Announcement: Introducing the Cup of Sunday Quiet

Hello, beautiful friends. 

I’ve been working behind the scenes to prepare something lovely for you, and today is finally the day to share it. 

It’s called the Cup of Sunday Quiet.

You know how every morning, I spend time at my desk in the quiet?

I bring my tumbler full of coffee over to this favorite corner of my home, and I spend time each morning sitting here. Diva always joins me, prowling around at my feet and eventually jumping up onto the desk, sitting quietly for what can lead to long stretches of time without moving. (How in the world does she do that?)

And during that time, I read the Scriptures. I stare out the window at my neighborhood coming to life. I think. I read. I write.

And I pray. 

This is sacred time for me. Out of that time comes the week-daily posts I write here in this space for you. It is time saturated with conversations with Jesus about my heart, my life, my life’s work and calling, my questions and wonderings and praise. It is time Jesus talks to me about himself, about me, about the world he set me into, about you.

It is such sacred time.

And do you know what? 

I want to create space for you to have such sacred time, too. 

I know not everyone has the luxury of spending extended time in the quiet each day. I know that life can get so harried and busy that even coming here for the “oasis from the noise” that’s offered Monday through Friday is just not on the radar for all. 

But what if, once a week, you received a gentle invitation into that quiet? 

What if, once a week, you had a chance to sit down and share that cup of morning quiet with me? 

That’s what the Cup of Sunday Quiet is for.

Consider it a once-a-week invitation from me into reflective space — a space to connect with your heart and with God (and a little bit with me). 

The Cup of Sunday Quiet is delivered to your inbox every Sunday. It includes:

• A bit of personal musings from me, inspired by the time in the quiet I’ve shared with God that week. Between you and me, I like to think of this part as though we’re sharing a quiet conversation over a cup of coffee — I share a bit of my heart and maybe hear back a bit of your own.

• A round-up of the previous week’s posts from Still Forming — since, again, I know getting here each day is just not realistic for everyone. This weekly e-mail brings those posts to you in a round-up format.

• A little something special I’m calling the “weekly lectio.” When you subscribe, you’ll get a chance to hear more about that and how it came to be, but the sneak-peek version is that it’s an audio recording from me each week that connects you to God and the Scriptures.

So, what do you think? 

Do you want to join me? I hope you will.

Sign up here: 

PS: If you can’t see the sign-up form, click here.

Living a Rhythmed Life: What It Is

Limbs reaching up toward heaven. 

It creates freedom. 

It creates space. 

It makes your “yes” and “no” more clear.

And:

It relieves anxiety and worry.

It lets you settle in. 

It increases presence.

What’s more: 

It removes the ineffectual and unnecessary.

It creates a sense of purpose.

It generates life.

It invites joy.

Is there anything you would add to this list?

Living a Rhythmed Life: What It Isn't

It isn’t about rigidity.

It isn’t about conformity.

It isn’t about ignoring reality.

It isn’t about losing yourself.

Also: 

It doesn’t look the same for each person.

It doesn’t remain the same always.

It doesn’t suffocate you.

It doesn’t snatch away your life.

What’s more: 

There isn’t one right way.

It doesn’t require having your life figured out.

It doesn’t make your life perfect, with no spots or mess in it ever.

What about this list surprises you or reveals something about your assumptions?

Living a Rhythmed Life: What's Going On in Your World?

Hey there!

In yesterday’s post in this series, we did an interior pulse check of sorts to learn our most natural rhythm — the rhythm of life that is most native to us. This provides a great starting point as we begin to explore the different facets and realities of life and how we might best live intentionally within them. 

Today, we’re taking the very next step: looking at what’s here. 

And I have another video for you, recorded this morning:

(If you can’t see the video in your e-mail or RSS feed, click here.) 

If you happened to watch the video from yesterday’s post all the way through, you’ll remember that I mentioned an exercise involving a tree drawing that I created to discern my way through an overwhelming season of my life. Today, in the above video, I’m sharing more about that tree exercise with you and am inviting you to draw your own!

As I mention in the above video, this is just a starting point.

We’re not going to try and figure out our lives all at once in drawing these trees right now. Instead, I’m inviting you to take an afternoon or a couple days or even a week to draw your tree and just be with the reality of what your life really looks like right now. 

And so try, if you can, not to judge your tree and all that it contains. You may feel it has too much on it. Or that the branches and little twigs and smaller branches you chose to include are silly. Or that perhaps your tree is not full enough.

Try, to the best you are able, to set aside those judgments.

This is not the day for making decisions about your tree. This is the day for simply seeing and being with what is. 

What is it like for you to do this tree exercise?

Living a Rhythmed Life: What Is Your Natural Rhythm?

Hi friends,

So, as we dive into this new series on living a rhythmed life, we’re going to begin by laying some groundwork — spending a little bit of time exploring the basic truths of ourselves before we begin looking at all the areas of life that a lifestyle of rhythm can affect. Also, we’re going to take a little time to understand what a rhythmed life is and what it isn’t. 

Let’s begin by getting in tune with the natural rhythm we carry inside ourselves, shall we?

I have always been a person who prefers quietness and a slow pace in my life, but it was just three years ago that I really owned that and explored what it would be like to live from that place of rhythm more intentionally. 

I made a little video detailing some of that process (recorded in 2009), which you can watch here: 

(If you can’t see the video in your e-mail or RSS feed, click here.)

You don’t have to watch the full 10-minute video. Mainly, I’d just invite you to watch the first 50 seconds of it, where I used my hands to show you the pace of my own internal rhythm.

And then I’d like to ask you:

What would it be like for you to do the same?

Take a minute of quiet right now to do this.

Close your eyes and go inside yourself. Gently give yourself permission to discard the demands of your current realities and really tune into yourself. What is the pace that hums along most naturally inside of you — not because of what external life asks of you but because it feels most true? What pace and rhythm feel like sanctuaried home? What rhythm is most real and life-giving for you? 

Move your hands up and down to indicate that pace and speed (like I did in the video). What is the measured tempo your most natural rhythm makes?

(If you’d like to create a short video clip to share your natural rhythm with us here, feel free to leave a link to your video in the comments. Or simply share what you notice!)

Living a Rhythmed Life: A New Series

Kirk’s desk.

When we celebrated a year of being faithful in this space a couple weeks ago with an open call for topic requests, one reader requested some meditations on cultivating the spiritual disciplines in our lives. Specifically, Terri said: 

“I’d love it if you covered more on the journey of cultivating spiritual disciplines. It seems as though writing this blog has become something of a spiritual discipline for you and I’d love to hear more about the obstacles you encountered and what was required of you to push through those obstacles.”

I’ve been musing on this request since receiving it, and that musing has formulated itself into a new series I’m going to offer here about living a rhythmed life. 

So much of learning to write faithfully in this space has been due to cultivating a rhythmed life. Rhythms have always been a part of my life in some way, but it’s only been in the last couple years that I’ve realized how much I truly need rhythms in order to thrive. And so — especially in this last year — I’ve become much more intentional about the way I live and spend my time.

And now I’ve realized that I have quite a bit to say about all this. :-)

The way this series is shaping up on the pages of my brainstorms about it, we will cover more ground than just my experience of growing into a life of greater faithfulness through the experience of writing posts for you in this space, though it will definitely include reflections on that experience. We will cover things like:

• The rhythms of our online lives
• The rhythms of our households
• How a rhythmed life cultivates self-care and love for others
• Exploring our personal rhythms
• Obstacles to the rhythmed life

Some parts of this series will delve into the spiritual realities of living a rhythmed life. Other parts of it will be more practical, more tactile, more down and dirty in the nitty-gritty dailiness of our lives. But I often find God in those nitty-gritty spaces, too. 

Will you join us in this new series? 

What questions, challenges, or even frustrations do you have about this idea of living a rhythmed life?

Finding God With and Within

I read a quote by St. Augustine this morning that helps illuminate our path to God. He wrote: 

Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new. Late have I loved Thee. For behold Thou were within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside, and in my unloveliness, fell upon those lovely things Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee. I was kept from Thee by those things, yet had they not been in Thee, they would not have been at all. 

I keep marveling at this sense of being outside ourselves that he mentions — how God can be found when we go interior, inside ourselves, but how we often flee that level of intimacy and knowing and being known by casting about outside ourselves. 

Or the way, too, he mentions God being with us but our not being with God. 

It is so easy to avoid presence, isn’t it? Presence with ourselves and presence with God. So we go outside ourselves.

It’s such a visceral picture to me — this going outside ourselves — as though we are leaving our real habitat, our real encasement, leaving it as an empty shell while we seek something elsewhere. Except as we are seeking that something else, we’re only a half-being because we left ourselves back with God.

Visceral, isn’t it? 

Can you relate? 

What is it like for you to consider finding God by going inward or finding God right there next to you?

He Delights in You

The last couple days, I’ve been camped out in a single verse from Psalm 44: 

We didn’t fight for this land;

   we didn’t work for it — it was a gift!

You gave it, smiling as you gave it,

   delighting as you gave it.

— Psalm 44:3

I keep meditating on this verse in the context of my tree. I mentioned yesterday that I experience these images from Jesus as a gift, and this image of being a great oak tree planted on a jutting cliff, where birds come and find nest in its branches is certainly that. 

So in this psalm, I find resonance. I didn’t fight for this place I’ve been planted. I didn’t work for it at all. It was a gift! Jesus accorded me this identity as a tree, and he led me to the place of my planting. 

And then the psalm says that he gave it, smiling as he gave it, delighting as he gave it. 

Yes. 

I’ve learned that Jesus loves doing what he does in our lives. He loves being present. He loves spending time with us. He loves hearing what we have to say — he really listens. He smiles!

And he loves doing the work only he can do in us: the work of excavation, of restoration, of building up, of leading, and of planting. 

He delights in us and in the ever-new realities he is making of our lives. 

Do you feel connected to the delight of Jesus in you?

What Images Do You Have of Your Life with God?

By now, it’s pretty apparent that images show up in my life with God quite a lot. And even though that’s been a reality of my prayer life for, oh, about 12 years now, I never cease to be amazed by it or surprised by the images that come. 

I’ve learned that these images are pure gift.

They are given, not constructed by me. Suddenly, they’re just there.

And I’ve found them to be a real help because they illuminate truths about myself and my life with God that I would not otherwise have known.

For instance, gazing at an image can be such a layered experience. 

You can look at it from one angle, and then you can turn it around or walk to a different side of it and look at it again. You see new things from the different angles. Or you can pull back and look at the image or scene as a whole. What surrounds it? What else is happening, beyond the focal point? What sense or impulse do you have while gazing at the image?

The Eastern Orthodox Church is familiar with this practice of holding images in their lives of prayer. They regularly utilize icons to help them “see deeper” into their lives with God. The icons become a window of sorts — a window into the reality of their souls, a window into the reality of God.

Images can be a help in our prayer lives — whether given to us directly by God or utilized externally for contemplative gazing, as with an icon. I am so thankful for these images. They speak truth to me, teaching me, rather than requiring me to speak or teach myself. 

Do images play a part in your life with God at all?

He Is Abundant Life

As I’ve been talking with Jesus about the tree that we are together, water has remained close by. I’ve been aware of it as an essential component to this new life Jesus has been preparing to give to me as a tree planted by him. I knew that wherever he planted me, the water of the Holy Spirit would be a necessary presence to nourish my roots and interior system continually.

And sure enough, it’s true.

Yesterday, Jesus planted the tree of me on the jutting edge of a cliff that overlooks the ocean. The beach where Jesus and I have walked together this past year in prayer is not far from view, and the huge, wide, blue ocean stretches out before me. All of that water encircles my cliff foundation, providing sustenance up through the elements and minerals to the grassy plain surrounding my tree, pushing all the way up through the fullness of its trunk and limbs and leaves. 

The water is necessary. 

It carries an abundance of life. 

The Godhead is many things, and one thing it definitely is, is the source and sustainer of abundant life. 

I feel aware that even as Jesus and I are the tree together, he is also the sunlight that nourishes it. He is the water that sustains it. He is its nourishing soil. He is the one who chose its location and planted it where it should be. He is the one who will prune and care for its leaves and bark and branches. 

In my awareness as this tree, Jesus has been and will continue to be the giver and sustainer of my life. And oh, it is such an abundant life he gives — life everywhere, surrounding and filling this tree of me.

How can you find God a source and giver of life in your own life today?

He Is a Haven

My favorite tree in Winter Park.

Jesus and I have been talking a lot about trees lately. (Which is great because I absolutely adore them. I am such a tree girl.)

A lot of this conversation about trees has been in the context of the kind of tree he has been making me to be. But this morning, as he has been showing me more and more of the tree that I am, I got to asking him about his part. 

If I am a tree, what is he?

As I exist as a type of tree in this world, where is he in that image?

He showed me that he’s also the tree. He’s the lifeblood of my existence as a tree. His Spirit is the water that sustains and nourishes my tree. It’s not that I am a tree and he is separate from me in that image in some way. 

We are together. One tree. 

In the context of this conversation, I keep going back to this passage in Matthew that says: 

“The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” 

— Matthew 13:31-32

I love this passage! It’s so beautiful.

But specifically, I keep being mindful of the safe space that the tree in this passage provides for all the birds of the air. It is a place all of them come to make nests in its branches. It provides support. Famliarity. Safety. Home. 

Jesus is that kind of tree for you. 

Do you know him to be a haven like that?

Looking Forward to the Year Ahead

I carried a secret smile with me all day yesterday, every time I thought about the year of being faithful that was being celebrated in this space.

This website is such holy ground for me, and offering you a bit of stillness and reflection here each day has become a precious priority. It is so connected to where God is leading me to direct the prominent focus of my life, and yesterday was a great reminder to me of that.

It felt great to celebrate.

And it was so much fun to hear what you’d like to receive in this space in the coming year!

• Meditations on old hymns. 
• Reflections on the spiritual disciplines, particularly from the vantage point of my own experience.
• More thoughts on getting close to God. 
• Additional insights on discernment. 

So much fun! I love all of these ideas, and it was great to learn what you would find most personally meaningful. 

I’m beginning to think through how these kind of reflections might show up on the site in the coming year. And you are still welcome to add to the list by leaving a comment below (or, if you’re more comfortable, sending me an email to christianne at stillforming dot com). 

The offer to pray for you in some specific way still stands, too, if you’d like to connect with me about that. 

In the meantime, happy June 1!

I’m looking forward to the new year ahead with you here.

xo,

Christianne 

A Year of Being Faithful

I’ve been anticipating this day for some time now! A year ago today, I started my commitment to write week-daily contemplative reflections in this space for you. 

A year of being faithful. 

I don’t know that I’ve ever told you the reason these week-daily posts began. It happened because of my graduate research proposal (which I wrote last spring, in May 2011) that studied the intersection of digital connectivity and spirituality.

• How does the pervasiveness of the internet affect our interior lives? 
• What have we lost in our increasing lifestyle of digital connectivity? 
• What have we gained? 
• What do our spiritual lives need in order to thrive? 
• Where can we find spaces to stop, go inward, and connect to God and ourselves in the midst of all that clicking?

These are the questions I took with me into my research, and these are the questions that informed the commitments I made at the end of it in response to what I learned. 

Through that process, I became committed to ways I could help.

This site began in October 2008 as a space to chronicle my own interior journey and explore my evolving ideas about spiritual formation as I studied. But in May 2011, on the heels of that research proposal, it changed. 

It became an oasis from the noise. For you.

As I look back over this past year, I can see how God used this commitment to writing week-daily posts in this space to grow in me a greater character of faithfulness.

When I began the commitment, I often missed a day here or there each week. I averaged four posts a week, rather than five. And there was no specific place in my schedule where those posts got written each day. I tried to write them in the morning, but other commitments often took me away from home, so sometimes I’d write them at the end of the day.

Over this last year, that has changed.

My mornings are now a dedicated time of quiet with God, and every morning when I spend time in the quiet with Jesus, I ask him what he wants to say to you here. 

This space is a regular part of my life now. A place that is a part of me. A place where I am faithful.

I feel like celebrating somehow. 

As I’ve been thinking of ways to celebrate this last year’s journey with you, I keep coming back to you.

What kinds of things would you like to receive in this space in the new year ahead? Is there anything you’d like to see change? 

I’m all ears to receive your thoughts if you’d like to share them. Leave me a comment or send me an email at christianne at stillforming dot com, and I will gladly receive what you have to say and see how it can be offered here.

Also, I’d love to be able to pray for you. If there’s some specific way I can hold you in my heart before Jesus, again, send me an email at christianne at stillforming dot com. I will hold you in prayer and then send you back a written response of that prayer. 

Today, I’m celebrating a year of faithfulness. Won’t you celebrate with me too?

What I've Learned About Suffering

It’s been a long journey, hasn’t it? 

We embarked on the exploration of suffering on May 1, and I can hardly believe it lasted a month. Who knew the unsuspecting discovery of a poem would lead to such an intensive journey for us here? I hope it has been helpful for you.

As I mentioned yesterday, I know this month-long series has fallen far short of examining all there is to be found and learned about human suffering. I am still contemplating a personal writing exercise where I type out all that I want to say and explore about this subject — all that couldn’t fit on those pink plastic tasting spoons in this space each day — just for my own benefit.

Just to see what I see. 

In the meantime, I want to share a realization I’ve bumped up against over and over again throughout this journey: 

The turns in the suffering have so much to do with Jesus. 

At least for me, this has been true.

Every turn in my own experiences of suffering can be traced, like a single trail of red yarn, directly back to Jesus. What he taught me about myself. Ways he helped me see a bigger picture. Truths he helped me learn in place of lies. Love he showed to me in places of pain. 

So much of human suffering creates a monumental court case against God. How could he let these things happen? How could a good God permit so much pain? Did God make this happen, or just allow it? Why would he let that be? 

I have certainly been there. I’ve wrestled with the problem of pain and God’s responsibility in it a lot the last few years. Sometimes it feels like I bear a particular burden about these things, as I’ve chronicled a bit in another of my online spaces. 

But one thing I’ve noticed, at least for myself, is this:

Any healing and wholeness and strength I’ve ever found has come directly from Jesus. 

Whatever God’s role in the world’s suffering is, I know at least one thing to be true: Jesus heals me in my suffering. 

What have you learned about suffering?

A Turn in the Suffering :: When It's Bigger Than We Understand

I have felt so aware throughout this suffering series that this subject is vaster than any bits and pieces of a blog series — even a whole lot of those bits and pieces strung together in a month-long series — can cover. 

I told Kirk that writing this series has felt like offering a tiny taste of perspective each day on one of those tiny pink plastic sample spoons you get at Baskin Robbins when you want to try an ice cream flavor before ordering your scoop. Each and every post of this series has felt like a tiny pink tasting spoon like that, and I feel like I could write whole book chapters on each post — each post that examined how suffering can affect us, and each post that has examined ways we might hold the suffering and learn what it can teach us. 

Not to mention all the perspectives that weren’t included in either side of that exploration yet.

This subject is just so big and vast. 

And this morning, as I was walking along the beach in prayer with Jesus and talking with him about all this, I felt so aware of the truth of this. It was like he looked out across the vast ocean stretching out for miles beside us and swept his arm out toward it, as if saying, “See this? This is its vastness. It’s true.” 

Sometimes our actual experience of suffering feels like that, too. 

There’s a vastness to it. An imperceptibility because it can be so all-consuming and great. An inability to pull back and see or even comprehend anything rational when it comes to what we’ve suffered or seen others experience. 

Sometimes it’s just too big to understand. 

And I think, in those places, we sometimes just keep walking — that that’s all we can do. Keep holding the tension of what is hard and what seems necessary. Keep living. Keep feeling. Keep knowing God and ourselves. Keep trusting that something in all of this matters, even if we may never know why. 

I think there is dignity in this way of holding our experiences. 

Because just because something doesn’t make sense or cannot be held in our minds doesn’t mean our experience of it is less valid or that there’s no meaning in it at all. Who are we as we live inside that inexplicable complexity? What will we choose to believe? What will it make of our faith? What will it make of our lives?

These are some of the questions suffering’s vastness invites us to hold, I think.

A Turn in the Suffering :: When We Can Consider Forgiveness

It took me a really long time to get to forgiveness. 

I knew forgiveness was pretty important — Jesus makes that really clear in the Gospels. But I also had gone through enough of the process of learning my heart to know what was really in there. I couldn’t fool myself into believing I’d forgiven when I really hadn’t.

Besides, I knew that wasn’t what Jesus wanted, either. He’s the one who taught me the importance of the heart. He’s the one who helped me learn that our hearts are the key players in relationship with God.

I couldn’t just play lip service to forgiveness. Neither Jesus nor I would be fooled. 

So what do you do when you know forgiveness is important but you just aren’t there? 

You ask God to help you get there, and you be with the truth of the mess in the meantime. 

I’m serious. This is what I did. For years — literally, years — I consciously asked God to help me learn forgiveness. And then I would look at the reality of my heart and know that forgiveness wasn’t in there yet. I was still reeling. Still in shock. Still picking up the pieces of brokeness. Still learning what happened because of all that brokenness. 

Still learning what Jesus could do with all that brokenness, too. 

I read so many perspectives on forgiveness over the years, and none of them penetrated me.

Forgiveness is a choice, they said. It’s a choice you keep choosing and choosing and choosing each day. Or they said, Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting what happened or saying that it’s okay. It means wilfully choosing not to hold that against someone anymore. Or here’s another one: Unforgiveness is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the other person to die. 

These things may be true, but none of those declarations or platitudes meant anything to me. They just didn’t compute. And they annoyed me. 

What got me to forgiveness was being with the pain. Examining it. Learning from it. Figuring out how it had formed me. Allowing Jesus to take me on the long journey of reckoning. 

And then getting to a place where I saw new things. 

The thing that helped me the most with forgiveness was having been with Jesus through that long season of darkness and scratches at healing. That long season helped me realize Jesus could handle everything that had happened to me. Even more, he could bring me through it — teach me new things, make something new.

I became more identified with Jesus and what he was making of me and my life than with the broken circumstances that had brought me to him in the first place. 

That’s when I could finally consider forgiveness.

When I didn’t need to hold the wrongdoings so close to my chest anymore. When Jesus had given me something more.

A Turn in the Suffering :: When We Become Less Identified With the Circumstances

Do you know what it’s like to feel so identified with your suffering that you don’t know how to tell your story without it? 

I do. 

I know what it’s like to be so connected to all the ways I’ve been broken that I can’t see anything else anymore.

Living in the anger. Living in the sadness. Chafing against the injustices. 

You feel like your suffering defines you. It’s the only identity you have.

I also know what it’s like to come out on the other side. It feels like slowly waking up, or watching the misty fog clear before your eyes.

Suddenly, there’s more to see.

For me, each time this has happened, it has been akin to realizing God was able to handle all that happened to me. It didn’t surprise him or faze him. He let me come to him with it and said, “Yes. It’s true. I know.” And then he sat down beside me or walked next to me in the aftermath, attending to the process of carving out a new identity, showing how these things would be connected to bigger pictures. 

I became less identified with what had happened and more identified with what God could, would, and was already doing with it. 

It makes for a pretty monumental shift.

I’ve experienced a shift like this a few different times in my life, and each time it has felt like a huge boulder being removed from around my neck, and the connecting rope along with it. Instead of being submerged at the bottom of the ocean anymore by the weight of it, I found that I could stand upright in the water, my feet sure on the sandbar beneath me, feeling the cool water and its buoyancy against my skin, surveying the waves and the horizon and the light … free, now, to play.

A Turn in the Suffering :: When It Creates a Reckoning

I’ve shared here previously that I walked through a marital separation and divorce in 2003-2004 and that it was an experience that created a heavy cloak of shame that I wore the length of my body every single day. 

I remember sojourning back to California from the Midwest, where I’d been living the previous year, with all that belonged to my name packed in the backseat and trunk of my little white Volkswagen Jetta. I arrived at my dad’s house, which would be my new home for the first part of that new season, and stepped into the tiny guest bedroom feeling all out of sorts and wondering what, exactly, my life had become. 

I was starting over. Starting from scratch. Re-entering the familiar context of my hometown, surrounded by people I’d known my whole life, but nothing was the same. 

Those first few months created a cocooning of sorts inside my soul. I would hole up in my room at the end of each day and play Sarah McLachlan’s new album over and over and over. I sat in that room with the door closed tight behind me. It was the safest place I knew.

And it was grief. Disorientation. A place where I pulled my shame cloak just a little tighter about my shoulders each day. 

But I’ve also shared that, eventually, I began to rethink all the beliefs that had been stamped into my soul through that experience. That was I worthless and thrown away … but no, I was beautiful to Jesus. That I was a single girl on her own for the first time … but no, I was now the bride of Christ. That I was less than desirable … but no, Jesus found me to be lovely. 

And then, in what was one of the most pivotal moments of turning around inside that season, there was the belief that my shame was merited because my new life as a divorced woman was counterfeit … but no, God sees me as Christianne, his daughter, not Christianne, his divorced daughter.

It became a season of reckoning. 

My suffering brought me face to face with what I truly believed about myself, others, and God. And by leaning into what those beliefs really were, God and I could look plainly at them together. In the context of that painful honesty, he could begin the work of reforming my crumbled foundation. 

A Turn in the Suffering :: When It Connects to a Broader Scope

I mentioned yesterday that my first turn in the suffering happened about 10 years into my heart’s journey with Jesus. One morning, I was sitting in a session with my spiritual director and was presented with the invitation to revisit a particular wound. 

I could see myself in that scene I shared with you already of being nine years old and given responsibility that was way beyond my years and then being held responsible for the disaster that resulted. I saw myself in the room of my sentencing, and my spiritual director gently invited me to explore whether Jesus was in that room with me that night.

Where was he? What was he doing?

He was sitting right there next to me, and he didn’t lift a finger.

It really angered me to see that — to see him sit calmly by while injustice happened to me. What’s more, as I’ve already shared, that night had far-reaching ramifications on my life, and Jesus did nothing about it. 

That really, really hurt. 

I sat in my director’s living room, eyes squeezed shut and tears streaming down my face. My thoughts raced with anger and sadness, wondering what Jesus could possibly say to me, wondering if he could say anything at all that would begin to help me understand or make what happened — his inaction — okay. 

I didn’t think it was possible. I’d lived with that wound far too long. 

But then slowly, like an onion, I felt him unraveling the cloth strips that were wrapped around my head, covering my eyes, the cause of blindness. 

Slowly, he unwrapped them in order to let me see. The weight of the cloths began to fall away. Dots of light began to shimmer on my eyelids.

And quietly, gently, I heard him say to me: “My daughter, it is true. I did allow that to happen. I was there, and I did not lift my finger. But you see, I had a greater scope in mind. I saw a vision beyond the story you could see. There is the greater story of your life, and how I’ve planned to use you. Because of what you’ve carried, you can come alongside those who also carry these burdens. You can touch them, because you know how they feel. You know what it feels like to be where they are.”

It isn’t that God was absent. It isn’t that he was uncaring. It’s that he had a different aim in mind entirely.

Sometimes our suffering connects to a broader scope that we cannot see. When we are in the woundedness, it pains us to even hear that. But when we are ready to heal, Jesus can lead us through.

A Turn in the Suffering :: Let It Take as Long as It Takes

When I think about “turns in suffering,” my mind immediately flies back to the first major turn I encountered in my own experiences of suffering. 

I had been walking in a very intent way with Jesus for about 10 years. Ten years was about how long it took for me to find myself steeped in my belovedness, to be rooted and grounded in that identity of love. I’d spent many long years encountering the truth of my heart — learning what my heart even was, and then learning what was true of it — and then combining that with the process of learning who Jesus was and how to bring the truth of my heart into relationship with him. 

In those 10 years, I’d discovered and acknowledged the wounds in my heart. I’d been through the anger mill. I’d grieved a lot of losses. I’d allowed myself to admit what I didn’t know. I’d allowed myself to learn.

And it wasn’t until about 10 years into that sacred journey that I experienced my first turn in the suffering. I guess healing — or preparation for healing — just takes that long sometimes. It did for me, at least. 

And when it did, I was ready to receive some new perspectives. 

Let it take as long as it takes. I’ve learned from experience that the wait is worth it.

What is it like for you to let the suffering and healing process take as long as it takes?