Today, God affords me some perspective

I heard a couple of weeks ago about a couple who had twins, a boy and a girl, born at 21 weeks gestation. They did not survive.

Things like this hit me much harder now than they did before I had a little one of my own. I sit and read updates on Facebook and cry.

But after I stand up from the computer, real life hits me smack in the face. Today, my little girl will not nap. I have tried five times today to get her to fall asleep, and only once has it worked, for about 45 minutes.

I tell her I love her, give her to her dad, and tell him to leave the house. Because, Hon? Mama needs a break.

But then I remember this family, unknown to me personally, but not at all anonymous to their Creator. I remember that they are mourning the loss of their precious babes, and all the hopes and dreams and anticipation and prayer they had stored up for them. And I have to remember that this couple would likely give anything for a few years of sleepless nights and napless days.

So I stop my complaining and eye rolling, and I offer thanks for my tired, cranky girl. And I repent of my thanklessness.

Making room

When Joe travels through the week, I often park my car in the middle of our two-car driveway when I return home from running errands. I figure, Hey, it’s just me and G. No one else needs to park here. My reasoning has always been that I’ll be out again before Joe comes home, and I can park on one side of the driveway when I get back from my next errand.

But once or twice, Joe has come home and I’ve still been in the middle of the drive, so he’s had to park at an odd angle to make sure his car isn’t sticking out in the alley. And then I get blocked in because of how he parked.

This week I’ve harbored a lot of resentment and anger towards Joe because he’s been gone and I’ve been home alone with G, who is sick. I’m tired and getting sick myself, and suddenly, in my mind, Joe can’t do anything right. I apologized on the phone one night, only to turn around and think of something else to be mad about 24 hours later.

So, when I took the dogs out this morning and saw that my car was still in the middle of the driveway and realized that I’m probably not going anywhere today with a {still} sick kid, I thought, Whatever. I’ll just leave it there and Joe can park wherever when he gets home.

But then I thought, How would I feel if I came home after a long week of travel and Joe’s car was in the middle of the driveway? I would be hurt – like, Didn’t you miss me? Weren’t you anticipating my arrival? Weren’t you looking forward to having me home? Why the *bleep* did you leave your car in the middle of the driveway?!

So, I moved my car over and made room for Joe. And in the simple act of moving over in the driveway, I moved some junk over in my heart and made space for him there, too.

In loving memory

I got a call yesterday that my Paw-Paw, Lyle Ballard, had died in the night. He told my grandmother he loved her, went to sleep, and woke up in glory.

Our 2010 visit to Tennessee

He lived eighty full years on this earth. He grew up in rural Kansas alongside a brother and sister. His parents loved him and raised him well. He served his country. He married well, worked hard, and saw three children and four grandchildren come into the world. He missed the birth of his first great-grandchild by only two months. He and his wife of almost sixty years walked through highs and lows together. They saw golden years and seasons of gray clouds. I am amazed at these two people who spent seventy-five percent of their lives together, and whose love I know was stronger at the end than at the beginning. I can only ask God for a love so strong and blessing so great.

Paw-Paw was a caretaker, in every sense of the word. He grew a huge garden in their backyard every year. The abundance fed family, friends and neighbors. Paw-Paw loved watching the birds from his back deck, and he fed them year after year (constantly battling squirrels on their behalf!).

Rarely did we leave Paw-Paw’s house without some sort of gift – the starter of a plant we’d admired, tools for Joe’s ever-growing collection, even benches that Paw-Paw built himself. He decided we needed them after we told him about the patio that Joe built that didn’t yet have any furniture.

Thankfully, Joe and I were able to visit Paw-Paw and Grandma just over three weeks before his death. As always, we sat on their back deck sharing stories for long hours. Paw-Paw and Grandma told us about a particular house they’d rented where there were no closets in the bedrooms. Paw-Paw built closets and made all kinds of additional improvements to the home – so much so that their landlady reduced their rent!

Grandma said, “Every place we ever lived, he left it better than when we first moved in.”

And so he did – not just with the places he lived, but with the lives he touched, particularly those of his family. We love and miss him so, but thankfully mourn with hope.

Paw-Paw was raised in a rural Baptist church in Kansas. I believe he learned his quiet, solid faith as a very young boy. When he prayed before meals, he always began with, “Father, we thank Thee.” It always made me smile, because it sounded quaint, but I knew he spoke it with such reverence for the Lord.

So, Father, we thank Thee…for the life of Lyle Ballard, and for the legacy he passed down to us, his family.

These are all the photos we have of Paw-Paw from our wedding

Mentoring: A summary

You might want to check out parts one, two and three.

A mentoring relationship should be something that happens naturally, without force. It should be something that happens because two people find themselves walking alongside one another during a particular season of life when one needs the other. A mentoring relationship really must be a friendship that one day wakes up and recognizes itself as more than just a common friendship, but a spiritual relationship. A mentor can stick it out with her friend when the going gets tough, because she trusts the work of the Holy Spirit in that friend.

Mentoring isn’t about diagrams or worksheets or lesson plans or going door-to-door with gospel tracts. It isn’t even about multiplying oneself to make disciples. However, in the best of mentoring relationships, that is exactly what happens.

Thanks for chiming into this conversation over the past week. What do you think are the “requirements” for a healthy mentoring relationship?

Mentoring: A natural affinity

This is part three of a four-part series on mentoring. You can read about my earlier experiences, both negative and positive.

Partway through college, I first heard the word mentoring. I thought to myself, “It kind of sounds like discipleship, but less important and official.” I now realize that the concepts of discipleship and mentoring are similar, but they have very different connotations in my mind because of the context in which I learned each. Mentoring is now the word that I prefer, but I believe the two terms are basically interchangeable.

During my last two years of college, I joined what my church called a Shared Life Group, or SLG. It was the most interesting group I’d ever been a part of, primarily because of the diversity ages and life situations. There were newlyweds, an engaged couple, a young family with children, a couple and their college-aged son, two empty-nesters, and a set of grandparents. I learned a lot from watching multiple generations of people interact with one another and with God.

During my senior year of college, after about a year in the SLG, I took the liberty of inviting myself over to one woman’s house for tea. (I brought my own very special tea and shared it, so I felt it wasn’t too much of an imposition.)

Over the course of the next three years, I met fairly regularly with my friend from SLG. I became progressively more honest and more comfortable with her. She walked with me as I graduated college, moved back to my hometown, explored foreign mission opportunities, found a job, met and fell in love with a man, accepted his proposal, prepared for and entered marriage, went through the most emotionally and spiritually challenging year of my life, endured and enjoyed the ups and downs of married life, applied for graduate school and found myself expecting my first child – and those were just the big things!

Eventually, my friend became one of the first people I called with any emergency or bit of good news. And, over time, she started to call me with her own emergencies and bits of good news. Most phone calls end with prayer. Laughter and tears are often sprinkled into the mix. And we still meet for tea when we can.

Tomorrow I’ll tie up some loose ends. In the meantime, tell me: What is the best experience you’ve had in a mentoring relationship?

Mentoring: What went right

You might want to start with part one, “What went wrong.”

In reality, it was only my first year in campus ministry that I didn’t “click” with my discipler. The following year, one of my best friends was on staff and we had a great mentoring experience – one that continues today, as we live in the same town, are involved in the same Shared Life Group, and are married to men who also happen to be very good friends. This friend and I have walked through all of the ups and downs of life together for the last four or five years.

My last two years of college, my discipler was a full-time staff member who had a real gift for building friendships with young women. She also exhibited a quality essential to mentoring: self-disclosure. She was willing to share her own shortcomings and even her struggles as a single woman trying to date – things that many mentors would want to hide in an effort to save face. Although we don’t see each other very often, we keep in touch. And you can bet that when she finally met her husband and married him, I was at the wedding with several other women whose lives she had deeply impacted. And now, when she posts pictures of her new baby girl to Facebook, I comment and then e-mail her for advice on which baby books I should read.

My junior year of college, I met a freshman who wanted to get plugged into our campus ministry. I started meeting with her, but I didn’t rush into a formal discipleship relationship. When we met together, we shared how we were doing and what we were thinking. I often shared with her my love for international students, my passion for foreign missions and my desire to reach Muslims with the gospel of Jesus. Before I knew it, my friend was rooming with an international student, studying abroad, and interning with a mission organization. She spent her first year after graduation traveling to four or five different countries, where she ministered to unreached people groups. She came to visit me recently and told me that she largely attributes where she has spent the last year to my influence.

Although I sometimes had rocky experiences with discipleship in college, it laid the foundation for learning how to share life with people in community, which I have learned is essential for survival as a follower of Jesus in this world.

What lessons have you learned from a mentoring relationship – either as the mentor or the mentee?

Mentoring: What went wrong

This is part one of a four-part series on mentoring relationships. Please join in the conversation!

When I was in college and part of a big campus ministry, we talked a lot about mentoring, but we called it discipleship. In those days, it was something formal that was supposed to have a trickle-down effect to everyone involved in the ministry: Paid staff members were to disciple student leaders, who were to disciple younger students. Those students were to share the gospel, win converts, and in turn disciple them. We had diagrams that showed how many people’s lives could be changed if each of us were to disciple just one new person each year.

In theory, this was a great system, meant to prepare young college students to enter the “real world” and live as Christ-followers. In practice it was…still just a system.

In my opinion, the main problem with discipleship as I learned it in college was that it was too mechanical and unnatural. Sometimes, “disciples” and “disciplers” were assigned. It made for some sticky situations, like the time I started discipling a girl who was my own age that I didn’t really like, and I just kind of quit. Or the times I felt like meeting with my discipler was a chore. And then there was that time that the girl I was discipling essentially broke up with me because she didn’t like the truth I felt she needed to hear. (Actully, that happened to me twice. I have a pretty spotty discipleship record.) We had all made what should have been an obvious mistake: We weren’t friends first. We weren’t walking through life together. We were trying to conjure a spiritual relationship out of nothing. We were meeting once every week or two to share the gospel with a fellow student, or to learn a new leadership theory, or to study a passage of scripture together.

Although I’m a little cynical, I’m not being directly critical of the campus ministry I was involved with or the women who discipled me. But now, with a few years’ distance, I can see some flaws in the system. There are also notable exceptions, which I’ll share in my next post.

What experiences – positive or negative – have you had in discipleship or mentoring?

One word for 2011

You know my non-resolution solution. You know “my” words from 2010. Now it’s time for me to share with you my word for 2011.

DEPTH

Lately, I have been so hungry for more. More of God’s Spirit. More of his presence. More intimacy with him. And yet…I have been so undisciplined in pursuing him.

In my spiritual life, I often feel that I am on one of those wobbly children’s toys, trying to maintain my balance. For me, the balance I am trying to strike is between grace and legalism (or perfectionism).

It's hard to maintain balance!

Because of how I was impacted by my choice of words in 2010, I felt strongly that whatever I chose for 2011 should again be my deepest prayer and heart’s cry. So, depth it is. My desire is to put down deep, deep roots in my relationship with God. I want to end 2011 more at rest in the Lord than I have ever been.

I don’t have a plan. There’s no twelve-step program for this. I’m not going to read through the Bible in a year. I have no stack of spiritual books to read. I’ve only got one word. But I think that’s enough.

Did you choose a word for 2011? What’s is it?

Christmas Eve and new beginnings

Gosh, I love our church’s Christmas Eve service. It’s worshipful. It’s upbeat. We take communion. I get those traditional, ooey-gooey Christmastime feelings. And yet, we still take time to listen for God and see what he might have for us.

Joe and I drove to my parents’ on Christmas morning and spent a couple of wonderful days with my parents and sister. I’m still at my parents’ house; Joe had to go back home tonight. [Sad face.]

Mom, Mollie and I are doing some after-Christmas shopping tomorrow and then, on Tuesday morning, I’m off to visit one of my friends and her wonderful, zany family. I’ll be back home on the 30th, in plenty of time to ring in the new year with Joe.

On a different note, one of my blogging buddies has an awesome way to forgo the traditional New Year’s resolution in favor of something unique and inspiring.

Last year, I weighed in about New Year’s resolutions. But, thanks to Alece’s suggestion, I did choose two words for 2010. And I have “my word” for 2011 ready to go.

Later this week, I’ll share some of what I saw God do through my 2010 words. And then I’ll share my hopes for 2011 as I reveal my new word.

I encourage you to read Alece’s post and consider whether or not her “one-word challenge” is something you’d like to try. If you decide to choose a word, make sure you check back later in the week to share it!

The ministry of reconciliation

Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).

At our wedding, our pastor spoke about the ministry of reconciliation that Paul wrote about in his second letter to the church at Corinth. I don’t remember what he said, but I know why Joe and I chose that passage.

The ministry of reconciliation is what I want to build my life around: the fact that God loved his creation (loved me!) so much that he took the most drastic measures to make sure we could live in peaceful, whole relationship with him.

Part of the beauty of what God has done for us is that we now have the same opportunity to bring reconciliation – between God and man and in our relationships with others. With this opportunity comes responsibility.

Joe and I are committed to the ministry of reconciliation among those who are both far and near to the kingdom of God. We want to be a part of seeing our family, neighbors, friends and community transformed by the radical love of Jesus.

2 Corinthians 5:14-21