Joy and April Fools and Finding New Strength

April 1, 2016April 1, 20164 Comments

Two years ago, I glued googly eyes to all of the food in our refrigerator, swapped my kids’ clothes around into different dressers, and stuffed toilet paper into their shoes.

Last year, I swapped out all of their regular shoes for doll shoes and acted like they shrunk over night.

I drew terrified faces on the hard-boiled eggs I packed in their lunch box with the message “Don’t eat me!”

And, I lined up their stuffed animals in the bathroom as if they were all waiting for the toilet.

This year, I’m sending my kids to school with gummy worms hanging out of the apples in their lunches.

And, I’ve turned all the pictures and knick knacks and everything I can get my hands on upside down in the night so they wake up to an upside-down house.

I hate pranks. It’s just not my kind of humor.

But I knew my kids would get a kick out of my April Fool’s fun, especially my one girl. Maybe my other kids would laugh at mom’s silliness, but this girl of mine would cackle.

So, I’ve been lightening up a little and celebrating April Fool’s Day as a mom.

It’s because I love my kids and I love this wacky, quirky, silly-joke-telling, comic-book-reading girl of mine.

Maybe she teaches me a little how to choose joy.

This world can batter us and beat us with depressing news and overwhelming sorrow.

But we have Good News.

God Himself came to earth in human flesh, received the punishment we deserve for our sin, died in our place and rose again, offering us eternal life with Him in heaven.

This Good News should root itself deep into our hearts and make our lives blossom with joy.

It’s an excitement that maybe the world just doesn’t get. Maybe they don’t understand.

Maybe we miss it sometimes ourselves. We talk about Easter or new life in Christ like it’s blah, blah, blah….words in a book, something that happened a long time ago, information for our head never impacting our heart and life.

Unfortunately, we become immune over time to the message’s impact. We forget the joy. We forget the wonder and excitement.

And when we imagine Jesus Himself healing people and teaching them, so often we picture Him as a melancholy Savior, all staid, straight-laced and serious.

Surely, though, he must have smiled a bit as Nicodemus puzzled out the meaning of “born again.”

When Jesus deftly sidestepped the theological traps laid by the Pharisees and Sadducees, I imagine He did it with an internal grin.

As He delivered the revolutionary Sermon on the Mount, Jesus could not have been a boring monotone preacher. He held the crowd’s attention for two solid chapters worth of teaching in Matthew 5-7. There must have been some joy there!

And I hardly think children would climb all over Jesus’ lap if He frowned and scowled and scolded.

Jesus is a joy-filled Savior teaching us to live with the joy of God’s presence.

Not that our life circumstances always make joy easy. Sometimes we feel like our “cup runneth over” and sometimes we feel like our cup is all poured out. What then?

Nehemiah faced a crowd of Israelites who felt too overcome by their sin, too full of repentant sorrow to feel joy. Yet he told them,

“Don’t be dejected and sad, for the joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10).

We have our weak days, our weary days, our times of feeling out of control, confused, worried uncertain, scared, sad, and broken into a million pieces.

Yet, the joy of the Lord is our strength.

It’s not the fake, paste-on-a-smile joy or the pretend-like-the-world-is-perfect joy.

It’s living fully confident that God is sovereign. We are in His hands and His hands can be trusted.

That’s what gives us strength to face each day, that quiet assurance of His love and His might.

So, we rejoice together when we consider the Good News of the Gospel.

We rejoice in God’s presence, in His accessibility to us at all times, in His compassion, in His faithfulness and unfailing love.

We rejoice in the journey of our faith, knowing that wherever He takes us, He is present there with us, even in darkness and long journeys through the valley.

Still we have joy.

“always be full of joy in the Lord. I say it again—rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4, NLT)

Originally published 4/1/2015

When Wonder Never Ceases

March 30, 2016March 30, 20163 Comments

Every spring for the past five years or so, we’ve watched caterpillars climb to the top of a tiny cup, flip themselves upside down, spin a chrysalis, and emerge a week later as butterflies.

This year, though, my daughters suggested doing something different.

After all, we’re old hands at this metamorphosis thing.

How about something new?

What if we ordered a frog kit instead? The company sends us a tadpole. We watch it become a frog and then we release it in a local pond. Perfect!

So, I started researching frog kits and we were all excited until I read the comments. These frogs live for 20-30 years.

I wasn’t sure I wanted such a long-term commitment. My children should be off living adult lives by then and I’d still be home tending to our everlasting frog.

And we couldn’t release this frog to any old outdoor body of water either. The frogs in the kit aren’t native to our area, and that could devastate the local wildlife population.

So, we decided that unless we found a local tadpole who we could raise to become a local frog, we’d stick to caterpillars in a cup.

I’m so glad we did.

Those caterpillars arrived and my son watched their centimeter long bodies creep around the plastic.

He learned how to say ‘caterpillar’ and he said it over and over and over, pointing at them to make sure I’d seen them and knew they were in our house sitting on our fireplace mantle.

He couldn’t wait to share the good news about the caterpillars. He told me. He told his dad. He told his sisters. He told the air. “Caterpillar, caterpillar, caterpillar.”

And then each caterpillar spun into a chrysalis and my son learned a new word and made more grand announcements.

The translation went something like this:

“Caterpillar go up. Sleeping in chrysalis.”

Who knew an unmoving chrysalis could be so entertaining? He’d watch the cup just as happily as if the caterpillars were still crawling around in there.

Then the most exciting day came. We peeked into the bug carrier and saw our first butterfly, completely still, waiting for his wings to dry.

My son now had big news. Big, big news.

“Caterpillar go up. Sleep in chrysalis. Butterfly.”

As more butterflies emerged, they began fluttering around and hopping onto the flowers we’d left for them.

And my son giggled. He just laughed and laughed at the sight.

In all our planning and thinking that maybe the butterfly thing was old-news and maybe we should try something different, I’d forgotten that even though we’d seen the butterflies transform year after year, he hadn’t.

For my son, this was newfound joy. This was childlike wonder and living amazed at the beauty of new life.

In Luke 5, I read about the disciples limping onto shore after a long and unsuccessful night of fishing.

They’d caught nothing.

Yet, Jesus sends them back out. He tells them to set down those same nets into that same water.

Simon Peter protests at first but chooses to obey. They take the boat out. They put down the nets yet again.

And they haul in the catch of all catches.

Their nets broke with the weight of the fish. They yelled for partners to join them out on the water to haul in the load faster.

Luke writes:

…he (Peter) and all those with him were amazed at the catch of fish they took (Luke 5:9 HCSB).

They were amazed. They were flabbergasted and overwhelmed by awe. They were made breathless by the wonder.

I bet they were pulling with all their might, load after load, like the fish just wouldn’t stop coming, and they must have been breathless and laughing in astonishment.

They’d yanked nets of fish into their boats many times before. This was different. This was God-at-work.

Years from then, those disciples would see the lame dance, the blind see, the deaf hear, food multiplied to feed a crowd, and their crucified Savior resurrected.

But right at this moment, they marveled at a boat weighed down with fish.

I pause and ask for this:

Lord, help me be amazed. Like my son standing on a kitchen stool so he can watch butterflies bounce around their home…..like the disciples exclaiming over an inexplicable abundance of fish….let me rejoice in you.

Don’t let me lose the wonder, not the wonder of the cross, the wonder of your creation, the wonder of your grace poured out in every detail of my life.

Help me to see afresh. Help me to consider anew. Fill me with such childlike joy in the Good News that I can’t help but share it over and over and over.

This is the LORD’S doing; It is marvelous in our eyes (Psalm 118:23).

Here’s the Good News

April 1, 2015March 31, 20152 Comments

“Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You with the oil of gladness more than Your companions”
Psalm 45:7

Last year, I glued googly eyes to all of the food in our refrigerator, swapped my kids’ clothes around into different dressers, and stuffed toilet paper into their shoes.

This year, I swapped out all of their regular shoes for doll shoes and acted like they shrunk over night.