If by doing some work which the undiscerning consider “not spiritual work” I can best help others, and I inwardly rebel, thinking it is the spiritual for which I crave, when in truth it is the interesting and exciting, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
I am returning to posting If questions from Amy Carmichael’s powerful little book by the same name. I invite to you follow along this journey. I pray you will be drawn to Calvary love.
I am giving away a copy of this book the next two Sundays along with a little olive wood cross donated by my friend Cindee Re. To enter please share one of the daily If posts on social media (Facebook, Twitter or Instagram) with the tags #CalvaryLove and #If. Add a comment here on the blog post you share. Martha Hutcheson and Gina Weeks are the winners from week one and two.
For the first time in my life I might know a teeny bit how it felt.
My parents are a world away. A cryptic email came this morning mentioning “great difficulty.” There is no way to really get to them. I could call and call and call their phones, but they would not answer. I do not know where they are sleeping tonight. If I needed them I could only send a message into cyberspace and hope they would read it. If they wanted to come home today they could not.
I remember years of my life when my parents could not get to me. I was wounded and broken. I withdrew from a prestigious woman’s college where I had an elite scholarship, because I couldn’t move anymore. An avalanche of life had begun crushing anything and everything I believed about God. This began with huge life changes like two brothers adopted from Romania, old pain from my parents younger selves being revealed, an ugly church split, my older sister who slept on my floor every night getting married and moving away, isolation from all the people I had known most of my life and my parents and siblings moving to Ohio. Trauma was the tipping point in a seventeen year old girl living on her own and completely alone. I was a sophomore in college, working two jobs, a Young Republican, active in Right to Life, active in the college’s Baptist Student Union. It’s true one storm can blow everything away. The younger you are and the more sheltered and naïve the worse the damage will be. I was decimated.
The story of the almost year between when my world blew up and when I called my parents to tell them is too graphic for this heart to retell. I know on their side they were thinking maybe I had simply changed my mind about schools. I did transfer to a larger state school the next semester. They were dealing with new jobs, special needs kids and making a new life. I had managed to keep working and paying my rent in my basement apartment. There wasn’t really anyone left in my life to be accountable to so my slipping away was easy to hide. When we did talk I know I told them what they wanted to hear to make it easier on them. Still, they would call some nights, and I did not answer. They did not know where I was sleeping or if I was really okay.
When I finally told them, because my sexual assault counselor told me I had to, I know it was horrific for them. Can you imagine the guilt a parent has when circumstances spiral to one of your worst fears being realized for your daughter? My dad got in his car and drove all the way to our home town. We met at an Econo Lodge. We got down on our knees, and he prayed with me. Then he asked me to come home. There was nothing in my heart that even moved toward making that kind of decision. Ohio wasn’t home. I wasn’t Monica anymore. I told him I couldn’t. I hugged him and said “goodbye” and “I love you” and went back to my dorm room to cry myself to sleep. I was a sophomore in college. I was a binge drunk. I was a whore. I was a blasphemer. I was eating with the pigs. I changed my major to sociology. I became a feminist, a humanist and a liberal. Still, when I was alone at night and could not numb myself any longer I could hear my Father calling my name.
Today I know what it must have felt like.
I just want them to come home.
I want to say “I’m sorry” for the million ways I hurt them. I want to forgive them for the million ways they thought they were doing what was best that hurt me. I want to show them grace. I want to honor them for their faith and courage and service. I am like them in many ways. I can hear my girls on the phone someday saying I was too involved in other’s lives, praying too much for people we don’t really even know, giving to people when we don’t have “enough” ourselves. I’ve faulted my parents for these things before.
I am so much like my father. I see the world through a theological lens I will never be able to leave behind. I hope it’s not theology. I think it is Jesus. I will always be digging and searching and maybe too serious. I will always need to retreat from social situations and need time to be alone to be okay. He is a lover of Grace and truth seeker. He is a writer, an early riser to seek the face of God and carries the lives of hundreds of families in his heart.
I am like my mother. I will learn of a friend of a friend who is hurting, and I will pray and ask you to pray. It is annoying to most and endearing only to those who know how sincere we are. I am sometimes an optimist like her. I used to call her house a glass castle. I understand over these last years it is a coping mechanism for making it through really hard things and also a ruthless trust in a good God no matter what. She is a journal keeper, early riser to seek the face of God and carries the lives of hundreds of families in her heart.
I want them to come home.
I want them to know after thirty-seven years an email from a far away land healed more in me than all the therapy I’ve ever been through.
I love you dad and mom.
Come home.
Father, bring them home.
(This is a repost from June 11, 2013. My dad is heading for China today. Won’t you please join me in praying for his safety and the Kingdom work he is doing there. Thank you.)
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give [to others and to charity]. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditures on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.–C.S. Lewis
It’s a recurring theme over the past few years and telling the specific stories never gets any easier. No matter how many times I try I can’t seem to write about them eloquently. I want to tell them again and again, because they all point to God and His faithfulness. The acts of “charity” to our family have given us the very manna to stay alive and move forward each day. I want to show my gratitude without using the same overused words. I want to give God ALL the glory, and in my weakness I don’t really know how to shine all this on Him.
This is one of my favorite stories of generosity and provision.
The week before we headed to Maryland for my first brain surgery and fusion we had scraped together enough for a fifth of the down payment my surgeon was asking for through my parents and several other gifts. We had several hundred dollars in our checking account for gas and food while we were gone. I had this crazy peace God was going to come through for us. The week wore on, and I began to pack my bags and get a little nervous. I knew our support system was worn thin from the past couple of years and a woman who always had a headache and could barely walk but looked fine for all intents and purposes was not the most engaging fundraising idea especially compared to Danica’s adorable face.
I was in bed in my oh so dark bedroom curled up in a ball with the weight of the world crushing my brain, head and neck. I wondered if I would even make it to my surgery date. This sounds dramatic unless you really understand how dangerous my situation was. My dad opened the door at the top of the stairs and threw down a letter. It was from a girl who lives in Virginia who I used to work with. I had only met her twice because I telecommuted states away. Over the past months she had begun to faithfully pray for me and encourage me through facebook and email. I opened the card and a check folded in half fell out. I read the note first. She wrote how she couldn’t sleep because she was praying about a way her family could help us. She said in the night she heard God tell her clearly to “DRAIN IT.” She obeyed. I looked at the check. It was a strange number. I found out later it was every penny this family had in their checking account. It was just shy of what we needed to pay the entire deposit. I was shaking. How in the world could someone give like this? This family was not wealthy. This friend works from home with two small children just to make ends meet. I immediately knew God was completely behind my surgery. He had funded it through the most unlikely of places.
It took me awhile before I could finally find a few words to call this friend. I was even more blessed by her back story to the giving. She shared her own fear of not having enough and God’s work in her life to put her treasure where she says her heart belongs. She talked about how she had telephoned her husband the morning after her prayer, and he too had to commit this huge gift to the Lord before the check she had already written could go in the mail. (Ladies, can you imagine calling your husband and telling him God told you in the night to empty your checking account?) She told me how over the last two quarters they had paid all their credit card debt off by careful spending and holding back some tithe. When the card balances were at zero they didn’t up their tithe. She later realized what they sent us was almost exactly the amount they had kept back. God already had this provision planned long before either of us knew we would be part of it.
God says in 2 Corinthians 9:6-7, “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”
I’ve had nine surgeries since that extravagant gift in 2011. God has always provided just enough through the kindness and generosity of many who have come along side us in this journey.
I will never look at tithing the same way again.
This is Kingdom giving.
This is Kingdom living.
Soli Deo gloria.
Photography by Cindee Snider Re. Used with permission.
If I ask to be delivered from trial rather than for deliverance out of it, to the praise of His glory; if I forget that the way of the Cross leads to the Cross and not to a bank of flowers; if I regulate my life on these lines, or even unconsciously my thinking, so that I am surprised when the way is rough, and think it strange, though the word is, ‘THINK IT NOT STRANGE . . . COUNT IT ALL JOY,’ then I know nothing of Calvary love.
I am returning to posting If questions from Amy Carmichael’s powerful little book by the same name. I invite to you follow along this journey. I pray you will be drawn to Calvary love.
I am giving away a copy of this book the next two Sundays along with a little olive wood cross donated by my friend Cindee Re. To enter please share one of the daily If posts on social media (Facebook, Twitter or Instagram) with the tags #CalvaryLove and #If. Add a comment here on the blog post you share. Martha Hutcheson and Gina Weeks are the winners from week one and two.
This blog post was originally published on August 18th, 2013. Friday was Janet’s birthday. I can barely remember what the landscape of my life looked like before knowing and being known by her. I celebrate her every day.
I have seen them in cities, and in my own neighborhood,
nor could I touch them with the magic that they crave
to be unbroken. Then, I myself, lonely,
said hello to good fortune. Someone
came along and lingered and little by little
became everything that makes the difference.
Oh, I wish such good luck
to everyone. How beautiful it is to be unbroken. –Mary Oliver
It’s a quiet morning here because Dan has taken the girls to church. I woke up locked in my room. My neck doesn’t move at first when my eyes open. I remember I had surgery, and I need to heal today. This is what Sunday looks like for me. Healing is my one job. I call out to have Dan bring me coffee. Normally I would go out to my nest chair and drink it while everyone else comes to life around me. Twix will crawl into my lap for snuggles and then Danica takes a turn. Today I can’t seem to move. I call Dan again to please come and get out certain pills for me to take that may raise my cortisol level, help with pain and also loosen up my poor neck. He seems annoyed. He doesn’t ask me how I slept, although I ask him, and he doesn’t ask me if I need something to eat or nibble on before I swallow six super strong pills on an empty stomach. It doesn’t even cross his mind. I don’t ask. Since I’ve been home it is much like other surgeries. I am put into my room with the door shut. I think my family looks at it as doing me a favor. The kids jiggle the bed which hurts my neck. They are loud and silly. Mostly because of the pain and meds too much input sets me off. Still, I have missed them incredibly and being alone hurts in the worst way. As they all leave for church the attitude is negative. I asked Delaney to read me Psalm 37 out loud. It’s one of my favorites. All I can feel is this rope of bad energy tightening around me. The house is a mess. As soon as they leave I cry for ten minutes straight. You know the kind of sobbing where you are just gross snot pillow soaked blotchy face and chest heaving crying? I am given a week in Maryland and that is it. I have to be better. Tomorrow Dan will go to work. I will be here alone with my girls. Delaney starts school Tuesday. Wednesday Danica has kindergarten preview and Thursday they will both be back full time. In between here I am supposed to just be mom. I’m supposed to lift up this neck and do all the things people say are stupid and careless to do following this surgery but there is no one else to do them. I am not supposed to move my neck in flexion or extension for a month. In other words, hold very still. Aside from the surgery where I went away to heal at the lake house this is how it has been. My family can barely scrape together enough time off and energy to do the mom is in the hospital thing. When my ride dropped me off yesterday my dad was waiting with his keys to leave. I asked him to please wait until Dan got home. I haven’t heard from my mom at all. I just can’t be alone yet. Dan does not function without me. He is angry at this situation. I get this. It’s maddening. But I wonder if anyone is thinking about what it must feel like to be in this body and mind and soul. Do you know what incredible shame I feel to be causing all this over and over again? He cannot come and sit with me and talk to me about how I am feeling. Even in the hospital he sat there the entire day after my surgery saying nothing. I felt so insanely alone and guilty and wanting to just let him off the hook for all of this. I always want to say to him, “You can run. It’s okay. I would totally understand.” This surgery is huge. It’s a big deal. For me, even more than the physical, it’s a mental and spiritual choice I made to try to be better. I did this only four weeks after a major abdominal and pelvic surgery. I made this choice because my husband has been given an opportunity to perhaps take on a larger role at work, my girls start school this week and last year I was completely bedridden when school began with another surgery and then another and it hurt Danica’s adjustment greatly, and my mom is completely unavailable in every way this time of year. Her family is the 600+ students entering those doors Tuesday and my dad is preparing to go to China and India for a month and good grief, how much longer can things keep being about me?
Why after all these years of blogging am I saying these things now?
Because something changed me.
Ninety nine out of one hundred of you may feel like this comes across as ungrateful, but if you know me you understand my spirit is only full to overflowing for every ounce of love and support from every corner of the universe, especially the sacrifices my parents have made. Still, what was given to me this time was something I have needed since I was a child. There has been a deep longing for a mother to care for me. Someone to just focus on me and build relationship. I have needed it so badly it is actually part of my sickness. I know this.
There she was.
An angel.
A woman I didn’t know personally until two weeks ago made this crazy offer. I didn’t really even think she was serious at first. She offered to come after my surgery and get me since Dan needed so desperately to work. Everyone who heard of this felt it was very strange. She bravely drove with her own physical limitations from Ohio to Maryland. She fed me. She took me on a hilarious trip around the beltway for prescriptions. She rubbed my neck and shoulders. I don’t think anyone had offered to touch me like that in months. Did you know you need human touch to be okay? I have been like an orphan tied to a crib. Failure to thrive. I need to be touched. She listened to me. I listened to her. Her daughter is sick with the same conditions I have. I think perhaps the windows into one another’s roles in all this was one of the greatest gifts. We talked for hours and hours and only scratched the surface of what our souls could share. I would fall asleep mid sentence and then wake and begin where we left off. She would quietly slip off as if knowing I needed space and then appear just when I was needing her. Gift. Gift. Gift. When everything else falls away WE are gift.
Before Danica’s major surgery in Cincinnati I wrote this post with a link to a song by Christa Wells that is truly my life song. I am amazed when one of the “thousand things” shows up. Christa’s new CD “Feed Your Soul” was released on Tuesday, the day after my surgery. I downloaded all the songs first thing that morning, and they played over and over in my alone time in the hospital. The song Come Close Now describes what Janet did for me.
God, every single step of this arduous journey You have given me Dayenu. It would have been enough. This present of knowing and being known makes me healed in places I thought would be broken until heaven. Even in my sadness today I understand I can only meet people where they are in their own journey. All the rest You will care for perfectly as I burn. Thank you for giving me someone to walk into my fire and just feel the heat of all this without shrinking back.
Do you know someone who is sitting in the burn today? Go close. Sing. Hold them. Be there in the fire. It will make all the difference.
If when an answer I did not expect comes to a prayer which I truly believed I meant, I shrink back from it; if the burden my Lord asks me to bear be not the burden of my heart’s choice, and I fret inwardly and do not welcome His will, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
I am returning to posting If questions from Amy Carmichael’s powerful little book by the same name. I invite to you follow along this journey. I pray you will be drawn to Calvary love.
I am giving away a copy of this book the next three Sundays and a little olive wood cross donated by my friend Cindee Re. To enter please share one of the daily If posts on social media (Facebook, Twitter or Instagram) with the tags #CalvaryLove and #If. Add a comment here on the blog post you share. The second winner will be chosen randomly from those participating after midnight tonight.
If the praise of man elates me and his blame depresses me; if I cannot rest under misunderstanding without defending myself; if I love to be loved more than to love, to be served more than to serve, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
I am returning to posting If questions from Amy Carmichael’s powerful little book by the same name. I invite to you follow along this journey. I pray you will be drawn to Calvary love.
I am giving away a copy of this book the next three Sundays and a little olive wood cross donated by my friend Cindee Re. To enter please share one of the daily If posts on social media (Facebook, Twitter or Instagram) with the tags #CalvaryLove and #If. Add a comment here on the blog post you share.
It was our first night. After an exhausting day of travel we thought we would check in to the hotel and crash. Instead, the first whiffs of fresh mountain air gave us a second wind. We felt the enormity of the gift we were given in this time away and didn’t want to waste a minute. I changed out of my airport clothes and slipped my freshly pedicured feet into open toed shoes. We floated down the grand lobby staircase hand in hand and settled in to a cozy spot on the expansive patio overlooking the city lights. I’d been there before. I loved sharing the nightly tequila ritual and toast and special menu secrets at Salud. We sipped drinks made with cucumbers and fresh agave juice. Something shifted as we bared our souls in several hours of conversation under the Tucson stars. We hadn’t wanted to admit the way we were holding insecurities and hurt in tight fists. Now we wondered out loud. How long had we moved through the motions of marriage? Recognizing one another’s unique fragility we cared too much to make even the slightest movement. We knew even one bump had the possibility of upsetting our delicate balance of survival. With open hands and hearts we purged the pain and sadness and cast it all in the fire on our way up to our room. It was a fresh start like only Jesus makes.
The next morning we woke tangled up in silky white sheets and duvet after the longest exhale of love. It had been years since we had the time and place, desire and energy to slow our intimacy to the metronome of breath. For the first time in almost eight years I let him fully see me, and he wanted to look. He traced every single scar with his fingers, and we took turns telling the story together. Not my story. Our story. I never doubted we were one heart, but something about all those wounds often made one flesh a difficult proposition. With every surgery and every long recovery I felt a gulf widening between who I once was to him and who I had become. Suddenly I could see in his eyes and hear in his voice a truth I’d not known before. He loved me even more because of the suffering not in spite of it.
Today marks a week since we returned home. When I stepped out of the plane onto the jet way here the temperature was below zero. I began to cry. I rounded the corner in the airport to see my Danica running towards me bundled from head to toe. I was wearing ballet flats with bare tan feet exposed and no coat. I hugged my sweet girl and cried even harder. Coming back here, a place I know causes very specific pain and many of my symptoms, was heart breaking. Dan looked over and winced as he saw the Monica Kaye he had reclaimed already slipping away.
It was a week ago I exiled myself with my Savior for His forty days in the wilderness. I’m daily sitting with Christ as best I know how. I’m listening to His heart as He prepares for the immense sacrifice He’s been asked to make on the cross. I am brought face to face with a God who knows every ugly sin I’ve committed or will commit. He sees my unspeakable mistakes and feels the bitter shame that wounded Him. His humanness, his hunger, his temptation, his pleas for release from this before the world began plan break me again and again. He is God made man. He sympathizes in every way without sin. My redemption could only come through a sacrifice this understandable and this unexplicable.
I’m walking closer to the days when I will see Him crucified. The wilderness, however uncomfortable, is just a preparation for the week when I will have supper with Him, tell Him I love Him, turn around and deny Him and then watch Him take the lashes, carry the cross and be wounded for my transgressions. At the last hour He will be completely forsaken by His Father and suffer hell for me.
When I’m face to face with Him I know for sure the scars I bear both inside and out are completely redeemed. His dying love stops my breath. His resurrection starts it again.
Since Tucson I pray for fresh starts and new beginnings. I long to live in a place that gives me a more whole body and healed spirit for my husband and daughters. I ache to take all this pain and turn it into a beautiful ministry for others walking this similar road.
When I’m face to face with Him. When I remember His love for me. I trust Him completely.
Every cut of my flesh has healed into a bumpy red reminder of God’s mercy to me. Every sharp memory of sadness and sin has kept me on my knees even though I’m completely free.
Dan and I hiked several miles up a mountain into the Sonoran desert. On our way we stopped to build Ebenezers. Each of us chose seven large stones to symbolize our seven years of tribulation. They stand as altars to God’s faithfulness. We were living something impossible. We were away together on vacation. I was hiking. I was breathing. I was well. We lifted prayers of gratitude as we moved on and my Dan began singing softly as he led the way.
Come, thou Fount of every blessing,
tune my heart to sing thy grace;
streams of mercy, never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
mount of thy redeeming love.
Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
hither by thy help I’m come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wandering from the fold of God;
he, to rescue me from danger,
interposed his precious blood.
O to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.
My song today.
Heal the wound but leave the scar.
A reminder of how merciful You are.
I am broken, torn apart.
Take the pieces of this heart and
Heal the wound but leave the scar.
I’ll build an altar of the rubble that You found me in and every stone will sing of what You can redeem.
Don’t let me forget everything You’ve done for me. Don’t let me forget the beauty in the suffering.
Heal the wound but leave the scar.
(This beautiful song by Point of Grace has been on my “healing” playlist for years.)
If I cannot catch “the sounds of noise of rain”* long before the rain falls, and, going to some hilltop of the spirit, as near to my God as I can, have not faith to wait there with my face between my knees, though six or sixty times I am told “there is nothing,” till at last “there arises a little cloud out of the sea,” then I know nothing of Calvary love. *I Kings 18:41
After the gift of time away with my Dan in Tucson I am returning to posting If questions from Amy Carmichael’s powerful little book by the same name. I invite to you follow along this journey. I pray you will be drawn to Calvary love.
I am giving away a copy of this book the next three Sundays and a little olive wood cross donated by my friend Cindee Re. To enter please share one of the daily If posts on social media (Facebook, Twitter or Instagram) with the tags #CalvaryLove and #If. Add a comment here on the blog post you share.
My heart is nearly bursting. There is much to write as I sift through the free flowing scrawls in my pen to paper journal during this precious time away. I want to share a photo of Dan and I on Valentine’s evening before our dinner date. It speaks volumes about the time we have been gifted here and the change in our bodies, minds, hearts and spirits.
When I travel I always buy a new book of poetry to bring along. The Singing Bowl by Malcolm Guite was my choice before this trip. It is rich with word-art. I have read through each poem several times now, and have begun to make notes on certain passages that particularly speak to me. The following poem titled “A Renewal of Vows” explains what is happening in Dan and I’s marriage through this precious time away.
So, open up the treasure-casket, love,
the treasure is still there, the hidden things
that love contains. Old words, like wedding rings,
surround their mysteries, they live and move
as breath renews them, burnished as the gold
around our fingers, glowing as we make
the vows that make us new again: I take,
protect, and comfort, cherish, have and hold.
The same old words, that cannot stay the same,
for they have grown, as we have, more than old.
They change and deepen like all things that live,
they compass more and still have more to give:
All that I have is yours, all that I am
I give again, with all I will become.
