Category: Life Insight

training is the best accountability

We’ve established I’m not a runner (see ‘lost in cornfield’ story).

But I do like to run. I like the the time it gives me to think and I like how all the jostling helps my loose marbles make some sense.

I set off for a run the other day and, as is usually the case, decided how long I would run based on my plans for the night. As I considered my route, I thought about why a runner trains. I remembered the first question people asked me after I finished Dam to Dam, “When’s your next race?” Everyone assumed I had become “one of those runners” who was always looking for the next race. I thought, “Sure, I’ll do it again.”

But as I mentally mapped out my route (that I’d determined should take me 45 minutes max), I realized why runners sign up for races.

signing up for a race is the best accountability for training for a race

I know it’s not rocket science, but it seemed pretty profound to me as the loose marbles starting making sense on Duff Avenue. The motivation for training comes from the goals for race day. Then race day happens. And then you sign up for another race. People have told me that you lose weeks of training in days and now I know it’s true. A whole lot of training and accomplishment and hard work amounts to little after a few days off.

And so, of course, I think about this Christian race we’re running. We stretch and train and beat our bodies into submission because we are training for something. And, I wonder if Paul felt the weight of “not having attained it” after every race he finished – every missionary journey and shipwreck and public sermon – he immediately signed up for another. His training built on training and there was never a time where he wasn’t preparing because there was never a time he wasn’t signed up for a race.

I wonder this because I can see the temptation after a race to wait, consider, and “rest” in a way that smacks excuses. When we finish something like a race, we feel accomplished and proud and (in some ways) as if we’ve arrived. When we believe it’s all about us, we will fall hard and fast clinging to the comfortable title of “accomplished” that seals our fate and renders us useless.

What a beautiful thing to always have the prize in front of us, to always strain towards what is ahead, to always have something worth training for even as we cross the finish line.

Training is the best accountability for runners and you only train when you are signed up for a race.
Today, I’m taking inventory.
Today, I’m making sure I’m signed up.

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

Posted on by Caroline 0

a front row seat in the glorious theater

Darkness fell like a hush; the lights circled us as we circled the fire. The jumping glow splashed on our faces and warmed our autumn skin as we cupped black coffee in thankful hands. The sky speckled with stars and the creatures sang out their evening melodies.

And we sat in the front row in the glorious theater of God.

After reading Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, we had all carried around conversations that couldn’t happen over the phone and couldn’t happen half-hearted. This night was set apart to try to understand someone from the great cloud of witnesses – to look at the life of someone who treasured the Lord in such a way that he was ruined for anything else.

And we sat in the front row in the glorious theater of God, right there in the backyard of an Iowa farmhouse.

The candles glowed in mason jars to light the path from the woodshop, where we enjoyed a bountiful spread of German delights, and inside I was a mess of emotion. A weighty, good mess of gratitude and purpose and joy and hope and pain and fear and defeat and doubt and sorrow. When despair seems simpler and right, stories of hope read more like fiction. But not last night… not when we remembered people whose lives were anchored by one thing, driven by one thing, delighted by one thing … and not when I looked around at the firelit faces of my friends, whose struggles on stormy seas are anchored deep down by the same greatest treasure.

The struggle is not to stay upright, but to rejoice in the anchor which holds us. Bonhoeffer’s life was not about making the message of Jesus look good or better or more intellectual than whatever religion his peers and countrymen presented. He was not about being interesting or popular or approachable, at least in the end. Bonhoeffer purposed to be about truth. He set out to know God and to draw others into a knowledge of God as it is revealed in the Word of God. His culture said a lot of things, burned a lot of books, and printed a lot of promotional materials for massive political campaigns… but Bonhoeffer had eyes to shake off the surface storms and cling to the hope that anchored and the only hope that would reveal the evil that had usurped the hearts of his countrymen.

This. This is beautiful, I thought.

I love how David Hall describes John Calvin’s thoughts on our seats in the glorious theater.

Calvin described this world, moved by God’s providence, as theatrum gloriae. For him, every aspect of life from work to worship and from art to technology bears the potential to glorify God (Institutes, 1.11.12). Creation is depicted as a platform for God’s glory (1.14.20) or a “dazzling theater” (1.5.8; 2.6.1), displaying God’s glorious works. Calvin viewed the first commandment as making it unlawful to steal “even a particle from this glory” (2.8.16). Such comments support Lloyd-Jones’ later claim that for Calvin “the great central and all-important truth was the sovereignty of God and God’s glory.” (“The Theater of God’s Glory” by David Hall at Ligonier Ministries)

I went away from the night knowing we hadn’t talked about everything, hadn’t appreciated history completely, hadn’t understood theology thoroughly… but oh so thankful that we showed up at the theater. I’m thankful I have others with whom I can behold the glory of God and I’m thankful for the support we give each other to be unapologetic about truth.

Today, I am still purposing to know God, find out what pleases Him, and delight to do those things. And today I am thankful for those I can share steps with along the way.

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

Posted on by Caroline 2

the human referral effect

Today, I put on my über hip (but less than hipster) tortoise shell glasses with the confidence of someone who needs corrective lenses and wears them with style. Just to be clear, I think glasses for fashion only is silly and a waste of money. If you do have to purchase glasses, then making it a fashion statement is a bonus. But why am I talking about fashion, which is so clearly out of my realm of expertise?

Because I bought my glasses online at Zenni Optical – which was WAY cooler than Factory Eyeglass Outlet, where my parents would take us to get glasses when we were growing up. Here’s the cold, hard fact: glasses are crazy expensive! You could pay up to $400 for glasses and that was $350 above my parents’ price range. You might assume I’ve really moved up in the world and am able to buy a $400 status symbol, but I haven’t. Actually, $400 glasses are about $375 above my price range and I’m now very thankful for those extra dollars my parents were able to spend on “any pair with the yellow sticker, sweetie.”

I heard about Zenni Optical from my friend Tina who heard about it from my sister, who googled cheap eyeglasses and then told everyone about her experience. It seems fake at first – almost like a really horrible practical joke because the price for a pair of sweet, hip lenses from their website is as low as $6.95. I know, I didn’t believe it either.

But then they arrived in the mail and you couldn’t pay me to NOT advertise for them. People would say, “Oh, your glasses are so cool!” and I’d always touch the corner, real studious like, and say with a shrug, “Oh, these? $12.00.”

No one believes me at first, but eventually I get them to write down the website and promise to look it up for themselves. At $12, you can afford to buy 2 or 3 pairs just in case one breaks. And, if you lose a pair, you just skip going to the theatre and you’ve evened things up for your wallet!

Zenni has since really snazzed up their website and have a feature where you can virtually try on glasses to see how they look on your face.

Wow.

I haven’t ordered a pair in several years, but I still get excited at the idea of someone else getting a good product for a good price.

And why all this about my glasses?

Because I read this article about the human referral effect in Forbes magazine that highlights another eyeglass outfitter who is committed to giving quality for a fair price. The author of the article, Alexander Taub (Iowa native, btw) talks about his Warby Parker purchase and the chain reaction of referrals that followed.

Bottom line: we like to point people in the direction of something wonderful… and not just the possibility of something wonderful, but the guarantee of something wonderful.

I love this idea.
I love that humanity is a fan of guaranteed wonderful things and that we want other people to have guaranteed wonderful things too.
I love that the human referral effect happens and that it happens so often and that Forbes magazine is taking notice.

What I wonder is if eyeglasses are the only thing we should be sending down this highly effective human pipeline. I wonder if this human referral effect is being extremely under utilized.

I wonder what would be the best thing for humans to refer to one another?

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

Posted on by Caroline 4

like wrestling a jellyfish

We were sitting around a crowded table at the youth offices with plastic plates piled with Abbey’s ciabatta pesto creation and various other potluck offerings. Our Bibles and devotionals and journals were all spread open in the mix of things and we were talking about how Jesus learned things. He studied the Scriptures and realized what it was He was supposed to do. As he learned, he obeyed by submitting to what was prophesied about Him. Jesus learned things.

Doesn’t that sound crazy?

It could have been all the banana bread baking or the fumes of a newly refinished gym floor a few doors down, but as the realization settled in, we wrestled. We tried to make sense of Jesus being human – learning things from the Lord and learning things about life that he didn’t know before. We wrestled through the possibility of another human obeying perfectly and submitting to the Father’s will. Yes, we know it’s not possible. We know that Jesus fulfilled the law. But, we thought about it. We wrestled.

And that’s when I looked around and saw that we were thinking of things, imagining things, wrestling with things that made our minds hurt a little bit. It kind of just came out,

Sometimes, when we seek hard after the Lord in Scripture … sometimes it’s like wrestling a jellyfish.

They looked back at me blankly while the picture played in their minds. I probably should have, but I didn’t take it back, because I really do think that our searching sometimes feels slippery and even that sometimes we are surprised by what we find. Sometimes answers seem illusive or strange and sometimes they sting. But, we’re drawn into that wrestling match because there’s something incredibly beautiful about knowing more of something so wonderful.

Yes, the analogy breaks down, as all analogies do.

But, until someone gives me a good reason not to, I’ll keep wrestling the jellyfish as I seek to know more about my Savior, to find out what pleases Him, and then delight to do those things.

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

Posted on by Caroline 0

every promise, always kept

We suffer the sale of cheap words, but we buy them still.
Every day their consequence cuts afresh the wound of our failure and exposes all the ways we fall short.

“The hill I’m walking up is gettin’ good and steep
but I’m still looking for a promise even I can’t keep.”

Brandi Carlile can sing. She can sing and boy! can she write. Her song, “A Promise to Keep” has been rolling around in my soul since she released a free EP on Noisetrade. When I listen to this song, my shoulders slump with sadness – a kind of resignation that wraps me in and weighs me down. The words are heavy bundles with long, painful sighs because the notes sing the melody of hurt.

Carlile sings hurt… maybe because she has suffered the sale of cheap words, but she buys them still. Maybe because she feels the consequence of fresh cut failure-wounds and is exposed to all the ways she falls short. It’s a humanity kind of failure – a shortsightedness that presumes another promise spoken, believed, and broken.

My shoulders fold in and my lip shakes a little and I hurt with her for the insufferable exchange – the buying and selling of promises.

I still talk to you in my sleep
I don’t say much cause the hurt runs too deep
I gave you the moon and the stars to keep
but you gave them back to me

The hill I’m walkin up is gettin good and steep
but I’m still looking for a promise even I can’t keep

I still lay on my side of the bed
I dance alone when the last bottle’s spent
memories like a river runnin through my head
I’ll have me an ocean before I’m dead

The hill I’m walkin up is gettin good and steep
but I’m still looking for a promise even I can’t keep

I still whisper sweet words to you
and when I’m busy, or have nothing to do
I pray to god, that my words ring true
and that your words might reach me too

The hill I’m walkin up is gettin good and steep
but I’m still looking for a promise even I can’t keep
I can’t keep it…

My hearts in pieces so please understand
I’ve tried to jump, but I’ve nowhere to land
so give me your heart and I’ll give you my hand
and I’ll try as goddamn hard as I can

The hill I’m walkin up is gettin good and steep
but I’m still looking for a promise even I can’t keep

She is desperate for an impossible promise and her grief is filling up oceans, recklessly hoping there is someone better than she. I get woven in to her grief like I’m knit right into the melody’s sweater. I croon it out my car windows and sing it to the silent roof.

Why can’t I find someone who keeps a promise these days?
Why can’t I keep a promise?

And with my heart freshly beaten, my soul cast down at our dreadfulness, I hear sweet words proclaimed from the pen of Paul.

For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not Yes and No, but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory. And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.
(2 Corinthians 1:19-22 ESV)

For the promises of God find their Yes in him (Christ).

Through Christ I can utter my beaten, battered, folded-in AMEN to God for his glorious promises kept to a suffering and obstinate people. Not one of us can sing Carlile’s song and not know her hurt. But, oh! that we might claim the AMEN in Christ – who was the fulfillment of God’s promises and evidence of God’s faithfulness.

God establishes us in Christ, anoints us, puts his seal on us, and gives us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.

The hills we walk up will get good and steep and full of suffering. But, even as we sing of our despair in broken promises, let us glory in the God whose promises are all Yes! in Christ. Every promise, always yes. Every promise, always kept.

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

Posted on by Caroline 1

how many daisies?

Lake Michigan, 2012

“Natalie. Build. Castle!”

“Oh, are we building a castle?”

“Uh-huh! Yep! Build castle!”

“Wow, look at that ca–”

“Natalie step on it!”

“Yep, you sure did. Now what are we going to do?”

“Natalie. Build. Castle!”

And so it went this past week – back and forth from the water to the shore and back again. Dig, rinse, scoop, pour, stomp. Repeat.

There’s a beauty in a child’s monotony that big people miss. We want our actions to produce something that wasn’t there before we started. We want results that make sense.

And we are annoyed when rhythms appear (to us) to move without purpose. We don’t delight in doing simple things over and over again. There’s nothing delightful about laboring for underwhelming results.

We’ve lost our awe of little things.

But, oh, I wish you could have seen Natalie’s face! She got so industrious with that shovel and had such purpose with the big red bucket. She kept beautiful busy – building or destroying – and every once in a while she would invite someone else to join her. Try explaining to great, big  2-year-old blue eyes that digging, rinsing, scooping, pouring, stomping and repeating isn’t a good use of her time. Just try it.

Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I wonder what he would say to my 2-year-old niece who does the same thing over and over again and watches the result like it’s the first time she’s ever seen it.

She isn’t expecting something different (she knows full well what is coming), but when “it” happens, she blooms with joy. Every time, like it’s the first time.

G. K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy Chapter 4:

“A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

I love it.

I love how Natalie could have the same amount of joy every time she built up the sand and every time the water washed it away… Every time I hid under the blankets and every time I appeared from underneath… Every time she said, “Natalie go outside, please” and every time she convinced someone to follow her.

Most of all, I love that “God is strong enough to exult in monotony.” Every once in a while we stop and admire the way the water comes in to the shore and splashes the beach, but God makes the water work in rhythm every day with crazy, consistent joy. I love to think that God “has the eternal appetite of infancy.”

Because how many times have we succumbed to sin, “growing old” with maturity marking our progress? How many times have we decided we don’t have time for monotony or aren’t interested or amazed by it anymore?

And how many daisies did God make today, delighting the same in the monotonous beauty of every one?

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

Posted on by Caroline 9

Fanfaronades and Delighting in Others’ Delight

Fanfaronade
Swaggering; empty boasting; blustering manner or behavior; ostentatious display.

This word, fanfaronade, popped out in the list of Unusual Words Rendered in Bold Graphics. I love words, or don’t you know that already? Well, I do. I love words because words make language. Language is that stuff that floats between people and between people and God. Language describes things, explains things, and… puts clothes on the skeletons of emotions, ideas, and surprises.

Fanfaronade is just funny to say. The syllables fold out like the person who wears them. You know the type, right? She’s that person everyone is regularly embarrassed to be around. She’s known for “making a scene” at the airport check-in counter and also when she’s ordering coffee at Starbucks. Her recent accomplishments are never secrets and her failures are unfortunate misunderstandings of her gifts. She’s never a supporting actress, even if she has to cause an emergency backstage to be front and center.

Though she would protest her theatrics described as such, fanfaronades are exactly what they are. The word doesn’t even have the dignity of distinguished pronunciation.

fan-fer-uh-neyd

It sounds like something an Uncle Bob might say about his out-of-control, pre-teen daughter Samantha who insists people call her Savannah the Singing Star. “Somebody’s gotta tell her we’ve had ’bout enough ‘o them fanfaronades ‘o hers,” he’d say. Can’t you just hear him?

I love the graphic from Project Twins because this is the noise following people who are known for fanfaronades – bleating horn blasts that crowd out all other sounds in the room.

I’m thinking about fanfaronades as I spend time with family in one of my favorite places – where beaches rival any in the world and half the blueberries never make it past the pickers. This little one, Natalie, is my almost constant companion for our West Michigan family vacation.

I chase her around and then she chases me. And I see how my brother and sister-in-law spot her fanfaronades and find many teachable moments. She announces her time-outs with resignation, but she always comes back calmly accepting her supporting role (at least for now). She doesn’t exactly know she’s fanfaronading, which is why she’s not… yet.

But we should know better.

Why can kids call spades spades without hesitation and we struggle to admit our charades?

I love to be around Natalie because something wild in me wants it to be all about her – I want to do things that spark wonder in her eyes. I want to give in when she says, “again” again and again and again. I want to hear her giggle. I want to witness her taste blueberries off the branch and build sand castles on the beach. I want to watch her delight in life.

I know there’s such a thing as smothering little ones with too much. But, I realized something happens when I’m around her. I want to do less fanfaronading because it’s not about me anymore.

I’ve wandered around with words to land at these conclusions:
1) Jesus – the One most qualified to speak all and only about Himself – spent his whole life pointing to the Father. He didn’t consider equality with God something to be grasped.
2) I’ve got to figure out how to take my affections for Natalie – the way I delight in her delight – and live that way with everyone. I want to delight to watch others delight.

Is this some of God’s heart for His creation? Does he delight in us as He watches us delight in Him, in life, in others?

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

Posted on by Caroline 2

experience: the great necessitator

A brilliant sunset with purple and gold and rusty hues.
A child swinging with legs pumping and face aglow.
An orchestra woven into the sidewalk and a choir decorating the ordinary day with an overwhelming melody.

Experience is the great necessitator and what it requires is words. I know the whole premise of an amazing experience is that words are insufficient – that descriptions are incapable of the glory of whatever occurred.

But words are exactly what experiences require… because without them we will never understand why a crowd of strangers, wrapped up in their own little worlds, would be drawn together by musical notes to participate in a glorious performance that causes children to wave their arms and grown people to stand with gaping mouths.

Why can music do this? How does man’s creativity wield such beautiful and magnetic power?

Where does this beauty come from and does it have a name?

Today, people all over these great United States are celebrating a day of independence with parades and flags and all sorts of star spangled accessories. But if experiences are simply ambiguous reasons to throw celebrations, we’ve denied experience what it really needs: words.

Explicit, meaningful, deep words that make sense of the beautiful and point to its origin.

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

Posted on by Caroline 2

why words will never go out of style

In the beginning, God spoke; at Mount Sinai, God wrote.

God’s relationship with humanity has always been understood through words. God very intentionally used language to communicate who He was, what He required, and the consequences of disobedience.

He did not merely paint a striking sunset followed by an unsettling thunderstorm.
He spoke.

Yes, His words carried the weight of canyons and oceans and galaxies far, far away. What came out of his mouth was not paintings, but real, vivid, breathtaking landscapes. God’s words wove intricate molecules together and held them there.

And then God reached his finger down and wrote a book, etched on two tablets. He did not draw a picture or send an instagram photo to the people of Israel who had just been rescued out of slavery. He wrote words.

What gives?

Words, it seems, are going out of style.
My generation is being romanced into image-only relationships where words are subliminal (if a picture is worth a thousand, why write at all?).

It is not that images or photographs or illustrations or cartoons are poor ways to reflect our Creator. Au contraire! This is exactly how we reflect God, because he’s given us the desire and ability to create in a way that points to His perfect Creative hand.

But God did not leave us to figure out His plan for redemption by viewing only his perfect and miraculous creation. He spoke to the people. He wrote out the law.

The redemption story jumping out from Genesis to Revelation is not a mystery because God used language to explicitly communicate His plan for salvation. We are not left standing in front of an abstract piece to interpret its meaning. He gave us Creation – beauty beyond belief – and then He spoke to us and explained the significance of our existence, the despairing end of our freely chosen separation from Him, and the hope of restored relationship in Christ.

He wrote it out.


And that is why words will never go out of style.
God speaks with words.

Are we listening?

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

These thoughts come from my reflections on the book Lit! by Tony Reinke. Check it out for yourself if you want to understand why reading is so important.

Posted on by Caroline 5

o love that will not let me go

“How did Jesus have power to do miracles?”

The question was like extracting one drop of water in a massive wave off the coast of El Salvador – marvelous and impossible.

I sat across from Anna and considered the fireworks in my heart. Oh, how I love my Jesus. I got flustered and stumbled over my words in excitement. My haphazard words fluttered out like they would if I was trying to explain that I’d found a key to a secret garden in the center of the city, where hydrangeas and peonies and lilies bloomed year-round. It’s too good to be true and my heart knows it.

The more we study the life of Jesus, the more willing we are to stand in awe – to marvel at the mystery. Anna’s question came from our summer Bible study, “Walking as Jesus Walked” by Dann Spader and my delight came from the response: digging deeper. My delight is not that I have answers, but that through the Spirit we have strength to comprehend the love that surpasses knowledge.

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
(Ephesians 3:14-21 ESV)

As the weeks go by, my encouragement to these girls is to go digging – to taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8) over and over and over again. Nothing bad can come of studying the Word and asking God to give us insight. The Word never returns void. When we’ve uncovered verses that we think don’t make sense, it means digging deeper to uncover why they do.

The more we read God’s Word, the more we want to read God’s Word. As we study the life of Jesus, I am holding on to the love that will not let me go – the love that allows me to grow in wisdom and stature, in favor of God and man (Luke 2:52), just like Jesus.

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

Posted on by Caroline 1