Category Archives: Life of Faith

What’s Coming Next…

Posted on by

Can I just say—I am so excited for what God has done, and what he is about to do. The story I’m about to tell you is one of God’s faithfulness, one I haven’t told anyone. But it’s also a story that needs to be told.

In October 2015, our pastor gave a sermon titled “Joshua’s Farewell Speech.” It was one that touched my heart and drove me to pray. In the application section of the commentary for the sermon (the commentary consists of extensive notes our pastor has been giving us as we have studied the Bible together in a multi-year series called God With Us), our pastor wrote:

If you are the head of a household, you must set the spiritual direction of the home. Create the environment for others to experience the one, true God. Lead the family in Bible reading and prayer; participate fully in the work, worship and life of the Church; set the example of what it looks like to have a real relationship with the living God. Don’t let your family drift spiritually. Be like Joshua: point the way to loving and serving God!

This note broke my heart. As the wife and mother, I knew the place of spiritual head of the household belonged to my husband (as much as I sometimes wish otherwise—I have a control problem. But that’s for another post). But I also knew, deep in my heart, that he was not ready for that place. He couldn’t set the spiritual direction described in this note, because he wasn’t there himself. In the margins of the commentary, I wrote out a prayer that I kept between God and myself until this day: Lord, I pray you turn my husband into this man. Until then, I pray that you will give me the ability to do this for my family. Thank you. I love you.

When we pray a sincere prayer like this, and continue praying it, God moves. And God moved, in the most incredible way. One that constantly reminded me of this prayer, tested my resolve to keep praying it, and glorified—and continues to glorify—God.

Shortly after I began to pray this prayer, my husband began to experience what was never officially diagnosed, but only can be described as, panic attacks. Anxiety. A lot of it. What I can write here will not ever fully capture what he and I both went through as he struggled through it (nor would he want me to be able to), but I remember trying to run on the treadmill and instead ending up on my knees, sobbing, singing in worship and praying my heart out to God and pleading for this to help him, to change him, pleading for help and strength to get through it because I just. Couldn’t. Do. It. And amazingly, miraculously, gloriously, the deepest aches and changes that my husband experienced were spiritual. He turned to God for help and has never looked back.

Since then, so many things have changed. My husband got a leadership position at work and that freed up our time to join small groups. I started to serve in the production team at church and he followed within months. He began to hunger and thirst for knowledge and understanding of God’s word, and began taking classes, listening to and watching sermons online, and is now being discipled by one of the pastors in our church who takes the time out of his schedule each week to meet with my husband and one other man for a Bible study. He talks to his friends at work about God, the Bible, and prayer more than I ever have—to me, his approach to this seems fearless. I won’t pretend that things are perfect—they aren’t—but the way God has moved in and changed my husband’s life, and our lives, is amazing.

And I am excited to see what God is about to do. So. Excited! Our church recently rolled out a financial campaign to fund renovations that will allow us, at both of our church campuses, to better serve our community. It involves building renovations that will invite people in during the week—a playscape, coffee shop, an auditorium the city can use, better parking—and involves going out to reach more communities, in church plants and/or additional campuses. And they were asking for a two-year financial commitment to help support the campaign, which they’ve put a lot of prayer into. Two years of giving above and beyond what is normal for each family.

From the beginning, I have felt the pull to be part of this, to be all in. Financially, but also with my abilities if only there is a place for me in God’s plan. So I’ve been praying about how to make this work financially, and I’ve been convicted about the fact that when I spend money, I’m spending God’s money, not my own. And I’ve been working on being wiser in my spending. But I wasn’t sure what my husband would do. He’s in charge of the money—he has always been better with it than I have been—and he has been increasing our giving over the past couple of years without my prompting. This time, I did say we should give to the campaign but left how much up to him. He’s been worrying about it, but I just reminded him we need to be wise and pray, but also trust God to provide.

He surprised me, and God did too. This weekend was the weekend for commitments—and my husband, home sick with the flu (the real flu, although we all got immunized), gave me a number to write down and turn in. A number above and beyond what I had been thinking, one that surprised me even more given that he’s now worried about running out of vacation days within the next few weeks since he’s been off for his mom, for snow days, and for illness—a real worry for the man who worked 364 twelve-hour days the first year that I met him, and would rather save up his five weeks’ vacation so he can get paid for them at the end of the year than take the time off to rest or travel.

God is going to do amazing things these next few years. He’s just proven it to me by working—again—in my own heart and my husband’s. I can’t wait to see the many ways he moves going forward, even just in terms of helping us rely on him to meet this commitment. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

.

I met my running goals for the week, and my friend and virtual running buddy worked on hers today, too! Get the latest running news through this week’s run-down and join my virtual running club by setting some goals of your own and being my virtual running buddy.

God’s blessings are too numerous to count, but that shouldn’t stop us from acknowledging them. You can read about the ones he’s brought to my attention this past week through the Daily Blessings Menu on the left.

Pick Me, Lord!

Posted on by

In elementary gym class, there were times when we’d play team games. The teacher would choose captains, who were then allowed to choose their own teams. They’d alternate, each captain choosing one person at a time until the entire class was on one team or another. I would stand there, a bashful, non-athletic redhead, making furtive glances through my eyelashes with my head bent toward the floor thinking, Pick me! Pick me! Please, pick me!

For me, those periods of waiting were pure torture. I was among friends, among classmates and acquaintances I had known and spent six hours a day with since I was five years old, but I had to just stand there and wait and hope while, one by one, their names were called and mine was not. More than half the class would usually have gone to one side of the room or the other by the time I heard my name: “Rhonda!” Finally, with relief, I would join the side who had chosen me. I hadn’t been chosen first, but I hadn’t been chosen last, and I had been chosen. What a relief.

I wonder: What might have happened if I had been less bashful, more eager? More confident? If I had been one of those kids who could barely contain themselves, bouncing up and down with their hands in the air and audibly shouting, “Pick me! Pick me!” Might I have been chosen first, or at least in the first half of the class rather than the last? Or would I still have had to play the waiting game?

Tonight, I had a fleeting vision of being back in that elementary gym class, amongst a bunch of other eager kids bouncing up and down with hands high in the air and shouting, “Pick me! Pick me!” But I wasn’t in an elementary gym class. I was at a church prayer meeting, one celebrating the birthday of our church and asking for God’s hand and blessing on our church for the future (check out the inspiration in Ezra 8). In my heart, I long to do more in the church and I was volunteering to the Lord, Use me. Please, use me. But instead of only one volunteer, like when God asked for a volunteer and the prophet Isaiah responded, I envisioned the entire roomful of hundreds of volunteers saying, “I’ll go, Lord”—and drowning out my voice, taking place after place on the team while I was left sitting on the sidelines thinking, Pick me, Lord. Please, pick me.

Church Prayer Meeting

Not that I don’t think God won’t pick me, someday. But I feel like I’ve been waiting on the sidelines for a while, hoping my name would be called. Hoping I would be called to join the ministry in some capacity, even while I see one person after another get called into ministry, even while others are quitting the team. But now that I’m home, I can’t get that picture of waiting, that picture of hundreds of volunteers in the place of the lone one—Isaiah—out of my head. So I looked up the passage. And I discovered something: There is a reason for the wait.

Here’s the passage I had been thinking of (Isaiah 6:8, NIV):

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I [Isaiah] said, “Here am I. Send me!”

Isaiah volunteered and was chosen. He didn’t need to compete with others—he was the only one there besides angels, as far as I know. Simple. Right after volunteering, God gave Isaiah his marching orders: “Go.”

But there was a scene I had forgotten about right before that one, one that I think is just as important (Isaiah 6:1, 5-7, NIV):

I saw the Lord, high and exalted, sitting on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. … “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

What I realized was that when Isaiah first came before the Lord, he wasn’t ready. The Lord had to prepare him for what was to come before he could be used. And while I know my sin has been atoned for—Jesus’ death and resurrection did that—I also know that the waiting stages are often times of preparation. Times when God is preparing us for what is to come, equipping us with what we need to serve him. Because one thing I can’t ever imagine is God leaving someone who genuinely and eagerly pleads, Pick me! Pick me, Lord! on the sidelines without one day saying, “I need you.”

The Lord will use me, in his own time, in his own way, for his own glory. Meanwhile, I’m glad to be one of many raising my hand, waiting, and whispering, Pick me, Lord.

Bits & Pieces
I have an update on last week’s running goals! If you’re interested, check it out in the newest section of my blog, the Virtual Running Club Menu (accessed on the left, through the main menu).

Also, ICYMI, earlier this week I posted about another blog feature, the Daily Blessings Menu (also accessed on the left). I’m trying to acknowledge God’s blessings more and complain less, and this is one way I’m going about doing it.

Finally, I launched an InstaGram account to tie in with this blog: rhondalorraineblog. It’s linked on the left, too. Follow and share!

Supporting Arms

Posted on by

As a writer, words are important to me. I can (and do) spend hours finding just the right words to convey my message when I write, and a well-written worship song—especially one that echoes God’s own words to us—will have me raising my hands in praise. But all too often, finding just the right words to say eludes me. My mouth is much less wise than my fingers, often blurting out ill-advised words that have little thought put into them. In the moment, when what one says is what counts, I fall incredibly short.

Last night, I didn’t have the words to say. I felt helpless to help my husband. He was hurting, anxious, and a little lost, wanting to cling to and draw strength from God but not quite sure how to do so. His mother, in her late eighties, was admitted to the hospital yesterday. The doctors have located the problems but can’t offer any real medical solutions. My husband’s is a position many of us have been in, and at the end of the day I found myself, as I have in years past, trying to encourage and support him as he learns how to lean on God. But I felt incredibly inadequate to the task. And even as I offered Bible verses to respond to the concerns he voiced, I wanted to run and hide. I know how much supporting him in times like this will cost me, and I don’t have the strength to endure it.

That’s just it, though, isn’t it? I don’t need the words, and I don’t need the strength. Instead, I have to trust that God will provide both the words and the strength, for me and for my husband. Jesus told his disciples not to worry about what they would say, “for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say” (Luke 12:12, NIV). And when Moses doubted whether he was up to the task that God had given to him,

The LORD said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.” (Ex. 4:11-12, NIV)

And although I forget time and time again—even as I am counseling others to do so—I need to rely on God, not on myself, for strength, for that is when his glory is revealed: “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness'” (2 Cor. 12:9, NIV).

What I do need to do—what I am called to do in times like these—is offer my husband what support I can. Sometimes, when the words to a worship song are right and it seems fitting to lift up my hands in praise, my arms tire but I resist putting them down until the verse or chorus has passed. At times like those I think of Moses, lifting up his hands and the staff of God in support of Israel as they fought Amalek (Ex. 17:8-16). When Moses lifted the symbol of God’s power and presence into the air, the Israelites prevailed in the battle. But when Moses began to tire and his arms fell, the Israelites began to lose. It is then, when he was tired and Israel was losing, that God called upon Aaron and Hur to come alongside Moses and lift his hands up for him, “one on one side, one on the other—so that his hands remained steady till sunset” (Ex. 17:12).

When I was facing my own inadequacy last night, I texted a friend of ours to (again) ask for prayer, letting him know of my own struggles. He responded, “You will be exactly what [your husband] needs when he needs it. God has equipped you with everything that you need to get through this.” God hasn’t called upon me to be strong, but he has called upon me to support my husband, to hold up his arms, to carry his burdens (Gal. 6:2). In turn, I am able to cast my own cares on him (I Peter 5:7) and, in him, find rest (Matt. 11:29-30).

This afternoon, as I struggled with finding the words to finish this post, our friend texted me again: “Praying for you today!” It turns out, that as I have been working (writing) to hold up my husband’s arms through prayer, through study, through understanding, others have been holding up mine in turn. The Bible doesn’t tell us that anyone came along to help Aaron or Hur, but in my imagination I can see a chain of people holding the arms of my husband, his mother, his family, and even me up in prayer. Even in the midst of uncertainty surrounding my mother-in-law, we can rest in the arms of our Lord and our brothers and sisters in Christ. Praise the Lord.