Tag: ordinary days

What About the Undramatic Life?

February 17, 2020 /

“It probably takes many years of monastic practice to equal the spiritual growth generated by one sleepless night with a sick child.”

Douglas Abrams with Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu, Book of Joy

So, recently someone recommended a lovely hike nearby to an area where the patron saint of Switzerland, Niklaus von Flue was born and lived in the 1400s.

He was a wealthy farmer who married and had 10 kids with his wife, but when the youngest was under a year old and the oldest was 20, he left them to become a hermit. According to history, he led an intense prayer life in his cloister (not far from his home), focusing on the suffering of Christ. Bless!

WHAT ABOUT HIS WIFE?? I can’t judge from my spot of privilege 500 years later, but I also can’t help inserting a little eye roll here and asking the question, “Who identified with the suffering of Jesus more – Nik, or his wife who had to deal with the daily stuff of dirty dishes, dirty diapers, and discipline with 10 kids to raise?”

We can elevate the dramatic, the “big” gestures of sacrifice for Jesus as the ones that really “count” in the kingdom and bring radical transformation of us as disciples, but really?

I’ve been thinking about “death by paper cuts” – the spiritual formation that can happen when we invite Jesus into the ordinary irritations of the everyday.

Come Holy Spirit, to the line at the grocery store.

May I find all the things to be grateful for even in the midst of disappointment today.

Come give me patience at the airport when my flight is cancelled.

Help me to see You, Jesus, in the joy of my kids at play.

Give me a willing heart to serve my husband in ways that are inconvenient.

Help me to be present to others as You are to me.

God desires to be recognizable in us in all we do.”

Beth Moore

What is the most ordinary place where you recognize God trying to form you more into His likeness?

Everyday Grace and the Fingerprints of God

January 6, 2016 /

Daughters Katy and Maggie and son-in-law Austin have gone back to the coasts – D.C. and San Francisco.

It finally snowed here in Minnesota (righting a cosmic wrong).

Christmas is over and I’m feeling the let-down. I’m sitting by the fire in our kitchen at dusk with a cup of hot chocolate as I write this.  Maggie insists I call it hot chocolate instead of cocoa.  No idea why.

The Christmas decorations are packed away til next year.  Ornaments made with chubby hands and glue of love.  Unusual baubles brought from far flung places.  Decorations marking special times.

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As I pack up Christmas I feel so conflicted…

I love and hate this time of year.

I hate it that it’s the end of my favorite season.  The end of twinkle lights and anticipation, shining stars and awe-struck shepherds.  Putting things away is such a mark of endings, while Jesus is the celebration of new beginnings that I love.

Jesus.  Every-day grace and fresh starts.  Every day.  Not just at Christmas and not just at New Years.

As I’m taking down decorations and wrapping up the creche I get to thinking there’s really no way to pack Jesus away.

I think of this Frederick Buechner quote: Continue reading

How to Untangle Christmas Lights Without Swearing

December 8, 2014 /

I’ve never heard either of my parents swear, but I have many memories of my mom, frustrated with a task, saying “I’m gonna swear.  I’m gonna swear! Close your ears kids!”                                                                                                                                                She never did, but she threatened to.  A lot.

There are some things that tempt a person to swear more than others. For me, the job of untangling Christmas lights brings out the worst in me.  I spent hours doing it this weekend, growling under my breath:

“I’m sure this must be a job people have to do in Hell.”

“If God really loved me I’d be rich enough to buy new lights every year.”

IMG_0597I was muttering, and resenting my husband who was off doing “spiritual” things, having “spiritual” conversations with colleagues, while I was relegated to “unspiritual” homey decorating chores.

As I glared and growled, and pulled and unknotted, and muttered some more I got to thinking about Mary (who had no lights to untangle btw) and how spiritual she felt during the 9 months that Jesus was being formed in her. Continue reading

Where are you going today?

May 9, 2012 /

Tomorrow John and I are leaving to go to Sri Lanka, off the coast of India (yes, I had to check).  He for a World Vision Board meeting.  Me, to support him in his Board-dom and see more of God’s world and work.

The amount of travel I get to do is a privilege I don’t take lightly.  I’m blessed, but I told the girls it doesn’t bode well for me that one of the first things I read about Sri Lanka is that they have 84 different kinds of snakes, but not to worry because not that many are poisonous.

I hate snakes.  I mean really.  Me and Indiana Jones.

So, Sri Lanka has that against it.  And it’s like a million hours on three flights to get there which I could live without.

But, I’ve been thinking.  Discomfort and snakes aside, in many ways it’s easier for me to go across the world and build relational bridges to folks in Sri Lanka, than it is for me to go across the street and build a bridge to my neighbors who smoke and have loud parties and yell at their kids.

It may be easier to fly across continents than for me to make the time to fight traffic and go across the city to a homeless shelter, or to tutor.

Sometimes it’s easier to jet across time-zones than to walk across the Great Room at church and include someone who is hard to love.  Or cross the coffee shop to listen to enter into someone’s pain, or reach out to a stranger.

I think of what it was like for Jesus, leaving the pure delight of heaven and coming across time and space to enter into the everyday brokenness, muck and mess of this world He loves.

And then He went across cultural and economic and class lines to reach the Samaritan, the tax-collector, the confused rich, and the broken-hearted father.

I think the reason it’s easier for us to go across the world than across the street is because across the street is just so everyday.  It’s always right there.  It’s the ever-present opportunity we’ll get to “someday”.

Going across my city, my neighborhood, my church, my home, my coffee shop.  It’s not like it’s a big deal.  Which is why, perhaps it is a big deal to Jesus.

A quote by Gregory Boyle has captured me this week: Jesus “goes where love has not yet arrived.”

So on this last day before Sri Lanka, my goal is to be aware go across wherever I can go across in my everyday world, prayerfully going where maybe love has not yet arrived.

Where is it hard for you to go across?

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