Your vocation is where your greatest bliss encounters the world’s deepest need. – Frederick Buechner

So last September, after my mom’s heart issues were stabilizing and we found out that she for-sure did NOT have ovarian cancer (thank God), I decided to apply to the sub pool and went ahead and checked “permanent position

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
-Pablo Picasso

I am beginning to understand that faith is not the way around pain, it is the way through pain. Faith doesn’t get rid of the opposition, it invites it over for dinner. Faith doesn’t give you the winning point at the last second, it ties the game and sends you into overtime. Faith doesn’t give you the solution, it forces you to find it.
- Mike Yaconelli

We’re attempting to convince the world how good Jesus is by how great we are. This is precisely how Madison Avenue sells toothpaste, automobiles, and underwear. People don’t need any more images of success, wealth, and power; they’re surrounded already. What they need are their sins forgiven. What they need is healing. What they need is love.
- Mike Yaconelli

These quotes really resonate with me. I have spent my life trying to be Superwoman and then Supermom and sometimes SuperChristian.
Why? Because I bought into the lie that if I’m a Christian, things should always be going right. I’m not sure where we got that idea. Certainly not from the book of Peter. Maybe from Jesus’ words in Matthew 11 “my yoke is easy and my burden is light”. This “selling” of Christ as a way that all things will be perfect is one area where the American church has gone terribly wrong.
I think this has also been a big factor in processing my pain issues. If I’m a Christian, I shouldn’t be in pain, right? This has been said to me as directly as “Your pain is a result of some unrepented sin in your life” and as subtly as “If you had faith, you would be healed.” These statements roll around in my head, wearing their familiar grooves along my long-traveled pathways of thought.
I believe God can do miracles – I believe he can heal.
He has not healed my physical body.
How can both statements be true? I don’t know – I may spend a lifetime “finding the solution” to this dilemma. Jesus has healed and changed many painful things in my life. I have seen and felt Him at work in me, softening my rough edges, gently showing me things I need to change, and redeeming my heart – making me believe – slowly, slowly – that He loves me so fully. The more I feel the love, the more entranced I am by Him. I have come to believe that I may actually be lovable after all. Perhaps I could never come to know this if I were able to be “Superwoman” and sell Jesus like he were toothpaste. Only by being broken could I know how powerful the Healer is.
The truth is, life is a struggle. My life may be messier than most, but honestly, I doubt it. I have pain, frustrations, difficult babies, and financial realities. Following Jesus doesn’t make all these things go away. Instead, I am learning how to forge forward, slogging through the muck of my life, holding firmly to Grace. This is Real. This is where I meet Jesus and where I find love and purpose and hope in the journey.

The grace of God is dangerous. It’s lavish, excessive, outrageous, and scandalous. God’s grace is ridiculously inclusive. Apparently God doesn’t care who He loves. He is not very careful about the people He calls His friends or the people He calls His church.
- Mike Yaconelli

The Writer by Richard Wilbur
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top.
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.