Category Archives: Sacred Mundane

• The crazy-beautiful yellow-gold tree in our front yard. It shines brilliant autumn-light!

• Shara reading Tough Boris, Heidi snuggled on her lap. Then tickles!
• Missionary friends staying with us before heading off to Papua New Guinea in January.
• Four kids racing round the “racetrack” that is our house.
• All eight around the table. Oatmeal and muffins.
• Amazed at fellowship in Christ. After only meeting them once or twice we’re like old friends! Love how the gospel unites us.
• Savoring domesticity.
• Fresh laundry folded neat.
• Apple Cider from scratch that’s just as good as TJ’s!
• Yellow-gold leaves on the backyard birch tree.
• Chocolate-covered peppermint oreos from TJ’s. WHAT?! So good.

• Early mornings snuggling by the fire.
• Christmas shopping done!
• Looking over the sweet things waiting to be wrapped. So excited to give them!
• Finding just the right pen.
• Sharp pencils.
• New markers.
• Fresh flowers by the kitchen sink.
• Familiar words, new again.
• REST.
• Resting, abiding, trusting.
• His finished work.

• Digging with Dutch in the yard, molehills supply hours of fun!
• Kids clinging to daddy’s legs.
• Dutch talking on the phone.
• Kind cashiers.
• Gracious return policies.
• My husband who loves unconditionally. Truly, what a man. Thank you, Lord.
• That the food on Thanksgiving really doesn’t matter.
• Feasting on fellowship!
• Calendars and schedules falling into place.
• One red leaf alone remaining on a tree.
• Dutch thinking that every holiday is opportunity to wear a costume. “Mommy, what should I be for Christmas?”
• Thanksgiving small. Relaxed and restful.
• Truly a day of rest.
• My first Black Friday experience … part investigator, part participator. I only visited one store but I was thankful for the experience. Interesting!
• Pear-cranberry green salad with parmesan and raspberry vinaigrette.  Yum!
• Leftovers.
• Pancakes for dinner.
• Long naps.
• Pulling out the Christmas tote!
• Kids playing all afternoon with new “toys” — Christmas ornaments, ribbons, and lights.
• Christmas books.
• Hanging our lighted “joy” sign.
• Having joy. 
• His joy. 

Let’s face it, among the goats and cows and rabbits we purchase this Christmas, we’ll still want to buy some gifts for our friends and family. Thankfully, there are ways to buy modest gifts for those we love that show our love and share our wealth. 

So, still looking for the perfect gift? Check out these fabulous finds. And, no need to stand in a line out the door, circle a dozen times looking for a parking spot, or wake up at 2am after Thanksgiving. Such a deal!

Books:

• Revolution in World Missions by KP Yohannen. (free!)

I know, I know. What am I doing talking about weight on a site devoted to spiritual growth? Of course by now you know my mantra: Everything matters. Diapers or devotions, laundry or liturgy, weight loss or worship, the details of life are the whispers of a Savior. Isn’t Christ in the middle of our mundane?

And, I just thought I’d toss in a word or two on the topic since the issue usually hovers beneath the surface with most women. And of course tomorrow is a day devoted to gluttony, yes? Plus, my friend Joy mentioned something about it the other day that I thought was great. So, feeling inspired, take it or leave it, a few thoughts:

The world has us wrapped around its finger because we alternately worship two false gods which feed upon each other:  

One is BODY, the other is FOOD. 

These two false gods have been erected and are now the focus of women’s worship in our world. And, we become what we worship. We naturally grow toward whatever we focus on. Joy made the point that she never diets because the more we focus on food and what not to eat, the more we tend to want that very thing!  It’s true.  We’re far better off just focusing on something else!

Sin must always be displaced. That is, we cannot just remove a sinful habit, we must displace it by pounding, as with a hammer and nail, another habit in, driving out the old one.  We’ll never remove greed by focusing on greed. Only be focusing on generosity.

We pound out greed by giving. 

We’ll never remove anger by focusing on anger. Only by focusing on patience, love, abiding in the grace and gentleness of Christ. When we worship and focus on Christ we become like Him. Make sense?

So back to the idols. Our culture has made idols of BODY and FOOD. We obsess about having celebrity-figures and yet we also obsess over FOOD. Look at our magazines? What’s on the cover?

Naked bodies and food.

Right next to a scantily-clad Angelina is a chocolate pie or a salad (or Kelly Ripa, right, holding Christmas cookies you better believe she’d never eat). Go ahead, look at all the women’s magazine covers. You’ll find BODIES and FOOD. 

So, knowing those are our idols, it’s a no-brainer to realize that we are bound to a life of frustration. Why? Because to have the one we can’t have the other and to have the other one we can’t have the other. AGH!  Or, more accurately, we either tend idolize one more than the other (and it shows). We look like what we worship. When we idolize body, we look anxious, striving, frustrated. When we worship food, we look overweight. When we worship both, we’re some mixture of the two. But always, always defeated. When we worship something that’s empty, we lose our vitality.

But what if instead we worshipped Christ? 

Instead of focusing on the pumpkin pie tomorrow, what if we focused on the Savior?! Instead of every family traditions centering on food, what if it centered on praise? YES, there is a place for feasting (God commands it!) but we were never meant to worship His gifts, only the Giver. If we worship food this holiday season we will gain 5 lbs and lose a lot of joy. If we worship the Savior, focusing on Him, obsessing about Him, planning about Him, seeking Him — We’ll come through the season with weightier lives, lighter hearts, and happier days.

Truly, the secret — we become like what we worship. 

Let’s FIX our gaze this Christmas on our beautiful Savior. 

{Thanks for reading.}

• Blue sky and bare branches.
• Sweet, simple things.
• Early morning snuggles by the fire.
• Coming home late, crawling under covers of each sleeping bug.
• Kisses on still cheeks.
• Cold bedrooms, crawling under icy sheets, waiting for warmth.
• Wood fire crackle.
• Wind rattling windows, trees swaying. Watching the storm from the warmth inside.
• Falling in love again.
• People who listen.
• Friends who edit. 
• Being a family of barracudas.
• Merciless tickling.
• Peals of laughter, that light in my boy’s eyes.
• Full, full days. Good.
• Crockpot.
• Introducing people and having them click.
• How God coordinates, orchestrates.
• Her sweaty curls when she wakes up.
• Pillows patched together with great-grandmother’s quilt squares. I love old things!
• New boots via a generous gift. Probably the nicest clothing item I’ve ever owned. Not sure if I should wear them! (But very thankful.)
• Candy Cane Lane green tea.
• Headaches persisting. Able to take the hint: Rest.
• Voice gone. Able to take the hint: Rest.
• Tired, achy. Able to take the hint: Rest.
• Blue whales and polar bears. Documentaries are amazing!
• The wonder of His creation. It all declares the glory of God!
• Soft, warm, lamplight.
• Voucher-payment for guest blog posts. Love that!
• Stocking up on Dr. Bronners.
• Mentor group — these ladies amaze me. Honesty, courage, humility, maturity, grace. So blessed.
• New faces.
• Old friends.
• Jeans worn through in the knee.
• Seeing fruit of the Spirit in my boy!
• Lacey’s pics.
• Finishing our busy season!!  Exactly 2 months filled with a house sale, move, 14 speaking engagements between the 2 of us, 2 retreats, Bible study, 2 weekly community groups, and a sprinkling of other joys. God was faithful and we rejoice!
• Celebrating the new quieter season with an afternoon of ironing. Sweet domesticity!
• Sewing pillows.
• Puzzles pieced together.
• Kids silly.
• Dutch, my boy like a baby deer. He skids and stumbles, his growing legs slipping and sliding everywhere as he darts through the house. He runs into walls, doors, bangs into open cupboard doors, trips over his feet. I laugh until I ache, that crazy boy.
• His birthday request: A Pirate-StarWars-Polar Bear party.  Trying to figure out what the cake would look like for that.
• Glimpses into people’s hearts.
• Seeing people find victory.
• Seeing He is stronger.
• Daytime date with my man.
• The Paskins.
• New job for a dear friend! Celebrating!!!
• Few leaves hanging on for dear life, clinging to the branches out the window.
• Branches bare.
• Last red leaves close enough to touch, outside our bedroom window.
• The notebook that holds all the pieces of my life.
• Voice coming back!
• Her, shirtless and in bluejeans, curls cascading down her back, bouncing as she runs around, a baby polar bear on the loose.
• That He manages to use us, broken as we are. 
• That He makes us new.

 You are loved beyond comprehension.

Happy weekend and  thank you for reading.

My parents maintain that they’ve only had one fight in their 41 years of marriage.

When Mom changed the family diet without warning.

“We’re now eating fruit every morning for breakfast!” She announced cheerfully. I don’t remember it (thankfully), but apparently Dad about blew his top. You see, the man loves his sausage and eggs, his oatmeal, his hashbrowns. The man don’t want no fruit for breakfast if you hear what I’m saying.

She quickly learned that changing the family’s traditions needs to happen slowly.

Now, the question I hear so often is this:

“How do you make your family follow along with your new giving priorities?”

That is, when you are newly burdened with a desire to give to poor, and you want to change your holiday-habits, how on earth do you do so without disappointing everyone else? What do you tell your kids? What about grandparents? Do you forbid them to buy your kids toys? What about Christmas morning? The question pertains to one particular day, but the principle can be applied to every day:

How do we establish new gospel-centered traditions?  

I’m certainly not the expert, but here are a few thoughts:

1. Go slow. Guaranteed, if you all of a sudden declare that there will be no more gift-giving or holiday shopping ever happening again, you will have World War III in your home. No bueno. Consider making small steps over the next five years. You’ll have much better results. (That same can be said with establishing new eating habits, as my mom learned!)
2. Make it fun. Over the past few years, my family has done more and more giving through Gospel for Asia. We buy pigs, goats, rabbits, Bibles, clean water. But we keep it fun. One year I gave my brother a rubber chicken and a stuffed bunny rabbit from the dollar store (symbolizing the gift we’d given in his name). Another year I gave hard-boiled eggs to everyone (again, chickens). Last year my brother gave Jeff an old Bible (sent Bibles to unreached people) and gave me a bottle of water (he drilled a well in my name).  There’s all sorts of creative ways to celebrate and keep it fun without heaping up more and more junk that we really don’t need. Get creative!
3. Let others be free. Personally, I feel that I am only responsible for the people under my roof. I’m not going to tell my parents, Jeff’s parents, or our aunts and uncles what they can and cannot do with their money. Plus, for heavens sake let grandparents be grandparents. Wild horses couldn’t keep Jeff’s and my parents from spoiling their grandkids. So we let them. We personally do not buy our children gifts. We do for their birthdays but not for Christmas. However, it’s wonderful that their grandparents do!  We’re free and so are they. (And I appreciate their amazing generosity!)
4. Never say, “We can’t afford.” Sometimes it’s easy to pull a cop-out and tell people or our children that we can’t afford certain things. But this communicates that we’re victims, which just isn’t true. Some people in our world are victims of absolute poverty. We are not. By saying, “We choose  not to buy those gifts this year so that we can bless some people in need,” we communicate an important truth. We believe that poverty-stricken people matter. We are choosing them.
5. Keep it real. Showing our children pictures of other children in need is so helpful in teaching them compassion. Daily look at pictures of children in need. When doing the Operation Christmas Child boxes, look at children in the age-group and talk about who might receive the box.  Help them see how real need is, and their hearts will be quicker to follow your new giving-traditions.

Isn’t it crazy that overnight the stores shelves went from Halloween costumes to Christmas lights?

The Word says we live “from strength to strength” but the World says we live “from shopping season to shopping season.” Guaranteed the minute the Christmas lights come down the Valentine chocolates and teddy bears will line the shelves. Not that I blame them. Truly, if we didn’t have the joy and wonder of Christ to celebrate of course we’d have to buy stuff to celebrate!

But we have something so much greater to celebrate, don’t we? And don’t we also have to be intentional every single year, to actually honor Christ at His birth instead of being swept along in the sea of consumerism and forgetting Him altogether? I know I do. And doing so doesn’t mean we can’t have a Christmas tree or bake cookies or give meaningful gifts, but it means preparing our hearts to honor Christ’s birth. 

How can we do this?

We’ll look together at just a few of the innumerable ways. And please, I would love to hear from you how your family prepares to celebrate Christ in the midst of Christmas. So feel free to leave a comment with your idea.

To kick it off, I’d love to share this video with you, from one of my favorite missions organizations, Gospel for Asia. GFA is a truly remarkable organization, and if you’ve never read it, I highly encourage you to read Revolution in World Missions (click here for a free copy!). But only if you want to be ruined for regular life. 🙂

For today, will you please watch this video (all the way to the end!), and share your thoughts with us. Let’s prepare our hearts together … {Thanks for watching, and reading.}

• Your blessed comments and encouragement as the Sacred Mundane adventure begins. Thank you!
• Cord of wood stacked neatly in the carport.
• Crackling, smell of fire, flames dancing, leaning against the warm iron– I love our wood stove!
• Car to drive.
• Beef barley soup.
• Quesadillas. Eating up all the kids left over.
• Reheating coffee on the stove.
• Spice cookies. (Just a few!)
• Family Community Group.
• New Community Group.
• Joy of each group being unique, something of a blessing in itself.
• Getting to know people.
• Guys talking.
• Girls listening. (Too often it’s the other way around)
• Treasure Hunt picnic! SUCH a blast — parts of our lunch hidden around the property. A day to remember to be sure!
• Pierre the dog we’re coming to love.
• Kids smashing ants with cut carrots.
• Dutch snuggled up resting on the couch. Quiet, then: “I’m starting to like this house.”
• Cody here to play.
• Dutch kissing Elle goodbye. Those two, I tell you, in 15 years …
• Nate’s smile.
• Soft, glowing lamplight.
• Kitchen worship.
• Singing with the kids. Heidi, “Sin is broken, you have saved me!”
• Heidi’s confession: “I not a Ch’istian yet.”
• Praying for her day of redemption.
• Trusting Christ.
• Snuggling longer than normal.
• Tired eyes. Napping with Heidi. Because I can.
• Inhaling her apple breath as she sleeps.
• Kissing her cheeks, round and soft like peaches.
• Snuggling up with Dutch.
• Little boy smells.
• Puppy breath — I’ll never quiet thanking God for it.
• Flossing tiny teeth.
• Falling in love with my man.
• Waking to hot coffee.
• Slipping under icy cold sheets at night, waiting waiting waiting for them to warm. Finally warm, pull feet up close, drift to sleep.
• Ann Byle, editor extraordinaire, gift from God. 
• The team.
• Trusting with.
• Long talks with my man about the kingdom of God.
• Wanting it to count.
• God being so so so so so faithful as we study His word in Galatians.
• Teaching. How on earth am I so blessed that I get to do this?!!  Amazing grace.
• More opportunities to trust.
• Bowing low.
• Standing tall.
• Learning to lose.
• Seeing my precious High School friends at Megan’s engagement party. So thankful for 20+ years of friendship! Amazing.
• My husband who makes me so proud.
• Date night.
• My dad who is my hero, taking care of Oma and both our kids.
• Letting Him worry about our future.
• Knowing He already knows it.
• Mrs. Meyer’s basil scented dish soap. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — products like that make domesticity bliss!
• Trader Joe’s.
• Really, really tired, but happy and seeing God’s faithful hand through a busy season.
• Legos strewn.
• Paint smeared.
• Windows smudged.
• Crumbs dropped.
• Books scattered.
• Dishes stacked.
• To-do lists abandoned.
• All day on the couch reading Treasure Island.
• Doing it again the next day.
• The breath and life, the gift of each day.
• Knowing I’ll do it again. Because I can and this is grace.

I had a very flesh-provoking week. 

As I shared with the dear WCC ladies at Bible Study, last week I had a headache that lasted six days, Heidi (who is completely potty-trained) wet the bed every night last week, we had a very important meeting at our house on Saturday night, during which both kids got diarrhea, then after church on Sunday Dutch admitted that he’d gotten a time-out in Sunday school for sitting on a girl’s face, and the grand finale was Dutch spilling his huge bowl of popcorn all over carpet and as I sighed, “Dutch!” and put my hand down on the counter I flipped my own bowl of popcorn up in the air, popcorn scattering all across the kitchen. At that point we both burst out laughing and I told him, forget it, just eat it off the floor. We did. (And yes, you already read my secret here that I do not keep it spotless.)

But those are just the funny things. Strewn among those were plenty of non-sharable and not-funny flesh-pokes that had me understanding more than ever before that we are in a battle. 

It’s no surprise the week turned out like it did, seeing that I was teaching Galatians 5:16-26 (Audio of the message here).  The flesh/Spirit battle is alive and well in our lives and quite literally in our bodies.

As long as we have bodies of flesh we’ll have battles with flesh. 

What is the flesh? Sarx:

Refers to moral and spiritual weakness and the helplessness of human nature still clinging to redeemed souls. It is the Christian’s propensity to sin, their fallenness that awaits redemption.

Simply put, our flesh fights against the Spirit’s work in our lives, keeping us from living the fruitful life of glorifying God and blessing those around us. What does it look like? Scripture says it’s obvious:

Sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like.

While certainly some of these have never presented themselves as a temptation, certainly anger and jealousy and selfish ambition have reared their ugly heads at times, even this past week. Like Paul we cry,

“Who will set me free from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24)

Thankfully, there is another verse. And another force:

“Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (v. 25)

Jesus Christ crucified His flesh so we can crucify ours. Galatians goes on to say that

“Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” (5:24)

Positionally, we have already been crucified with Christ. Experientially we continue in His crucifixion by living the crucified life. Blessed theologian John Stott, who’s now with the Lord, says this:

“The first great secret of holiness lies in the degree and the decisiveness of our repentance. If besetting sins persistently plague us, it is either because we have never truly repented, or because, having repented, we have not maintained our repentance. It is as if, having nailed our flesh to the cross, we keep wistfully returning to the scene of its execution. We begin to fondle it, to caress it, to long for its release, even to try to take it down again from the cross. We need to learn to leave it there. When some sinful attitude or thought enters our mind we must kick it out at once. It is fatal to begin to examine it and consider whether we are going to let it live or not. We have declared war on it, we are not going to resume negotiations. We have settled the issue for good; we are not going to re-open it. We have crucified the flesh; we are never going to draw the nails.”

Have we really declared war on our flesh? Do we hate it enough, are we tired enough of its bondage that we’re ready to fight and find freedom. Yes, there will continue to be battles, but we are more than conquerors as we face the fight each day.

{What area of the flesh are you ready to fight? More on this next week, but I pray Stott’s words can encourage you today. Bless your Friday and thanks for reading.}