Okay, prepare yourself, this is a snapshot of the dessert table, coordinated in shades of turquoise and brown!  This beautiful temptation was the centerpiece of a recent fantastic women’s conference at The Chapel in Baton Rouge.   Never have I seen the color, turquoise, used with such abandon.  Talented women….women with an eye for beauty.

Flying home,  I was reminded how much beauty nourishes the soul.  It’s like something our souls were born to crave.   Something inside me exhales in the presence of beauty.   Life may be crazy.  People can disappoint.  Things happen you couldn’t have imagined could happen.

But then….the sunlight filters through the Carolina pines on the first crocus of the winter than never was.   Or my eyes drink in a meticulously color-coordinated table of treats.   Or my grand-daughter bounces through the door in ten shades of pink.

It’s God who has tuned our souls to come alive to beauty, I believe.  Splendor and beauty are in His presence,  the Psalmist declares.   Jesus covers our ugliness with his beauty broken for us.   The prayer of Psalm 90…

May the beauty of the Lord be upon us…

You know how we do women’s conferences here,  with piles of food, drama,    music, and comfortable surroundings.   Well,  here in Latvia in a Baptist church  (the Baptists have been in Latvia for 150 years), these women sat from early  morning to late afternoon in straight-backed pews,  with a bowl of (really good)  soup for lunch.

I kept expecting the group to dwindle.  Surely they had children’s soccer games to attend,  shopping of some sort to accomplish.   No,  at five o’clock they were all still there, listening.  When someone invited them forward for prayer, they came and stayed another hour.

Part of this picture is explained in new Latvian freedoms.  After 800 years of foreign occupation,  Latvians have their country back,  and their freedom.   They are still grateful people.  They sit in straight-backed pews and listen all day–because now,  they can.

I will never forget one particular moment.  A man with a beautiful tenor voice sang the old Beatle’s song,  ”Hallelujah.”   As if on cue,  the whole audience stood up and started singing along.  ”What’s happening here?”  I asked the woman next to me.

“Oh,”  she replied,  ”this is the song the crowds sang night after night  in 1990 in the public squares, celebrating Latvian freedom.”   Such hope you could feel in their voices.

I asked a friend who teaches and travels overseas this question recently.   “Do you ever get over the humility that when you “minister” in another country,  God gives you back more than you gave?”

She laughed.  ”You see God use you,”  she replied.  ”And you always get reminded that you are not the Big Cupcake.”

Afterwards, she comes to me with her face turned upward, close so I can see, her   eyes searching.  ”Grandmommy,  is the cross still on my forehead?”  she asks.        The pastor has anointed her with oil and made the sign of the cross on her    forehead.   She wonders,  is it still there?

“Oh, Molly, honey, the cross will always be on your forehead,”  I reply, not skipping a beat.   I believe that is true.  She is a marked woman.

She thinks about it a moment.  ”Okay,  so did he get it on there straight?”

I had to laugh.  Yes, he got it on there straight.  Heaven forbid that one should wear the cross on one’s forehead a bit crooked.

This is one of those moments I am storing somewhere deep inside.  I need to be reminded.   The cross sets me apart.  It sets me straight.  I am not my own,  but I belong to Him as surely as if I had a visible sign etched on my forehead.

My personal favorite concerns a subject I’m doing a lot of thinking about these days:  fear.   It stalks the perimeter of even our best moments,  waiting for the chance to intrude.   Fear has deep roots,  clear back to the Garden,  when we knew no fear.

And in our own lives,  fear often finds its origins in childhood experiences.

That’s why I particularly love the scene in this movie where the King is practicing with his speech coach for the upcoming coronation.  He takes his seat on the throne that dates back over a thousand years.  He is noticeably uncomfortable.  How will he ever fill the shoes of those who have come before him?

His speech coach intimidates him into believing that maybe, just maybe, he might have what it takes to be a king.  You don’t have to be afraid of the same things you were afraid of when you were five. How wonderfully true!

To claim the place God has for us in this world is to believe exactly that….that whatever sort of fear may have controlled our life in the past,  now is now. The Christ we know in the now breaks the hold of any fear in the past.

Be strong and courageous!  For the Lord your God is the One who goes ahead of you.  He will not fail or forsake you.

Deuteronomy 31

The very word sounds like the last parched patch of ground at the    end of the world.

Barrenness means no child, no future, no hope.   That’s the          picture.  It’s no easier now than it was in Mose’s time, or Isaiah’s.

When I talk with a woman who longs for children and she can’t have them, or she can’t find a man to have them with…I feel such pain I can hardly sit through an hour’s conversation.   Why is it so crazy hard?.

The reason, I believe,  is that “barrenness”  flies in the face of how we are made as women.   The patter of little feet,  the sticky hug of grandchildren….somehow we know we are made to bring life into being.

Last summer I had lunch with some of my old mother’s old friends,  all women in their 80’s.   One of her friends never had children.   Oh, how I struggled to find something to talk about with her.  How quietly she sat and listened.   At the tender age of 84, this was yet one more experience of feeling left out.

I say all of this for an important reason.  If “barrenness”  is the very picture of emptiness and loss,  then maybe we should all listen up.    God makes his most startling promises about this “worst” of human experiences.   Even this He is able to redeem.   Even this He makes fruitful.

What God says so loudly is that if He can bring promise and hope and fruitfulness to a barren woman…then He can surely redeem the bleakest situation in your life.   Have you thought about that recently?

“Sing, O barren one,  who did not bear;  break forth into singing and cry aloud,  you who have not been in labor!  For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her who is married,”  says the Lord.”

Isaiah 54: 1-6

Maybe you remember how children with cerebral palsy were helped at one time.  Teams of friends took a shift and for eight hours a day,  that child’s limbs were exercised  in patterned movements designed to re-ignite the brain to produce normal motion.

Years before research proved the plasticity of the brain,  this practice was an early expression of the reality that sometimes….the body teaches the brain.

I know this is a wild leap, but God does something like this for our souls in the season of Lent,  so soon upon us.   We are “patterned”  through a time of chosen sacrifice and loss.   But it’s not forever and it’s not the whole story.  Easter morning always comes.

In a sacred sort of rhythm,  our souls learn and re-learn the pattern of God’s movement in our lives.  Sorrow, loss, sacrifice….lead somewhere.   We are taught to actually anticipate redemption.   By this means is hope born.

I don’t know about you,  but I often face the temptation to see some particular event in my life as random, meaningless, or worse…just-what-I-deserve.   I put a period where God puts a “to be continued.”

If I pay attention, though, to the way God patterns my soul,  then I realize, no, this is only a step in the direction of something good,  something that smells like Easter morning.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good…” Psalm 34

Terrible things happen.  Of course, that phrase can be spoken a bit more colorfully.   But the essence is true:  it’s a broken world and I’m a broken woman and there are more ways to screw up one’s life than I have fingers to count.

Mostly, though, what shakes my soul awake is that, in the long run,  it’s not what happens to you that matters most.   It’s where you turn with what happens to you.   And there are a thousand places to turn.

A glass of wine that becomes two.

Friends and friends and more friends,  all with hope of keeping me from being alone.

The next trip to the mall.

A man.  Oh, is there any mirage brighter than the illusion that the love of a man (good as that is)  will take away the pain.

If, though,  by some quiet miracle,  I take the mess of a messy life in a messy world to God,  if I just let myself pray aloud a Psalm,   or pray with a friend,   or in one of a thousand ways I turn to God,   the pain and the problem doesn’t go away.  But something starts to transform in the midst of it.   And I think,  it’s probably me.   I start to see some new door.   A different reality.  A bigger picture.  A truer love.

God is our refuge and strength,  the Psalmist insists.   He is a present (which means “well-proven”)  help in time of trouble.

How has He, over time,  proven Himself true and faithful and good in your life?

As a woman who’s seen a bit of life,  I want to encourage you to realize how short is this span of time that requires intense mothering.  I know it seems like forever on some days.   I know there are people in your life telling you that you’re too smart to stay home with these little feet.   I know there are other doors you can walk through,  and they probably have a title with your name attached.

But if there’s anything I wish another woman had said to me when I had small feet around my house, it’s this:  Paula,  there will be time for everything you need to do in life.   It will all be there waiting on you.

There will be time to run the pregnancy center….and write the book…and get the advanced degree…and fulfill your particular calling.   There will be time for everything God intended for you.

But these little feet…won’t come again.   Not like this.   The feet in this particular picture belong to my granddaughter, Molly.  She comes every Friday morning I”m in town for “grandmommy school.”    When people suggest I could do something more profitable with my time,  I just laugh.

I may not be smarter, but I am wiser and I see now what I couldn’t quite see then.  Little feet grow up and walk right out the front door into a big, wide world.   The days I have with these little feet–and that you have with the little feet in your home–are numbered.

I am just old enough to realize how fragile family actually is.  What looks rock solid…is really rather tenuous.  Too much joy and tragedy is packed into too small a container.   A thousand needs get piled on top of each other–like pool balls all converging on the same spot in the table.

Or as I have come to say recently,  ”nothing human is enough to hold anything human together.”   Not over the long haul, anyway.  Which brings me to the great joy of Jesus coming.  Of Christmas and angels singing.   Of little girls in angel’s wings floating through their grandmother’s house.   There is a God in whom rests all our deepest longings for family.    And occasionally,  we get some beautiful glimpses of that through the cracks in this rather vase we call “family.”

What fun...speaking at an event with women who sing what they write!

You know how words can pierce you, sometimes? How they rearrange the furniture of your soul–or pour oil on a wound you didn’t even know you had?

If you know what I mean, then, you’ll be able to appreciate the richness of Christa Well’s lyrics. (She wrote the words to “Held” that Natalie Grant sang and won a Grammy). Christa and Nicole Witt (pictured here)  gave a fantastic concert for a women’s evening where I recently spoke.

So these days, I”m riding through streets strown with red maple leaves listening to Christa’s lyrics in a song called “Weightless.” It’s about forgiveness. I could use a little more forgiveness.

And then I face the yesterdays that disappointed.
Misunderstood by a cruel world. And I’m angry.
You might suppose that the years would close the

curtains on the scene from such a time.

But this was mine to harbor.

Well, I’ve carried this a long time. In a well-hidden bundle on my back.
But I’ve realized that forgiveness is weightless.
So I’ll leave my burden on the tracks.

Great, cleansing, healing words. And while you’re at it, check our Nicole’s song, “I Want to Know That Man.”

What “words” are you listening to these days?

Such fun...speaking with women who sing and write lyrics!