Hi, First name / friend!

 

Last week, the wind shifted. At least, ours did, through the form of two monumental conversations that have changed the trajectory of what I thought the first part of our 2025 would look like.

 

Years ago, back in my waiting days, I traveled a lot. People often ask if I ever got island fever when we lived on Maui, but I never really did. I was never really on the island long enough to get antsy to leave. Most of my traveling was to meet girlfriends in dreamy destinations, attend workshops, teach at conferences, usually leaving my husband behind. It was my way of filling the void, I suppose.

 

“I'm living vicariously through myself,” I would often joke in response to the women who watched my life through social media squares as they sat squarely in the mundane motherhood I was so desperately trying to fill the void of. Until one day, God yanked my heart back to the island I loved, the waiting I loathed.

 

Around that same time, I found a sign with Mother Theresa's words scribbled across it in feminine handwriting that reminded me of my own and bought it on a whim.

 

“If you want to bring happiness to the whole world,” the sign read, “go home and love your family.”

 

It felt ironic, silly, even, to buy a sign emblazoned with this idea of staying home to love my family when all I wanted was a family to stay home and love. Still, I bought it and hung it on the wall of our 500-square-foot cottage, right by the front door, to see every time I walked out of it to leave.

 

I posted a photo of my new wall sign on March 1, 2016, just after it arrived.

 

 

 

I didn't mean to tell that story when I started this letter. But when I started talking about shifting winds, God reminded me of it, and I have to say, this sudden shift feels a whole lot like that one did.

 

To be sure, there is no surprise pregnancy coming this time (that ship has sailed), but I also feel that the wind filling the sails of this new, after-the-miracle ship has shifted suddenly just the same.

 

I've taken things off of my plate that I can and rearranged the things that I cannot let go of. (Most notably, the heart-wrenching decision to cancel Camp SOS.) I've shifted my body weight inward, clamming in toward my family and away from everything else. And I've chewed on a few seemingly innocuous words in the book of Acts that feel monumental to me. It's a combination of Acts 27:12 and 2811 and the idea of passing the winter in a place that is suitable for wintering.

 

I found it after a deep desire to hibernate (which I realize can be a depressed person's way of saying that they just want to sleep all day). The word “hibernate” itself isn't in the Bible, but it means “to pass the winter” and, it turned out, that phrase was.

 

I glance to Acts 27:13 and see the south wind blowing softly. Not long after, verse 14 says, that tempestuous headwind arose. If you read my last email, you know that it was marked all over with tempestuous winds. I'm going backward in this narrative, I suppose. (At least, I hope that's the way the winds are blowing.)

 

But, backward or forward, it doesn't matter to me. For now, His wind blows me softly in an unexpected direction to the place where we will pass the winter together. And, at least in the last couple of months, it's never felt so welcome.

 

xo,

 

There’s a subtle language shift in Genesis 8 with the way that God speaks to Noah after the ark. Have you ever noticed it? It gives so much insight into God’s tenderness toward the sometimes difficult transition out of one thing that has become less of a thing and more of an identity and into a new and unfamiliar one.

 

When God first tells Noah to build the ark in Genesis 6:13, the text says: “God said to Him.” The Hebrew-speaking verb is ‘amar —it’s one of the primary speaking verbs in the Old Testament and is used nearly 5,000 times throughout its pages. Its main use is for words to bring something to light—in this case, once, in verse 13, with instructions for building the ark.

 

It’s there a second time in Genesis 7:1 when God told Noah to come into the ark (and also in Genesis 8:15, when He told him to go out of it). And then, there’s Genesis 8:21, 9:1, 8, 12, and 17, when God speaks the promise of the very first covenant in the Bible. Noah After the Ark

Now, jump back to Genesis 6:13, when God ‘amar-said to Noah the state of humankind and the instructions for the ark. For the next hundred years, Noah built in obedience to God’s ‘amar-speaking. You know how the story goes from there—the rains came, the flood waters rose, and the ark that housed Noah’s family bobbed on the waters’ surface for a year. Then comes the dove, the visible ground, the dried earth.

 

What happened next shows the language subtleties that you wouldn’t necessarily catch unless you were digging for it, like eavesdropping on an incredibly intimate conversation that isn’t intended for you to hear. Except it is.

As you can imagine, Jesus is familiar in our home. Our children are well-versed in His Word (pun intended). They go to a private Christian school and church on Sundays. They have knowledge of God. But, I realized at that moment that it was time to begin introducing a spiritual understanding to complement that knowledge.

 

He didn't begin by saying his usual, "Mom, imagine Jesus was a black cartoon character," he simply said that He was. So, I started there. I whispered to Jonathan about how Jesus' voice sounds and the types of things that He says. I told him the verse that says God is light and there is no darkness (1 John 1:5). It was the first time I realized as a mother that giving my children knowledge of God is only the first step. I also need to teach them how to discern what is God speaking and what is something else, trying to trick them into thinking that it's God.

 

That's what Paul is doing here, in this letter—taking their knowledge of God and praying for wisdom and spiritual understanding to go along with it. It's learning to hear the nuances of God's voice and the ways that He does (and does not) speak. It's getting to know His Word intimately to understand what walking like God truly looks like (and what is jumping through the empty hoops of religion).

 

It's having a spiritual understanding of the hard things that God calls us to be patient under, to discern His glory through, and to understand that, as we lay down to sleep at night, over-exhausted and maybe a little bit jumpy, He crouches down at our bedside and whispers His truth:

 

"I count you worthy to carry this burden, to raise this special needs child, to teach your six-year-old how to distinguish between My voice and every other. I count you worthy to endure the weight of this fertility war, this diagnosis, this chronic and invisible pain.

 

I count you worthy to carry this because this light affliction is just for a moment, and its working in you a far more exceeding weight of glory (2 Corinthians 4:17)."

 

And the reason that you hear that Spirit-spoken whisper and absorb His peace-inducing truth deep down inside of your exhausted, frightened, maybe even downright terrified spirit? It's because of the spiritual understanding that your faith has become entwined with.

 

And once you have that? There's absolutely nothing to fear.