Love is in the details

When we were in Youth ministry all those years ago we were poor… dirt poor.  And most of the time we did not get reimbursed for things like having teenagers drop by the house after school for a snack and a bit of conversation.  I always assured the kids that if they stopped by the house I could always make popcorn and Koolade even if I had nothing else in the house.  Sometimes I had enough ingredients to make cookies.  And we tried to keep a stash of frozen pizzas on hand for those spontaneous “parties” when a bunch of kids would land at our house after youth group.  But anyone who knows teenagers knows that they are worse than a plague of locust- they can clean out your pantry in a matter of minutes.

I discovered that many of our kids really liked the strawberry lemonade I made from scratch.  I started freezing large ziplocks full of lemonade to have on hand too.  Eventually I started giving away frozen lemonade as birthday presents to some of my girls who particularly loved it.  It may seem like an odd gift, but I paid attention to what people enjoyed and remembered what made them happy- that was the real gift.  The girls loved getting frozen lemonade for their birthdays.

Here in Costa Rica, in the absence of Starbucks and Caribou Coffee shops, I have started a new trend among our students.  I serve iced coffee.  I have asked various missions teams to bring me bottles of coffee syrups and we set up a regular coffee shop in my kitchen.  Our “regular” students know the formula now and can instruct the newbies in how to prepare the best iced coffee drinks on the planet.

Just because I know someone will ask me for the recipe, I’m going to share it here.  It’s pretty easy.  It’s a cold press base which means you dump a small package of coffee into a pitcher, fill with cold water, and put it in the fridge for 24 hours.  Then you scoop and strain off the grounds and top off the pitcher with more cold water if needed.  That’s the coffee base.  Now you need sweet cream.  This is made my mixing one can of evaporated milk and one can of sweetened condensed milk.  To make the iced coffee drink, start with a cup of ice.  Pour half of the cup full of coffee base and half full of sweet cream.  You can add syrups if you like.  I like to drink mine with a straw… because I like straws. 🙂

Anyhow, my point is that love is in the little things like paying attention to the details of a person, knowing the things they like, remembering their birthday, or being causally gracious when they stop by your house unannounced.  You don’t need to be fancy to show someone they are loved and accepted.  Nothing makes me happier than to see my kitchen full of teenagers or University students munching on handfuls of popcorn and enjoying a homemade iced coffee drink.  Love is in the details.

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Digging Deep

Once upon a time we were in Youth Ministry at a church.  A young couple that worked with us as youth leaders got pregnant and had a baby.  A few months after wards, it became apparent that something was not right with the little girl’s health.  After months of medical tests, they discovered that their baby was suffering with profound genetic defects and there was no hope for a cure.  She was given just a few months to live.  They signed a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) medical order and took their daughter home to enjoy the last few months of her life.

We prayed like crazy during those couple of months.  We prayed for a miracle.  It did not happen.  When their smiley little baby died, we were stunned and hurt.  We all said the awkward, unhelpful things that people say when friends experience such a tragedy.  None of us knew how to help them grieve.  We were all in our early 20’s, and none of us had the wisdom nor the life experience to know how to handle this kind of sadness.  They retreated into their grief and we stood ineffectively on the sidelines wanting to do something, but doing nothing more than providing a few meals and pitiful sympathies.

At the funeral for their baby girl, the grandfather gave the eulogy for this young life taken far too soon.  I wondered how he found the strength to do it.  But he said some of the most beautiful and life impacting words that I have ever heard.  I’ve never forgotten them.  He talked about foundations.

On his morning commute through downtown, he would drive past an entire city block fenced off with barricades indicating that construction would soon take place there.  As the weeks passed, the buildings that were on the site were demolished.  Heaps of rubble were hauled off the site.  Then the digging machines were brought in.  For MONTHS they dug the hole deeper and deeper, preparing to lay the foundation for the future building.  As the hole got bigger and bigger he wondered what kind of massive building would be built there.

As the months passed and the sky scraper began to take form, the grandfather pondered these things in the light of the impending and certain death of his first granddaughter.  At the funeral he said, “When God lays a foundation, he has to dig deep.  We wonder what kind of structure he will build here.  The deeper he digs, the bigger the building will be.  In order to build something massively ‘upward’, you need to take the time to prepare the ‘downward’ part first.  The deeper God excavates our lives, we can be sure that He plans to build something very big on the surface, but he has to dig first.”

I have no idea if the family even remembers this eulogy spoken through the haze of their pain, but it has stuck with me for all these years.  I think about it when I feel like God is tearing down and digging out too much stuff in my life.  I thought about it when we let go of our life and possessions and family to move to the mission field.  I cried for the pain of the deep digging, but I wanted the results of God’s construction in my life even more than I wanted the rubble I gave up.  The bigger the blue print for the building, the deeper the hole for the foundation.

If God is digging really deep in your life, hauling out a ton of dirt and making a really big hole, then he plans to build a really big structure with your life.  We are the temple of God.  Does our foundation go deep?

Food should be a Love Language

Many years ago someone wrote a book about the 5 Love Languages and how to “speak” each other’s language.  It was a fine book, but they failed to mention my favorite Love Language… FOOD!  Ever since I was a young girl, I have baked and cooked for the people I love.  I learned to bake banana bread for my family in 4th grade.  In college, I would go home to do laundry during Sunday afternoons.  While my laundry was running, I would make cookies or Rice Krispy bars for my friends back at school.  In our Youth Ministry days, I told our teens that they could stop by our house any time and I would make them a snack.  Several made it a habit to stop by after school for a cookie or popcorn.  And on their birthdays, I would make my youth group girls a special batch of my famous strawberry lemonade, frozen in a zip lock with a bow on it.  These are ways I showed love.

This last weekend we had our first “Leaders Retreat” at our house.  We are in University ministry, and this last year we launched our first 4 groups on 4 campuses with 8 more in the works for 2013.  So now that we have leaders, we need to train them.  My husband did two days worth of teaching, training, and planning with our students.  I made all the meals for them.  I literally started prepping 3 days before the event.  I made the base for a cold press coffee cooler drink that the students love.  It takes 24 hours to brew.  I made the menu and sent my husband to the store while I taught school during the day.  Then when our car broke down, I walked to the store myself for the last few ingredients that needed to be purchased fresh.

In addition to preparing meals from scratch and washing dishes about 10 times a day, I taught a cookie baking workshop in my kitchen.  I told them, “Food makes friends- especially hungry University students.”  I have never seen a college kid turn down a home made cookie.  I send them with my husband to his teaching seminars all around the country and they make him very popular.  I send them as gifts to students when I hear that it’s their birthday.  Now our students could invite others to their groups by passing out cookies and a flyer. Cookies open doors and iced coffee opens hearts.  Food should definitely be considered a love language.

The Pencil in the Crack

When I was in high school I had a boy friend that my parents really were not happy with.  This kid was trouble.  My parents tried a lot of different tactics to get rid of this bad influence in my life.  Finally, out of desperation, they asked my youth pastor’s wife to have a chat with me.

As we sat on the couch in their family room, my pastor’s wife pointed to the breakfast bar where her daughter sat on a stool every afternoon to do her homework.  She said, “One day Lindsay was sitting there doing her homework and I was sitting right here on the couch watching her.  Suddenly she dropped her pencil.  Rather than getting down off her stool to look for her lost pencil, she just twisted around on the stool looking for it.  From where I was sitting, I could see the pencil perfectly.  It had rolled into the crack between the carpet and the breakfast bar.  But from her vantage point, the pencil was no where to be found.”

The point is, God puts people in your life (like parents and youth leaders and spouses and friends) who have a different perspective than you do.  You would be wise to listen to what they have to say and to consider that maybe they are seeing things that you can’t see.  Rather than considering these people as nosy intruders in your life, think of them as God’s gift to you.  By listening to wise counsel, you can save yourself a lot of trouble caused by your own mistakes and limited point of view.

How Francis Chan Rescued My Husband from a River

Once upon a time, before we were missionaries, we were in youth ministry.  We have some lingering side effects of having spent so many years with teenagers, and one of them is that we are always on the look-out for great sermon illustrations and object lessons.  Kids remember stories and illustrations more than anything.

So one day I was surfing around on youtube for good illustrations and I found a simple, but profound illustration by author and preacher Francis Chan.  In this illustration, Francis uses a really long rope.  One end of the rope has about 6 inches of red tape wrapped around the end.  Holding up the red tape, Francis begins to talk about our time on Earth.  He lists all the things that tend to occupy our thoughts and concerns as we pass through our brief time on Earth.

This red part of the rope represents our time here on Earth.  And all the rest of the rope represents eternity.  We have a very brief moment called “Time” and we spend the majority of our energies concentrating on the things that are only relative to this little section called Time.  Comparatively speaking, we spend a very small amount of time and energy thinking about things that relate to eternity.  This is a profound and shocking illustration… and it actually saved my husband’s life.

When Josh and the team from California went to the tribe and got caught on the wrong side of the flash-flooded river, my husband happened to have the rope from this illustration in the back of his car!  When the water level rose from knee height to arm pit height in a matter of minutes and loose bolders and trees pounded their way downstream, the missionaries strung the rope across the river and tied each end to one car on each bank.  Using the rope, the last members of the team and Josh were able to cross the river in the nick of time.  So I like to say that Francis Chan saved my husband’s life with his rope illustration.  A good illustration can be worth more than we realize!

This is a 6 minute illustration… a POWERFUL 6 minute illustration… that just might change your life today and your eternity forever.  Watch it!

Spirit Breaker: When Life Disappoints Me

Warning:  This blog post contains indelicate, unorthodox, inelegant, and unrefined locution not merely for the purpose of being vulgar or crass, but for the express intention of communicating intense emotions with appropriately magnified rhetoric.  All opposed should cease reading approximately midway through this article.  ~Respectfully, Overly Conscious, Dutifully, Protectively and Sincerely Yours, The Author.

As we each journey through life we find something meaningful to pour our heart and soul into.  For me, I find meaning in pouring myself into ministry to others.  But sometimes we meet with a challenge or road block that can be a Spirit Breaker for us.  Sometimes it’s losing something that we’ve invested ourselves in that causes heart break.  Sometimes the heart break takes the form of rejection by someone that we have loved or someone that we have given our best to.  For me, that is the worst Spirit Breaker.  It takes a long time to heal from that kind of heart break and it takes a true act of the will to love again.

Josh, talking with students

Let me give you an example of this kind of Spirit Breaker.  Back in 1996 Josh was a Senior in Bible College.  We had been married for about a year and a half.  That summer our son was born, Josh was working on his internship and holding down 2 part time jobs.  Then he returned to classes in the fall and added that load to his back as well.  He was working very hard.  In the middle of his internship under the youth pastor at our home church, the youth pastor resigned!  Josh finished his internship (a.k.a. worked for free as the youth pastor) and in the fall was hired part time to officially fill the position.  He worked full time and was paid part time.  He graduated the following spring with a degree in youth ministry and more than a year of experience already under his belt.  The next 8 years were both fantastically successful and fantastically painful as we poured ourselves heart and soul into the youth group. We loved those teenagers more than they will ever know.

We graduated 8 classes of teenagers.  We played a part in the development of a couple hundred teenagers during those 8 years.  The best part was being a spiritual influence, mentor, guide, and leader to kids in various stages of spiritual growth from 7th grade to 12th grade.  The worst part, the Spirit Breaker was when kids would make bad decisions even when they knew the right path to take.  As youth leaders we could only stand at the side of the road of life and shout words of encouragement or caution.  We couldn’t force people to follow God.  We couldn’t force people to behave right.  We couldn’t force kids to stay in the church after they graduated from high school.

It was more than heart breaking to see kids that we had prayed over, cried with, and poured our heart and soul into then leave the youth group and turn their hearts away from God.  We felt like failures when we saw some of our teens floundering inspite of our best efforts to lead them on the right path.  We loved those kids and tried to show them God’s love.  When things went bad, we had to remind ourselves that these kids weren’t rejecting us, they were rejecting God.

Compounding this heart break, this sense of failure, was the lack of support– sometimes open hostility- that we experienced from some of the parents.  We used to joke that Moses had the right idea:  he killed off everyone over 20 before he lead the Children of Israel into the Promised Land.  Of course that was a joke, and we had a few amazingly supportive parents on our side, but it was just that the disgruntled ones complained so loudly and some were on the church board.

Josh had a particularly devastating experience when a deacon who had kids in the youth group swore at him and complained that the church would be better off without a youth pastor.  This deacon immediately went on my “list of people I do not like” and it was really hard to minister to his kids after that.  I could have let that be a Spirit Breaker for me, but I chose the high road and chose to keep loving the kids even though their dad was a jerk.

(Readers of sensitive constitution should omit the following paragraph.)  I can’t tell you how many times I was horrified and humiliated by a parent when we were in youth ministry.  I had one guy stop me in the church lobby on a Sunday night to complain that there were not enough teens in church on Sunday nights so his kid didn’t want to come either.  Then in the same breath he complained that I was looking a little sloppy for church- I was wearing a T-shirt and cargo pants.  I wanted to tell him, “Screw you!  I don’t drive your kids to church, you do!  And I can wear whatever the hell I want, no one is paying me to be here or to abide by a dress code.  This is probably WHY kids didn’t want to come to church, because some self-righteous prick might criticize their clothing.”

Instead I again chose the high road (with a touch of smart-aleck) and said, “I dressed up nice this morning when all the grown ups were in church.  I figured there wouldn’t be as many grown ups here tonight, so I could dress more appropriately for ministering to teenagers.”  I was shocked that someone would be so critical of me personally.  It was like I wasn’t even a human being in this parent’s mind.  I was giving my all in a “job” where I never received ONE paycheck and this was the reward?  Spirit Breaker.

But I always had hope that I was making an eternal difference for some kid out there.  What off-set all the heart breaking experiences in youth ministry were the times when a kid would really surprise us.  Sometimes a kid that struggled a lot as a teen would pull it together and become a strong Christian adult!  Surprise!  We never could tell how all these seeds that we were planting would turn out.  We had to keep the hope alive.

We just had to hope that we were making an eternal difference even though we didn’t see the evidence right away.  I remember on our last night at youth group, kids and parents were standing around waiting to talk with us and to say good bye.  A few hours later, as the crowd began to dwindle, a girl from a past graduating class came up to me.  She had driven 4 hours from college to say good bye to us.  Then she had waited in line for at least an hour to talk to me.  Ironically, I never felt like I connected well with this girl even though I tried.  I really did love her though.  She started crying and thanking me for the cards that I used to write to her.  Just that little act of attention meant a lot to her.  I was very touched.  Somehow I had made a difference in her life even though I didn’t know it at the time.

Hope.  It is only in thinking of the possible results of the millions of little acts of kindness that I can set aside the pain of Spirit Breaking experiences and to keep on loving and giving and working and sowing seeds into the lives of others.  My only hope is that somewhere along the way, something I do will MEAN something, someone will be touched by a little act of kindness, someone will see Jesus differently because I loved through the heart break.  And for me, that is the only way to overcome a broken spirit… hope for better.

“God proves to be good to the man who passionately waits, to the woman who diligently seeks.  It is a good thing to quietly hope for help from God.  It is a good thing when you’re young to stick it out through the hard times.”  Lamentations 3:24-26