rewriting the story

Do you ever find yourself stuck in a belief that just isn't working for you anymore, and yet you don't know how to stop believing it?  I DO!  (That's why I'm writing about this...)
Without even realizing it we all have beliefs that we are living into.  Ever heard of self-fulfilling prophecy?  Well, I think it turns out that the stories we believe actually become the storylines that we tell ourselves, and believe, and thus are true.  I'm not talking about prophecy in a way of I can tell you my future.  I'm talking about beliefs that run so deep in us that we live them out daily, hourly.  For example...I believe that I'm not beautiful.  And so I live this story line out.  I prove it to others.  My actions prove it, the way I look at myself reinforces this belief.  And eventually I have convinced everyone around me.  But you know what?!!!!  I can change this story line if I want to.  NO, I don't mean that I have to go out and get plastic surgery or a new haircut, or start putting make-up on.  What I mean is that I can choose to look at myself in the mirror and say "Lori, you are beautiful...yes, YOU!"  And I can choose to start telling myself that daily, hourly.  And soon this will become my belief that I am operating out of, relating to others out of, and convincing others of.  Nope, it won't turn me into a beauty queen.  I won't become the drop dead gorgeous type of beauty.  But I will become the type of beauty that glows out of someone who believes in themselves, and tells themselves that they have worth, value, beauty.  Simple as that.
Hmmm...okay, not so simple.  Because as we all know, beliefs are NOT EASY TO CHANGE.  Just look at Facebook.  Someone posts something political that you disagree with.  They even include an article to try and convince you of their belief.  You might read the article, and find your own belief only grows stronger.  Have they changed your belief?  I am 99% sure that they have not.  If anything you've only gotten more in touch with your own belief about the situation.  More stubbornly attached to your belief.  Maybe you will even go as far as looking for something to post on the contrary, or make a comment to your friend about why the article they've shared is rubbish (in a nice way of course!)  CHANGING BELIEFS IS FAR FROM EASY.
SOOOOOOO, is it possible?  That's a great question.  I'm asking that of myself right now.  Because frankly, I am paying a lot of money to go see a counselor once a week, and I'd like to put that money towards a new pair of jeans...or something else.  So I have some choices to make.  Am I going to keep telling my counselor week after week why my belief system is pathetic, but be unwilling to do anything to change it?  Am I going to keep seeing myself as a victim of my beliefs and pity myself that this is my lot in life?  Or am I going to start working on a new script for my life?  One that is healthier, freer, better?!!!!
Okay, I know I've got some pessimists out there in the crowd.  Heck, I am one of them!!!  I'm my biggest naysayer...I know how to tell myself "it's not possible" better than anyone else I know.  BUT I'm getting tired of my naysaying ways.  I'm getting bored with the small little existence that my naysayer has created for me.  I'm getting annoyed that this naysayer follows me everywhere, telling me that my dreams will never happen, that I'm just not "whatever" enough, and that my future is basically me trying to manage anxiety a little better.
blah, blah, blah
Ever seen the movie Beautiful Mind?  When I watched it I thought about how my fear voice is that other voice in my head.  While the movie is about a schizophrenic, I could relate to those other voices in the head that I wished weren't there.  And how I often listen to them and believe them.  BUT enough is enough.  IT's time for me to start listening to the voice of love. The voice of truth.  Time to ignore the voice of fear...that naysaying voice that is quite loud (even as I write this).
How did he manage to deal with those other voices?  Well, my memory isn't great as it's been at least 10 years (more) since that movie, but I remember that he had to choose which voices he was going to listen to.  The other voices never went away, but as he stopped giving them as much attention, those voices got dimmer.
AHHA!  So there might be hope for all of us.  But I'll speak for myself...because as I said already, it's really hard to convince others to change their beliefs.  It has to start with myself in this experiment that I'm proposing...
I'm nearly 40 years old (gasp!) but I'm thinking that it might still be possible for me to change my beliefs.  When I was the young age of 20 I worked at a summer camp (Hey all you New life ranchers!) and one of the counselors would always say to me "Lori, Lori what's your story?!!!"  I think she just liked how it rhymed, but I would always try to figure out what my story was in a brief sentence to answer her back with.  And for whatever reason, this little chant has stuck with me all these years!  In fact, it is what inspired me to write this post.  Because I'm asking myself that same question now--Lori, Lori, what IS your story?  What is the story that I believe about myself--my life?  Do I believe that there's hope for my future?  Do I believe that there are good things in store for me and my family?  Or do I think that all the good stuff is over, past, gone?  Do I believe I have gifts? or that I am a failure?  Do I believe God is with me and for me, or that he has abandoned me?  Do I believe that anxiety is the predominant player in my life, or that it is merely a challenge that is shaping me for the better?  What story lines am I going to believe?  It's actually my choice (and yours...).
Pushing "publish" on this post is a little vulnerable...because it means I am sharing with you something that I mean to work on changing in my life.  And so if I choose to believe I can change my story line...then I am not allowed to keep being victim of my story.  That feels a bit scary, because it's not going to happen overnight.  I mean, if it were that easy I would have fired my counselor last week.  BUT NO...rewriting a story takes time.  It takes practice, work.  I'm going to fall back into my old story lines sometimes.  And, actually that is where friends come into play.  Friends who love me and care for me and believe in me...they are important to the rewriting of my story.  And they are the ones who can help me think about what story lines I'm believing that might be holding me back from the truer story that I actually want to live out.
Well, there it is--Me trying to listen to what story lines are NOT worth keeping.   Trying to work on rewriting the story lines that I am believing and living into.  It's not easy work...but I invite you to consider asking yourself "What is my story?"  What story do you believe about yourself?  Is it helpful to you or holding you back from dreams?  Are there story lines that you've been repeating for years that it's time to let go of?

Winter, soul seasons part 3

Soul seasons are not always as distinguishable as the seasons experienced up north (or for my Aussie friends--down south).  Sometimes the seasons of our souls are subtle like the seasons in Florida or Southeast Asia.  But occasionally we go through a season in our lives when it is obvious that we are experiencing drought, or death--where it feels like our souls are bare of all that is comfortable, known, and bright.  In those times we wish we could escape the cold and the discomfort and feel the warmth of spring, the hope of new life.
This past March--when spring was breaking through the winter soil--I found myself descending into the darkness of winter.  After spending so much of my effort and time on trying to fix my problems--namely Noah's eczema--without relief, I began to experience despair and anxiety.  I had gone all out trying to figure out how to heal Noah's skin.  I didn't want to use steroid cream, so we pursued natural alternatives.  We were eating gluten free, dairy free, processed free...basically everything free.  It was such an extreme way of eating that it made it hard (impossible) to eat out or even at other people's homes.  It was exhausting, but I did it because I truly believed it was going to heal Noah of his eczema.  Instead, we watched his skin get worse and worse.  We pressed on because I thought it was detox...and that soon it would heal.  But then Noah got impetigo from a classmate.  Impetigo for most children is minor...but not for skin compromised by eczema.  This began the downwards spiral for both Noah's skin, and my emotional stability.  Even after the impetigo was treated, Noah's skin was looking worse.  He would scream when water touched his skin, making showers nearly impossible.  Finally, we succumbed to the steroid cream that I had been so fearful of.  By this time I was desperate for relief...yet still fearful of all the worst case scenarios I had read about surrounding steroid cream.  But it seemed we had little choice...so I made my first step towards surrender and letting go of control.
Who likes to feel out of control?  Me, me!!  (yeah, right!)   Life feels like it's flowing and smooth when it seems all is under control.  When disruptions occur we scurry to bring things back in alignment--to get things under control again.  But what happens when things don't "get back under control" easily?  When life feels out of control and we really don't know how to fix it?  It's unpleasant to live in that space where things aren't as we want them to be.   To let go and let be.  To choose life despite the fact that life isn't as we imagined or idealized.   For me this took the shape of health issues that wouldn't resolve quickly.   Facing my inability to "heal" my son's skin felt like failure.  It also presented itself as an immovable obstacle to our family's ability to enjoy life and move forward (sans eczema).   I had obsessed over the perfect diet to heal my son's eczema, and pictured life happily ever after once it was healed.  I had imagined everything working out well, and counted on it.  But when my plan backfired and we found ourselves making dermatologist appointments, driving three hours to Miami to see a specialist, and rubbing steroid cream all over Noah as thick as peanut butter...I was at the end of myself.  "I couldn't heal Noah.  My plan didn't work.  What went wrong?!!"   How could this be a part of the plan?  I had prayed that God would heal Noah, I had prayed for wisdom on how to help Noah get better, but I had not been ready to accept that his skin might not be healed...or that the healing could come from a more traditional approach (steroid cream).  Because things didn't go as I had imagined, I felt stuck.  How would we ever get to that "happily ever after" part of life?  I sunk into a sea of despair and anxiety.  I guess you could say that anxiety is my default when I feel out of control and I don't know how to fix it.
Well, since it's highly improbable that anxiety just sprouts up out of nowhere, I think it's fair to say that I was finally facing the seeds of fear and worry that were deeply rooted in my life.  Life mantras that I had built my belief system on were baring themselves.  My sense of failure was rooted in a (mis) belief that it was all up to me to heal Noah so that we could move on to the "happily ever after" part of our lives.  I had this idea that I needed to fix all that was wrong in my life so that I could be happy and free.

Remember that verse my friend shared with me a few years back? (see soul seasons part 1)

"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."

Enter the dark night of the soul (or the winter of the soul).
Easter was on the horizon and I thought to myself "well, maybe I will have a resurrection experience in my life this Easter."  That was me hoping that I would pull up and out of my depression quickly.  Easter came, Easter went, but the darkness did not dissipate.  It became obvious that this was not a quick fix sort of crisis.  It wasn't going to be one of those times that a bandaid solution could lift me out of the pit of despair.  May came, May went.  June came, June went... I have to say that I was beginning to wonder just how long this "winter" was going to last.  Two months? Three months?  Meanwhile, I was searching for a counselor that could help me--but this was no easy task having just moved to Florida.  Even finding a few friends whom I could lean on proved difficult--who likes to make new friends when they're in the midst of a dark season?!  Ha!!!  (The good news is that you know they're real friends if they like you when you're at your lowest point!)

In the past few months I finally sense a slow creeping up and out of the pit of darkness, but I have still not found myself standing on top of a hill in the summer of my soul.  I would say that I'm somewhere between the end of winter and early spring--when the two seasons blur and you're still not sure if spring is breaking forth or winter is still unrelenting.  There are days when I see glimpses of new sprouts, places where death has happened and new life is finally making its way through the winter soil.  But there are days when all I see are the bare branches of a winter tree--wondering when I will feel the glory of leaves covering my tree once again.  When I will feel the warmth of the summer sun on my back, and hear the songs of the birds as they perch on my strong (weathered) branches.

I am seeing that death really is necessary for new life to spring up.  And just like we experience the four seasons over and over again each year, soul seasons come and go and are not merely a one time event.  Sometimes the death might be small and barely noticeable.  A small realization that opens our blind eyes to see something we hadn't seen before.  A chance to let go of something in our lives that was holding us back.  Other times the winter is grander and longer, and we truly wonder if spring will ever come.  But even far north in Mongolia and Alaska, summer arrives every year--no matter how long, cold and dark the winter was.  Spring always comes.

And so as I live in the midst of a long winter, I am finding that my way forward is to surrender to the death and rest of winter.  In the winter time a seed is resting in the cold winter soil, waiting for when the temperature is right for it to break through the soil.  But the seed cannot force this process to happen any faster than nature will allow it.  And so really, winter is about learning to surrender, learning to rest, and learning that it's not about the seed's effort to sprout--but about the timing.  If the seed did not let go and die, making its way into the cold winter soil, it would not experience the spring when life begins to flow from it once again.
And so I wait.  Can I feel the nourishment of the winter soil, healing me so that I can bloom when tis time?  Can I allow myself to be but a small seed, fertilized by the nutrients I need in order to grow once again?   Can I trust that spring will come?

While it's so much easier to say yes to spring and summer, may I say yes to winter and all that it is doing in my life.  May I let go and stop resisting the necessity of death and rest so that I can grow and produce life when it's time.
...and surely, spring will come...because it always does!

Dynamite (soul seasons, part 2)

We moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand in June 2013.  As we drove across the border between Laos and Thailand for the last time there was a lot of excitement and anticipation about the year ahead.  Pete and I had decided to take a sabbatical year--a year to rest, listen, be restored, and see what was next.  Neither of us knew what lay ahead and beyond a sabbatical year in Thailand, but we were hopeful and optimistic.  The hardest part of our decision to leave Laos was leaving behind friendships.  The friendships that we made in Laos were some of the closest and dearest friends we have made along the way...

I vividly remember our drive from Laos to Thailand.  The windy road through the mountains, stops along the way to refuel and buy banana chips or pho (a bowl of noodles for lunch), and the song we played more times than I count.  Thanks to Silas' end of the year school performance in Laos, the song Dynamite became our boys' most requested song to listen to.  Can't say I would ever have chosen that song to be our moving theme song, but there it was...the song that seared itself into all of our memories as we made our move from what was known to an unknown future.   We blasted that song as loud as our ears could handle, and "danced" to the beat lifting our hands in the air (just as he sings in the song).  I felt free and light as we drove away from a place that had held so much heaviness and darkness in my life.  (Yes, I know that you cannot leave your problems behind just by moving, but I will admit that in this situation I think I believed I was doing just that.)  We didn't listen to that song much after that drive, but anytime the boys ask to listen to it now I am instantly back on that windy mountain road feeling the lightness in my heart and the excitement of what lay in store for us.

soul seasons, part 1

I don't like cold weather--never have--and so living in Asia, and now Florida, has worked nicely for this warm weather girl.  But after living in Kentucky for a few years, my love of fall grew.  Growing up in Oklahoma, fall was occasionally filled with bright colors, but mostly the leaves turned brown and just fell off the trees.  But Kentucky--wow, the falls were brilliant.  When we moved to Southeast Asia and Facebook came along, I would look with jealousy at my friends' pictures of their little babies in piles of leaves.  Especially the Gingko tree outside of Asbury Seminary (where Pete and I met and got married).  The Gingko tree would hold onto its yellow leaves and then all at once they would fall, and your window of opportunity to get pictures with your family was brief.  You had to time it--get there when the leaves had dropped and were blanketing the ground, but before the grounds crew came to rake them up.  Pete and I were fortunate to enjoy this picture feast twice--once when we were back from Laos with Silas.  Silas was just learning to walk, and I was so excited to get pictures of him standing in the midst of a yellow whirlwind of color, falling into the pile of leaves, laying on the leaves making leaf angels with our arms and legs.  And then once more when we moved back to Kentucky for a year and had Noah.  I still like to glimpse at these photos now and then, because who can deny the beauty of fall?  Even I who has chosen to live in warm tropical climates misses the beauty of fall.

But today I was struck by the rejection of seasons in my own life.  It seems there are seasons in our lives, just as there are seasons in nature.  In that way, living in a tropical climate disconnects us from the reality of soul seasons--and the necessity of experiencing seasons in our own lives.  None of us gets to live an eternal spring or summer--those are the seasons when growth and life flourishes.  But fall and winter remind us that even the trees and plants need a season of death and rest so that life can come once again.  Even in places where we do not experience a true fall or winter, I can still see the pause that comes in the cooler months.  It's not as dramatic as up north, but it's still there--a time of resting when the greens are not as bright and brilliant.  In Laos the winter months meant the cease of rain, and the red dirt began to cover over all of the plants.  So while the trees were still green beneath the dirt, everything looked dead.  By April there was a definite longing in all of us for the rains to start so that everything could be washed and made clean and new again.  

While nature reminds us that death is necessary for life to come once again, it is not something that we welcome in our own lives.  If anything, I can picture myself being the fall tree resisting the natural tendency for my leaves to fall.  "No leaf, don't go!  How can I be a tree without you leaves!"  But the leaves do what is in their nature--they fall.  It is a time of letting go, resting and making room for new life to come again.   

In the last year of our time in Laos I was really fragile.  I was burnt out, emotionally depleted, and physically struggling with health issues.  I was doing everything I could to repair myself, to get better, and to flourish.  It was painful to admit that I didn't have what it took to be a superstar missionary, a superstar mom, a superstar wife.  I was human, and I was fighting my frailty.  But when    I look back on that year now, I see that it was the year I experienced God's arms around me in the form of a group of women.  We would meet each Tuesday afternoon.  It was my lifeline.  I don't think I could have survived that year sanely without that group to look forward to each week.  One week a woman who I didn't know joined our group.  She was visiting from another province in Laos, and she sat in with us.  It was a week when I couldn't hold my tears back, they flowed like a river betraying the feelings of grief, sadness, discouragement I was holding inside.  At the end of our time together, this visiting woman said that she felt she had a verse for me--John 12:24.  

"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."

I was quiet.  This wasn't really the verse that I had hoped to hear.  How can this be encouraging to me?  This verse speaks of death...going into the winter soil.  But I wrote the verse down because somehow I felt it really was for me.  My only hope was that I was experiencing the winter of my soul already--that this verse was not pointing to a winter to come.  Perhaps the verse was saying "your spring is coming".

  to be continued...

love notes to self

  I have been writing myself love notes.  Does that sound silly?  Perhaps it is, but I think that the passage in the Bible that says "love your neighbor as yourself" is not merely challenging us to love others as much as ourselves, but is saying you have to love yourself to love others.  Let me explain--if I don't really see myself as lovable, worthy, or anything special, then it's going to show in how I treat others.  I see it with my own children.  When they make mistakes, how do I respond?  Do I yell, get upset, berate them, tell them things like "how could you do that?"  The messages I speak to my children are telling of the messages I speak to myself.  And so I am doing an experiment.  If I start to speak love to myself, start telling myself things like "be kind to yourself" or "have grace on yourself", what will happen?  I think that if I am loving myself better and well, I am going to love others better and well.  But often I think in the Christian world we are told to love others, deny ourselves, suffer for Jesus, and that it's selfish to consider ourselves before others.  I am going to propose that if we don't love ourselves, if we always put ourselves on the back burner, if we deny ourselves before we've ever loved ourselves, that we are going to grow bitter and resentful of others when they don't love us back, thank us, or when they keep asking for more.  Because we are all needy of love.

  I worked with a project in Laos for several years that was helping women restore their lives after working in the sex industry.  I often minimized my own problems.  These women had been raped, sold into the sex industry at young ages by parents, tricked by friends, and basically were left feeling that their worth was zero.  All they had to offer was sex to ungrateful men, one after another.  I am sure they never felt loved, never felt thanked, never felt worthy.  But I found that I really had very little to offer them.  What they needed was love.  But my own feelings of worthlessness and insecurity kept me from really being able to love them.  I knew the Bible, knew in my head that God loves me and loves them, but experientially my sense of love and worth were low.  And when your own love bank is running on low, there's really not a lot left to give to others.  Sometimes I would even feel jealous of these women.  It was easy to feel like they deserved to hear about God's love over and over again, but I should already have gotten it by now.  I mean--they had had far worse experiences than me in their lives.  So why couldn't I just shake that feeling off of "but I need to feel loved.  What about me?"  Eventually, I did burn out, and due to health reasons and a general feeling of resentment, I could not continue to help these women.  It had taken its toll on me and my family.

  Fast forward to nearly two years later, and I feel like the anxiety crisis I have been through these last six months has brought me to a low point.  A place of darkness and desperation.  It has been a place where I found myself wondering how I could keep going forward.  I've actually thought a lot about these women in Laos during the past six months.  And today it occurred to me...we all need love notes to ourselves.  I have been writing myself love notes these past six months.  Writing them all over my journal, and then in the past week I started writing little notes of love and care on 3x5 index cards to carry around, place by my bed, etc.  And I get them out and read them.  They say things like "hope", "be kind to yourself", "let go", "rest", "you are not alone", "you don't have to carry this by yourself", "you are going to get better", "grace" and so on.  One of the ones that has really stood out the most is "be kind to yourself".  And it hit me, that if I can be kind to myself, how much kinder will I be towards others?  THAT'S IT!  The message of the gospel.  Love others as you love yourself.  And so I am realizing that God loves me so much that he wants me to really know how loved I am.  That he would allow me to have a crisis and experience darkness and desperation--to come to the bottom of myself, so that I could begin to hear him say "I love you."  But it's taking lots of time.  It hasn't been enough to hear it once or twice.  I've had to hear it said over and over again, every single day for the last six months.  To hear Pete tell me "you are going to get better.  I believe in you!" and to hear my counselor and others say "there is hope!  I believe it for you!"  

  Now I feel like I am starting to slowly get it...that if I want to be able to minister to others it has to come from a place of having received it myself.  How can I really give anything to others that I don't even have myself?  If it's just head knowledge, then I'm just speaking words.  (If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.)  But when it becomes something I've experienced, then I truly have something to offer others.  And when I reflect on how long it is taking me to heal, how long it is taking me to "get it", I realize that the same amount of time and patience and compassion is what others need in their own healing journeys.  To hear it or experience it only once (or even twice) is not enough.

  And so, I invite you to give yourself love letters.  If you don't feel loved, and yet you know with your head that you ought to feel loved...maybe you need to hear "be kind to yourself".  Or maybe you need to hear "it's okay, you can step out of all the giving of yourself and take time to receive my love today".  It's okay to recognize your own need for love, rest, kindness, patience, self-care.  When we listen to our needs, when we care for ourselves, it is not being selfish.  As we honor ourselves and listen to our needs, we will find that we have so much more to offer others.  And how can that be selfish?

Love yourself today...and tomorrow...and the next day.

letting go

  I am
letting go of worry
letting go of the past
letting go of figuring out the future
letting go of fixing everything
  so that I can
be present with today
be present with what I have
be present with my children
be present with my husband
be present with my reality
  because
we only have today
we only have this moment
we only have this breath
we only have the here and now
  but we miss so much because
we focus on what we don't have
we focus on the past
we focus on the future
we focus on our problems
we focus on what we can't control
  and in the end
we have held onto our worries
we have held onto our problems
we have held onto our past
we have held onto regrets
we have held onto possessions
  and we realize
that life was not really lived
that life has been lost
that life was in the moments never lived
that life is what is going on now
that life cannot be relived
that life begins when we enter into the present
  but it is never too late
to let go and breathe
to let go and be
to let go and see
to let go and behold
to let go and notice
to let go and become
to let go and live
  and we will be free
to live fully

holding on

It's been nearly five months since my last post.  And ironically, my last post was about hope.  I had no idea that this would be tested (and still is) in such an extreme way just a month after I wrote it.  I thought lower back pain was hard...and then my son's eczema flared like it has never flared before, and again I was faced with despair, discouragement, and anxiety.  And this time I really plummeted into darkness.  I have experienced dark seasons before, but I would say this past spring has been one of the "darkest nights of the soul" that I have lived through yet.  And I say "lived through" but really I am still on the edge, perhaps emerging out of the darkness, but not yet in the light where all feels well.  My hope has felt tested, rung out, dried in the sun.  I have had many days and nights where I had to ask others to hope and believe for me.  There have been days where I couldn't imagine how I would make it through the day.  Anxiety is like that...it pushes your mind into a hamster wheel spin and your body goes into fight or flight mode.  The future looks bleak, and so the present moment feels intolerable.  And yet the only way out of this is to enter into this present moment as much as possible and begin to feel "safe" in it again.  It's a LONG s l o w journey back to the present moment.  In four months time I have filled my journal's pages with prayers, requests to be restored, and anything I could imagine that might help encourage me to take this breath...and the next breath.  And hope has just been a small flicker, at times virtually nonexistent.  At other times a moment would find me saying "I will get better" and I would be surprised by this "out of nowhere" hope.  And so hope's seeds were in me, they just seemed covered over by all the despair and anxiety.  And yet, they did not disappear altogether.
Perhaps hope is like that.  It's not some big bright flower in full bloom that makes you feel all cheerful and happy, but rather a subtle new sprout poking through the winter's soil.  It takes courage to hope, and it takes hope to have courage.  It takes trust to hope, and it takes hope to trust.  Really, I had little to do with the hope that would suddenly spring up in me.  It was a miracle, really.  And that is only the beginning of what I am learning in this season.  How much my faith is about Him and not about what I can muster alone.  How having enough faith doesn't mean it all turns out as we wanted it to.  I am seeing how much more faith it takes to hold on to my beliefs when it's in the unseen, not the seen.  When the storm waves are high and we cling to our faith, that is where courage and trust are truly tested.  And that is when the hand of God, holding onto us, is all that we can hope for.  I could not have made it through these last few months if God's hand was not mightier than my own.  I have heard people say "hold onto God" but my grasp was not enough.  And so I said "God, hold onto me."  And that is what he did for Peter when he stepped onto the water, out of the comfort of his boat.  When Peter's faith was not enough to hold him up on the water, Jesus reached his hand out.  "Oh you of little faith."  Those words can sound harsh and condemning and yet I am coming to see how full of compassion they are.  Because, yes, I am of little faith.  If we are honest with ourselves (and others) are we not all of little faith if life isn't going well?  Faith seems strong and easy when our prayers are answered and all goes as "it should".  But when our prayers go unanswered, or the answer isn't what we had wanted or imagined...where is faith?  Yes--I am of little faith.  And yet, Jesus reaches his hand out to me and saves me from falling.  He loves me that much!  He has faith in me!  And that is what enables me to hope again, and what enables me to have faith the size of a mustard seed (that's tiny).  Because it's not about what I bring to the table that will get me out of this place of darkness.  It's what God brings to us.  It's about Him.  And that is enough.

to hope

Hope does not disappoint us

I have heard this line many times, and I've even said it to myself.  But it has never struck me with just how profound it is until today.  I have been laying flat on my bed a lot this year (yes, the year is only 2 weeks old...).  I had the flu for a week, and then just when I was feeling better I got struck with lower back pain.  Back on the bed.  And while for some they would just roll with this knowing it will pass soon enough, I began to feel despair.  Will my back ever get better?  Will I ever get off this bed? Will I ever be able to be "normal" again?  And while these questions seem ridiculous to my husband who would try to assure me "Yes, you will get better!"  I was not feeling too sure.
This morning I got out of bed and could feel the tightness in my back.  Ugh, still there.  Each morning I roll out of bed and see "will it be a good day today?" based on how I feel.  The tightness and pain seemed to say "nope, still there.  Perhaps it's just not going to get any better."  Yep, that's what kind of "optimism" I am wired with.  I know, kind of pathetic.  But there it is.  This belief in me...this idea that when things are hard there's really no hope.  I see the dark side of it all.  Start imagining myself being a mom that is sick and laying on a bed all the time.  I start to play out the worst scenarios.  Horrible back pain that I will have to learn to live with.  And on and on.  My husband tries to be sympathetic towards me at first, but his patience runs thin.  (Whose wouldn't?!)
But these words "hope doesn't disappoint us" came into my head this morning...seemingly out of nowhere.  And instead of letting them float out just as they floated in, they stuck.  They felt like a message I was supposed to listen to.  So I pondered what it means that hope doesn't disappoint us.  You mean, I can have hope even when I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel?  Even when my back aches day after day without relief, I can entertain hope?  I don't have to be filled with fear, despair, worry?  I can dare to hope?  Dare to believe that things will get better.  Dare to believe life is still good.
This is new to me.  A major "aha!" moment as I savor this idea.  As I attempt to let hope enter into a heart that has been so full of fear.  Anytime I suffer or face pain, my first response is fear.  But oh, to hope!  To be free to let what I cannot control be God's, and to let hope lift my spirit.  To feel the lightness of hope.  To DARE to believe in what I cannot see yet.  That is so delicious sounding!  I want it!
Lord, teach my unbelieving heart to hope.  Stretch my spirit beyond what I see.  Enable me to expand to new heights--to trust you and thus be filled with hope.  That is my desire, my prayer.  Let it be!