Author Archives: Elizabeth

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 I Offer My Heart To You

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We are all walking wounded.

We have all been hurt. We have all been rejected. We have all offered our hearts only to have them thrust back into our faces.

Why would we continue to offer what no one seems to want? Why would we want to keep risking when we seem to receive so much hurt in return? 

Why would we continue to make ourselves vulnerable, holding out our hearts in cupped hands, when so often the result is more bruising, more cuts, more places that will not heal?

Why?

Because this is what God did.

Yet while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son…

This. This is why.

God continually offers Himself to us. He offers us His heart.

God continues to offer what we don’t seem to want. He risks Himself and often receives hurt from us in return. He continues to make Himself vulnerable, holding out His heart to us while we simply thrust it back into His face.

While we were still sinners. When we were God’s enemies.

That was when He offered up His heart in the form of His Son.

And that is why we continue to offer our own hearts, to make ourselves vulnerable so that we can form the sort of community that demonstrates to the piece of world around us the immense and vulnerable way that God loves.

art credit: painting of Christ Crucified by Velazquez

Clasping Gold Instead of Gold Stars

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It is a difficult and forever-long process, this learning how to make everything sacred. 

It is also beautifully rewarding.

Learning how to make all things in your life sacred takes focus. It takes the sort of focus that teaches me how to be single-hearted towards God.

She is good at being very focused and single-minded, my youngest. Especially when she needs something.

The dreaded event of all mothers everywhere, her special lovey simply had to be washed at bedtime one night. My littlest couldn’t understand why she didn’t have her bunny at bedtime.


“Bunny?” “Bunny is taking a bath, darling. I will bring you Bunny as soon as she is dry.” “O-hay.”

“Can I read you a bedtime story?” “Bunny?” “Bunny is taking a bath.” “Bass? Bunny?” “Yes, a bath. I’ll bring you Bunny when she is done.” “O-hay.”

“Let’s talk about our day, shall we?” “Mommy? Bunny?”

 I sigh in frustration, yet feel a small stir in my heart. 

What if I were that focused in my pursuit of God, my pursuit of making all things in my life meaningful?

What if I, too, blocked out more of the mindless stories I read and meaningless discussions I have online in order to pursue God? What would that even look like?

You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in You. ~ Isaiah 26.3


I read about a mother and daughter on a trip together through the world. The mother speaks of a friend who accomplishes a marvelous amount of things during a day. 

What’s allowed her to realize her dream where so many others fail, including me for many years, is how carefully and sanely she chooses exactly where to spend her time and energy…Kristin’s life illustrates that it takes more than passion and a lot of work to make a dream work–it takes focus. What you think about matters, a lot. Your thoughts drive your actions.

The mother continues to talk about the myriad of women who choose to please others, to accommodate others, rather than choosing to stand up for themselves and their families.

She says that many of us choose to be “good girls going for gold stars, instead of clasping tight the gold of our lives by living as we truly desire.”

This has the scent of truth that makes me pause. If I substitute “living as God desires”, this touches something deep in my heart. 

How many times have I said “yes” to an activity, to a time commitment, even to a service opportunity, simply to please someone else or to create a certain image of myself? 

So many times those “yeses” have cost me and my family. They have kept me from clasping tight the gold of obeying God’s desire that I should, for this season, focus most on these little disciples running around my feet.

I want desperately to be single-hearted. I desire to chase after God, to pursue and focus on only what He has called me to do rather than to fritter away my moments on activities that attempt to please others.

What does this look like? How do you do this in your own life? How do you carefully and sanely choose exactly where to spend your time and energy? 

Do you have a goal, a purpose or mission statement for your family? Do you have a lens through which you filter every request, every moment’s choice? 

The mother in my book says that “change happens in the small moments, when a sliver of light finds its way through the cracks”. 

To help herself to focus, she “wrote down every single thing I did in fifteen-minute increments for three entire weeks…I asked myself a thousand times a day before acting – and, miraculously, speaking – What am I creating with this choice right now?”

I want to see everything around me as sacred, to be single-minded in pursuing God and His desires for me. I want to choose with intention rather than feelings, excuses, or circumstances. I want to please God rather than man.

I want to clasp tight the gold instead of aimlessly grasping for gold stars.

Losing My Temper Again

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Her eyes begin to flood, her hands creep up to cover her open mouth, and her body caves in on itself, trying to hide from the world around her.

My eyes narrow, my hands clench into tight balls of anger, and my body tenses up as if ready for battle.

By this sixth meltdown of the day, occurring because we took a different route home from the game, my heart is weary and my patience is gone.

My voice is low but harsh as I demand that she stop fussing and quit crying, and I spit at her to just be quiet if she can’t be happy.

Hurt radiates from her eyes as her sobs get even louder. Guilt pierces my heart as I once again realize that I lost my temper because I didn’t want to deal with her. Hard truth: She was inconvenient to me.
I remember that she hasn’t had much sleep because her sister just moved into her bed to make room for Baby. I remember that she is struggling with a new sport and feels afraid of too many kids all crowded around the same object. I remember that she is only four and that if I sometimes have irrational meltdowns, perhaps she is allowed a few as well.

This feels like my moment-by-moment cycle: I forget, I am harsh to those I love, I remember, I am guilty. 

I now speak harshly to myself, trying to will myself into perfection, into loving without fail. This always fails. I am not perfect and my will is not strong enough.

And

I am loved by One Who is pouring more than I could even imagine into the lives of my husband and children.

I and my family are loved by One Who loves us enough to call us His children. 

We are loved by One Who, before the world was even made, loved each one of us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault. 

I am loved by One Who can make up for all of my mistakes, Who tells me that His power is made perfect in my weakness, Who reassures me that His grace is sufficient. (II Cor 12.9)

My strength is not sufficient to calm my temper.

My will is not sufficient for me to love my loved ones perfectly.

My fierce desire is not sufficient to force my little ones’ hearts into a state of loving God and each other.

His grace. This is sufficient. 

I am struck with relief and gratitude, and so I sing. 

He is good when there is nothing good in me. 

He is love, when I am not, on display for all to see. 

He is my hope because He has covered all my sin. 

He is true even in my wandering.

I run to His arms and allow His power to be made perfect in my weakness. I trust all of our hearts to His love.

(song adapted from Forever Reign by Hillsong)

Slinging Mashed Potatoes

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My eldest has had trouble loving her sister lately.


When she gets angry, even if it is with herself, her first instinct is to lash out and hurt Little Sister. We’ve been working on this, trying to teach her other ways of expressing her anger, but it is a long and difficult road. She seems to lose all common sense when her emotions run high.

Sadly, this reminds me all too much of the adults in our country this time of year.

Ah, election season.


Time for everyone to lose logic and common sense and to begin slinging hateful words around like mashed potatoes in a junior high camp cafeteria.

I have been wondering how we got to this place. How did we get to the place where it seems impossible to have a compassionate discussion of ideas?

In my most recent Mars Hill Audio Journal, it was suggested that this has become part of our culture because of the direction that our public schools have taken.  When we emphasize math and science to the exclusion of teaching ethics and civics and philosophy, our citizens grow up without knowing about logic, without knowing how to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion.


Here is a clip of one of my favorite authors, N.T. Wright, speaking about the problem that we don’t even have the debate but rather have bits and pieces of a shouting match (if you are viewing this via email/in a reader, click here to view this video):

 

I can see, having been a teacher myself, how cutting logic and philosophy out of schools would appeal. It is much easier to control the flow of ideas than to teach people to think for themselves. (I am not proposing that this has been a deliberate conspiracy against free thinking in our country, rather that this has been the unintended consequence of placing a higher value on sciences than humanities. It simply helps the cause that the things that are cut out are subjects that tend to make governing more difficult.)

As I thought about how we got to this place, though, and as I listened to respected leaders speak about this issue, I realized that this is not a new problem, this problem of not teaching young people to think for themselves, of not teaching children how to think logically about an idea and spot the fallacies contained within.


In the 14th century, John Wycliffe was one of the first advocates for translating the Bible from Latin, a language that only priests and rulers could read, into the common language, accessible to all. The leaders of his day violently opposed him, wanting to keep the power of ideas to themselves. Wycliffe’s opponents cried out, “The jewel of the clergy has become the toy of the laity”. In the end, Wycliffe was declared to be a heretic and his body was exhumed and burned, and the ashes were scattered.

As much as I would like to swell with indignation at the thought of trying to control ideas, if I am honest with myself, I can relate. It is difficult for me to trust my own children. I want to control the flow of ideas, to control what they know and understand. This would be much easier than teaching them to think critically and then dealing with the inevitable hard questions that will come.

Thankfully, I know better. God has instructed me to trust. Not other people, but Him. I must trust His Spirit inside my children.


So I will continually ask for help in relinquishing control. I will trust my girls to the care of God’s Spirit and trust that He will show them what is good.

As for our country, our election season, let us be the first to use logic and common sense, to show compassion to those with whom we disagree, and trust in God’s plan and His Spirit working rather than taking the easier route of slinging mashed potatoes all over their faces.

Art Credits: Vote photo by woodsy; photos of N.T. Wright and Wycliffe stained glass from Wikipedia images

I Am Angry

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I am really angry.

On Sunday, I began thinking about every wrong and ugly thing that has touched my life recently.

My brother and his little boy, missing their wife and mommy for more than a year now.

My Papa, getting weaker and weaker, and my Gram, facing life without her husband of 63 years.

My sweet friend, who has struggled for years with disease and multiple transplants and who now has to stay at a rehab center in a town not her own, away from all she knows well.

A dear family from church, whose seven year old son was hit by a car and who is struggling to figure out their new normal as well as how to care for their other children (including a newly adopted daughter) while also caring for their son in long-term care in a far-away city.

I know that each one of you has your own list.

Are you angry yet? This world is broken and we have an enemy that takes full advantage of our brokenness. He is prowling and trying to devour all of us. He is hurting people who are dear to me, and that makes me angry.

It also makes me grateful. 

I am grateful for a God Who has already fought this enemy, has died in the battle, and has won the war through His resurrection. 

I am grateful for a God Who cares so much about bringing people to Himself, that He was willing to die. 

I am grateful for a God Who loves us so much that even though we were the ones who brought death into the world, He works crazy hard to help people stop running away from Him. 

Like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be recovered, so we must die. But that is not what God desires; rather, He devises ways so that a banished person does not remain banished from Him. ~ II Samuel 14.14

I am grateful for a God Who cares more about molding people into the image of His Son than about protecting them from danger or pain, and so is willing to allow our enemy to continue prowling. 

I am grateful that our enemy’s time is limited.

I am angry. And I will allow my anger to drive me. I will allow my anger to motivate me to work, to show God’s love to the hurting around me, to do my part in bringing God’s kingdom to earth here and now. As my dear friend said, “Give fully, believing He will fill the space.”

Why?

Because I am grateful.

Are you angry too? As I tell my four year old (and myself, too!) when rage threatens to erupt, getting angry is not wrong. It is what you do with that anger that is right or wrong. Instead of allowing that anger to harden your heart, allow it to soften your heart towards God and send you clinging to His peace. Let it send you off to battle for those that He loves. 

God has already done all the work through Jesus’s death and resurrection. Now God allows me to join in the defeat of our enemy through the all-powerful love of God that moves through me.

When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O Death, is your victory? Where, O Death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. ~ I Corinthians 15.54-58

All Things Made Sacred

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I’ve been thinking again about the idea of God being in everything, having bearing on everything, the idea that everything in our lives should be made sacred. Thus far, I have come up with two different spheres of thought (although they do overlap, of course).
In a broader or grander sense, I’ve been wondering if you can fully study anything without believing in God. (This truly is a question, not an “I have a definite opinion and am just phrasing it as a question” sort of wondering!)

Can you fully study anything without a recollection of the context in which you work? 

If, as I believe, all order, all created things, is a gift, then it seems as though if you study math or music, science or sociology, without an underlying attitude of gratitude as well as an understanding that there will always be mystery, then you are missing something. 

Without that context, are you really studying anything to its fullest potential?


As a side note, I love the idea that there will always be mystery in our world, our universe, for our curious minds to explore. The idea that we are at the pinnacle of knowledge is a bit ludicrous. As Isaac Newton said, 
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
I am interested to know what others think. Is it possible to study anything outside of the context of a creator God? (Forget, for a moment, what you believe about a relational God or about Jesus Christ…simply consider the idea of a creator God.)

In a more immediate and practical sense (I am well aware that not everyone is as much a lover of learning and studying as I am!), I am discovering that in order to find God in everything, to make everything sacred, I must work to develop habits of living more fully present where I am. I must truly pay attention to who and what is surrounding me. 

It is much too easy for me to just drift or skim through a day, usually focusing on what is to come rather than on what is. 

A huge part of living more fully present is completely relational. Every one of you reading this is a son or daughter, brother or sister, friend, spouse, parent, or grandchild. Finding God means developing every day habits of loving, patient, kind, selfless living in the community in which we are right now. It is discovering once again what family means, what neighborhood means, what community means.

It sounds, perhaps, too simple, but it is something that I can start doing and exploring right now and never reach the end. I can never get bored with this even if I work at it for the rest of my time on earth.

Will you join me?

art credit: photo of Eagle Nebula from NASA

Never! Said I

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I would never do that.
No, never! Said I.
Horrified, confident, righteous within.

Never? He said
with a gleam in his eye.
Perhaps, yes perhaps, and yet.

This little thing?
What about this small little thing?

Oh, that? That’s nothing.
Said I with a grin.

That surely won’t matter
in the vast scope of life.
So yes, I’ll do that and enjoy.

Well, what about this?
Just a teensy bit larger.
And the pleasure is much larger still.

Oh, that? That’s still nothing.
Said I, standing tall.

This too, doesn’t matter
it surely won’t hurt
those around me or go against God’s will.

Said he with the gleam
You’re so close, just look
at what could be savored and gained.

I turned ’round
and suddenly saw with despair
my righteousness lying in shreds.

I did it, yes did it.
How could I? Said I.
with shock and confusion within.

Your confidence blinded.
Said he with the gleam.
You trusted in self not in Him.

Why You Should Make Mistakes With Your Kids

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Our middle daughter (can I say “middle” when the youngest is still inside my belly?) turned two years old this week.

As I watch her and her four-year-old sister growing up so incredibly quickly, I sometimes start thinking about how much of what I do, both with them and in front of them, influences who they become.

This thought almost makes me start hyperventilating. I start feeling almost physically weighed down with the pressure to do things perfectly with my children.

I was recently reminded, however, of how much God loves these girls. He loves them even more than I love them. That idea is difficult for me to wrap my mind around, considering how deep is my love for them, but it is truth. 

God loves my girls more than I do, and He wants them to fall in love with Him even more than I want that to happen. 

And if God wants something to happen, well…

If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all–how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things? ~ Romans 8.31-32

This is, like most issues in my life, a refusal to trust, a difficulty in letting go of my pride. I have to trust God with the hearts and lives of my children and I have to realize that I am not the most important influence on them. 

God is more than able to make up for my myriad of mistakes.

In fact, I am learning that it is good for me to make mistakes.

When I make mistakes with my little ones, when I mess up in front of them, I have the chance (if only I took it more consistently!) to show them how to make mistakes. I have the opportunity to teach them how to apologize, how to ask for forgiveness, how to ask God to change your heart and help you to do better.

How to do this, how to wisely use this chance, is something that is indelibly imprinted in my heart: it is the image of my dad asking me (a tiny, humble kid!) for my forgiveness. His actions taught me a beautiful lesson.

By messing up in front of my girls, I can show them that God loves them no matter what they do. 

My eldest is already learning this lesson. Every night, as part of her four-year-old routine, she says, “Mommy? Did you know that God loves you even when you disobey?” And I respond “Yes, darling. Isn’t that a beautiful thing?”

This is what I want to teach my girls. That God loves them no matter what. That we can’t ever be good enough and that is why Jesus came to rescue us, why the Holy Spirit has to work in our hearts to heal them. I want them to rest secure in God’s love, enjoying His presence and loving Him right back.

I sit in awe and praise God that in His mercy and grace, He uses my mistakes, my imperfect and messed-up self, to show my girls just that.

A Difficult Anniversary

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He buried his wife one year ago today.

I sat at the feet of this younger brother of mine as he said goodbye to his wife of four years, the mother of his one-year-old son.

Over the past year, I watched him struggle through despair, depression, doubt as he faced a long road of raising his son alone.

I watched my nephew cry and cling to his daddy, looking for his mommy and feeling afraid that his daddy will leave him too.

Through this long struggle that still is not done, through one piece of bad news after another, through the next days and months and years of memories, where is God?

When all pleas seem to go unanswered, when even let the end be peaceful is ignored, what are we to think? 

What do I really believe about God in all of this? 

God’s Words tell us clearly that there is pain, there is heartbreak in this world. We should not be surprised. 

More often than not, God chooses not to save His people, chooses not to spare them sorrow and hardship. Hebrews 11 gives a long list of those who were killed or lost ones they loved, Jesus’ closest friends died martyr’s deaths, even His earthly father died without His intervention.

I have pondered long and hard this question of what I believe about God in the midst of “it wasn’t supposed to be like this”. Here is my conclusion. 

I know my God, His character, well enough to trust Him when I don’t understand, when I cannot see in the darkness. I know, from what He has said about Himself and from what I have seen, that He is always good and always love. I know that, if we only knew the reasons, we would adore Him for what He does. 

God promises that we will have trouble in this world. He also promises that if we are grateful to Him He will give us peace. He doesn’t promise that He will take the pain away but that we will be at peace, that we will have joy. 

Isn’t that a much bigger promise? 

No matter what, God is still God. 

Will I only praise and thank Him when He does what I like? Will I only accept from Him what I deem to be good? 

When I deeply think through the idea of declaring my circumstance to be bad, it seems incredibly arrogant. 

How can I think that I know better than God what is good? How am I more capable of naming something to be good than the One who is good? 

Will I trust that God has a beautiful, amazing plan only when I can see the beauty of it? Either God is God, and capable of having plans and reasons that I cannot comprehend, or He isn’t God, and I am silly for blaming a myth. There is not really any in-between place for the things with which I do not agree.

…if I go to Jesus, he’s not under my control either. He lets things happen that I don’t understand. He doesn’t do things according to my plan, or in a way that makes sense to me. But if Jesus is God, then he’s got to be great enough to have some reasons to let you go through things you can’t understand. His power is unbounded, but so are his wisdom and love…He can love somebody and still let bad things happen to them, because he is God–because he knows better than they do. If you have a God great enough and powerful enough to be mad at because he doesn’t stop your suffering, you also have a God who’s great enough and powerful enough to have reasons that you can’t understand.
~ King’s Cross by Timothy Keller

God is God, and since he is God, he is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere else but in his will, and that will is necessarily infinitely, immeasurable, unspeakable beyond my largest notions of what he is up to. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

I can trust God, trust in His nature.

Of course he’s not safe. Who said anything about being safe? But he’s good. He’s the king. ~ Mr. Beaver in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

When faced with the fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego told King Nebuchadnezzar that

If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and He will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if He does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up. ~ Daniel 3

When Job lost all of his children and all that he owned and was himself in great physical pain, he declared

Though he slay me, yet will I hope in Him. ~ Job 13.15

No matter what, I will praise God and offer Him my gratitude, my sacrifice of praise. 

God tells us over and over in His word that He has a beautiful plan for humanity and creation as a whole. 

And that he has a beautiful plan for each of our lives. 

Sometimes I doubt this promise, this truth. 

And then I look at Jesus, at His cross. 

I’ve been clinging to Romans 8.32 through all of this:

He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all–how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

If God ever had to prove Himself, prove His love for us, prove that He is taking care of us, He has more than proved it all through the cross. 

I’ve also been thinking a lot about Hezekiah. In II Kings 20, he pleaded with God to “change his story”, to give him more life when God had told him (through Isaiah) that he was going to die. God did change His mind that time, gave him fifteen more years of life. And in that fifteen extra years, Hezekiah’s son Manasseh was born. This son that wouldn’t have been born if Hezekiah hadn’t asked God to change the ending of his story ended up as king and “lead (Israel) astray, so that they did more evil than the nations the LORD had destroyed before the Israelites”. ~ II Kings 21.9 

Our desired story ending versus God’s desired story ending. 

Perhaps, just perhaps, God really does know best. Perhaps He does know which story will bring about a beautiful, redeemed, transfigured people. 

When through the deep waters I call you to go, 
The rivers of woe shall not overflow; 
For I will be with you, your troubles to bless, 
And sanctify to you your deepest distress. 

The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose, 
I will not, I will not desert to its foes; 
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake, 
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake. 
~ How Firm a Foundation, att. John Keith, 1787 (modernized) 


a re-post from the archives for today, the anniversary of Kristina’s death
credit for images: Lion photo, painting by Simeon Solomon, Cross photo

Again

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Our family has been struck again, less than a year after our Kristina died, and I am reminded of how much I hate cancer, of how much I hate death. 

To an outsider, it may not seem quite as much the tragedy as before. This is my Papa, after all, my eighty-six year old grandpa. He is not fighting for the chance to raise his children or wishing for a chance to grow old with his spouse after only a few years of marriage. He has lived a good and full life. 

And yet it is a tragedy. Death itself is a tragedy, and while I am tempted to rail at God against the ugliness of it all, deep inside my heart I know that it is our sin, our rebellion that let death into our world in the first place and it is God’s mercy that gave us life again.

Cancer and death are tragedy, they are ugly. For our family, this cancer is as ugly as any other. Yes, there is difference between a twenty-six year old and an eighty-six year old. And yet, I am greedy. 

I am greedy for more time. I want to yell at God, “NO! It is not enough! Thirty-four years with my Papa is not enough. I want more time! I want him to meet this baby growing inside of me. I want all of my children to know and remember him. You did not give me enough time!” 

All this while stomping my foot like the child that I am.

Yet my heart has been changed through Kristina’s struggle and death. I have learned a little more about Who God is and who I am in relation to Him. I have learned about obedience in the midst of the ugly. 

And I have learned that I have a choice in all of this. I can choose to blame God, letting my anger and grief drive me away from Him, or I can choose to be obedient and thank Him, clinging to Him and letting Him be all that I need.

So at least for today (I know I still have disobedience, some yelling and foot-stomping inside of me for another day), I will choose this:

Thank You, Abba, for the gift of my Papa and my Gram. 

Thank You for giving me so many years with them, years of such close relationship and of so many beautiful times with them.


Thank You for giving them so many talents and abilities and for giving them the desire to teach and share those skills with me.

Thank You for their wisdom, for all that I have learned from them, for all of the wisdom that I now have stored in my own heart.

Thank You most of all for making their hearts like Yours. Thank You for allowing me to see You in them, to see in their lives how You want me to live. Thank You for showing me through them how to live faithfully as a child of Yours, as a spouse and as a parent.

Thank You for the beauty that is their lives. 

Thank You, Abba, for Your grace.