by Elizabeth | Mar 3, 2011 | Learning Story
I’ve spent the last week or so preparing a workshop for leaders. Concluding a section on leadership struggles, I thought, “This is beginning to sound like a downer! Leadership, as tough as it is, also brings great joy.” I took out a sheet of paper and wrote, “The surpassing joy of leadership is…” and began filling in the blank. Here’s what I came up with. What would you add?
The surpassing joy of leadership is resting in Christ’s righteousness to draw those we shepherd to rest in Christ’s righteousness.
The surpassing joy of leadership comes in inviting the weary and heavy-laden to come to Jesus and exchange yokes of performance, pleasing, pressure, and independence for his “light and easy” yoke: trusting his mission, doing his work, telling his story, loving his creation.
The surpassing joy of leadership is doing higher math: watching as one become two, two become four, four become sixteen…exponential multiplication of men and women living and loving in the Gospel Story.
The surpassing joy of leadership is growing unity: helping twelve become one, each part functioning fully in its purpose and beauty, to present a living body glorifying the God who formed them.
The surpassing joy of leadership is tending a garden: weeds, shrubs, roses, sunflowers, herbs, string beans, and more: God’s multi-variegated species growing and flourishing in wild worship service of the Creator God.
by Elizabeth | Mar 2, 2011 | Learning Story
Cruciform: Living the Cross-Shaped Life Coming April 1
This blog is a regular attempt to remind us all of what it means to live God’s story for His glory. Today I am thrilled to offer you a tidbit from Jimmy Davis’s new book, Cruciform: Living the Cross-Shaped Life. I can’t wait for you to read the entire book — if you want a sample, read Chapter One on www.cruciformpress.com. Meanwhile, read this and rejoice in how God created us:
“When God made mankind he created a people with a purpose, sons who would serve. They were not only meant to take delight in one another, but also to take dominion over all that God had made (Genesis 1:28). As his ―kingdom of priests, the mission of God‘s son-servants was to ―work and keep creation, to cultivate and care for the place in which he put them so that it would be the dwelling place of God and his people, for the glory of God and the good of others forever (Genesis 2:15; Numbers 3:7-8; Exodus 19:6; Revelation 1:6, 5:10). God is a relationship that rules, a being who is doing. So those made in his image and likeness are to relate and rule, to be someone special to him and to one another as together they do something special for the glory of God and the good of all he has made.” Jimmy Davis, Cruciform.
by Elizabeth | Feb 28, 2011 | Learning Story
LIVING THE STORY INCLUDES EVERY MOMENT OF THE DAY
“Be careful to follow every command I am giving you today, so that you may live and increase and may enter and possess the land that the Lord promised on oath to your forefathers.” Deuteronomy 8:1
Have you ever noticed how many “today”‘s and “this day”‘s are in the book of Deuteronomy? I never had, until I read this introduction by Eugene Peterson. I get jazzed about Living THE STORY — about what it means to take the Words on the Page of the Bible and walk right into TODAY living them. Don’t get me wrong — that doesn’t mean I’m going to get everything right. But the Word also has Words about people not getting things right. What it does mean is that I have Hope for the many moments when things in the day go wrong. This is a great word to preachers and teachers, but even more a great word for all of us:
“This sermon does what all sermons are intended to do: Take God’s words, written and spoken in the past, take the human experience, ancestral and personal, of the listening congregation, then reproduce the words and experience as a single event right now, in this present moment. No word that God has spoken is a mere literary artifact to be studied; no human experience is dead history merely to be regretted or admired. The continuous and insistent Mosaic repetitions of ‘today’ and ‘this day’ throughout these sermons keep attentions taut and responsive. The complete range of human experience is brought to life and salvation by the full revelation of God: Live this! Now!”
Eugene Peterson’s introduction to Deuteronomy in the Message.
I challenge myself and invite you into the challenge — let’s LIVE this Word TODAY!
by Elizabeth | Feb 25, 2011 | Learning Story
Not THAT kind of COACHING!
“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a profession like this?” No one has actually asked me that question, though I think a few of my friends have thought it, and I know I have. People know me to be all about heart change, not behavioral modification, about gospel transformation, not the American religion of “bootstrap-pulling.” “Is coaching even biblical?” some folks are wondering.
Not necessarily. There is a kind of coaching that believes in the basic goodness of humanity and suggests we can look within to find the power to live a life we design.
That, thankfully, is NOT the only coaching approach. I coach because I believe we have a story in which we are called to live. I coach because I believe there is freedom in Christ Jesus to live more fully in this story. I coach because I love being a part of people growing in their capacity to learn, live, and love in their unique story.
Because there is so much misunderstanding about coaching, I’m always on the lookout for helpful ways to describe the process. Recently, I returned to Proverbs for a thorough study. Eugene Peterson’s words danced off the page, inviting me to join in.
Listen to his words. Coaching is all about walking alongside a person as they grow in the wisdom to “live skillfully in whatever conditions we find ourselves.”
Many people think that what’s written in the Bible has mostly to do with getting people into heaven – getting right with God, saving their eternal souls. It does have to do with that, of course, but not mostly. It is equally concerned with living on this earth – living well, living in robust sanity. In our Scriptures, heaven is not the primary concern, to which earth is a tagalong afterthought. “On earth as it is in heaven” is Jesus’ prayer.
Wisdom is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves in.
Wisdom has to do with becoming skillful in honoring our parents and raising our children, handling our money and conducting our sexual lives, going to work, and exercising leadership using words well and treating friends kindly, eating and drinking healthily, cultivating emotions within ourselves and attitudes toward others that make for peace.
Threaded through all these items is the insistence that the way we think of and respond to God is the most practical thing we do.
Proverbs concentrates on these concerns more than any other book in the Bible. Attention to the here and now is everywhere present. Proverbs distills it all into riveting images that keep us connected in holy obedience to the ordinary.” Eugene Peterson, Conversations: The Message Bible with Its Translator
by Elizabeth | Feb 23, 2011 | Learning Story
The crucified condensation heart
Yesterday started rough in the hope department. Almost five months ago, my shoulder underwent surgery to repair a rotator cuff. Fall has turned to winter and spring is nighing, but the shoulder and accompanying arm are still reluctant to swing into full gear. Even worse, most of the time it feels like I have a second-degree sunburn — INSIDE my shoulder and bicep. Some days I’m hopeful it will rise fluidly; others I doubt. On a doubting day, God invited me to see His heart and to pronounce these true words:
“As for you, God, your way is perfect, Your Word is proven. You are a shield to all who take refuge in You. Who is our Rock besides You, o God?” Psalm 18:30-31
“Answer me, O Lord, for your lovingkindness is good. In the abundance of your mercies, turn to me.” (Psalm 69:16)
“I love you, Lord, because you heard my voice and my supplications. Because you turned your ear to me, I will call on you as long as I live.” (Psalm 116:1-2)
“I will give thanks to you, the God of heaven, for your merciful love endures forever.” (Psalm136:26)
A condensation heart. A condensed heart. Right there before my very face, making the heart of God ‘my-size’ – large enough not to be ignored, small enough that it fits in two window panes, misshapen enough that it seems just right for me, inexplicably there – condensation, sure – in a heart-shape on the window where I go to pray – huh??? There is no other condensation on that window. And, as of this writing, fifteen minutes after I first saw it, it is still there.
God there, in my window, telling me He loves me.
Then to open my daily prayer book and find love sprinkled liberally through all of the passages.
“I love you, my daughter.” “Your faith has made you well; now go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.”
To call me to say these words, “As for you, God, your way is perfect, Your Word is proven.”
So that I would say these words, “Lord, I surrender this shoulder to you. I surrender healing or not-healing. It is yours to do with as you will. I surrender my capacity to understand why. It is not because I am doing something wrong it is not better yet. It is not because the doctor or physical therapist is doing something wrong.”
Your Way is perfect, and your love is perfect.
by Elizabeth | Feb 19, 2011 | Learning Story
I’ve always loved this song (written by Gillian Welch), and I never hear it without remembering our older daughter singing along when she was about 4, “I am a NORTHERN, on God’s highway…”
Whenever I hear it, I think of the one day when there will be no more orphans, when we will live forever in eternal unity, no more tears, no more brokenness, no more death, disease, disaster…(Revelation 21:1-5)
I am an orphan on God’s highway
But I’ll share my travels if you go my way
I have no mother no father
No sister no brother
I am an orphan girl
I have had friendships pure and golden
But the ties of kinship I have not known them
I know no mother no father
No sister no brother
I am an orphan girl
But when He calls me I will be able
To meet my family at God’s table
I’ll meet my mother my father
My sister my brother
No more orphan girl
Blessed Savior make me willing
And walk beside me until I’m with them
Be my mother my father
My sister my brother
I am an orphan girl
