Elizabeth’s

Sex, Missions, and Listening to God {book recommendations for you}

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by Elizabeth

This spring I read three of the best books I’ve ever read. One in particular I couldn’t stop talking about for weeks – but it wasn’t the sex book! I had to start with that word, though, because I knew it would grab your attention. 

Up first, the best book on missions EVER: The 3D Gospel: Ministry in Guilt, Shame, and Fear Cultures by Jayson Georges.

When Christine Paterson of FieldPartner recommended the book and mentioned that it was only $3.99 on Kindle, I figured I’d give it a try. I intuitively knew that American culture held more than just a guilt/innocence worldview and that shame/honor and fear/power comes into our thinking as well, and I was eager to learn the specifics of each worldview.

What I didn’t expect was for the book to so thoroughly rewrite my understanding of culture. I underlined nearly the entire book. At only 80 pages in paperback, there’s no fluff here. Every word seems essential, and every sentence sheds light on world cultures and their differing assumptions and thinking processes. I began to understand shame/honor and fear/power cultures more fully, and I began to see how the Bible beautifully addresses all three cultural concerns (guilt, shame, and fear). 

Once my eyes were opened to this, I even began to see these three concerns addressed in most of our worship songs. In Western cultures we tend to tell the gospel story only through a guilt-innocence lens, and while that’s not wrong, it is incomplete. We look to God for help with our problems regarding fear and shame, but we don’t tend to bring these perspectives into our telling of the Gospel story, and this hinders our spiritual growth. 

Thankfully, we can offer people a more three-dimensional gospel, one that has the power to redeem their day-to-day struggles with fear and shame, whether in our passport culture or a host culture. God knows the human heart and has offered a solution for all our problems in Jesus Christ. 

This book made me fall in love with God all over again.

Next up, the best book I’ve read in a long time about listening to God: How to Walk into a Room: The Art of Knowing When to Stay and When to Walk Away by Emily P. Freeman

I remember resonating so deeply with Emily’s podcast episode, “How to Walk Out of a Room,” a couple years ago. The episode was mercifully devoid of details so that her principles could apply to all sorts of situations. When I heard she was writing a book based on that episode, I knew I would want to read it.

Emily is a spiritual director and has a master’s degree in spiritual formation, and she has a way of walking with people in discernment that is quiet and calm. She offers a “non-anxious presence,” as they say in spiritual direction circles. (Full disclosure: I’ve been meeting monthly with a spiritual director for about the past year, and it’s been a huge part of drawing my heart back into conversation with God after some dry, lonely years.)

I had a feeling this book would be important, and so I decided not to mark it up but to leave it empty and, in a way, sacred. Instead, I would rewrite meaningful sections in my journal. This helped slow me down and really savor Emily’s words. It helped me process the past, it helped me learn how to make better decisions, and it gave me peace in the decisions I was making. Then one day I looked around and realized I was making decisions much more easily than I had in the past, even small daily decisions, and I had to wonder if this book had something to do with it. 

The thing I love about this book – and that sets it apart from other books purporting to help people recover from restrictive religious environments and explore a more expansive relationship with Christ – is that Emily gives tangible steps people can take to process the past and discern their present and their future. To walk with Emily is to learn together how to listen to God.

And lastly, one of the best books I’ve ever read about sex: The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex: Creating a Marriage That’s Both Holy and Hot by Sheila Wray Gregoire.

This is the book every woman needs to read before she gets married – or after, if things in the bedroom aren’t working, whether she got married a year ago or 30 years ago. Sheila co-wrote The Great Sex Rescue with two other authors, and it’s a great research-based book that helps people untangle their unhealthy and unbiblical beliefs about sex, but The Good Girl’s Guide really gets into practicalities. 

I heard it recommended by a Bible college professor who teaches classes about sexuality, and I wanted to check it out myself. There was an earlier version of the book, but just this year it was revised and expanded, so I read the revised version. This is the book I will give to my daughters when they are engaged or newly married. I still recommend Aanna Greer’s Darling: A Woman’s Guide to Godly Sexuality for those who are quite innocent or naive about sex and their bodies, but Sheila’s book is a necessary follow-up.

Sheila, along with her pediatrician husband, also wrote The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex: Because Good Guys Make the Best Lovers. I haven’t read that one, but I’m assuming it’s good because that same Bible college professor recommended it and because it’s from an author I trust.

I hope these books will help you or someone you love.

The Beloved of God

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by Elizabeth

The old conversation about women and work has been circulating again. People are quick to take sides. They’re for women working. They’re for women staying home. (Never mind the fact that this is a false binary, and that women who stay at home work, regardless of whether they work for pay.)

To me this conversation seemed like a lot of wasted cortisol and adrenaline. Why would I torture my body with extra stress hormones just to justify my life choices to strangers? 

But it did make me think about the past 20 years of my mothering. For the first several years I stayed at home full-time and cared for our four children. I loved it. I always wanted to have a lot of kids. I didn’t always want to homeschool them, but I fell in love with that path too.

At the time I knew in my head how hard my husband was working to allow me to stay home and also pay the bills, but I don’t think I fully grasped his sacrifices. Only now, having learned what it’s like to earn income while trying to remain an engaged parent, can I more fully appreciate all that he did during those years. And I am impossibly grateful.

Because amid the exhaustion, I loved those years. I loved playing with my kids and reading aloud to them and being free to just traipse all over whichever city on whichever continent we lived for playdates and errands and homeschool activities. 

I felt a unique sense of purpose in those years, contributing to society by contributing to my family in (obviously) non-monetary ways. Along the way, we created our own family culture. Sometimes I didn’t realize what an incredible gift that really was.

Fast forward to today, when I still stay at home and homeschool my younger children, but I also work from home part-time. Now I understand more fully the financial pressures facing my husband these last 20 years.

Working from home also makes me appreciate the years I had with my kids as my main focus. As fulfilling as my freelance work is, it can be hard to live with a divided psyche, to have my heart in more than one place.

And yet I am impossibly grateful. Grateful that I’ve been given work that is meaningful to both me and the people I serve. Grateful that I’m able to bring in extra income and help pay the bills while still mostly staying home. The economy is different now than when we left America in 2012. It’s even harder to live on one income now than it was then.

And so families sacrifice. ALL families sacrifice. Whether we’re sacrificing one spouse’s income so they can stay at home with the kids, or whether we’re sacrificing one spouse’s time to either leave the house for work or to work from home – whether part-time or full time – everything is a sacrifice. Families are working hard to take care of their kids and their bills, and the last thing any of us needs is to feel judged or to judge others for our choices.

So when I first read about the recent gender roles controversy, I wrote it off. I thought some of the claims people made were silly, but as I said at the beginning, I didn’t have the time or the cortisol to waste on a conversation that is so nuanced and complex and personal and which so many people reduce to maxims and memes.

The longer I heard and saw people talking about it, however, the sadder I got. There are a lot of women walking around without knowing their worth. Without knowing their belovedness. Without understanding their deep value to God apart from what they do.

When we know our belovedness, no one’s opinion of what women should or shouldn’t be doing with their lives can push us off kilter. We know who we are, we know who God made us to be, we know who loves us, and we know the ones we love. We don’t have anything to prove to anyone, because we are secure in Christ’s love. 

I can say, “I am a child of God, and I know my Father loves me.” And I can say to you, “You are a child of God, and your Father loves you – whether you stay home with your children or whether you work from home or whether you work out of the home or do any of it for pay.”

This is what I wish we all knew, truly knew, deep in the viscera of our bodies and the basement of our souls:

The woman who stays at home? Loved.
The woman who works from home? Loved.
The woman who works nights so she can be with her kids during the day? Loved.
The woman who works days because it’s the only way to make ends meet? Loved. 
The woman who stays home when her kids are little and then goes back to work? Loved.
The woman who works because she genuinely enjoys her job? Loved.

You are the beloved of God, and no one can take that away from you. You are hidden in Christ with God, and your real self is found in Him, not in the approval or disapproval of other men and women. You are a child of God, and that is the most important thing about you. 

The God who adopted you as Daughter will lead you in ways that are personal and particular to you. Your life may look different from mine, but we are all the beloved of God. He is ours, and we are His. 

May we cherish each other in the same way the God of the universe cherishes us. May we honor each other’s choices, just as we honor the same God who leads us in different directions. And may we remember that our value comes from Him, not the particular ways we serve our families and communities. For we are the beloved of God, and no power on earth can convince us otherwise.

The Table {Postcards from Re-entry}

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by Elizabeth

In 2006 when our lead minister and his wife became empty nesters and moved out of the church parsonage so that we could move in, they left their kitchen table. We were a young family who didn’t have a kitchen table and were grateful for all the other furniture they left too.

Over the next six years, our family grew around that table. We added babies, and we added memories. We created a family and ministry culture around that table, and when we left the States for Cambodia, my best friend took the table into her home. 

It was full of memories for her too. Memories of late-night conversations when she would visit me because I was stuck at home with young children and a traveling husband. (I now try to return the favor to young moms when I can, going to them during naptime.) It was full of summer days with our kids eating snacks around the table and then playing in the yard or doing science projects together. She had to let me go, but she didn’t have to let that table go.

A new kitchen table was one of the first things we needed to find when we arrived in Phnom Penh in 2012. Some friends took us to a local furniture shop and helped us pick out both dining and living room furniture. The pieces were cheap, but they looked good enough.

Our first table soon fell apart. Huge flying termites bored holes into the table and migrated into our door frames as well. We could hear them chewing away at the wood. Jonathan tried to tear out the rotten pieces and kill the termites, but eventually he gave up the struggle. The table had to go. Its cheap, untreated wood had probably brought the termites with it from the shop in the first place. Next time we would be more careful.

In the meantime, we needed something to eat from, so we pulled out a spare metal round table, the kind that Khmer people set up at weddings. It took up a lot of space in our kitchen, but we discovered we liked the equanimity of a round table. Everyone could participate in family life the same. We were all the same distance from each other, and family life thrived. We decided our next table needed to be round.

Eventually we found a super heavy, high quality Khmer round table, and it took several delivery men to pull it up the two flights of stairs to our kitchen. We couldn’t host people around that table very well, but we couldn’t host people very well around our rectangular table either. Our kitchen was just too small.

We loved that round table. You can see it in lots of family photographs from our time in Southeast Asia. It became emblematic of Trotter family life, and after a few years we all signed our names under our places at the table.

Then covid happened. We returned to America early for a planned furlough, leaving our table and other belongings behind like usual. When we realized we weren’t going back, Jonathan did everything he could to rescue our Cambodian kitchen table, that centerpiece of family life. After multiple failed attempts with one company, we found a legitimate company that could transport our most precious belongings back to the States. It consisted mostly of books, pictures, and personal items, but we also shipped the table. 

The shipment took several months, getting stuck in U.S. customs and requiring unexpected fees, but it eventually found its way to Joplin, where we were resettling. We pulled our heavy Cambodian table into our new home in December 2020 and breathed a sigh of relief that we had preserved part of our children’s childhood for them.

But it took up a lot of space here as well as there, and after a couple years Jonathan started dreaming about a table that could host more people. We weren’t engaging in much hospitality during the pandemic, but he knew he wanted to host people again. He wanted to live like we did at the parsonage, regularly inviting people into our home and our backyard. He wanted to live like he did growing up on an acreage in a small Kansas City suburb, where his parents frequently hosted people for evening bonfires, sunrise services, and hot cocoa. To do that, we would need a different table.

The family wasn’t sure how to take this news. We loved our round table. It reminded us of Cambodia. But I caught the vision. I knew he was right – we needed a different table if we wanted to invite people into our home and into our lives. But tables are expensive, and we needed everyone to get used to this new plan, so the idea sat for a year or two.

All along, he kept an eye out for wooden tables and benches (which seat even more people than chairs). Then one Saturday morning he saw a friend selling wooden benches online. He texted right away, explaining that he was looking for benches to go along with the long kitchen table he was still dreaming of.

She said they still had the table that went with the benches, the table they had raised their family around. The table they had invited dozens of people to over the years. This table had a heart for ministry. It had a legacy. Its owners decided to gift it to us.

And what a gift it was. To know that this table had seen years of love and care and fellowship, years of laughter and soul secrets and tears. And to know that we were receiving such an incredible heritage from these generous people so that we could do the same thing they had done, the thing we had been dreaming about doing again, was such a sweet gift from the Father. 

So we rearranged our kitchen to welcome this new table, which came with two benches and two extensions for larger groups. Daily life doesn’t require the extensions, but we can already envision our married children and grandchildren gathering around this table someday.  

Our Cambodia table still has a place in this new arrangement. We cut off both leaves, along with the rolling feet, and set this reduced mass in an open area near our kitchen. Now we have a place to put food and utensils when we host people, since our kitchen has next-to-no counter space. And this is getting into the geometry of it (which I find fascinating, though you might not), but a round table maximizes circumference (which is why it took up too much floor space in our kitchen) while minimizing surface area (which is why there was no room on the table for food). This new table solved all of our problems at once.

A few weeks later we got a taste of this new way of living. We tried out the arrangement with guests, and it worked splendidly. Everyone could relax comfortably, the kitchen didn’t get overcrowded, and we could all eat whenever we wanted. Our home feels like it’s meant to feel – open and warm and clear, and most definitely ready for guests.

2023 Year in Review (in photos)

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by Elizabeth

The cry of my heart for ever so long. I encounter God so deeply in science. My girls gave me this mug for Christmas. I love it, and I love them for giving it to me.

My firstborn explaining trusses to me. I took Statics 20 years ago when I was pregnant with him, and here he is 20 years later taking the course himself. I actually remember very little about it, but it was fun to geek out with him over the E (engineering) in STEM.

My four children overlooking Horse Bluff at Camp Tahkodah. Their great-great-grandfather Dr. George Benson cashed out a life insurance policy to purchase the campground — that’s how much he believed in it. 

The older I get, the more I’m thankful for such a heritage for my children. (They have a beautiful heritage of faith and family traditions on my side too.) Benson later sold the camp to Harding University, who still owns and operates it.

Horse Bluff has always been my favorite bluff. 

In many ways the song “Sing My Way Back” from Steffany Gretzinger represents the year 2023 for me. Re-entry challenged my faith and seemed impossibly hard at times. In a very real way I lost access to the one thing that could have strengthened and sustained me in that time.

My relationship with God thrived on the field, but upon returning unexpectedly in 2020, I found that not only had I changed while I’d been overseas, my passport country had also changed.

For a long time everything felt dark, and I felt dead inside. But somehow in 2023 I found my way back to His heart.

Much of this change was accomplished through working with a spiritual director. I’m so grateful to Danielle Wheeler for answering my questions about spiritual direction and for connecting me with a potential director.

We are more completely our true selves when we are in communion with Christ. That’s part of why I felt so much unlike myself during re-entry. I’m thankful to be making my way back to both God and myself.

Brooke Ligertwood’s “Honey in the Rock” represents another aspect of my year. I first heard it a couple years ago and disliked it. I wasn’t experiencing life like this and thought it was out of reach.

But 2023 has changed all that. It started at the beginning of the year with some financial challenges — we had to make major foundation/crawl space repairs, and the bill for these necessary repairs frightened the living daylights out of me.

I’d had anxiety around money for decades — ever since adolescence when my family faced adverse financial circumstances. I’d carried that anxiety through life, memorizing and reciting Matthew 6:25-34 over the years and praying for my daily bread with the Lord’s Prayer. But the anxiety remained.

I had to do some deep inner work on my money fears this year, and it wasn’t pretty. About halfway through the year I began to find some healing.

But that wasn’t the only way I found “honey in the rock, water from the stone, manna on the ground, no matter where I go.”

This year was a series of progressive healings, only one of which was with money. There was healing in relationships, healing in my ability to reach out to others. The manna God offers isn’t just physical nourishment, but I hadn’t experienced His manna in a long time.

Of course, now I can look back over all the years of re-entry and see honey in the rock everywhere. But for so long I couldn’t see the stars, I couldn’t taste the honey.

24 years ago this handsome guy asked me to marry him at this camp (albeit a different bluff). We’ve returned to this place as often as we can over the years — it’s as close to Home as he gets.

And it’s been the place where we’ve often made big decisions. The decision to start a family (remember that big tall guy explaining the trusses?), the decision to go to nursing school in KC, the decision to go to the mission field.

There were no big decisions to make this year, but I came away with a very grateful heart for 2023 and the God (and people! you know who you are, College Heights Church!) who brought me through it.

“Home is wherever I’m with you.”

Re-enacting our engagement for our children.

There’s no one else I would rather do life with. Here’s to 24 more years — and 24 more years after that.

Some Liturgies You Can Add to Your Morning Times

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by Elizabeth

Over the years our family has developed a morning ritual. We call it “devo,” and we model it after the daily devotionals my husband grew up with. Every morning his family gathered in the living room before breakfast to read the Proverb and Psalms for the day.

We started doing morning devos in Cambodia when everyone was young and still learning how to read out loud, and we’ve changed up our routine several times. We started with the Proverbs only but at one point got bored of them and switched to the Psalms instead. Then we went through a phase where we were reading through the Gospels. We tried Shane Claiborne’s Common Prayer for a while, and now we’re back to the Proverbs again – we all missed the simplicity of those early days in Cambodia.

Several years ago we decided to sing on Friday mornings instead of read. Hymns had been instrumental in building my faith and keeping me moored in times of doubt and fear, but my children didn’t know the hymns, as we didn’t sing them at church on Sunday mornings. We owned a few Church of Christ hymnals, so we got to work teaching our family how to sing.

I don’t know if you do a “morning time” in your homeschool or if you have evening devotionals with your family. But I do know a few liturgies that have been helpful to our family, and I wanted to share in case you want to add any of them to your worship times.

The Apostles’ Creed. With a world in such flux and so many arguments over what is important or true, we wanted to draw our children to the foundations of our faith. In the Creeds we proclaim the most important beliefs of the Christian faith. They are the ones we need to agree on, the ones we should never waver from. We worked together to memorize the Apostles’ Creed and say it together most (not all) days. It has been an anchor for me the past several years. There are a couple modern songs based on the creeds, but nothing beats reciting the complete Apostles’ Creed, whether by yourself or in community.

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
      creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
      who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
      born of the virgin Mary.
      He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
      was crucified, died, and was buried;
      he descended to hell.
      The third day he rose again from the dead.
      He ascended to heaven
      and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
      From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
      the holy catholic church,
      the communion of saints,
      the forgiveness of sins,
      the resurrection of the body,
      and the life everlasting.
Amen.

The Doxology. This was one of the first songs we taught our children. It’s simple and easy to sing and is really a prayer. We often end our morning devo by singing the Doxology (although we sometimes end on another song, which I’ll explain below). We also sing it before meals, especially when we have guests over. We love it when old Church of Christ friends come over because they can SING. Four-part acapella harmony, delicious and delightful and a little taste of heaven. (As it turns out, you can take the girl out of acapella churches, but you can’t take the acapella out of the girl.)

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

The Serenity Prayer. Reinhold Niebuhr’s words are a newer addition to our morning times, but I think they have staying power. Like most people, I’ve known the first stanza for years (and it is the only part of the prayer attributed to Niebuhr with certainty). The second part is used in many 12-step programs and has been particularly helpful to me as a compulsive worrier. We are memorizing the entire prayer as a family.

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference,
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as He did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that He will make all things right,
If I surrender to His will,
That I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with Him forever in the next.
Amen.

Paschal Troparion (Resurrection Hymn). We’ve been singing this song ever since I learned it from eine blume during a Velvet Ashes retreat. The lyrics are a modern English translation of a 5th century Orthodox hymn. We sometimes end our morning times with the Paschal Troparion instead of the Doxology.

Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling down death by death.
And to those in the grave
He’s given life, He’s given life.

The Lord Bless You and Keep You. My mom prayed Numbers 6:24-26 over us each day before we headed off to school, and I started praying it over my oldest as soon as we got home from the hospital. At some point I stopped saying it over my bigs before bed, but my youngest still regularly requests this prayer – a reminder of the power of repeated prayers. The version below is closest to the New American Standard.

The Lord bless you and keep you;
The Lord make His face to shine upon you,
The Lord be gracious to you;
The Lord lift up His countenance upon you,
And give you peace.

And finally, the 23rd Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer. We don’t pray these as a family, but I pray them regularly by myself. I depend especially on “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want”; “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me, Your rod and your staff, they comfort me”; “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name”; and “Give us this day our daily bread.” They speak to my tendency to worry, especially over money and death and danger. I need something beautiful and poetic and true to ground me in those times.

Prayer rituals have the power to form us as Christ followers. Perhaps you already have prayer rituals of your own; perhaps you are looking to develop some. If so, I hope these ideas can enrich your spiritual life and build a deeper, sturdier faith in our triune God.