Category: Comfort

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Greatest calling? Well – ‘A’ calling.

I don’t know yet about the ‘greatest calling’ part of this – or how that’s meant to look – but it certainly has been my experience that God will use my most searing hurts as a connector to others in theirs… so if that’s my greatest calling it is fine with me. I LOVE that God does this… He won’t waste a single hurt if we’ll let Him do His thing…

2 Cor 1:3-5 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.

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One day when our first grandbaby was living and in such a fragile state I had a minor but major moment in which some ways of seeing life shifted sharply – with the kind of swiftness and visibility of a camera refocussing.

Dashing through the school, driven with the desire to get to the hospital as soon as I could, another mum was in a quandary about her child. I quickly said what I thought and as I kept moving was struck with the knowledge that it was the seriousness of a life in balance that gave me clarity and speed to speak and without that, I too would have still been standing by my child’s classroom feeling so uncertain.

One of the things God has used to teach and draw me over the past year is this verse… “Seek first His kingdom and righteousness and all these things will be added to you”. (Matthew 6:33)

The context it was said within matters rather a lot as always… and I could write pages on the verse in its context but here, what I want to say is just this…

I have a tendency to chase after the very things the Father already knows I need.

I have a tendency to inflate wants and desires into the place of need.

I am a Dory. Continuously distracted.

I am also His loved child who, by His grace alone, is consistently drawn back. He takes my face in His hand and compels me to look at His face again.

When I’m seeking (with my whole heart) after God, – His kingdom and righteousness – that other stuff snaps into the background perspective.
Present.
Needed.
Seen.
Acknowledged.
Messy and in need or order – but soothed into its proper place.

“Seek FIRST His kingdom and righteousness
and
all these things will be added to you”

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Enough love?

Ever since Miss 6 was born she’s had several ‘other mothers’ – namely her 3 older sisters, but this comment is about the elder one of 9 years.

So many times when Miss 6 was a baby, Miss Then Nine would sidle up quietly beside me as we went rushing out the door and say “Don’t worry about a bag Mum, I’ve packed some nappies and wipes and a change of clothes…”

Continue reading “Enough love?”
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Comforted

I realised some years ago that for a variety of compounding reasons, I’d held a bunch of false expectations of God, which had led to anger, disappointment and confusion. I never quit believing in His reality, but some junk existed in my head which needed sorting.

I have never felt that God picks this one or that one, rubs His hands together and says, “right-o then – I’ll pluck off someone you love – I’ll wreck your marriage – I’ll take your baby – I’ll crash your car – you can handle it! This’ll be good for you”

…BUT…

I did realise that I had an expectation that doing life with God, would mean things didn’t hurt sooooooooooooo much.

Through a certain set of circumstances, eight years ago the ‘cruise ship’ of my faith got stripped away to a bare raft that for a while consisted almost solely of: God is real, He loves me, He is kind. One day I asked God “what ARE your promises?” as I felt like so much I had picked up over the years actually was not promised at all! – just a bunch of verses taken and applied out of context with hope or desire for control.

This stripping occurred when our tiny little grandson was born at 23 weeks and only lived for 22 days. Some of you reading this will remember that time. Our whole family was so thoroughly loved and supported but nevertheless it was the hardest year of our lives. After little Elijah died his precious mum came to live with us for a while as these two young parents (16 & 17) needed to be together to grieve. The pressure, the sorrow, the agony, the complexity – and myself still hormonal from the birth of our own little girl (then 3 months old), meant I was clinging by a thread. I would get the kids to school each morning, keep my determination until I parked back in our carport and then rest my head on the steering wheel…and sob.

There was a song I listened to daily… it somehow scoured my soul and gave me solace at the same time. Scoured my soul because it was so raw… Brought solace for the very same reason… there was no fluffing about with the truth of pain in this song. (First comment below for the link). I would have my cry, listen to my song and pull it together before coming back inside where Izzy was, and who did not need to see MY struggle right under her nose as she had quite enough of her own.

So this was the context where I felt my faith be stripped to the minimum. A little way down the track I told God I knew I had stripped away too much of Him and would He please ‘put back in’, ‘restore’ and ‘increase’ Himself to me – but only what really belonged. I was sick of fluff and padding. Fairy floss faith that dissolved on contact. The raft had taken me through the storm of that time but I also knew God to be so much more.

Then one day I had a super special time with Tarri. She’d had her immunisations and was as miserable as it’s possible to be. Temperature, local reactions and just sad, sad, sad. I had her sitting on the kitchen bench with my arms around her saying over and over “I know, I know” when…

…in that moment… God’s presence was right THERE with US. It was as though we were held in His feather soft wings and He’d come to show me He’d done the same as I was doing for Tarri – for me… for us… all this time… that just like my arms enveloped Miss Tarri, His encircled me… us… and while Tarri was too little to understand my words AND that she still felt miserable her little being was benefiting from my presence and comfort. The worse thing, the unbearable thing for Tarri (or for me) would have been to remove the presence of the Comforter and removing that presense would be the only way to know the difference between the pain with or without the comforter. Either way was going to hurt. But His presence meant He wept with us, just as I was moved to tears for this little bundle of misery in MY arms.

Yes I had still hurt, but yes, He’d been there all along comforting and whispering “I know, I know”. Sometimes life throws us things which are immeasurably painful… immeasurably difficult… all of our experiences will be different but most, if not all of us, will be find ourselves at some point in time, at (or over) the edge of our endurance.

This is when we can know and understand some of the paradoxes in the Bible as truth…

“Blessed are those that mourn for they shall be comforted” – the blessing is not the mourning – the blessing is in recognising His comfort within the mourning.
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted” – He never said our hearts wouldn’t be broken, He said He’d be close at hand WHEN we are brokenhearted.

There is no pass out of the pains and sorrows of this life – but there is the reality and promise of his presence. And the reality and promise that when we seek Him with our spare time after we finish on FB or watching movies, that He will be able to be found by us. Actually no… I am busted… it doesn’t say that at all… it says that when we seek Him with our WHOLE HEART, He will be found.

Christians are always banging on about how Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship. Well – in fact it is a religion BUT at it’s core, if it’s not a relationship, it’s not real. There is no Priest or Pastor or mentor or formula who can make this happen… it really is between us and Him directly.

It’s a growing thing… but growing needs a beginning.

And I know I need His arms around me.

(Written and shared with Izzy’s blessing xx )

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Our longest day

Today marks the sixth anniversary of the longest day of our lives. Well, it actually began a few days before but extended for 22 more from this point on, while a little life hung in the balance and the rest of us held our breath.

I am not the centre of this story, but his life in many ways has been at the core of mine.

The time from when we knew he was on the way, till the time we said goodbye, has been like a BC – AD division of history in my life. There is Before Elijah and After Elijah. So significant it has been. And due to his coming and passing, so much in my heart and life changed. One night I wrote a list six pages long of areas of my heart and thoughts that had been impacted by this season. I only stopped writing because I was too tired to continue.

I think more about him in this month of February, but there isn’t a day that I don’t think of him at all.

That long long day was a succession of phone calls and drives to KEMH, tension, precious moments, the continuation of normal, exhaustion and tears.

And it was followed by a much much longer night. A night which is not mine to tell but in which I was deeply enmeshed and which was mostly invisible to almost all around. A night which lasted years…

Some of you are my Facebook friends because of contact made around this time six years ago… And others or you are still my friends because of the love and care expressed through that time. I feared judgement and we received grace. I expected rejection and we got loved. I still have all the emails in a folder… A great many of the stories shared were different situations but of people’s greatest pain and have lodged in my heart as the most significant kind of sharing – and like the little box of Elijah memories under our bed, I cannot open the email file – I know it is there and i treasure it all.

The story isn’t finished, I don’t know when it will be, or even if. But for me there has been a great healing by a Gentle Friend who has walked beside in every moment.

Before Elijah was born I had a sense of stepping off a precipice. This impression came to me as I was giving birth to Miss Taryn who was three months old when Elijah was born. The precipice impression was as gripping to me as the birth process happening at the time. Tarri was posterior, the doc had commented that it was as though my body had forgotten it had done this before (7 year gap) and the pain was more like a first than a seventh delivery. I was totally loony on the gas but felt Gods presence acutely. With this impression of the precipice came the correlation to birth… That I had no option but to trust in time passing, in the process and in those caring for me… and the God who sees, cares, comforts and walks beside. In going over the precipice I had no option but to trust in those same things.

So I did.

Some years later I had another impression. This time, of having been set gently down. I had indeed gone over that precipice, but like the eagle, He had swept in under me and set me so gently down that I didn’t even know when it had happened.

Just that He had.

And so we remember
The presence and passing
Of a little life
Who mattered
One through whom
We grew and were changed
One who
Forever will be
Part of the fabric
Of our family