Prayer

Music and Midlife {some recommendations}

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

I thought I would drop in with a mini “favorite things” post. Here are just a few things I’ve loved over the past few months. ~Elizabeth

The Upgrade: How the Female Brain Gets Stronger and Better in Midlife and Beyond by Louann Brizendine, MD. I saw this book recommended on a menopause website and was intrigued. I bought it on Kindle and practically underlined the entire thing. I have several other books about taking care of physical health in perimenopause and menopause, but nothing ever addressed the mental work of midlife like this book. It was also very hopeful about the second half of life – something I both appreciated and needed.

Inside Out 2. When the puberty button was pushed and all those new thoughts and feelings appeared out of nowhere, I felt like I could relate to Riley. Like her, I thought I had all my belief systems, thinking patterns, and emotions under control, then bam perimenopause happened, and I had to recalibrate. It’s been a lot of work to ride this emotional roller coaster, but it has certainly made me more reliant on the Spirit — which is never a bad thing.

Abide by Aaron Williams. I was seeking discernment about a few things in my life this spring, and one Sunday while we were singing this song in church, I felt like God gave me the answers I had been seeking. A beautiful song that draws us to the heart of God.

Christ Be All Around Me by All Sons & Daughters. At one point this summer I was really craving a prayer that could ground me. I love the prayer of St. Patrick (and I love St. Patrick) and had a distant memory of singing his words once in a song, so I went searching for it.

Same God by Elevation. This song ministered to me after a specific time of prayer about my identity. With so much in my life in flux, I felt adrift. God was basically saying to me, “I’m the same God I always was to you, and you’re the same girl you always were to me. Nothing about any of that has changed.” And I still need this God, the same God who has shown up for His people for thousands of years, every day of my life.

This is Our God by Phil Wickham. I get goosebumps with every verse. I remember the walls, the prisons, the giants – I’ve faced so many of them in my life. But look at what God does! And what a joy to be able to tell the stories of His faithfulness throughout our lives.

Olive Velvet Ashes Retreat image. This is the wallpaper on my phone now. The themes of this year’s retreat matched so much of what God was already speaking to me that I wanted to remind myself of it every time I opened my phone. Plus, those colors made me happy and calm.

When your husband calls you “a shell of a woman” {A Life Overseas}

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Elizabeth is over at A Life Overseas today.

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For months this spring I felt like a shell of a woman. I was empty and didn’t have anything to give. Oh, I was still doing all the “right” things. I was still getting up most mornings attempting to connect with God, and I was still relatively consistent with my commitment to exercise.  But I felt dead inside and couldn’t figure out why.

My husband noticed. Where before him once stood life and life abundant, he now saw a shell of a woman. He even suggested another round of counseling. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do about it or even what it was. I was unhappy in life and unmotivated in work. Was it depression? Burnout? What???

I felt especially dead at church. That was a strange feeling, because corporate worship has always quenched my thirst and nourished my soul and made my spirit come alive. But I just buried that newly incongruous feeling and ignored it. I tuned it out and refused to listen to it. I ran to the nearest screen and numbed out on TV and Facebook and solitaire games instead.

Finish reading here.

A Letter for the One Who’s Waiting {Velvet Ashes}

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by Elizabeth

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You in the waiting,
Yes, you
And yes, me too —
For we are all waiting for something —
Dear sister,
Beloved one,
You in the waiting,
This much I know:
There are no shortcuts to healing.
There are no shortcuts to wholeness.
For we can’t know God as Healer without first being wounded.
And we can’t know God as guide without first being lost.
We can’t know Him as counselor without first being confused.
And we can’t know Him as comforter without first sustaining pain.
We can’t know Him as intimate companion without first feeling abandoned.
And we can’t find our identity in Christ alone without first losing it elsewhere.

You in the waiting,
Dear One,
This much I know:
There is no way around the ache of the human soul.
There is no detour through the pain.
When we walk through the valley —
And we will all walk through the valley —
None of us gets to skirt around the edges.
We are completely baptized in sorrow,
Fully immersed in its grief.
For there are no shortcuts to healing,
No shortcuts to joy.
There is only Jesus.
If anything, He is the short cut:
He is, after all, our Way home
Even if that way be long and broken.

So you in the waiting,
Keep waiting.
Keep seeking,
And keep asking,
Even in the silence —
For there may be silence —
And even in the darkness —
For there may be darkness —
But don’t you give up Hope.
Hold on to Hope.
Hold on to the name of our Jesus.
This waiting, it takes time.
It takes space.
And, I wish I didn’t have to say this, but —
It takes hard work too:
The hard work of shedding the lies we believe about God,
The hard work of shedding the lies we believe about ourselves,
The hard work of being honest with Him about the injuries,
And the hard, Spirit-assisted work of letting go of our entangling sins.

So you in the waiting,
Yes you —
And yes, me too —
For we are all waiting for something —
Dearest sister,
Beloved One,
You in the waiting,
This much I know:
There are no shortcuts to healing,
But in Jesus there is healing.
And there are no shortcuts to wholeness,
But in Jesus there is wholeness.
So we hold on to Him,
We hold on to Hope,
And together, we wait.

Originally published here, reprinted with permission.

When the lights go out {A Life Overseas}

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Elizabeth is over at A Life Overseas today . . .

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I want to do all the things. All the very good things there are to do in this world. So I overcommit myself. I don’t say “no.” I say “yes” instead, and spread myself too thin. Then my soul suffers. My work suffers. My sanity suffers. My family life suffers. My spiritual life suffers.

I suffer in silence, thinking I’m all alone. I’m the only one failing at everything. I’m the only one who can’t pull it together. I’m the only one who can’t catch my breath, who can’t catch up on work, who can’t catch up on school, who can’t catch up with friends, who can’t catch up with the God I say I love so very much.

And I, insecure missionary blogger that I am, am afraid to tell people.

To top all that off, the heat in Southeast Asia has been crushing me. The past two months have held record highs here, and we get a lot of power cuts. I echo Ramona Quimby in Ramona the Brave who shouted out “Guts! Guts guts guts!” when she wanted to say bad words. Instead, I yell “Cuts! Cuts cuts cuts!” and very nearly lose my mind.

After one particularly grueling 12-hour all-night power outage, something inside me broke — flat out broke. I lost my hope. I began to question everything. Why are we here? Why can’t we live in America? Why exactly do I serve this God of mine? And where the heck is He when I can barely sleep or even breathe in this heat?

I was struggling under the weight of all the expectations I had for myself: be a good mom, be a good wife, be a good home educator, be a good missionary, be a good team leader’s wife, be a good friend, be a good writer, be a good editor, be a good Christ-follower. And I couldn’t do any of it.

Finish reading this post here.

My low-pressure approach to cultivating intimacy with God

/ trotters41 / 15 Comments

I recently shared some of this material at a ladies’ brunch. It is my hope and prayer that it might help you in your walk with God. ~Elizabeth

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This is a story about getting away with Jesus and how it transformed my life. It’s a story of hearing God whisper, “Come away with me,” and it’s the story of how I said yes – not perfectly, but repeatedly. It’s a story that might seem really elementary to some of you, and you’ve been living this for years. But for me it was groundbreaking, and it happened here in Cambodia.

Our international church was a watering hole for me right from the beginning of my time in Cambodia. It was a spiritual oasis, a weekly time to refresh and renew and meet with God. I remember walking into the church’s auditorium four years ago, feeling something inside me take a deep breath, and just knowing I was home. I met God that first Sunday, and every Sunday after.

But about a year and a half ago I felt God drawing me into deeper communion with Him. I felt Him calling me to a more daily commitment to meet together. Before then, I’d never learned to be consistent in my time with God. I had tried, but my attempts never lasted more than 3 to 6 months at a time. And they were never in the morning. (And I’d kind of always felt guilty about that, actually.)

But I was suddenly finding that Sunday mornings were not enough for me. They weren’t enough to get me through my week. My cup was empty. My well was dry. I didn’t have the strength I needed to thrive. Maybe in my passport country I could have survived like that, going from Sunday to Sunday, with maybe a Wednesday Bible study thrown in. But in Cambodia, I couldn’t live like that anymore. Life in this country was taking more out of me, and that meant that in turn, I needed to take more from God.

I knew, deep down in my spirit that this was what God was calling me to. I knew I needed this, and I knew I wanted it. But I have NEVER, EVER been a morning person. Left to my own devices, I would prefer to sleep.

So I had to start with really small steps. And I do mean really small: 10 minutes. I woke up 10 minutes early. In the beginning all I did was read a daily selection of prayer and scripture from a prayer book. I got a notebook, and I started writing out my own prayers and recording the Bible verses that really stood out to me.

I knew I wanted this to be a long-term commitment, so there were several things I decided not to feel guilty about:

  • I didn’t let myself feel guilty if I skipped a day because I was too tired to get out of bed. I just woke up the next day and started over again.
  • I didn’t let myself feel guilty if I couldn’t keep up with some prescribed Bible reading plan. I didn’t try to catch up when I missed. I just slowly worked through whatever section of Scripture I was in.
  • I didn’t let myself feel guilty if I got sidetracked with other Scriptures or devotional books and deviated from “the plan.” 
  • And I didn’t let myself feel guilty about my short times. I just slowly increased my morning time, usually by 10 minutes at a time.

Each individual meeting with God doesn’t always feel very fruitful. But the seconds add up to minutes, and the minutes add up to hours, and every moment with God means something. When I look back over the last year and a half, I see that these times with God have been the source of some of my greatest spiritual breakthroughs. And that’s not to say I didn’t experience God before coming to Cambodia, because I did. I really, really did.

But here is where I discovered that God’s love for me is much deeper than I ever knew before. Here is where I discovered He loves me as much as He loves everyone else, and I didn’t use to be sure of that. Here is where I learned who I am in Christ in ways I’d never known before. And I’ve had various seasons where God says, “Ok, we’re going to work on this particular sin now, or this particular lie.”

I know I can get really excited when I talk about intimacy with God. But I also want to be very careful how I talk about it because

  • The last thing I want to do is heap more guilt and shame on you or give you something more to DO.
  • I don’t want to give the impression I think I somehow “earned” God’s intervention in my life by deciding to spend more time with God. I didn’t earn His gifts of healing and freedom; everything is a gift and comes from Him alone.
  • I don’t want to give the impression a morning quiet time will solve all your problems. I still walk through difficult times. I still sin — and that still discourages me. I still sometimes skip my morning devotional time. And I still sometimes have a hard time connecting with God.
  • I also know some of you may be walking through a desert right now, or a fiery trial, and thriving may seem far from possible. So I want to be really sensitive to your pain and your weariness.

When we talk about needing to steal away and spend time with God, it can sound legalistic, like this is what you have to do to measure up. But that’s NEVER, ever my intention. All I want is for people to get away and be with God. All I want is to see people healed and set free. Our time with God is NOT where we prove what great followers we are, it’s where the healing happens.

And we will still have trials. Our relationship with God can’t inoculate us against difficulty. And we will still have times in the desert, seasons of winter when we can’t see the fruit or feel His presence.

If that’s you today, if you’re in a difficult or dry season, I want to encourage you not to give up hope. Seasons don’t last forever. Hold out for another season. In the big picture, over the whole course of our lives, if we are drawing near to God and He is drawing near to us, we can thrive even in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

And that is the truth about my story: I’m no longer barely surviving in Cambodia. Cambodia is actually the place I learned how to thrive in my walk with God. Cambodia is where I learned how to abide with Him and to commune with Him. I found God here, and I’m not the same person I was before. In fact, God isn’t the same God I thought I knew. He’s so much bigger and better than I ever thought.

And I’m thankful for that, thankful that I was so needy that it drove me to get more of God. What I was on my own wasn’t enough to handle life here. What was inside me wasn’t enough to live life here. I didn’t have the reserves or the strength the way I might have had in my own country.

I still hear God on Sunday mornings — I’m so thankful for Sunday mornings!! Now though, I hear God throughout the week too. (And since I’m a human and kind of dense and hard-headed, it helps the lessons sink in better if I hear them on Sunday and during the rest of the week.)

So if you are like me and you’re only haphazardly meeting with God, perhaps only on Sunday mornings, and if you’re ready to go deeper into God and into His love, I want to gently suggest that maybe it’s time to make more space for Him in your life, maybe it’s time to invite Him into your busy, stressed-out schedule and into your worried, overwhelmed heart.

I promise you that if you get away with Jesus, it’s going to change your life. Because the time we spend with God is what helps us thrive – whether you’re in Cambodia like me, or somewhere else. Only God’s love is enough to fill our hearts for our days, for our marriages, for our friendships, for our work, for our children, for our ministry. When we’re connected to God, we can be like the trees in Jeremiah 17:7-8, the ones planted by streams of water, flourishing and bearing fruit, even in the dry, desert places.

 

God, you are the only one who can make us flourish in the desert. You are the only one who gives life to our lifeless souls. God, plant us in you, that we may know you, that we may know your heart. Give us your life abundant, and help us thrive in whatever land we find ourselves. And we acknowledge that when you do this, when you make us thrive, it is NOT our doing, it is YOUR doing, and the glory goes to you alone. Thank you for being enough for us, Amen.