Elizabeth’s

When Ministry and Marriage Collide

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by Elizabeth

Jonathan and I have been married almost 15 years now, and I can honestly say being married to him is the best thing that has ever happened to me. We were friends first, then fell madly in love our senior year of high school. Even our first year of marriage – considered by some to be quite difficult – was pure bliss. And I can honestly say that every year after that has grown more joyful and more intimate. This is not to say, however, that we haven’t ever struggled.

I’ve shared before about two of the major struggles in my marriage. I’ve talked about how I didn’t want to move overseas in the first place and how Jonathan and I were at an impasse until God got a hold of me. I’ve also shared my struggle to believe God loves me as much as my husband, since he seemed to have so many more gifts than I have.

There is another difficult season in my marriage that I’ve never discussed online. The two stories I mentioned earlier represent enormous works God wanted to do in my heart and in my spirit. They also had enormous implications in the way I lived everyday life alongside my husband. The struggle I’m going to talk about today might seem more earthy than spiritual, but it still looms quite large in the landscape of my memory.

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Some of you know we served in youth ministry in the States for 10 years. At one point we lived in a Parsonage next door to the church building, and we hosted summer youth meetings in our house. Initially we only invited juniors and seniors to our house on Tuesday nights for Bible study, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Later we started hosting all ages in our house every Wednesday night during the summer. And every Wednesday night without fail, teenagers trashed my house.

This went on for two whole summers. My house was a disaster every Wednesday night, and I had a breakdown every Wednesday night. Jonathan and I could not see eye to eye on this issue and often fought over it. He felt we needed to have the teens in our home, and that I needed to want to have them in our home, and that furthermore, he believed the teens would perceive my reluctance to welcome them into our home, so I needed to check my attitude.

This, as you can imagine, led to lots of stress in our marriage. I wasn’t confident enough to instruct the teens how to throw trash in the trash cans or how to avoid spilling coke all over my white living room carpet. I’m more confident now and would be able to teach teenagers in that way, but I was too intimidated back then. (Also I was much more uptight about cleanliness when I only had two kids as opposed to now, with four.) I just wanted my husband to kick the teenagers out; I wanted him to do it for me. At the same time I felt an intense pressure to let them in my house every Wednesday, or else I’d be a “bad ministry wife.”

Conflict can happen, even when you’re married to your best friend, even when you are absolutely convinced he’s the only one for you, even when you love practically everything about him. We shouldn’t be surprised when we have disagreements with our spouses. We’re different people, and we’ll see the world differently. And when we feel our own point of view so strongly, it can be difficult to imagine someone else’s point of view.

For any of my old darling youth group members who may be reading here today, please know I love you. And I want you to know I miss you all so dreadfully. I’m recounting a problem that was mine, not yours. Probably any of you who still like me enough to read my blog wouldn’t have been the ones tearing it apart in the first place, but either way, it doesn’t matter. This conflict wasn’t about you.

Two years and many, many fights later, we finally got creative in our problem-solving. We finally thought outside the box. This wasn’t either/or. It wasn’t: have them at our house, or they won’t feel the love. It wasn’t: have them at our house, or I’m a failure. It was: let’s have them at our house and not in. We didn’t cancel Wednesday nights at the Parsonage. Instead, we invited teens into our yard (but outside our house).

We gathered around the fire pit for hot dogs and marshmallows, for long chats and pyromaniac adventures. We played volleyball with the teenagers and let all the youth volunteers’ kids play in our kiddie pool. We swung on the bag swing and climbed up the rope on the oak tree. And it was a great compromise. It was hotter outside than in, that’s for sure, but my husband didn’t have to give up teens at his house, and I didn’t have to give up my sanity, my privacy, or my clean house.

I share this story to illustrate that compromises around ministry stressors are possible. For a long time, I saw the problem one way, and Jonathan saw it another way, and as long as we did that, there was no meeting in the middle. We had to get desperate enough to think about things in a different way, desperate enough try something new. I’m such a black and white thinker that our eventual solution never occurred to me (or my husband). In the end he must have figured he had to do something about his unhappy wife, no matter the ministry cost.

Now I look back and think how silly we were that we couldn’t find a compromise sooner. At the time, though, it didn’t feel silly at all. It felt deadly serious, as I’m sure all marriage conflicts do at the time. It took me a long time, but it was a good lesson to learn: sometimes there’s a solution that isn’t either/or. Sometimes there’s a solution that meets both spouses’ needs at the same time. Sometimes we just need to consider other options.

A Conversation with Timothy Sanford {A Life Overseas}

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by Elizabeth

pch

The last four months we’ve been exploring the ideas in Timothy Sanford’s book “I Have to be Perfect” (and other Parsonage Heresies). Here are the first four posts if you need a refresher:

The Little Word that Frees Us

“I’m Not Supposed to Have Needs”

“I Can’t Trust Anyone”

“God is Disappointed in Me”

Today we’ll conclude our series with an interview with Timothy himself. My questions and comments are in bold. Also stay tuned for his book to become more accessible for overseas workers this summer, when it will be published electronically.

Click here to read the interview.

The Church: On Not Being the Casserole Lady

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by Elizabeth

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Many a Casserole Lady has cared for me. The Casserole Lady brings food to the hurting, nourishment to the weary, comfort to the downcast. She’s first on your doorstep with home-baked bread and brownies, with meatloaf and soup, and of course, with casseroles galore. She ensures you don’t need to plan and prepare meals when you’re grieving a loss, are freshly postpartum, or find yourself in any other time of need.

I love the Casserole Ladies, but I am not one of them.

Sometimes I think about people with the gift of hospitality and get this gnawing, guilty feeling. Why can’t I be more like them? I wish I could, for hospitality seems like the Real Spiritual Gift. Delivering meals to doorsteps, inviting large groups into your home for meals, hosting people long-term as part of your family — this all sounds so very first century Christian. I sigh and start to think I must not measure up.

But I think my accounting system is off when I calculate this way. Maybe I shouldn’t be tallying things up like this. It shouldn’t be about me, me, me. It shouldn’t be about how valuable or useful my gifts are. We shouldn’t have a “usefulness hierarchy” — that’s a joy-stealer if ever I heard one. Instead, I’ve come to believe that it’s about the love behind my actions. It’s about my offering of love to the Lord’s Beloved, for I speak a language of love to the Church that is no less than those gifted in hospitality.

This idea of speaking a language of love originated in Gary Chapman’s book “The Five Love Languages,” where he specifies these 5 love languages:

Words of Affirmation

Physical Touch

Acts of Service

Gifts

Quality Time

I’ve mostly heard the idea of Love Languages applied to individual relationships, and to marriage in particular. It generally seems to be discussed in the context of getting your own needs met, explaining why you’re disappointed when they aren’t, and of course making sure you meet your spouse’s needs in return. [Note: I’m not saying that’s how it’s discussed in the book. I’m just saying that’s how I’ve usually heard it discussed amongst The People.]

That approach just doesn’t satisfy me anymore. I want to reframe the gifts discussion, and I want to reframe the love language discussion. I want to stop talking about the gifts we receive from God and start talking about the love we offer back to Him. I want to move beyond just determining how I prefer to receive love, and start embracing the way I most wholeheartedly give love.

Some people, like the Casserole Ladies, love through their Acts of Service. (And we’re all grateful for them!)

Some people love through monetary Gifts. (And building funds and charities everywhere are grateful for them, not to mention those of us in support-based ministry who rely on Gifts for our daily bread.)

Some people love through Physical Touch. (And we’re all grateful for the huggers and the greeters and, let’s not forget, the tireless nursery workers and stay-at-home moms.)

Some people love through Quality Time. (And we’re all grateful for the preachers, teachers, and small group leaders who painstakingly prepare lessons week after week, and for those who sit with people, whether sick or well, whether discouraged or not, giving their time to them.)

Obviously this is not an exhaustive treatise on all the ways members of the Body might speak these five different love languages! I just want to ask this question today: How do you speak love, out of an overflow of your own heart, to the Church? Not what you think you should be doing to serve. Not what you see someone else doing. Not what you’ve always done. But, how do you speak love in such a way that brings you joy?

For me, the way I most wholeheartedly give love to the Body of Christ is through Words of Affirmation. I use words with the hope of blessing people, not for my sake, but for theirs. I offer words, and not just in blog posts — though they’re here too. I also pour all my love into emails and private messages, just because I want to, and because it brings me joy. It is through words that I give gladly and love fully.

I take my counsel from Peter, who says “Do you have the gift of speaking? Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you,” and from Paul, who says, “If your gift is to encourage others, be encouraging.” I hear their commission to speak and encourage not through the lens of gift or skill or talent, but through the lens of love.

I want the discussion of love languages to be about what we give, for the pure joy of it, and not what we need from others. I want to approach service from the vantage point of love, and not of giftings. Not from a focus on me and what God has given me, but from a focus on offering my love to others. Not in order to pigeonhole myself into speaking only one “language,” but to embrace the way I show love and to give my whole soul to it.

I want our love languages to be an outpouring of love, a breaking open of our alabaster boxes.

 

What is your offering of love to the Church? What Language do you speak to her?

 

Check out Julie Meyer’s song Alabaster Box, in which she talks about pouring out all her love for Jesus.

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And we cannot end without a quote from Henri Nouwen who, in his book The Return of the Prodigal Son, expresses my feelings and experiences so well:

“When I first saw Rembrandt’s painting, I was not as familiar with the home of God within me as I am now. Nevertheless, my intense response to the father’s embrace of his son told me that I was desperately searching for that inner place where I too could be held as safely as the young man in the painting. . . .

I have a new vocation now. It is the vocation to speak and write from that place back into the many places of my own and other people’s restless lives. I have to kneel before the Father, put my ear against his chest and listen, without interruption, to the heartbeat of God. Then, and only then, can I say carefully and very gently what I hear.

I know now that I have to speak from eternity into time, from the lasting joy into the passing realities of our short existence in this world, from the house of love into the houses of fear, from God’s abode into the dwellings of human beings. I am well aware of the enormity of this vocation. Still, I am confident that it is the only way for me.”

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Other posts in The Church series:

Hungry for Community

“Me too” Moments

Dear American Church

I am a Worshipper

Authenticity is Not New

The Darkness Deepens

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by Elizabeth

dd2

In church we sing

Lord reign in me, reign in your power, Over all my dreams, In my darkest hour.*

We proclaim our determination to say “Blessed be the name of the Lord” even

When the darkness closes in.*

And sometimes — though less often in the modern worship era in which we now live — we sing

The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide.

I used to think phrases like these meant I could cling to God when everything around me was falling apart. I thought the darkness was outside me. I thought the prayer was for help in walking through human suffering.

Last year in my piano time, I happened anew upon the hymn Abide With Me. I was in a dark time, and it caused me to question my original understanding of this song’s meaning. I wondered if it’s not really talking about the darkness outside, but rather about the darkness inside.

Maybe it’s when the darkness rises within me that I need Him most. Maybe this hymn is a prayer for mercy when sin starts to overtake my heart. Perhaps it’s a plea for His abiding presence when my mind and heart wander from His light.

Abide with me, fast falls the even’tide.

The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide.

When other helpers fail and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, O, abide with me.

 

I need Thy presence every passing hour.

What but Thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?

Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?

Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.

 

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;

Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.

Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?

I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.

 

My mind can be a dark place. And when I’m in that dark place, I can take any Biblical truth or reality you might offer me, twist it, and spew it back at you with venom. I can fight each statement of truth with self-made lies.

Psalm 18:29 declares, “My God, you make my darkness bright.” Earlier this year I prayed, along with Common Prayer, “When I walk in darkness, Lord carry me through.” Perhaps those, too, are prayers for the darkness within, rather than the bleakness of my external circumstances.

Thankfully I’m not in a dark place now. I have been before, and I’m sure I will be again someday. When that happens, when the darkness closes in, when the darkness deepens, may I search deep within the pockets of my memory and remind myself that I triumph still, if He abides with me. When I pass through dim, cloudy days, when I feel helpless to fight the lies within, when I stumble along in a darkness of my own creation, may I call out for the Lord and beg Him to Abide.

 

*Lyrics from the songs Lord Reign in Me by Brenton Brown,

Blessed Be the Name of the Lord by Matt Redman,

and Abide With Me, by Henry F. Lyte, respectively.

The Heavens Declare

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by Elizabeth

apolloearthThe well-known United States/Soviet Union “Space Race” overshadowed a contemporaneous Cold War competition to cut through the Earth’s crust and reach the mantle. The United States abandoned its attempts to drill through the Pacific seafloor — under 11,000 feet of ocean water — after only 5 years and 601 feet. Meanwhile, Soviet drilling tenacity outlived the Soviet Union itself, continuing 24 years from its inception in 1970 to its abandonment in 1994.

Temperatures at the bottom of the Kola hole in northwestern Russia exceeded 300 degrees Fahrenheit. The rocks there were so “plastic” that whenever the drill was withdrawn, the hole would start to close. Their eventual depth reached 7.6 miles, halfway to the mantle and deeper into the Earth’s crust than Mount Everest stands above it — but still minuscule in comparison to Earth’s 7,918-mile diameter.

I never knew any of these fascinating historical tidbits.

I also never considered the fact that although we can see into outer space, we can’t see all the way to the center of the Earth. Our planet poses a problem for scientists: we can’t see into it. The methods we have for “seeing” inside the Earth are limited; everything we know about the bowels of our own planet has been discovered remotely.

I found this information in the July/August 2014 edition of Discover Magazine, in an article by Tim Folger. How we came to understand that Earth has a solid inner core and liquid outer core (in contrast to the liquid-only core scientists had previously believed Earth to have) was particularly intriguing to me, as the discovery was made by female seismologist Inge Lehman. It was a woman who, in 1929, discovered evidence of a solid iron core. It was a woman who, in 1936, published her paper arguing for that solid inner core. And it was a woman who had to wait until 1970 to be proven correct, when instruments were finally sensitive enough to corroborate her claims.

The article goes on to discuss the uniqueness of our magnetic field, especially considering new research into the heat transfer properties of molten iron, whose heat conductivity is higher than previously thought. Recent calculations with these updated properties indicate that the outer core would have conducted too much of its initial heat to the mantle, leaving it too little heat to remain molten. And Earth needs that molten iron core in order to create our life-sustaining magnetic field. Molten iron in the core is what produces the convection currents that power our magnetic field and protect us from cosmic and solar radiation. (This phenomenon is known as a “geodynamo.”)

So where did the heat come from that keeps our outer core molten? In light of the new calculations, scientists have had to look elsewhere for sources of heat for a molten outer core. One of those heat sources is a possible collision between Earth and a Mars-size body, whose blast particles would eventually coalesce into our moon. In that case, seemingly unrelated aspects of life on Earth might not be so unrelated: our moon, a molten core that induces our magnetic field and protects our oxygenated atmosphere from being stripped away, water in the crust that allows for tectonic plates to slip past each other, thus releasing heat from inside the Earth, thereby cooling it and allowing the conduction and convection that makes the molten, moving iron core induce our magnetic field to begin with.

Coincidences? the article’s author asks. Or not? Perhaps a habitable planet requires more than we’ve previously thought necessary. How repeatable is our Earth? We now know that planets are commonplace occurrences, true. But is there now more that needs to happen to ensure life than we used to think? One interviewed scientist said he thinks “It’s a matter of chance, just how the game played out, how the dice were thrown.”

I disagree. It doesn’t matter though. I still find God in the pages of a science magazine. I don’t have to be afraid of the worldview of a science writer. God can be found in the heavens He created, whether or not any researchers believe in Him. He is still there. He is still able to be found. He is still able to be worshiped.

May we daily go forth and find God in the world He has created for us.

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Photo source: Earth as seen from the Apollo 17 mission