About Elizabeth

Hello! I'm glad to meet you! My name is Elizabeth. I am a wife and a stay-at-home mommy to three beautiful girls; I am a musician and a writer. I would love for you to visit with me at MadeSacred.com where I write and try to thoughtfully engage life and culture as a way of loving God and loving others. After all, God has made everything to be sacred, things in our daily lives and things in the world around us.

Some Days Are Just Ugly

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Elizabeth

There are some days when it is easy to love.

I am able to surrender to the Spirit which causes peace to fill me up and overflow into the hearts of my daughters, my husband. I have the supernatural strength to stay calm in the midst of tantrums, kind in the midst of misunderstandings, and joyful in the midst of hurt.

Then there are days like today.

Days when something ugly wells up inside of me. Days when I want to be mean. Days when I feel resentful towards those I love best.

I hate these days.

What is this darkness, this nastiness that overwhelms me and threatens to spill out into the hearts of those I love?

My daughters cry to be held, fuss about wearing clothes, throw tantrums because school is hard, and my desire is not to comfort them but to scream like a crazed woman with fire in my eyes.

My husband makes an innocent comment and my desire is not to hear his loving intentions but to deliberately misunderstand and hiss a disparaging remark.

I intentionally fight against the changing of my mood. I want to savor, to wallow in my blackness.

I hate these days.

I get so tired of fighting this battle within me. I get so weary of fighting my very self. I long for the day when I finally look like Jesus, when my desire is to love rather than hate, when my heart is all light with no shadow at all.

As ugly as my heart can be, I am grateful that God refuses to give up on me. I am thankful that He does not save me and then leave me as I am. I am astounded that He is filling me up with Himself, crowding out the ugliness until there is nothing left but Beauty.

I try not to feel impatient.

Yet I know. I know. I know that I belong to Jesus. He gave Himself for me and therefore sin has lost its hold on me. I can hold on to that knowing even when I cannot feel it. Little by little, sin’s grasp is slipping away because Love has taken hold and nothing dark can hold on in the light of this fiercest Love.

As the recent hymn says, “No power of hell, no scheme of man can ever pluck me from His hand; ‘till He returns or calls me home, here in the power of Christ I’ll stand.”

No scheme of man. Not even my own schemes. Nothing can separate me from Love Himself.

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end;

They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

Amen.

Seeking God’s Will

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Elizabeth

I have to give my two year old a lot of specific instructions throughout her day.

I have to tell her which arm to put in which arm hole, how to get a blanket pulled over her legs, where each toy should go when cleaning up.

And she’s two, so I’m okay with this.

My seven year old, however, I expect to have a general idea of what I want from her.

I would feel disappointed if I had to give her as many minute directions as I do her younger sister. As my eldest matures and as our own relationship grows, one of my hopes is for her to know me well enough to know what I want from her without me having to detail it out.

I have spent much of my life wanting to know God’s will for me.

I wanted to know what college to attend, which career I should pursue, whom I should date, whom I should marry. Much of my relationship with God was consumed with begging Him to tell me what He wanted me to do.

I told myself that I was seeking God’s will in order to please Him and bring Him glory, but in truth I wanted to know His will in order to protect myself. I wanted to be sure that I would be successful, that I wouldn’t make any mistakes that would cause me lasting pain.

I am learning.

I am learning that God’s relationship with me is much like my relationships with my daughters. The more I know God, the more our relationship grows and the less He has to direct my every move.

Only asking God to tell me about His will does not constitute a growing relationship. That amounts to not much more than a dictatorship.

When I am with my husband, I don’t want either of us to order the other about. I want us to understand each other deeply so that orders are not necessary.

And so it is in our union with God, a person both loving and beloved. He does not delight in having to always explain what His will is; He enjoys it when we understand and act upon His will. Our highest calling and opportunity in life is to love Him with all our being. ~ Dallas Willard in Hearing God

In recent years, rather than seeking God’s will for my life, I’ve spent my time seeking God.

I seek to know Him, to understand Him, to love Him more. In that loving, I trust that He will let me know if there is something specific I need to hear. I trust His Spirit in me to guide me when either I am beginning to head in the wrong direction or there is a specific thing He wants me to do.

And He does. He fulfills that trust.

I have a long way to go. I have not yet grown to the point of having an easy, conversational relationship with God throughout every day. But I want that. Oh, how I long for that kind of relationship with the One I love.

Rather than praying “God, help me to know Your will so that I can do what you want me to do”, my new prayer is “God, help me to know You more so that I can love you more.”

That is a prayer I believe He delights in answering.

And you, Solomon my son, know the God of your father and serve him with a whole heart and with a willing mind, for the Lord searches all hearts and understands every plan and thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will cast you off forever. I Chronicles 28.9

Whatever Is Necessary

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Elizabeth

What do we do with the truly awful things of this life? With a loss of love, with a deep constant pain, with a fear that pervades our depths?

It is dangerous to attribute it all to our not loving God enough, although perhaps we could say that is often the case.

Our faith is, as CS Lewis once said, often only a house of cards.

He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down. ~ CS Lewis A Grief Observed

We walk around, believing that our foundation is solid, but in truth we are playing at faith. Our house needs a good breath of wind, for if it is never allowed to fall, it can never be rebuilt to last for eternity.

If my faith is only steady enough to endure this life, wouldn’t I want God to blow it down with whatever wind is necessary so that I can endure to the end?

I’m not sure.

I think I want this, but fear holds me back. Fear of what God, in His infinite love and wisdom, might deal out.

He never promised to be gentle.

Is any pain at all worthwhile if it brings us closer to Him, closer to the sort of life with God that Jesus lived?

The given answer should be yes, but I hesitate and pull back at the brink of giving it.

Which means that I do not yet desire God above all else.

Not truly.

Do many of us?

We give our hearts over to so many things other than God. . .As long as our happiness is tied to the things we can lose, we are vulnerable. ~ John Eldredge Walking With God

If God is truly enough, if He is what we need for happiness, for contentment, then we should be able to let go of those we love, endure that deep pain, rise above the pervasive fear, because we still have Him.

It is God who remains when all else is gone. It is God who fills us up with Himself so that we do not need anything or anyone else.

In truth, when we lose, when we hurt, we have more of Him than we have in the comfort and in the ease. That in itself should make us turn from the easy way.

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him…that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. ~ Philippians 3. 7-12

If only I could believe that. Truly know it and live it.

But without the pain of learning it.

Lord, Have Mercy

Posted on October 2, 2015 by Elizabeth

Lord, Have Mercy

a spoken word poem

(for email subscribers, click here to listen to the audio of this post)
(it’s better heard than read)

Lord, have mercy

Again I am trying
And again I am failing.
I preach ways of love
Yet all the time I am flailing.
I yell and I threaten,
My daughters are quailing.

I blame all but me:
The crankiness of these
You gave me, my own lack of sleep.
I cast stones away Yet from Thee
I can’t flee.

Into Thy hands

My heart, it won’t change,
My faults stay the same,
My thoughts won’t rearrange,
My emotions I can’t exchange.

You alone can make me new,
You alone can cleanse me all through.
If You want my heart to resemble You,
Only Your hand will do.

Thee I adore

Out of Your amazing grace,
You are willing to give chase
And work to mold me into one
You are proud to call a son.

You give me life
and joy in my strife.
You are beauty, You are art
You are holy, set apart.

You are worthy of all praise.
Your glory is set ablaze
Like the fire of sun’s rays.
To You no face is raised
And all heaven and earth obeys
You, the Ancient of Days.

Amen

The Stakes Are High

Posted on September 25, 2015 by Elizabeth

From my high school band director days:

Mrs. Giger! My bassoon solo actually sounds good now!!

Well, I’m glad. What did you do differently?

I finally followed your advice to practice the song. And it worked!!

Aha.

It is something I’ve been trying to teach my seven year old. Working hard at a challenging task brings such a sweet reward.

Any excellent and beautiful ending is the result of working hard at something difficult.

We know this in our adult lives ~ we feel most satisfied after a day full of meaningful challenges that we tackled wholeheartedly; challenges that ended with accomplishment.

Why do we think that life should be different?

If this life is preparation for the life to come, why would we expect it to be easy? Shouldn’t we expect it to be more like boot camp?

…suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope…

We think that life should be comfortable, full of the things and people we desire.

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

We are offended and outraged when things don’t go as planned.

Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline.

We decide that this is too hard.

Life is too lonely, too full of hurt, too saturated with grief.

True.

And this loneliness, this hurt, this grief can have purpose.

For it was fitting that (God), for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.

Eternity is high stakes. We shouldn’t be surprised that the preparation can be grueling.

Each day we have a choice. We can choose to accept what we are given and let God use it to mold us or we can dig in our heels and choose to look for the easy way, the way of least pain and effort, the way of bitterness and discontent.

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. ~ C. S. Lewis

Life is. We can fight against it and live in a state of war. Or we can surrender to God and be molded into someone who is perfectly ready for eternity.

The stakes are high. Are you ready for the challenge?

The Weight of Holy

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Elizabeth

I am evangelical all the way down to my toes.

In many ways I am proud of my faith tradition. I will be the first to admit that we have our troubles, things with which I don’t agree, but there are many things I think we get right.

I am grateful for our emphasis on the Bible, our insistence on a personal relationship with God, our reliance on Jesus’ sacrifice to make us clean.

There are a few pieces of Christianity I think we miss out on, though.

One of those pieces is our loss of depth when we focus on individual relationship with God over communal relationships with God. This is a subject I’ll have to explore in a different post.

For this week?

We also lose a sense of the sacredness and holiness of God when we focus solely on a personal, intimate relationship with God.

In our casual services, in our emphasis on God as friend, we forget sometimes how other God is. He is holy, which means separate. Apart.

He is not like us. He is so far above us that we cannot begin to comprehend Him. We are not worthy to stand in His presence. We cannot meet His gaze. To see His face is to die.

We attended a Lutheran church service a few Sundays ago.

I was struck by the ceremony, the honor and respect with which they treat all things belonging to God: in particular, the Word and the Lord’s Supper.

Every move was accompanied by a genuflect before the table holding the Bible and the Communion. There was a reverence to that portion of the service that was weighty.

There was a hush of holiness over the proceedings that I do not see in my own tradition. As each person came up to receive the bread, they were looked in the eye and told “This is His body which was broken for you”. As each person came up to receive the cup, they were looked in the eye and told, “This is His blood which was shed for you”. As each child came past with their parents, a hand was laid on their head and a blessing given on them.

It was holy and it was personal.

As each server of the bread and wine came to their turn to be the receiver, they bowed before the Word and the Communion. Not in worship of those items, but in reverence for the One they represent. In a recognition that God is holy and has declared these things to be sacred.

Our whole lives are to be sacred. I recognize that there is no separation between sacred and secular in our everyday lives. That is the premise behind this very blog. Yet it serves us well to be reminded every now and then of the absolute holiness of the One who makes everything sacred.

Nothing is sacred without God.

Sometimes we forget how much more sacred is the Giver than the gifts.

Sometimes we lose the weightiness of holy and in that shallowness can float upward until we believe that we are closer to God than we truly are.

…and behold, a throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne. And he who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian, and around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald…From the throne came flashes of lightening, and rumblings and peals of thunder…Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!

All photographs this week are by Kirk Sewell. You can purchase canvas prints of many of his gorgeous photograph artwork on his website: photographybysewell.webs.com

Go Act Like It

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Elizabeth

Sometimes, when I forget who our King is, this world makes me want to run away and hide.

In a week when refugees number in the millions,

In a week when a friend, a friend with a wife and three small children, dies much too soon,

In a week when fellow believers choose to scream about gay marriage across the country rather than to do something about the poor on the other side of town,

It is easy to believe the lie that I can do nothing against the darkness of this world.

It is easy to believe that the darkness is too strong.

It is easy to believe that ISIS wins, that cancer wins, that politicism wins.

In a week like this, I want to give in to despair. To give up. To gather my babies around me and sit and wait for Jesus to come back and make all of this right again.

And then I remember.

I remember that Jesus calls us to fight. He calls us to be a royal priesthood. A people who rule on His behalf and a people who represent Him to the world around them.

If we hide from the darkness, the darkness will certainly overcome. At least, it will overcome those to whom God asked us to be the light. Perhaps it will overcome us as well.

God is light and He has commissioned us to bring that light to the world.

I often tell my children:

You are beautiful. You are loving.

Now act like it.

So now I tell myself and I tell you:

We are royal. We are priests.

We should act like it.

Go dish out food at a soup kitchen.

Go babysit the children of a parent who has lost someone they love.

Go take a meal to an elderly friend who broke their hip.

Go have patience with that tantrum-throwing child one more time.

Go bake some cookies and take them to the gay couple down the street. Without a note that tells them how wrong they are.

Go find out how to help those refugee children who are lost and hungry and afraid (here’s a good place to start: http://wewelcomerefugees.com/).

We are royal. We are priests.

Act like it.

Be the light that overcomes the darkness.

And take heart; Jesus has overcome the world.

My Capricious Heart

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Elizabeth

I’m back.

Tentatively, yet determinedly back.

I’ve been a little paralyzed, waiting for the perfect post to form itself before writing. I’ve been a little hesitant, thinking I should have time to dig deep into books before pouring forth out of my emptiness. I’ve been a little prideful, believing that my troubles are not of value to others because they do not deal with death or poverty or persecution.

I will cast off these lies and write. I will write and pray that God will use what is inside of me whether or not it is perfect or brought from research or developed from great suffering.

Since when can God only use greatness for His purpose?

Moving is hard.

There is a loneliness that comes from knowing that deep, local friendships lie months, even years away. There is fear in the understanding that your introverted self is going to have to be bold and take risks in order to find those new friends. There is a sadness when grieving the friendships you left behind.

There is the ache of watching your children struggle, seeing them cry before trudging off to a new school and holding them when they rant and rage with an anger that is really stress they don’t know how to handle. It hurts to hear them talk about what they miss from our old home.

There is the exhaustion of too many sleepless nights. Sleepless from a six month old baby who still wakes up multiple times a night, sleepless from older sisters who wake with nightmares or because they can’t find the bathroom in their new place, sleepless from your own desire to unpack just one more box and try to make this house a home.

And?

Moving has within it a hope for future grace.

There is the freedom of a house in which your children have the space to spread out a bit, a house big enough to host a gathering without sitting in each other’s laps, a house with room for you to grow.

There is the excitement of a town you know you can enjoy, a town that’s just the right size for you, a town with potential for serving and for fun.

There is the joy of being near my brother and his family, the joy of good neighbors who might become good friends, the joy of a job my husband enjoys and doesn’t dread every day.

Underneath it all there is the peace, when I look for it, of knowing that we are where God wants us to be. My heart is capricious and ever-changing; the loneliness and grieving will not always be so strong. Until my emotions catch up, I will know that God has purpose for us here. I will know that He will use us in beautiful ways we don’t yet see and that this is what will make us happy.

Until that happens, I will trust Him and cling to Him even when my heart would tell me otherwise. The joy and peace will come. This I know and this I hold on to.

What Hope Changes

Posted on August 29, 2015 by Elizabeth

Hope.

It changes nothing. It changes everything.

How do you endure? When everything around you is falling apart, when all that you love on this earth fails you, how do you keep going?

It happens to all of us. At some point in our lives, whether early in life or late, we sit in stunned silence while our world crumbles.

What do we do? What do we do when we or one we love is living in the middle of unimaginable pain? What is it that keeps us going, that lets us perservere?

Hope.

It changes nothing. It changes everything.

Hope doesn’t heal the sick or take away the pain. It doesn’t fill the stomach or bring your loved one back.

It changes nothing.

Hope gives you a glory-full vision of the end of your story. It gives you a glimpse of the beauty, the joy, the perfection that is promised.

It changes everything.

When you know the end of the story, when you know that Christ wins and that we will be with Him forever, it gives us the power to bear anything. Anything. When you can see the end of fear, the end of despair, the end of pain, when you can see the adventure, the rest, the wholeness that waits for you, you are sustained in the now because you know that this, too, shall pass.

So hope. Hope in what is promised. Hope in what God has promised through the power of the resurrected Christ.

For you who have just received that 3 a.m. phone call, you who walk dazed from your doctor’s office, you who saw your child drift away, you who wish desperately for a child, you who sit weeping in a corner, who think that you will always be alone and unloved, for all of you who live in darkness and doubt…

there is hope. Beautiful, glorious, resurrection hope. So breathe deep of this hope. Let it fill you up with peace and joy so that you are able to endure all things. For He who is our hope is coming.

It is promised. It shall be so.

Art credit: last photograph by R.K. Sewell Photography (photographybysewell.webs.com)

Psalm of Love

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Elizabeth

Holy. Beautiful. Glory.

Creator. Author. Majesty.

King and Lord. Humility and Servant.

Love.

Wise beyond my wisdom.

Knowing beyond my knowledge.

Perfect plan beyond what I can comprehend.

Love.

Giver of all that I grasp too tightly.

Sacrificer of all, that I may see Your face.

Abundant mercy and grace, I rest in your delight in me.

Love.

For all that comes before,

When I cannot understand,

Still I will cling to Your power, Your goodness and

Your Love.

About Elizabeth

There are some days when it is easy to love.

I am able to surrender to the Spirit which causes peace to fill me up and overflow into the hearts of my daughters, my husband. I have the supernatural strength to stay calm in the midst of tantrums, kind in the midst of misunderstandings, and joyful in the midst of hurt.

Then there are days like today.

Days when something ugly wells up inside of me. Days when I want to be mean. Days when I feel resentful towards those I love best.

I hate these days.

What is this darkness, this nastiness that overwhelms me and threatens to spill out into the hearts of those I love?

My daughters cry to be held, fuss about wearing clothes, throw tantrums because school is hard, and my desire is not to comfort them but to scream like a crazed woman with fire in my eyes.

My husband makes an innocent comment and my desire is not to hear his loving intentions but to deliberately misunderstand and hiss a disparaging remark.

I intentionally fight against the changing of my mood. I want to savor, to wallow in my blackness.

I hate these days.

I get so tired of fighting this battle within me. I get so weary of fighting my very self. I long for the day when I finally look like Jesus, when my desire is to love rather than hate, when my heart is all light with no shadow at all.

As ugly as my heart can be, I am grateful that God refuses to give up on me. I am thankful that He does not save me and then leave me as I am. I am astounded that He is filling me up with Himself, crowding out the ugliness until there is nothing left but Beauty.

I try not to feel impatient.

As the recent hymn says, “No power of hell, no scheme of man can ever pluck me from His hand; ‘till He returns or calls me home, here in the power of Christ I’ll stand.”

No scheme of man. Not even my own schemes. Nothing can separate me from Love Himself.

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end;

They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

Amen.

I have to give my two year old a lot of specific instructions throughout her day.

I have to tell her which arm to put in which arm hole, how to get a blanket pulled over her legs, where each toy should go when cleaning up.

And she’s two, so I’m okay with this.

My seven year old, however, I expect to have a general idea of what I want from her.

I would feel disappointed if I had to give her as many minute directions as I do her younger sister. As my eldest matures and as our own relationship grows, one of my hopes is for her to know me well enough to know what I want from her without me having to detail it out.

I have spent much of my life wanting to know God’s will for me.

I wanted to know what college to attend, which career I should pursue, whom I should date, whom I should marry. Much of my relationship with God was consumed with begging Him to tell me what He wanted me to do.

I told myself that I was seeking God’s will in order to please Him and bring Him glory, but in truth I wanted to know His will in order to protect myself. I wanted to be sure that I would be successful, that I wouldn’t make any mistakes that would cause me lasting pain.

I am learning.

I am learning that God’s relationship with me is much like my relationships with my daughters. The more I know God, the more our relationship grows and the less He has to direct my every move.

Only asking God to tell me about His will does not constitute a growing relationship. That amounts to not much more than a dictatorship.

When I am with my husband, I don’t want either of us to order the other about. I want us to understand each other deeply so that orders are not necessary.

In recent years, rather than seeking God’s will for my life, I’ve spent my time seeking God.

I seek to know Him, to understand Him, to love Him more. In that loving, I trust that He will let me know if there is something specific I need to hear. I trust His Spirit in me to guide me when either I am beginning to head in the wrong direction or there is a specific thing He wants me to do.

And He does. He fulfills that trust.

I have a long way to go. I have not yet grown to the point of having an easy, conversational relationship with God throughout every day. But I want that. Oh, how I long for that kind of relationship with the One I love.

Rather than praying “God, help me to know Your will so that I can do what you want me to do”, my new prayer is “God, help me to know You more so that I can love you more.”

That is a prayer I believe He delights in answering.

And you, Solomon my son, know the God of your father and serve him with a whole heart and with a willing mind, for the Lord searches all hearts and understands every plan and thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will cast you off forever. I Chronicles 28.9

What do we do with the truly awful things of this life? With a loss of love, with a deep constant pain, with a fear that pervades our depths?

It is dangerous to attribute it all to our not loving God enough, although perhaps we could say that is often the case.

Our faith is, as CS Lewis once said, often only a house of cards.

He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down. ~ CS Lewis A Grief Observed

We walk around, believing that our foundation is solid, but in truth we are playing at faith. Our house needs a good breath of wind, for if it is never allowed to fall, it can never be rebuilt to last for eternity.

If my faith is only steady enough to endure this life, wouldn’t I want God to blow it down with whatever wind is necessary so that I can endure to the end?

I’m not sure.

I think I want this, but fear holds me back. Fear of what God, in His infinite love and wisdom, might deal out.

He never promised to be gentle.

Is any pain at all worthwhile if it brings us closer to Him, closer to the sort of life with God that Jesus lived?

The given answer should be yes, but I hesitate and pull back at the brink of giving it.

Which means that I do not yet desire God above all else.

Not truly.

Do many of us?

We give our hearts over to so many things other than God. . .As long as our happiness is tied to the things we can lose, we are vulnerable. ~ John Eldredge Walking With God

If God is truly enough, if He is what we need for happiness, for contentment, then we should be able to let go of those we love, endure that deep pain, rise above the pervasive fear, because we still have Him.

It is God who remains when all else is gone. It is God who fills us up with Himself so that we do not need anything or anyone else.

In truth, when we lose, when we hurt, we have more of Him than we have in the comfort and in the ease. That in itself should make us turn from the easy way.

If only I could believe that. Truly know it and live it.

But without the pain of learning it.

Lord, Have Mercy

a spoken word poem

(for email subscribers, click here to listen to the audio of this post) (it’s better heard than read)

Lord, have mercy

Again I am trying And again I am failing. I preach ways of love Yet all the time I am flailing. I yell and I threaten, My daughters are quailing.

I blame all but me: The crankiness of these You gave me, my own lack of sleep. I cast stones away Yet from Thee I can’t flee.

Into Thy hands

My heart, it won’t change, My faults stay the same, My thoughts won’t rearrange, My emotions I can’t exchange.

You alone can make me new, You alone can cleanse me all through. If You want my heart to resemble You, Only Your hand will do.

Thee I adore

Out of Your amazing grace, You are willing to give chase And work to mold me into one You are proud to call a son.

You give me life and joy in my strife. You are beauty, You are art You are holy, set apart.

You are worthy of all praise. Your glory is set ablaze Like the fire of sun’s rays. To You no face is raised And all heaven and earth obeys You, the Ancient of Days.

Amen

From my high school band director days:

Mrs. Giger! My bassoon solo actually sounds good now!!

Well, I’m glad. What did you do differently?

I finally followed your advice to practice the song. And it worked!!

Aha.

It is something I’ve been trying to teach my seven year old. Working hard at a challenging task brings such a sweet reward.

Any excellent and beautiful ending is the result of working hard at something difficult.

(for email subscribers, click here to listen to the audio of this post)
(it’s better heard than read)

Again I am trying
And again I am failing.
I preach ways of love
Yet all the time I am flailing.
I yell and I threaten,
My daughters are quailing.

I blame all but me:
The crankiness of these
You gave me, my own lack of sleep.
I cast stones away Yet from Thee
I can’t flee.

My heart, it won’t change,
My faults stay the same,
My thoughts won’t rearrange,
My emotions I can’t exchange.

You alone can make me new,
You alone can cleanse me all through.
If You want my heart to resemble You,
Only Your hand will do.

Out of Your amazing grace,
You are willing to give chase
And work to mold me into one
You are proud to call a son.

You give me life
and joy in my strife.
You are beauty, You are art
You are holy, set apart.

You are worthy of all praise.
Your glory is set ablaze
Like the fire of sun’s rays.
To You no face is raised
And all heaven and earth obeys
You, the Ancient of Days.