HW Confessions [True Value]

"I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me," Mth. 25:35-36.

First I have to say SORRY for how long it has taken me to get back to uploading to this discipling blog! I have not stopped writing---and God certainly has not stopped working in our lives! I just have not had the time to edit & get pictures for the pieces I've been working on. I am in the midst of launching a photography business (which has kind of come up suddenly) and been very consuming. Several of you have encouraged me to 'tell the stories' even if at this phase of life I cannot put all the time into as much editing as I did to the first 39 entries. Just tell the stories of how God is revealing Himself to your family daily.

One friend's comment put it over the edge for me, 'I think it's great you are starting this photography business, but you CANNOT stop writing for your blog! Even if it's only once a month---do not stop! Your stories show moms how we show kids Jesus in every day!' Wow---how encouraging and humbling, this dear friend Natalie does not even have children! I was confused as to why she was even following this blog.

We continued to talk and then I realized it, what Natalie and I share is a childhood filled with the pain of many, many decisions made apart from God. How incredible is it that her hearts cry is to raise a family that seeks the Lord and she has not even started having children yet! If my stories of honesty regarding the difficulty of the process and the rewards God sprinkles throughout encourage families to lay their lives at His feet, then wow---I'll keep telling the stories! So, phase 2 of this blogging journey will need more editing eventually for the book I plan to compile the devotions in for my boys, but again God confirms what He keeps trying to teach me, 'it does not have to fit into a pretty little package to be used by Me. I use dirt to create!'

So, now for true confession time. Homework time has had me pulling out my hair lately. Really, all this frustration and aggravation at the end of an already long school day?! Asking Will and Wyatt to focus further energy into sitting activities when they long to run and wrestle (which they've restrained themselves from doing all day) has been pretty ugly. In my heart I wrestle with how much time I feel forced into a teaching role for school work that I think should resume tomorrow, during school hours, not in the precious little time we have as a family. Last night was particularly bad because we saved hw till after dinner which was also running late.

The whole time we were sitting there, I saw it, the twins minds were somewhere else. Honestly, so was mine. Added to that, Wyatt had a paper with the 'were you using your time wisely?' tell-tale comment in red. So, I had him complete what he had not done in class. Both boys' minds couldn't be further from first grade math! Both were ready for bed and the focus of counting backwards by 2's starting at 48 was putting us all over the edge.

Cut to bedtime and one argument over a book on CD between the twins room and Tad's room. "That's it, one more person out of bed or loud and it's a spanking," I yelled up. Several minutes later I hear voices and all I can think is, 'they have to go to sleep, they need more rest not less and they are still fooling around up there.'

I walk into my foyer to start up the stairs to put the kibosh on all the activity. I stop dead in my tracks at the bottom of the stairs because of what I hear, "Dear God, thank you for my family and my friends. Thank you for all the food I had today. Thank You that I have God money so I can fill a box with toys for a poor kid who lives far away. I wish everyone in my church could do this too and my school, I wish they could do this for Jesus. Amen. Ok, let's read our Bible now Wyatt," said William.

"No, I need to pray first, then we can read our Bible," Wyatt said and launched into a similar prayer, gratitude then intercession for those too easily ignored. Wyatt spoke about people without food. I remembered our conversation that morning at the breakfast table. While buttering a 2nd piece of cinnamon toast for Tad I said, 'boys you know what I'm thinking about while I butter you more bread? Pastor Joe showed us a photograph at church of a boy eating his one bowl of food for the day, seated by the trash dump which he called home. It seems God has given us so much so that we can thank Him then share that with others."

A conversation that had happened 12 hours earlier with a whole lot of regular life filling up the in between and yet they remembered.

These were the boys I wanted to throttle only an hour earlier at the homework table. It was like God was saying, 'Jennifer, this is what really matters. Yes, encourage them to work whole heartedly at whatever they set their hands to, but understand that school is just a tiny piece of the equation of what I'm doing in their lives. Never let forgetting agendas, going on yellow for writing notes when they are supposed to be working independently in class, and incomplete classwork assignments take your eyes off of what I am growing in them. Never let them get so frustrated by their lack of focus that they take their eyes off of Me and what I long to teach them which has nothing to do with counting backwards by 2's.'

Their vision was big and mine was small. I prayed, 'thank You Jesus that the frustration at the table did not carry over to creating defeat and anger in those little boys. Thank You that they dream big dreams about caring for those who do not have. '

Yup, I'm wiping the tears now as I write this. When we stand before Jesus He's going to ask us what we did with what we were given. These are the boys who will dump all their "God," "Save," and "Spend" bags of money into the rice bowl collection for feeding the hungry at church. They will go help a neighbor weed, totally unsolicited. They seem to know God's going to ask if we reached out with mercy and kindess or did we only reach in to build our own empires? I'm pretty sure counting backwards by 2's from 50 isn't going to be on the roll call. Eternal value is way too easily trumped by all these very temporary distractors. Give us eyes to remain focused on true value even when every voice screams to pull our attention away.

*picture is one of the apology notes the twins wrote for writing notes with their friends during classwork time. Apparently this was started by a note Wyatt received that said, "Wyatt likes Joy."

Gamblin' Time [Trust]

“There is no room in love for fear. Well formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life---fear of death, fear of judgment---is one not yet fully formed in love,” 1 John 4:18.

GAMBLIN' TIME

The great gamble: to let them choose. God enters this Free Will arena armed with a trumping sacrifice and a consuming nature that IS ferocious love. He is fully prepared to be rejected and fully prepared to be embraced. He spares no cost and He counts no costs while He lavishes His love indiscriminately, wastefully, and unabashedly. He’s in hot pursuit of those who will respond to His still small voice that beckons a soul to come and find rest in a restless world.

He knows He’ll be scorned by many more than He’ll be loved, yet He is undeterred. He is fully acquainted with the grief and shame His loyal children will often bring to His name. He grins when we are indignant at the idea of ‘forgiving 70x7’ as He calculates the number of times He’s shown forgiveness to each one of us scoffers. He tries to raise our downcast and weary souls towards Him, yet we pledge our allegiance to the distracters of this world. Yet, He woes still. He takes the gamble, paying the price to make the wrong right and invites us into communion with Him. He’s a gamblin’ Man!

Discipling my boys helps me to understand just a bit more about this love of a Father who pours into His children with whom there will be no guarantees. Guaranteed reciprocation of a passionate love, well, it’s just not there. The start of my discipling journey was rooted in the the fear of ‘what if’s’ which crowded and cluttered my brain to the point of massive frustration. My fears loomed large through our devotion time---what if the boys did not chose to know the redeeming grace of their Father? What if they did choose the path of a fool who rejects God and accumulates misery quicker than credit card debt?

My devotion time was my personal fire insurance: get them into heaven and outta hell. So when I met interruptions in Bible time my frustration would mount. It was a regular Jerry Lewis wipe-a-thon: three bottoms, two spills, three sets of hands, three snotty noses, and one head full of oatmeal. How was I to lead these boys into God’s kingdom with these constant interruptions? Wasn’t it all supposed to be more serene and Little House on the Prairie- like? There were just too many tears, too many messes, too many time outs, too many times of lost patience and yelling. At this rate I could barely get breakfast cleaned up before it was time to begin lunch, much less disciple these boys!

This is all a reference to when they were young, however, now as my boys are 7, 7, and 8, it’s not much different. Slightly less chaos ensues on a regular basis, but often our table time is still full of the messes I thought we’d be done with by now. Our first day of school this year Chris worked from home so he could see the boys off. He decided to lead Bible time at the breakfast table. Since he is always at work during Bible time, surely he must have been thinking, ‘this pattern has been in place for a long time now, I bet this is going to be a really cool discipling time with my boys.’

Well, Will and Wyatt, both within 3 minutes of each other wiped up the frozen blueberry juice puddles on the table with their first day of school shirts instead of napkins, a water cup was knocked over covering the table in water, frozen blueberries (a coveted breakfast treat) had left their name sakes impression on all 3 boys hands and faces instead of the spoon that lay right beside their plate, and one interruption was met with another, repeatedly.

I saw Chris’s frustration and felt my own. Wasn’t it supposed to be smoother than this? “This is why I wrote the devotions,” I whispered to Chris. “I get it, the whole process can be very frustrating. Sometimes it can also be pretty awesome. Mostly it’s just run of the mill. But one thing I know is His truths ARE sinking in, there is no denying that.”

I questioned the worth of doing this devotion time for years and God just kept showing me juice for the squeeze in the most unexpected ways (talked about in other devotions). We were obeying God’s commandment to take His precepts and ‘get them inside of you and then get them inside your children. Talk about them wherever you are, sitting at home or walking in the street; talk about them from the time you get up in the morning to when you fall into bed at night,” Deut. 6:1-8.

God also showed me that anything practiced in fear is doomed from the start. He is slowly prying my fingers from the fairy tale I’d been fabricating in my mind and attempting to create in real life. Little boys and fairy tales are quite simply oil and water. God was asking me to find Him in the midst of my mess, not after the mess was cleaned up.

God revealed my desire for a fairy tale life that placed Him in a neat little box and removed Him as a necessity in my life. He questioned my motives and my desire to know Him in His intimate roles the Bible calls Him to be: Friend, Intercessor, Redeemer, Rescuer, Sustainer…. How was I to come to know the Lord in these roles if this discipling life could be packaged so neatly and full of guarentees?

To move forward in my discpling journey with the Lord and discpling my boys toward knowing the Lord, two more dreams had to be given an unceremoniously burial. First---having regular Bible time would erase (or at least drastically reduce) the number of tears and quarrels that spilled over from too many of our days. God said no. There will be tears, there will be fights, there will be bonking on the heads, there will be yelling, there will be spankings---find Me there and see what I have to teach you. I figured, what’s the point then? He said, ‘to know Me,’ not to make your life easier. That’s discipleship Jennifer.’

Second dream to be buried---that devotion times would guarantee hearts that would respond to God’s invitation of love. Oh, ok the messiness of daily life in a Christian home I was coming to grips with, but no guarantee that the boys would come to know and love the Lord?! How was I to give that up?

God asked me to consider His heart for His children. He has taken a huge gamble with us. He could have programmed His creatures with obedient hearts that quickly responded to His love. Instead, He took a huge gamble with us by allowing this free will to reign. He was asking me to share my heart for knowing the Lord through His Word, as He’s commanded in Scripture, and that was it. I was not responsible or accountable for the decisions my boys would make with that information. I was accountable to teach them God’s Word. They would be accountable for the decisions they would make concerning it. Scary, but it lightened the load I felt. I was accountable for teaching them and sharing my heart, as He has commanded. They were responsible for the decisions they made regarding that discipling.

If perfect love casts out fear, I had to allow God’s perfect love to penetrate all my fears so I could release them and be free to share my love relationship with God with my boys. I moved away from fire insurance and into a sharing of His abundant goodness and grace throughout every generation. As much as I would still choose a Little House on the Prairie-like devotion time, I have waved the white flag on that dream and accepted the happy and not so happy chaos that often ensues around here that encircles everything we do in a day, including our Bible time. I’m willing to partner with God in this great gambling adventure for the hearts and souls of His children and there doesn’t have to be any guarantees for me to be sold out for His cause.