When the guy on the screen says that he could hear the cries of children underneath the rubble, his voice starts to crack and how in the world does anything stand in a world like this?

How do you just put a jug of milk out on the table on a Tuesday and stand there watching your kids eat breakfast, light in their hair, the sky hanging outside the window like a potential Behemoth, when there’s a dad with his heart running liquid down his cheeks  in Oklahoma, waiting for them to dig out the body of his crumpled boy.

How does the sky just suddenly spin mad on a muggy Monday afternoon in the middle of side-street America and 24 school kids never come home to their moms and peanut butter sandwiches again?

How does the sky just rage unannounced, storm black and pelt us flat?

They said they found 7 of those little kids just wanting their mamas, found them all drowned in a pool of water.

Who can stand when your heart’s flooded with grief?

God’s overflows.

“… his heart was filled with pain.” {Gen 6:6}

God has a heart. And it hurts. Not with just with a a few drops of ache, not just with a slow drip of sadness — His whole massive heart fills, swells, burns with this raw, relentless pain.

In the midst of the storm, all the emptiness of God floods with pain.

What grieving mother in Oklahoma could wake up today and forget her little one,  could forget the way she smelled, the way her hair fell, the way his arms felt around her neck — what mother could just up and forget her always-baby?

And God whispers hoarse: That mother whose heart is bound to her child’s — doesn’t compare to how your Father’s heart is bound to you. {Isa 49:15}

The Lord of the Universe, He’s lashed Himself to us. And He didn’t need to. But He tied the knot Himself. God who hung the stars, He takes a thread of His heart and ties His to ours. God tied His heart to yours so when you feel pain — He fills with shattering pain.

So when we howl: “If there’s a God who really cares, He’d look at this world and His heart would break.”

And God looks to the Cross and says -- My heart did.

God’s heart breaks.

On that Cross — they speared His side and pierced straight into His heart filled with pain and it was the water and blood of His right broken heart that gushed right out.

It’s the quantum physics of God: one broken heart always breaks God’s in two.  We never cry alone.

And our crying God, He catches every tear in His bottle — God catches every falling tear because He’s keeping us from falling apart.

I can’t turn away from the screen, from the father in Oklahoma brushing away the tears.

And all I can think is — God tied His heart to ours — and the tears of God are the essence of Time.

Time only continues on in this impossibly suffering world — because God Himself is willing to keep suffering the impossible with us.

That’s what we all share — that He shares the grief with us and reasoning is cold and His embrace is warm.

The Farmer tells me that they are calling for rain today.

Somewhere across the mid-west, they’re calling for rain.

And I can only nod, not trusting my voice not to break, trusting only His broken heart.

Trusting how it comes in storms –

these, the falling tears of God.

Related: Timothy Keller’s sermon: Lord of the Storm

Photo Credit: John Sheba

{because my heart is with all the folks living through all kinds of bad storms this spring…}

‘If God really works in everything — then why don’t we thank Him for everything?”

She asks me this straight out.

My daughter, Hope, and I, we sit in the truck on the field’s hem, waiting to give the Farmer his lunch.

The Farmer’s planting bean seeds into earth’s dark bed. The sky’s rising darker in the west.

He races rain.

“For every drop of rain You keep from falling on us planting— thank you, Lord…”

I had murmured the prayer, water splatting hard against the windshield of the pickup.

We need at least one more day of dry weather to plant a year’s worth of beans, our livelihood.

“And for every drop of rain that You do let fall — thank you, Lord…” My daughter, Hope, whispers her strange echo.

Really? I turn, searching her face.

She looks me right in the eye.

“If God really works in everything, why don’t we thank Him for everything? Why do we accept good from His hand — and not bad?”

This is hard. Maybe the hardest of all. She is young. She has much to come.

I have held dying babies. Eaten with those who live on the town garbage heap. Wept with women who’ve been violated, with the bankrupt, the heart crushed, the terminal.

And this never stops being true: Neglecting to give thanks only deepens the wound of the world.

Doesn’t God call His people to a non-discriminating response in all circumstances? “[G]iv[e] thanks always and for everything” (Ephesians 5:20 ESV).

This is the hardest of all.

If I only thank Him when the fig tree buds — is this “selective faith”? Practical atheism? What of faith in a God who wastes nothing? Who makes all into grace?

And yet — is thanking God for everything… thanking Him for evil?

Rivulets run down glass, blurring my husband and all our seeded prayers. What do I accurately see and know?

When we bought the enemy’s lie in the beginning and ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Satan hissed then that we’d really see and know what is good and evil.

But the father of lies, he’d duped us in the whole nine yards. Though we ate of that tree we did not become like God.

We have no knowledge of good and evil apart from God. My seeing, it is not omniscient.

It may definitely feel like it — but how can I really see the long-term outcome of a death, disaster, dilemma,? Mine is only to faithfully see His Word and wholly obey Him in this. Therein is the tree of life.

Is this why He commands “giv[e] thanks always and for everything”? Because to thank God in all is to refuse Satan’s relentless lure to be god-like in all.

To thank God in all is to bend the knee in allegiance to God Who alone knows all.

To thank God in all is to give God glory in all. Is this not our chief end?

When I only give thanks for some things, aren’t I likely to miss giving God glory in most things?

Murmuring thanks isn’t to deny that an event isn’t a tragedy and neither does it deny that there’s a cracking fissure straight across the heart.

Giving thanks is only this: making the canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God.

Our thanks to God is our witness to the goodness of God when Satan and all the world would sneer at us to recant.

I lay my hand on the rain-filmed windowpane and I see clearer. But this is the hardest of all:

That which I refuse to thank Christ for, I refuse to believe Christ can redeem.

The grey sky’s drumming steady on the truck’s tin roof.

His perfect love casts out all fears and leaves only thanks and I listen to her sing it, like a chorus with the rain:

Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord.

Like a song from the belly of the fish, like a Jonah refrain echoing off the walls of the whale: “But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you…” (Jonah 2:9 ESV)

Like a haunting, holy answer to what she asks, the song of the saints, always thanksgiving — practicing here the only song that will be sung at the very last of time, “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving… to our God” (Rev. 7:12 ESV).

Thank you, Lord.

I lilt it soft with her, the brazen song the faithful sing into the hardest storms….

The rain falling hard now.

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This post is excerpted from:

One Thousand Gifts Devotional Journal: Reflections on Finding Everyday Graces

60 fresh & releasing devotional reflections, each one like a singular tree, invite you to take wing into a forest of graces. 60 Days of Devotional Reflections. 60 Days to Joy. Practical. Profound. Pen-worthy: includes the only numbered 1000 gifts journal, space for you from #1-#1000, to begin the radical habit of thanking God for your own one thousand gifts. Perfect for spring and life storms?

 
Join us? And happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts? Dare you to Joy! Take the dare to Fully Live!
1. Grab this month’s Free JOY DARE Calendar with 3 daily prompts to go on a scavenger hunt for God’ gifts … {or write down any gifts you choose. Use the free app.} 2. Count 3 gifts a day and you have over #1000gifts in 2013. Jot them down in the new numbered One Thousand Gifts devotional journal — The Farmer’s writing in his with a red pen and daily – the numbers in the journal already there! Motivating… 3. Share your gifts everyday in our beautiful Facebook community to enter everyday for the monthly $100 Amazon draw (or link to your blog post with your list of gifts). 4. Count #1000gifts in 2013 and enter to win a Nikon DSLR camera with lens. Slow Down. Savor Life. Give thanks. Believing something is one thing. But the Best only comes when you decide to Be Living it. Please, jump in, make your life about giving thanks to God! — Just add the direct URL to your specific 1000 gift list post… and if you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other in our refrain of thanks by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.
Give thanks to the Lord! His Love Endures Forever!

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Photo Credit: Jo Naylor

Look… you get what we all get — a lifetime.

Just you or none of us ever get to know how long that will turn out to be.

So get to it. Because you woke up 18 this week.

You sat at the end of the table after barn chores, grinning like you were just getting stretched up for the starting blocks and the race of your life — and somewhere inside I felt this crossing of an invisible finish line, right through the stretched out tape.

And I want to go back.

I want to go back and hold the whole of you right in palm again and lay you in that kitchen scale and count your every gram, as if I could give you weight in this world.

I didn’t know that would happen until I started letting you go.

I want to go back and pull that boy with that bowl hair cut up on my lap again. Feel your chub fingers help me turn one more page, reach for one more crayon, hold my hand one more moment, and you have no idea how much I don’t care if that makes me a fool.

I want to go back to your sleep breathing on my shoulder and the way I didn’t want to move, to your bows and arrows and slung-on tool belts and well-envisioned, questionably-executed tree forts, to your buck teeth and big bravado and flipped up toilet lids and flipped out drive-me-mad attitude. I just want to go the whole ugly-beautiful way back and I want to get a do over.

Go back and shake up that 21 year old girl who brought you home and tell her that the best way to raise up a kid is to just loosen up. Nothing ever got raised up when held down tight. The Holy Spirit is a fluid grace and the wind is a carrying thing and you have to lean into it and let Him surprise if anything’s going to rise up and fly.

You grew up — and I want to go back and I want to go with you, but I can’t do either.

That’s a hard thing to sit with.

Hard to know I can’t fix any of the times I dented up your heart with my ridiculous white-knuckled steering-wheel control and big Buick idols. Yeah, you and I both remember how it got ugly and wild. You’ve got to know I’ll spend the rest of my life and pitiful wisdom trying to bang out those dents with presence and grace. Yeah, you and I both know I’ll probably make some more.

You made me get that: Grace isn’t some soft, ethereal notion. Grace is a noun, it’s a verb, it’s concrete, it’s like air. Just try living without it. Just try living without breathing. We all know how wrinkled hard lives like that are. You — you made me me breathe grace right down to the bottom of the lung. It was the only way we could live with each other. Inhaling, exhaling, giving and receiving grace.

It ended up beautiful, what all happened, and I don’t even think we realized it was happening at all.

So you’ll end up heading out.

Heading out down some back roads and long roads and roads I’d never pick for you and I wished I’d lived more backwards, backwards from the knowing that ends really do come.

Knowing that one day you’ll leave and I’ll be brave and wave. And you’ll go fall in love and you’ll feel it too and I can’t stop it for you — how a crush can crush you, how real love is never logical, how real love is always crazy love, and love is the most horrible and the most wonderful because it will make you strong and it will make you weak and it will make you vulnerable, which is the perfection of strong and weak together.

How Love will open you right up, then pull open your heart to let someone get into you and get to you and undo you and remake you and it’s everything terrifying and everything you ever wanted.

And I will nod and say yes.

That’s what you’ve done to me.

That’s what I’d go back to tell that new 21-year-old mother I was with her dangling kid, what I’m feeling as the woman falling over a finish line I don’t want to cross, what I’m saying to you, that new 18-year-old man done with being a kid — Don’t fight the hurt. Let the hurt make you real. Let go of the defenses and the shields and the tightfisted formulas for some life that doesn’t exist and give away beautiful pieces of yourself and feel the hurt, because the only way to own a life worth having is to give away your own life.

Give away the life of polished floors and gleamy sinks, of big hair and bigger bank accounts, and let love get in and mess with you and loosen you up and make you laugh and cry and really give and really hurt because is the only way to really live. Don’t waste a minute of your life on anything less than love.

Don’t waste a minute of your life on anything less than eternity.

And that’s. what. love. is.

I once heard the story of a preacher man with a PhD — whose mother died when he was two. When he was two and they were 5 kids in poor Kansas and she had grabbed hold of her husband’s hand and whispered her 5 last words: Always keep eternity before them.

Always keep eternity before them.

Think of eternity — and live backwards from that.

Don’t waste a minute of your life on anything less than eternity — and that’s. what. love is. Eternal, without end.

Let love happen to you. Don’t fight the hurt. It’s making you real.

You woke up to snow on your 18th.

“Crazy, for the 13th of May.” And you inhaled your plate of waffles, and said it again, “Snow — for my birthday in May!” And you downed the bacon and eggs I’d heaped up for you, and you pushed back your chair –

“I’ve got to go make a snowman. Before the sun makes it all go — ’cause who knows if it’ll ever happens like this again?”

And I get that. And it won’t.

And I stand at the window and watch you, the oldest, the child no more —

and your sister, the youngest, the child a bit longer, make a snowman out of spring.

And who would have known you’d be doing that on your big day when we found your gift weeks before — a watch.

A watch we had engraved with words that beg you to ask whatchya going to do with it:

“You have been given now. Romans 12:1.”

And all I can hear is the echo of a snowman melting in May: Seize the Day.

Just go do that: it’s never too late to love and there is always time to love and what else is a lifetime for?

You could see that snowman, right to the end, looking the loveliest real, giving itself away and unafraid to the sun.

Related Posts: How to be The Parent You Want to Be: 40 Things Your child Needs to Know Before they Leave Home
4 steps to Take When You are Not Ready For Change
After Steubenville: 25 Things Our Sons Need to Know About Manhood

How to make the Perfect Cup of Tea: George Orwell’s 11 Rules

The Best Moment of My Day… This. Slows your heart rate down, yes? What’s yours?

On living the Unhurried Life.… read. this. slow. What are your sheer acts of defiance?

Ten Inspiring Ways to Your Parenting – no matter where you live……

5 Minute Glory Holy-day -– the whole earth is full of the glory of God and this is nothing short of breathtaking. Like a mini vacation, hol-i-day— what a way to start the day, looking for His gifts…

Why you will remember what you read on the page — and not on the screen…. why reading books matters.

That post? Those 3 Simple Words for Every Day that are sort of rocking my world? “… then you came?”

Here is one way one man is doing just that — (inspires you to get thinking creatively, eh?)

82-year-old Barber offers Free Haircuts to the homeless — in exchange for a Hug:

“The 82-year-old Cymerys, who is known as Joe the Barber, began offering his services 25 years ago after retiring from a career in business. He had cut hair for his family but decided to put his clippers to work for the less fortunate after being inspired by a church sermon about the homeless.

“It really is love. I love these guys,” Cymerys said. He paused and turned to his client in the chair, “You know I love you, right?”
Full story and slideshow here

  A read for deep soul refreshment: Not by Sight: A Fresh Look at Old Stories of Walking by Faith

When Mr. Jon Bloom, President of Desiring God, sent me an early manuscript of his book to read, I read slowly. Captivated by the stories of Scripture all over again. I made notes. I re-read. The chapters, 35 imaginative retellings of Bible stories, made me hungrier for God, His Truth, the company of Christ. Mr. Bloom’s Scripture saturated lines stirred a trust in God’s promises instead of personal perceptions.

And when I met Mr. Bloom at his office this past winter — I was deeply struck, taken aback, by his humility, his genuine warmth and down-to-earth grace — this was a man who sincerely walked with Jesus.  Mr. John Piper writes the forward of Not by Sight: “Pick a chapters in this book whose title looks relevant for you. Listen as you read. Look through what you hear. And see if Jesus does not show himself to you in such a way that you do not trust Him more.” Mr. Bloom lives this.

And I offered my own endorsement: “Spurgeon said, “My books are my tools.” And this book is one wise match for the journey. Bloom’s stories and insights ignite– ignite fire in bones, ignite the best and old paths, ignite glimpses of God’s glory that makes you want to run this walk of faith.” I humbly encourage you to pick up Not by Sight… penned by a man who quietly, authentically lives what he so compellingly writes. Perfect devotional reading for your morning cup of espresso or tea!

In the morning when you rise…  (Consider clicking off music in the left sidebar?  Just click the speaker icon. And RSS readers, join us here to see this morning’s espresso videos…}

Worship.

Time for this… Let this have us on our knees:

Morning Verse for Today’s Living:

“He will have no fear of bad news;

his heart is steadfast, trusting in the LORD.”

~Psalm 112:7