Dear readers–I’m pulling this one from the archives today for you…mostly because it was what I needed. -J.
Do you remember the first time you wondered if God really was good?
THE AWKWARD MOM
because uncomfortable conversations are the ones worth having
Category: God’s will (page 1 of 6)
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Reading Time: 6 minutes
That day, in the whirlwind of working with kids at home, I received the kind of email I felt in my chest. Bad news.
I heard my respiration accelerate as my fingers curled the counter’s edge. My daughter watched my face, then looked at the screen.
Reading Time: 4 minutes
There’s a question Jesus asks a blind man in the book of Mark that I am occasionally a little jealous of.
“What do you want me to do for you?”
I picture the man there, not seeing the hairy legs he sits in front of. Knowing what Jesus smells like, committing his voice to memory. Perhaps the man reaches out a hand, adding a fabric texture to his mental portrait.
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Who did you think you’d marry?
My husband–I unearthed this a few years into our marriage, when we finally had the fortitude to be more vulnerable with each other–thought he’d marry someone more athletic. (I am laughing out loud as I type. Poor guy.) To his credit, when he met me, I was running every morning, performing pushups and situps at night. We played intermural sports and pickup games of soccer together. We hiked together. And to my own credit, I still live an active lifestyle. But none of these has approved the actual coordination factor.
(My parents laugh about me as a child falling repeatedly into the same hole in the yard on my way over to the bus each morning. I do not share these memories. And one has to ask, if it were true: Why did no one ever fill in said hole?)
Reading Time: 6 minutes
A couple of weeks ago, I was stuffing paper bags with sandwiches, flipping pancakes, signing permission slips, smelling breath to confirm teeth brushing, etc.–all your average morning chaos. That’s when my middle child told me he was quitting football.
Imagine the activity in my kitchen suddenly lurching to a halt. “What? Why?”
He had some good reasons. And a few not-great, 12-year-old ones. It was one of those weird parenting situations where you wish there was a highly detailed playbook. What to do when your kid wants to quit football and he’s been in it for a month and isn’t getting to play and… I told him to go to practice, and we’d talk about it on the weekend.
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Do you remember the first time you wondered if God really was good?
I can’t say I remember the first. But I have to admit to you that it’s a constant decision of mine: to choose truth and trust. It was Eve’s issue too, right? Questioning the purity of God’s motives; her created brain and heart tossing around the idea that maybe he’s the one who’s lying.
This year you’ve read as I’ve wrestled with God here and there. Like Jacob, it’s left parts of me dislocated now and again. But there is too much evidence that he is who he says. And honestly, there are too many parts of me that are false and undeveloped and limited in sight: Let God be true and every man a liar (Romans 3:4).
Reading Time: 5 minutes
It had been one of those days. I was trying to stomach a failure of mine in my job, and I sat at the kitchen table with my husband, shaking my head. I explained that this past year, one of God’s key messages for me seemed this idea of making “no graven image”. I had to be really careful, I told him, not to remake God as “the God of what I want”–that Divine Waiter I wrote you about.
But my husband’s hazel eyes leveled with my blue ones. “I think you also have to be careful not to make an image of Him as the God who represents whatever you don’t want.”
Huh.
Reading Time: 3 minutes
This is one of those posts where I’ve still got so many issues that I wonder if I should be writing it in the first place (possibly passing on my corrupted thoughts to all of you?). Body image and I have a long and gnarly history. (See the first post of this series, A Body Good: Naked Truth about Body Image…and this one.) I still wrestle with it in real-time, so consider this a post of someone thinking out loud.
In my recent conversations with Western women, I’m getting the idea that I’m sadly far from alone. Body image certainly influences our confidence. The way we spend our time. Our sexuality and marriages.
Reading Time: 4 minutes
It’s an interesting question. Maybe I could add it to the list of questions to deepen your relationships. Because it’s applicable to pretty much every homo sapien on the planet.
What’s one thing you are waiting for?
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Let me put it bluntly. Upon returning from Uganda and starting my own business as a freelancer, I was hoping for a little more…easy success. I was leaving such a good fit for the way I was made–my technicolor dream–at what felt like sacrifice. And I’ve been writing for so long. I just hoped there’d be a few more supernatural wins involved, you know? I admit to thinking of it a little formulaically: Obey God = Find “favor”.
Hmm. Favor. I mean, you could back that up with verses like “Anyone who comes to him must believe…he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” But as I type, I’m realizing I had a somewhat concrete vision of what that might look like.
Pull up a chair for practical ideas and discussions on the parenting, relationships, and spirituality we're all army-crawling through every day.
After five and a half years in Uganda, my family and I returned to the U.S., where I write and speak professionally, and we continue to work on behalf of the poor.
My first solo book, Permanent Markers: Spiritual Life Skills to Write on Your Kids' Hearts (Harvest House), released October 2021.
#instagoodness
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