Read a story, help a cause!

My beautiful imaginary-blog friend turned real friend, Amy, sent an email a while back about CausePub. If you don't know Amy, you don't know that her blog's mission is to introduce people to big and small ways to change the world. She is constantly posting about organizations, ideas, and projects in which average people like you and I can become involved and that will help make a difference in the lives of others.

CausePub, she told us, is looking for stories for a book they want to publish and the proceeds will go towards helping people in Africa to have clean water. Stories to help people, you say? 

I'm all there.

So I went to the CausePub website to find out more about it and what I found out made me want to help. From their website: "CausePub is a community of story-tellers working together to create best-selling books that directly impact specific causes."

Basically, CausePub wants to get a bunch of storytellers to submit stories for a book called Couch Rebels. A Couch Rebel is someone who got up from the couch and had a life changing experience. They say it best: "While the rest of society is imitating potatoes, you’re learning, growing, and experiencing the incredible things life has to offer."

Once the book is published they hope to sell 15,000 copies and for every book sold, an organization called Blood: Water Mission will be able to provide three people in Africa with clean water for one year.

Isn't that awesome!? That's 45,000 people for 15,000 books!

So how can you help and why am I telling you about this? Well, the stories that are published will be chosen based on a few criteria; one of them is number of votes.

So...you can help me by going here and voting for my story, or...you can go here and vote for any story you like such as Amy's right here, and/or...you can commit to buying a book when it comes out. Judging from the stories submitted it will be a very cool book to own.

I hope you would take a moment to check this out. You can help make a difference with a few minutes and a few clicks.

Easy as pie.

  

Five Minute Friday: Comfort

When you are five or seven, a broken heart, a monster haunting a dream, a stubbed toe can all be comforted wrapped in the arms of the one who loves you the most. Comfort is the warm lap of the woman who would give her life for you and whose tears mingle with yours because she can't bear to see you hurting.

But where do thirty-five-year-olds go when they are too big for momma's lap, or momma lives too far away, or they are simply too grown-up to crawl into a parents' arms for comfort? Are hearts not broken after childhood? Do monsters not haunt our dreams any longer? Do we not hurt physically and emotionally anymore?

When you are thirty-five, a broken heart, a hurting body, haunted dreams, and shattered hopes can be comforted in the arms of the One who loves you the most. Comfort is found in the Word of the One who gave his life for you and whose tears mingle with yours because He can't bear to see you hurting.

He is your Father, your Abba, your Lord. And like a child you can come and find the comfort you seek in the arms of your Savior.

"But I have stilled and quieted myself, just as a small child is quite with its mother. Yes, like a small child is my soul within me." Psalm 131:2 (NLT).

**Linking with Lisa-Jo for Five Minute Friday**

Pride and Prejudice (well, maybe more like Pride and Humility)

They say the first step towards recovery is to admit you have a problem. 

I admit it. 

I have a problem. 

I have a problem with pride that has reared its ugly head for a few months now. So last night I laid it all out to the women of my Bible study. We are studying the Book of James and James, man, James does not strive to treat you gently. He will lift you off your feet, shake you like a rag doll, and set you down roughly. And this week, he did me in again.

I have not written for a while and it took some wrestling to figure this out. I don't write consistently. True. I tend to write when something gets a hold of me and I have to put words to it. But lately there have been stories floating around me that I just can't seem to pin down. I'll start one and never finish it. My virtual waste basket is full of wadded pieces of paper with discarded ideas. But it took an ancient writer to confront me and point out the truth to me: you don't write because you don't write like her, her or her.

James has harsh words for jealousy but I sat smug in my chair. That is a illness from which I don't suffer. I don't envy these bloggers. I'm not jealous of them. I celebrate them. I encourage them with comments. I share their sites with my friends. 

But then he got to humility and my smugness turned to conviction.

I have read post after post about not comparing yourself to other writers, about writing the story God gave you, about how even if one life is touched by your words it is worth doing it. I know. I know. I agree. I've uttered those words. And yet... I'm struggling to accept that God can use anything less than this right here. 

And so, my friends, this is pride. 

"If I cannot write like that, I will not write at all," says my heart stubbornly, in essence denying that God is smart enough to know what gift and to what measure and for what purpose is ours to have.

I know God has called me to write. I know He has given me tools. I know when I write I am changed and I know that some of you also walk away a little different. So why is that not good enough for me? James would not mince words in telling me that it is because I lack humility to accept my place in the Kingdom of God. 

Joan Chittister said that "humility is the admission of God's gifts to me and the acknowledgement that I have been given them for others." Pride is forgetting where those gifts came from but it is also discarding His good gifts and His holy calling in our lives because they are not as important/developed/talent-full/necessary/interesting as other people's.

It was an epiphany. 

I have to stop hiding behind my excuses that I only write when I "feel" it, or that maybe God is not really calling me to write, or that I just don't have the time. The truth is I suffer from pride when it comes to my writing. And the road to recovery will be long because those amazing writers are still out there writing away. Temptation to compare and to desist will keep coming. But I took the first step and it was tough: I admitted it. And not just to myself. To a room full of women who know me.

The cure for what ails me is a dose of humility. And there is nothing more humbling that to speak it out loud: I am prideful.

So here is to step two: hit "publish" and pray for the Lord to continue to teach me who He's called me to be.

Home

**Linking with Lisa-Jo for Five Minute Fridays. What can you write in five minutes about Home?**

We've moved a lot. Two states, three cities, and five houses in twelve years. I know to some that is nothing. But this girl grew up well-rooted in the same house her grandmother built. My people stay. They are not the sedentary kind.

I knew when I married him that pastors migrate. That's what we do. We move. So home is an elusive word for me. And having my heart in two countries just makes it harder. Is "home" Ecuador, where I grew up? Is "home" my mother's house in Kansas where I've never lived? Where do I go when I go "home" for a holiday?

My life is not to stay put. My kids won't grow up in the same house and come home from college to the house where they took their first step. That is just not how we roll and it is not what we were called to do, this family.

So home for me is where he is. And where she lays her head at night. And where he plays with his bear. Home is where all four of us gather at night, regardless of continent, state, or house. They are my home because He has moved heaven and earth for a boy from South Carolina to meet a girl from Quito, Ecuador to become parents of two children who look nothing like us.

I am home when I am with them. 

                                                               Any time. Anywhere. 

Choose this day...

This morning I discovered the remnants of three bad choices Isabel made yesterday. To disobey, to sneak, and to disregard caution. By her own admission she had a "bad" day.

I sent her to her room while I collected myself. My downfall is my temper and disobedience is a sure way to set it off. So, following a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit that I am learning not to ignore, I asked her to go elsewhere while I sought some wisdom and diffused the blood that was boiling inside me.

I sat on her bed ready to hand down consequences and was, once again, amazed by the depth of insight of my small child. I was going through the obligatory lecture about obedience and obeying parents to learn to obey God and my job of teaching her to do both when she stopped me with these words:

- "But, I have to be who I am."

-" What? What do you mean?"

-"I am a person and I am who I am and I don't know how to stop sneaking and doing bad things."

This seven year old understood, without understanding, the core of our depravity. We are who we are and we don't know how to be different. And often we don't want to.

So we talked about God's grace and his power to transform us into the people He wants us to be. We talked about consequences of our choices and the importance of learning to obey the Lord while we are young. And we talked about ways to withstand temptation. All in all a good conversation.

But the most crucial nugget of that conversation, the one I credit to the Holy Spirit itself, was this:

- "Every day, Isabel, there are voices calling for your attention and every day you make a choice of whose voice you will listen to."

I opened my Bible and showed her what Joshua told the Israelites in his last speech to the nation. "Choose this day whom you will serve...as for me and my family, we will serve the Lord" (24: 15b).

- "You can choose to serve yourself, Isabel, what you want, what you need, what you feel like doing. You can choose to listen to your own voice telling you that your desires are more important than the teachings we are giving you. And you can spend the day worrying that we will find out. Ashamed and fearful. Or you can choose to serve God and never have to hide what you did or fear the consequences. Which one sounds like a better life to you?"

Even a seven year old can figure that one out.

So I made signs that say: "Choose this day whom you will serve. Joshua 24:15" and hung them, child eye-level, around the house, on the refrigerator door, on the mirror of her bathroom, on the entrance of our classroom. Because this concept she understood and  it is my job to teach her, to help her, and to remind her while she lives under my care.

But also to remind myself that every morning, I, too, have a choice to make. We all serve someone no matter what. It's who we are. So we choose. Every day. And we should choose wisely because how we choose will not only affect us but also our children, our husbands, and all we encounter in a day.

I know it is a choice I cannot make on my own. I don't have the strength. I can only make seeking God's grace which daily allows me to say with Joshua: "As for me and my family, we will serve the Lord." 

Bare

Today I'm joining with Lisa-Jo for Five Minute Friday. You have five minutes to write. This week's topic: Bare. 

If I bare my soul to you, would you still love me? If you knew all my shortcomings, my mistakes, my past sins, would you still call me friend? Could you bare your heart to me and trust that I would not betray you or discard you? Could we be that transparent with each other?

There would be healing if we were. 

I would hold you and tell you that you are not alone. You would take my hand and tell me to forgive myself for I have already been forgiven. 

We would cry together and remember that a burden shared is lighter on the shoulders.

But we walk past each other with the mask of a smile. We say “fine” and “great” and “wonderful” when we mean “broken” and “hurt” and “ashamed.” 

And I don’t know why.

Sister, let me into your world. Let me be your safe place and be mine as well. Let me pray for you and feel your prayers over me. I covet your arm around my shoulders holding me up when I want to crumble. I yearn to hear Christ speaking through you with words of peace and comfort and renewal.

And I long to speak such love and healing into your life as well. 

For the heart in chains...

It's so easy for a heart to be put in chains. 

It only takes an unkind word, an unjust situation, an unfair accusation for a heart to go in bondage under the pain. 

And it weighs. 

It is heavier than a boulder inside your chest. The iron shackles surround it and threaten to drown it in grief. 

The offender wraps the first few chains around it and we add the rest link by link.

When we refuse to forgive, when we feed the thoughts of revenge, when we verbally assault the wrongdoer in our minds, arguing for days with their memory, always winning: sometimes with reason, sometimes with ugly words, sometimes with righteous anger, but always winning. 

Relishing the idea of a confrontation where we come out victorious, but forgetting that when a relationship is broken, nobody really walks away the winner. The real confrontation is rarely as we imagined. There is no penitence on the offender's part, no ready apology, no bowed brow or downcast eyes. There is defensiveness, and frustration, and truth flung back at us that we may not want to hear. It is often messy, always hurtful, and many times disappointing.

So how will this heart lose the chains of having been wounded that are pulling it deeper and deeper into darkness? 

Only when we forgive the undeserving, the one who does not even think he requires mercy, the one who will never utter the words we long to hear. Only then. Only when we give the pain back to the One who suffered like no other and more unjustly than any other, for him to take and to exchange us for peace and mercy. Only then. Only when we let go of the desire to confront, the right to speak our piece, the need for an apology. Only then.

"Come to me, you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest," He said. 

There is no heavier burden than un-forgiveness. There is no more wearisome life than the life of the offended. 

"For my yoke is easy and my burden is light," He said. 

There is no harder yoke than the yoke of self-righteousness. There is no stronger bondage than the bondage of anger. And there is no emptier existence than the existence of those who don't know how to unburden themselves of these shackles.

"I have come that they may have life to the fullest," He said. 

When a heart is drowning in the pain resulting from living with others just as flawed and sinful as itself, grab onto Him who is Life himself and let Him pull you out of the mud of tears and the mire of shattered friendships, and set your feet right back onto the rock of his grace and forgiveness that will then flow out of you and onto others and... 

Set you free.