An RV, a yurt, a moldy house, a tree house... and our eternal home.

(May 2015 excerpts from my journal, with some additional thoughts.)

My husband and I have been married for two years.  In those two years of marriage, we and our little family have moved six times.  (Depending on your definition of a "move...")

This "always in limbo, never settled" living situation has so many Heavenly parallels for the believer.  It feels familiar to me, because it is... As Christians we are, as the Bible has put it, sojourners; strangers in a strange land;  aliens.  Joey and I have not really had a place to call our own, yet.

And that's good.  I so love this very tangible, present reminder that these are the true circumstances of every believer:  Not home yet.  Not settled yet.  Not fully at peace or at home.  Only on the journey.

Our little family doesn't have "a place" for our belongings, really.  They're strewn, hither and yon, between different locations.  One place is the small house originally on our property... the one we intended to fix up before discovering that its foundation was completely shot, among other  issues that would have made it a financial black hole to invest in.  It was foreclosed due to severe mold issues (so we call it our "moldy house" to differentiate it from our tree house, our RV, "our" Neenah winter residence, and our future abode).

People involved in a realty scam broke into it twice after we bought the property but before we moved onto it.

All of that strikes a chord, as I am reminded of Matthew 6:19:
"Do not collect for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and thieves break in and steal."

Sometimes we chuckle to ourselves, amused that the majority of our belongings actually consist of the building materials collected for our eventual home.  And I'm reminded of another parallel.
"Collect for yourselves treasures in Heaven..."

What treasures do we have?  We have lots of convenient things.  A few sentimental things.  But if we lost everything in one big fire, I can't say I would be particularly sad to see most of it go.  I am glad for that.  That's not to say I don't truly appreciate our material belongings, but I like to think my heart isn't tied to them.  I think it's healthy to feel that way.  God's gracious hand has seen to it that the things I treasure most, in which I have thus far invested the greatest percentage of my life, are all things I get to "take with me" when I die.

Not having grown up with "treasures," at least not the way this world defines them (materialistically), I didn't develop a taste for them.  It can make me feel awkward and out of sync with humanity at times.  Sometimes I feel as if I have nothing to contribute to certain conversations.  (I've actually caught myself chiming in to complain about things I really don't mind at all, just for the sake of solidarity or fitting in, probably. I know: it's easy to recognize as completely stupid when I say it out loud.)  But, really, when I think about it, I should be alright with not caring about "things" or not always being able to engage in lively conversation about them very well.
"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

I want my Savior Himself to always, always be my treasure and my heart.  Not just mostly.  Not just a little more than the other things in my life, like my husband and my children.  I want Him to be very clearly the greatest and highest of anything I value.

A pastor once told me directly that it is foolish to talk about aching for Heaven or about just wanting to be with Jesus.  His reasoning?  Because Jesus gave us this world to enjoy, after all.

I can see the train of thought there.  But I also read my Bible.  And up against the perspective it offers, I see how teeny tiny, short, and insignificant all of human history will be in comparison to forever.  How much tinier, then, is my one life on the grand scale of eternity?!

Tell me something:  Why should I spend all of my time, energy, emotions, and resources garnering the applause of this world-- making myself successful or liked in the eyes of people, whose days are numbered, rather than making myself successful and faithful in the eyes of Jesus?  He's the One I will stand before one day, yearning to hear the words, "Well done......"

You might be proud of yourself for your credentials, your career, your life experiences, your "been theres..."  And I fully understand that temptation myself.  Right there with you.  Maybe you're a "do-gooder."  Maybe your life is wrapped up in public "ministry."  Maybe you consider yourself an intellectual.  Maybe you know everything there is to know about anything.  Maybe you're frankly just the most epic person in your circle of friends.  :P  Let's say you're a brain surgeon, a celebrity, a professional athlete, a United States ambassador, a military academy graduate, or an FBI agent.  [*insert your most-admired profession here*]

Cool.  But this earth and the entire system that gave you those experiences is going to burn.

What really matters?

You and I would be fools and borderline mental to treat this life like it's the one that matters most.  The only actions that matter in this life are the ones which have ramifications in eternity.

(And, no: In eternity, it's not going to matter that your husband made you late for church or that the kids spilled milk on the couch.  But how your heart responded in those circumstances will matter.)

It can be tempting to look back on one's life and think of how much more successful you could have been, or how much more "fulfilling" your life would be, had you made different decisions.  Certainly I was no exception.  Years back, when most of my friends were either in the military or well on their way to a four-year degree, I frequently thought of the opportunity I had to attend the Air Force Academy. I second-guessed the decisions I made regarding many other prestigious doors that had swung wide open to me.  Then Jesus altered my perspective.

And that's what makes all the difference in life.  He always does that when He touches a person's heart.  That's the turning point in so many events recorded all over the Bible, isn't it?  "...But God....."  Suddenly, a non-accredited Bible college with an emphasis on world missions and classes solely on the Word of God looked to me like one of the smartest investments possible.

Let me put it another way: I've heard people regret having married so young-- that they could have pursued their talents, had they put off starting a family.  Wives are bitter about their husbands "holding them back" from developing a career of their own, or parents lament their child having a medical condition that prevents them from ever following their dreams.  I've had my own relatives downplay to my face God's emphasis on taking the Gospel to other countries, because it simply didn't hold the same value as the comforts of home that they chose to pursue in life.

If you believe this life is all there is and all that matters, it makes sense to think that way.  If you genuinely believe God and what He says about eternity, it absolutely does not.

Are we living in light of eternity, today?  Do we do the simple, daily things for the glory of God?  Or have we "settled" into the short ride of this life, Church?

I am cherishing this "unsettled" feeling.  All my life, and especially as of late, I am constantly reminding myself, "This is just a small taste of how it feels to live free.  Live with a focus on Jesus and Heaven.  This is good.  Stay unattached to the things of this world, my soul.  Be forever clinging tightly to those things which will last: Jesus, His Word, and the eternal state of people's hearts."

I love traveling and living out of a suitcase... always have.  What we have now, however, is neither settled nor travel.  Isn't that what the Christian life looks like, too, though?  Sinking very shallow roots, living only temporarily, in circumstances that we know are not as ideal as they will be one day?

When the early church was persecuted and scattered, Peter addressed his letter to them this way:  "To the temporary residents of the Dispersion."  I love that.

Later, he essentially says, "If you call yourself a Christian, act like one."  But he puts it this way:  "If you address as Father the One who judges impartially based on each one's work, you are to conduct yourselves in reverence during this time of temporary residence." 

Isn't that exactly what a Christian is... a temporary resident?  Temporariness is all over the Bible.

Oh, this bittersweet tension between the already and the not yet!  Yes, we do have a house.  No, we cannot live there right now.  But we sure spend a lot of time and energy preparing to live there, and thinking about what life there will look like.

To be clear, I have absolutely loved living in this RV over the past couple of years.  In many ways, I will will miss it dearly.  But on "rougher" days when it's raining and my toddler has a 2-foot by 8-foot space to run around in, or I could really use a washing machine here, or I run out of gas for our camp stove in the middle of cooking (when we're having other people over for dinner), or I'm making instant rice in a coffee pot (hey, it works!), or a shower seems like paradise itself-- I remember many things.

One thing I think about is that we truly live in luxury compared to a huge part of the world.  Another is that I grew up under much more simple conditions, and it was good.  Yet another is this: the reality of what will be.  There will be a crib in that new house, for sleeping babies.  There will be the fire, and a couch, where Joey and I can curl up together at the end of a long day and be us.

Do we all do that, Heavenly-speaking?  When this life becomes difficult, do we always derive endurance and joy from looking to and really thinking about Jesus coming back and our forever-future?  Do we remind ourselves that we truly have a hope that most in this world do not have?  Do we remember that this is not nearly "as bad as it gets?"  Do we dwell on how unfathomingly beautiful eternity with Jesus will be?

Just ask my husband, who has had to expend a mind-numbing amount of thought and an exhausting amount of work on this project, and he'll tell you that this whole yurt-house-building saga has been proof that it is possible for your mind, energy, and focus to be wrapped up in someplace you don't even live.  (It's a fact that we've lamented because we want to be so much more eternally-minded, but it's a fact nonetheless.)  So let's do that with our someday-home, people.

That's how Paul says to weather this life.  In 1 Thessalonians 4 he describes Jesus' second-coming and how we will all be together with the Lord, and he concludes this way: "Therefore encourage one another with these words."  These words... Not words about how we should actually really be loving this life; not words which give a false hope that things here will get better.  This beautiful picture of what is coming... That is where we are to find encouragement.

People who consistently live with Heaven in view do not get bent out of shape by the little, circumstantial things.  They do not freak out when plans change and things go wrong.  People who take hard times in stride because they know hard times do not damage the sureness of their future... those people exude hope.  And hope is something for which this world is desperately searching.

Yes, I am cherishing this unsettled feeling and the reminder that it brings.  I am cherishing the sehnsucht... cherishing the longing.

But when we have our own "home," it still will not be home.  Our brand new abode, in all spiritual reality, will not be home any more than the moldy house or the RV could be considered "home" right now.

Always, always, always, I want to remember that.

"All I know is, I'm not home yet.
This is not where I belong."

Is Life So Bland?

I've been coming to grips with a very raw, brutal, hard truth lately. (Hard for me, anyway.) It's this: Life isn't always a crisis. But it is. My definition may just be wrong. And yours might be, too.

...Completely confusing, I know... I'll get there. Here's my heart.

First of all, let's talk about "crisis."

Paramedics know what crisis is. So do firefighters, combat soldiers, law enforcement, and doctors in the ER. If you've ever been to basic training, or first on the scene of a car wreck, or found yourself in a hostile country, or some other "I'm gonna die" emergency situation (possibly even, "The house looks like World War III and mom will be home in five minutes"), you probably know what it means to find that elusive third gear.

It's "do or die trying." Everything else slows down (yes, like the movies) and you find your adrenaline-infused self operating at a speed, dexterity, brilliance and competence you never thought possible.

Well the thing is, I kind of live for those times. I live for stuff that is difficult and challenging and painful and, well, miserable (and not only for the heck of it, but especially for the greater good or when no one else wants to do it--my idea of "helping people"). So much so that sometimes, despite my attempts to adjust, "normal life" feels unbearably dull and painfully purposeless by comparison.

I'm sure part of it is my personality. But recently I'm also realizing that, until now, I have never really had to live outside of crisis mode very much.

All my growing up years were straight-up survival on our primitive family farm. It may as well have been Mars. (When your reason for getting out of bed in the morning has always been, "To live," other average reasons are just not quite as motivating.)

From there I joined the Air Force auxiliary and lived off of emergency services/search and rescue training and military discipline.

Then I helped start and then run a military youth academy, working with youth who had been into everything you could name, of which I was made the Cadet Commander (which brought new stresses and challenges, to put it mildly).

From there was living in Egypt (enough said?). Middle Eastern drama, persecution, a new and difficult language to learn. Awesome third-world-country life that I never tired of.

Three jobs, a marathon, CNA.

Next, New Tribes Bible Institute. Which was not crisis mode per se; but still rather new, exciting, lots of vision and inspiration and deadlines, and I got the occasional, brief adrenaline fix by working as a Driver's Ed teacher. (My foot still unconsciously hovers the imaginary emergency brake, so you may not want to ask me to sit in the front passenger's seat...)

My genuine ache and struggle to find significance and meaning in normalcy, my addiction to crisis mode, my stressing over lack of stress, may be hard for most people to understand. But the resulting symptom mimics something our Hollywood-saturated culture and everyone else struggles with, too: Discontentment. And unrealistic expectations.

Let's put it this way...

Maybe, you want to marry a country boy. Because you think they're all as great as Phil Robertson. And so you marry a country boy, but he's nothing like what you thought a country boy should be, definitely not romantic or as understanding as you expected, or even a gentleman... and you're crushed. Maybe, by crazy chance, he's everything you thought he would be. But you find other things about him that you don't like, and you pick on them. And you're crushed. Disappointed.

Maybe you've always wanted to be a nurse. You just want to help people, you say, but of course you want to enjoy yourself and look great doing it. And at some enlightened point in your stressful, black coffee-drugged four years of classes and clinicals that are harder than you ever thought possible, you wake up. And you realize: It's not going to be like Grey's Anatomy. And it's certainly, definitely not like Scrubs. At all.

Perhaps you've always wanted a small, primitive family farm. Want to live off the land. So you start the slow, difficult journey toward what you're sure will, someday, be romantic and picturesque--it must!--but something just seems "off." You find yourself aching from entire days of unglamorous, monotonous weed-pulling in a field that goes on and on for acres; stitching up a calf with a quilting needle in your living room; twice-a-day milkings with no respite; scampering to can and preserve a winter's worth of food for a whole family; slaughtering animals by hand in the freezing cold; working all night by the headlights of a truck to pick up all the potatoes before morning's delivery; wondering when in the world, oh dear God, there will ever be time to do laundry or cook or wash the dishes or rest your back. And there's nobody there to capture the essence of what looks a lot.. better.. than it feels.. sometimes.

Or what about this: You really, really want to be a missionary. Missionary biographies captivate you. You're "on fire" for God. And all you can think about is missions (and deep down, somewhere you won't admit, you might feel you'd be viewed as a "better Christian"). You're very compassionate and empathize with the plight of the people in, say, Somalia, and -- excitement!! -- you end up there. It's amazing and wonderful and different at first. But soon you notice things you didn't before. Like how the different food and the habits of the people are extremely annoying now, and it's a lot of work to fit in and you just want things to be how they were; and you find your compassion is dwindling because the people don't even want you there and nobody's getting saved. And you can't figure out why it's nothing like that two-month or maybe even just one-week missions trip you took, once upon a time.

Could go on and on with other situations: Marriage. The dream career. Parenthood. Retirement. The cake you baked or the picture you drew or the house you built. Disappointment. Not how it was supposed to go. Nothing ever going how it was supposed to. (Side note here being that disappointment happens and is neither rare nor wrong. Sadly, our default setting is to turn it into bitterness and cynicism, which certainly is wrong.)

The Dean of Students while I was a student at NTBI spoke in chapel one day, and said something like this about living for your personal dream, no matter how good: "If you don't achieve it, you will be depressed because you didn't; if you do achieve it, you will be depressed because you have nothing left to live for." (Queue King Solomon and the book of Ecclesiastes.) Point being, Jesus Himself is the only thing worth living for. Not even dreams that involve Jesus. Because who knows what may happen to them.

Here's something my Heaven-sent husband reminded me of the other day (paraphrased):

Part of what I'm feeling is not wrong. We are to live in crisis mode, we need to live in crisis mode, because we are living a crisis. There are people's souls, and the state of the Church, and our stance before Jesus one day, at stake. It's just hard to see from our current vantage point. And Satan, the world and our flesh use that blurriness against us.

I'm not saying we should have no expectations at all. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what I'm saying about a conclusion regarding degree of expectations. But here's what I am saying:

Thankfully-- probably because of the way I was raised-- I've never been disappointed by life in that everything is, frankly, just so much more awesome than I ever would have planned or imagined (from ice cream to my husband to my in-laws). I still get excited and giddy inside about watching a movie or getting new toothpaste or the fact that the inside of my house is warm in the winter!!!

However... most of my expectations still tend to be unrealistic because they envision a life that by necessity is much more difficult (or challenging or characterized by crisis), whereas a lot of other people's expectations are unrealistic because they envision a life that is much easier (or more comfortable or picturesque or like the movies). But neither of them are much like "normal" life. So both produce discontentment if we focus on them too strongly.

Now, God may not end up calling Joey and I to something "normal" (or even to another day of life on this earth). But He might. Because He calls the shots. We could live out our lives in Aleppo, Syria or the mountains of Tibet or in a town of 300 people in rural Wisconsin. The point is that it should not matter. The heart that is God's says, "I am Yours. You bought me. It is my joy to live for You, wherever, doing whatever!" Like Paul:

"I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. 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 4:11-13]

Obviously, this is easier said than done, and requires daily renewal by the Spirit of God. It is so much harder to learn to live content with the idea of either, or oscillate between the two, than to stick with one.

I would like to implore us all toward this:

Relish true love stories, but not chick flicks. Don't feed on things that you find produce discontentment, which are all different things for each of us. Live in the real world. I encourage you, with every breath I have... Live here, in this real, imperfect world, with real, imperfect people, acknowledging your very imperfect self, before our loving and perfect God.

Because the real world (even in all its fallen nature), when it's not being compared to grand delusions (lies), is still pretty dang beautiful.