Endure: 5-Minute Friday

Endure:

The very word evokes

Teeth gritted in determination,

Toughing it out.

I don't even need to unclench my jaw

To spit out the word.

Hupomeno, though:

The Bible word begins with an exhale,

Tells a different story--

To remain under,

To stay and not flee,

To hold fast and not retreat,

To dwell under the yoke with Christ

And not to look for shortcuts,

Escape routes.

Will I pitch my tent

In the barren waste of wilderness

Because the pillar of Shekinah glory fire

Hovers overhead

And warms the night?

Will I step into the raging furnace

And let the Fourth Man

Loose my bonds

And companion me there?

Will I abide in the fiery trials

Without numbing,

With surrender

And submission,

For the sake of knowing better

The fellowship of His sufferings?

Will I pray,

"Thy will be done,"

Though it cost me bloody sweat

And a cross of pain,

Rejection,

Derision?

Will I trust Him enough

To wait

And stay

And listen

And watch for His appearing?

Lord Jesus,

Make a way out of the desert,

Flames,

Gethsemane,

Quickly, if You will;

And grant me the courage to endure

With patience

And hope

Until You show Yourself strong

For those whose hearts are completely Yours.

Lack {Five-Minute Friday}

Lack and I are no strangers. Most mornings I wake up knowing my lack of strength  and competency to meet the demands of the day. To get out of bed is to count on the manna showing up one more morning.

Yet in my emptiness the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ dwells. The cracks in my earthen vessel are the places His glorious light shines out to the watching world.

The Japanese make precious art from cracked clay pots like me by repairing them, not with Superglue, but with gold. Kintsugi, they call it. This strikes me as gospel imagery. The Lord Jesus Christ enters our brokenness and makes it a beautiful display of His grace. He transforms our lack into something infinitely more beautiful than mere competence. His glory is better displayed in our weakness than our strength. His provision for my lack comes like an arrow pointing back towards Himself.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth likes to say that anything that makes us desperate for God is a blessing. Today, Lord, I praise you for the blessing of lack.

Five-Minute Friday: Connect

1. Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking.
2. Link back here and invite others to join in.
3. And then absolutely, no ifs, ands or buts about it, you need to visit the person who linked up before you & encourage them in their comments. Seriously. That is, like, the rule. And the fun. And the heart of this community...

CONNECT

They call it the Web, a complex, invisible network of computers and databases. It's more than that, however. Complex and invisible it may be, but it connects people: real people with real prayer requests; flesh-and-blood people who send cards, text messages, and tokens of remembrance.

The greatest blessing of two years of blogging for me has been the people scattered around this World Wide Web, its threads connecting me to others in the sisterhood of chronic illness, another with a passion for prayer and the revival of God's church, another who is a delight and surprise in how alike we think and respond to life, another who is refreshingly different in her energy and boldness, others who share (and enable) my love of the written word. The threads of the Web have traversed  state boundaries and oceans and broadened my world in ways I never thought possible.

Some while back, Allen looked at the glass cabinet door where I post the Christmas card photos and leave them for an embarrassing amount of time beyond the holidays. He pursed his lips and silently shook his head. When I inquired, he replied, "I just can't get over the fact that we've never even met half of those people."

Thank you, crumbles, for connecting your stories to mine. You are a blessing, and I thank God for you daily.


~sharing with Lisa-Jo Baker's blogging community, where you can read many other offerings on the word of the week~

Joy Breaks Through {Five-Minute Friday}

This has been a long week, and I haven't yet finished my exercises for today or read, let alone answered, the messages in my inbox. Five-Minute Friday writing wasn't on my list today...

But the topic is for Sara this time. Sara who has been choosing joy in her life and on her blog in years of severe chronic pain and restrictions imposed by her Ankylosing Spondylitis. Sara who chose joy in the sudden loss of her dad, when she was too ill to attend the funeral. Sara who learned this week that the disease is winning the battle for her earthly body and is choosing joy in hospice.

The topic this week is joy. I realize now when I think of joy, the people who come to mind are those who have known Christ's fellowship in deep suffering: Margaret, Jeanette, Joni, Sara, Elisabeth.

The faces for "happy" are completely different and inconstant.

That makes me wonder if joy is what the Spirit births in God's children when the happy has been knocked out of them by trials. If that's the kind of joy Jesus promised His followers in the upper room the night before His death.

And yet, is it possible, too, that that kind of joy eventually, even if it's on the other side of death, blooms into happiness, too?. First we consider it all joy, then we discover it all joy, then we see Him who is our joy and find we are happy. Really happy for the first time.



If you would like to join in praying for Sara as she prepares to go Home to the Lord and for the many who love and will miss her, her story is here at her blog, "Choose Joy." She and her blog are the reason blogging seemed like a good and reasonable response a year ago when my doctor put me on bed rest at home temporarily. Though I only know her through reading and commenting on her blog, she has helped me grow in grace, and I'm grateful.


Linking up today to Gypsy Mama and her community, which each week writes for an unedited five minutes on a shared prompt:




...and to Jessica's tribute page at The Mom Creative

Another most beautiful tribute by someone who has known Sara in person can be read at A Holy Experience.

5-minute Friday: Rest

1. Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking.

2. Link back here and invite others to join in.
3. Go a little overboard encouraging the writer who linked up before you.

OK, are you ready? Give me your best five minutes on:

Rest…

The bridal shower where we received our packs

When we married, we registered for cross-country backpacks instead of china and flatware. At the time, we believed we would be moving to India inside of a year, so we were striving to decrease rather than increase our possessions. We also thought that our mission work would require travel into out-of-the-way places where a large camping backpack would work better than an airline carry-on. So... we registered for backpacks.

I still remember, at least 8 years from my last pack usage, the feeling of physical relief when we arrived at our destination and rolled the packs onto a table or pick-up truck bed. Ah, rest.

Climbing into bed at the end of a long day, coming home after a trip, curling up in my favorite chair--all these things spell rest to me.

There's another kind of rest the Bible describes, too: the rest of rolling burdens and worries and others' expectations onto the shoulders of the Lord; the rest of ceasing to strive for my own agenda and leaning into His; the rest of coming to Jesus and accepting His yoke; the rest of moving forward in trust and confidence in the direction of His call.

That kind of rest is available in the midst of the work, in the midst of the labor, as available as a cry to Jesus for help.

I'm feeling a need for both kinds today; how about you?

Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28, NLT).


*****
This is my first attempt at joining the 5-minute Friday fun. Scanning and adding the photo occurred after the buzzer. :) It's been one of those weeks that feels at once too long and too brief: too long because of fatigue and too short because of the self-induced pressure of all that remains on my list. Consequently, when I saw on friends' blogs the word for this week, it seemed the right time to dive on in.


May you find deep rest and replenishment this weekend, which is a long one for Americans. Fitting, isn't it? A long-feeling week followed by a long weekend. As Ann Voskamp says, all is grace.