to hedge our bets, here. We're going to pray for them and stand by them however we can.

The God who can raise the dead, who can intervene to make anything any way He wants meets us as we walk in through the door. He says, in the face of despair or pain or death that only He has the power to obliterate: Hope.

So we do, even though it may hurt and even though it could be dangerous...especially coming from Him.

We hope against all hope
trying not to weaken our faith
we look the facts square in the face
and we believe in the power of God, anyway.


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I am not the world's best pray-er. And I don't have the world's strongest faith. At all. Those facts don't change just because I'm writing this blog entry about prayer and hope. But if you're not perfect like me, I hope you'll be encouraged even as I have been encouraged.

questioning leadership

Recently, I've been encountering situations of various magnitudes that put before me a choice: hope or despair. These are situations that cause me to wonder about my own purpose in life and my relationship with God. I wonder about what I can do and what God can do and what it means to pray. I have questions about what being rescued or "saved" means for people who continue to lead difficult lives. It can really weigh me down at times, even when my own life is fine. I see children with very difficult home situations, adults with children who break their hearts, children born with conditions that make life more difficult, and the myriad ways people are affected by other people's sin.

These are things I really wrestled with in college. The difference is that back then, most of these situations were hypothetical. I knew they were probably happening somewhere. So I had it out with God over the "problem of evil," also sometimes put as "Why do bad things happen to good people?" or "Why do bad things have to happen to ANYONE?" I was really calling unto account God's ability to make good decisions. I promised myself two things during that time: 1.) I would never be afraid to question things down to that level again, and 2.) I would question thoroughly so I would never have to do it again.

So when I find myself asking similar questions now, some 10 years later, I do what I can to keep both promises. I decide to just go ahead a lay it all out there, knowing I likely will get no more answers this time than I did the last. And I didn't get ANY answers during that crazy time of questioning God. I just got to know Him. He didn't explain Himself to me or anything. What's different now is that I don't expect Him to.

Something else that is different this time around is that I am some manner or other of spiritual leader. While I am re-wrestling with God over the things I see going on in the lives of my girls or their friends, or others, I'm also trying to lead them through their wrestling, too. When I'm having my own questions about how to know I've heard God, I'm being asked questions about how to hear God. When someone asks why God hasn't answered their prayer for rescue, I'm asking the same question. Don't hear me wrong. I don't think it's a human's job to know all the answers. Somehow I was just expecting to know a few more....

This Sunday, the girls were over. We've been learning stories that go straight through the life of Christ, which I'm trying to conclude before our Christmas party. This means that I had to teach the entire week of the Passion in one hour. In order to simplify, I made a sort of virtual felt-board to help keep track of the characters and who was where when. Starting out, we have Jesus and his 12 disciples. (I don't really think Jesus was a head taller than everyone else....)

He's washing their feet and sharing what he knows will be his last meal with them. He also knows that one of the guys whose feet he just washed, named Judas, is going to betray him. He tells him to go ahead and do it. (I don't think I'd do that.) So then it's Jesus and the 11.

He tells them about how he's preparing to die and how he will go to prepare a place for them so they can be together again. He takes the bread and says, "This is my body," and rips it in two. He takes the wine and says, "This is my blood," and pours it out. He has to be kind of freaking out inside. They sing together and he asks his close friends to come and pray with him up on the Mount of Olives. I can imagine he wants some company on what he knows is going to be a very difficult night. So there we have Jesus with Peter, James, and John going to pray.

But the guys keep falling asleep instead of praying. And Jesus has gone to talk to His Father, to ask if there's not some way for life to go well without this awful stuff happening to him. He asks three times. That makes me think that maybe He's not hearing anything back. Either that, or He's getting an answer He doesn't like. But he decides to believe God knows better and says, basically, "Do it your way, not mine." That's pretty intense. And cause for all kinds of theological unrest within the trinity, but I'm glad to understand Jesus as fully human here, because that makes sense to me...praying the same thing over and over, not sure if you're hearing (or not hearing) right, hoping you've heard wrong, hoping more prayer will change God's mind anyway. And then you're interrupted by more bad news.

So there is Jesus with his three sleepy friends and then here comes Judas back with the Roman soldiers to arrest Him.

Peter chops off the ear of one of the soldiers. Jesus says, "No, that's not how this is going to go down," puts the ear back on the soldier, and lets them take him away to be tried and killed. And he knows that's what He's doing, because where does he end up? At the house of the high priest, Caiaphas, who had already been talking with his friends about how it's be better for Jesus to die than not. I don't think anyone's expecting a fair trial, here. Peter and John follow along to the house and wait outside to see what's going to happen. It's there that Peter, in a weird rush of self-interest, calls down curses on himself and swears he's never had anything to do with Jesus in his whole life. Peter was one of Jesus's closest friends.

He's then taken alone before Pilate, who tries to release him. But then all those people who had been praising Jesus the week before, who thought He was going to come and be their king by overthrowing the Romans, show their disappointment in Him and His methods by asking for the release of a violent revolutionary instead. So then, when Jesus gets to the cross, He's up there all by himself, with the rest of the world either against Him or powerless to be for Him.

And while He's up there, He yells, "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?" I know there is a big discussion to have about that. How is God not really with Jesus? Is it because of the sin of the world? Maybe Jesus is just saying that and God the Father didn't really leave Him, after all. I don't think it matters...at least not for me right now. What matters is that, in the hardest time of His life, Jesus at least feels all alone. No one is helping Him. No one is saving Him. And, because He decided not to do it His own way, He's not even saving Himself. And He's going through that so He can later be with us forever. But He wasn't in the euphoric forever yet. No. He did all this in the, "Why, God?" where the rest of us live.

And then, with His last words, He trusted His soul to the one He didn't understand. "Into Your hands I commit My spirit."

Now, none of my questions are bigger than the one Jesus was asking. And none of my deciding to trust God anyway has such high stakes for me. But I was so grateful to be reading through this story with the girls and learning myself how there's nowhere I go in life where Jesus hasn't gone before me to show me how to do it. Even when being an example for us, He still asked, "Why?" He still tried to come up with a better way for the world to work than what He saw coming down the line. And it's because I can follow Him there that I can follow Him to hoping against all hope that somehow all things really will work for good. Somehow.

with artistic excellence

Disclaimer: I hope that in writing this post, I am not justifying myself, but merely sharing the freedom I've come into and the lesson I'm learning...again.

" It is assumed that one will have talents, materials, subjects – perhaps even genius or inspiration or vision. But these are traditionally understood not as personal properties with which one may do as one chooses but as gifts of God or nature that must be honored in use. One does not dare to use these things without the skill to use them well. …To use gifts less than well is to dishonor them and their Giver."
- Wendell Berry, in “Christianity and the Survival of Creation”


I embarked on our recent retreat (see post below) with many questions for God about my purpose in life. I am interested and passionate about so many things:

- education
- nutrition
- beauty
- hospitality
- deep friendships
- community development
- mentoring
- gardening
- parenting
- teaching
- writing
- and more, I'm sure, but these things are always near the front of my mind.

It is not uncommon for me to try to major on all of these things at once. And I know others who seem to be able to do it. But I've come to realize lately that I might not me one of those amazing, can-do-it-all sorts of people. My garden is barely identifiable this year. I am frustrated with my kids and just about everyone else. The nutrition I was providing for kids was made with at least as much stress as it was with love. The small neighborhood beautification projects I did became ugly again. I had several writing goals I didn't begin to attempt. And my friendships have become rushed, stressful things to maintain instead of rich things to be enjoyed.

The things I want to do are all good things. But too many good things make for a lot of bad things. It means that, though I'm taking on plenty of noble tasks, I'm not doing any of it well. And I hate mediocrity. I think God does, too. I went to the retreat knowing I needed to prioritize.

While we were there, we spent an afternoon at the Cincinnati Art Museum. They have an entire wing showcasing the work of Cincinnati artists. Apparently there was an arts community there in the late 1800's. (Maybe? I'm horrible at remembering dates.) Perhaps it was simply because they lived in such close proximity to me that I found them particularly interesting. Maybe it just made them more relatable. Maybe I just thought them more ordinary for that reason and was all the more impressed with their work.

Regardless, the work done by those artists was wonderful. There was a particular sculpture there that caught my attention as having been done with excellence. (Just about everything there was done with excellence, but this was particularly so.) It was "Eve Hearing the Voice" by Moses J. Ezekiel. The way she is both hiding herself (face, nakedness) and pushing the Voice away is striking. (This image is more striking, but even though it is not pornography -- we are obviously meant to be looking at the woman's soul -- I didn't want to post a female chest on here in case some people didn't want to see it.) This sculpture was slightly larger than myself, appearing a little super-human. I found myself, much like God probably did, looking for her face.

(photo from Quantum Interceptions)

This was one of the first pieces I saw on our visit and it was the one I could not forget when we left. There were so many beautiful things to look at and so much time represented in the works of art there. Each piece took so much thought, time, and effort to create! So much time that could have been devoted to others, to the poor, to justice, to community development, to whatever other direct dealing with making the world a better place. I wonder what their lists of "good things to do" would have included. I almost began to judge them for having spent so much time working with copper, or colors, or wood, or whatever instead of with people. But these artists did one thing well and that one thing still speaks to me today. And that was their contribution.

(I realize I am making assumptions here. Perhaps they were also very involved in their church or community. Maybe they gave all they had to the poor. Maybe they fed the hungry. I don't know. But the point is that they made a lasting contribution to humanity whether they did those things or not.)

Like all of us, I have many things I could try to do well. But (at least for this season of my life) I need to pick just one. So for the time being, I will be devoting my energies to making my house a house of peace that is nurturing to me and my family and welcoming to others. This means saying no to a lot of things that could justify my existence and make me look great on paper. It means saying no to things that are helpful to others. There are people -- two girls, specifically -- that I will be spending a lot less time with. But I'm hoping I will have better time with them and with others as I am a less-stressed person to be around.

Right now, I'm reveling a bit in this new freedom of "just being a mom" (or wife, or household-manager, or whatever). I'm looking forward to doing my "one thing" with excellence. Here are a couple of my gifts from God. I hope to use whatever skill I have honor both them and their Maker.