It's Deja Vu All Over Again!

It's been a few years ago now, but before the first book in "The Rhyme and Reason Series" came out, I was feeling very frustrated with how long it was taking for everything to come together so my vision could become a reality. There were a few times when I was tempted to take matters into my own hands and self-publish, or put out an audio book.  Something! Anything!  Each time I would make a move, the Lord would say to me, "Catherine, if you will not get ahead of Me, if you will not take matters into your own hands, if you will not give birth to an Ishmael, I will give you an Isaac."

I can't tell you how many times that caution kept me waiting on Him and trusting Him to move.  And eventually, He did exactly that. It was worth the wait after all.  The books are all I had hoped they would be and people's response to them have proven to be everything I had dared to hope.

During all the waiting I had innocently but foolishly assumed that getting the first book published would be the hardest part of the journey and that everything after that would be relatively easy. What I learned instead after climbing that first mountain and looking out from its peak--was that there was an entire mountain range stretching out before me! It was genuinely shocking to me to realize this journey was never going to be an easy one--even with the Lord in it!

I am irritated to find myself in the same position of frustration I was in with the first book as I wait for the Lord to provide the means for the series to continue. It's been two years since "Matthew" came out. I thought for sure I'd have 4-6 more books out by this point. It's been extremely difficult to figure out exactly what the Lord is doing and why He seems to be procrastinating again!

The good news is I have no choice but to wait on Him. I can't move forward on my own or, knowing me, I probably would! But I am reminded of His past faithfulness and resting in the fact that He always finishes what He starts--whether that involves my sanctification or the series.

And so I wait. And even though I am eager for provision and movement, I don't wait as one with no hope. I wait with confidence that God is in this and He is ever faithful. He moves according to His time table and not mine. He always has, He always will. Perhaps the lesson is learning to be grateful for  what He has already done and have faith for what He is yet to do.

I just wish I knew if learning it would move things forward again!

Careful What You Pray For

Everything about my life seems to go in spurts. I reread, for the 647th time, "Destined For the Throne" by Paul E. Billheimer.  It reignited a deep yearning within me to go to greater depths in my walk with the Lord, as it always does which is why, even though I have books stacked everywhere and my reading list is a mile long, I reread that book often. I spent several days worth of my prayer time pouring my heart out to the Lord, telling Him how much I want to know Him, how desperately I want to come to a place of such surrender and obedience that His life in me is evident to everyone I encounter. I declared my singular allegiance. And I meant every word of it.

I guess I sort of expected accolades from heaven, answers to my prayers, or revelation from the Word.  Instead, all hell broke loose.

I can't even describe it.  Multiplied frustrations. Staggering disappointments. Someone closest to me saying something that devastated me. That pesky negative thinking cycle. All of it left me feeling downright depressed, discouraged and demoralized.

It's really been a hard few weeks. And there is no end in sight. After spending days in the "poor, poor, pitiful me" cycle, it was like the Lord shook me and said, "You need to stop moping. I'm just answering your prayer."  

"What?!" I yelled in my head, "I want to be close to You, not frustrated and demoralized wondering where You are when I have such passion to know You!"

But suddenly, everything started to make sense. The way we draw close to the Lord is through trials! The way we learn to trust Him is by clinging to Him! The way our faith grows is by having to exercise it!  The way we surrender is by acknowledging our own inadequacies. And I realized the Lord was only allowing opportunities for me to do just that. Draw close, pour my heart out, exercise faith. Trust Him despite the circumstances. Realize how poor is spirit I truly am. Cling to the truth and not the lies.

At that point all I could do was laugh! And give thanks. Thanks that He hears and answers my prayers. Thanks that He loves me enough to take me through hard stuff, confusing stuff, hurtful stuff so I can better learn the sufficiency of Christ in all things. Thanks that He is using this life to prepare me to rule and reign with Him throughout all eternity! From that perspective, everything looks much different. 

As someone much wiser than me once said, "Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing."  James 1:2-4

The Message puts it this way: "Consider it a sheer gift, my friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So don't try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so that you are mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way."

Amen. Thank you Lord, for loving me enough to grow me up in You.

These Three

"But now abide faith, hope and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love." 1 Cor. 13:13

Fatih, according to the timeless wisdom and relevance of the Bible, is defined in Hebrews 11:1 as the confident assurance that the things we hope for will actually come to pass. Other translations are a little more poetic, but the essential truth is that faith is an unwavering belief in Jehovah God and a firm confidence in His fidelity to His promises. It is the essential component to any serious endeavor to live a Christian life. By faith we are saved, thus instigating the journey. It's the starting point of a transformed life for those who embark on an eternal relationship with the invisible God. Faith is the conduit--the connection--of the finite with the infinite.

Hope is the mechanism by which the connection is sustained. It is the part of us that is certain there is a God in heaven who can and does intervene in our circumstances and who has a purpose for our lives that continues into eternity. It is a gift from God that we can also give to one another. How good of God to let us join the fun! We can offer hope to one another, bear one another's burdens and, "comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God." (2 Cor. 1:4) We are comforted and comfort others with the hope that God is at work and we have not been abandoned regardless of how bleak things might seem at a particular moment in time.

Interestingly, faith and hope are not eternal qualities, but essential tools for navigating life in a fallen world. They will be unnecessary in the world to come. The instant we see God face-to-face, our faith will be rewarded and our hope realized. And when they are, it will be more extraordinary than anything we can possibly imagine! What I like to call the eternal gasp of delight.

But love? Ah! Love is eternal! God is love and God is eternal, therefore our faith and hope will culminate in the unending and ecstatic enjoyment of Divine perfection and love. It's the greatest of the three because it is the perpetual and sine qua non (without which not) nature of God.

How magnificent of the Lord to give us all the tools we need to navigate a life of faith while we are "alive and remain," then sweep us into His heavenly home to dwell with Him forever in the bliss of perfect love and fellowship. One thing is sure: I will cling to faith and hope tenaciously in this life, but will gladly lay them down when it's my turn to enter the supreme satisfaction and rest of the eternal life to come.

"Joy to the World" The Lord DID Come!

I have a friend who has a friend who is dying. She prayed to be healed, but instead, the Lord gave her a vision of a small, shallow, babbling brook and told her, "Dying is easier than crossing that stream." I can't shake the beauty and comfort of that thought.

When my Uncle Ned was dying, his son Bob asked him what it felt like to know he was going to die. He said he felt like a little boy getting on a bus that would take him to his grandmother's house. He had to ride the bus by himself, and that was a bit scary, but he knew that when he arrived at his destination, he would be sitting in his grandmother's kitchen eating chocolate chip cookies, and she made the best chocolate chip cookies in the world!

One of the greatest gifts the Lord gave me was an easy death for Jordan. Rather than eventually suffocating from the effects of bronciolitis obliterans, he simply never woke up after emergency surgery and instead of seeing our faces, he saw the Lord's!

It might seem odd to be writing about death on Christmas Eve, when most of us are preparing to celebrate a very significant birth. But unlike the rest of us who are born, that birth was all about a death. And that death would not be easy. It would be bloody and agonizing. It would be vile and painful--and it would be for all of us.

It would, for the first time in all eternity past and all eternity future, rip the Godhead apart and stagger the universe in an unprecedented display of atoning grace.

But that death would not be permanent. The power of God Himself would raise His Son Jesus from its cold grip and in that triumphant victory, overcome our final enemy on our behalf. At last, salvation had come to mankind!

At Christmas we celebrate the most significant of births. At Easter, we celebrate Christ's glorious resurrection. In between those two events are His life and His death. And for me, none of it can be separated. For without His birth, there would no substitutionary Life, and without His death there would be no resurrection.

I pray the significance of all that God has done on your behalf would resonate in your soul this Christmas and manifest itself in heart-felt worship to the King.

Home Away From Home

I went to get my nails done today, a fact that irritates my husband just as much as it delights my publicist who insists, "If you're going to sign books, your hands need to look as professional as the rest of you."

I went to the same place I always go, a shop just up the street from my house, owned, like most nail salons it seems, by a Vietnamese couple. Usually the wife does my nails but today her husband Tran had the honor.

After the requisite discussion about the relentless heat, he asked about my children, so after answering him, I returned the favor and asked about his. They have two, a son and daughter, both students at OU. I asked if they had been born in this country, and he said, "No Vietnam. But we left when the youngest was two." That was eighteen years ago.

I asked if they had been back since, and he said told me they'd only been back once because it is so expensive. I asked if he missed it and he replied with a most emphatic, emotional, "Oh yes! It's home."

It hit me hard. He has been in this country eighteen years. His children have no memories of their birth country, yet he has chosen to make a home away from his true home.

Immediately the verse in Hebrews 11:9-10 came to mind where it speaks of Abraham and says, "By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents...for he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God."

And like Tran, we Christians also are making a home on earth away from our true home which is heaven. We live here. We build our lives here. But our true home, and the one we long for even more than Tran longs for Vietnam, is with our Father and Brother.

May our hearts yearn for that home, even as we go about living the gift that life is, and using that life to do things that will glorify God and last for eternity.

See you at the reunion.

Grace Revealed

I had an e-mail exchange with someone who had seen me on one of the Florida television interviews I did recently to promote "Matthew" the second book in "The Rhyme and Reason Series." It's been out for almost a year now, but I am just now doing a belated publicity tour. Anyway, it's always a thrill when someone contacts me through the website information that's posted on the screen.

This particular woman is a few years older than me and still feeling like she hasn't fulfilled her purpose in life. She was lamenting a lifetime of mistakes. Here, in part, is my response:

As far as making a lifetime of mistakes goes, I think you are standing in a very long line! In fact, I don't know a single honest human being who isn't standing in that line. It's why we all need a Savior!

I used to struggle with feeling like God would somehow be disappointed with me as well, but more and more I am convinced that nothing I do or don't do will make Him love me any less, and nothing I do or don't do will make Him love me any more.

The One who created us adores us with a passion and zeal we cannot fathom. We human beings are trained in conditional love, so unless we have been extremely fortunate to have had someone demonstrate it to us, we have no real frame of reference for what true unconditional love acts and feels like.

I had a grandmother who adored me and spent almost every summer of my young life trying to help me improve my school work. She was a Special-Ed teacher and I would go over to her house every day and work through workbooks of all the subjects I struggled with, which was most of them.

She never scolded me for my mistakes. I never felt her frustration as I did mine when I failed to grasp a concept we had gone over and over. She never made me feel stupid. She always gently encouraged me. It felt so reassuring to have her sitting next to me as I labored over my work.

Every year she would have me pick out something I really wanted and put it in the chair across the table from where I sat to encourage me to reach the goal. If, at the end of the summer, I had successfully completed all the workbooks--you know--earned it, she would proudly hand me the gift I had picked out.

The only one I really remember was the Chatty Cathy doll. Oh, I wanted it so badly! It was almost torture to have her sitting across from me in her box, just waiting for me to get all my work done so I could break her out of her cardboard prison and pull the string that would magically let her "talk."

I didn't get all the assignments completed that year. Math, particularly, was and still is a torment. I was crushed. My little heart was so sad. Worst of all, I felt like I had disappointed my grandmother who had invested so much time in helping me. I knew she really wanted me to be able to earn my prize.

So on that last day of summer, I was feeling very dejected. She went over to the chair and picked up the doll to put it away. Or so I thought. Instead she got down on her knees and handed her to me. She said something along the lines that even though I hadn't completely finished the workbooks I had worked very hard and had learned. She told me how proud she was of me and then she told me the doll was mine. That it had always been mine, since the first day of summer.

That's how I think the love of God is. Everything He has for us is ours already. We don't earn it, because we can't, no matter how hard we might try. It's a futile effort. It's ours because He chooses to give it to us. Everything we have is a grace gift from the One who longs to give us Himself most of all.

My Redemption is Revealed!

My daughter Jessie graduates from college this coming Saturday. She is a fifth year senior because she studied abroad last year and it set her back a bit. But she would be the first to tell you it was a grand experience and well worth having to "redshirt" in order to graduate.

For those of you who might not know, she is the youngest of my three children, my only girl, and the overachiever of the family. She is the one who made up her mind in the 8th grade that she was going to be the valedictorian of her high school class--and she was. She is the one who decided to study abroad, made all the arrangements herself--and did. She is the one who looked for and found scholarships--and got them. The one who applied for a grant to try and find ways to make baked goods healthier--and got it.

None of this is new. She is also the child who announced to me that she wasn't going to have any part of the same half day Kindergarden program her brothers had been in. She wanted to stay all day and eat lunch and take naps with her friends, thank you very much. It was more money, but I wan't about to argue with her!

She is the one who, when she was about six or seven, was quite upset that she could not flip her omelette. This meant, of course, that unbeknownst to me, she had turned on the stove, gotten the omelette pan out, cracked and beaten the eggs, grated the cheese and sprinkled it over the eggs. But she wasn't quite tall enough to reach over with the spatula and get it flipped. Which is pretty much what I did when I walked into the kitchen and saw what she was doing!

So it comes as no surprise to those who know her that she will graduate with honors and has already been admitted into graduate school where she will receive dual Master's Degrees. Who knew you could get two at a time?

However, the reason I am telling you all of this is not only to brag on her, though as you can see, I am quite happy to do just that! It is to show you the redemption of the Lord in my life.

You see, I was a horrible student from Kindergarden through my dubious college experience. After the first week of Kindergarden I couldn't figure out why they kept sending me back every week. I hated everything about school, and that attitude never really changed. By ninth grade I had all but stopped showing up for class. At the end of the year, I had five Fs and a D. I have no idea how I got the D. The only reason I made it into 10th grade is because I changed school districts after my parents severed their parental rights and put me in The Sunbeam Home.

I actually managed to graduate, and after three years in Youth With a Mission, I went back to college for two and a half years before I got married and started having kids.

Jordan, my oldest, had a difficult time in school as well, but he had ongoing health issues and that probably contributed to a lot of it. He simply felt bad most of the time.

For high school he went to a small home school co-op. There were just five kids in the graduating class and that year, and after he graduated we went to Boston for our family vacation and toured the Harvard campus. As we were leaving, I put my arm around him and said, "Son, from now on you can tell everyone you know you graduated 5th in your class and went to Harvard! If they ask you any questions, just hold your hand up and say modestly, 'No, really, enough about me...'"

Anyway, Jacob and Jessie always did very well in school. For Jacob it just came easily. He graduated from OU magna cum laude two years ago and is going to seminary to get his Masters of Divinity degree. Jessie, on the other hand, worked very hard. I have never known anyone--man, woman or child--as disciplined and determined as her. She amazes me.

But here's the redemptive part. I have always deeply regretted squandering the educational opportunities that were handed to me on a silver platter. I had carte blanche--opportunities most people only dream about--and I blew them all.

Yet the God who is capable of redeeming everything, has redeemed that regret in my life through two of my children. What I squandered, they took advantage of. What I wasted, they utilized. What I missed out on, they have enjoyed. Where I failed, they have succeeded beyond my wildest expectations!

That's just how God does things.

I don't usually ask questions of my readers, but it's my blog so I can do whatever I want! And my question to you today is, "What is it that you need God to redeem in your life? What regret do you want to give Him and allow Him to bring to a satisfactory conclusion? It may take time, but He can do it.

Truly, there is nothing too hard for the Lord. And He delights even more than we do in being able to take our failures and redeem them--even if He does it through our children.