Elizabeth’s

Conflict and Our Dustlikeness {A Life Overseas}

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Elizabeth is over at A Life Overseas today. . .

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Conflict. If you’ve been in church work for long, you know what it’s like. People abound, and conflict happens. Then there’s the big blow up or the cold exit or, even scarier, the explosive exit. I’ve been in church work for a decade and a half now, and big blowups and bad exits seem to be the default setting for church conflict. I don’t like this kind of conflict. I run away from it – and from the scary people who cause it.

Kay Bruner likes to say that there are difficult people on the field. I say yes. Yes, there are difficult people on the field, and sometimes, they are ME. Sometimes I’m difficult, and sometimes conflict comes because I am difficult. Not because I mean to be, of course – but my good intentions don’t remove my propensity to offend.

I have a hard time fessing up when I offend, and my reason for this is two-fold. First, I don’t really like the fact that I’m still not perfect and that I still sin against others. The acknowledgement is still so cumbersome to me. But secondly (and perhaps more importantly), I fear I won’t be forgiven. Oh, I know God forgives me; I have full assurance of that. But I still don’t trust God’s people to forgive me. I’ve been in too many relationships where people said they would forgive, but they never really did.

Lately, however, I’ve had ample opportunity to seek forgiveness, and God’s people are proving me wrong. They are forgiving me and showing me the love of Christ in tangible ways. Receiving their forgiveness and their assurance of committed love is an almost sacramental experience. It’s a direct connection with my Savior: someone is sticking with me. Someone is forgiving me, giving me a second chance. That is Jesus in bodily form.

Finish reading the article here.

When you’re out of time

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by Elizabeth

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Eugene Peterson, in his book Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (which was originally published in 1980), writes: “America does not honor the quiet work that develops spiritual root systems and community stability.”

One sentence. That’s all it is. Yet for me it was flooded with meaning. I’ve always felt myself to be outside of time. I’ve never grasped fashion (NEVER – you can ask my sisters) or been able to keep up with what’s cool, hip, or current. In that predicament, I felt I didn’t belong amongst my peers. And in fact, friends were a rare jewel throughout many of my childhood years.

At the same time, I look back over my life and see the slow development in small, local Churches of Christ, learning Bible verses by heart, studying Biblical and early church history, and thoroughly taking faith into myself. I see my soul woven into other souls – not mostly of my peers but of those both older and younger than me.

It was my parents’ choices that kept me grounded in theology and tethered to church community. It was slow — very slow. And steady: Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, Wednesday evenings, every week, for decades. And though we lived in many places, my parents certainly weren’t church hoppers.

Later it was my own unconscious choices that rooted me. I think of how we got married young (so young!) and started volunteering in youth ministry right away. I think of years and years of working side by side in the local church, serving the people right in front of us. And we stayed in those small places. Even when it got hard — and it DID get hard — we stayed.

In some ways ministry has blossomed for me in the past few years, seemingly out of nowhere. But it’s not out of nowhere. It’s the fruit of working in small, local churches for many years, developing a love for people, for “small” ministry, and for the local church, which I believe is the very heartbeat of God.

All this was quiet work, silent work, unseen work, and yet it’s beginning to yield a harvest in my life. I’m beginning to understand how God uses small ministry to prepare His people for a little bit bigger ministry. And I’m beginning to see that if it’s God who roots and grounds us, we can still love, embrace, and be satisfied by that small ministry.

I may be unable to keep current, and America may only honor currentness, but in my square-peg-in-a-round-world life, I see something richer and deeper and more meaningful than fads and fitting in. I see that being out of time, in cooperation with God who is also out of time, and in friendship with His people, isn’t so very obsolete after all.

Further resources on these ideas:

Kelly Hallahan’s “Hidden” blog post

Video discussions on Banning Liebscher’s new book Rooted

You can also read the rest of my Church series here.

Weaker But Equal: How I Finally Made Peace With Peter

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by Elizabeth

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I’ve written before about how Paul’s seemingly misogynistic passages were a real stumbling block to me at one time. In that post I mentioned that although Peter said some of the same things Paul said, he never bothered me quite the same way. Whether that’s because I already liked Peter, who kept me laughing with all his mouth-moving-before-mind antics, or because he didn’t write half the New Testament, so that his words didn’t carry the same metaphorical weight, I’m not sure. I only know I should probably have dealt with his household codes before now. So I’m here today to offer you the latest in these apostolic adventures of mine.

First of all let me just say that I probably should have been asking more questions about Peter. For instance, where was his wife on all those missionary journeys?? I knew he had a wife, because I knew he had a mother-in-law, but I never asked the question – or, if I did, I assumed she stayed at home while he gallivanted all over Roman territory. (Perhaps I’d been too influenced by the more modern life of William Carey.)

Turns out, Peter’s wife traveled with him. It’s right there, plain as day, in I Corinthians 9:5 (which begs the question, how exactly did I miss this??). “Don’t we have the right to bring a Christian wife with us as the other apostles and as the Lord’s brothers do, and as Peter does?” So he didn’t leave her at home. He valued her and brought her with him on his travels. (Many thanks to Michael Card for pointing this out in his commentary on Mark.)

Another thing Peter did? He took care of his mother-in-law, something I never questioned but that Card claimed wasn’t Peter’s cultural responsibility – it would have been his wife’s brothers’ responsibility. So it seems Peter valued his wife, and he valued his mother-in-law, and maybe just maybe he wasn’t as anti-woman as I’d always thought, either.

In the past I’d kind of fixated on I Peter 3:1-6, with verses 5 and 6 giving me especial trouble as a trailing spouse:

In the same way, you wives must accept the authority of your husbands. Then, even if some refuse to obey the Good News, your godly lives will speak to them without any words. They will be won over by observing your pure and reverent lives. Don’t be concerned about the outward beauty of fancy hairstyles, expensive jewelry, or beautiful clothes. You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God. This is how the holy women of old made themselves beautiful. They put their trust in God and accepted the authority of their husbands. For instance, Sarah obeyed her husband, Abraham, and called him her master. You are her daughters when you do what is right without fear of what your husbands might do.

Oh I knew that verse 7 existed, but maybe only in the New International or King James Versions, which are much more patronizing.

So anyway, prompted by Michael Card, I went and read all of I Peter 3, including verse 7 in the New Living Translation:

In the same way, you husbands must give honor to your wives. Treat your wife with understanding as you live together. She may be weaker than you are, but she is your equal partner in God’s gift of new life. Treat her as you should so your prayers will not be hindered.

And this Bible verse, this amazing, freeing, validating, liberating Bible verse, it was neither underlined nor starred in my Bible. WHY EVER NOT?!?! This is a Bible I’ve used for six years. Six years of reading the previous verses and feeling the weight of their burden, but never noticing verse 7 just below them?

These words are such a balm for my soul. Right there in verse 7 Peter calls me, as a wife, an equal partner. An equal partner. And this particular version tells husbands that they MUST give honor to their wives. Must?? That’s a much more commanding tone than NIV or KJV.

So I did what I usually do when a verse strikes my fancy: I looked up the Greek words on Bible Hub.

  • Give — to assign or apportion, to render; from the Greek aponemontes
  • Honor – to accord or apportion honor, pay respect, perceived weight or value, from the Greek timen
  • Understanding – knowledge, wisdom; from the Greek gnosin
  • Weaker – weak, depleted, without sufficient strength (mostly physically); from the Greek asthenestero
  • Equal partner – joint heir, participant, coinheritor; used of believers sharing inheritance with Christ; from the Greek synkleronomois
  • Hindered – puts obstacles in the way of a moving object (this made me wonder, is the thing that the mistreatment of women hinders the movement of the Gospel?); to sharply impede or cut off what is desired or needed; from the Greek enkoptesthai

Basically, Peter is instructing husbands to assign appropriate honor and respect (there it is again, a woman’s heart-need for respect) to their wives, because they are valuable and worthy, and to live with their wives in a wise and understanding way (“It’s not about the nail” comes to mind), because she is a joint heir, co-inheritor, and equal partner in Christ. And why should they do this? So the work of God won’t be blocked or shortchanged in their lives.

Of course Eugene Peterson’s The Message interpretation is even better:

The same goes for you husbands: Be good husbands to your wives. Honor them, delight in them. As women they lack some of your advantages. But in the new life of God’s grace, you’re equals. Treat your wives, then, as equals so your prayers don’t run aground.

But even if you stick with a strict translation and some Greek background, you will not get the same thing out of Peter that I have been getting for years (on the surface): a man at the top calling all the shots. Instead you will get: EQUAL PARTNER. A wife is her husband’s equal partner.

It brings me to my knees in thanksgiving to have a Lord whose gospel of life reframes everything human beings tried to twist His perfect Edenic world into. So I’m now laying to rest my last reservation with Peter. Peter and I can now be completely at peace. And I can now rejoice that Peter — and God — calls me my husband’s equal partner.

What I Want to Teach My Daughters About Married Sex {Velvet Ashes}

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Elizabeth is over at Velvet Ashes today talking about something we don’t talk about very much: sex.

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I’ve been married for 16 years now. While that’s not as long as some of you — and certainly not as long as my husband’s grandparents’ 70 years (!) — it’s still long enough to have seen and heard a lot of marriage advice.

And you know what? Some of that advice makes me cringe. So I can tell you up front: I’m not going to advise you to make sure to meet your husband’s needs by having lots of sex with him. And I’m not going to tell you that the purpose of marriage is to make you holy. (It isn’t.)

What I do want to talk about is walking in sexual wholeness.

How can I possibly talk about a topic as big and complex as human sexuality in a single blog post? While I can’t offer the comprehensiveness or the nuance that a book or a therapist can offer, I’ll give you my basic framework.

These are the things I want to teach my daughters someday: what the foundation for healthy married sexuality is, potential obstacles in the bedroom and what to do about them, and potential temptations outside of marriage and what to do about them.

Read Elizabeth’s 3 points here, as well as her first comment which offers some additional resources.

When fear strikes at night, here’s something you can do

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by Elizabeth

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I was talking with a friend recently when the subject of fear came up – specifically, nighttime fears. And all of a sudden I remembered the nameless, faceless fears of my early twenties. These were the fears that were irrational and nonspecific, feelings more than words. I didn’t always know what I was afraid of, I just knew I was afraid and couldn’t sleep.

Back then, all I knew to do was to sing the name of Jesus, over and over again, until I fell asleep. I had a few songs on repeat in my head. Later I would sing those same songs over my babies as I rocked them. This practice became so much a part of who I was that I didn’t consciously think about it as a weapon for fighting fear until I was in the middle of this recent conversation.

As we were talking, my friend said, “It’s like singing yourself a lullaby. We sing lullabies over our children, why wouldn’t we sing them over ourselves?” That was such a great description of the practice. So I’m going to share with you my lullabies. They’re calming to me but may not do anything for you. However, I think it’ll give you a starting point to find (or remember) your own evening songs.

The first and main song is one we used to sing in college with our friends. This version sounds fairly close to the way we used to sing together. I used to sing the “Jesus” chorus over and over to myself till I calmed down and fell asleep. There’s something so powerful about lifting your eyes up, away from your problems and even away from petitions for help, and focusing on the name of JESUS.

Here’s another one that helped me, though I can’t find any music for it anywhere. It was written by a lady in our Church of Christ circles who sang in a group called Free Indeed:

“Lord give me peace,
I’m feeling all alone,
calm my spirit,
still my mind,
fill my heart with peace.”

It had a really simple melody that I learned one Saturday morning from my youth minister’s wife. She used it when she needed peace and patience as a mama of young children; I used it at night when I couldn’t sleep.

And this last one might seem kind of strange, so bear with me. In middle school choir we sang a song set to words that had been scrawled on a cellar wall during WWII’s Holocaust:

“I believe in the sun even when it is not shining
And I believe in love even when there’s no one there
And I believe in God, even when He is silent
I believe through any trial, there is always a way

But sometimes in this suffering and hopeless despair
My heart cries for shelter, to know someone’s there
But a voice rises within me, saying ‘Hold on my child,
I’ll give you strength, I’ll give you hope. Just stay a little while.'”

The melody and the lyrics are both haunting, and the song has stayed with me all these years. It gives me comfort – though I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s when I’m in the dark, alone and afraid, that I need its message most. And it represents the undaunted faith I want to pass on to my children.

I was only 12 when I first learned the song, so I couldn’t understand the full soul-depth of its cries, but I remember watching people in the audience weep as we performed it. Now I know why they were crying. They were living in – or had lived in – a world where the sun wasn’t shining, a world where God was silent, a world where it seemed no one was there. Yet they still wanted to believe.

The version below is the closest I could find to the song I learned:

These days, I rely more on the “Doxology” and the “Gloria Patri” for peace and calm. Many years ago in a ladies’ Bible class I listened to one woman talk about how her mentor had taught her to center herself with the “Doxology” when she felt anxious. (Did you catch that? That was a long stream of women passing on wisdom that I’m now passing on to you.) So now in times of stress, I tend to fall back on:

“Praise God from Whom all blessings flow
Praise Him all creatures here below
Praise Him above ye heavenly hosts
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost”

And this:

“Glory be to the Father
And to the Son
And to the Holy Ghost.
As it was in the beginning
Is now and ever shall be
World without end
Amen, amen.”

If you’ve never sung to yourself at night, I hope this post gives you a new weapon for fighting fear and anxiety. The songs that speak to you in the middle of the night may be different from the ones that speak to me, but I pray you can find your own nighttime lullabies and start singing yourself to sleep.

If you already sing away your nighttime fears, consider blessing someone else by sharing your own songs in the comments.