Author: joyfuldomesticity

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To Pray

 

…Lord, teach us to pray…
Luke 11:1 (ESV)

I went jogging in the peaceful coolness of the early morning. The sun was shining through the trees, the breeze was hitting my face, my ears were filled with sounds of morning songbirds, crowing roosters, bawling cows, and crunching gravel beneath my feet. I don’t like exercising, but I do like being fit—and I like having solitary time to focus my thoughts and tune my heart to God, His creation, His Word. Sometimes I sing psalms while I exercise, sometimes I pray, sometimes I simply weep and trust that the Spirit intercedes for me even when I am speechless.

I love to pray, to commune with my Father—and I’ve been doing it for my entire life. Conversing with Him is as natural as conversing with my earthly father, for I have known both of them that long. But there are times when I don’t really know what to say to my dad, or don’t need to say anything to be heard. Sometimes we just catch each other’s eyes and know the meaning behind it, deep in the other’s heart. Sometimes it is sob-filled, teary phone calls where I’m certain my words are somewhat incoherent, but I need to say them, and he is the one I want to hear them. Sometimes we have long conversations, giving and taking in the banter equally. And sometimes I am so at a loss for words, for whatever reason, that I just don’t even want to begin the conversation.

And I find that my conversations with God parallel these things.

Just a month ago, my morning prayers were filled with almost senseless begging, pleading to God with repetitive requests and endless questions, desperately wondering what He was doing, why I had to suffer this way, practically asking to wrestle blessings from His hands. If you had been listening in, the refrain would have sounded a lot like, “please God! Oh please God! Please, God, just… oh please!” My heart filled in the rest and my tears were the chorus. I could almost sense the robins, the deer, and the squirrels hushing—I imagined it was because the Lord knew the sacredness of this conversation with Him where I was so helpless, and even His woodland creatures hushed their breath and stilled their actions as I jogged by so I could cry and He could listen. This morning, as my feet carried me forward, my heart cried to my Father again. Today was one of the more eloquent days, with fully formed sentences and coherent requests, littered with lists of thanks for His graces, and I honestly sought Him on behalf of others rather than on behalf of myself.

The Lord is with me in all of these things. He hears me in each of these situations, and every one in between. He hears me when I plead with Him on the ultrasound table, He sees me rip out my hair while I wail in grief in an exam room, He bottles my tears in the bathroom over negative pregnancy tests, He embraces my body and soul as I grieve over death and as I expectantly long for reunions in heaven. He hears me on  behalf of my suffering friends and my grieving family members.

As I continue to grow in my relationship with my Heavenly Father, I want to deepen my understanding of prayer, enrich my conversations with Him, and learn how to glorify Him with my praise, my requests, my stutters, my tears, my shouts of joy, my cries of anguish. I often sing the Lord’s Prayer, and then take each of the six petitions therein, expounding upon one at a time in spoken prayer, filling out the shape of what Jesus exemplified for us. I often also use the book of psalms to help shape my prayers. I want to embrace asking for God’s will to be done with my whole heart and entire mind. In Matthew 26, Jesus Himself cried out to God as He anticipated His own crucifixion, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (ESV). It is perfectly honorable to follow the example of Christ, and ask the Lord to take this bitter cup of suffering from me—and, trust me, I do that regularly! I’m nigh well sick of the recurrent pregnancy loss journey, and He hears about it from my lips often enough. But even when I ask Him to take away miscarriage from me, when I beg Him to grant us living children, when I come to Him asking for wisdom in pursuing medical avenues and uncovering health complication—even in the midst of those requests—I want to prefer His will over mine. Sometimes I just plain ask Him, “give me the desire to prefer Your will, because honestly, I don’t understand how this plan is better than what I asked of You!” I ask Him to grow me up into His will, into loving His will, into desiring His will, into embracing His will.

So as I continue seeking God’s face in the mornings—as I quiet my soul before Him while the body He gave me exercises in the midst of the nature He placed around me, presenting not only my words but also my body before Him—may He teach me how to speak with Him, glorify Him, make requests of Him, and live fully in communion with Him—not because I want to get things from Him, but because I want Him—and I desire to learn from Him how to pray so that I can get more of Him.

 

© Melissa Joy, 2014

Written originally for Mommies With Hope, Melissa Joy seeks to grow in grace and wisdom alongside her husband Steven, while pursuing joyful domesticity by nurturing her home and family. The blessing of motherhood and the blessing of growth in Christ have intersected in a beautiful and challenging way for her, as she embraces being Mommy to twelve beloved children: 3 in her arms, 9 in the heavenly choir. The joy she finds in her family, homemaking, music, writing, ministering to those in grief, and seeking to be a pillar of loving strength in her home can be seen unveiled at Joyful Domesticity.

 

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Lenten Thoughts, II

If yesterday’s thoughts on Ash Wednesday were my first round of Lenten Thoughts, here are just a couple more.
Yesterday I linked to Pastor Sumpter (a friend, and previous pastor of ours) in defense of observing Lent. Here I will link to Pastor Wilson (another friend, although a peer of my parents rather than myself, and another previous pastor of ours; in fact, the pastor who baptized us when I was 12) in defense of not observing Lent. What I love most about the juxtaposition of these two links I’m sharing is that these two pastors, and their two churches, live in an incredibly tight community, work together in Kingdom work & ministry opportunities, and have the most incredible amount of public grace toward one another. I can not tell you what a blessing it is to witness unity & diversity, smothered with abundant grace, encased in flesh. This is the love of Christ! This is one of the mercies that I long for, as I seek to put my heart into observing the Lenten season this year (not in any prescripted ways, but in whatever way the Lord has put upon my heart to do it): that I would grow in the godliness that rejoices in the unity & diversity of Christianity that comes from God’s people as they trust in Him.

…when things are difficult, when we are disappointed, when it feels like God is taking things away that we love, when it feels like He isn’t loving us, it is frequently just the opposite. It is frequently in those moments that God is actually most loving us. He has something far better in store for us. He has a glory for us that will only fit us if we are dramatically changed. So during this season, fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of your faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising its shame and has now sat down at the right hand of the Father. Run with endurance. Keep running even when it feels like you’re going to die. Keep trusting your Father that He knows what He’s doing. You know you can trust Him because He sent His beloved Son first. We know that glory awaits, that resurrection awaits because Jesus is risen from the dead, so we can trust Him.

~Toby Sumpter, blog~

Today I have been meditating on Psalm 91, and spent some time using it as a springboard for prayer:

You who dwell in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, Say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust.”

For he will rescue you from the snare of the fowler, from the destroying pestilence. With his pinions he will cover you, and under his wings you shall take refuge; his faithfulness is a buckler and a shield.

You shall not fear the terror of the night nor the arrow that flies by day; Though a thousand fall at your side, ten thousand at your right side, near you it shall not come. Rather with your eyes shall you behold and see the requital of the wicked,

Because you have the Lord for your refuge; you have made the Most High your stronghold. No evil shall befall you, nor shall affliction come near your tent. For to his angels he has given command about you that they guard you in all your ways. Upon their hands they shall bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.

Because he clings to me, I will deliver him; I will set him on high because he acknowledges my name. He shall call upon me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in distress; I will deliver him and glorify him; with length of days I will gratify him and will show him my salvation.

And as I continue to meditate on Scripture, study Ecclesiastes, and seek diligence in prayer through Lent by God’s grace (and like someone else said, yes, I should do these things diligently always, but I am a sinner & need reminding!), I am seeking to hold fast to these three points of the Lenten season:

  1. Remind us of our own sinfulness – “my offences truly, I know them; my sin is always before me…” (Ps 50:5)
  2. Call us to turn to God with open hearts – “O today listen to His voice, harden not your hearts…” (Ps 94:8) 
  3. Proclaim God’s unending mercy – “if you, O Lord should mark our guilt, who would survive?” (Ps 129:3)

 

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Date Night: Daily & Divine

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Food and cooking are among the richest subjects in the world. Every day of our lives, they preoccupy, delight, and refresh us. Food is not just some fuel we need to get us going toward higher things. Cooking is not a drudgery we put up with in order to get the fuel delivered. Rather, each is a heart’s astonishment. Both stop us dead in our tracks with wonder. Even more, they sit us down evening after evening, and in the company that forms around our dinner tables, they actually create our humanity.
~Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb~

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Food matters because it’s one of the things that forces us to live in this world—this tactile, physical, messy, and beautiful world—no matter how hard we try to escape into our minds and our ideals. Food is a reminder of our humanity, our fragility, our createdness. Try to think yourself through starvation. Try to command yourself not to be hungry, using your own sheer will. It will work for a while, maybe, but at some point you’ll find yourself—no matter how high-minded or iron-willed—face-to-face with your own hungry, and with that hunger, your own humanity.
~Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine, p250~

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So try it. Try Keller’s three-times plan. Make it once according to the recipe. Then you know how the chef or recipe writer intended it to taste. Practice your scales. And then write your own version of the recipe. And then make it entirely from memory, at which point it’s yours.
~Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine, p102~

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But our goal, remember, is to feed around our table the people we love. We’re not chefs or restaurateurs or culinary school graduates, and we shouldn’t try to be. Make it the way the people you love want to eat it. Make it the way you love it. Try it a million ways and cross a few off the list because they were terrible, but celebrate the fact that you found a few new ways too—ways that are fresh and possibly unconventional but perfect for your family. That’s the goal. Learn, little by little, meal by meal, to feed yourself and the people you love, because food is one of the ways we love each other, and the table is one of the most sacred places we gather.
~Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine, p51~

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I am a bread-and-wine person. By that I mean that I’m a Christian, a person of the body and blood, a person of the bread and wine. Like every Christian, I recognize the two as food and drink, and also, at the very same time, I recognize them as something much greater—mystery and tradition and symbol. Bread is bread, and wine is wine, but bread-and-wine is another thing entirely. The two together are the sacred and the material at once, the heaven and earth, the divine and the daily.
~Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine, p11~

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Ash Wednesday

So this is the first year where we will go to an Ash Wednesday service. I am curious… apparently it will be a eucharist service ending with compline. But I don’t really know what to expect of the ash liturgy. Usually the evening services at church are pretty small, and my children will occupy the majority of my mental energies as they will be even more curious than I am. 🙂 But we are looking forward to this opportunity to worship the Lord and fellowship with His people in a new capacity, through the Ash Wednesday service.

Then every Wednesday until Holy Week we will be going to the church for “Lenten soup and lectures” where the whole church will have a soup supper together, and we will study this book together (discussion led by the author himself who is a friend of ours). Steven and I have already read the book, and while it is a short & “easy” read, it is also so deeply honest & raw that it cuts sharply and leaves an impact of blessing and grace.

I have been planning on giving up an hour of sleep every morning during Lent, to focus on prayer and Scripture. This (the actualities of the Lenten season) is all pretty new to me (we’ve been attending an Anglican church since last spring), and I love the beauty in a lot of these things. So this morning, at 6am, I spent a while with the Lord quietly in the darkness of my room. It was beautiful to speak to Him of my husband, my children, our church, our parents. It was good to lay desires before Him, and ask for His will to be done. It was a practice of faith in action. Even though the action seems small, just kneeling and speaking quietly with closed eyes and bowed body, it was big work. And I am eager to see what big things the Lord continues to do through small offerings of prayer, offered in a purposed and habitual way, more diligently planned (so to speak) than is my usual prayer routine.

For another thing, I am going to go through the book of Ecclesiastes, along with this commentary on it that my husband said was enlightening for him. I only read the first chapter of the book, and of Ecclesiastes, but I already agree. The Lord is so good.

May He bless His people, as we seek to follow Him and pursue the light of His countenance.

From dust we came, to dust we shall return. May we turn from sin and be faithful to the Gospel. May the peace of the Lord be with you. Amen.

…and for some beautifully enlightening reading, please read what our pastor friend wrote here on Lent.

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the goodest of friends

We got to share meals and space and time and conversation with some of our “goodest” friends (in my son’s words). The kind of friends that you do not get to see more than a couple times a year, but who never feel like you’ve lost time with during the in-between. They are the kind of friends that you want to grow old with, and swap grandkid pictures with when we’re grey, and take annual summer vacations with, and create traditions with. This is a family that is like family to us. We are so indescribably thankful for them, and how God lets us cross distances to stay close.

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…There are things you can’t know,
and questions you can’t ask,
and memories you can’t recover via email and voicemail.
It was about the being there,
about being there to really see
what’s exactly the same and
what’s totally different about each one of us.
~Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet, p63~

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Share your life with the people you love,
even if it means saving up for a ticket
and going without a few things for a while to make it work.
There are enough long lonely days of the same old thing,
and if you let enough years pass,
and if you let the routine steamroll your life,
you’ll wake up one day, isolated and weary,
and wonder what happened to all those old friends.
~Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet, p65~

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Good friends are like breakfast.
~ Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet, p65~

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faithful body image

What does the world mean when they speak of having good body image?
The test is simply whether you can look in the mirror and love yourself.
Can you see your body and love it?

But for a Christian woman this question should be completely different.
Good body image for a Christian woman means being able to look in the mirror and love God.
If you can look in the mirror and thank God for the body that He gave you –
that He spoke from nothing when He called you to life –
when He made your heart beat in a secret place,
when out of nothing He crafted you and gave you life.

When you can thank Him for all the challenges that come with this body of yours
because they come from His hand –
this is a far deeper joy than loving yourself.

This is not the shallow joy of having good body image,
but the deep security of having faithful body image.

Pursue that – because it is pursuing your Creator.
Thank Him – for His gifts to us are overwhelming.
Image Him, even as we see ourselves.
~Rachel Jankovic~

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enjoying life & its offerings

[M]ake the most of dinner time in particular by creating an event of it.
Don’t allow it to be just throwing food down the hatch.
Enjoy the time, enjoy the food, and
enjoy our fellowship together as a family.
~Kim Brenneman, Large Family Logistics, pg215~

There are one thousand ninety-five meals a year that we as home managers are responsible for…
For those one thousand ninety-five mealtimes that your family sits down together to enjoy,
be encouraged that God will help you in your efforts.
Food, presentation, etiquette, and conversation direction are responsibilities
we need to take seriously as the matrons of our homes.
We must give thought and plan for these times during the day.
In planning meals, it is important to realize that these are times that the
family is gathered together around the table sharing, talking, and enjoying each other
and the food set before them.
~Kim Brenneman, Large Family Logistics, pg282~

 If you’ve never been able to summon fervent interest in nutritional breakdowns,
you will find a companion here.
And if you are one of those who has dined with such enthusiasm
that nothing could stand in the way of sheer enjoyment,
you may find that you’ve enjoyed not gluttony,
but the fullness of life and its offerings.

~Deborah Madison, in her preface to Supper of the Lamb~

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8

Eight years ago, he asked ~ eight years ago, I said yes.

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This ring brings me so much joy every day, reminding me of the bigger joy it represents.
Wow.

Song of Solomon 2:10-14

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.

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fat isn’t the enemy

A certain amount of fat keeps your skin looking younger and more supple. As females, we have 12 percent essential fat in our bodies to support our reproductive organs, brain, bone marrow, spinal cord, and complete nervous system. That percentage is high compared to men who only require three percent essential fat. We also need some non-essential fat. That is the fat that lies just below our skin layer and helps protect our bodies from injury and cold. It also provides us with a great source of energy and allows us to sit on something, rather than just a tail bone.
~Trim Healthy Mama, p97~

 

A healthy amount of body fat on a woman is not repugnant. Don’t think you need to be “shredded” and try to eliminate all body fat. That is not healthy for your hormonal profile. Going too far below a healthy body fat ratio will disrupt your delicate endocrine balance, and if you are pre-menopausal, you may stop your period altogether. That is a dangerous set-up for bone loss, depression, skin aging, and cardiovascular disease. God did not design a grown female to appear like ripped muscle and skin as men are more apt to be. Desiring that appearance is a warped perception of how a female should look. Female fat layers in the right proportion are beautiful. That “too skinny” look is very aging for anyone over 30 years.
~Trim Healthy Mama, p97~