these are the days: december

December always feels to me like an airplane coming in for a landing—only instead of slowing down and preparing safely for the touchdown onto the runway, the plane just keeps accelerating as it drops. The tarmac is getting closer and closer at an alarming rate and everyone on board has a glint of panic in their eyes until finally, at the last possible second, the landing gear come down and the plane all but crash-lands, careening wildly into the start of another new year.

Anyone else? Or is this just me?

On top of the normal December rush, we are closing out another decade. It seems quite impossible that we stand on the cusp of the year 2020. I still remember coloring my printer-paper-taped-together “2000” sign with red and yellow markers while the world held its breath for the new millennium. How is it that one-fifth of that “new” millennium is already behind us?

Sorry, I don’t mean to freak anyone out. But I do wonder—can you sense the ongoing crescendo of time, as I do? It always seems to be getting louder and faster to me, like some terrifying amusement park ride with a whirlpool effect: the longer we spin, the faster we go and the harder it is to slow down.

I’ll be honest that it scares me a little. But there is a delight of anticipation, too. Just as I imagine Israel was waiting with both uncertainty and excitement for the Messiah to come, the Church waits in the discomfort of impatience for Him to come again.

For two thousand years the expectation has been building, the music has been rising, the years have been turning. Every day His return draws nearer. He came once as the Bright Morning Star, the low-hanging planet on the horizon that is first to predict the dawn; next time, He comes as the Sun itself, whose Kingdom will illumine even the ends of the earth.

Suggested Thinking

Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him; they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever.

And he said to me, “These words are faithful and true”; and the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, sent His angel to show to His bond-servants the things which must soon take place.

“And behold, I am coming quickly. Blessed is he who heeds the words of the prophecy of this book.”

Revelation 22:1-7

these are the days: november

I took this picture on one of the last days of October. The leaves were past peak, but still hanging on; now that November is in full swing, nearly all the trees are bare. The changing of the clocks seems to have sounded the knell of winter’s arrival, despite several more weeks of fall ahead. Suddenly there are only six weeks left of the year 2019, and an entirely new decade is around the bend.

It’s in the midst of all this constant moving and changing that the days have turned, for me, into the days of learning how to stop.

Did you know that the word “Sabbath” (or “Shabbat”) comes from the verb in Hebrew that means “to stop”? It’s not quite the same as the verb “to rest,” the way it normally appears in our Bibles. God didn’t “rest” from His labors so much as He “stopped.” Sabbath is an invitation to stop. To cease. To quit trying to carve out our own survival and success for a pause to remember that the real source of survival and success is Someone else.

Between my regular job, my writing, and various other projects, I got caught trying to avoid Shabbat for a bit too long and spent a few days sick in bed because of it. Even during my fifteen minute breaks at work, I’ve had a bad habit of keeping my brain busy by checking my email or listening to a podcast. It can be so hard to submit to a full stop - to release the need to find my value in my productivity and performance for even a few minutes a day and just be still.

So these are the days of learning how to stop. To sit and look out the window when I have five spare minutes before I need to leave for work. To sew quilt binding in silence when I’d normally want music or a podcast or a TV show to fill that space in my brain. To follow God’s example and not only rest, but fully cease, as an acknowledgement that the work I’ve done is good and that the Provider is even better.

Suggested Thinking

• The We’ll Get There podcast’s recent series on culture, Christianity, and politics

• The Holistic Psychologist and all her work regarding wholeness, healing, boundaries, and relationships

• Another essay I wrote a couple of years ago regarding Sabbath rest: Receiving the Gift of Rest

follow me: a testimony (part 2)

Over a year ago, I shared about the pivotal moment in my testimony of knowing Christ: the moment when He said, “Follow Me.”

But something I’ve always firmly believed about testimonies is that they are much more than nice stories with happy endings wrapped in bows. They are dynamic - they’re the stories God is actively writing with our lives, right now, evolving in real time as we take each step forward with Him. Every testimony really ends with “To be continued.” Every testimony, as long as the Lord tarries, will have a part two, three, or four.

When Jesus says to someone, “Follow Me,” it’s the beginning of a journey, not the end. And the invitation will, of necessity, be renewed daily. Sometimes hourly. The choice to obey is not once; it’s over and over again, one step at a time.

It would take pages to recount all the steps He has asked of me since that first invitation. I often took them without even knowing where my foot would land, and the course the path has taken is nothing like I expected. There have been moments when I let go of His hand and begged Him to go on without me because the next foothold looked so terrifying, but in His grace, He never left me there alone.

Today I’m standing in a pretty forest clearing, a place of rest. My Lord is not endlessly demanding and He knows I need to catch my breath. We have come a long way.

A year and a half ago, in April of 2018, He asked me to start writing a book. Together we stepped into a walk of solitude through a wild wood, the trail ill-defined and a bit lonely. I’ve written many thousands of words in my life, but I have never sat down to a project and vision of this size before. It was six months to put out the first draft, another six months to read it a dozen times over and make thousands of revisions to the manuscript, and yet another six months to design the layout and place it in the hands of people who can look at it with new eyes for me. Still to come, I am sure, will be yet more revisions based on their feedback.

Every step of this process has been an exercise in submitting to Christ’s call: “Follow Me.” He has brought inspiration, motivation, and accountability alongside me exactly when I’ve needed it. He has held my hand when I was scared to tell anyone about what I’ve been creating. And now He is slowly, bit by bit, revealing His vision for how He wants me to use and share this book with others.

With the fruit of this journey now in the hands of a few people I trust to provide sound criticism, I am taking a breather in this pretty little forest clearing, watching Jesus paint a picture of where the journey might lead from here. I doubt I’ll see the finished product before we start on our way again, but there is comfort in simply knowing that He knows, even when the path seems obscure.

I can tell you what His work is stirring in me so far, though: an ever deeper desire to help other “ordinary” American Christians (like myself) know who He is by knowing His Word. My heart aches for my own nation, which has greater access to God’s Word and solid Biblical resources than any other, and yet largely doesn’t know how to use them, or even why they’re important. We are a nation of people who can easily find a Bible verse that supports nearly any ideology but have no idea how to respect the true intentions and origins of the text. In this place, we are terribly vulnerable to deception, legalism, and licentiousness; we are easily enslaved to cruel masters, like unnecessary guilt and our shifting emotions, and are deaf to the softness and tenderness of Jesus’ call.

Jesus said, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me” (John 10:27). What a gift and a relief it is that we are known by God, and that He offers us the safety and care of the Good Shepherd. But we can’t rest fully in that truth, nor trust fully in His leadership, until we can hear His voice in the first place.

(By the way - if you want to be the first to know when this book becomes available to the public, you can drop your email address below.)