Unraveled Church

October 12, 2015October 13, 2015Leave a comment

It feels strange to learn how to “do” church while your husband is in full time ministry. For some people it feels strange to “do” church at all and to others “doing church” feels like an old perfectly broken in baseball mitt.

For me it feels like I have the old cozy baseball mitt but my hand just hasn’t settled into those comfortable places yet.

“Doing” church is something I am still learning to do. And this is where God has me.

There was a time when I would try to settle into those comfy spots like a stepsister forcing her way into a glass slipper. Forcing my hand to make it touch every contour, nook, cranny and seam. I believed if I could just do it better or try to make it fit harder maybe then the doing of church would feel more comfortable.

And then there are times when I haven’t even felt like wearing the glove at all. I saw the glove and I knew my hand didn’t quite wear it well so I hid behind pride, behind shame and even behind the pointing the finger of blame.

The root of pride that I was just too different.

The trunk of shame from who I have been and what others have said about who I am.

And a branch of a pointing finger which bore the fruit of blaming others for a perfect glove which wasn’t quite snug enough.

And now I realize, ten years into being one with someone who is called to lead God’s people in God’s church, that doing church or learning to do church is simply a process. It is a constant unraveling of what you thought you knew from who God is calling you to be. Whether you have a brand new glove or your glove is cozy and your hand feels like it fits every cranny.

Everyone is in the process of learning how to love Jesus more and love their self less.

And God has me in the process of learning how to do church. A place where I know my hand isn’t quite settled into every cozy place and I am okay with that.

I don’t feel cozy in my glove when I sit in the front row on Easter Sunday and one of my handsomely dressed children is eating their boogers. My pride still has me finding my worth in how we look sitting there in the front row.

I don’t feel cozy in my glove when my husband doesn’t share a story just right from the pulpit and the expression on my face shows it. My perfectionist self reveals it’s rolling eyes and my wanting to control rears it’s ugly side.

I don’t feel cozy in my glove when we are adjusting to a service which is thirty minutes earlier and with four kids we seem to be walking into worship late and with wrinkly slacks almost every Sunday. The soil of acceptance and my need for others to see me as “shiny and freshly pressed” seeps into my pridefully drenched roots. Sometimes my heart finds it’s worth in freshly pressed pants.

It is only when I can undo what I have already wound up tightly, unravel what I thought I knew from what is true and start with feeding the roots of myself with faith and belief… this is where I can find freedom.

Dependent roots grounded in the gospel of truth which remind me that yes, I am different, but I am also uniquely knit together and wonderfully made, called specifically to be in the front row with booger eating children for a purpose I don’t quite know the meaning of yet.

A trunk of fresh bark, firm and strong by the Word and His power which reminds me that in Christ, I am a new creation, the old is gone, the new has come and I am more accepted and loved in Christ than I could have ever dared to dream of.

And branches that don’t bear fruit of blame and pointing fingers at others when I don’t feel like I fit in but instead bear fruit of love and service because I realize unraveling this idea of doing church is not at all about me, or anyone else around me. When I pull back the threads of pride I can see clearly that church is about God and calling people from all different backgrounds to love and serve Him, no matter how well the glove fits, in the name of Jesus.

When I recognize that my biggest discomfort about fitting in and “doing” church well actually has mostly to do with my pride (myself) when I point that branch back at me, it is there when I can wear my glove more comfortably.

Even though I haven’t quite completely grow into it yet.

It is there, when I unravel what I thought I knew about doing church from my pride and unbelief that I can be comfortable with just being in process.

It’s not about shoving like a stepsister. We all desperately want the glove to just fit better but instead we should be learning to be more comfortable in the places that don’t quite yet fit. This is where we find faith and belief. This is where we trust that God will grow us in the ways he needs us to grow, in His timing.

We are loved when our gloves don’t seem to fit, our kids eat boogers and we are running late with wrinkly pants.

I will grow into the coziness of the glove in God’s good and perfect timing. Being in process of doing anything is a good thing. God is good and He is at work, we need not shove. He is able to grow us into our gloves even without our shoving.

I am a pastor’s wife, learning to “do” church. I am in process and I am okay with that.

Thursday Night Refresh

September 21, 2015September 21, 20152 Comments

I am very excited to talk bout something we have going on at our church on my blog. I never really talk specifically about church events on my blog but this new ministry is very personal to me and I needed to tell you about it.

This year at North Cincinnati Community Church we will be launching a new division of Women’s Ministry called Thursday Night Refresh.

The first meeting is this Thursday, September 24, 2015 at 7:30pm at North Cincinnati Community Church. I will be sharing pieces of my story this week and speaking in front of a large group of women for the first time.

Thursday Night Refresh is important to me because the purpose behind launching this new ministry is to connect busy women.

Months ago, a friend came to me with this idea to have a meeting for women every six weeks and I was immediately on board. As women get busier and busier it is becoming more and more difficult for them to connect into a weekly Bible Study of Discipleship Group and because women are busy they aren’t able to connect to Women’s Ministry.

I was one of these women. When my husband and I were first married I was a new teacher and if I wasn’t working, I was sleeping. Teaching was so exhausting for me and I did not have the energy to ever give myself 100 percent to a weekly Bible Study.

When I transitioned to being at home with my kids, my busyness changed but I was still busy with four kids in a little less than five years. I tried to get connected to my church’s women’s ministry but is was difficult to get all my babies to Bible Study every week.

I see a great need in women’s ministry to connect busy women with a come-as-you-are, no-prep-needed meeting where in seventy-five minutes every six weeks women can come and connect to other women, hear a story of God’s faithfulness through the testimony of a woman who has hope in Christ and at the end have an opportunity to share prayer requests.

The name.

When the idea of this meeting was given to me, we did not have a name for it. I was even inviting people in the early stages and saying, “but I don’t know what this meeting is called yet.”

Overtime, I just kept coming back to the word, refresh.

I thought back to when I was busy and not connected to a community of women what I remembered was it was consistently difficult for me to ever feel completely refreshed.

Yes, I received refreshment from reading God’s Word and in prayer but there is something even more beautiful and more refreshing when you find your struggles and your stories tangled up in the struggles and stories of other women.

Refreshment comes from community.

I also thought about a webpage and the act of refreshing a page. You know how sometimes you refresh a webpage it takes forever for it to completely refresh? Maybe you have too many windows open or maybe your wireless connection is not as strong as it needs to be to receive a quick refresh.

Women. We have so many pages open. We wear so many hats. Some are mothers, some are wives, some are working, some are up to our eyeballs in volunteering. No matter where we find ourselves, we find ourselves with so many pages open that it is difficult to find refreshment.

I am hoping that once every six weeks you can come to a meeting at our church, shut all your other pages down and connect to community.

We start this week, September 24 at 7:30pm.

All are welcome to join us. You don’t have to be a member at our church, you don’t have to be a member of any church. Just come as you are and connect with us.

The speaker.

The speaker will be different each time but this first week I will be speaking and sharing about how God has changed my life and what I have learned as I have learned little by little to put my hope and trust in Him. I will also share about my current struggles as a woman, wife and mother. I always promise to be authentic and maybe even a little funny.

I hope you can come and find our stories tangled up together along the way.

Don’t forget to share this with your friends. I hope to see you there!

Find out more info at http://www.northcincy.org

The Night Before…

August 17, 20152 Comments

Tomorrow I will go in for my first Breast MRI. This is a routine, preventative MRI purely for early detection purposes.

I received the order for this MRI in January but I have been putting the whole thing off.

Today I am a thirty-two year old woman. Wonderfully married with four beautiful children. My oldest son loose toothed in first grade and my youngest daughter almost two.

Holding onto fear in the unknowns, I have held onto my order for an MRI in hopes that I could freeze time.

Twenty-five years ago my mother was a thirty-two year old woman. Wonderfully married with three beautiful children. Her oldest in first grade and her youngest two years old.

She found the first lump in her breast when she was thirty-two.

As I go in for my MRI tomorrow I am mostly confident that I am perfectly cancer free. However there are parts of me that find myself seeing my life following down the same path as hers.

I fear her story will be my story too.

And as faith and fear collide for me here on the night before my first big step towards preventative screening I just ask for your prayers.

Living in the night befores and waiting on the unknown pieces of my story are not my favorite places.

Tangled up in fear and even sometimes clinging to the worst possible outcomes.

Please if you think of me tomorrow just pray for me as I navigate the unknown.

Even though I know a great God, who knows the number of hairs on my head, tonight I feel afraid of what tomorrow could bring for me.

And I feel weak in faith.

Please pray with me if you think of me tomorrow, it will be a very emotional day. I’m already so tired.

Thank you.

If You Think You May Have Married A Crazy Person

August 4, 2015August 4, 20153 Comments

I know it crossed my husband’s mind a time or (let’s be honest) a dozen times when we were first married. I know in our first months of matrimony he looked at me more than once like he did not even know me at all.

The first time was perhaps when we were fighting about something really good like how long an unused glass should sit on the countertop. My husband would say an empty glass could sit on the countertop and be refilled again for further hydration purposes throughout the day and I am more of a “as soon as it hits the countertop I am swooping it into the dishwasher” kind of gal.

One of these first fights had us both pretty heated as we were both just learning the dance of communication in marriage.

Literally while I was firmly speaking about all the times he had left his glass out with hands going in all directions my sweet husband sat down on the couch opened his Bible and motioned me to sit next to him. He started reading the scriptures to me and I think my head started spinning like the exorcist lady.

I gave my husband my evilest of teacher looks and I growled, “YOU GET THAT BIBLE AWAY FROM ME.”

Call me a horrible Christian or call me human but I did not want to hear the Word of God in that moment.

This may have been the first little appetizer of my insanity and the first time my husband may have thought he married, for better or for worse, a crazy person.

The soup and salad course of this dazzling crazy person meal would probably have been the time he brought a buddy home after seminary class while I was at work without telling me. When he brought me home that afternoon and mentioned the great time he had I FREAKED OUT because I had not cleaned the toilets that morning.

The entree was most likely when I had my new husband take me to the emergency room because I believed I was having a heart attack. I was twenty-two and generally in good health but on the way to the hospital I was panicking about quadruple-bypasses.

The dessert course was most likely the other argument we had about glasses on the counter and he asked me if we could pray about it and I said “Sure, you pray out here in the living room and I will pray in the bedroom.” And I fell asleep instead of praying.

And this was really me.

I was really married to my husband and I was struggling to believe truth, hear truth and walk in truth.

And I was really hurting.

BUT

My husband loved me though it.

He may be the only person that has truly seen me in the worst of times, the craziest of times, and loved me through the crazy.

And at times our marriage has felt like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride but my husband has fastened his seatbelt and committed not to unbuckle and bail when the bumps and hiccups feel like something he didn’t sign up for.

“Human sin is stubborn,” says Cornelius Plantinga, “but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.”3 Stubborn, persistent, unrelenting grace that changes us. Now that’s good news indeed.”
― Dave Harvey, When Sinners Say “I Do”

The beautiful thing about a marriage founded in the gospel is Michael and I both are not committed to the person who we see sitting in front of us right now in this present moment. As husband and wife, we are committed to the wretched mess being sanctified only because of the power of God working in us. And we believe that God isn’t finished with us yet but working in us until we reach our full potential and beauty.

So if you are in a Christian marriage and you are contemplating whether or not you married a crazy person…

Cling to the truth that the icing on that cake is coming and one day, God will perfect us with all the endless truth and beauty freely offered on Christ.

“To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

He is able to redeem the crazy person and give the crazy person the gift of grace of being known and loved.

My Conversion Story

July 30, 2015July 30, 20154 Comments

Years ago I was a Kappa Delta at Eastern Kentucky University and an Elementary Education Major. I loved school, I loved service and I loved my friends. I worked a little waiting on tables at Outback Steakhouse but my time was filled by the things I loved the most: school, service and friends.

When I look back on my years in college I am so pleased with all of the things I was able to accomplish and I am more than thankful for the lifelong friendships I made in the classrooms and on the sidewalks of The Campus Beautiful.

But I always felt like I was missing something. No matter what I was able to achieve or who I was able to meet I still felt empty. By the end of my years in college I began to realize all my accomplishments and accolades would eventually end up onto a piece of paper somewhere and I would be left having to make an entire life of finding the “somethings” to fill up my accomplishment cup.

My homecoming court picture taken by one of my college friends. (2004)

The girl in the picture above found most of her worth in making a difference and doing good things. She went to church because she thought it was something she should do, like a routine that would somehow end up on her list of accolades and accomplishments at the end of time. The girl in the picture above believed God would see her resume, laden with good things and look over the moments when she wasn’t devoting whole her heart to him.

The girl in the picture above had never opened a Bible. She just went through the motions of religion she had learned from watching the culture around her. She went to mass, followed along with the hymns, said her “Our Fathers” and went about the rest of her week like Sunday morning was completely separated from the way she spent her Sunday nights.

The girl in the picture above did not have a faith that was found in anything but herself. She put God in the boxes she made up all on her own.

And then, one day when she really wasn’t even seeking God He began to soften the walls of her neatly packed boxes and He changed her heart.

The gospel washed over me when I was twenty-one years old and I would never be the same again.

I remember feeling angry because I never knew about this kind of God before. The God that loves unloveable people. I spent so many years feeling shame about who I became in the wake of my grief after losing my mother. There were times when I was so unloveable and just trying to survive. I still shudder at those years.

I remember feeling angry that I didn’t know about a pursuing God. A God that pursues us even when we keep Him in our self-made boxes or when we are trying to hide behind our messes, our shame and our guilt.

I remember feeling insecure about sitting next to people in church who had known a God of grace for much longer than I had and I have recently cried in front of my peers about being an inadequate pastor’s wife because I don’t know every church song.

I remember feeling free from the idea that God was keeping a record of my achievements and accolades and measuring them up against the times when I followed my rebellious, God-box-making heart. God wasn’t keeping a record of my rights and my wrongs. When I found God in His Word I learned He does not work this way. When I first believed that Jesus died on the cross for me God exchanged all my rights and wrongs for the perfect righteousness of Christ.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Romans 8:1-4)

I found God for who He really is in His Word. My boxes were broken and I began to live all of the nooks and crannies of my life like I loved a Great Savior.

When I first believed, I read John cover to cover, then I began at the beginning in Genesis. I memorized a stack of scripture notecards so thick it barely fit into the breast pocket of my Outback uniform. I shared my faith and I didn’t just go through the motions at church but I found myself worshipping The God who gave me the greatest gift of all: freedom, grace and unconditional love.

For the first time I began to see myself inside a Greater Story. I began to live for the kingdom of The Everlasting instead of a kingdom which wanted to build up my own resume.

And this is where the journey of following Christ began for me. An unlikely person who wasn’t seeking God being drawn into His family. And for some reason, greater than I can even comprehend now, God is using this tiny story for His purposes.

The more I share my story and the more I write about it, the more I find there are many unlikely converts just like me. And I am so thankful. God knows exactly what He is doing even when we can’t exactly figure it out.

And I sit in the front row at church! It seems wrong and unfathomable to me to be married to my pastor husband.

But I am learning little by little what it means to be Christian in the front row at church. And I am also learning that most church people are learning too.

I am so thankful to be thirty-two and secure in Christ and not twenty-one trying and endlessly spinning my good girl wheels.

God really is so good.

Even to me. An unlikely girl.