Life's tapas

We're going out for tapas tonight with our son and his fiance to celebrate their engagement, which became official earlier this week. (We're so happy for them!) Ordering rounds of "small plates" of sun-soaked Mediterranean flavors is a fun way to eat a meal, and a perfect recipe for community.

I have a lot of small plates in my life right now: family, two part-time jobs, the opportunity to edit a book-length manuscript, and lots of opportunities to serve. Some of them don't even feel much like work, because they are flowing out of what God is already doing in my life.

I pray I'm offering the empty plates back to God as I go.

In honor of a tonight's tapas celebration, here's a list of some yummy little plates of media consumables on my life's table right now:

My current "to read" pile:
The Sacredness of Questioning Everything - David Dark (just started it)
The Magic Barrel - Bernard Malamud
Notes From the Underground - Doestoyevsky
The Monkey and The Fish - Dave Gibbons
Writing Down The Bones - Natalie Goldberg (halfway through it)

My top three favorite podcasts:
This American Life
Internet Monk
Aliyah Revolution

Four worship songs resonating with me right now:
You Won't Relent - Misty Edwards
Hero - Jars of Clay
Daughters of Jerusalem - David Brymer
Never Let Go - David Crowder Band

Most interesting documentary I've seen this summer:
Hiding and Seeking

Favorite pickles:
Osem canned
(Just threw that one in for fun.)

Late summer reading list

Recently, I've had an opportunity to read a handful of interesting non-fiction books. The first, Keri Wyatt Kent's Listen: Finding God in the Story of Your Life, was a wonderful treat to myself. The next three were review copies offered to bloggers by publishers. The books have taken me from contemplative life to life between the sheets, from a theological throwdown to a challenge to rise above the rabble of pop culture.

Read on to find out which one of these books I didn't like one bit.


Listen: Finding God in the Story of Your Life (Jossey-Bass) is an accessible, thoughtful invitation to a deeper life with God. The divisions of the 193-page hardcover offers a great overview of the way author Keri Wyatt Kent has tackled the subject of intentional listening: Section 1, Listening To Your Life, explores our passions, struggles and longings. The next section discusses Listening to Others in community and through a committment to compassion. The final section of this book, Listening Practices, is an introductory journey through the spiritual disciplines of silence, lectio divina and prayer.

Wyatt Kent's writing voice is luminous and wonderfully honest. She puts her life and struggles onto the pages as appropriate, encouraging illustrations meant to urge us along. She's a smart, funny suburban mom, kneading her passion for God into the dough of everyday life - and letting the rest of us know that a deeper, wiser, more intentional life is possible. Highly recommended.


Even though the picture above looks like a floating fig leaf, it is actually the cover of Pastor Andrew Farley's recent release The Naked Gospel (Zondervan). The subtitle of this book is "The truth you may never hear in church". I've actually heard his version of "grace versus law" over the years in some of the dispensationalist churches we've attended.

Farley is understandably angry about his own past addiction to religious performance ("My intensity hit its pinnacle when I could no longer sleep at night unless I had shared Christ with someone that day"). His Martin-Luther-like "Saved by grace through faith, and not works" breakthrough in intellectual understanding about the nature of grace helped move him off the performance treadmill and onto the horse he's riding in this volume.

I disagreed with his view of the place of the Old Testament and the need for confession, just for starters. But his smug, graceless delivery that left me feeling like I'd been slimed by the time I'd finished the book. Farley had some clever illustrations to support his points, though it was a bit distracting to have him insist on presenting them as fact ("In 1998, my father was killed in a car accident...") instead of the illustrations they are (his dad wasn't killed in a car accident - gotcha!). The book's tone is unnecessarily defensive and combative, and by the time I finished its 231 pages, I all I wanted was a piece of good news. This attempt to strip away religion from the gospel wasn't it.

No More Headaches: Enjoying Sex & Intimacy in Marriage (Tyndale/Focus On The Family) would make a helpful read for a monogamous wife and mother of a couple of young kids who has been married for about 10 years. Dr. Juli Slattery tackles differences between men and women in this overview of married sexuality, coaching her readers toward a greater commitment to their mates, themselves and God.

She's frank without being salacious, and discusses desire, physiology, our past baggage, life in our hyper-sexualized society, and the effects of parenthood on intimacy in far more detail than you'd hear at church, but less detail (thank you) than you'd hear on Oprah. Slattery would affirm my own (thank you) response - she observes that younger and older women tend to have different comfort levels with discussions about sex. Younger women who have been brought up in our sex-saturated culture keep far more on the table when discussing their sex lives with their friends than we boomer women do. My own experience working with college women has confirmed this.

She does a good job connecting the physical to the emotional and spiritual, while avoiding specific prescriptions (how adventurous should a couple get?) in favor of general principles. Slattery's friendly writer's voice and lots of anecdotes from her own counseling practice make the book like a heart-to-heart conversation with a smart, wise Christian girlfriend - and a useful overview/gentle course correction for some church-going women.


For a heart-to-heart of a different kind, Jordan Christy's How to Be a Hepburn in a Hilton World: The Art of Living with Style, Class and Grace (Hachette) is the kind of advice book most every generation needs. Unfortunately, the people who most need Jordan Christy's advice - the skanky girls who use Paris/Britney/Kardashians as role models - would probably never pick up this breezy book. But for young women trying to figure out how to navigate a world where immodesty and agressive sexual behavior rules, Christy's smart, sweet book of advice is like pep talk from someone who is channeling a combo of Miss Manners, your wise grandmother, and yes, Audrey Hepburn.

With chapters discussing topics like language, friendships, clothing and dating, you'd think this book might read like a giant, pruny scold from an never-married aunt born during Queen Victoria's reign. But Christy writes with the bubbly confidence of someone who is navigating these waters NOW while making intentional choices that allow her to rise above vapid shallowness. She tosses store names (Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters) and sprinkles pop culture references (Ashton Kutcher) into timeless advice like "don't call him - wait for him to call you".

In fact, those date-stamped "right now" references may give this book a relatively short shelf life. But for young (20-35) women trying to figure out who they're going to be, Christy's cheerful wisdom may be just what they need right now to march into their tomorrows with class and a cute pair of shoes.

Suffer the little ones...

During our search for a church some time ago, we landed for a season at a small congregation that had been a part of the community for about 20 years. The people seemed friendly enough, the corporate worship was solid. We appreciated the family feel of the place, and hoped we might have found a good fit.

My first clue that something was terribly wrong was when I volunteered to help in the nursery. I was a newcomer to the church, so no one knew me beyond those little generic lobby conversations that sandwich a worship service: "Beautiful weather today", "Wonder how the Bears will do this afternoon", "Have a good week". The lady in charge of nursery scheduling asked me one or two questions about who I was and where I'd come from, then added me to the rotation.

My first Sunday in there, she came in to show me where wipes and graham crackers were, and mentioned that a middle-school girl might be in to help me. Then I was on my own for the next hour and a half. I had a half a handful of kids that first day and didn't know anything about any of them. The three parents dropped their kids off, and a couple of them came to check in partway through the service, but otherwise, I was on my own.

I stayed on the rotation for the next few months. One Sunday, I spent the service caring for a single child. While the little boy played happily with a roomful of toys, I spent the morning pondering what a nearly-empty nursery communicated about the church. (My conclusion: The place had given up on growth and outreach and had instead become a religious clubhouse.) We left shortly afterward, because the place then went through some dramatic leadership changes that caused the place to further contract.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Leadership Summit at Willow Creek, thanks to my new position with Catalyst Lake County. The speakers were terrific, and the event had much to say about encouraging leaders' soul health and casting a vision for service to others beyond their own tribe. The speaker who left the biggest impression on many was Compassion's Wess Stafford, who told about his own call to ministry as a result of the abuse he suffered as a child in a missionary kid boarding school in Africa. He explained that the missions organization with whom his parents served sent their failed and washed up missionaries to teach at the school. They threw anyone with a pulse at the job, and horrific physical and sexual abuse was a part of the institution's culture as a result.

I saw the same expediency at work in a micro way at that little clubhouse church. Kids weren't important (and there were so few of them) - and they were willing to throw anyone with a pulse at the "problem" of nursery.

Most large churches have formal screening policies in place for those who work with children. But for those of you attending smaller churches, I'm curious - what does your church do to evaluate and monitor the people working with your kids?

Heading home via Deuteronomy 8

Imagine being a thirty-something who'd spent your entire life living a nomadic existence in the desert. You'd played on the hard-baked sand as a child. You'd nursed your babies in a tent pitched next to a lone barren tree. The repetition of a lifetime manna-diet mirrored the bleached, unchanging environment in which you'd laughed, loved, lived.

And worshipped: your Sabbath rest the only punctuation in an unchanging march of days through an unchanging terrain toward...

Maybe you'd forgotten whatwherewhy. A life spent in the desert gave you no context for the "what's next" of this journey. All you'd known was the journey, and it was home.

God handed ancient Moses the stopwatch and whispered, "Time's up". Moses told his people:
^"Observe the commands of the LORD your God, walking in his ways and revering him. For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land—a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills" ( Deut. 8:6-9).

Can you imagine these fairy-tale images being spoken into the souls of people who'd never experienced anything but desert? What context could these 40-and-under wanderers have for a watered land, a variety of dining options, a land from which to build, to create, to call home?

Yesterday at church as I mediated on these verses, the unreality of these words struck me. I am a wanderer, and there is a destination. This I know. But when someone attempts to describe my destination - heaven - my deepest longings and imagining beyond the mapped terrain of my own soul can not comprehend where I am going. I have no context. It is an act of faith to pull up my tent pegs and move purposefully toward home.

God's recycling program

"I'm sorry, but there's no room for you in the program here," my advisor looked up from a stack of papers centered on the desk in front of her. "If you're convinced you want to pursue this teaching certification, there are other colleges you might consider if you're willing to transfer out of state."

I bit the inside of my cheek, willing myself not to burst into tears. This deadbolted door was not not the way things were supposed to happen. The deaf education program at Illinois State University had an enrollment cap, and I'd tried for three semesters to move into one of the rare open spots in the program. I couldn't immediately afford to transfer to an out-of-state school.

I returned to my home town and entered the work force in search of a Plan B. Or C. I was certain that working with deaf children was God's Plan A for me. Through a long, challenging process of relinquishment, I learned to unclench my fists from Plans A-C (and D-Z, too), offering my gifts, skills, experiences and desires to Him to use as He saw fit. Or not use at all.

I recently spent a bit of time reflecting on what He's placed in those emptied, worshiping hands as I moved through life. (You know where this is going, don't you?)

He has recycled those gifts, skills and desires, asking me to use them in ways I never could have dreamed. Sign language, for example, trained me to quickly access my brain's thesaurus function because a single sign can represent a number of spoken vocabulary words. This training has been invaluable to me in my vocation as a writer.

God's redemptive recycling program doesn't waste a single moment of our life's experiences. Joseph expressed this truth perfectly after he revealed his identity to his betraying brothers after years of separation: "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives" (Gen. 50:20).

What about you? How has God recycled your past gifts, skills, experiences and/or desires? Please send an e-mail to mishvl@yahoo.com telling me how He's using something from your past in your life right now. I'd love to hear a bit of your story!

As a way to honor you and the One who makes all things new, everyone who e-mails me even a single sentence on the topic will be entered into a drawing for a $25 gift certificate from Christian Book Distributors. Keep it for yourself - or gift it to a friend who is experiencing a deadbolted door of his or her own.

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Writing and speaking news

I'm once again offering e-mail tutorial services to home schooling families. If you or someone you know is looking for personalized, step-by-step writing instruction for a child in grades 5-12, please point them toward my website: homepagewriting.com.

I'll be leading a couple of workshops at the Wisconsin Christian Writers Conference on Saturday, October 17. This affordable event promises to be a great day filled with practical tools for aspiring authors. Visit the website for registration information.

If your group is looking for a Word-rooted, Spirit-led speaker, I'd welcome the opportunity to help connect our stories to His with messages and prayer ministry based on the parables. I'm also happy to work with you to develop a message or a retreat tailored for your group. Contact me at mishvl@yahoo.com.

I had an opportunity to be a part of two very different book projects both releasing this fall. One is a devotional for women entitled Quiet Reflections Of Hope (Baker/Revell). This simple, thoughful volume would make a lovely gift for a busy woman in need of a brief, focused bit of time with the Lord each morning. The second project is still under wraps for another few weeks. I can tell you that it is a creative and worshipful volume. I'll send details as soon as the publisher gives the group of contributors the OK to reveal the project. (I can't wait!)

And if you're in search of a fresh, Biblically-faith exploration of more than 24 of the stories Jesus told, visit www.theparablelife.com to order my books Parablelife: Living the stories Jesus told in real time and Uprooted: Living a parable life from the inside out.

Up North Tour Guide?

When we first moved to Wisconsin in 1995, we had no idea how deep the pull of "up north" had on the psyche of the entire state. People didn't have to say the name of a place. They'd just get a misty look in their eyes and say things like "We're going up north this weekend" or "I'm heading up north to hunt as soon as I'm off of work Friday." Only happy things apparently seem to everyone who headed "up north". It had the aura of a giant clubhouse where only those who'd been grandfathered in by culture and relatives (like actual grandfathers) could enter.

We used to joke that if we told people we'd graduated from Hurley High School ("Go Midgets!") and thrown in some off-hand references to "cabin", "snowmobile" and "muskie", our transplantation to Wisconsin's fiercely provincial soil would have been a non-issue. There is deep reverence across southern Wisconsin for those who come from "up north" to work in the Big City, mostly because the know where the open door back into "up north" life is located. They will use it. They will retire up there.

And they will access it on weekends and during gun deer season until they're free to return permanently.

As we drove across WI yesterday, I found myself wondering about what people love most about lake-n-tree life, and why "up north" is such a powerful magnet. Feel free to e-mail me at mishvl@yahoo.com if you can pretend to be a tour guide and explain the magic of life in the pines to me.