The Secret Life of Sarah Hollenbeck

I just finished "The Secret Life of Sarah Hollenbeck" by Bethany Turner and let me just say that you've got to read this book!

Bethany weaves a fun, inspirational and (dare I say it?) sexy story revealing the life of the quirky but delightful heroine, Sarah Hollenbeck. The story follows Sarah through her conversion from steamy romance writer to Christ-follower. Throw in the complication of falling in love with her new pastor and she's in for a wild ride. Then again, Christ never said that our lives would be easy and Sarah learns that the hard way!

Filled with lines like:

"I stood up straight with my new resolve, determined to do the right thing for Ben. And isn't cute how I thought I knew exactly what the right thing was?"

And:

"He'd slammed his hand into the wall, I destroyed a cell phone and howled like a banshee. Everyone handles frustration in their own way."

Right on down to a thought provoking line like:

"It was all about the journey, not the inevitable outcome."

Or one of my favorites:

"I got dressed and did my makeup with confidence, certain I was going to be an awesome Christian."

Bethany Turner gets real about issues like temptation and redemption and learning to rely on Christ for strength to deal with past mistakes. 

I fell in love with the characters, laughed at the dialogue and stayed on the edge of my seat through the twists and turns. It was awesome so at the risk of repeating myself, you have to read this book! It goes live on October 3rd but you can pre-order it on Amazon now!

Mismatching and Knitting

“Katt! Put your feet down!”

I was a little startled by the three year old’s demand but I complied and stood up from the table, curious what had her so upset. She climbed down from her seat and walked around the table to stand in front of me, peering down at my feet.

“Your socks don’t match!”

With a laugh I shook my head, “You’re right sweetie. They don’t match.”

“Mine match!” She announced, pointing to her own socks.”

“Yes, they do,” I agreed. From the other room where her mom was feeding the baby I could hear her laughing at our conversation.

It was a rather amusing moment. See laundry is not my favorite chore. I don’t mind washing and drying the clothes because the machines make it easy but I hate folding them. And of course the worst part of folding clothes is always matching socks.

Seriously, you have to go through an entire load of laundry just to find the matching pink sock with white stripes? That seems a little ridiculous to me. Not to mention the fact that it can take just as long to match all the socks as it does to fold everything else in the load! That’s insane!

So years ago I came up with a solution. I stopped. I couldn’t stop folding laundry unfortunately because then my clothes would get wrinkled but I did stop matching my socks. Now most people who don’t want to match socks just buy socks that all look the same but that’s far too boring for me so now I have socks of all different color and design that hardly ever match. Today, for example, I’m wearing one blue one and one pink one.

Now my mom is someone who has to have things match. She can’t wear two different earrings that look similar much less two different socks that are completely opposite. She wouldn’t wear red and green together outside of Christmas time, because they don’t match. She notices that sort of thing. My aunt even goes a step further and matches her shirt for the day to the socks that she’s going to wear. Even the three year old I spoke of earlier has a definite opinion that things are supposed to match. Me? I just don’t care and it’s one of the things that people who know me now recognize as one of my relatively unique quirk.

All of us have quirks, different things that make us unique as individuals. Mismatched socks is just one of many little idiosyncrasies that I have all of which combined, make me, well me. God made us different. My mom’s need to match and her love of symmetry is as much a part of her as my mismatched socks and hate of laundry are a part of me.

These are small things, not really important, but when you take into account the billions of people in the world and how different each person is it really paints an incredible picture. Not one of diversity so much but of great love. Psalm 139:13 says “…You knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

God made each and every one of us. He didn’t just make Adam and Eve and then ignore the rest of human race. No! He created, knitting together, each person on the planet, including you. Have you ever watched someone knit a blanket or a sweater? It takes, time, concentration and effort. It’s not an instantaneous process and that makes it a labor of love. How fitting then, that this is the description that’s used. Our Heavenly Father loves us and he knits us together with great love, creating each of us to be unique and quirky but still in His image.

Waiting by a Cave

In 1 Kings 19:9-14 we find Elijah, the prophet, in a cave. Now he’s just come from an amazing showdown where God destroyed the prophets of Israel’s false god, Baal. Afterwards God brought rain, drenching the ground to break the drought and famine that had been holding the country for years. It’s a wonderful victory, but immediately afterwards Elijah, being human, is scared for his life and runs away from the king and queen of Israel, hiding away in a cave.

God speaks to him in the cave and (I’m skipping most of the conversation here) tells him to go out because He’s about to pass by. Elijah goes out to the mouth of the cave and a great wind passes by, but God’s not in the wind. Elijah stays where he is and an earthquake passes by but God’s not in the earthquake. Next there’s a great fire but God’s not in the fire. Finally a gentle whisper passes by and Elijah hides his face for he realizes that God is in that whisper.

It’s an amazing recounting of an incredible event. There are so many lessons to be learned from this story, as there are in every incident in the Bible, but for a moment let me just focus on one. Can you imagine Elijah’s patience?

I fully admit that I’m not a patient person. I can have times of patience but overall, especially when I’m praying for something, I tend to lose my patience. I ask God for something and I want it now. Often the need feels so urgent. That bill that has to be paid in three days. That deadline that is coming up faster then you can get the work done. That boss who won’t let up and is making your job harder and harder each day but you can’t seem to find another place to work.

Whatever your situation may be you try to do the right thing and you turn it over to the Lord and then… you wait. It’s one of the most dreaded words in the English language. Wait. However there's really nothing else to do so you wait. And wait. And wait. And wait some more. And it feels like forever. Pretty soon you start to wonder how long you’re supposed to be waiting. Surely it’s been long enough, right?

As I was thinking about this Bible passage and reading it over I tried to put myself in Elijah’s shoes. God has said He’s going to pass by and I believe Him but the wind goes by and He’s not there. So now I’m starting to get a little antsy. 

"Where are you God?"

Then comes the earthquake but still no God. Now I’m really concerned. 

"Um, hello? Did you forget about me? I’m still down here! Still waiting. You’re supposed to be appearing, remember?"

Finally the fire but this time when He doesn’t appear I’m freaking out. 

"Did I miss Him? Was He in one those great and wonderful shows of His power and I just didn’t realize? Or is He not coming? I mean, come on God! If you’re not in the wind or the earthquake surely you’ll be in the fire! So what’s happening here?"

Now on a good day we’re like Elijah and we stay put. We listen to the Holy Spirit, who lives inside of all believers, and we trust God’s promises. We stay outside the cave, waiting for God. But how often do we have those good days? I’ll tell you friends, in my case, it’s not often enough. Too often I lose hope and I walk back inside the cave. Maybe it’s because I think I’ve missed God. Maybe it’s because I think He’s forgotten me. Maybe I just stopped listening. I curl up into a ball and wait it out, missing God completely.

Thankfully He doesn’t let me stay there. He calls me again, picks me up off the floor and gets me back on the right path because He wants me to be there when He does pass by.

See Elijah’s story doesn’t end after the fire. He stayed where he was, waiting on God and as a gentle whisper goes by there, in that whisper, that still small voice, is God. He could’ve come in the wind or the earthquake or the fire and sometimes He does but often, more often then we realize, it’s in that gentle whisper that God appears.

So let me leave you with this question. Where are you? Are you inside the cave because you’ve lost your patience and given up hope? Or are you still outside, waiting to hear? I know it may seem like it’s taking forever but don’t give up. God will fulfill His promises, but you have to wait because He’ll always do it in His time, not ours and so often the fulfillment doesn’t come in the way that we had hoped or even imagined.

Elijah had just witnessed God literally reigning fire onto the earth. I doubt that a whisper was where he expected to find Him next.

Bottle Feeding Lessons

First I just have to say Happy Birthday to my wonderful and amazing mother who gave birth to four kiddos, raised 5 teenagers (plus several extras here and there!) and still takes cares of even as adults. She checks in, loves us, worries about us, helps us and is always, always there for us with a hug, a smile, and a listening ear. Happy Birthday Mama, thanks for being the best mom ever!
And it's fitting it's her birthday today since she and Dad were the first two people to teach me to make allegories about my faith from my everyday life. This one's dedicated to you Mom!

While I was in Texas I was helping take care of a 3 month old precious baby boy. One day as I was feeding Jr. I noticed that he had a habit of pushing the bottle away. It wasn’t that he didn’t want it. It was actually the opposite, he wanted to hold it himself but his hands weren’t big enough and he didn’t have enough coordination to be able to handle it. He needed help.

It got me thinking about our interactions with God. Our Heavenly Father will try to feed us spiritual truth in a loving way but we push against His efforts, wanting to do it ourselves but we’re not strong enough to handle the tasks. We may want to take care of it on our own but we can’t. Patiently the Lord tries and tries again to teach us until finally, like I had to do with Jr., He sometimes has to hold down our hands. This way He can get the bottle into our mouths so we can eat and be nourished without us getting in the way.

Another thing I noticed with Jr. was that when he would get hungry he would, like all babies do, cry. Nothing new there but then I’d have to make him his bottle. He didn’t understand the process so he would cry harder and harder until when the bottle was finally ready he was crying too hard to eat. He was hungry and I had the bottle he craved but he couldn’t enjoy it until he calmed down a little.

It got me thinking how when we’re asking God for something and we don’t get it right away we get upset. We start complaining, screaming and crying so by the time we finally do get it our attention is so focused on our tantrum that we don’t realize He’s answered our prayer. Or we do realize but we’re not as grateful as we should be. Instead of thanking God for what He’s been doing, preparing us to receive His gift, we’ve been complaining and we’ve let the devil steal our joy.

The best way to combat this is to thank God for what He’s doing even when we can’t see it. So when I’m praying “Lord, please let me find a way to pay the bills.” and I get an extra $5 I need to say, “Thank you Lord for this $5 to put towards the bills!” instead of saying, “Lord, this isn’t enough!”. Or when I’m praying, “Lord, please work in Sally’s life.” And then I see Sally making horrible decisions I can say, “Thank you, for the work that you’re doing in Sally’s life that I can’t see.” And it will keep my joy, and my faith alive so when I do see changes in Sally’s life I’m that much more joyful about it.

One more observation I had was how distracted Jr. would get when he was supposed to be eating. So I’d give him the bottle and he’d eat for a moment but then something would catch his attention and he’d stop. Now if I took the bottle away he’d start to cry. He wanted to eat but he also wanted to be distracted.

Doesn’t that make you think of how we are with God? We want to call ourselves a Christian but we also want to do our own thing. Yet God says He wants us 100% of us not 41% or 72% , 13% or even 99.9%. He’s only satisfied with 100% of our hearts, attention, actions, thoughts, and soul.

So there it is! Lessons I’ve learned from feeding an infant. As I write this I’m hoping and praying that someone actually finds this useful and it’s not just the result of not enough caffeine and a different schedule that makes this relatively simple task seem faith testing and though provoking to me.

If you like this post, or any other post, or just have something to say I’d love to hear from you. Please leave me a comment. One tip, if you get this blog through your email you can’t just hit reply. You will need to follow the link in order to post the comment but I hope you do, it would be great to hear what you think!

Moses?

A couple of weeks ago I got to spend the week at my Grandpa's cabin with my mom's extended family. It's a beautiful location set in the mountains, right on a lake, surrounded by forest where you can really dwell in God's presence, surrounded by His creation.

Of course when you put twenty some people together for a week things are bound to happen and there's a few funny stories I just have to share.

The first is about my niece Addy.

All the kids are out playing and I believe I was working on a puzzle when we suddenly realized that Addy was missing. We start looking around, calling her name and one of the kids says "I think she's downstairs" at which point we're a little concerned since she's not allowed to be downstairs on her own.
I ran downstairs to the daylight basement only to find that she had locked the door so I started knocking, "Addy, it's auntie, unlock the door sweetie." Thankfully she listened and a moment later I open the door and ask her what on earth she's doing down there on her own.
"The girls left me here!"
Now it's time to go back upstairs and ask the 7 year old and the two 5 year olds why Addy had been left downstairs. That's when we learned that the oldest girl had needed to go downstairs for a moment and she'd been given permission, the two 5 year olds followed her because... well that's what you do with your older cousins, you follow them, and of course, Addy, who's only 2 followed right along. Now why the girls came out and left her? Well, that's something that we never did quite figure out but it was only for a moment before we found her again. Still it's enough to give this auntie a serious heart attack!

Next up was losing Michael. My eight month old nephew was in his little raft in the lake and always had an adult with him until we heard Ella, his 5 year old sister, say something and turned around and saw her holding her brothers raft.
Apparently there was a miscommunication and everyone thought that someone else was with him and he had started to float away when Ella caught him. Of course they were right next to the dock so it's not like he was in any danger but it was still a bit scary. Which is when we considered changing his name to Moses, you know the baby that floated down the river in the Bible as his sister Mirriam kept watch? Just sayin'.

There were other moments, like taking kids on a hike and trying to convince them to stay on the path so they don't get to close to the edge and fall. Or one child on the swings when another walks behind them.

The fact is that things happen. Kids do things that scare you to death. Adults glance away for a second and suddenly the kid has found a whole new way to get into trouble. But we still love them, they are some of God's greatest treasures and I'm blessed to have such wonderful kiddos in my life.