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May All Your Expectations Be Frustrated

I read this little prayer on the podcast last week and Lindsay asked me to post it on the blog. I realize this can be a slap in the face to someone in great pain, but for folks on the other side of it, it is a powerful affirmation of what God does in his people. Only as we lose our agenda to put our lives together the way we think best, can we enjoy Father in the midst of our trials and tragedies…

This ‘blessing’ was prayed over Henri Nouwen by his spiritual mentor:

May all your expectations be frustrated.
May all your plans be thwarted.
May all your desires be withered into nothingness.
That you may experience the powerlessness and the poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

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A Mother’s Day Story of Incredible Redemption

A couple of years ago a dear sister wrote to me about some horrible pain in her life. Five years before her 24-year old daughter in the midst of severe pain took her own life. Other believers distanced themselves from her, wanting to find comfort in the misguided view that if she had been a better parent, this would not have happened to her daughter. Somehow God led her to some of my books and CDs and she has let me in on the story of God’s work in her life. These are some of her own words over the last two years of an amazing process God has worked in her:

Yes, Christian leadership, programs, formulas, functions, and institutions failed, but that was when God began to teach me how He didn’t fail. You’re right; it’s a life-long learning experience and an incredible journey of experiencing for myself the love of God, in the life of God.

When Erin died, most of me died with her. I was acutely aware that a person could be alive and yet dead because I was. Conversely, for the first time I understood that I could be dead [unresponsive to God] and yet be alive. I said God, I know this is not your problem. You don’t produce spiritual birth defects. How did I miss the truth of knowing You? How did this happen to me? Why don’t I know you? I thought I was pursuing a relationship with You, but here I am, a child of God, walking in darkness and deep trouble, hemorrhaging life and dying. (I am) poised to walk the same pathway to death as Erin. Show me how to know you the way you intended for me to know you, not my way, God, your way. Please just start with Jesus loves me this I know and take it from there. God answered by saying, ‘You don’t even know that, but it’s a good place to start.’

I stayed with my burden of guilt (and) failure for six years. God never failed to offer His Way of coming into the Light during that time. He has provided His Way of healing and restoring the spirit, soul and body and I was hiding my pain. Come on! A good mother would know her 14-year old child took the screen off her window and crawled out to be drugged and raped, right? A good mother would certainly know what to do with the fragile spirit, soul and body of that child dumped like garbage in the yard, right?

I could go on but that voice has been silenced by God who is calling me to celebrate with Him how He and Erin are celebrating His eternal life today. When an adult child takes their life—for the mother of that adult Mother’s Day can be messy. This was my sixth sad, messy, awkward Mother’s Day and although emotionally prepared [I thought] I wasn’t prepared for how God would use my mess to heal another place in my soul.

Last year, God used Mother’s day to invite this sister into another level of freedom.

He said, ‘You can continue to carry a burden of guilt and your ‘good mother’ definition or let My Light, Truth, Grace, and Love shine on your twisted thinking.’ He didn’t say it’s time to move on, get over it or suck it up. He said every time I think of Erin I should use the word celebrate. He said,’Every day I’m celebrating with Erin and every day Erin is celebrating with Me. Guess who’s missing the party?’

God was asking me to change ‘how’ I think. He’s saying I may not be able to change what I think—thoughts come. He seemed to be saying I have a choice of “how” I will respond to painful thoughts. It took 4 days to work what the Holy Spirit said into my spirit, soul and body but on my sixth awkward Mother’s Day I am embracing God’s Way of healing for a damaged part of my soul. I wish I could explain how God does it. Without changing the original experience; God somehow disconnected the painful “good mother syndrome” memory hard-wired in my soul. The painful memory had a voice that mocked me. It hasn’t been an on/off switch but gradually when I think of Erin I respond to what the Holy Spirit said and I use the word ‘celebrate’ the painful memory and my wrong definition have been diffused [unwired?] and celebrating His Life in this situation is producing less painful and more appropriate responses to both my internal and external world.

So, how is she doing now? I wrote her earlier today when I was working on this blog to see if she was still growing in that celebration and to assure her that Sara and I would be celebrating with God, Erin, and her this Mother’s Day. Here’s what she wrote back a few moments ago:

How kind of you to remember about Mother’s Day. It’s fascinating really. Last year at this time I didn’t really understand the result would be a permanent healing in this area. I hope I never get over being amazed by God’s ability to resolve the unresolvable. Somehow God turned my mourning to dancing [celebrating]! There was no need to begin talking myself down a week in advance. The painful emotions
surrounding Mother’s Day are just gone. I’m the one with the surprised look on my face!

The latest podcast (at The God Journey) was a great discussion! I was walking the same pathway to death as [aka Shelly]. I pray she accepts the wise counsel and finds the Way of knowing Christ in a relationship that makes sense—knowing, seeing, hearing, believing, and responding to God in the midst of painful life circumstances that often don’t.

I think I’m an example [normal?] of what you expressed on the podcast. There is a Way to know Christ as Life on the other side of these painful life circumstances. A Way that impacts “how” I think, believe, feel, see, hear, speak and respond. Thank you Wayne for helping me to know God ‘like that.’

Isn’t Father amazing? There is no pain too great, no tragedy so profound that God cannot crawl into it with us and walk us out of our dark cave into the light of his gracious redemption. Pray that for all of you today, and especially for moms who hurt on this day. May God’s light shine into your pain and begin to rewire your thoughts so that you can think like him through it and be transformed by his life.

Added Note 2016:  Two years ago I got to meet the woman in this story. I was traveling in her part of the world and we arranged to finally meet face to face.  The freedom and healing continues. They say you never get over the death of a child, and I believe that… But you can get beyond it and find life and joy beyond the loss.

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Living the Relational Journey

I love the term ‘relational’ when it speaks of how we live this walk. To me, it means to live out of relationships—the first one with the community of Father, Son and Spirit, and then to share that experience of community with people in our lives.

I notice the term, however, is now being by people to describe house church, small groups, or even large congregations that set to be more focused on relationships. People even write me telling me they want to be more relational so they are going to start a small group in their home.

Living relationally is not about whether or not you go to a specific group. Living relationally means you recognize that God is a God of relationships and works through our relationship with him and our relationships with others. Those who are relational make room in their lives for relationships. They get to know their colleagues at work, their neighbors down the street and find time to encourage other believes, whether they are or are not on a similar journey. And when they find brothers and sisters who share their passion and hunger for the kingdom they take time to let those relationships grow, whether it is through face-to-face contact if that is possible, or even on discussion boards and email if it isn’t.

Being relational is an active lifestyle, looking to engage relationships, even at the most rudimentary level to anyone that cross their path. It may only be a greeting in passing at an airport, or a conversation in the grocery store line, but it says that people are important to Father and to me and I’m going to make room in my lives for others, and watch what God does with the relationships he gives me…

Don’t go this alone, or wait quietly in your home for fellowship to break out. Just live each day open-handed and gracious to everyone you can, without any agenda, and watch what God will do through you to bless others, and through others to encourage you.

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Egotist or Lover?

As I wrote earlier Sara and I are reading through The Christ of the Mount by E. Stanley Jones while she gets ready to leave for work in the morning. This book is a classic study through the beatitudes. Writing about the first two beatitudes he wrote:

The end of human life will be either the finished egotist or the perfect lover. The first beatitude is the end of the egotist, the second is the beginning of the lover. It is the nature of love to insinuate itself into the sorrows and sins of others.

Wow! That feels like a slap of a two by four upside the head. I’m not sure we get to perfection on either of those two extremes, but I like his point nonetheless. Living in the love of the Father, will continually call you outside of yourself to love others in the same way you’ve been loved. If we don’t learn to live in the Father’s love, then or lives grow increasingly ego-centered and narcissistic. We may try to make it look loving, but all we do is manipulate people and situations around us to get what we want.

Certainly living to ourselves will produce the egotist, but interestingly enough so will our service of religion. Religion still puts the focus on our selves, even when we’re trying to produce for God. In the end we still become an egotist instead of a lover. I want to learn that lover part more every day and embrace Jesus purpose for my life each day, rather than trying to fulfill my own agenda, no matter how convinced I may be that it comes from him.

Travel the next few weeks will take me to Sacramento this weekend, and then over Memorial Day weekend to the Detroit area in Windsor, Ontario. From there I’m going to make a quick stop in Iowa to help a school district sort through an anti-harassment policy near Des Moines. I’ll be there May 30 and 31. After that it’s Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and then Sara and I hope to take a vacation into the Pacific Northwest… But only, if the Lord wills…

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What A Restful Weekend

I’m a bit behind on email, so please don’t give up hope if you’re waiting for a reply. I’ll get to you. I’m editing a book now and that has got me busy, but I had the most incredible weekend. For the first time in a long time, I just hung out with Sara. We did do some yard work in her growing garden in the back (not my favorite thing) and spent some time with my son who came home unexpectedly. It was great and needed. Without periodic times away from everything lifejust bogs us down. We weren’t made to keep rushing from one thing to the next. Sometimes it is so good to just sit back and do nothing! It was that kind of weekend for me.

Don’t miss the latest God Journey podcast. I interviewed some wonderful brothers from Ireland and they tell their story of how God called them to dismantle the growing institution they had 25years ago and taught them to live as his community in and around Dublin. It’s a fabulous story. It is similar to the Fairlee story I told some years ago…

I also got a call from NPR (National Public Radio) that did an interview on the recent goings on at BridgeBuilders and are supposed to play some bits of that on their Wednesday morning show, ‘Morning Edition’ but don’t hold me to that. If they put it on the web, I’ll try to enclose a link later. [Update 4/26 – Link to NPR story. Click on the ‘listen’ button at the top of the page.]

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What Time Zone Am I In?

I thought returning home from Ireland wouild give me time to post some thoughts on this blog, but it has been a whirlwind since I got home from Ireland. I had tons of work to catch up on at home as well as keeping up with email, podcasts and other wild things in my life. I’m also helping a friend rewrite a book that we’re hoping to publish soon and tunr into a movie. More on that in an upcoming blog.

But today I had to drive down to Orange County to do a BridgeBuilders presentation for a group of California educators. Now I am at the Orange County ariport waiting for a late night flight to Seattle, where I present a workshop tomorrow for the Washington Conference of School Attorneys on BridgeBuilders mediation strategies for cultural and religious conflicts. I have to be there first thing in the morning, and I have yet to recover from Ireland. After the conference I’m meeting a friend for lunch before catching a 5:00 flight back to Orange County to get my car and then tackle the (hopefully!) 90 minute drive home.

I actually plan to pass out this weekend. The last couple of months have been exhausting and I am far behind on so many things. I hope that doesn’t sound like complaining; it’s just the reality. Though I’m at the end of a pretty concentrated stretch, I love leaving it all on the field at the end of the day. I really enjoy each of the things God has put in front of me and enjoy waking up every morning to see what each day will hold. For now, I only hope for enough strength to be coherent tomorrow and responsive to their questions with helpful answers.

Then I’ll look forward to a recuperating weekend at home. After all that, I might get back to some intelligible postings here!

I’m not too loaded up in May. I’ll continue working on the book and have a trip planned early in the month to Sacramento, CA and later in the month to Canada, across the border from Detroit. Oh, yeah! Sara and I also have our 31st Anniversary in the middle of the month. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. She is such a treasure.

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Christians and Culture

I often think Christianity Today misses the important realities of what God does in the world, so when they hit one out of the park I’m not only surprised, I want to share it. In the March 2006 issue of Christianity Today, they printed an article on the influence of believers on culture entitled, Loving the Storm-Drenched by Frederica Mathews-Green. It is the most incredible article I’ve ever read on the subject and I wanted to shout AMEN virtually with every paragraph. I’ll quote some excerpts here, but I’d really encourage you to follow the link above and read the entire article.

What’s more, (the culture) is already changing – constantly, ceaselessly, seamlessly – changing whether we want it to or not, in ways we can’t predict, much less control. If you take the cultural temperature at any given moment, you will find that some of the bad things are starting to fad, and improvement is beginning to appear; simultaneously, some good things are starting to fall out of place, and a new bad thing is emerging.

Not only can we not control this process, we can’t even perceive it until changes are so far developed as to be entrenched. Chasing the cultures is a way to guarantee that you will always be a step behind the times.

God has not called us to change the weather. Our primary task as believers, and our best hope for lasting success, is to care for individuals caught up in the pounding storm. They re trying to make sense of their lives with inadequate resources, confused and misled by the Evil One and unable to tell their left hand from their right.

This focus on an external, public sign is contrary to the mission of the church. Christ planned to attract people to himself through the transformed lives of his people.

But if someone should actually see our billboard, and be intrigued, and walk in the door of a church, he would find that he had joined a community that was just creating another billboard.

Culture is not a monolithic power we must defeat. It is the battering weather conditions that people, harassed and helpless, endure. We are sent out into the storm like a St. Bernard with a keg around our neck, to comfort, reach, and rescue those who are thirsting, most of all, for Jesus Christ.

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The Power to Bless

One more day here and then we will get on a plane Easter Sunday morning to head on home… and sometime on Easter afternoon I will get another hug from Aimee, my 16 month-0ld-granddaughter who is just learning to ‘hug back’. She gave me one on the day before I left and it was so amazing. I told her she has the amazing power to make so many people so happy just by giving them a hug.

And then I realized that we all have that power every day with people God might bring in our paths who need someone to love them.

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Ireland Update

I’m so sorry I’ve had such little time for updates this trip. I’m exhausted with all the running around we’re doing and the people we’ve met. But it has been FABULOUS! The people here are amazing and have taken to Sara and me as if we were long, lost friends having returned home. What an absolute joy. And amazingly enough the weather here has been superb. I’ve gotten a chance to play two rounds of golf during my stay and we’re headed out this morning to a men’s tournament with a bunch of the brothers around here. (Sorry, gals, none of the wives here seem to play golf!)

Anyway, a couple of days ago I recorded an interview with two of the brothers here who were involved in this group of folks dismantling their institution 25 years ago to learn to live as a community of God’s people in the Dublin area. We’ll use it on a future edition fo The God Journey. It’s fabulous. When we were talking about some of those things later in the day, one of the wives said how blessed she has been that all the relationships from those days have grown on over the years with such beauty, depth and grace. She wondered if they hadn’t laid it all down when Father asked them to if they would have the same relationships today. Wouldn’t it have been easier for them to end up in conflict over how things should be run, who should be in charge, and what they should be doing.

That got me thinking. Maybe that’s what happened back at the congregation I was with 15 years ago. I see now how God may have been asking us all to lay it down and walk away and if we had all those relationships wouldn’t have gotten shattered by the agendas of men. Hmmmm…. Some of us did walk away rather than fight those who wanted to take possession of God’s working, but if we all had, I think what she said would have been true. If our participation in the resurrection life of Jesus is found in our own willingness to lay our lives down when he asks, why wouldn’t there be a corporate expression of that? There are times when God does wonderful things among us and if we could just enjoy them for what they are instead of turning them into institutions, maybe our relationships wouldn’t get broken, maybe the kingdom would grow freely in the world, and maybe we would really see the living expression of his family in the world.

I’m sure you can’t ‘lay it down’ too often in this world. What we grasp for, we lose. What we give up we seem to be able to enjoy without being owned by it.

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You Gotta Hear This One

I’ll be honest, the audio isn’t very good on this one because of a mistake I made in recording it. But the quality of the content makes it worth it to listen anyway. What One Prayer Can Do is the story of how a prayer and a willingness to follow Father’s leadings can have astounding impact on an entire continent.

I don’t often recommend our podcasts here anymore, but if you’re not yet listening in there, this is one who won’t want to miss. People who think God can only use large institutions often argue that we must all be involved in them if we are going to impact the world. Here’s the counterpoint. Behind the scenes in Africa God is relationally connecting people in a way that is disarming tribal conflicts and opening the door to more effective governance, all in response to a simple prayer played out over 35 years. Imagine if there were hundreds of thousands of believers every day who would just follow the lamb wherever he leads them, not trying to impact the culture, but just being real one relationship at a time and see what God produces in that simplicity. This is what he wants for each of us.

Listen Here

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