What a Broken Person Has

By

 

 

 

“I happened to be in the courtyard when it happened.” He said it quiet. Reverent.

“About sixty missionaries were driven in and herded together, awaiting execution. What impressed me most of all about these people was their amazing fearlessness. There was no panic, no crying for mercy. Roman Catholic and Protestant alike… they awaited death with perfect calm.”

He stops for a moment. Tears fill his eyes. “I’m convinced that there can be no salvation for us sinners except through the Redeemer, Jesus Christ. This terrible massacre has led me to look into the Scriptures.”

Then he tells the story of a thirteen year old girl.

Just before the carnage began, the golden-haired girl stepped out and went to stand before the governor. “Why are you planning to kill us,” she asked.  Her voice carried to the farthest corner of the courtyard.

“Haven’t our doctors come from far-off lands to give their lives for your people? Many with hopeless diseases have been healed; some who were blind have received their sight, and health and happiness have been brought into thousands of your homes because of what our doctors have done.

“Is it because of this good that has been done that you are going to kill us?” The governor’s head was down. He had nothing to say. There was really nothing he could say.

The golden haired girl continued. “Governor, you talk a lot about filial piety. It is your claim, is it not, that among the hundred virtues filial piety takes the highest place. But you have hundreds of young men in this province who are opium sots and gamblers. Can they exercise filial piety?

“Can they love their parents and obey their will? Our missionaries have come from foreign lands and have preached Jesus to them, and He has saved them and given them power to live rightly and to love and obey their parents. Is it then, perhaps, because of this good that has been done that we are to be killed?”

By this time the governor was writhing. Each word seemed to touch him to the quick. It was far more than a defense, that brave speech, it was a sentence. It was the girl who sat in judgment and the governor stood at the bar.

But the drama only lasted for one brief moment.

A soldier, standing near the girl, grasped her by her golden hair, and with one blow of his sword severed her head from her body. That was the signal for the massacre to begin.

“I saw fifty-nine men, women, and children killed that afternoon,” went on the gentleman. “Even in the moment of death every face seemed to hold a smile of peace.

“Is it any wonder, therefore, that such marvelous fortitude should have led me to search your Scriptures and to have compelled me to believe that the Bible is in very truth the word of God?”

 

~Testimony taken from a firsthand account written by missionary to China, Jonathan Goforth 

 

 

 

And how can we live Christ if we are living for the approval of man? And how can we eat Christ if we eat the world’s fare? And how can we walk the narrow road if we are too caught up on the broad path leading to destruction?

Before God, I repent.

Some things in life are worth dying for.

Some things are worthy to be set apart unto.

Many, many things are worthy of nothing but to be left behind, set aside, turned away from. Our very selves are considered as nothing… when we have The Pearl of Great Price, the Treasure worth giving everything up for.

May I die to all else, big and small, in living and in dying, each day, every breath. Jesus, may I live it true: All I have is CHRIST.

May 17, 2013

1 Comment

Filed Under: Brokenness, Christian Living, Missions

The other story you didn’t hear about but need to

By

 

 

 

When the hidden moved and the earth shifted violently and the buildings shook, we did too. And I remembered 2008 as we quaked on the third floor like birds perched on a shaking branch. Without wings.

On behalf of us all, I begged for mercy. Little girls pressed close, still in their pajamas.

Sometimes you are shaken apart and nothing … nothing … can put it back together again. And you want to pretend everything will be fine, that tragic dark won’t touch you, won’t mark you. But the tremors keep coming and sin’s after shocks remain and there really is no denying it. It’s part of living in this fallen and sinister world. The pain, the death, the unspeakable, it happens.

A friend calls to say he’s trapped in a broken city and can’t get out. Roads are blocked and lines are down. His entire apartment building disappeared into a dusty heap.

Where do you go from broken?

Preliminary reports say it could be bad, very bad. That the 7.0 quake combined with shallow depth means greater potential for damage.

And when Adam and Eve took that step, it was bad, very bad. There was no going back and no undoing it and the world’s entire future had one sure word hanging over it: death. 

 

How do you live with death?

We get outside of shifting cement  and rub shoulders with people. I tell the kids that’s what we are here for: to use the bodies we have and the minds we’ve been given and the time, that fleeting gift of time, to spend it all on someone else who has none of these things.

I know one day it will be me. I’ll be out of time. But until then, I pray for a way in. Let me be hope for someone today.

When the sun begins to go down on the day’s ruin, I can’t escape those rocked by tragedy. They fill my mind and capture my heart. I partake of their despair. But then I remember something. I remember the earthquake at the cross.

I remember that which rearranged someone’s life, upended their whole world, is the very thing that showed the way to God.

The broken places ripped the veil in two and made the way to God.

In the earthquake,  God is on our side. He is re-writing the story.

The breaking open is not the only news. The earthquake, the fire, the Boston bomb, the storm, the chemo treatments, the funeral notice.  These are not the only stories.

There’s always the ripped veil, the revelation of God. There is always another story. In the midst of the shaking, quaking mess, there’s the splitting of death tombs, the bringing forth of new life.

There is the way to God.

We must never forget!

As we prepare to shut down for the night, Jackson checks email one last time. “God’s people are there,” he says, reading from a colleague’s note. “Within 4 hours local believers had convened and were on their way. With them were tents, blankets, water, food… and hope. They’ll be there throughout the night.”

This is the story the world needs to know. In the dark and in the doom there’s the way to God. The broken has ripped clear through to heaven.

Always.

Today, be part of this story. 

{And pray for us as we are part of it here?}

April 20, 2013

3 Comments

Filed Under: Brokenness, Life Overseas

When you are looking for the resurrected life

By

 

 

When my arms opened and I pressed that Little Bit of a girl against my chest for the very first time, I’d no idea how my life would change. I’d no idea how a heart could bleed ragged after it had learned to protect itself so thoroughly.

There are some discoveries in life you’d rather not make.

I’d no idea that learning to trust God for the resurrected life… that Easter hope… would mean entering the darkness of the broken one first, that the two run side by side.

I had no idea that when we found the marks of abuse on our daughter it meant our stories would be written far different than I had hoped. And you are invited to read part of our broken story over at Not Consumed today… and more in the days ahead.

There are some days I just can’t do it any more. Even so, His story tells me death does not have the final say.

His Book tells me all authority resides not in cancer or abuse or statistics or predictions. All authority rests safely with the One is faithful to complete what He started in me. In us.

There are days when my choices add to the shattering. I fail miserably and struggle to find my footing once again. Yet once again He speaks. He says He is faithful not only to forgive, but to cleanse from all unrighteousness.

He intends to raise the dead to life.

There are times I slip in the darkness and falter blind and wish our stories had been written differently. But then I remember to focus the gaze on this: He is able to keep me from stumbling and will present us, the  broken ones, faultless before the throne… with great joy.

And this month, our memory verses remind us that He is faithful to take the small and grow it; faithful to strengthen us when we turn to Him; faithful to provide seed for sowing;  faithful to give us a way of escape in the midst of temptation.

Always, always, it comes back to Him. HE REMAINS FAITHFUL.  O ye of little faith!

This month, Amy has crafted this beautiful bracelet to wrap us in. For the moments during the day when our faith falters, we have a reminder that in all these things, He is faithFUL.

 

faithful2

 

 

If you are looking for a special gift for a mother, daughter, sister, friend, Amy’s scripture bracelets are perfect! She hand crafts each one to size and thoughtfully gift wraps before sending. Use code Love316 at checkout today and get the “God is Faithful” bracelet for $17. Wow!

 

Resources for your Monday:

April’s Scripture Memory Cards {printable, thanks to Stephanie!}

Entire Collection of Scripture Bracelets

Our Story at Not Consumed

 

Rest in His faithfulness today!

 

 

 

 

April 1, 2013

5 Comments

Filed Under: Adoption, Brokenness, Complete, Shepherding

The Coin

By

 

 

It was eighteen years ago that she gave us the coin.

That was before she accused Dad of running around with a young woman at church. Nearly split the church wide open. Dad came home with a shot gun and the counselor had to intervene and they’ve been seperated ever since.

But eighteen years ago was before all of that happened. Before tongues wagged and hearts broke and tears fell and things were never the same.

We were sitting at the supper table after church, Jackson and I. And Mom, she handed us a Canadian Maple.

“You’ll face hard times together,” she said. “Here’s something for you to put away for a rainy day, for when you just don’t have anything else.”

She slipped us the coin and we tucked it away and for eighteen years of marriage, while we traveled the world over and back again, that coin stayed in the attic, tucked away in its plastic sheath.

Until recently.

Jackson took it out.

He opened the safe where important documents are kept and he slipped the coin out and he looked at it.

“We need groceries,” he said.

I knew what the words cost him. I knew the pain of a hardworking man not able to fund a trip to the grocery store. But I also know something else about him… that walking the path of the Lord’s will is more important to him than anything else.

“The Lord’s going to take care of us,” Jackson continued. “He always has.”

He looked at me as he fingered the coin. The clock ticked and the fridge hummed and four little bodies lay tucked in their beds, oblivious to the choices of their parents.

“It’d be a shame to just spend this.” He said it thoughtful. Slow. The processing of a man intent on what’s best for his family.

I thought of the growing grocery list: bananas, bread, jelly, toilet paper, trash bags. I thought of the empty cupboards and the empty bank account and I knew they would stay empty.

“I want to invest it,” he says it slow, sure, sacred- like; an act of worship.

 

“What do you think about us selling this and giving the money to feed the Nuba people in Sudan?”

I choke back the tears and say YES! What better way to invest than in another person?

We get down on our knees and pray. “Thank You, Jesus,” I pray. “Thank You we get to be part of this, part of ministering to Your body. Thank You for the chance to give our best.”

The next day, Jackson goes to sell the coin. He returns home with $1500 cash, 15 crisp hundred dollar bills.

My man, he knows how to invest.

 

That Sunday we slip the bills into an envelope and write “Sudan” on it and we listen to the guest speaker, a Sudanese pastor.

“We take trip to Sudan,” he tells us. “We buy grain and take it into the Nuba mountains. My people are starving. They are hiding in caves and are being bombed every day. Life is hard. I cannot forsake them.”

And on this side of the world, brothers and sisters, an entire association of churches, pledge to help. We send two men with our Sudanese brother into the mountains of Sudan.

The mission is dangerous. Sudan is in turmoil and these men are entering the war zone.

The team gets stuck in Cairo. It takes days, then weeks, for the money transfer to go through. The rains are forecasted to begin any day in Sudan and when that happens, they will not be able to travel.

The team encounters one difficulty after another…they get sick, they can’t locate drivers who are bold enough to trek into the war zone, the money still won’t go through…

The team contacts us and asks everyone to fast.

We all feel the spiritual warfare of this mission. We know we battle not flesh and blood.

The call to fast goes out and we stop eating. At dinner time, the kids ask why I’m not having meal with them and I explain about the Nuba people and the need for God to provide a way. Jackson is working late…but fasting. Friends text to let each other know we are in this together.

All over our little town, we call on the Lord, asking Him to move His mighty hand. We pray for our brothers and sisters hiding in the Nuba mountains.

The Lord hears.

I get the message on a Monday morning:

“Team Nuba were able to get up the mountain, get the grain/oil/supplies to the people, and even pick up 500 refugees on the way back and safely transport them to a camp near the border.

Said they haven’t had sleep in 70 hours but they were in very good spirits. Their plan is to get rested up today and start the journey home tomorrow.
PLEASE DO NOT STOP PRAYING NOW!”

 

I fall to my knees and thank God. I ican see those faces, the mommas. The babies. All the blank stares.

But this time, I see the smiles.

It is such a sacred thing to be a part of, there is such a deep intimacy with the Lord. It is an hour before I can even call Jackson with the news.

All day, I break out in random song. When I pick oldest up from school, I excitedly tell him the news and we hoot and holler in the car.

 My Nuba sister is hiding in a cave somehwere with her children. But tonight, she will have food to give them. Tonight, she knows that the world hasn’t forsaken them, her brothers and sisters living in houses with heaping plates…well, she knows we care.

Tonight, she knows that her God delivers.

Jackson eats with us tonight, and he breaks the bread:

“Share with God’s people who are in need.

Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For 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…

Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for Me.

And if anyone gives a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward.

So do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.”

 

Jackson and I just look at each other.

We both feel it, the pleasure of God.

And as we eat our simple meal, we enter into our inheritance.

And I’m so full, I’m just about to pop.

Come back tomorrow, Thursday, June 21, for an update on the Sudan mission!

 

Invest means “to use, give, or devote (time, talent, etc.), as for a purpose or to achieve a profitable return.”

Sometimes when you need something the most is when you *need* to give it away.

We can spend a life or we can invest one.

“But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.  What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ.” Philippians 3:7-8

 

Linking up with Ann today

May 21, 2012

5 Comments

Filed Under: Brokenness, God Provides, Honoring God, Missions, Prayer, Sacrifice, Victory

When it feels impossible

By

I remember when it happened.

It was Christmas Day 2006 and since China doesn’t officially celebrate Christmas Day, it was also the log in date for our dossier. And it was the day I found out I was pregnant.

I stood in the shower crying. “How am I going to do this, Lord? How am I going to have an adopted child and a bio child at the same time?”

I was scared to death.

That’s when He reminded me He only gives gifts. And He had chosen Christmas Day for it all to come down just so that there would be no question about it in my mind. These babies were good gifts from the Father above.

And then the two girls came, 4 months apart in age, and I was officially *overwhelmed*. I learned that God’s gifts are not synonymous with ease and comfort and happy go lucky.

By the time our fourth child arrived, the third within 23 months, I was having some serious conversations with the Lord. “I know these children are gifts, Lord. But I can’t keep up. What You have given me, under these circumstances…well it is just too much for me.”

{That was another shower conversation.}

And right there while I was washing my hair, He said, “You’ve asked Me for more love. For more joy. To know Me more. You’ve asked Me for a deeper surrender to My Spirit and more power in your life.”

“Do you not recognize the answer when I give it?”

I was quieted… although it did not make anything easier.

Slowly, ever so slowly~ because I am pigheaded~ I began to understand the ways of a Savior.

He sends you into the storm to show you that He controls even the elements.

He allows your faith to be tested so that its object is Him alone.

He gives strength in weakness to remind everyone just where strength comes from.

Silly me. To ever think I could do anything to begin with.

Motherhood became and remains a daily exercise in faith. Some days I exercise well. Other days I skimp on the workout, wishing for an easier way.

I’m His disciple, among the crowds in Mark 6:35-37:

“By this time it was late in the day, so his disciples came to him. “This is a remote place,” they said, “and it’s already very late. Send the people away so that they can go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat.”

But he answered, “You give them something to eat.”

 

And oh, how motherhood puts us in the dusk of the day, the remote location, the late hour, our greatest time of need.  

And Jesus, He turns to us and says, “You give them something to eat.”

Seriously? He’s kidding, right?

But then we remember the ways of the Savior, how He doesn’t ask that we come up with our best shot…He invites us to bring all that pathetic absence of sufficiency to Him and watch Him do the miraculous.

He invites us to play a front role in the miraculous provision.

Yes. This is motherhood.

And at the end of the day, we gather up the excess.

Friend, I don’t have all the answers. Most days I wake up and feel the impossible pressing in. But I do know this: The impossible is an inviation to the miraculous.

So it’s good.

It’s all good.

 

February 23, 2012

9 Comments

Filed Under: Adoption, Brokenness, God Provides

When you want to scrap it all and start over…but you can’t

By

**Updated to include video at end.

 

For months now it’s sat in a box, right there on top of the bookshelf.

And when I take it down one night after the kids are in bed, my friends stop over for a look.

They even help glue a piece or two on before telling me, “The rest is a lost cause. You best scrap it and start over with a new one.”

And I don’t have the heart to tell them that this broken pitcher represents me…

…that one day I knew God was breaking me and I needed something tangible to represent what He was doing and so God and I, we had a ceremony. We went to purchase a pitcher.

We brought the pitcher home and went out on the patio and dropped the pitcher on the hard stones and it shattered.

I collected all the pieces and wondered how it could ever go back?

But we all know that God mends the broken-hearted and even though we can’t ever go back to the way things were before the break, we can be healed.

Right?

So I tried to put the pitcher together again.

Except I couldn’t.

And friends stopped by to help.

They couldn’t put it together either.

The best advice they could give was “scrap it and start over again. It’s too shattered.”

So the pitcher that represented me went into a box and sat in pieces up on the top shelf.

For months and seasons and a year plus of mornings and evenings, it sat.

It gathered dust.

And I wondered what the purpose was? What do we do with our brokenness?

Until one day I realized I had learned the first lesson: a lifetime of trying and effort and striving can never fix me. Neither is there a person on the face of earth who can fix me.

I can stop trying to piece the broken together.

So I started to live broken.

Then this:  As I lived broken, I began to embrace broken.

Bit by bit, when life pounded and I shattered, I let it.

I stopped resisting.

And when old temptations to fight back and avoid brokenness creep in, ancient words whisper across my heart, the story of another pitcher that was broken, shattered. Except this pitcher contained a torch and could it really be me?

“(Gideon) put trumpets and empty pitchers into the hands of all of them, with torches inside the pitchers.

“And they blew the trumpets and smashed the pitchers that were in their hands.  When they broke the pitchers, they held the torches in their left hands…” Judges 7

And aren’t I a jar of clay with the treasure inside? 

And can’t that precious light only be seen when the jar is broken… When there is nothing to hide it under? When the shell of self is shattered and broken away?

Brokenness is necessary for the glory that resides within to be seen without.

Brokenness is working glory for me.

Brokenness, therefore,  can safely be embraced.

After all, God promises to break but not destroy.

Isn’t this how Paul came to boast in weakness? In trial and distress and insult and difficulties and persecution?

He went from asking God to remove the hardship to exulting in the difficulty… because he learned  that through these very things  the power of Christ dwelt in him. (See II Cor 12)

And if he learned it, I can too… and you.

Oh, the power of Christ dwells within us. It’s never of question of “if.” The question is “how.” How does the life of Christ move from within to without?

When the clay pot is hammered, day after day, week after week. When month after month, the jar stays broken and shattered… and no effort is made anymore to try to put it back together.

When the pitcher is shattered and the torch is taken up in the hand, then Christ’s life can be raised high.

What is cracking your pitcher?

Can you see the wondrous purpose of the breaking?

And some days it is hard. The breaking hurts so bad. And I wish there were a sister nearby to stoop near and come alongside and say, “Remember the clay pot? I see the glory shining through!”

But there is none and I fall to my knees, wet hot lava dripping. It is true that we grow in dark, silent places. The seed breaks and births in it’s dark cave while the world carries on above.

There seems to be nothing celebratory about the breaking.

The babes see the lava, come to my side. “What’s wrong, mama?” And I hold them and say, “It’s okay, sweets. It’s good. It’s good.”

And I force the words through the lips, even when the insides resist: “Thank You, God. Thank You for this breaking. Thank You that the life of Christ is manifest in me. Thank You that Christ is in me, Oh! The hope of glory!”

And I pray for these babes that see so much. I pray for others who may look on. I pray for the life trail I am leaving behind. May they see a broken woman, a shattered mama, one that manifests the glory of God.

For when the broken clay pot gets swept into the trash bin, the glory will remain…

The Glory will always remain.

Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.  II Cor 4:10 NLT

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
November 11, 2011

3 Comments

Filed Under: Brokenness