Finding Color in the Gray

I didn’t get to know Sue when we went to Bible college together; she took different classes than me to earn a different degree, she lived in a different dorm, and she hung out with different friends. However, I’ve learned a lot about Sue in the last few years that has led me to believe that we have more in common than I realized:

• She has three boys that she loves to pieces, and yet they still make her pull her hair out.
• Her husband (whom I did get to know a little in college) is one of the major truth-tellers in her life; luckily, they love each other a lot.
• She has a weakness for chocolate.
• She likes High School Musical movies and Radio Disney.
• She is a pastor’s wife.
• To follow God, she has made at least one major move, at least once with children in tow.
• She deeply loves God, but often gets hung up on the day-to-day struggles of housecleaning, sour milk in the mini-van, serving snacks every two minutes to her boys, and laundry. (She has a great song that combines her loathing of laundry with her love for HSM.)

In my first post for Color in the Gray, I admitted to staying up until 1:00 am reading mom blogs. The one that had the most effect on me was Sue’s Confessions of a Tired Supergirl. I was laughing out loud, then crying, then laughing again, all within the same five-minute time-span. Reading Sue’s blog did two things for me: first, it helped me realize that whether or not I enjoy my life is up to my perspective, not my circumstance. Am I going to get caught up in the gray-ness of my life, or am I going to celebrate the specks of color that flicker through it, even if just for a moment? Secondly, when I read her “confessions,” I felt more than ever that I am not alone in my day-to-day life as a wife, a mom, a daughter, and a friend.

Sue Foth Aughtmon’s My Bangs Look Good and Other Lies I Tell Myself was recently published, and when I saw the opportunity to be part of her book blog tour, I couldn’t pass it up. Her book is just as refreshing as her blog, flavored with the same frankness, wit, humor, and vulnerability about her own life, all pointing to life-changing truths that we tired supergirls (“tsgs”) often forget.

As I read each chapter title, I frequently thought, “Hmmm…. I think I’m good on this one.” However, the more I read, I came to realize that I had forgotten the truth and succumbed to believing the lie. I think I’m especially vulnerable to lies right now. Here are just a few of the parts that spoke to me:

• With all the craziness, upheaval and unknown of this season, I’ve fallen prey to Lie #7: God Doesn’t Hear Me.
• In another chapter, Sue wrote, “[The Liar] often likes to paint the corners of our souls with fear.” Doh! He got me again!
• Throughout my life, one of my deepest desires has been to fulfill my God-given purpose and make a difference on this earth. However, as I look at my list of tasks and my list of short-comings, I often start believing Lie #6: God Can’t Use Me. I resonate with Sue’s line in the book that says, “Some mornings I feel truly uninspired by who I am.” Then she reminds me of the Apostle Peter and the truth that I need to be ready for God to use me.

Not only is the content right on the money, but the structure of the book is in perfect, bite-sized pieces for busy supergirls. In an average of just five pages per chapter, Sue is able to engage you and then walk you through to the life-changing principle. That’s only about five minutes of reading per chapter! It’s great for reading on your own, but it would even be perfect for a coffee/chat time with fellow tsgs because it has a few simple questions to discuss after reading each chapter.

There’s a lot of truth-telling crammed into those five minutes, and when you put the book down, you’re left with a lot to chew on. You should buy it because it’s fun (I laughed out loud at least once per chapter!) and because it’s inspiring. It’s available now at your favorite bookseller from Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group.

By the way, after you read this book, you should also go back and read All I Need is Jesus and A Good Pair of Jeans. Or better yet, order them both at the same time!

NOTE: I received a complimentary copy of this book from Baker Publishing Group. This has neither positively nor negatively biased my review.

photo from Flickr, posted by Horia Varlan

When we envision or hope for God to do something in our lives, we picture what should better be called “magic.” We trust Him to wave his magic wand, and – poof! – things are no longer as they were. What once was is no longer, or what once wasn’t, all of a sudden is. A path suddenly clears for us. A tumour disappears. Negative feelings are instantaneously replaced with positive. Sometimes God works His “magic,” and that is what we like to call a miracle. And it really is.

But most of the time, God’s miracles look more like chemistry. In order for something to be changed in chemistry, there is a process. Things are combined and stirred up. Heat is applied. There is often a waiting period. And the most exciting ones (according to my bio-chemistry major husband) involve explosions. There has to be some kind of reaction for change to happen.

If we think about it, chemistry is just as awe-inspiring as magic. We have to wait for it to happen, but we can see the process as it unfolds. Amidst the stirring and the heating and the explosions, change is taking place at the molecular level. It’s not simply an illusion – we know for certain that it’s real.

This kind of God-activity in our lives should also be called a miracle, as it is the most common way God works in our lives. It is a miracle that He would even love us enough to want to.

Over the past few months, I’ve been listening to an audio book, The Divine Conspiracy, by Dallas Willard. I usually listen to it on Thursday mornings while my younger two are with a sitter and I’m working on projects. However, I don’t spend every Thursday morning at home and this book is quite heady, so it’s going to take me a very long time to finish it – perhaps a year! It’s a great book, but I’m more of a visual learner than audio, so this has been especially challenging.

I had the chance to listen to it this past Thursday while I started sewing our family Christmas pajamas. It reminded me of a conversation I had with my daughter about heaven, so I reposted the story yesterday.

The way I view heaven, as reflected in yesterday’s post, is relatively new to me. I heard all sorts of stories about heaven while growing up. They involved angels, streets of gold, mansions of glory, God. However, I didn’t want to admit that I only wanted to go to heaven because I didn’t want to go to hell. After all, I only had two choices. Heaven sounded boring, but at least it wasn’t where the devil is. The idea of a never-ending afterlife spent with just streets of gold, singing angels, and big houses held no appeal for me.  Having a new body gave the impression that I wouldn’t be me anymore, and it made me want to put off death, if I could control it, even longer.

In the late nineties I read Deadline, a fiction book by Randy Alcorn. In it, the author describes death as birth, with friends and family who are already there anxiously awaiting your arrival in a waiting room. There will be a celebration once you have arrived, and your life will continue from where you left off on Earth. You won’t been stripped of your identity or preferences or personality. You’re still you, just a truer you. Being in heaven means you have endless resources to explore and learn, discover and experience God and everything in Him.

While it was fiction, it still caused a shift in the way I thought about my eternity. Could it be that heaven was more than pretty streets and houses and endlessly singing choirs? It was out of this perspective that I have been teaching my children about heaven.

Then last Thursday, I heard Willard explain eternal life in such tangible, appealing terms as I’d never heard it explained before. He didn’t call it “eternal life” or “afterlife;” he said we will “keep on living.” Those words resonate with me. Willard made the point that we don’t realize how long we actually will live. He encouraged readers to imagine where we’d be in 150 years, in 3,000 years. He emphasized that the break we will experience between Earth and Heaven will be from sin and from our bodies, but it won’t be from our spirits, our personalities, who we are. What we’ve begun exploring and discovering here on earth, we’ll continue exploring when we wake up in heaven.

Several times in the Bible, death is referred to as falling asleep. Willard explained that before sedation was common as people were passing away, nurses and family members would sit with the dying and have conversations with them about what they were experiencing.

This is how Willard explained what the dying saw: imagine some friends are sitting in my living room and others are in my daughter’s bedroom. I am walking away from my living room friends, talking with them, while also moving on to a conversation with my friends in my daughter’s room. Even though living room friends can’t see daughter’s bedroom friends, they are still there. Death is like me passing from one room to the other. I’m still me, I’m just moving on.

I don’t really want to “move on” from my husband, kids, family, and friends any time soon, but this perspective on my eternity puts me at ease. Honestly, I have so much more I want to do with my life, so much I want to experience and so much I want to learn. My bucket list, however, doesn’t have to be finished by that unknown date when my body calls it quits. I get to keep on living and working on that list in a place where I have all the time in the world to experience it all.

*Originally posted January 16, 2009

Anneliese has been a sponge lately. For the past few months, she’s been trying to identify rhyming words: “Mommy! ‘Car’ and ‘cat’ rhyme!” Well, the first letters are the same. She’s been learning to identify letters of the alphabet and is trying to wrap her brain around the idea that each letter represents a sound. And she learned how to count things too. Most of the time she gets it right.

Not only has she shown new academic prowess, but she’s showing deeper interest in spiritual things too. This past fall she started asking a lot of questions about God, like “Where is God? Is He sitting next to me? Why can’t I see Him?” and “Why can’t I hear Jesus talking to me?” Since I have two older kids, I know that developmentally she is right on target. These are the questions that three-almost-four-year-olds ask.

Recently, I’ve had a few conversations with moms about kids and God. Their three and four-year-old children have been asking questions about death and heaven and hell. It’s hard explaining unknown, abstract ideas like that to their young minds. Kids get hung up on the scary parts, like hell and death.

Anneliese broached this topic yesterday.
“But that’s okay if they die because they come back to life. Right, Mommy?”
You already know how I answered that one. We’d had similar exchanges before, but this time it clicked for her. Death, when it comes to our physical selves, is permanent.

“Are you going to die someday, Mommy?”
“But who’s going to babysit me?”
“Am I going to die someday?”

She was starting to get upset. I tried telling her that she didn’t need to worry about it for now, that we weren’t going to die until God decided it was the right time, and that it probably wouldn’t be for a long time. It wasn’t working.

I decided to move on to the good news – that we would be going to heaven – but unfortunately, she didn’t take it so well.

“But I don’t want to go to heaven! I want to stay home!” The tears were flowing.

My little Liesie is very shy and clingy. To her, a big place with lots of people, whether she knows them or not, is scary. She even clams up with Auntie Christen when she sees her at church.

But then I thought of another approach.

Last August, her special friend from across the street moved 18 hours away. And since last summer, she has been asking at least weekly when will we move to a new house far away. She wants a new pretty room with stripes and flowers.

So I presented her with this thought:
“Going to heaven is like waking up in a new house. It’s that pretty new room you’ve been talking about with stripes and flowers. It’s like your new house is Disneyland!”

And something clicked. She could see past death and the unknown. She could see that heaven was the fulfillment of her dreams.

“But what if I’m shy of God?”
She came up with a response on her own:
“Last year I was shy of Santa, so I won’t be shy of God anymore.”

And then just to be sure, she started asking questions:
“Will there be pets in heaven?”
“Will there be colouring in heaven?”
I answered “yes” to all of them, and I even told her that there were no bad guys or monsters there.

“What will I do in heaven?”
“You and Jesus will do somersaults together!”
“And even cartwheels? But I don’t know how to do cartwheels.”
“In heaven you will!”
“And Elia can do cartwheels with Jesus too!”
She was so excited and full of anticipation.

The Bible college graduate in me was being fought off with the Scripture that tells me, “God is the Giver of all good things” and the one that paints a picture of Jesus saying, “Let the children come to Me. Don’t let your adult ideals stop them from running into My arms.”

When I was relaying this conversation to my pastor-husband, I could see him cringing internally. So I asked him, “What if John had been a three-and-half-year-old girl?”

It wouldn’t have been streets of gold and mansions in glory that he described. It would’ve been flying ponies and somersaults, and stripes and flowers, and fluffy puppies that never grow big or bite.

Which leads me to think…
if John had been a 36 ½ year old woman, maybe he would’ve had visions of warm, sunny skies over cool, breezy meadows without bees. And Jesus would be sitting under a tree, smiling at him as he did cartwheels.

I subscribe to a blog called Holy Experience. It is a simple blog, rich with beauty and meaning and peaceful photographs. Today’s post was about how her family reads the Bible together, but it gave me a new perspective on how to include it in our day.

You would probably be more affected by the post if you were to read it yourself, so I encourage you to do so. However, if you want my “Cliff’s Notes” version of it, here goes. The whole premise of their habit is “Man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.” (Deut. 8:3)

Ann Voskamp’s husband grew up in a home where no one was dismissed from the table until they had feasted on the Word. “You never leave the table until you have chewed the Real Bread.” She and her husband have continued the tradition in their own home. I have included the last portion of her post here because the way she wrote it is just beautiful: 

• We read 10-15 verses at a time, chronologically through a book of the Bible, less with little children, more with older. We want to savor, chew long.
• We close in prayer, voices around the table, sometimes too with a hymn
• We give each person their own Bible, their own serving, so each person can see Words, what they’re eating.
• We meditate, listen to the Spirit, let each quietly chew the words.
• We read the Words aloud together, eat like a communal meal. Like we help little ones eat with the fork, we help little ones with words — oh how they smile, reading Scripture on their own…
• We discuss, serve the Words around. Children explain meaning, offer summaries, ask questions. Parents taste conviction, confess, repent.

It seems long. It isn’t.

It seems good. It is — but only for us. But there are many ways for a family to eat Living Words and no one right way. As gathering in each family’s home is a beautiful one-of-a-kind experience, so each family eats Words in their own special, creative way.

It seems perfect. It isn’t. Days when I sadly want to rush, when children tussle over Bibles (and they are all the same!), when we read too fast and a little cries and no one pays attention. But some meals too are simply edible, hardly memorable, but we don’t stop eating. We try the dish again or we change the way we eat or we just smile and set the table with candles next time.

Always, we eat again.

We eat again.

If you’re looking for a new method for family devotions, this might be a great place to start. If you need inspiration, this could very well give you that too. Either way, I hope you’re encouraged to find a way to feast on God’s Word with your family.