from the unpaved road

Some days my life feels kind of like this.  Time, moments fly by faster than I can catch them.  I am still digging my way out of the resulting backlog from two weeks of a sick computer {now healed thankfully}.  I never knew how much I needed that “s” key until it was not there.  It too flies by under my fingers as I try and play catch up scaling cyber mountains and email landslides.

I will soon be back here more regularly.  Thank you for grace in the interim.  I have loved meeting new friends and family in Philly, catching up with dear friends in the UK and now I am on to a few days in NYC.  As the month of May slows down and it will slow down, I will be hopefully writing more again and tackling another mountain of creative projects.  Ahem.

Please as you think of us- pray for South Sudan.  We are in a crucial stand off with the North and nanometers away from all out war.  We need a miracle.  And cherish your prayers.  For more on the situation back on the home front, check out the BBC here.

Green from blackened earth charred with flame. We wait the coming rains and yet ash falls from the sky, a predecessor of things to come.  This time of year reminds me of so much.

The miracles pushing through the ashes like resurrection leaving death an empty tomb.  He gives crowns of beauty for ashes still.  In fact He can only trust us with the authority of His beauty in places we are willing to consumed by His fire.

And from the very least likely ground, all left for dead, His beauty is springs forth.  ALIVE.  May we be found the same.  Brimming with His life that grows in wastelands and war zones and chooses the gutters of this world to be its greenhouse.

What unlikely place is Life displacing ash for you my friends?  Sometimes all comes in the seeing and being and less in the speaking and doing.

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“(For the ancient Celtic Christians) …A cross within or breaking through a circle spoke of the glory of Jesus transforming every aspect of creation.”- Karen J Lowe

These crosses were more than memorial stones, they were bold, creative declarations.  This cross told a story that called forth a response. I want to carry the story of the cross on the inside of me that calls forth a response and transforms the world around me.

The cross was not the end. It was the beginning of all things being made new.  It was the climax of the story, not its ending.  And if the cross was the climax, the empty tomb was the denouement of it all.

I just like the word.  Denouement.  Pronounced day-nu-ma.  It is a literary term meaning the solution of the mystery, the outcome, the end result, the sequence following the climax of a drama where resolution is reached.  In the case of the resurrection story it is the point when Jesus steps out of the tomb to leave death an empty grave.

The first walk with God in the garden was a walk of intimacy.  Adam and God. Until the choice was made that would plunge creation into chaos.  Next time we read of God the Son walking in the garden, it was a walk of humility.  The will that was lost, given away to evil, by the first Adam was regained by the Second in an agonizing “not my will but Yours be done.”  {How many times do I fight for my will when His is better, always infinitely better?}

And then Jesus walked out of the tomb into another garden in victory so that we could be embraced by Him for eternity.  And that eternity starts now. And so we are sent out in authority to walk the land with Him, the story of the cross written on our hearts, us no longer alive in ourselves but yet bursting with His Life, with freedom and all that is good and true and Him.

This resurrection journey: intimacy, humility, victory, eternity, authority all interwoven expressions of His matchless, endless grace.  May I walk these paths with Him everyday.

I want my life to be a signpost of heaven.  Like the ancient Celtic crosses that dotted the landscape in the days of Columba and Patrick.  These were not symbols of an ultimatum but rather an invitation.  Come walk with us and meet the ever-present, always-good God who deeply, intimately loves you.  Who numbers your hairs and knows your rising and sitting before you do.

Come aside and learn of the story.  The plot, the mystery, the climax and yes the denouement of the ages we live and breathe and move in.  HE is the fulfillment of all the promises and in Him all things hold together.  Even our stories, even our lives.  His glory seeping out through surrendered vessels to transform a broken creation crying out for sons and daughters of God fully manifested, fully made known.

May I be one of these.  The cross-story etched in my heart, His resurrection glory circumscribing, transforming my dust, and even the world around me as I walk with Him, stepping lightly but boldly in love on fragmented lands that they may become whole, running to the margins, seeing the unseen, hearing the voiceless cries in the night, following this wild unpaved road with One Who is not at all tame or safe, but in all ways good.

May He bless you with new life springing forth today and always.  I am always so grateful for you, that we can journey these miles together.

With love from this unpaved road,

Michele

This is a hushed week.  Really it is no different than any other week except it calls me to remember.  Many call this week holy, this time we set aside to walk with Jesus through His final week on earth.  It is holy not because of liturgy but because IN liturgy we remember together.  It is not the words I utter with my lips that matter most, but the liturgy I live out in community each day with my life.

I need liturgy.  Not the kind written in a book {although there are many beautiful things to be found there}, not the kind celebrated in a building {but I am ever thankful for growing up with these words that still echo in my heart}.  Yet neither of these hold true meaning without the liturgy of prayer lived out each day with Him and before the world around me.

It is a hushed, holy week: this time I take to reflect on Love’s journey to the cross.

And from the cross as well.

Not an ornate silver cross like the one I wear around my neck but a rough, wooden one.  What for me has become a symbol of freedom and liberation was then a symbol of a military state’s oppression and domination. I don’t even like wearing the literal shape of what subjugated a people in fear, so I embrace a more symbolic one.  Four Celtic Trinity knots weave a reminder of the cross and the fact I need to remember in eternal community.  I am invited INTO the community God is within Himself.

I NEED to remember.  To RE-member.  To be put back together by the very act of Love that tore His flesh with my wounds. This love makes every week holy.  If I stop to see the cross… and beyond it.

How easy it is to forget.  That the ruffian lot of turncoats who all but one left Him when the night was darkest {would I have risked all to stay?} did not have the benefit of the story’s ending.  Or the perspective of 2000+ years of His comings in and through His people.  They were nose to nose with what looked to be the biggest epic fail of all.  Abandoned.  Defeated.  Enemies of the state by association. Complete failure.  Grief at the loss of a friend, teacher, and dreams all in one Man’s nailing, in one Man’s refusal to fight back against what seemed ultimate injustice, in one Man’s willingness to embrace MY brokenness and die a criminal’s death for ME.

But they did not know any of that. They met a dark Friday and darker Saturday head on without knowledge of any happy conclusion in sight.  They walked among the graves of buried dreams and broken hearts.  What do we do in the places before resurrection when all we see is what is lost?

I wonder about the raw faith it takes to trust for restoration in the middle of a valley of dried out bones, in a cemetery of shattered yesterdays.

It is in these places I most need to remember.  Not alone.  Liturgy cannot be lived alone.  It is by its very nature a public act.  It can only be authentically lived in the place of community.  It is in these hard places I need to remember together with you and you with me that the pain on Friday and the darkness of unknowing on Saturday will lead to a resurrecting to come on Sunday.

What lies beneath buried innocence in a cemetery of broken dreams? Could there still be stones waiting to be rolled aside? Resurrection leaping forth to leave death an empty tomb.

Only those who dare walk among the graves and remember His promise together, dancing over panes of shattered yesterdays will know.  For it is in the remembering, new places of resurrection come forth in all of us.

I walk out of my bush bungalow office.  Golden hour falls softly all around me.  The hour when the world is kissed with amber and even dried out leftovers of last rainy season glow in the lengthening light.

Holy Monday.  Or I should say the Monday of Holy Week.  The week Christendom walks with Jesus through the lauding crowds to the midnight garden agony, onward to the final hours where death jeered and the rocks split: all the way to an empty tomb.  I wonder is it any more holy than any other Monday, but for the remembering.

It seems a fitting a day to start something new.  Something steeped in eternity…  {Continue reading this post over here.}

She first came as a cherub faced infant whose world had imploded on itself.  And she has been every inch of her naming since the day she arrived.  Light.  She is.  Radiantly His.

There were the seasons she was sickly and weak and we wondered if she’d ever get her legs under her strong enough to walk.  One week I had enough of the robbing and stealing of the infirmities that kept plaguing and nipping at her toddler sized heels.  I remember searching her out and holding her up a little longer each day.  Benia tai, daughter of mine.  zaman fi asade le ita be dooru.  The time is now for you to walk.   And little by little I watched her legs grow stronger and one Sunday she wobbled across a mat right into my arms in the middle of worship.  She learned to walk in worship, took her first steps in praise.  May that be where I learn to walk and step out as well.

Now she runs and laughs and talks a storm.  My sweet shining one, ever gentle as she brushes hair out of my eyes and cups my face in her small hands.  My heart melts every time she says mama.

I walk across the compound the other afternoon to the music of her giggle as she shows off a backpack bigger than she is.  She stands strong and triumphant all strapped in and I am not sure who is carrying whom.  I laugh and capture time in my lens and revel in the gift she is to us.  Not because she can carry an amazing load or is prodigious or is anything other or more than the gift of herself.

I watch her and see myself.  How sometimes in excitement I strap on a bag that is too big and not my own to carry and then wonder why the novelty of it fades all too soon and I tire of its weight.  Often it is because I am trying ever so hard to carry something I see as important but that is not what I was made for.

The real problem comes when I start comparing my backpack with yours.  But yours is lighter or bigger or pinker or prettier or smaller or or or or or.  The “or”s never stop.  Comparison is our greatest compromise.

We each have our own pack.  Custom made just for us.  So why compare as if our Papa in heaven wanted us to each be a replica of one another.  Far from it!  He has no cookie cutter children.  He makes each of our back packs unique.  Custom-made calls that are tailored and suited just for us by the One Who is Love Himself.

True community can only be had when we each are free to embrace the gift of being completely ourselves.  True unity cannot be found outside of a celebration of diversity and uniqueness.  Unity in spirit and song does not mean uniformity in appearance and action. We each have our own unique dance in the rhythm of His heart, our own unique sound and song that folds into the harmony of heaven.  Community happens as we celebrate Him in each other and stop comparing ourselves with ourselves.

So what about you my friend, have you been trying to carry someone else’s backpack that doesn’t quite fit?  Maybe ask Papa to show you what your backpack looks like, the one He made just for you.  He celebrates the gift you are.  Do you? Only when you can see yourself through His eyes as a gift, can you freely allow Him to give you away.

Some of you may remember reading about the day we found Mercy.

How she clawed wild and we held long and God moved mountains with His love and grace.  These last few months, she has been teaching us all lessons in mercy and the unstoppable love of God.

Today I sit on the steps of the pyatt {aka dining hall aka tent shelter for visiting teams in the season when falling mangoes make the trees less than desirable cover}.  I watch as Mercy gently takes Baby Blessing by the hand and patiently guides her over to me.  Naming is a powerful thing.  I am watching her be transformed into the reality of her name.  Our words do frame our worlds. How do we name the ones around us?  How do we even name ourselves?  Our words hold life and death in their grip.

She sits with me.  I rise to search out a few images with my lens for a post I am pondering. She follows my wandering as I find some green shoots springing out of ground charred black from fire.  She with them is growing against all odds.  One by one she picks the grass blades for me to photograph. This is not the same little girl who came with a plastic bag tied on dress and stretched us all thin and desperate for heaven to do what we could not.  She too is green with new life growing out of the ashes.

On New Years Day when we recant the stories of God’s goodness from the past year and look forward to His Promise in the year ahead, Mercy is held high as a living demonstration of the power of God’s love to change all of our hearts.

photo courtesy of anna burns

This one we were told could not hear, would not speak is learning more words every day.  She listens and helps out as she can and is learning even as we learn with her.

With the help of one of our amazing team members, we now have a fledgling charter school for our treasures who have unique learning needs. It is rough and raw and often chaos but in the middle of the fray love happens.  Learning to love happens.  And isn’t that the most important lesson of all?

Here Mercy is painting the world with fresh colors, learning more appropriate social skills and even creating her very own abstract needlework designs.  And we celebrate every step, every attempt, every movement towards the future filled with His hope.  We even celebrate the failures because without them, without the permission to epically fail, learning will always be stunted by safety.

I will not sugar coat this.  It is not easy.  It is hard work and a laying down of our lives and time, doing the small things, the unglamorous stuff real love is made of.  Things worth doing rarely are easy.  And it is often the small things done with great love that matter most.  We can only be faithful with what we have been given.  If we are not faithful here, now we won’t become faithful there, then.

So we are on a journey, Mercy and us together, to learn about His grace, His kindness for every moment.  We have our ups and downs and there is still a long road ahead.

And you.  You standing with us with your prayers. We are so very grateful for you.  Thank you for continuing to ask how she is, for loving us even from a world away.

She is teaching us all lessons in Mercy.

• Mercy is about doing the little things with great love.
• Things worth doing are worth doing even when it becomes messy, hard, uncomfortable, incovenient, dare I say exasperating.
• If we are not faithful with what we have here, now; we will not be faithful with what we don’t yet have in times and places to come.
• We celebrate successes, even the smallest ones. Success is not about great achievements and accolades.  It is about one more step, one more motion in the right direction.
• We celebrate even the failures because without real permission to fail trying, learning will always be stunted by what seems safe.

So may you find His mercies new every morning.  And may you know the celebration of heaven even in the middle of the mundane and messy as you endeavor to do the little things and love the one in front of you.  All heaven cheers you on!

Today I am pushing at the edges.

It takes most of the evening to get a few images to load and some things dusted off and rearranged in cyberspace over in my art studio.

Oh yes, I have an art studio.  By the way…  It’s called Talking Walls.  Because walls should speak.

They should speak the dreams of a generation, the promise of tomorrow, the faithfulness of yesterday and all that is good, all the gifts counted up and offered back to Him, a celebration of now being the present from eternity that it is.

What do our walls speak about us?  Because they do speak.  Our facebook walls, our virtual pinboards, our literal hallways where we showcase our priorities, our hopes, our successes maybe even more than we intend to say or show, somehow what is in our heart seeps through.  But didn’t Jesus say it would?

I am in the middle of starting to story-board a children’s book that has laid dormant and dust-covered in my heart since it was originally penned in high school.  It’s a story about becoming who you really are.  That is where all real art is found.  In being the original masterpiece we are created to be. It’s a story somehow I am still learning.  Still learning this art of being loved by Him.  His Beloved.  Be the loved so I can love and fly and dream. 

Art.  It is the second person present indicative form of the verb to be. {Thanks Ann for teaching me that! And for writing one of the best posts on creativity I have ever read.}  Art comes from being.  I need to be more.  Breathe more. Stop more.  See more.

For the last few years there has been a growing desire to study art more formally.  Over the weekend in the space of the quiet hours when our internet was somehow fast enough to load a few extra pages, I did it.  I took the leap and enrolled in a distance program from the London Art College.  A year long diploma course in Children’s Book Illustration.  Why that?  It felt right.  I felt His pleasure in it.

Many have asked if I illustrate because apparently my style is “illustrative”.  Deep down part of me pushed back at that idea, as if illustration was somehow less art, less being, than the formal kind found on gallery walls.  And don’t we all want to do the great things that scream success?  

But again what is success–really?  What if success is doing the little things with great love?  What if success leads far from stage platforms, spotlights and applause to create in secret places images that might mold a generation?

If I am truly honest with myself, all expectations aside.  Nothing but my heart being, beating before Him, laid bare, exposed.  And He comes and asks:  What do you ENJOY?  What puts you IN JOY?  Really.  In you could do anything… anything at all… {because we can do what gives us joy, what He created us for.}

And I realize.  I ENJOY creating and sharing stories to be hung in hearts maybe even more than potential masterpieces to be hung in galleries.  After all the only gallery walls that are eternal are inside of us.  Shouldn’t I paint my images there?  In this season, I am learning how to listen to my own heart as it is held by His BEING, His beauty, His art not succumbing to the pressure of a grand outside vision apart from what just doing He is doing in the moment. This moment, the present gift that it is.

THAT is where the greatest art is found, in the place of being.  Being loved, being free, being His.

Walls should–and do– speak.  What do you want yours to say?

Maybe take a trip over to my art studio where I am practicing being. Waiting.  {Especially given our internet speeds here. }

It is the season of fire and dust.

The time before the rains come wash the world again and make it new, bringing with them the resurrection of this scorched earth.  It is the season we put plow to the dusty rocky soil and prepare to plant with the coming rains.

We ready the ground in faith because right now nothing looks like it will ever grow and the fires lick close at our fence line. The mango trees laden with new fruit, their roots sunk deep where moisture still flows beneath stand tall against the flames.  I want to be like them.  Rooted. Fruitful in the fire.

But there are days here I feel more like the seared dust that swirls in whirlwinds waiting to land, like the dry cracked ground longing for moisture, like the tangles of brittle grass fragile, easily ignited, burned to ash.

But blackened earth will soon give way to green, dust will settle and cracked ground become sucking mud. In every season there are metaphors of grace.  May I not miss them.  May I have eyes to see His storied goodness all around me even in fire and dust.

So Papa today I pray, let my dust be blown on Your wind, my thirsty ground drink deep of Your beauty, my fragile places be ignited by Your flame even as I look for and wait the coming rains.

It stands as the center of our compound.

This metal tube thrust deep into the unseen ground below our feet. Its arm ever being pumped for precious life-giving liquid coming from the deep places beneath.   I stand and watch our children drink and play and splash in its cool wetness.  Draw from its depths to wash clothes, bathe bodies, quench their thirst.

The sun beats down, a slight breeze blows more like a convection oven giving rise to salty rivulets running down my back.  The red bottle brush trees are in full bloom so we know the rains are not far away and the cooler air that comes with them.  But standing in the mid-afternoon heat today, you would never guess that.  Unless you knew the signs of the seasons here.  How many months to harvest and what of the seasons of heaven?

The water from deep in the heart of the earth runs cool even when everything else cooks above.  Maybe that is why I need to draw water deep from the heart of God and not become content in the shallow places that really don’t quench much of anything.  Perhaps it is only the deep places of His river that will satisfy the empty depths in me.

Have you ever noticed it is impossible to give something away unless you first have a measure of it yourself?  I cannot give what I do not have.  I cannot impart what is not a part of me. I know this, I feel it more now than ever.

Remember Jesus at the Feast of Tabernacles?  Everyone wants to kill Him.  So He sneaks in.  But then He stands in the middle of everything and starts to teach, bold, without apology, right in the middle of some who were clamoring already for His life.  Who does this?  Perhaps someone who knows the Source of their life.

On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.  He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” – John 7:37-39

I cannot give what I do not have.  If I am learning anything on this dusty unpaved road here in the newest nation of Africa, it is this.  I must drink and drink deep of Him in order to have any life in me to give.  I must not run from my thirst. I must not run from my need.  I cannot bury it in activity or seek to satisfy it with outward success.  What is the success that really lasts and matters anyway?  There is only one thing to do with my thirst.  Come and bring it with me to Him.  Let it pull me into the depths of Who He is.  That I may drink and overflow. 

Living from the place of overflow is the only way to truly live. All else is dry emptiness that has nothing of real life in it to give. But first, above all, I must stop running away from my thirst, and my heart with it.

Why is it so often I run away from the very thing that is supposed to bring me closer to His love, to the deep wells of His Presence?  A dry sponge is a very ineffective sponge.  A dry sponge in denial is even worse. We were created to live on overflow everyday.

In this as in so much else, my children have it down.  The well is the center of our family life.  Right in the middle of the hard work of their play they stop and bring their thirst to the well.  They pause, bow low and put their mouth right under the deluge to receive all that they need.  Oh that I might take all my dehydrated places and do likewise.  

Stop.  Return to the center.  Bring my thirst to Him. Bow low, position my heart under the waterfall of His grace and drink and drink again that I might live from the overflow of His Spirit and not the emptiness of my self-effort.  THIS is LIFE and Life more abundantly.  This living on overflow.

How about you my friend?  Do you run from your thirst?  Or do you let it draw back to the only One Who can ever truly satisfy it?  So great is His loving extravagance that He doesn’t just want to quench our thirst itself, He wants to transform our thirst into a river that never runs dry.

Selah.  Come often.  Drink deep.  Splash freely.  Flow over.  Spill life.

–

We pause and remember and offer our deepest gratitude to God as we celebrate this World Water Day when so  many around us in this region have no access to life-giving clean water.  Thank you for your love and support that allows our children to experience the goodness of God with every drink they take.

A well here costs around $12,000 US to put in.  Our children are very wealthy indeed.  And thanks to the generous support of one of our partner churches in the US, we were just able to put in a well for our immediate community.  But there are still thousands of people who draw their water from disease ridden, filthy mud holes and contaminated water sources.  We are always looking for opportunities to share the gift of living water with the communities we serve.  Please contact me if you’d like more information on how you might be a part of helping us do this.  And as always, we give thanks for the deep wells of your love and prayers!