Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers... Blogs...

I have a new pet peeve.  It may offend some of you, but I just have to get this out there.  When scanning blogs, I get a little irritated at all the baby blogs.  Sure, they're cute.  I am absolutely certain that one day, should the Lord bless me with a child, I will be equally as over the moon as these parents obviously are, but... it's all the same!  I scrolled through about ten of these blogs just now, and each of them touted some new and glorious event in their baby's life, like "Willoughby {they almost always have some weird, unique name} is 3 days and four hours old!" or "Seven just coughed up her first solid piece of mucus!" or "Pooch is a genius!  He just ate a beetle because of its nutritional properties!"

Please.  A photo diary might be cool, or even a unique Look Who's Talking perspective blog, but relating the daily infant minutae is a little much.  Does anyone besides Mommy, Daddy, Grandparents, and maybe Pediatrician really care if Sandollar's bowel movements have been irregular?  Doubt it.

So baby blogs kind of annoy me.  But I love babies.  In fact, maybe a tiny reason why baby blogs are annoying me so much recently is because as of late, I have been feeling out of the baby-loop.  Don't get me wrong-- I can't hear my biological clock ticking (well, not too loudly anyway), but I feel like I have been bombarded with baby imagery and information and news, and it makes me feel a little left out (not an entirely new feeling for me).
 
My married friends aren't quite at the baby stage yet, but the fact is they could be; when they are, I'll be two steps "behind," and life will be forever changed for them and for us.  And then they get to have a baby, this little piece of themselves to love and have love them in return-- plus they're really cute.

I suppose the problem isn't really that I want a baby.  Not now anyway; I'm YEARS from that (let's just focus on one thing at a time.  I think I'll need to find a guy first; that's usually how that works).  I think the real problem is what the real problem always is: discontentment, distrust.  If I were truly content here and now where God has placed me, babies would be enjoyed, but not coveted.  If I really trusted God's plan for me, I would think of babies with hope and anticipation, not anxiety and annoyance.  Guess I'll keep working on that old problem. 

But can I just say, even if I flipped a switch and suddenly found myself completely content and trusting.... I'd still be annoyed at baby blogs.

My First Ebenezer...

 

There are moments in my life which I remember with perfect clarity-- the day Kristin and I signed our first contracts for our first teaching jobs, the snowy afternoon I opened my acceptance letter from Moody, and that snowless, dreary February day when I reached the first real turning point in my faith...

February 12, 2000 was an unseasonably tepidly cool Saturday.  I was sitting on the couch, and the phone rang.  I looked behind me out the window.  The grass was brown, dead, with the snow long-melted but the spring still far off.  I didn't know what the phone call was about, but really, I did.  Dad came in and told me that Tim had died, and I cried.  I went upstairs and turned on my late-90s Christian music and leaned against my tall dresser and cried.  I opened up my journal-- a Veggie Tales journal that still bore the traces of girlhood-- and I wrote what had happened, my mascara-tinted tears staining the page.  As I think back ten years, I remember that girl, sitting on her bed, crying.  Her heart was broken.  She didn't understand.  Her life had changed and she didn't think the pain would ever, ever subside.  She certainly couldn't see ten years into the future, and how this event would forever change her life.

Let me back up even farther.  It's May, 1998.  I was about to graduate eighth grade.  I was to leave the friends with whom I'd spent nine years of my life and enroll in a Christian high school, full of beautiful tall, blond, Dutch models... and I didn't know a soul.  As if that weren't frightening enough for a fourteen year-old, my parents had dropped a bomb on me.  We were leaving the church in which I'd grown up.  This was the church where I'd met my closest  friends, been involved in AWANA for years, and created countless memories.  We were leaving and I didn't understand.  My whole world capsized, and to a fourteen year-old with deep emotions and a lack of control over them, this was unbearable.  

We started church hunting one Sunday, beginning at Grace Fellowship Church... and we never left.  Immediately I was welcomed into the youth group.  The girls liked my homemade "glow worm" dress.  They took me on a walk during the church picnic with the intent to witness to me, because they didn't know if I was a believer.  They showed me the love of Christ.  Their leader was Tim Yetter, a young Moody grad with a wacky sense of humor and a deep love for the Lord.  This youth group and its leader began something in me that would change the rest of my life: I think it was sometime after joining this youth group that my Pharisaical faith became real.  What I'd always heard about and known in my head finally entered my heart and I believed it and wanted to live it the way Tim lived it.  I'd never seen someone so young be so on fire for the Lord.  He inspired the whole youth group to be "fully-devoted followers of Christ."  The lessons I learned as I entered high school were the building blocks of my true faith, and little did I expect that I would soon need to rest on those blocks when the storm came.

The youth group wasn't perfect.  We probably idolized Tim too much.  But even so, he always pointed back to Christ, quoting John the Baptist: "He must become greater; I must become less."  But one day, on a youth retreat in Minnesota (the picture at the top of the post-- he is seated front left), Tim mentioned some fleeting health concerns.  We made fun of him, put Ambersol in his Billy Bob teeth, and forgot about it on the eight-hour ride home in an un-airconditioned bus with vinyl seats.  But just a couple months later, he was yellow.  Jaundiced, because he had a rare disease of the liver.  And as if that weren't enough, by winter we knew he had liver cancer.  He was 27.  He was our youth pastor.  This wasn't supposed to happen to him.  His ministry was thriving.  Things like this didn't happen to people like him, right?  His name went on the transplant list.  I recall one night around Christmas, youth group had been canceled because Tim was on his way to potentially get a transplant.  We gathered anyway in the sanctuary that was lit with Christmas candles and prayed.  We sang.  We made the choice to trust God rather than blame him.  

The transplant didn't pan out.  So we had an all-nighter.  Tim spoke to us and fed us the words we'd heard him say before: "He must become greater, I must become less."  He was weak, yellow, dying.  But there were words of praise, not words of pain coming from his mouth.  Two weeks later was the day Tim went to be with Jesus.

And that's where you meet that girl on the bed.  I say "that girl," because I am no longer "that girl."  Because that day, I knew I had a decision to make: I could choose to not trust this God who had allowed something so terrible to happen to such a wonderful leader and teacher... or I could choose to trust that this God was sovereign and good, with a purpose so beyond me that I could not understand.  And here I raise my ebenezer: I trusted him.  I trusted him, and that test of my faith grew me more than I could have ever imagined, because I (and the rest of the youth group) was forced to depend on the Lord and trust and hope that good would come from this painful situation.  

It wasn't easy.  I remember going to bed each night and praying that God would make me not miss him as much the next day, that it would hurt a little less.  I thought I'd never heal.  But I did.  Years passed, and the series of events that have played out in my life are sovereignly connected to Tim's impact on my life.  I attended Moody Bible Institute, which forever changed my life and my relationship with the Lord, and it led me to move to Florida where I now have my own ministry to young girls whom I teach to be fully-devoted followers of Christ.

I can't let February 12 go by without remembering Tim Yetter, being thankful for his spiritual legacy, and most importantly, giving credit to God for orchestrating events in a way that changed my life more than I could have ever imagined (and I know I'm not the only one).  The point of this blog is a memorial and a reminder to me from whence I came, and an encouragement to myself to continue trusting God for my future.

I pray that if you read this, you think about your spiritual legacy.  I pray that if you read this, you remember the fact that God is sovereign and good.  And I pray that you strive to be a "fully-devoted follower of Christ."

And God, the next time you see him, please tell Tim "thanks" for me, and let him know that I'm keeping the main thing the main thing. :)

Restless Life Syndrome...

You've heard of restless leg syndrome? Well I have restless life syndrome. My mind plays mental ping pong: What do I want to do with my life? Do I want to teach forever? Should I go back to school? Should I get into debt? Should I move? Should I uproot my life? Should I go back home? Should I go overseas? Should I go into full-time ministry? These are the questions that bounce between my ears, thus causing restless life syndrome. At a time in life when most people are settling into their careers and building upon the foundation their schooling and experience have laid, I am experiencing a quarter-life identity crisis and feel less sure and more unclear than I've ever felt. Especially me, the over-planning, under-risking one who knew what she wanted to do with her life by the time she was seven. And now, at twenty-five, I have restless life syndrome. Is there a pill for that?

What I know to be true, however, is that restless is just a nice word for discontent. I've come a long way in the area of contentment when it comes to singleness, but haven't yet come to grips with my discontent regarding, well, what I should do with my life.

I listened to a CJ Mahaney sermon last week that reminded me of some important truths. I don't need to know the next step. I don't need to know what God's doing. He's always at work. When have things ever NOT worked out for His glory and my good? It should simply be enough that God has saved my sinful soul from hell. I shouldn't have to ask why, or what now? Clarity is not something God promises. He does promise to provide for me and to work things together for good for those who love Him. But He hasn't promised clarity. Mother Theresa said, "I have never had clarity, but I have always had trust." I would like that to be said of me.

My job is simply to trust and obey. Glorify God where I am, follow His leading, and trust that when it's time to take that next step, God will direct my steps. So now, my struggle is against restlessness (aka, discontentment). This is a ridiculously difficult and ambiguous struggle, but struggle I will until I learn to just trust.