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.

Why?

Posted on January 9, 2015 by Elizabeth

Why?

It is a cry that explodes from a pain-filled heart. It is a cry that whimpers from a lonely soul.

It is a cry that propels its way out of all who hurt in one way or another.

Why did my twenty-six year old sister-in-law have to die in such a horrible way?

Why did my Papa labor in pain to leave this earth on the very same day that that I labored in pain to bear my daughter into it?

Why do my friends suffer illness and miscarriage and even death while we still are young?

Why?

And yet I have to wonder: what would we get if we got an answer to our questions of why?

Would we gain satisfaction? Would it really change anything if God sat down in front of us and explained everything to our face?

We would still have to face the empty chairs. We would still be faced with the memories of pain.

Job asked why. He didn’t just ask, he demanded the chance to ask God why. He shouted for the opportunity to plead his case before God.

And God came.

He came not with reasons but with glory.

God didn’t reveal His ultimate plan, He revealed Himself.

God didn’t show the reasons for what happened, He showed His face.

And Job?

Even covered with sores and ashes, he looks oddly like a man who has asked for a crust and been given the whole loaf. ~ Frederick Buechner

In answer to all of our questions, may God be gracious enough to give us Himself.

God’s Idea of New

Posted on January 2, 2015 by Elizabeth

Due to holidays, sick children, a bad cold in my own head, and being eight months pregnant, I’m diving into the archives this week. May God grant you deeper knowledge of Him and deeper love for Him during this new year.

What is it about the word “new” that makes us so excited?

New life, new try, new baby, new piano.

I’m not big on resolutions, but there’s something about the start of a new year that makes me hopeful.

Some of you have had a really difficult year, full of sorrow and pain.

Others of you have had a wonderful year, full of laughter and beauty.

Either way, most of us are ready for new.

A new year. A new start. A new attempt.

There is much in His Word about what is God’s idea of new.

One of the biggest ideas is the new covenant.

I’ve always been struck by the ridiculousness of the idea that God would make any sort of a promise with us, that He would uphold His side of the covenant even when we fail to keep our own promise. It is a beautiful thing of grace that God would be faithful to His own covenant FOR us through Christ.

‘The time is coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers…because they broke my covenant…’ declares the LORD. This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,’ declares the LORD. ‘I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.’ ~ Jeremiah 31.31-33

What is the new covenant that God makes with us, the covenant that is different from the one that we broke?

In the same way, after the supper He took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.’ ~ Luke 22.20

Jesus. That birth we just finished celebrating leads to the new covenant drenched in His blood.

Hebrews 8 and 9 works through all of the fascinating details of the old covenant and how it foreshadows the new covenant. Towards the end, after explaining the system of sacrificing goats and bulls and using their blood to take away the sins of the people, the author of Hebrews says this:

How much more, then, will the blood of Christ…cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! For this reason, Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance–now that He has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.

Gratitude swells for this new covenant that cost so much. This new covenant leads us around to another use of the word “new”: in Christ, we are a new person, a new creation.

Back in the Old Testament, God promises in Ezekiel 36:

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you, I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

The fulfillment of that promise?

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! ~ II Corinthians 5.17

And this:

You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. ~ Ephesians 4.22-24

Praise God!!! What mercy! What grace!

Again, gratitude swells, the beauty of it grows.

Because God was willing to make a new covenant with us when we broke the original one, because Christ was willing to spill His blood to seal this covenant, we are now a new creation in Christ, created to be like God!

And just think…think of the new that is still ahead of us!

Isaiah prophecies this beautiful thing in Isaiah 65:

Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind…I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more. Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years…my chosen ones will long enjoy the works of their hands.

We are given a beautiful glimpse of the future fulfillment of all of this in Revelation 21:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away…and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and He will live with them. They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’ Then He said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.’

It sounds as though God Himself gets excited about the word “new”.

Perhaps our own excitement over new things in this world is there for a reason, is placed deep inside of us by Him in Whose image we were created, is given to us to point us toward the most beautiful new thing of all.

Art credits: Last Supper by Da Vinci; cross and winter sky by Davenport; cross and sunset by vivekchugh; Golden City

Christmas

Posted on December 26, 2014 by Elizabeth

Merry Christmas! May God grant you joy and peace no matter what else is going on around you this week.

Waiting

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Elizabeth

It is a time of waiting.

It is a time of waiting in darkness, of waiting in grief, of waiting in loneliness.

We are a people living in a land of darkness, in a land of the shadow of death, and as much as we would wish to skip the waiting and rush straight into the glorious light of Christmas, we are still living in Advent.

It is same as our desire to skip over the ugly of Good Friday and rush straight into the beauties of Easter Sunday. Yet we cannot get to the power of Easter without first living through the pain of Friday.

And we cannot get to the light and wonder of Christmas without first living through the darkness and tenuous hope of Advent.

Even our Christmas hymns hint at this. They speak of a longing for deliverance, a yearning for Immanuel, God with us.

O come, o come Immanuel and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here.

No more let sins and sorrows grow nor thorns infest the ground.

It is a time to linger with the deepest longing of our heart: the longing for God to come, the longing for God to make our world and our hearts right again.

Our world was a land of darkness with only the whisper of a light to come that anyone was able to hold on to.

And then.

And then the end of the story broke gloriously into the middle of the story. The Christ, the Messiah, the end of our story came bursting through with light and stars, with angels and worship.

The light came and shone upon the people living in a land of great darkness. The light arrived and we saw that the darkness was not the final word.

We still live in a land of darkness, but now we have more than a whisper. Now we have a glimpse of the Light Himself to hold on to. We have seen the breaking dawn and we know the end of the story.

It is still a time of waiting for yet another Advent.

It is still a time of waiting in the darkness. If we cannot linger through the darkness of our world’s need for the light, if we cannot dwell long in our own need for the darkness of our hearts to be banished, then we cannot ever reach the hope and joy of Christmas.

The deepness of the darkness is what shows us the glory of the light.

So wait. Linger in your waiting.

And then, when Advent is over, when Christmas Day finally arrives, you will be able to revel in the joy and hope of the light that came and that promises to come again.

This time to banish all darkness for good.

Art credit: The Adoration of the Shepherds by Charles Le Brun

Embodied Souls

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Elizabeth

What does it mean to be human?

It is a question asked by many. Perhaps asked by all in the way that they live and learn if not with words from the mouth.

It is a question that was recently asked by the Chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities, William “Bro” Adams. He is exploring how the study of the humanities can answer questions about life, how we should live, and the values by which we should live.

Adams desires for us as a nation to explore how the study of philosophy and humanities can help us to understand what it means to be human.

There is nothing new in this. Throughout the ages philosophers and psychologists alike have tried to figure out what it means to be human, what a human really is. They have laid out theory after theory, description after description about humanity.

We as Christians and theologians then take those theories and descriptions and use them to figure out Christ’s humanity. Hear that again: we use our own selves to figure out the piece of Jesus that is human.

Does that seem backward to anyone else?

Karl Barth, one of the great theologians of the twentieth century, wondered how we could possibly know what it means to be human if all we know about being human comes from a messed up, broken state of humanity due to our unnatural state of sin. Christ’s humanity therefore shows us what it means to be human rather than the other way around.

Jesus was an embodied soul, an ensouled body, to use a phrase from Karl Barth. For Jesus, being human was always being a soul and a body. Even after the resurrection He made it a point to eat and drink to show us that even after our own resurrection we will still be embodied souls.

We have always been body and soul, and of a finite nature. Before The Fall, we were finite in body and soul but were allowed to continue living by way of the Tree of Life. When Adam and Eve sinned, we were still finite, still formed from the dust of the earth, but now we were subject to death and decay because we were cut off from the Tree of Life.

Then the LORD God said, “…Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever –” therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden…

Our bodies are part of what constitutes our identity, as important as our thoughts, our feelings, our will.

Is this important? Does it really matter whether we view our bodies as important or as inconvenient?

This is where this post could grow to become book-long, but I will try to only brush up against potential ramifications rather than expanding on each one.

If our bodies are just as important as our souls, then we should spend time caring for our bodies in our daily lives. We should take the time to think about how we care for our babies’ bodies even while in the womb and whether things such as prenatal testing is more helpful or harmful in this regard. We should take the time to consider the end of life and how much should be done to keep our bodies alive.

The idea that our bodies matter a great deal affects the ethics of medicine, of medical research and technology. If we begin to think of our bodies as unimportant or, worse, as impediments to a good life, then our decision making about the health of those bodies begins to become skewed.

It is as important to the decisions we make every day as it is to the decisions that we will make at the end of our lives or at the beginning of our children’s lives.

Perhaps thinking deeply about what it means to be human, about the nature of our own selves, about the importance of our souls and our bodies, is something that is too important to be left to philosophers and psychologists alone.

Perhaps it is something that is meant to be pondered by all of us.

Pondered and prayed over.

Art credits: Nativity by Antonio da Correggio; Supper at Emmaus by Michelangelo da Caravaggio

Coming

Posted on December 5, 2014 by Elizabeth

It is a waiting.

A breathless hope that is sometimes too fragile to look at straight on.

Will He come?

He came once before and has promised to come at the end.

But will He come now?

We don’t want to be disappointed and so we hide our deepest waiting with the waiting for other things.

We wait for chaotic colors and shiny sounds.

We wait for hustling and bustling and we fill up our days with old and new memories to avoid peering hard into hearts.

We wait for silver bells and for sugar plums so that we don’t have to feel our desperate waiting for Him.

Will He come? Will He show up at this time and in this season?

In Advent is waiting and in Advent is coming and if we wait, will He come in a way that brings the peace and joy we crave?

Stop.

Breathe.

Close your eyes.

Listen.

He is here.

He has come and He will come and He will continue to come for as long as we are here, which is for always and forever.

He gives breath to your hope and whispers into your waiting that He loves you and He delights in you.

It is a waiting.

A waiting that bears the fruit of His greatest gift of all.

He has come.

Art credit: photos of Christmas color by R.K. Sewell Photography

Seeking Knowledge

Posted on November 28, 2014 by Elizabeth

Children have control over so little in their lives.

We grownups like to think that we have control over our lives, but perhaps that is only illusion.

Daddies and Mommies tell them when to get up and when to lie down, when to eat and when to play, what to wear and where to go. Children will often grasp at anything that will give them more power over their lives.

One of the things I’ve noticed that children use to gain a little control is knowing what name to call things, especially when that thing frightens them a little. When she was smaller, my eldest daughter’s constant response to a loud noise was That was? That was? Now that she is a little older, she asks What was that? That noise? Knowing the name of something gives her power over it, makes it seem a little less scary.

She seeks to know.

Perhaps she is not very different from many adults.

Scientists, medical researchers, geneticists, stay-at-home moms who like to learn…people want to know what name to call things, want to know about things, because that gives them power over those things, those ideas. If we know how something was put together or how something works or even just what to call it, we feel as though we have power over our world.

We seek to know.

A long time ago, in a land far away, around the beginning of the Christian Church (perhaps even earlier), there lived a group of people we call Gnostics who believed (among other things) that matter, the material universe, was bad and that deliverance from our material form could only come through special knowledge.

Not long ago at all, in a land not at all far away, there lived a group of people who believed that their minds were all-powerful, that the dying of their flesh was bad, that through knowledge they could overcome all physical limitations. They could eat poorly and take vitamin supplements. They could ignore their children and send them to therapists. They could extend life and choose the sort of life that they procreated through the technology they created. They believed that saving our natural resources wasn’t important because their minds, human ingenuity in the form of science and technology, could surely take care of that problem as well.

There is nothing new under the sun…

In C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man (in 1943!), he said that mankind’s power to do exactly what it wants seems to be growing all the time through humanity’s so-called “conquest of Nature” – the progress of applied science. However, “each new power won by man is a power over man as well.” We can throw bombs from airplanes but can also be bombed ourselves; a race of birth-controllers is a race whose own birth has been controlled.

We seek to know. We seek to control.

Why do we feel that Nature is bad, that the material world needs to be conquered? Even as Christ-followers we seek knowledge because we fear. We want to know and to name so that we can control that which is uncontrollable.

Is the pursuit of knowledge wrong? Not at all.

Paul says in Philippians:

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God. ~Philippians 1.9-11 (Italics mine)

Paul seeks to know.

Paul also said this:

I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength. ~Philippians 4.12-13

Paul is definitely not in control, nor does he seek to be.

Is this a Faustian-like power, this power of knowledge? A power that gives away everything good that God created in order to gain power and control over His creation?

It can be.

As Christ-followers, do we seek knowledge because we are fearful of the future and wish to wrest control of His creation from the One Who set it all in motion?

Sometimes I do.

Perhaps instead we can seek knowledge in order to praise God with our minds. Perhaps we can seek knowledge in gratitude for our imagination and intelligence, in gratitude for the complexity of His creation.

I suppose that, as with most that God has created, the goodness or evil of the pursuit of knowledge depends upon the heart of His creation.

May our hearts and minds seek to know out of thanksgiving rather than out of fear.

*etching is “Faust” by Rembrandt

*edited from the archives

Famine in the Land

Posted on November 21, 2014 by Elizabeth

Amos, the herdsman turned prophet.

The visionary with the visions of things he kept talking God out of doing.

Too much! he would say, and God would agree.

Locusts forming up to devour the land.

Too much! And they were turned away.

Fire consuming the deep places in his country.

Too much! And they were put out.

Amos looked around at the men lounging around eating their fill of the richest of foods and throwing the rest to the hounds. He looked around at the women dressed in the finest of cloth and adorned with the choicest of jewels. He looked around at the leaders and their wives lying on beds of the softest linens and dabbing themselves with the sweetest perfumes.

Amos also looked at the men and women who fought with the rats for the stalest of bread, who froze when the wind whipped through the largest of holes in their shirts, who slept with the cockroaches on the hardest of stone.

He said there would be famine. A famine and a thirst and a loss of the sun in the middle of the day. But not a famine of bread or a thirst of water.

No, this famine would be far worse. It is a shortage of the words of God. It is a loss of the light of His face.

The rich and the lovely would be doomed to run from sea to shining sea, searching and thirsting for the Word of Life.

It is a loss of light, a loss of life. It is the loss of God himself.

Towards the end, God will make himself so scarce that the world won’t even know what it’s starving to death for. ~ Frederick Buechner in Peculiar Treasures

Too much!

May God have mercy and not abandon us to our own selves and desires.

Lord, we would have more of You.

My Little Circle of Lamplight

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Elizabeth

We wander around in the dim light.

Lost in a twilight we hope will end in glorious dawn yet are frightened may only lead to utter darkness, we stumble around and squint about us for a path.

We can ever only see the next step, sometimes two, but we still strain our eyes towards the horizon, searching for a ray of the sun.

Other shadows stumble near us and we are as likely to swing out clumsily to protect our frightened selves as we are to welcome them as companions on a journey.

All we can do is cling to Jesus, to that name, whatever it means to each of us. We cling to the Word and are disappointed that it is a lamp and not a floodlight.

Yet as we stumble and search, if we keep our eyes on that dim pool of lamplight, we find that it is enough. We find that a circle of candlelight is enough to keep us from falling flat on our faces if we will only keep our eyes on our own path instead of casting them around farther ahead or behind.

Asking for our daily bread keeps us crying out that we need Him every hour rather than only every week or so.

And so the dim light helps rather than hinders. It keeps us clutching the One who knows where we ought to be rather than stubbornly crawling off the edge of a cliff because we have the right and freedom to do so.

Perhaps the searchlight of God would be enough to turn us to stone and make us beg for the soft familiar lamplight again.

We all wander around in the murky light.

And if we can only remain content in our small circle of candlelight, then one day we will see, perhaps only out of the corner of our eyes at first, the first rays of Him who is the Light of the world breaking through our mist and burning it all away for a glorious dawn.

I need Thee, oh, I need Thee;
Every hour I need Thee;
Oh, bless me now, my Savior,
I come to Thee.

My Prison

Posted on November 7, 2014 by Elizabeth

Sometimes I live in a prison.

It is a prison of my own making, but it is a dingey dungeon nonetheless.

These bars over here are the guilt I give myself whenever I read instead of playing with my children. The guilt that I feel Every Single Time.

Those dirty, cinder block walls over there are the pressures I put on myself to be sure I am teaching my kids every single thing they will ever need to know in their lives. Perfectly.

That low, suffocating ceiling up there is the stress of trying to be the perfect wife, with the perfect body and the stellar cooking skills. The pressure of trying to give without taking. Ever.

It is an unreasonable prison, and I know it. Deep down I know that I am imperfect and that it is okay to rest, to receive, to care for myself.

Gratefully, I live here only some of the time. Only some of the time do I give in to the pressure I feel around me; only some of the time do I tuck deep into my heart those perfect photos on Pinterest.

The rest of the time?

Those are the times in which I wisely choose to listen, instead, to a God who says “I love you No Matter What”. Those are the times in which I choose to listen to One who tells me that His is a “never stopping, never giving up, unbreaking, always and forever love.”

And in those times?

There is release.

Art Credits: photo of prison 1 and last photo of open door by Miguel Saavedra, photo of prison 2 by Colin Brough, photo of cellar prison from rgbstock. photo of prison window by Chris Hitchcock,