Marian Vischer

4 Reasons Why Your Right-Now Work Matters to Jesus {even if it doesn’t matter to you}

Once Jesus’ “official” ministry on earth began, he ascended to fame quickly. Jesus, a no-name carpenter from Nazareth, fed thousands of people, grew a loyal following, healed sick people, and confounded the establishment. In today’s cultural currency, he’d be out-trending Beyonce. #Jesus

Even his followers got in on the fame. They became an entourage, fighting over who was his favorite and becoming recognized themselves.

And then his story went off the rails.

He allowed himself to be crucified. To his followers this must have looked like He was complicit in his own murder, his own career suicide.

Does this sound like too much for a blog post situated within a little series about work? It does, doesn’t it.

The truth is, I’ve been wrestling with this Jesus part for weeks and haven’t known where to put him. Jesus feels dramatic and out of place. And maybe that tells us something. We compartmentalize Jesus. He’s with us at church, as the topic of our small group discussion, at a funeral, or when we’re in the depths of despair.

But Jesus seems either awkward or removed when we talk about work. Except that’s He’s not. He’s 100% relatable and 100% present.

If you feel alone in your right-now work —

If you feel insignificant and unimpressive —

If you feel like you’re getting lost in the dust of everyone else doing “important and meaningful work” —

Take heart. You have a friend who cares deeply about your work, one who meets you in messy places, one whose real life reveals that all our work matters.

When we realize this, all of work can become a sacred sort of water cooler, the place where we meet up with Jesus and discover that we have a knowing friend who’s with us in every role and every task, both the gritty and the glorious.

Here are 4 reasons why your work matters to him.

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1. Jesus is a friend in my right-now work.

Whether it’s the office, the coffee shop, the kitchen, or the field — Jesus is with us in our labor as a kind and honest friend.

Do you realize that nobody gets you like He does?

Sometimes, knowing Jesus is with me in my work feels like Jim and Pam at Dunder Mifflin. I find myself eye-rolling. And I imagine looking over at Jesus, both of us sharing a knowing smirk. Why? Because He gets it. He gets me. He knows my frustrations. He knows I can be unproductive and frustrated. He knows people can be idiots. He knows that sometimes I lash out. And while He may lovingly nudge me toward confessing that haughty attitude and giving it to him, he knows why I feel the way I do. And being understood goes a long way when I feel tired, hopeless, self-righteous, unappreciated, or uninspired in my everyday roles and in my everyday work.

Maybe that sounds weird to you, making Jesus so “human” like that. I get it. Except that Jesus was a real person, a real carpenter, a real teacher. He had actual friends, people like you and me, and they adored him.

It’s easy to be in one ditch or the other when it comes to Jesus. We can turn him into our best friend, our buddy, our “Jim.” Because He is our friend. But we forget that he also holds all things together. Literally. Like, the whole world.

Or we can see him as only God, as only seated on his throne and nowhere else. Jesus can seem like an abstraction instead of a real companion.

But Scripture, the story of his real life, and his actual relationships on this earth show us that he was both.

2. He didn’t exalt one form of work over another.

His first miracle had to do with drink as he aided and abetted in sheer celebration.

He stretched the food so that hungry crowds could fill their stomach.

He washed dirt from people’s feet.

He broke bread and poured wine.

He made his living as a carpenter, a laborer.

I know what you might be thinking. “True. But he also preached and taught and healed people and raised the dead. These are hardly everyday labors.”

You’re right. But when you read through the Gospels, these don’t get more spotlight than the bread-breaking and the fishing. They are simply part of the narrative of a man who was born to everyday people and did everyday work even though he pulsed with the literal power of God.

Sometimes the narrative shifts and we see his epic power juxtaposed against his everyday work — signs and wonders that would astound anyone and rightly earn trending hashtags. Yet the epic is seamlessly woven into the everyday. Sometimes He even turned away from spectacular work, choosing instead to rest or pray.

These things should tell us something.

Perhaps you’re “just a stay-at-home mom.” You’re “just a customer service rep” or “just a teacher” or “just a creative.” You’re in good company. The “justs” don’t define you even though the world and your own mind are trying to convince you otherwise. Jesus was described as one who “had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”

He lived as an ordinary man doing mostly ordinary work that was infused with extraordinary love and redemptive power. His earthly fame and “success” was short-lived by our standards.

There is no “sacred / secular” divide with our work, not from Jesus’ perspective. There are no “Christian callings” that should be more esteemed than other vocational callings. Jesus’ very life reveals that it is all sacred.

3. He met people in their everyday work and came alongside them.

He went to men working on their boats.

He fished, building relationship with them in the everyday rhythms of work.

He talked with a woman while she fetched the water she needed for the day — both helping her and asking for help from her with the everyday business of getting water.

He came to Levi while he was sitting at his tax booth.

Will he not also meet you in your everyday work, giving you strength when you’re weary and hope when you’re burned out — at the stove or by the bedside or sitting in the windowless office?

4. He used all kinds of work as a metaphor for the kingdom of God. This is huge.

So many of Jesus’ parables are grounded in work.

  • Leaven and flour — kitchen work
  • Sowing seeds — agricultural work
  • Building a house — construction work
  • The dishonest manager, property and stewardship, vineyards and tenants — financial and managerial work
  • Lost sheep — shepherding work
  • Giving a great banquet — the work of hospitality

Jesus spoke the language of work because we speak the language of work. Why? Because work matters.

Our work is a key filter through which we understand the kingdom of God and our unique yet everyday roles in this world.

Our work can be the gate through which we become more intimately acquainted with Jesus, our faithful companion. Both the work that allows us to “feel his pleasure,” and the work that is so frustrating, all we can do is cry out to him for help, renewal, wisdom and understanding. Either way, our work is where we can find Christ. It’s not a place where he retreats into the heavenlies and leaves us on our own.

No matter what your right-now work looks like, Jesus’ call to you is the same as to the men and women who linked arms with him 2,000 years ago: Follow me.

He extends his hand to you just like he extended his hand to them. Their lives with him were not compartmentalized. As they fished, He fished with them. As they hosted guests, He was in their midst. As they worked to feed hungry crowds, He was right there, showing them how to do it and helping them.

He is with us in our work because if we are in Him, it is also his work. {John 15:4-5}

Will you trust Him with it?

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I wish I could hand you “4 tips to only doing work you love and that matters. And how to make millions of dollars doing it.” That’s sort of what we all wish for, right?

With gobs of money and time, I’d hire out the unpleasantries, be less stressed as a mom, pay experts to help me, and bask in “meaningful work” all day.

I’d also have little need of Jesus. No desperation. No need of his strength that meets me in weakness. No need to hope. No being surprised and relieved when possibility shows up out of the impossible.

I’d have everything I wanted, yet be without the most meaningful gift my messy life hands me when it feels extra uninspired — a Jesus who shows us in the trenches as my companion, my comfort, and my help.

I’m learning to meet Him in work that is complicated and hard — in marriage, in motherhood, in writing, in running my home, in work that doesn’t come naturally to me and makes me feel like a failure.

Ultimately, this isn’t about me. It’s about Him. Meeting Jesus like this compels me to worship, to love, to live all of life — whether I’m wiping tears or writing words — coram Deo, before the face of God.

Friend, your “meager” right-now work can actually hand you the most invaluable gift — the company of Christ himself. One who has always met his own in their right-now work and compelled them to offer whatever they have each day, even as they hope for change.

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If you’re new here, we’ve been talking about hope and possibility when it comes to our work, especially the work we’re not loving so much.

“How to Pursue Your Hoped-For Work When You’re Busy With Your Right-Now Life”

How to Embrace Your Right-Now Work Even if it’s Not Your Hoped-For Work

One Gift Your Right-Now Work Is Giving You, Even If You Smell Like Marinara Sauce

4 Simple Ways to Create Time When You Don’t Have Any to Spare

4 Reasons Why Your Right-Now Work Matters to Jesus {even if it doesn’t matter to you}

2 Ways to Give Your Hoped-For Work a Voice. Right Now.

3 Ways to Avoid Despair as You Pursue Your Hoped-For Work

“Never stop starting.” And 5 Other Truths to Keep Your Hoped-For Work Alive in the Midst of Your Right-Now Life

8 Favorite Resources to Help Make Your Hoped-for Work a Possibility in Your Right-Now Life

Hope and Possibility, straight to your inbox! Subscribe in the box below.

4 Simple Ways to Create Time When You Don’t Have Any to Spare

I don’t know how long I’d been complaining, mostly to myself, about how I didn’t have time anymore to be a writer. I had a long list of excuses — both valid ones and ridiculous ones — to justify my bouts with self-pity as I envied the generous writing lives of others. I camped out in my certain failure and assumed that I’m light years away from reaching a single goal, all because of time limitations.

That’s where I was in January. But more on that in a minute.

If you’re reading this post, perhaps you’re curious about how to move forward with possibility into something else — whether it’s something creative you long to do on the side, a ministry or volunteer opportunity you’d like to pursue, or how you can keep your day job while moving into other work that feels more in line with who you really are.

You know you need more time and you hope this post will tell you the big juicy secret.

I don’t have a secret. But I do have a story — my own story as a wife, mom, employee, and hopeful writer whose current season of life is bursting at the seams. Yet somehow, somehow, I’m recovering bits of time to write in the margins. From this right-now story, I have takeaways that you can implement right where you are.

Two things before we begin.

1. Ironically, I have a long history of being terrible with my time. It goes without saying that I am not an expert on this matter. Which is its own special qualification because I know what it feels like to be bad at this whole time management thing.

2. There are countless awesome resources on time management and how to pursue the work you love, books written by actual gurus. {I’ll list some of my favorite resources at the end of the series so stay tuned.} But here’s the thing. I haven’t read most of the guru books. I’m not looking for “40 days till my dream job” or “how to make six figures in six months.”

There’s nothing wrong with any of that but I don’t want to turn my life on its head in order to reach a certain goal. My husband and I have three kids who are growing up all too quickly; these four people in my life come first. I also have a sweet part-time day job that I work on when my kids are at school. So I’m looking for everyday ways to lean into my hoped-for work even as I’m busy with my right-now life. I believe that’s where most of you are as well.

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Here’s what happened in January:

I read this post by Ann Voskamp — “How to Make Time and Space for the Life You Really Want.” It was a re-post I’d read before. But something about it clicked.

I was sick of letting my limitations boss me around. I was tired of telling the ideas in my head that they would have to wait to be born into words, that maybe they would never be born at all.

I was tired of self-pity.

Instead of feeling guilty about not using my time more wisely, Ann’s post about the young soccer players of Ko Panyee challenged me to make time with the ingredients I have on hand instead of wishing for the ingredients I don’t have. If a bunch of barefoot kids in a developing part of the world could run toward their dreams by building a soccer field out of floating trash, surely I could wring out some extra writing time throughout the week.

God gives us everything we need for space — but we will have to make space.

God gives us all the ingredients for time — but we will have to make time.

God gives us everything we need to live — but we will have to make a life.

No one just gets space. 

No one just gets time.

God gives you the raw materials — but you will have to make your life.

~ Ann Voskamp

I decided to make peace with imperfection and to receive the raw materials of my own writing life, even if it came to me in pieces instead of in plenty.

We’re halfway through March and I can tell you that it’s working. It’s messy and imperfect. But it’s working.

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So here are the 4 takeaways — how to create time when it doesn’t seem to exist.

{Keep in mind that these apply to any new tasks or goals you have in mind, even if they’re not work-related.}

1. Do the things that only you can do. Consider how you might outsource the rest.

I’m the only one who can be my husband’s wife and my kids’ mom. I’m the only one who can write the words that are burning a message in my soul. Because I’m personally contracted with an actual job that pays me real money that our real budget actually depends on, I’m also the only one who can meet those obligations.

{I’m not outsourcing watching my boys play golf together.}

Everything else is negotiable.

  • I can pay someone else to really clean my house once or twice a month. We’re not doing this yet but we plan to in a few months.
  • I finally taught every child how to do their own laundry and I decided not to micromanage any aspect of it. Because micromanaging takes time.
  • I gave up making the kids’ lunches every day. The cafeteria does the cooking.
  • Dinner is so simple right now — tacos, spaghetti, anything I can do in the crock pot, etc. We order pizza once a week. My goals are basic: dinner around the table together, easy prep, easy clean-up, something everyone will eat.
  • I’m on the e-mail list for an online grocery ordering service when it comes to our newest supermarket. Order my groceries online and then pick them up at the store without leaving my minivan? Yes please.

Sometimes we know we need help but our thinking is stuffed inside a box. Get out of that box and look around. There are almost always creative solutions. Maybe your kids want to earn some cash? Or a neighbor kid would love to get paid for doing some housework or mowing your lawn? Perhaps you can barter things with a friend? Maybe online grocery ordering is totally worth the time and energy it saves? {Bonus: No impulse buys.} These are just some ideas to get you started.

2. Create a new rhythm.

Once I finally felt inspired to “make time” where there didn’t seem to be any, the first action step I took was a game-changer. I decided to go to bed even earlier than I already did so that I could get up earlier. Maybe you’re in a season when you can stay up late and sleep in. Also, if you have babies or toddlers, you probably need all the sleep you can get. Different seasons of life rule out certain options. The point is, what are your options during this season?

My forty-something brain is not the same as my twenty-something brain. And my forty-something schedule is radically different too. This brain right here becomes illiterate after dinner. For me, right now, mornings are where it’s at. I love being up before the sun and before my kids / I hate getting up before the sun and before my kids. Translation? Waking up has always and may forever be painful for me. But the reward of having that daybreak time alone and giving myself a long runway to drink coffee, become coherent, read, pray, write, etc. before I have to go upstairs and make breakfast is a game-changer.

A scene from “morning time.” It’s dark outside and the house is quiet. Glory. Also? There are dead flowers but this is not the time to tidy.

This morning space clears out my brain’s cobwebs and sets the stage for the work that begins after I drop the kids off at school. Psychologically it says to me, “You are taking your work seriously. You are making time for important things.”

Here’s another idea. Depending on the kind of work you hope to do, consider blocking out all or part of a weekend every now and then. This is something I just did a few weeks ago and plan to do again this month. I went to my parents’ house 30 minutes away, hunkered down in a guest bedroom, and worked for most of my Saturday. It’s amazing what a gal can get done without refereeing fights and acting on the sudden urge to paint a wall.

3. Honor the sacred yes and no. {And don’t feel guilty about it.}

I have two writing goals I’m working toward. Because I’m saying yes to them during this season, it means I’m saying no to most everything else.

This is essentialism, something I define as “the art of editing your own life.” In his book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less {highly recommend}, author Greg McKeown says this about editing as it applies to our commitments:

a good editor is someone who uses deliberate subtraction to actually add life to the ideas, setting, plot, and characters. Likewise, in life, disciplined editing can help add to your level of contribution. It increases your ability to focus on and give energy to the things that really matter. It lends the most meaningful relationships and activities more space to blossom. 

To create time where none seems to exist, you have to get downright bossy. An edited life may not be popular or easy to come by. It’s painful in the moment to say no. But when you’re able to live in the assurance and abundance of your truest “yeses,” it’s worth it. Living like a bossy editor isn’t necessarily a forever thing. It’s just a right-now thing.

4. Wherever you are, be all there.

We’ve all heard this, right? In an age where tiny computers in the palms of our hands invite us to step through a thousand simultaneously opened doors, being present takes discipline, a word I sort of hate.

Recently, I read these words on Instagram from my friend and fellow writer / wife / mama / plate-spinner, Elizabeth Maxon, and they struck a chord:

Balancing an unconventional job as a writer and mommy / wife role isn’t always easy. Honestly, it’s messy. Here’s the best I can do — When I’m with them I can’t carry any guilt about what I’m not doing as a writer and when I’m writing I can’t carry any guilt about what I’m not doing as a mama. Being completely present is key. Wherever you are today, be all there.

I’m the worst at being “all there.” I blame part of it on my brain which has always fired a thousand thoughts at once ever since I was a child. Busy brains make it hard to be present. I blame part of it on my own propensity to feel guilty about pretty much everything. And finally, I blame it on not cultivating the habit of committed presence. Habits take practice. And one of the habits I hope to cultivate during this season of life is “all-in-ness.”

If I’ve set aside time for writing, I try to be “all in” and only write. I limit the distractions and don’t feel guilty that I’m not doing something else with that time. If I’ve set aside time to watch a movie with my kids, I try to be all in and not feel guilty for not writing or not cleaning up the kitchen. During this season of life in which the hat-changes are many and the energy is in short supply and the limitations seem to have the upper hand, the simple but challenging practice of presence is the key to making our time and energy count.

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I’d love to hear your ideas. Let’s talk about them in the comments or on the blog’s Facebook page. This is the good work of community; we’re better together. I plan to list all sorts of resources at the end of this series. I’d love to include some of your ideas on how to create time and save energy.

This post is part of a series: “How to Pursue Your Hoped-For Work When You’re Busy With Your Right-Now Life”

How to Embrace Your Right-Now Work Even if it’s Not Your Hoped-For Work

One Gift Your Right-Now Work Is Giving You, Even If You Smell Like Marinara Sauce

4 Simple Ways to Create Time When You Don’t Have Any to Spare

4 Reasons Why Your Right-Now Work Matters to Jesus {even if it doesn’t matter to you}

2 Ways to Give Your Hoped-For Work a Voice. Right Now.

3 Ways to Avoid Despair as You Pursue Your Hoped-For Work

“Never stop starting.” And 5 Other Truths to Keep Your Hoped-For Work Alive in the Midst of Your Right-Now Life

8 Favorite Resources to Help Make Your Hoped-for Work a Possibility in Your Right-Now Life

Hope and Possibility, straight to your inbox! Sign up in the box below.

One Gift Your Right-Now Work Is Giving You, Even If You Smell Like Marinara Sauce

The perks of my long-ago waitressing job were free family-style feasts before the dinner shift and leftover focaccia bread to take home. The non-perks of the job were sore feet and the smell of garlic and marinara sauce that seemed to linger on my skin even after I showered.

I was 25 years old and three years married. Instead of attending law school after college, something I’d planned since I was 10 years old when I aspired to be the next Sandra Day O’Connor, I got married and recovered from four years of self-induced exhaustion. I also reevaluated everything I thought I wanted and ultimately chose college teaching over a career in law.

The road to my revised career wasn’t tidy. When my husband and I both began grad school three years into our marriage, we’d already trudged through more vocational trial and error than we’d expected to in our young marriage.

When we moved to a new state, him to pursue an advanced degree in Economics, me to pursue the same in American History, we were excited and hopeful. And also broke.

He went to school full-time. I’d applied to the program late so I took just one class while I waited for in-state tuition and hoped for a teaching assistantship. I spent the rest of my time greeting hungry customers with “Buonasera! Welcome to Bella Notte.” I was no stranger to humbling jobs but this felt extra-humbling. Not because it was waiting tables, a job I sometimes actually liked, but because of the timing. There I was, full of eagerness and enthusiasm, on the cusp of finally knowing and pursuing what I really wanted —

And I could only afford to take one class.

Instead of running headlong into the rest of my life, I was mostly rattling off the nightly specials and refilling the drinks of strangers.

But I had that one course. Week after week, I sat with a mix of students held captive by a quirky and brilliant professor who wore plaid sport-coats, walked with a limp, and challenged every notion I held about the American South. I instantly adored him. And I was hungry for all that academia had to offer, voraciously devouring each book and article, writing my heart out, and becoming deeply engaged in discussions.

I knew this was where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. What I didn’t know was that this particular professor was an Endowed Chair at the university. And that he was one of most famous historians in his field. And that it was a ridiculous honor to sit in one of his classes.

His class was simply my happy place in the midst of unhappy work. Had I known who he was, I would have curbed my enthusiasm like any reserved history student with half a clue.

Dr. Freehling took notice of my enthusiasm, cluelessness and all. Unbeknownst to me, he’d spoken to the Director of Graduate Studies. So when a position for funding and a teaching assistantship opened up in January of 1999, I got a call. Out of the blue. The position was all mine because you don’t argue with an Endowed Chair. I still cry just remembering this story.

Dr. Freehling went on to become my major professor as well as a father figure to me over the next four years. He had a daughter exactly my age who lived far away. In a way, we became surrogates for one another. He believed in me, made me a better writer, and saw potential that I didn’t see in myself.

When my husband and I found out we were going to have a baby during my last year of coursework, I was overcome with angst about the future of my PhD. Instead of hammering home the importance of my work and the privilege I’d be giving up, Dr. Freehling gave me the permission and encouragement I needed to embrace the fleeting season of motherhood and all that it would demand. The PhD would always be there; a baby would not.

And that’s how God used a loving atheist historian to provide me opportunity when none existed, to hold my hand as I stepped into courage, and to gently guide me off that same path when it was time to close one chapter and begin a new one.

It would be the first of many reminders that I am only so much in control of my story.

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Those four years in graduate school were a roller-coaster in every way. If I think of that time as a book, it would look something like this:

  • Ch. 1: Obscurity and Nightly Specials
  • Ch. 2: Opportunity knocks.
  • Ch. 3: School is hard and awesome. I love my professors + friends + classes + all the books.
  • Ch. 4: The neighbors beneath our apartment are growing weed. And there are roaches here.
  • Ch. 5: Let’s move.
  • Ch. 6: I don’t believe in God anymore.
  • Ch. 7: Maybe I do.
  • Ch. 8: We are so freaking broke.
  • Ch. 9: Yay! I’m finishing my coursework!
  • Ch. 10: We’re having a baby?!?
  • Ch. 11: I quit.

What can I say, we packed a lot of crazy into four short years. Those days of smelling like marinara sauce were short-lived in the whole scheme of things. But it didn’t seem that way at the time. I fought for my perspective on the nights when the shifts were long and the tips were bad. I didn’t think in terms of “hope” and “possibility.”

Thankfully, they hunted me down anyway. That’s because our stories intersect with others’ stories and with an ultimate story, like a divine matrix.

I see how every one of those chapters shaped me invaluably. How hope kept showing up even when life felt like it wasn’t working out. I wouldn’t change the person who came out on the other side.

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So what’s the one gift your right-now work is giving you? A story. A story in which you, the main character, perseveres and comes out changed on the other side. 

I already know that’s not what you want to hear. Story doesn’t make your right-now work go away. I’m not even providing you with a three-part action plan. What kind of a helpful blogger am I?

Also? I just used the “p” word — perseverance. What is happening? I’m the gal who writes about grace! And rest! And letting go!

Perseverance sounds like the business of bootstrapping our way through hard days. Not exactly a message of hope for you, my exhausted and heavy-laden friend. But what if I told you that your hard days of wiping bottoms or listening to angry customers are part of a story?

I believe they are. A story that’s situated “in between.” I believe this is where we all live out our narratives. And while I know this on the epic level of redemptive history, I forget that this reality plays out on the everyday level too.

All of life reflects the tension of living “between the now and the not yet.” Our literature, our paintings, our movies, our labor — they reveal our human frustrations and fears, as well as our hopeful longings — longings that will one day find fulfillment. Longings for beauty, for justice, for reconciliation, for rest.

We taste them now. But it’s only a crumb in comparison of what’s to come.

Work was created to be perfect. And personal. It wasn’t created as drudgery. It wasn’t supposed to encompass things like layoffs and bureaucracy and environmental destruction and rejection letters and a toddler smearing her diaper across the wall during naptime. Our work is marked by brokenness, but it’s also infused with the hope of redemption.

Sometimes our work is glorious and we feel fully alive, tasting a spoonful of what it was meant to be. {I’m sorry I just said “spoonful” after discussing poo.}

In the midst of our right-now work, we need to know we have a place in a story that’s going somewhere. And we need to know that our right-now work is just as much a part of the story as the hoped-for work. 

Perhaps we need look no further than our own stories to remind us. As I remembered that redemptive saga from 1999, I recalled many other scenes from my life, scenes in which my potential felt small and my dreams seemed ridiculous. From this vantage point, I now see what I couldn’t appreciate then. I get a glimpse of story. Perhaps you can look back and say the same thing.

Perseverance is renewed when we place our right-now and our hoped-for within a narrative — both our own narratives and the overarching narrative.

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My favorite novelists are the one who produce the best characters. As we follow these characters through a story, we see that they do not return the same. They embark on a journey. They break out of prison. They stare death in the face and survive. And they come back changed. The treacherous mission, the White Which, Voldemort, the season of marinara sauce, even the seemingly endless chapters of poo and tantrums  — they do not have the last word. Hope does.

I believe hope is the fuel of perseverance. And that perseverance is the bedrock of story. Just ask Harry Potter or Bilbo Baggins or Lucy Pevensie. Ask Andy Dufresne and “Red.” Ask Jesus.

The curtain closes on disappointment, devastation, derailment, and despair.

We wait.

And we wait.

The curtain opens on redemption. And we go wild.

We’re able to keep watching, to keep reading, and even to keep working when we are buoyed by hope and possibility. And because story is both epic and everyday, we see redemption in little ways, every day, if we’re willing to look for it.

— when he finally apologizes

— when your co-worker actually thanks you

— when you’re surprised that your own feeble efforts produced dinner on the table at the end of an impossible day

Perhaps you feel like the work in this scene of your life will never end. That the curtain has closed, never to re-open on anything better.

I can’t promise that perseverance will ever land you the exact brand of your hoped-for, not in this life anyway. But I can remind you of story, promising that you’ll come out changed on the other side, perhaps even tinged with hope in some small way at the end of this very week.

When the days are long, remember that you’re writing a story with your life. You don’t have to show up with a prepared plot. You simply have to show up with hope.

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You May Also Enjoy

When Hope Swoops In and Unties the Knots {Or — The Cure for a Week of Doom}

On Stories and Scars and True Transformation

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This post is part of a mini-series.

“How to Pursue Your Hoped-For Work When You’re Busy With Your Right-Now Life”

How to Embrace Your Right-Now Work Even if it’s Not Your Hoped-For Work

One Gift Your Right-Now Work Is Giving You, Even If You Smell Like Marinara Sauce

4 Simple Ways to Create Time When You Don’t Have Any to Spare

4 Reasons Why Your Right-Now Work Matters to Jesus {even if it doesn’t matter to you}

2 Ways to Give Your Hoped-For Work a Voice. Right Now.

3 Ways to Avoid Despair as You Pursue Your Hoped-For Work

“Never stop starting.” And 5 Other Truths to Keep Your Hoped-For Work Alive in the Midst of Your Right-Now Life

8 Favorite Resources to Help Make Your Hoped-for Work a Possibility in Your Right-Now Life

Hope and possibility, straight to your inbox! Subscribe in the box below.

How to Embrace Your Right-Now Work Even if It’s Not Your Hoped-For Work

I long to be a full-time writer. I used to keep that a secret because our dreams are vulnerable things to release to a watching world. What if it never happens? What if everyone then knows I’m a “failure” by my own standards? And maybe by their standards too?

The great thing about being in my 40s is that I’m a tad more brave. I’m less afraid to tell you what I truly desire and what I really think. This year, I resolved to write brave. Less sugarcoating. Fewer disclaimers. More real.

So there you go. I’ve said it. Writing is my dream job. Not because it sounds easy or lucrative but because my DNA has the helix of a writer.

{And that last sentence is precisely why I will never be a scientist.}

Perhaps your dream job is teaching middle school kids or coaching young runners or being able to quit your full-time job so you can be at home with your children.

Right now my real life means I don’t get to be the purveyor of words as I’d like to be. There are other priorities that trump writing.

Roles like wife and mom and domestic engineer coexist with my part-time paid job. {A part-time paid job that involves writing so yay for that.} And jobs that give you money are critical because they pay for necessities like groceries and kids’ braces and my orthodontist’s flat screen televisions.

I’m profoundly grateful for my work — the work that pays me and the work that doesn’t. Sometimes God gives me glimpses of my unique purpose in a particular task, why I’m just the person for it. That insider’s look is a rare privilege we don’t often get.

But much of life doesn’t feel affirming like that, does it? Like you, I live in the tension between the real and the ideal. Whether it’s vocation, marriage, motherhood, or keeping house, I confess that plenty of my right-now work isn’t my hoped-for work.

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I believe I can admit these things and still be grateful for my real life. I believe it’s possible to embrace my right-now season of motherhood even as I’m nostalgic about the already-gone season and weepy about the yet-to-come season. I can acknowledge that it’s hard and exhausting and I don’t know what I’m doing. And also that it’s wonderful and I’ll probably miss it one day.

Right-now motherhood doesn’t always look like hoped-for motherhood. I love my children even though I sometimes want to kick motherhood to the curb.

So how can we grateful for what we have yet still long for something else?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that we do this every day in countless ways. You may have everything you once hoped for — marriage, children, home, community, work. But that doesn’t mean you’re not struggling. This is what it’s like when we live in the place between dreams come true and dreams that aren’t yet. 

Because I’m a Christian, I believe that every good gift in this world is a reflection of what we’ll one day taste in all of its fullness. Even the most obvious gifts this life may offer now — the gorgeous home, the beautiful family, the dream job, the revitalized neighborhood, the perfect meal — are but dim reflections. We were created to enjoy good gifts. These are ancient and sacred longings.

But I’ll be the first to confess that my longing for the gifts usually displaces my longing for the Giver.

I know this. But it doesn’t stop me from trying to gather up as many dim reflections as I possibly can, hoping that the sheer abundance of them will add up to the shining, glittering fullness I long for.

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Back to my dream of a full-time writing life. Right now I don’t get to write my own stuff as much as I’d like. I can be pouty about it on the inside. Sometimes I even feel downright panicked, which is weird. But when that panic settles into my chest, it signals two different things that can actually coexist even though they need to be unpacked differently.

1. That my agenda for my life has displaced my trust in God’s agenda for my life. 

and / or

2. That I’ve succumbed to fatalistic, “all or nothing” thinking. When that’s the case, it’s time to think outside the box and and step forward with hope and possibility. 

I’ll get to this second issue in my next post. For today, let’s camp out in the first issue.

My agenda for my life has displaced my trust in God’s agenda for my life:

When I’m holding my agenda with white knuckles, it’s become an over-desire. I’m believing the lie that I know best what I really need to be fulfilled and that my real life is getting in the way. It makes me super fun to live with.

This doesn’t mean that certain things, like writing and communicating, shouldn’t be as life-giving as they are to me. It doesn’t mean I should feel guilty about the way I’m wired. And it doesn’t mean that writing can’t be pursued in some form.

This also doesn’t mean that I need to pull myself up by my bootstraps and pretend to love the many mundane but essential tasks that make my family’s world and budget go ’round. It doesn’t mean I should feel guilty because I don’t love ALL THE DOMESTIC THINGS.

I’m human, y’all. And so are you. Like I said, we have the ideal and we have the real. Living in the middle is not for the faint of heart. And let’s be honest, work is called work for a reason. It’s literal labor.

Here’s what I’m getting at:

Sometimes my right-now work feels like it’s interrupting my true work. And when that happens, it means my ideal life has smothered the gifts and opportunities of my real life. 

Friends, this is backwards. Not to mention dangerous.

I love what C.S. Lewis says about real life:

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So what’s the secret?

We all walk a fine line as we seek to establish the rhythms and priorities of our everyday lives. How do we know what to let go of {or possibly even outsource} and what we need to keep? Sometimes we say yes to things we shouldn’t and they become obstacles that keep us from our real priorities and a life of semi-sanity. Sometimes we mismanage our time and that keeps us from our truest priorities. I’m guilty of both.

But sometimes our real priorities are the very things keeping us from our hoped-for work. That’s the season I’m in. Maybe you’re feeling it too.

I can panic over this. {And I have.} Or I can make peace with it and dare to receive the beauty and opportunity, realizing that this “really is the life God is sending me day by day.”

The heart of the issue reveals that I’m in a standoff with Trust.

  • God, do I trust that you know best right now?
  • Do I trust that there are purposes I may never know?
  • Do I trust that there is a time for everything and every season under Heaven?
  • Do I trust that you are still doing unseen “kingdom work” in the midst of my right-now life?

When I’m able to answer “yes” to those questions, I can embrace my right-now work because I trust that God has given it to me. This is not a cosmic killjoy sort of God. This is the God who loves me and created me. He is cheering me on. He is actively living through me, whether I’m cleaning up dinner, forgiving someone who’s hurt me, publishing a blog post, working at my job for a local non-profit, or asking for wisdom.

Trust is freedom.

And free people are way more awesome to be with than fretful, bound-up people. I don’t know about you but I want to live free, no matter how bound-up my circumstances seem.

I can embrace my right-now motherhood, messy though it is, because God is humbling me every day through it. And even providing moments of great hilarity and joy, despite all the tears and fears.

I can embrace my seemingly insufficient writing life because He’s the one who put words in my soul. I can trust Him with the offering and the outcome, no matter how meager it seems.

I can embrace my current path of struggle while I hope and pray for a breakthrough.

Each day, I know what it’s like to sit down at a table where both Celebration and Frustration are dinner guests for the same meal. I’m learning that I don’t have to resist this hard-to-swallow reality; I can simply receive it.

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Jesus is the secret behind the secret.

I can write all day about receiving your own life. I can motivate you with words like “accept” and “embrace” and “gratitude.” But those are superficial fixes if I don’t tell you the real secret.

Jesus dealt with this same issue when he lived real life on this earth. Scripture says he sympathizes with every hard thing we’re going through because He can relate.

I don’t throw in Jesus at the end of a post because it’s the Christian way to wrap this up. I speak from the realness of his Word and from my right-now life. I speak from weeks that have dredged up more questions than answers, weeks where The Gospel of Marian’s Way has ever so subtly and subversively displaced The Gospel of Jesus Christ.

When I examine the life of Jesus, I see that He was fully human. He had plans for each day, much like I do. He got hungry. He became tired. He sometimes needed a break from the crowds. He knew what it was like to be frustrated and discouraged, even angry. He was bursting with gifts and wonders that he sometimes had to keep on the down-low.

He held so much human potential. 

How ironic then, that Jesus, the greatest communicator and miracle-worker the world has ever known, spent 30 years in the trenches of the everyday and only three years in public ministry.

Every interruption, every annoyance, and every grand opportunity — they were all received within a single framework: the will of the Father.

It’s taken over 2,000 words in a blog post that’s breaking every rule of the internet to arrive at the truth I never realized until I wrote it:

So that WE can receive our own lives in the same way.

Jesus knew what it was like to live in the tension. He prayed over his own suffering while also receiving it. And aren’t we exceedingly grateful? Because He received his own life, He released the hope of redemption into every nook and cranny of the world.

This same Jesus is alive and well within those who believe. It means that we too can make our plans and dream our dreams and serve the world with our gifts. But we proceed like He did, from a place of trustful and hopeful surrender to the Father’s will.

You don’t have to choose a life of exciting intention OR a life of dismal surrender. Jesus weaves all things together into the cohesive fabric that is your life. Ironically, limitations and possibility are BFFs. {But they usually hate each other before they can become friends.}

Receiving your own life means you hold all things — the mundane and the marvelous — with open hands of gratitude, acceptance, hope, and possibility.

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Yesterday a friend sent me some encouragement from Psalm 25. The title for that Psalm is “Teach Me Your Paths.” In it, David pleads for protection, for deliverance, for wisdom about how to proceed from his troubling circumstances. Instead of formulating his own strategy, he affirms the attributes of God and takes comfort in his love and character. In verses 20-21, David asks these things:

Guard my life and rescue me; do not let me be put to shame, for I take refuge in you. May integrity and uprightness protect me, because my hope, Lord, is in you.

See that little word “hope” there at the end? Tim Keller says this about “hope” as it relates to this passage:

Verse 21 uses the word ‘hope’ to translate a term that means to wait eagerly for God. This is not resignation or passivity but an active stance toward life.

Did you hear that? Hope is active and eager!

But hope is not like a relay baton. We don’t grab hold of it and take off sprinting toward our own glorious win. Rather, we sit with it. We pray over it. We release it to the One who is Hope incarnate, the One who holds all things, including our very lives and longings, in his loving hands.

Friends, we can receive the here and now. We can enjoy the presence and power and perspective of Christ today. And we can do that while waiting eagerly for a more spacious place — whether that spacious place is a different job, a less exhausting season of parenthood, resolution in a difficult marriage, or more time to pursue the longings that God has placed in your heart.

Here’s what I know. There is freedom in receiving your own life. And there is hope for redemption.

But it might mean dying to your current agenda, which isn’t the same thing as dying to your dreams.

Nearly all of the most cherished and beautiful gifts in my life have been born out of something that either hurt badly or had to die. “Interruptions” can be gifts like that.

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If you’re like me, living within the tension of your right-now and your hoped-for, here’s a prayer for us, an arrow to rightly orient our minds before we can move forward with possibility.

May this prayer divinely settle into the soil of our hearts:

God, I thank you for my right-now work and my right-now life. I acknowledge that my right now is sacred, a gift from a personal and sovereign God who knows my needs and the needs around me. 

I confess that I long for more, that my right-now work and my right-now life seem insufficient and incomplete. Bottle my longings like you bottle my tears. Sow them in fertile soil and bring about the proper fruit in due time.

May you bring me joy in the right now, diligence in my daily tasks, strength when I am weary, wisdom for the days ahead, and grace for the moments when my ambition and my agenda try to grab the throne that rightly belongs to you. 

Jesus, help me to receive my own life just as you received yours. Give me eyes to see redemption and a heart that isn’t afraid to hope. 

Amen.

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A disclaimer and what’s coming next {even though I said earlier that I’m done with disclaimers}:

A looooong post, I know. But I hit publish anyway. If you’ve made it this far, thank you. {And congratulations. Now go have a sandwich.}

While I absolutely believe that my agenda for my life can easily displace God’s agenda for my life, I also believe that it’s okay and even fruitful to prayerfully pursue our hoped-for work even as we accept our right-now work. They’re not mutually exclusive, you see.

But we can’t move forward with hope and possibility if we’re not rightly receiving our own lives first.

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Need more possibility even as you receive your own life? 

This is the first post in a mini-series on the blog that’s all about moving forward with hope, even as we appreciate the gifts of the right-now.
Enjoy these additional posts in the series!

How to Embrace Your Right-Now Work Even if it’s Not Your Hoped-For Work

One Gift Your Right-Now Work Is Giving You, Even If You Smell Like Marinara Sauce

4 Simple Ways to Create Time When You Don’t Have Any to Spare

4 Reasons Why Your Right-Now Work Matters to Jesus {even if it doesn’t matter to you}

2 Ways to Give Your Hoped-For Work a Voice. Right Now.

3 Ways to Avoid Despair as You Pursue Your Hoped-For Work

“Never stop starting.” And 5 Other Truths to Keep Your Hoped-For Work Alive in the Midst of Your Right-Now Life

8 Favorite Resources to Help Make Your Hoped-for Work a Possibility in Your Right-Now Life

Subscribe in the box below and you’ll receive each new post in the series.

Hope and possibility, straight to your inbox!

*header image and clothesline image courtesy of Pixabay. Amazon link is an affiliate.

How I Almost Let a Horrible Light Fixture Ruin My Life

In a perfect world, life should pause when you move your family and all of your belongings to a new house during the busiest part of the year.

But it doesn’t. We are grown-ups and therefore we carry on, even if we are not always keeping calm. People need to be fed and clothed and helped and loved, major life transition or not. And so, like many of you, I schlep around our three kids who are at three different stages of life in three different schools and with three different sports. Church and basketball practice and birthdays and invites — they all keep going.

And then there is this house, which we dearly love, patiently waiting to be settled into and cozied up so that it can love on us and the people who come through our doors.

These are all the best problems really. We have jobs! And children! Who get to receive an education and play sports and have friends!

We have a lovely house for which we prayed and waited so long, one that shelters us and felt like home from the very beginning.

I write these things to remind myself because over the weekend I was not all, “Yay house and I’m so grateful for shelter!”

No. I was standing on top of my daughter’s bed WEEPING because of a light fixture from 1959. My bewildered husband looked at me and made the dreaded remark that husbands sometimes make when they are trying to console a crazy woman: “It’s not the end of the world.”

But in that moment, it was, in fact, the end of the world. It was so much the end of the world that I left the house and found myself in my favorite Chinese restaurant with a to-go order. Extra rice. And an egg roll for good measure. Because a gal needs nourishment when the world is ending.

This would probably be a good place to insert the backstory.

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I have a teenage daughter who cares very much about her room.

Like her mama, things like color and lighting and aesthetics affect her greatly. We are both “highly sensitive” types in these ways. And while she has HER VERY OWN ROOM on the “lower level” {as we like to call it}, her space has what the Nester refers to as “lovely limitations.” Limitations like textured cement walls, tiny windows that let in minimal natural light, and brown carpet with matching brown rubber trim.

And a light fixture with no globe that hails from 1959, when the house was built.

She’s a freshman in high school. These are the years when the world can begin to do a number on one’s angsty, adolescent, insecure soul. The years when school and activities and the social scene and pressure about the future can demand more than one’s fragile self can give. I want our home and our family to be a refuge from all of that. And because I love her more than words can say, I want to give her a space that says,

Come, child. Come lay your head and rest your cares and let it all go for a spell. Come sleep and dream and feel the love in this place that we’ve prepared for you.

I can’t give her straight A’s or a full-ride to college or protect her from a broken heart. But I can give her soft sheets and a furry comforter and an excessive amount of pillows and twinkle lights.

This was my motivation and my vision, a lovely and cozy sanctuary for my teenage girl who will only live here for a few more years. {Please pass the tissues.}

And then an Evil Light Fixture tried to steal everything.

An Evil Light Fixture with no globe that should have so easily detached from the ceiling and been replaced with a capiz shell chandelier that I got for $20 and had planned to fit ever so easily around the existing bulbs.

But this fixture got all 1959 on me with its sketchy wires and Houdini way of being UNREMOVABLE without the services of a professional electrician. It mocked me as it dangled from the ceiling.

It resembled the torturous lighting of an interrogation room. Which was appropriate because the sudden anger of the moment made me want to murder someone.

Let’s recall the aforementioned sensitivities to bad lighting. This room had the worst lighting in the house. Also? I had less than 48 hours to do complete the project. My daughter was away on a Young Life retreat and I had planned to surprise her when she returned. For two whole months, I’d been planning a secret re-do for this particular weekend.

But back to Friday night.

The Evil Fixture sapped my will to even launch the project. I was bone-weary from an extra busy week. I had everything I needed in place and the clock was ticking. But the perfect  paint color and cozy bedding and party of throw pillows would only make the space look like a girly version of an interrogation room if I could not remedy that fixture.

So I abandoned the cause altogether and drowned my despair in Asian vegetables + extra rice + eggroll in my bed while crying and watching a movie like a responsible grown up.

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Rest {and Chinese food} are magic. By the next day, I had a vision that came to me in bits and pieces.

A lampshade frame.

Yarn and fabric strips glued all Bohemian-like onto the frame.

And this GLORIOUS wall-hanging that the Nester posted just last week.

This is why God made Pinterest.

We come across ideas that lodge themselves in our brains. And then these ideas become friends with one another and help a sister out when the pressure is on.

Here I am on Sunday afternoon with a massacred lampshade frame {from a lamp I snagged off the curb}, a hot glue gun, yarn, and whatever other Bohemian doodads I could find in my craft closet.

Let’s all pretend this is a flattering photo of Marian.

Again, this is the Evil Light Fixture when it was winning.

And this is the Evil Light Fixture DEFEATED and hidden by a Boho chandy.

It was one of the greatest decorating victories of my life. Even more than the flipped-over rug and the dining room turned lounge of yesteryear.

You won’t find this fixture in a magazine. It looks more crafty than couture. I hope to add more yarn and beads to make it a bit more substantial. But it worked. Resourcefulness and perseverance WON. And even though she would have picked a tiered chandelier from PB Teen in a perfect world, she actually said she wouldn’t change her one-of-a-kind chandy, pieced together with love. And a lamp shade from a stranger’s curb. And a lot of anger and unbalanced hormones if I’m being honest.

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I know this post appears to be about a DIY chandelier. But it’s not.

I needed that small victory something fierce.

Life today is more of a balancing act than it’s after been. From morning until I fall into bed, I spend most of my time doing what I have to do {because I’m trying to be a responsible grown-up} and have precious little time to partake of pursuits that make me come alive. Pursuits like writing and pondering and creating. I’ve started some meaningful projects in recent months and been unable to finish them.

There are four unfinished posts in my drafts folder as we speak.

A book proposal that I’ve recently restarted but had to put on hold. Again.

An entire house that’s waiting to be cozied up.

These are hardly tragedies. But Discouragement and Guilt and Frustration and Weariness have been my constant companions. I walk around with a low-grade grief because certain projects that I dearly love have either died or are still waiting to be born. Things that cannot have life unless I breathe it into them.

And so the bullies that live in my brain taunt me with thoughts like:

Maybe you should just give up. 

You don’t have what it takes.

You have to manage your time perfectly.

Just be grateful and quit dreaming.

You don’t have the resources or know-how to make this work.

So when I finished this room all by my big self AND defeated the Evil Light Fixture that felt like an impossible foe, I cried. And also did some high kicks.

It felt like the first win I’ve had in a long time. It gave me courage and confidence. It showed me that the worthwhile endeavors which make us come alive are indeed work and sometimes work is anything but fun. I gutted this one out, y’all.

And it was so worth it.

Most of all it reminded me that there is almost always possibility lurking beneath the impossible.

Maybe this applies to your marriage or maybe it applies to a room in your house with bad fixtures.

Regardless, it’s inspired me to think outside the box about how I can make regular writing a possibility. And finishing my proposal a possibility. And completing one room at a time a possibility. And working through hard relationships a possibility.

And most importantly, thinking about how I might take certain things off my plate so that some of these life-giving possibilities might become real.

Sometimes we just need the smallest of victories to keep us going.

Reminders that redemption awaits us in the most everyday of challenges. Even if it’s just an Evil Light Fixture.

P.S. I know y’all love a good BEFORE and AFTER as much as I do.

BEFORE

AFTER

She told me she never knew this room could look so pretty. Honestly, I didn’t know it could either. It’s been a gift to us both.

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If you’d like to DIY your own Bohemian chandelier, here are my very lazy instructions:

1. Find an old lamp shade and rip off the actual shade so that you’re only left with the skeleton of the shade.

2. Decide the shape of your fixture. I just needed one round oval piece. But you may choose to keep both the top and bottom parts of the shade plus the vertical pieces that connect the two. If you turn it upside down, you could have a beautiful tiered chandy.

3. Choose your yarn, ribbon, fabric strips, strings of beads, pom-pom fringe, or whatever materials you want to use. Cut strips of varying lengths.

4. Wrap the end of each length of yarn or ribbon over the frame and hot-glue it to the inside of the frame. Keep cutting strips and gluing. Do this 5,000 times or whenever you like what you’re seeing.

5. Attach the fixture to the ceiling with little hooks that you hang coffee mugs on. {I don’t know the real name of them but they screw into the ceiling.} I only needed two. Lightweight metal frames dangling with yarn don’t weigh very much so this shouldn’t fall from your ceiling. If it does I am not responsible.

In case you’re wondering, I spent two-ish hours making mine.

Here’s a view from inside the chandy:

I replaced the swirly CFL bulbs that give off murderous lighting with two spectrum halogen bulbs that give off more of a natural daylight. It’s so much lovelier, plus nobody gets killed.

{This post is linked up at my friend Richella’s “Grace at Home” series.}

SUCH a heartfelt thank you to Emily Freeman and Myquillyn Smith for featuring this post on your “Weekend Links.” Your blogs were the first two I started reading way back when and they remain my two favorites. {All the cheeks-blushing / heart-eyes emojis.}

Need more possibility in your life?

I’m beginning a mini-series {4 posts or so} on the blog that’s all about moving forward with hope and possibility. Though this current post is about doing that in our homes, I want to talk about how we do that in our work.

Because maybe your right-now work isn’t your hoped-for work?

And you want to know how to receive your “right-now life,” even as you move forward with possibility into your “hoped-for life.” If that sounds like some encouragement you need, subscribe in the box below and you’ll have each post from the series delivered to your inbox when it’s published. You may unsubscribe anytime you like. 

{Click here to read the first post in the series.}

When the Crazy Begins to Settle & the Imagined Becomes Real: Notes on a New Year

Happy New Year! 13 days late.

Cranking up the blog after the holidays is a struggle every year. Much like cranking up the juicer and cranking up ye olde exercise routine. The older I get, the more I realize that the only way to win is to keep lowering one’s standards. I don’t feel the need to try so hard at ALL THE THINGS anymore. Think of me what you wish.

This is such a weird post and here’s why. For some reason I feel like I can’t begin writing “real posts” until I sweep out the cobwebs of my life and tell you what’s been going on with my big important self. I have all sorts of things I want to write about in the coming year but I don’t feel like I can do that until we catch up.

And by “we” I mean “I” because this is obviously a one-way dialogue. Which is technically a monologue.

Before I jump into the state of things presently, I offer notes on 2015: The Year I Almost Died. Not really. But in retrospect it sort of feels like it.

The year we tried to sell our house again. Then the year we quit trying to sell our house. Then the year we tried selling our house again, again. Then the year our house finally sold and we moved. And then the year I almost died because moving is hell and I mean that with all of my heart.

Amid the whirlwind of showings and chronic uncertainty {and my minivan junked up with laundry and the dog and the kids and whatever chaos I couldn’t get put away before a showing}, some awesome stuff still came my way.

I took a part-time as the communications gal for a local non-profit. I love it and I thank God for it. Five months later, in the midst of moving, I took an additional part-time job. I also loved it. But I chose not to stay for the new year. Still, God gifted me with some beautiful new friends, 23 of whom are first-graders. I miss them but have promised to visit and read them books. I’m so grateful for all that they taught me.

On the home-front, we entered the world of three kids in three different schools — 9th grade, 6th grade, 2nd grade. I almost died again. I still can’t believe how fast it’s all going. We juggle cheerleading and teenagers’ social schedules and boys basketball and sibling squabbles and keeping our kids’ brains from turning to mush because of all the dang screens. Screens that I threaten to throw in the garbage on the regular.

Marian tried to stay strong-ish through it all, even if she did cry nearly every day and have to see her doctor about some medicinals. But moving and sleep deprivation and chaos will eventually have its way with one’s body and soul.

So when I broke my foot three weeks after moving and my kids suffered through some unsavory stuff and couldn’t really unpack or settle in, I almost died again.

December showed up with the flu and ear infections. January welcomed me with bronchitis.

And I realize this post now sounds dismal with a dash of hypochondria but the point is this. How long will it take before I learn that there is only so much one can carry before the mind and body says “enough?” Apparently for me it takes 42 years.

After our holiday travels landed us back home, I committed myself to the ministry of Netflix as I binge-watched {with a capital BINGE} like it was my job and with zero guilt. I finished Breaking Bad and Parenthood. For the win. I felt a strange sense of accomplishment in just finishing something. Anything.

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We’re on the second week of the new year and I’m writing this from my home office. Thanks to the steroid pack I enjoyed last week, I unpacked with an energy I hadn’t known since my 20s. And even though this week I’m back to my lethargic old self and I have a sick kid upstairs on the sofa, my office makes me feel like I’m LIVING THE DREAM.

I haven’t busted out the paint or made her all pretty yet. But she’s open for business and I’m in love.

Last year was hard. I’m not gonna lie. Not in the way that cancer or real tragedy or chronic illness is hard. Not even close. It was a trip to Disneyworld compared to those things. Just hard in a very unsettled, very chaotic, so-much-stress-for-so-long sort of way. I never did get my bearings.

But the crazy thing is this. I am profoundly grateful for all of it. As I look back across the last two years, one thing is crystal clear. God fought for us and I love him for that. Loved ones fought for us too — praying for our house to sell, praying that we’d find one, praying for provision, praying that God would calm the storms.

When we’re waylaid by a season crazy, we can’t see straight and that’s normal. But now, from the vantage point of this January stillness, I look back and I could weep. I never thought we’d get here.

A year ago, I couldn’t have imagined sitting here in a different home in a real office. {Not that my tiny writing nook between my bedroom dresser and bedroom wall wasn’t its own brand of tiny-awesome. I prayed and journaled and wrote my heart out in this space.}

I couldn’t have imagined the meaningful work God brought my way and what a gift it would be to me and to my family.

I couldn’t have imagined some of the doors God opened up — to speak and share with others.

I couldn’t have imagined some of the storms that He would settle, even though all of them aren’t settled.

I couldn’t have imagined how my teenage daughter would also begin to become my friend — that shopping and binge-watching Gilmore Girls covers a multitude of sins. Raising teenagers with gentleness and unconditional love and half a clue is one of the hardest things in my life.

We are both spirited, complicated, strong-willed women. Sometimes I wish we weren’t. But deep down I wouldn’t change us. {Well, I’d probably change myself.}

I couldn’t have imagined the unlikely ways God would begin to teach me about true compassion and how that compassion would begin first with myself and then to my people. For a gal who’s always looked for the book or the formula or the checklist to tell me how to do my life, I’m learning to simply close the books and trash the checklists. Because sometimes good advice can get in the way of God. More and more, God’s Spirit in me leads me to just love my people in a way that casts out fear and sends performance to the backseat.

I couldn’t have imagined that even though this kind of compassion sounds good and I’m rocking it one minute, I’m being way too hard on people an hour later.

Compassion is a process. Each day, I begin again.

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I’m grateful for the journey but I won’t lie. I’m exhausted. And I’ve committed to easing into this year with slowness and stillness and nary a resolution in sight.

And while I couldn’t have imagined so much of the goodness God has imparted after a long season of waiting and upheaval, please don’t get the impression that life is tidy and perfect. I have my fair share of angst and unanswered questions and embarrassing issues and stupid mistakes I can’t stop making.

Hope and beauty, mess and brokenness, excitement and exhaustion — they all live under the same roof don’t they? Though I breathe in complication, I’m learning to exhale trust.

2015 offered more opportunities to trust than I could have imagined. As I consider the unknowns of this new year and the tender places I still guard with a vengeance, Trust is my faithful companion. A companion I wouldn’t have without the ordeals of the last year.

I’m obsessed with fresh starts because I always need one.

As we begin again together, I hope that this little corner of the internet will continue to be a place of real talk and real grace for everyday people like you and me.

I hope to write with more courage and less reluctance. Because we all need brave friends, at least I do, and I’d like to be a brave friend, even if it’s a friend who lives in the internet on the other side of a screen.

I hope that we’ll redeem the epic and the everyday messes here together, that we’ll be able to laugh at ourselves and find beauty in the small things, the broken things, the not-yet things.

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Whether you’ve been around these parts for a while or you’re here for the first time, thank you. And if you’d like to keep up with each new post, just subscribe in the box below!

{Curious about the most popular post here on the blog in 2015? Here you go. Also? I still need to read this post every day.}

When Motherhood Has You in the Valley of Defeat

One more thing: What would you love to see more of here in 2016? Favorite kinds of posts? Favorite topics? Consider this the most informal of all surveys. You can chime in here in the comment section of the blog {scroll back up to the top of the post and click “Leave a Comment”}, on the blog Facebook page, or by sending an e-mail to marianvischer at gmail dot com. Thanks a million! : )

Why You Really Are Prepared for Christmas. {Even if You’re Not.}

It will be a Christmas memory for the archives. All five of us, on December 13th — just two weeks behind schedule — traipsing through the Lowe’s parking lot to find our family tree.

It was a soul-sucking vignette, to be sure. Megastore garden center at night. Vacant cinder-block stalls, emptied of the best trees. Bad fluorescent lighting that reflected off the cement and handed me a shot glass of depression. The whole scene felt a bit like prison.

2014 — The Year The Vischers Bailed Out a Christmas Tree

One child stood in the corner, arms folded and scowling and I can’t believe this is the tree we’re getting!

The other two pushed each other around on the flatbed metal carts because their mom was too melancholy to care. And my husband, God bless him, channeled his inner Clark Griswold and assured his disgruntled family that this was indeed a fine tree and that we were going to have a hap-hap-happiest Christmas after all.

We drove out of the parking lot as the kids complained about our small-statured tree and how we’re putting it up late this year and why aren’t there lights on our house and so on.

I simply stared out the window in silence. As we drove home, my husband asked me what our schedule looked like this week and when no answer came, he looked over and saw tears rolling down my cheeks. Of course he asked what was wrong and all I could get out was, I’m just overwhelmed.

We didn’t realize until recent weeks that the last half of 2014 was tougher than we’d acknowledged, an extended season of physical, emotional, spiritual, and relational stress that gradually seeped in without fanfare or acknowledgment. Sometimes we’re so busy putting out the fires and making the decisions and dealing with the issues at hand that we don’t realize we’re actually drowning. The waters have risen, ever so slowly, and we find ourselves gasping for breath.

Or in my case, crying on the way home from Lowe’s and telling my husband that for the first time ever, I wish we could just skip Christmas.

And then there’s the guilt. December 13th and no Christmas decorations. No advent readings {because the books are packed up in boxes} and therefore no hearts “prepared.” No intentional memory-making endeavors like gingerbread houses and Christmas lights and tree farms and putting on the ornaments while we pass the hot chocolate.

For the mom who’s overwhelmed by her stress, her lack, her distraction, her loser-ness, there is only one answer.

To be overwhelmed by grace through Christ. 

I can look at the expectations, overwhelmed by how I’m coming up short. Or I can look at Jesus, overwhelmed by his sufficiency.

I can look at the all the moms getting it “right,” overwhelmed by my pitiful comparison. Or I can look at Jesus, overwhelmed by his favor for me.

I can look at my kids’ expectations, overwhelmed in a torrent of guilt. Or I can look at Jesus, overwhelmed because there is no condemnation for those who are in Him.

In far too many moments, I’ve been looking in the wrong places for approval, affirmation, and joy. And I should know my now — that always leaves me gasping for air, emotionally bankrupt, and reeking of self-focus.

Why are we so prone to define ourselves by what we’re doing {or not doing} instead of what Jesus has already done?

It’s been a December in which I’ve been ambushed by my culture’s expectations, others’ expectations, and my own expectations instead of overwhelmed by the simple yet profound truth of the Gospel.

But it’s still December. And I’d love a do-over. I long to shift my gaze.

Because even if the tree never went up and the cookies never got made and the advent readings never got read, Christmas would still come because Christ still comes.

And when He showed up on the scene over 2,000 years ago, no one was prepared, not even his own family. There was no matching layette, no birth plan, no carefully prepared suite, not even a room at the inn.

Do we think Christ’s humble beginnings were a result of poor planning or just happenstance? Do we criticize Mary for not having it just a little more together, seeing as how she was getting ready to birth the Savior of the World?

Of course we don’t.

Because God isn’t a God of coincidence, the world’s unpreparedness was no coincidence.

If your own Christmas preparations feel behind, pitiful, or less than enthusiastic, you’re in good company.

Christ came to the unprepared, the unlikely, and the unsuspecting. And He didn’t show up with a checklist. He showed up with compassion.

During this crazy week, know that it’s never too late for your heart to “prepare Him room.”

And though He is God in the flesh, though his glory is beyond our comprehension, He is the most gracious guest for whom we’ll ever prepare. He’s not impressed by lights or tinsel or even our intentionality as parents. He doesn’t require garland or even a Christmas tree by December 1st.

He simply asks that we receive Him — just as we are, just as He finds us.

(One of my favorite Christmas posts, edited and reposted from the Christmas archives.)

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You may also enjoy:

Why Compassion is the Answer to a Messy Christmas

What an $18 Fake Christmas Tree Taught Me About Saying Yes

This 4-Part Advent Series from 2014

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Why Compassion is the Answer to a Messy Christmas

How I talk to others is usually a barometer for how I’m talking to myself. And by others, I mean those living in my own house. I am highly skilled at being polite and kind to friends and acquaintances. But the filters come off when I’m in the comfort of my own home.

I’ve been measuring my worth by external markers again. Which means I’ve been measuring others by external markers too.

My house is chaos. Therefore I am chaos.

It’s December 14th and a tree isn’t up for the second year in a row. Therefore I am bad at making Christmas happen. 

Relationships under my own roof are hard right now and I’m to blame for plenty of it. Therefore I am a hypocrite and a terrible person.

This child cannot get his / her act together…and perhaps never will. Therefore I am a terrible parent and he / she is a terrible child. 

You get the gist. I look around at all that is unwell and blame myself. While also, somehow, blaming everyone else. Christmas is a time of generosity and there is just an abundance of blame to pass around!

It has not been the most wonderful time of the year. And while I write this, I am under the quilt because I have the flu.

{Raise your hand if you’re inspired yet by this heartwarming Yuletide post.}

I’m hardly the first one to say it but there is enormous pressure to get the Christmas season right. Even though Pinterest is not the boss of me, I subscribe to some sort of invisible magazine of expectations and I am the editor. Even though I am all about grace and receiving your own life, Christmas can turn me into a crazy person. I’m my own worst enemy.

Between the Advent readings and the baking and the shopping and the buying and the events and the decorating and all the memories we’re supposed to be making, I can’t do it all {on top of real life} and stay well.

I actually get giddy over Christmas. I love traditions. I love presents. I want to create a special season for those I love. But it’s a LOT to squeeze into four short weeks. It’s probably why I’ve wanted to skip Christmas, this most beloved holiday of mine, the last two years.

I want to skip Christmas because I’m tired and when I look at this season, it doesn’t look like Jesus. It looks like striving.

When I consider Jesus coming as a baby in the dead of night, hustle and overspending and overscheduling and killing myself isn’t what comes to mind.

Jesus is rest. He is peace. He is fulness. He is compassion.

And compassion always begins with kindness toward myself. If you tell me that’s selfish, I may have to punch you in the face. Because if I can’t personally receive the lavishness of God’s love and grace, I am hard on others like I’m hard on myself. And that has been terribly true lately.

As Charles Spurgeon wrote long ago, “It is no use for you to attempt to sow out of an empty basket, for that would be sowing nothing but wind.”

There has been no compassion in my basket. I’ve gone about my days, sowing out of sheer effort and grit. And it shows up most in my demeanor and in my relationships.

Getting the flu has been a blessing in disguise. I’ve been able to read and reflect, to meditate and sort of rest, as much as a mom is actually allowed to rest. And in this time of stillness, God whispers this message to my weary, walled-off heart:

Calm down. Be compassionate. First to yourself. Then to others. Quit being so hard on yourself and measuring your worth by all the wrong things. And then quit being so hard on those you love and measuring their worth by all the wrong things. I did not come to condemn you, but to love you. And when you begin to believe that I love you just as you are and not as you want to be, loving others just as they are gets a little bit easier.

Each year, I’m in a different set of circumstances during Advent but the theme tends to remain the same — Christmas is not what I expect it to be. I expect it to be a little more worthy of admiration than it typically is. I struggle to receive my own life, even at Christmas. Especially at Christmas.

I know this because I’m a writer and the words of Christmases past tell me so. And I am both comforted and disappointed by the fact that I’ve never quite gotten it “right” by my own expectations.

In the midst of a house that’s still unsettled with unpacked boxes and unpainted walls —

In the middle of Advent and still no Christmas tree —

In the middle of growing-up kids who often bring out the worst in me instead of the best —

I long to speak with compassionate language toward myself and others.

These words by Father Gregory Boyle have given me much to ponder because indeed, the Lord does often come disguised as myself. And it’s always when I come to the end of myself that I see Him clearly for who He really is, a God of boundless compassion toward all who are needy and long to receive the life and love he brings.

Out of the wreck of our disfigured, misshapen selves, so darkened by shame and disgrace, indeed the Lord comes to us disguised as ourselves. And we don’t grow into this — we just learn to pay better attention. The “no matter whatness” of God dissolves the toxicity of shame and fills us with tender mercy.

Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Gregory Boyle

This Christmas season, maybe you’re feeling pretty good about yourself and your efforts.

Or maybe you’re like me. And you feel a little bit like a disaster. May your own flawed and failed humanity be the unlikeliest portal to find Christ Himself, who loves you in whatever condition you may find yourself. May the “no matter whatness” of God be still your spirit in this hurried season. And may his lavish love spill over and run like a stream into the lives of those around you who are thirsting for it.

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*book link is affiliate; header image source

How to Give Thanks for Your REAL {messy * beautiful * laughable * sorrowful * honest * hopeful} LIFE

I have a six-year-old friend in the first grade class where I work each morning. She is a real-life caricature of a Disney princess, minus the ball gown and polished demeanor. Her voice is little bit like Shirley Temple’s and she says everything with a twinkle in her eye and a smile on her face.

Her head is in the clouds when she “should” be working and she’s delightfully uninhibited. She rattles off obscure facts about animals with endearing enthusiasm and explains what words mean in a way that’s remarkably perfect.

She embodies wonder. And I adore her for it.

A couple of weeks ago she remarked about the beauty of something completely mundane — I don’t remember what exactly — and I said to her, “I just love you. Your glass is always half-full.”

To which she replied {with said twinkle in her eyes and fluttering eye-lashes and ever-present smile}, “Oh Mrs. Vischer! My glass isn’t half-full. It’s ALL THE WAY FULL!” And she stretched out her arms to the sky as she said it, just to demonstrate the enormity of her everlasting joy.

I love her because I want to be like her. I want a heart that intrinsically gushes with gratitude and a mind that’s captivated by wonder and eyes that zero in on beauty. There are those who are simply hard-wired for joy and gratitude and glass-half-full-ness.

Some people get all the good personality genes and yes, I’m jealous. I desperately long for that sort of innate positivity.

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The last week has been on the melancholoy side for me, which is putting it ever so politely. I realized that I’ve been stuffing grief for about five years now because real life has not allowed for such indulgences like acknowledging loss. There are sandwiches to make and children to parent and marital spats to smooth out. There are jobs to work and bills to pay and a house to set up.

In the hurry and flurry of real life, I didn’t realize just how much sorrow I had packed away like old high school trophies, telling myself I’d deal with it all later but lugging it around from place to place in the meantime.

And then something triggers the baggage. And while I’m used to triggers and they are terribly unpleasant, I know the drill.

Shove it back down. Stuff the emotions that are temporarily dislodged. Pack them away. Deal later.

This is a necessary form of denial because the demands of the everyday monopolize your physical and emotional energy.

Even for someone who’s “real” like me, I didn’t realize how stuffed full of sorrow I was until it all came unstuffed and the suitcase refused to latch. And when it did? Rage and anguish and despair came with it. All I could see was the mess of my life — the mess of the past, the mess of the present, the probable mess of the future. I couldn’t see how far we’d come. I could only see how much still feels like a disaster.

My glass was not only half-empty; it was bone dry. And it had been that way for longer than I even knew.

I walked for hours on a broken foot that’s beginning to heal, taking breaks to sit in the sun and seek clarity and feel sorry for myself. But all I found was darkness and confusion. My thoughts found voice only in the words of King Solomon, who had everything under the sun yet declared it all meaningless.

I had forgotten to remember.

This week a dear friend and counselor reminded me: “Climb onto the life raft of rememberance.”

“The Life Raft of Rememberance.” It’s the title of a blog post I once wrote. Three and a half years ago I penned these words:

In laying bare our needs, we simultaneously remember the ones God’s already met. Practicing remembrance saves me. It’s impossible to drown in discouragement and hopelessness when we remember how He’s parted the sea time and again.

Remembrance is an exercise in trust, an invitation to hope, and a pathway to peace.

Sometimes it takes the perspective of others to untangle the truth from the lies. It takes my husband telling me over dinner and with all sincerity that we are not where we were, not by a long shot. It takes a loved one telling me that “nothing has changed” is a straight-up lie and reminding me to look around. We’re here, in this house, together and intact.

In the words of Elton John, “I’m still standing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And I’ve decided that “still standing” is indeed a victory.

Is it all still terribly messy? Ohmygosh, yes. But there is life and goodness in the middle of mess.

Has the sorrow vanished? Not at all. But it’s been brought into the light, promised to be acknowledged and carried by someone other than just me.

Am I free of consquence and baggage? Hardly. But they do not define me or my family.

Mess and sorrow — it’s part of my story and I’m guessing it’s part of yours too. I’d write the narrative differently but I can’t. I can only keep moving from this point forward. Instead of rewriting my own life, I can simply receive it.

And I can receive it with gratitude.

A curated life has the allure of perfection and the illusion of control. In an age where we can stage our lives and portray them as we wish in our online spaces, we allow ourselves to fool and be fooled. I’m not gonna lie, I still want to pick and choose with my real life. I want to be the snobbish gatekeeper of my own past, present, and future.

But a real life doesn’t have fancy filters and carefully crafted vignettes. A real life has the slate of redemption as its foundation and the banner of hope unfurled across its roofline, even if its rooms are still junky and a lot of stuff needs to be fixed.

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Sometimes I still look at God as the Grand Editor and tell him that I have a better idea for how the story should unfold.

He graciously reminds me that my gaze doesn’t see the beginning from the end. My characters are predictable and safe. My plot-lines leave no room for rescue or transformation. I am my own hero. The end.

As I look back, I can drown in resentment and how failure still impacts me today. Or I can climb aboard the life raft of rememberance. I can be grateful that adversity has transformed me and my people in fruitful ways, even as I still keep company with sorrow.

I can consider where we’d be, if not for grace, and that would be a terrible place indeed.

I can remember holidays gone by that were fractured and false and raise my hands to the heavens that we broke through the hell of that, hard road and all, and now we have a life that’s honest. We are anything but perfect. Truthfully, we are embarrassingly clueless and flying by the seat of our pants most of the time. And that makes us needy in a good sense, desperate for a savior in both epic and everyday ways.

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This Thanksgiving, I offer thanks for an honest life.

An honest life isn’t free from sorrow or mess or baggage.

An honest life doesn’t pretend that the present doesn’t bear scars from the past, nor is it fearless about the future.

An honest life does not have tidy relationships or closure or complete healing.

But an honest life is wide open to receive and to give because it’s ripe to be made new and humble enough for transformation. An honest life knows its own crazy and is set free to walk through the doors of others’ crazy.

This Thanksgiving, I receive my own life with gladness and gratitude. All of it. I don’t say that lightly. This is THE continual struggle for me.

I invite you to do the same, even if your story is not as you might have written it.

I invite you to join all of us honest folk around this very real table where we feast and cry and laugh and spill the sweet tea and nibble around the burnt part of the rolls and eat pie until we test the threshold of our stretchy pants.

May we scoot over to finally make room for the sorrow that cannot be denied, knowing that sadness and gladness can sit around the same dinette. Sorrowful tears can mingle with joyful ones. As my friend Kimberly says, tears “water the seeds of compassion in your spirit. You must let the tears do their inner work because it is a holy one.” 

May we begin with compassion toward our own fragile souls.

May we hunt down beauty in the midst of brokenness.

May we even have glorious moments in which we are soul mates with my six-year-old friend, where our gladness for ALL THE DELIGHT and ALL THE WONDER makes our eyes twinkle and our smiles widen and our arms stretch with great might toward the heavens.

Why? Because we dare to remember all the goodness. We dare to receive our own lives with thanksgiving instead of bitterness. We dare to hope with a capital H.

And because of Hope, we can receive this life in all of its beautiful, ridiculous, messy glory.

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For Your Thanksgiving

One Thousand Gifts: Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp. A modern classic that I need to keep reading.

Choose to be Grateful. It’ll Make You Happier. By Arthur C. Brooks at The New York Times.

The Life Raft of Remembrance {by me}

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*nature photos courtesy of Pixabay; book link is an affiliate

A Tale of Two Soldiers

I’m here today because two young soldiers, against all odds, returned home from World War II seventy years ago.

The one with the slight build barely looked old enough to man a tractor, much less a machine gun that stretched out of a plane’s backside.

But his small frame was the ideal size for that of a tail-gunner. I’m told that the “life expectancy” of tail-gunners was less than three minutes. Yet the small shooter with ruddy cheeks and blue eyes survived countless missions and two plane crashes. We have pictures of him standing beside the wreckage, arms crossed, an “all-in-a-day’s-work” expression on his face.

When he left his job as a college professor to serve on the the European front, he said goodbye to a young wife who carried fear and hope along with their unborn child. Miraculously, the young gunner returned home to hope-realized and a two-year-old son. The soldier and his lovely bride would have six more children across the years. Their second child is my mother.

The other soldier was eighteen and also newly married. He spent twenty-one days on a boat from his base in California to the war-front in the Philippines. By God’s grace he survived hell on earth in the damp jungles of the Pacific, and his wife survived days turned weeks turned sometimes months without knowing whether her young husband was dead or alive.

Underground and in the rain, the soldier read his Bible aloud to fellow comrades and I’ve no doubt they needed every word of that good news. Trapped in foxholes with disease-ridden feet, perpetually wet and starving, they dug graves in the wet jungle floor for dead Japanese soldiers and for their own fallen brothers. Day in and day out, they suffered and stared death in the face and prayed for home.

You’ve probably guessed that the Bible-reading soldier made it back too. He spent months in several hospitals, recovering from cholera and putting on weight and shaking horror from his mind.

But he finally came home.

He and his beautiful bride had three children across the years. The oldest child is my dad.

The tail-gunner and his wife are with Jesus now. I miss them terribly.

But the infantryman who fought in the Philippines is as spirited as ever.At 91 years old, he’s one of the youngest World War II vets. There are few left now. His war bride is now 92, still beautiful and resilient even in her frailty. Even though I taught American History and am the granddaughter of two veterans, I tend to forget their sacrifice. I’m here because even though they were terrified, they chose courage. And God chose to bring them back. They left behind all that was dear to secure freedom for the rest of us. We’ll never be able to fully appreciate the remarkable lives of the “greatest generation.”

I think on these things every Veterans Day. I’ve considered the variables and what ifs and knowing that one misfire 70 years ago could have written a different story, one without me in it.

Today as I left my morning job at the school, I stopped to watch my son’s second grade class stand inside the front door and give homemade cards to the veterans passing through their two straight lines on the way to a special lunch. The teacher and I fought back tears because there’s something almost sacred about seeing the older generation reach out and touch the heads of our own children waving flags and saying “Thank you for your service.”

I considered my grandfathers and thought to myself, There are a million reasons I shouldn’t be here. But I am. There’s purpose to my life. Honestly, I was surprised by gratitude. Sometimes it’s that simple:

I’m supposed to be here.

I’ve also considered the connection between sacrifice and freedom. I realized that they’re opposites. {Because I’m a genius.} Sacrifice implies restraint and restriction and going without. Freedom implies boundlessness and peace and fullness.

Sacrifice giving birth to freedom is a completely upside-down thing.

And because I’m a Christian, this thought took me to the cross. The more I consider the overwhelming sacrifice of a perfect Savior on my behalf, the more passionate I am about the freedom He secured for me. There’s a direct correlation between our appreciation of the sacrifice that came before us and our appreciation of the freedom we now enjoy as a result.

This is the only patriotic post I’ve ever written. I’m not a military wife or a “God and country” sort of writer. The problem with studying our nation’s history is that I’m more aware than I’d like to be about some of the darker moments and motives of our past. It’s not all glory and honor and equality; this we know. But I absolutely believe that we can be honest about our history while bowing to the courage and sacrifice of noble men and women who have served valiantly and who continue to devote their lives for the protection of others, hopeful for a more secure future.

Honesty and honor are not mutually exclusive. May grace always have the final word.

We have never been a perfect nation. But it’s the everydayness of our people that has made America such a unique and storied place. We are not descendants of royalty. We are rebels and misfits and commoners. We are 18-year-olds who left behind small, southern, mill towns for lands they had never seen, fighting for the future of great-grandchildren they had never met.

Thinking about the two soldiers nearest and dearest to my heart, remembering the stories they’ve shared with me and with my kids, I’m grateful beyond words for their sacrifice and service. I’m so thankful that they dared to hope.

This Veteran’s Day, might we consider the sacrifice of those who have gone before us and cherish anew the freedom we enjoy?

And for those who are in Christ, it’s a reminder to think upon an even greater sacrifice — his sacrifice for us in order that we might fully dance in the freedom and security that is ours.

/////It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.{Galatians 5:1a}/////Thanks for reading this updated repost from the archives.

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