Thoughtful Thursdays - Roseanna M. White

A Year of Promise

by Roseanna White | Dec 31, 2019 | Thoughtful Thursdays

PROMISE.

That was my word for 2019. As I blogged about it way back in the first week of January, I said I’d keep an eye out for how God’s promise would play out in my life this year.

Confession: I really didn’t.

In fact, I didn’t even remember that it was my word of the year. I had to look it up on the blog to remind myself a few weeks ago, and I felt quite the mental slap to realize I had a word so, well, promising and didn’t cling to it.

But as I reviewed the post, the scriptures I’d included in it, the thoughts I’d had at the time…it’s okay that I forgot. In fact, it totally fits with the whole purpose of the word as it was given to me. Because the thing that struck me then and which struck me anew as I read my words from a year ago is this:

It’s when we think God has forgotten His promise to us that He’s fulfilling it.

It’s been a difficult year. I finished up the last books of the 6-due-in-18-months schedule I’d been on, and I was seriously exhausted by the end of it. (Hence why I spent three weeks in November frantically rewriting the last of those books, which certainly told the tale of exhaustion, LOL.) My daughter began high school, which in homeschooling world means a bit more intensity for me in terms of grade-and-record-keeping. And my husband is changing careers, which comes with some stress…okay, a lot of stress.

But with the PROMISE of Joy. Something I need to remember now. And cling to.

Something I need to examine. I sent my blog post from Jan 1 to my husband a few weeks ago, and he asked, “But what exactly IS the promise God has given us?”

He never promises us smooth sailing. He never promises us career success. He never promises us fame or acclaim or anything the world deems “good.” So what is at the heart of His promise?

I will never leave you or forsake you.

Through you all the nations of the world will be blessed.

Seek first the kingdom of God and the rest will be added.

His presence is, ultimately, our promise. Things will go wrong–but He’ll be there. If we keep our focus on Him, nothing else will matter–and we’ll spread the good news of him to everyone else.

A week before Christmas, my family started reading a book together morning and night called Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (there’s a free app for smart phones too that has the exact same stuff in it!). It takes the traditional prayers of the church, both Catholic and Protestant, and combines them into one volume meant to connect us with other Christians around the world and throughout history; to be approachable to different denominations and backgrounds and help us seek unity with one another through our shared roots. The authors explain in the introduction that these sorts of prayers can be used to hide in…but they can also be used to teach us about the form of prayer and to be a wonderful jumping-off place for our more personal ones. There’s a place in each session where you pause to pray for what’s on your list and praise God for what He’s done.

Each morning prayer ends with this, which I think is a beautiful benediction for us all as we close out a year and prepare for a new one:

May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you : wherever he may send you;

may he guide you through the wilderness : protect you through the storm;

may he bring you home rejoicing: at the wonders he has shown you;

may he bring you home rejoicing : once again into our doors.

We never know where He’ll send us. The wildernesses we may go through. The storms that will come. We don’t know what the new year will bring. But we DO know that He’s there. In the whirlwind and in the whisper. We know that He does the miraculous every day, and that we ought to be looking for it, ought to be filled with wonder at the mystery that is our God. We know that when our eyes remain fixed on him, there is always Joy to be found. Always something to rejoice over.

We know that Christ is the ultimate promise fulfilled.

How has He shown Himself to you in 2019?

The Light Has Come

by Roseanna White | Dec 24, 2019 | Thoughtful Thursdays

Last weekend, my dad’s Christmas sermon began not with the familiar passage from Luke, but with John.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. 4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

We all know those verses–I can even recite part of it in Ancient Greek. 😉 But this year, what struck me wasn’t the Word…but the Light.

The Light has come. Into this dark world. Into the shadows. Into the gloom. Into the evil. The Light has come–a pinprick, at the start. A baby. Small, vulnerable, powerless. But the moment the God of the universe took on flesh, something shifted in the very fabric of the cosmos.

The darkness was pierced. The Light shone. And the darkness did not–could not–shall not–comprehend it.

Sometimes our world seems so very dark today. Sometimes it feels hopeless. But it’s not, my friends. It’s not, because the Light has already come. And more, the Light now resides in us.

When Christ was born, God set a new star in the heavens, to light the way to Him. May we be that star today–shining the way to Him for those who seek Him. May we be mirrors to reflect His light.

Christmas is, ultimately, this. A celebration of the darkness being defeated. The Light has come into the world. Let us praise Him.

Thoughtful About . . . Written on Our Lives

by Roseanna White | Dec 5, 2019 | Thoughtful Thursdays

A couple weeks ago, my church watched Mom’s Night Out–a rather hilarious Christian movie that we all thoroughly enjoyed. In one scene, the heroine’s little girl is drawing on the walls with markers–Mommy ends up putting frames around some of them rather than painting over them, which was adorable.

The next day, as I thought about that scene, my mind traveled back to my own days of small children and wall art. I honestly thought we’d escaped the writing-on-the-walls danger with Xoe–never did she do such a thing when she was young enough not to know better.

Then we started teaching her how to write.

For months afterward, we’d find her name scrawled on EVERYTHING. Walls. Counters. Cabinets. Dressers. Toybox. She would just walk around with a pen in her hand and put her name on absolutely any surface she found.

As I remembered those days, I smiled. Not because it was so funny at the time. But because as I thought of it, I also thought of that command God gave us–that His law should be written on our hearts.

Have you ever wondered what that should look like?

I think it looks a lot like a five-year-old with a pen in her hand and new knowledge filling her. Everything we touch, everything we see, everything we encounter should be a new opportunity for sharing that knowledge. For practicing the faith. For reveling in all He’s given us. Every blank surface should be an opportunity for showcasing how much we love Him.

If His word is written on our hearts, then we should also be scrawling His glorious name all over our lives.

Thoughtful About . . . Broken Vessels

by Roseanna White | Oct 24, 2019 | Thoughtful Thursdays

Sometimes we are broken. Cracked. Chipped. Completely undone.

Sometimes, no matter how much is poured into us, it feels like it all comes leaking back out.

Sometimes life just keeps throwing rocks at us, making those chips and cracks grow.

Maybe there’s been a diagnosis–for you or someone you love. Maybe it’s the loss of a job. A home. A dream. Maybe it’s a tragedy. Or maybe it’s just a million little things all adding up. Maybe you’re running too hard. Reaching too far. Expecting too much. Maybe you’ve fallen back into that habit you’d thought you’d kicked.

Maybe it’s any of a thousand things that leave you empty at the end of the day. Whatever it is, I think most of us have been there. Broken.

Way back in the day, when I was writing Whispers from the Shadows, my heroine Gwyneth says to the hero Thad, “I’m broken.” And his reply is one I think of time and again. He says, “Oh, sweet. We’re all broken.”

A truth we can’t always see. Because when we’re looking through a cracked lens, we sometimes blame that for the flaws we see in others. (Or sometimes we can only see their cracks and don’t realize it’s our lens.) But it’s a truth nonetheless. We all have those cracks and bruises. The pock-marks and scars. We all have holes and seams and missing pieces.

That’s why I love that our Lord is described as a potter. He knows all about these fragile vessels He’s made. He knows how easily we break. Shatter. Fall to pieces.

And He knows how to fix us. More, He knows how to take the pieces and make something new.

Lord, use us in your mosaic. Fix us where you can, filling our cracks and holes and empty places with you. And as for those times when we feel so utterly shattered that there’s no putting us back together…that’s okay too. We know, Lord, that to you it isn’t a thousand pieces of that old, broken vessel that you see. It’s a thousand pieces of a gorgeous piece of art, just waiting to be made.

We serve an artist, my friends. A God capable of taking the worst tragedy–the ones we can’t actually recover from–and using the fallout to forge something we never could have dreamed. We serve a Potter who can take that same old clay and shape something never seen before. We serve a King who never looks us and says, “You, my son, my daughter, are broken beyond repair.” He looks at us and says, “Will you let me take the pieces? I’ll make something wonderful from them.”

Let’s give Him our pieces. One by one. Maybe we’ll hurt a little as we pick them up and offer them up–some of the edges are pretty sharp. We might bleed. We might cry. But clinging to them will only make those cuts worse. Let’s offer them to Him instead. Our sacrifice. Our praise. Our trust.

Because when we’re at our worst, shattered, that’s when He’s at His best. That’s when He can really get to work…if we step back and let Him.

Lord, here are our pieces. Make of them what You will today.

Thoughftul About . . . New but Eternal

by Roseanna White | Oct 10, 2019 | Thoughtful Thursdays

22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;

    his mercies never come to an end;

23 they are new every morning;

    great is your faithfulness.

Lamentations 3:22-23 (ESV)

One of the most amazing things about our God is that He’s eternal. He exists somehow outside of our understanding of time, beyond the line of it that we perceive. We can understand the “unchanging” aspect of His nature best when we realize that change requires time, and He is not subject to it. Now, our perception of Him can change. Our understanding. That can evolve and grow over time, as we experience more and contemplate more. But God Himself remains unhindered by time. Eternal.

Perhaps this is also how His love can be unceasing. How His mercies can be new every morning. They are new…and yet older than anyone. As is everything else about our Lord.

Several months ago I came across a discussion about a current movement among women in the church, women whose message seems bound up in the idea that they’ve discovered something their mothers and grandmothers didn’t know about God. Okay…understanding can certainly evolve over time, so maybe. Until you ask those mothers and grandmothers, who look at these young women like they’re crazy and say, “Well of course. We’ve always known that. Weren’t you listening?”

On the one hand, this sort of example makes me shake my head in dismay–why can’t we just learn from those who come before without thinking we’ve grown beyond them, that we’re better, more faithful, closer to Him than they could have been? It’s really kind of strange–we look to the first century church for so much wisdom and so many examples…but many people also just dismiss those early church fathers out of hand, unless their words were canonized in the Bible. Not named Paul, James, John, or Peter? Sorry, dude. Not interested.

And there’s still something relevant to this idea of “new knowledge.” It is new. New every morning, like His mercies. It’s new to us. We get to discover it every day, every year, every generation. More, we must discover it anew, for ourselves. We have to find that thing that makes us go “Aha!” and internalize it. That thing that makes the faith ours, not just theirs.

There’s truth there. But there’s opportunity for deception too. Because we need to understand what that possessive pronoun means. It’s ours, not just theirs…but NOT “ours, so not theirs.”

See the distinction?

Faith, Christianity, Truth itself is not like a shoe. One person owning it doesn’t mean another can’t. It’s more like…a planet. We can all live here. There’s room. We can occupy different parts, we can travel around, seeking to understand. One person can study one aspect, another a different one. It’s big enough, mysterious enough to accommodate all our curiosity.

But let’s not fall into the trap of saying, “Oh, no, you’re so wrong to describe it as mountains. Clearly it’s plains. God wouldn’t have done that.” Or, to go back to my original example, “Look at this waterfall I’ve discovered, that’s been completely unknown until now!” (And it turns out to be Niagara Falls.)

The faith is new every morning. Every generation. But it is also–MUST also be eternal. Otherwise, why would it have survived this long? The Truth we discover today is the same Truth Jesus preached. The same Truth that founded the Church. The same Truth that led Christians onward before there was even a Bible compiled. The same Truth people have been contemplating and writing about and preaching about all these centuries.

We need to learn anew each day what those before us have already learned. We can follow their examples, we can build on their work. We can discover new facets…but chances are, if you pick up a few ancient works, you’ll find those same facets already explored. Because He is new every morning–always relevant, always discoverable, so vast we’ll never comprehend all of Him–but He is also eternal. Unchanging. The same today as at the dawn of time.

He is new every day for us. But let’s remember He was new every day, in the same way, for them. For all who have come before, and for all who come after. Our faith is ours, but we don’t own it. If anything, it ought to own us.

Thoughtful About . . . Elevators

by Roseanna White | Oct 3, 2019 | Thoughtful Thursdays

How do we approach conversation? Is it just a means of exchanging information? Letting our opinions be made known? Are we trying to help others? Broaden our understanding? Do we go at it with no purpose–or with a self-serving one? If you’re anything like me, the answer is simply “yes”–we use conversation for all those things.

But how SHOULD we use and approach it?

After having some truly amazing conversations over the weekend with friends we don’t see nearly enough, I realized anew that conversation can be so much more than we usually allow it to be. Think for a moment about the power of our spoken words–the very things God used to create the universe. The very thing John calls Jesus. The very means Jesus himself used to express Truth to the world.

How often do we use it for that purpose? Sometimes (I hope, ha ha). But enough? I know I don’t.

But as I contemplated WHY I find myself falling into the comfortable, routine, surface conversations more often than not, I realized that this isn’t what I want to do.

I want to actually know what you think, believe, feel about things.

I want to know where our thoughts merge and where they digress.

I want to know why they digress.

I want to let my understanding grow based on what you teach me.

I want you to know that you have taught me.

I want to be able to share with you anything I’ve learned that might help you.

I want you to leave a conversation with me knowing that I heard you and value your words.

I want us both to walk (or tab, if it’s online) away with that certainty that the Lord was in our words.

I want, most of all, for our conversation to lift us both closer to Him.

I want our conversations to change me.

We need to be elevators. Not the metal box that transports our bodies upward in a building–but the spiritual equivalent. We need to use our words to lift others–and ourselves–closer to the Most High.

How do we do that?

I’ve been pondering that question all week. In part, it’s by teaching, when that’s appropriate. But it isn’t always, is it? What about when we’re talking to someone older, wise, and more educated? Is there just no way to elevate them?

I don’t think that’s the case. Because I think the true way to lift ourselves and others toward God in conversation is this: to ask good questions. To actually listen to the answers. And to adjust our thoughts accordingly.

That last part is key–the greatest conversation means absolutely nothing if both parties walk away and dismiss it. We have to let it change us. Change our opinions, our approach to a subject, our actions. We have to be willing to be the clay if we want the Potter to continue shaping us daily–and conversations with others is a way He’s done this throughout the ages.

Now, we can’t control whether other people will change–but we can control ourselves. And if we model it, if we demonstrate that they had a real effect on us, if we make it clear to them that we took their words into account and adjusted accordingly, they’re going to be more likely to do the same. Because it will allow us all to lower our defenses. And that’s where real change can occur.

This works whether we’re the teacher or the pupil. The shepherd or the flock. It works whether we’re talking about how to convince the world to entertain ideas about God or about our kids’ interests. It works if we’re talking about fashion, and it works if we’re talking about salvation. Why? Because it shows the other person that we value them, it gives us both the opportunity to entertain new ideas, and it lets the love of Christ Shine through us. It builds relationship.

This is a challenge I’m making to myself. I want to start THINKING about the conversations I engage in, and I want to be deliberate about how I participate in them. I want to always be looking for what I can learn from them, and also for places where I can share the truths of God’s love that He’s shown me. I want my conversations to reach for something higher than myself.

Words are some of the most powerful things the Lord has given us–and some of the most ill-used. Let’s change that.

How do you lift others toward Him in YOUR conversations?

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