As some of you may know, I speak for Girls Night Out events all over Canada and the United States, with a great group of other women! In that picture above, I'm second from the front, and my friend Connie Cavanaugh is at the back. Connie has a new book out, Following God One Yes at a Time, which has just been released by Harvest House Publishers. This book tells you how -- one simple, immediate, possible yes at a time – to do what Jesus commanded when He said, “Follow Me.” This is “following God for dummies”; it is a simple way for ordinary Christians to follow Christ through the maze of our complicated lives.
I asked Connie to come and talk to us about her book:
You said that God may have "seasonal" dreams for us. What does that look like if you're a mom of young kids, but you've always felt called to something big?
The dream of being a writer came to me in my 20s and the dream of speaking came in my 30s. Neither dream was realized until my 40s and 50s. The simple answer is that I could not pursue those dreams until I first pursued other dreams God also gave me, such as devoting 20 years to being a stay-home mom. Some people have the mental and physical energy to pursue more than one big dream at a time, such as the OBGYN who delivered my second baby and continued working through the births and rearing of six children of her own. I am not that kind of person. But God knows what we can and cannot do and He is good so during my years at home, He was giving me "material" to use in my subsequent season as a writer and speaker. For the young mom who feels called to something "big" I remind her that nothing is "bigger" than being a godly, effective parent.
But I hasten to add, don't lose hope because if God gives the dream, He will lead you to fulfill it in His time.
Do you think that husbands and wives usually share dreams? What do you do if you feel called to something but your husband doesn't?
Yes, I think couples often share dreams. When my husband pursued the dream of completing his education, it was actually the realization of a dream that I had in my heart that my husband would have a much broader ministry than he had at the time. That was a shared dream.
However, if you feel called to something that your husband is opposed to, then I would caution you to be absolutely certain that you are hearing clearly from God. God calls us to love and respect our spouse and I doubt He would ask us to do something that would damage the marriage relationship. It may be that you are to wait and pray until you and your spouse reach agreement. Perhaps God is using your spouse's hesitance to refine the dream into something a little different than what you are now thinking.
Bottom line: honour the marriage first and trust God for the dream.
You begin by saying “God has a dream for every believer.” I love that idea--that God "dreams" for us. What do you mean by it, though?
God does have a dream for every believer. In fact He has many overlapping, interlocking dreams for us: some big, some small; some lifelong, some seasonal; some manageable, some seemingly impossible. When His dream looks like a mountain we can’t climb, because we lack faith in ourselves and in Him, we think:
This dream is too big; I don’t have what it takes.
The process looks so complicated; I don’t even know where to start.
The finish line is so far away; I don’t think I can go the distance.
I’ve tried before and dropped out; I must be all out of chances.
Is this God speaking or my own wishful thinking?
People like me don’t get to do these things; I’m not worthy of this.
I think most of us can relate to those barriers that keep us from following God.
The biggest barriers to following God are internal, not external. It’s not situations, circumstances, tragedies, crises or even physical limitations but it’s things like fear, guilt, pride, shame, comparison, and doubt that hold us back from pursuing the dreams God has for us. Following God one yes at a time is about how God breaks down His impossible dream into manageable steps and once we begin to follow Him in faith, because He loves us, He sends us proofs that we’re on the right track.
Do you think God always sends us “proofs” when we follow Him? I sometimes get scared that I'm assuming God wants me to do something when it's me who wants to do it.
Even though we talk about a God who is alive and personal, all Christians occasionally feel like He is remote and invisible. Once God gets us to say yes to His dream and begin following Him, He knows that we’re going to be battling doubts and fears so He sends us proofs that we heard Him correctly and we’re on the right track. These proofs are little assurances that we pick up in a number of ways – through our daily Bible reading or hear in a sermon or through music or circumstance or pretty much anything that God chooses to use.
He’s not limited in the ways He communicates with us. These “proofs” are His way of encouraging us not to lose heart but to keep following.
Sheila talking now: I like this concept that God gives proofs, and that's what I really appreciated about the book, because quite frankly I don't think that I trust enough. I second guess myself all the time. Did I really hear God say that?
We had this one experience a few years ago that made me believe in proofs. It was the summer of 2007, and we as a family had planned to move to Kenya for a year. We were going to leave in August and return the following July. We had saved money so we could go; we had arranged a place to live; we had arranged for a hospital for Keith to work at; and we had arranged for work for me to do. We even had someone to live in our house.
It had been our dream.
And then things started to go wrong. Every time the mission organization called us, our phone line would go dead. Our phone line NEVER goes dead. And it happened no matter what phone they were calling from. Little tiny things kept going wrong, which I can't go into all the details about, but they left us really puzzled.
And then the final straw came. We received our acceptance package in the mail, but it had been burned to a crisp. It came in a Ziploc bag from Canada post, with a note apologizing for its condition, but apparently someone set the mailbox on fire. I had never heard of mail being burned before. We opened the package and ashes fell out instead of a book, and yet somehow the label with our address had survived.
I started asking friends if they thought it was a sign. Should I just assume it was a sign, or was that presumptuous? One very smart man said, "Sheila, what else do you expect God to do?" And so we didn't go. And four months later, Kenya erupted into the worst violence they had seen in decades. We would have been right in the middle of it. God protected us.
So God does give proofs, but often we second guess Him. I think it's good to keep checking things out, but sometimes we just have to learn to live by faith, and I find that hard. If you do, too, Connie's book can help!
My 15-year-old daughter writes a blog, and I read it, though I'm not sure she knows that.
Anyway, I was blown away by her post today. Here's part:
We believe in something we can’t see, can’t hear, can’t smell, can’t feel. But still we give our life to him. It’s like standing blindfolded on top of a table, when you’re told that there are friends waiting at the bottom, and jumping off and hoping they’re there to catch you. Christianity is that three seconds from when you jump to when they catch you. That freefall when you aren’t quite sure whether they’re going to catch you or not—but you still trust them. You still love them. You still have faith that they’re there for you. But you can’t hear them. You can’t see them or feel that they’re there.
Some people think Christianity is that time when you’re caught, and there’s that rush of relief and happiness—but I don’t think it is. I think that’s what heaven is. The transition, our life on this earth, is when you aren’t quite sure whether you’re right or not, but you have faith nonetheless. When we’ve finished this life, we’ll land into the arms of God with the knowledge that everything was worth it. The scariness was worth it. The uncertainty, the doubt, the fear, the ridicule, the pain, the choice to go the hard way—it was all worth it. Because now you’re in the arms of your savior, and there’s nowhere else better.
There’s a time to feel God, to see God, to hear him audibly—but it might not be now on this earth. This earth is the place where you have faith in the unseen, the unfelt, the unheard. Where you believe in God not because he’s proven himself to you, but because you just know that he is God. If it feels like you’re in a freefall right now, like God isn’t there to catch you, like you’re all on your own—you aren’t. God’s waiting to catch you, but it’s not time yet. But when you do land in the hands that hold the world, you’ll know it was worth it.
I love that. And I love it even more that it's coming from my 15-year-old daughter. Read the rest here. And if you have teens, send it on. I know she'd love more teens to read (and subscribe)! And she loves comments!
Okay, I have to admit that I wrote that headline just to be provocative. A better one would be: does the fact that you believe in a Creator God mean that you necessarily believe in a God that is good?
And I think the answer would have to be no.
Today, for Spiritual Saturday, I thought I'd elaborate a bit on my understanding of the amazing benefits of the fact that our God is, actually, good!
On Good Friday I wrote a post on how pain is an intricate part of life, and we don't have to deny pain in order to prove our spiritual bona fides, so to speak. But we often still struggle with why God lets bad stuff happen. One thing we never tend to ask, though, is whether God is actually good. We just assume He is, and that's why we're in such a conundrum.
But does it necessarily follow that God has to be good? Let's go from first principles. What does it mean to be good? Does it not necessitate a standard for what is right and wrong? And if there's a standard, good can't be relative. Good has to be linked to how God defined it.
However, most cultures do not have the view that God is actually good. They may believe He is holy, but they often mean something different by that that we do. God is holy because God is God, and therefore anything He does is right. But God is outside our realm of understanding, and therefore we will never understand what good is.
Take the ancient Greeks, for instance. They believed in a multiplicity of gods, most of whom were engaged at any one time with war with other gods, or with stealing men's wives, or with in general making life difficult for those here on earth. The gods were to be served and placated, but never really understood or befriended. The gods were not necessarily one's ally.
In tribal religions in the Caribbean, South America, and Africa, there's a similar view of God or of "the spirits". The spirits are mean. They're unpredictable. They can curse you or cause you pain at any time, and so the main job of humanity is to make the gods happy with you at best, or else fail to notice you at the least.
Christianity, though, says something very different. Our God is not actually omnipotent, because there is something our God cannot do. Our God cannot sin. He cannot lie. He is good, because He is The Good. We don't have to fear Him. He doesn't ask us to operate by a moral code that He Himself doesn't already operate by.
When you serve a God who MAY lie, or who MAY do mean things, then morality often becomes relative. In Islam, for instance, it's wrong to lie to other Muslims or to rape other Muslims, but it's okay to lie to unbelievers or to rape unbelieving women captured in war. They do have a version of the Ten Commandments, but those commandments only apply within the Muslim community. Outside the Muslim community anything goes. Christians, though, are never allowed to do any of these things. A commandment is a commandment; it's not relative. Our holiness is defined in the same way God's is; we are to be absolutely holy, as God is holy.
That may sound onerous, but it isn't. It actually makes life so much easier, because we know what's expected of us, but even more so, we know what we can expect from God. Do you realize what a luxury it is that we get to wrestle with the question "why does God allow bad things to happen?" I know we fuss over that question, but it assumes two very important things: God is good, and He loves us. We who grew up in the Judeo-Christian culture take those assumptions for granted, but most of the world does not share this view.
When we lived in downtown Toronto we had frequent conversations with Muslim neighbours. Around the time that our son with Down Syndrom was born, we got in a conversation about birth defects. They had a family member with disabilities as well, and they had interpreted it as God punishing them for something. God was capricious, and so this family member was essentially hidden so as not to bring shame on the family.
I won't go into the reasons that I think God allows bad things to happen, because that's another post, but the very fact that we believe God loves makes us approach life differently. If you don't fundamentally believe that God loves you, and if you fundamentally believe that God can do bad things, then where is the joy in serving God? Is there not just primarily fear? There isn't necessarily even relationship; it's just a subject to a master, understanding that the master might do anything he wishes at any time and you really can't predict what those things will be because God doesn't operate by any rules that you could also understand; they are all above us.
Just because Islam is monotheistic does not mean that it actually has anything in common with Judaism or Christianity. It doesn't necessarily believe in a loving God; it doesn't believe that there is an absolute right and wrong--there is only what Allah wills, which is unknowable anyway. And because Allah doesn't operate by any logic that we understand, it's hardly surprising that Islamic societies tend to be anti-intellectual (the academic progress made in the Ottoman empire was largely made by Christian slaves from the Byzantine empire).
I love God, and I know He loves me. I know what right and wrong is (even if I don't always do them). I know God will never do wrong. And that makes life so very, very much easier to live, even if we do struggle with the question of suffering. I'll take that struggle over the alternative anyday.
Last night my 11-year-old announced that she is ready to be baptized. There was much rejoicing.
But this has been a bit of a humorous journey for her (or at least it's been humorous for me). Last year, when her sister was baptized, she told me afterwards that she'd like to be, too, but she's afraid of having to give her testimony.
"I really don't have anything to say yet. Maybe I should wait until I'm twelve."
To which I replied, "What are you planning on doing between now and 12?"
So she's decided to take the plunge. So to speak. But she's still nervous about having to give her story.
I tried to explain to her last night how there are two types of testimonies: the God saved me ones and the God spared me ones. I have heard the girls explaining to their grandmother, who attends a church with infant baptism, that at baptisms you get up and say how you used to be addicted to drugs and then God saved you. It's like a script: at some point the drugs come up.
But I told Katie that that's not true for everyone. Some people do have a God saved me testimony: I did all kinds of bad things, I was on the wrong path, but God plucked me out. And we love those testimonies because they're so exciting. And they show what a difference God can make in a life.
I think, though, that the God spared me testimonies are even better, even if they're not so flashy.
Katie tried to put this into words last night. She said, "So it's like I was raised in a family with God at the centre, and now I want to declare that I believe it, too?" And I said yep.
Isn't that a good testimony? To say that you were spared the drugs, and the rotten roads, and the confusion and the pain, and you knew Jesus from a young age? I think that's beautiful.
It's too bad we often glorify the God saved me testimonies, because I think it's every parent's prayer that our children will end up with a God spared me one. Isn't it? I rested in God's arms as a child, and it was there that I stayed. That's a beautiful image. And it's my prayer that before Katie has to explain it, she understands how precious it is.
My husband is a pediatrician, and it seems that over this weekend we've seen a number of accidents involving children and ATVs. No deaths (though there was one a few weeks ago near where I live), and Keith himself hasn't treated them. He's just heard through the grapevine.
It only takes a second for something really bad to happen. Maybe it comes from already having had a child die, but I often look at my girls when we're all laughing together, and I say to myself, "I am going to bottle this up." The truth is you just never know what's around the corner.
Even if we eliminate as much risk as possible, though, you never can be sure. And that's what's so hard as a parent. Are you going to live your life petrified that something could happen, and so become overprotective, or are we going to release our kids, confident that no matter what happens we're all in God's hands?
That's a really hard point to get to. I've had several experiences in my life where I had to come face to face with God and realize that He is my foundation, and not my husband, not my kids, not anything else. It's an awfully uncomfortable feeling, because for some reason we often think that as soon as we do surrender everything to God, and say to Him, "You are enough," that He's going to swoop down and steal everything that matters to us.
Nothing could be sillier. Do we think our kids are safe as long as we don't surrender them to God? And yet that process of handing our kids to Him is such an emotional one, because we are so wrapped up in them. How could we possibly separate from them?
It's not that I think anything actually will happen to my kids. And sometimes I get this cold chill run up my spine when I wonder what I would do if... But the truth is that if that day did come, I know God would carry me through it, because He carried me through before. But since that day is not here yet, I would rather live in the here and now and enjoy my kids, instead of worrying about all the things that I might one day have to deal with! If we can get to that point of trusting God, it is much easier to cope with today.
I've written a couple of articles about this. You can read one here. Here's how another one begins:
A little girl disappears without a trace. A three-year-old drowns when he wanders off from a family reunion. Hardly a day passes without hearing horrors like these, making you shiver as the unthinkable flashes through your mind.
Becoming a parent is not as simple as entering other stages in your life. It's more like being engulfed by a violent tornado and flung into the land of Oz. Everything is foreign and frightening. Once you're a parent, the world, instead of being full of possibilities, offers unlimited dangers.
For the most part this is instinctual. God wired us to be fiercely protective of our children to ensure we would care for them. Why else would we endure people who cry incessantly and throw up repeatedly? Last year as my daughters and I were emptying one of our compost bins, I inadvertently hit a mouse's nest with my shovel. As five pink babies fell to the ground, their screeching mother bravely darted in and out of the bin to rescue each one. She needn't have bothered; I was far too queasy to kill either her or her squirming offspring. But it was a vivid example of how mothers will sacrifice themselves for their children. As soon as we become parents, we instinctively wrap our arms around our kids and hold on tightly so nothing bad will happen.
The problem, of course, is that no matter how hard we try, we can't protect our kids from everything. And when we do try, we may have the opposite effect: we may raise immature children who make poor decisions. Obviously this is not our intention. Yet it's easy to fall into this trap if we let our fears for our children take our eyes off of God.
But let me say this first: I used to pray constantly for my kids' safety. All my prayers went like this: "Dear God, don't let anything happen to them. Put angels around them. Protect them. Etc. Etc."
Then Columbine happened, and I heard the story of Cassie Bernall saying "yes" when the gunmen asked her if she believed in God. And I realized that's what I would want my children to do, too. There was something I wanted even more than safety.
I started weeping as soon as I thought of that, because it felt like they were already dying. And yet that realization started to free me. I had to focus not only on their physical safety, but even more importantly, their spiritual growth.
What about you? Is this something you struggle with? Are you scared to trust God with your kids? Tell me about it in the comments!
My talk, "Do You Believe God Loves You?", focuses on why it's so hard to surrender things to God. You can puchase the CD or the download here.
We had a baptismal service at church last week, and afterwards Katie, my 10-year-old, mentioned something interesting.
The pastor had asked anybody who wanted to be baptized (we're in a believer-baptism tradition church) to talk to him after the service. Katie said this:
"I really felt like I should go talk to Pastor Ernie, but then I remembered that when you're baptized you have to tell your story. I don't have much of a story yet, so I think I'll wait until I'm twelve."
To which I replied,
"And just what are you planning on doing in the next year and a half?"
Over at Joy Unexpected there's a debate going on about what to do if someone tells you that God told them that you would be healed. In other words, what if someone pronounces healing over you? Do you believe it? Do you question it? And should we pronounce healing over others?
Here's my take.
When I was pregnant with our second child we found out that he had a serious heart defect that would eventually likely kill him.
I was devastated. How are you supposed to watch your only son die?
Then one day, about three weeks before he was born, I was at a March for Jesus rally in downtown Toronto. A woman I didn't know asked me about the baby, and I spilled everything. She looked at me and said, "God has told me this baby will be healed." And she prayed on the spot. And she said to me, "If you have faith he will be."
I think that is a very mean thing to do, although I'm sure the woman meant no harm. I've written books about this since, and I speak at women's conferences about it.
But here's the thing: I did have faith that God could heal Christopher. But did I have faith even if God didn't? That's the more relevant question. And this woman, who did not know me and who would never see me again, could feel great about herself because she pronounced healing on me, though she bears no responsibility should my son not be healed.
And she so much as told me that if he weren't healed it would be my fault. I think God does work healing through people, but on the whole, I think we should make sure that we have something invested in the person's life before we pronounce such things. Make sure you're there to stick it out if the healing doesn't occur. We'd be far less likely to be cavalier about hearing God's voice if we had to stick around and see if God did actually intervene in the way we wanted Him to (God did intervene in my case, though my son did die. But we had a peace about it, and God has used my story to touch many. And He let me write a book about it. It was not what I would have planned, but I'm grateful for it). And that's why I don't think we should be so certain that we hear exactly what God is saying. Let's leave room for God's will, because His will is not always what we would like it to be.
God does heal, but it's rare. On the whole we have to walk through difficulties, but Jesus did, too. Suffering is not something He is indifferent to, or unfamiliar with. He watched his own earthly father die. He watched John the Baptist die. He saw people he loved die. He cried with us. He knew that life was not supposed to be this way, and He probably felt the injustice of death and injury far more than any of us do because He lived in a time when such things did not exist. He hurts, too. But that suffering is part of who He is, and it's part of our life on earth.
So yes, we need faith that God can heal. But we also need faith even if he doesn't. Our faith should be based on who God is, not what He will do for us. And that, I think, is ultimately more important.
If you want to listen to a talk I gave on this subject, here's one called "Do You Believe God Loves You?". I also have a full conference that deals with a lot of these themes called Extreme Makeover: Heart Edition. You can download them right to your computer and listen in!
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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