by Elizabeth | Aug 5, 2014 | Learning Story
If you’ve been around here for long, I hope you’ve recognized my passion for gospel-cultivated women’s community. A sad reality of the fallen world is that women learn to attack each other from the time they are young girls. In the new book I am writing, I am looking for the hope of redemption in the midst of broken sisterhood stories. here’s one such story:
Sammie, regular attendee at the women’s group for about a year, invited me to lunch. I had been wanting to get to know her better, and I was looking forward to it. When the waitress arrived, Sammie didn’t order anything. That seemed a little odd, since she had invited me to lunch. It should have tipped me off to what was to come.
We exchanged small talk until my salad arrived, but as I took my first bite, she spoke in a serious tone, “I’ve been wanting to talk with you about the group.” Not waiting for me to respond, she launched into a litany of accusations. In summary, I was authoritarian in my leadership, I had steered the accusations away from her attempts to be “real,” and I was stealing women’s voices.
Wow. She blind-sided me. I knew enough not to engage her bitter stream of condemnation, but at the time, I was so roughed up that I couldn’t speak the gospel into it. I remember little about the next 20 minutes. I think I tried to do some of the things you’re supposed to do when someone offers critique, like nod and affirm and listen. I am sure at some point I caved into self-defense that she utterly demolished. Finally, the excruciating encounter ended with her departure. I quickly paid my check, rushed to the safety of my car, and burst into tears.
I drove down the road for a few minutes, still reeling from the blow, then realized (thanks to the Holy Spirit I’m sure) what I needed to do. I pulled over, grabbed my phone, and called a friend. A longtime sister in Christ, my friend listened to my pain and humiliation, then finally spoke soft words. She reminded me of the gospel I believed and taught regularly to others. Without slandering my accuser, she told me the story of how Christ died so I could love my enemies. She helped me see the slivers of truth embedded in the harsh words; she showed me where the words were wrapped in misperception and manipulation.
This story of sorrow and redemption reveals two powerful realities about women’s relationships: we can be one another’s cruelest saboteurs or one another’s most faithful supporters. Women desperately need healthy, thriving community, what I am calling here, “sisterhood.” Yes, we are sinners (Romans 3:23), but as Christians, we are also saints (Romans 1:7). In the gospel, there is not only hope for a sisterhood of sinner-saints, but a calling for it. Christ has redeemed us as a chosen people and a holy nation (1 Peter 2:9); in order to live fully into our new creation, we must love other women as our sisters. The gospel is the story of hope that such a community can exist.
Copyright for little sisters’ image: Martin Novak: www.123rf.com
by Elizabeth | Jul 18, 2014 | Learning Story
When we know God’s story — the story of the gospel; the Story of Faith and Hope the Bible tells, it changes our prayers. No longer dry, dull, and distant, prayer becomes interaction with the story God has told and is telling. That is why an essential feature of each Living Story Bible study is called “Praying Story.” Here is one I wrote for the end of Chapter 6: The Hero’s Story, in Living God’s Story of Grace. Try praying this story aloud, or write your own prayer to the God who fulfills promises and restores hope in His way, in His time:
Dear God, Fulfiller of Faith, Restorer of Hope,
We come to you humbly, confessing that we so often want your promises to be fulfilled in our time and in our way. We thank you that you are God and we are not, that you refuse to bow down to our demands, but instead draw us to kneel before your majesty, to declare your wonder, to marvel at your beauty. Help us to walk as heroes of faith, fixing our eyes on your heavenly city from afar, remembering your “already” redemption, and knowing with deep assurance that you are redeeming and transforming now. You will never stop until the day Christ returns to fulfill your greatest promise — eternal life with you in the new heavens and the new earth. In hope assured by you and faith founded in you, we pray. Amen.
by Elizabeth | Jul 15, 2014 | Learning Story
It’s July 15 — can it really already be time to think about back to school and back to Bible study? Apparently so, since I received a from our women’s ministry leader that teachers needed to let her know by August 1 what we’re teaching.
If any of you are looking for good material, be sure to check out the Living Story Bible studies. I wrote these to help you know the story of grace Scripture tells, to know your own stories, and to live them out in real life. I address questions that people new to Bible study may ask and that people who have been doing it for years may need to be reminded of — in short, the good news of the gospel.
There are now three studies in the series — you can do them in sequential order, but they will also stand alone:
Learning God’s Story of Grace looks at the whole story of redemption: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation, and what it means for our lives.
Living God’s Story of Grace focuses on the struggle of faith and hope that we all experience.
Loving in God’s Story of Grace is about, you guessed, it — love — the radical, countercultural love that the gospel tells.
Try them — you’ll like them! And, if you do one of these studies with a group and would like me to meet with your group via Skype or telephone, let me know! I would love to interact with you!
Check out this “theological theme,” in which I try to take some “big words” and make them make sense in real life:-)!
Theological Theme: Justification by Faith
“Abram believed and it was credited to him as righteousness.”
In the first chapter of the study, we asked the question, “What does faith do?” One of the most important byproducts of faith is “justification.” To understand the word justification, consider this story:
I had spoken impulsively, reeling off some sarcastic remark sure to draw peals of laughter from my daughter’s friends. Immediately I felt chagrin. My joke came at the expense of my daughter’s dignity. I wanted to justify my action, saying I was only trying to be funny, but it was clear there was no excuse – I had traded my daughter’s reputation for a moment of fame among a group of 13-year-olds. In God’s court of law, I would have been declared guilty of a love-failure.
As sinners, which we all are (Romans 3:23), there is no justification for our sin. In a court of law, we are declared guilty. That is why Genesis 15:4 is such a radical statement. Abraham is declared “righteous,” that is, “not guilty,” just because of his faith. Abraham’s righteousness does not come from his moral rectitude or good actions – it comes from his faith, which comes from God.
Faith in Christ brings an even more astounding reality to our stories. We receive the credited righteousness (see imputed righteousness in Learning God’s Story) by transferring trust from our own efforts at being good to Christ’s finished work on the cross (Romans 3:23-26). When a person confesses, “I believe Christ has fully paid the price I owe for my sin,” we are credited with Christ’s righteousness (Romans 4:23-24).
The radical concept of justification by faith should humble and astonish us. One of the great old hymns asks, “How can we keep from singing?” Indeed, when we understand that the holy God sent his holy Son as the only adequate substitute for our sins, how can we keep from living a life of loving God and loving others?
by Elizabeth | Jun 24, 2014 | Learning Story
“We are having a problem with this shame-resilience group.”
“What is that?”
“We don’t like the word ‘shame.’”
“What do you want to do about it?”
“We’d like to call it ‘sha-may’.”
This is part of a dialogue in a delightful clip of Dr. Brene Brown’s presentation at the “Up Experience.” If you haven’t yet heard of Brene Brown, she is a sociologist and a self-proclaimed “shame-researcher.”
As a women passionate about helping other women live authentic, courageous, connected, compassionate lives, I have been intrigued by Dr. Brown’s work on shame and vulnerability and her invitation to women and men to yield striving in perfectionism and performance.
(I also enjoy the fact that Dr. Brown will be found in either cowgirl boots or clogs. If you know me, you know why:-)!)
Her sense of humor and delight in story is compelling, and she is majoring on all the important attributes of a life well-lived. I’m a fan.
As I listened to her thoughts on shame and “living story,” I thought about my life and the lives of women I coach. We desperately need to know the real reason we have freedom from sha-may. Brene says the cure for perfection and performance is knowing “I am enough.” I would adjust that slightly and say, “I am not enough. Christ is more-than-enough. The odd truth of the gospel is that God gave me Christ’s more-than-enough-ness. (righteousness).”
According to the gospel, my real hope for freedom from shame comes from the Cross. Here is the strange storyline: Christ died for me, a sinner, on the Cross, and even more surprising, God has called me “so very right” in Christ.
Here’s what that looks like in real life: I’ve done things I should be ashamed of – sin — turned my back on a friend, yelled at my children, dissed my husband. There’s no enough-ness in me that can save me from that shame. But Christ can, Christ has, and Christ will again. Christ, the perfect, sinless God-man, so much more-than-enough, shamed “sha-may.” In Christ, God has made me new creation and declared me — more-than-enough-in-Christ.
Therein lies the freedom from perfectionism that our hearts desperately need. In this story, we truly can live freely enjoying and glorifying God, enjoying and loving others.
by Elizabeth | Jun 10, 2014 | Learning Story
When we pay attention to God’s stories of grace in our lives, we begin to see what Flannery O’Connor calls the “imperceptible intrusions of grace.” In recognizing God’s grace worked out in our lives, we live and love freely as God created and redeemed us to do. I hope you enjoy one of my favorite “intrusion of grace” stories.
“Mom, please don’t cry!” My thirteen-year-old daughter begged me to lift my head and look at her. I had collapsed over the steering wheel when I saw the blue lights of the second trooper in a matter of three weeks, realizing that despite my earnest efforts to watch my speed, I had again failed. I was furious with myself, even though I knew that I had no malicious intent – I had driven over 3000 miles in the previous two months, carting kids around the Southeast to various camps and volleyball tournaments. My chief method of coping with the draining and dreary hours on the road was to listen to sermons or lectures and sometimes as I did so I simply forgot to pay attention to how fast I was going. But I knew it was no excuse and I dreaded the thought of telling my husband, even though I knew he would be understanding and forgiving. So as the trooper sat in his car scrawling out an illegible ticket, I laid my head on the steering wheel and sobbed.
Then I heard Mary Elizabeth through my fury and self-pity and exhaustion, “Mom, I know – let’s pray!” And since I certainly didn’t start praying, she did. She asked God to be with me and to help me know it was just a mistake and to help me remember what a great trip we had had. Somewhere in her prayer, I heard the voice of Jesus, whispering, “Come out and join the party.” The officer offered me the ticket like a bill from the local diner and said cheerfully, “Have a blessed day, Ma’am!” I resisted the urge to tell him exactly what would bless my day and maneuvered the car back onto the highway to drive the last 60 miles of the thousand mile round trip I had done in the last 24 hours.
Mary Elizabeth, tender nurturer that she is, persisted in her goal of cheering me up with more camp stories. That morning she had been talking with a friend whose grandfather had died before camp. M.E. noticed her friend was sad and asked her what was bothering her, and the friend told her going home made her remember how much she missed her grandfather. Mary Elizabeth reported the consoling words she spoke to her friend, “That’s the way it is with losing someone to death, you are sad, then you forget for a while, then you may be sad again, and that’s okay.”
As she told me this story, she seemed to experience a sudden revelation and chirpily added, “But getting a speeding ticket isn’t the same as your grandfather dying!” I couldn’t help but laugh, and I remembered the words I have spoken numerous times and heard repeated back to me, “This will make a really good story one day!” Indeed, God was redeeming this story already, bringing beauty out of ugliness. I would never choose the humiliation of being stopped by state troopers twice in one month, but I also wouldn’t trade the beauty of my thirteen-year-old daughter ministering to my heart.
Because I am attuned to God’s story of grace playing through all of my stories, I can hear the melody of redemption in this particular story. Though it highlights my humiliation, I remember and tell this story, because it reveals God’s redemption. I was committed to a story I had written, one in which I played the righteous hero, the supermom driving my children all around the country, and everyone praised and lauded me for my tremendous efforts. In this story, a state trooper should understand how I could fall into the trap of driving a little faster than the speed limit, and rather than giving me a ticket, he would bestow a special needs tag on my car that would allow me to drive as fast as I wanted without ever being stopped.
My self-righteousness and self-pity reflected the sad state of my heart. I withdrew from my daughter, at first refusing to receive her offers of grace. Thankfully, the story isn’t catalogued under the title “Elizabeth’s Stupid Sin” because God’s story of grace trumps my sin. The story unfolds in the good news of God’s pursuing love, incarnated in my daughter, who relentlessly hounded me with the sounds of heaven in encouraging me “to remember what a great trip we had” (and unspoken message: “Don’t ruin this memory for me, Mom!”). God did save me from ruining the story for my daughter, and this chapter will stand in our storybook on the page with other memories of God’s miraculous movement in our lives.
