Faith – Page 6 – Louise in the Light

April 27, 2016April 27, 2016

Even if the river otters leave

You’re a failure. You should just give up.

Discouragement had been whispering in my ear all week, and sitting across the dinner table from one of my students as they said they wanted to leave TLC a month early hit me right where it hurt most. I tried to form a response, any response, but the only thing that came to my mind were more accusations and lies.

You suck at this. You haven’t loved them well enough. You already lost one student this year and now you’re about to lose another. You’re gonna spend your last month in Alaska here, in this house, alone. Some ministry… What a waste…

I drew a deep breath and excused myself from the table with a cracking voice. Unsure of where to go, I escaped to my bathroom where I crumbled onto my knees, a silently sobbing heap at the feet of Jesus.

What. The. Heck. Lord. It doesn’t seem like it should be this hard to keep two students in a house for a year… but some days it is; it’s so freaking hard.

The beauty of bush life is that just about anything goes here. Because we don’t have roads in our village, we don’t technically have addresses other than our PO box numbers. As life would have it, I’ve learned that some things just don’t ship to PO boxes. Thus, our team has gotten a little creative in putting down roots where the Lord has us by making up our own addresses.

My boss and his family? They live at 44 Magnum Drive, because… Alaska. Two of my most dear friends? You can find them by walking 200 yards north of my house. The trail looks the same, but you’ll “find yourself” at HemmingWay. (Oh, how I adore Heather and all her English nerdiness.) Naturally, my girls and I live at self-proclaimed 723 Jesus Loves River Otters Lane. Because… Jesus. And because we have a pair of mildly vicious river otters who often frolic in the bay in our “backyard”.

As I cried, hunched over on my bathroom floor, I begged God to keep my sweet student here at the Tanalian Leadership Center, where I’ve seen Him do so much in her life this year. I prayed over our little house– for Grace to make Himself at home here at our made-up address, because in all honesty, I was so exhausted and discouraged that night that I just wanted to snap back, “JUST LEAVE THEN” with everything in my wounded momma heart.

I battled the doubt and discouragement that was waging war inside of me, twisting my every thought. And I thanked God when He sent me reinforcements in prayer via text message, right as I needed them.

As I sat on the floor battling the lies and the doubt they caused, I tried to differentiate what success and failure would look like in this situation. I sat stumped.

I don’t know what calculating success or failure as a missionary looks like. Logically, I suppose I know I’m not a failure. But that night Jesus reminded me of the struggle against myself and the innate desire to “succeed” I’ve felt nearly every day since moving to Port Alsworth. Most days it’s so tempting to try and measure the success of ministry the way my American upbringing tells me I should—quantitatively. But when I get sucked into the numbers game, I quickly find myself counting the things that feel like failures and not those that seem like success.

1, possibly 2, students gone.
1 student sitting alone, upset at the dinner table as I sobbed on the other side of our house.
3 pots and pans that wouldn’t get washed that night because I was mentally fried.
4 other students I should’ve been preparing to play soccer with after dinner instead of crying.
5…
6…

My list of failures, my questions about success, and my prayers swirled around in my brain until a peace that truly surpassed any (and all) of my understanding washed over me.

“Stop striving, Kacy. Everyone could leave. Everything could ‘go wrong’. Even then, I would still love you. My love for you has never been based on the number of times you succeed or fail. You are Mine and therefore, you are more than enough. Come on, come off the floor, My sweet hot mess of a child… Go and love the ones I’ve placed you with out of the freedom of My fullness instead of the fear of your failure.”

I eventually made it off the floor that night. (Although I never did make it to soccer…Such is life.) A few quiet days passed in our house as I prayed and prayed that my sweet student would decide not to leave TLC prematurely. In the silence of those days, I couldn’t help but earnestly question my deep-seeded need to “succeed” in life, rather than just “be” the woman God has called me to be, where He has called me.

I stood at my stove cooking dinner in the familiar silence Monday night, mulling over the situation for the millionth time when I heard our front door bang open and the voice of one of my boys. “Mail plane!” he shouted before chucking my packages and letters on the entry way floor and slamming the door shut behind himself.

I made my way over to the pile, picked up a red envelope with the address 723 Jesus Loves River Otters Lane scrawled in my friend’s familiar handwriting, and laughed at the absurdity of this whole season of life. Inside that envelope were the exact words my soul needed from a woman who has delicately reminded me of the Truth of the gospel for nearly four years. Amy wrote:

“No matter what the day has held or what tomorrow will hold, there is sweet purpose and enough-ness in being a daughter of The Father. He has not made a mistake in sending you to Jesus Loves River Otters Lane… even if the river otters leave. May you find sweet satisfaction in Him today.”

“Even if the willow tree does not blossom, nor fresh fruit be in my grocery order, even if the produce I ordered for ‘family dinner’ freezes at altitude in the plane and rots before it makes it to my kitchen, and the ‘fields of future believers’ that I thought would be ripe for harvest refuse Jesus… Even if the students/river otters I love leave me and silence fills my house, I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. For God, the Lord, is my strength: He makes my feet like the Dahl Sheep’s; He allows me tread on His mountain tops (and lovingly meets me when I am low on my knees).”

(Habakkuk 3:17-19, The Alaska edition)

April 21, 2016April 21, 2016

By the word of our testimony

I hated the old wooden pews in my family’s uber traditional Mexican church growing up. If I think about them too long, I can still feel the haunting pain in my tush incurred by sitting on those benches for hours during Sunday service.

By the time we sat in those pews, my family had broken away from their formal Catholic upbringing and had somehow made their way to what I can only describe as a small, “free-form” congregation of believers in our hometown. The pastor’s teaching was remarkable—I knew that even as a child—but the Sunday sermon was only a small part of the three-hour service.

There was worship and “specials”, communion and flag twirling, praise dancing and scripture reading, and after all that was said and done, and the message had been delivered, anyone and their mom was given the opportunity to take the mic and share their testimony.

“What is the Lord doing in your life right now?” A deacon would ask as hand after hand would wave in the air, motioning for the microphone. By this point, I was usually slumped down in my pew, sitting on my hands, praying that the feeling would come back to my rear end. Testimony time seemed like torture because ohhhh can sweet old abuelitas and tias talk and tell stories for days…

In all honesty, I don’t remember any of those stories about God’s goodness. I was young and ignorantly uninterested, solely focused on trying to escape the wooden torture devices we sat on. As my cousins and cousin’s cousins stood to speak, my mind wandered to the green chili smothered feast we would eat if we ever made it out of that sanctuary.

If you were to fast forward roughly fifteen years, you would’ve found me in a similar setting this weekend at Tanalian’s Spring Family Conference. (But praise the Lord our little village church has chairs instead of those horrific wooden benches…)

A friend of mine stood at the podium the first night of the conference and read Revelation 12 to a room of two hundred-some Alaskans–

“Now a war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth and his angels were thrown down with him. And I heard a loud voice saying, ‘Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for their loved their lives not even unto death.’” (Revelation 12:7-12)

When he was done reading, he looked up and said, “We have conference speakers this weekend, but our hope is that the majority of the speaking will be done by you. No one here will negate that Southwestern Alaska is dark. Some of you came here from villages where you’re the only Christians or where there are other believers but no pastor or church… This weekend as we gather, we long for you to be fed, but also hope you’ll beat back the darkness by sharing your testimony. We want to hear what the Lord is doing throughout Alaska; for the darkness has been conquered by the blood of the Lamb and and will continue to be by the word our testimony.”

Just like that, there was a steady stream of believers from all different ages and backgrounds who took the podium and shared some of the most powerful testimonies I’ve ever heard.

Some spoke in English and some in Yup’ik (the predominate Native language of our region). When simple words couldn’t express what needed to be said, songs sung with an acoustic guitar said what individuals couldn’t manage to. It was so powerful that every ounce of emotion in my body caught in the back of my throat and for once in my life I couldn’t even cry.

One man, a doctor in the village of Dillingham, stood before us and softly said, “I have pictures of my nephew being baptized in that bay, just out that window… He went home from here and later died a violent death. It was horrible. It was hard. But because of Jesus, we have hope. Hope changes things. Prayer changes things. Let us not be afraid to pray for people. Our family has confidence and hope that my nephew is with God because someone, somewhere wasn’t afraid to pray with him, just once, and that turned into so much more. Let us be a people who pray. Let us pray for revival in our villages.”

The mother of one of my students followed him at the microphone, speaking between heavy sobs. “Our people are wounded. Deep. Deep down. So deep. There wounds we have caused ourselves and generational wounds on top of those. But I’m here at this conference and I’m standing here now because I want our people to get better. I want so badly for them to know Jesus and be free from the anger, shame, scorn, devastation, lies, alcoholism, denial, fear, and drug abuse that has kept them captive for too long. Pray for revival in the ‘up-river’ people; pray for our people.”

I sat and watched, my momma-heart bubbling with pride, as my TLC students took the mic, reading scripture and rejoicing in the freedom and new lives they have found in Christ this year.

I listened with my jaw dropped as a woman, who I knew to be a recently active persecutor of the church several villages down, stood and publicly apologized for the way she had treated the believers in her village. “I was wrong, I see that now. I just want to follow Jesus. I just want my kids to read the Bible and know God’s Word…”

The testimonies and pleas for prayer went on for hours each day and it was glorious.

As if she could read my mind, my neighbor learned over and poked me in the ribs Sunday morning, smiled, and said, “It’s just like being in Mexican church, huh?”

“It’s just like home.” I laughed out in a whisper. “These people, they’re family… But thank God we don’t have those old school pews that makes your tush fall asleep. These chairs make testimony time so much more enjoyable.”

Would you join our family here in Alaska and pray for revival?

Pray that people would be awakened to the beauty of the Lord in our villages.

Pray for strength and grace for our isolated and persecuted brothers and sisters.

Pray that the church would be burning to tell the world of the hope that we have because of who Christ is and what He has done for us.

Pray we would live out of the truth of Revelation 12—that we can beat back the darkness by the power of our testimony. And that the testimonies we hear would stir us to a deeper love for Jesus, moving us to action to pursue those living in the darkness that settles in where there is a void of His light.

April 8, 2016April 8, 2016

“This is the way, Pioneer”

“Open your hands, child. Your ‘kids’ are not yours; they never were to begin with. Give them back to me. I’m the One who can, and will, take care of them.”

I’ve experienced my fair share of heartbreak over my Street School students, but leaving them to come to Alaska last fall felt like the thing that was going to rip my heart out all together.

At the end of last school year, Eli, the other English teacher, sat across from me and said the words I’d been thinking for months, but had been too afraid to verbalize.

“If I leave… and if you leave… Who is going to love these kids? They’re so hard sometimes… But I love them so much it hurts. Is it possible that someone else could love our girls the way we do? After all, they’ve become our girls… And they so desperately need to know that they’re loved.”

Those words echoed in my heart for months and shifted into fears over time. That fear gave way anxious tears that further distorted my vision. I began to see my students as far more fragile than they were and I stopped seeing Jesus as the powerful, risen Savior who came (and always comes) for God’s children in love.

I was afraid He would somehow abandon my students. Or worse, that my pre-Alaska goodbyes would become the last words I’d ever speak to them. After losing a student to gang violence last year, I was so scared that any goodbye could become permanent, and thus, I held my kids close.

So when Jesus called me to walk away from the job that had become my passion and the kids whom I saw myself as the protector of, I fought Him. Hard. But we all know how the story went… Ultimately (and albeit a bit begrudgingly) I hugged the students who held my heart and I got on a plane with their sweet, handwritten notes and gifts tucked in my pack.

God loves these kids more than I do. He won’t let anything happen to them that’s outside His will. He’s a Good, Good Father; His provision and providence puts my earthly mom-brain to shame. It will be okay. I prayed and pep talked myself all the way home on my last day of work and often over my first few months in Alaska. If I’m being honest, I still struggle to lay my DSS students at Jesus’ feet every time I see something worrisome on social media or wake up to see that I missed a call from them in the middle of the night.

At those times, the beautiful gift of my students’ continued relationship and trust, even 2,500 miles away, seems a bit like a blessing and a curse. But I cherish those random phone calls, even though my selfish heart breaks a little with each one as I wish I could offer them more than a simple prayer from the other side of a phone or computer.

Which begs the question: Why does prayer seem so insufficient to my momma-heart? Why do I believe that I could provide anything better than Jesus if I was physically present with them? I’ve wrestled with these questions as I’ve sat speechless, staring at Facebook messages and texts, wishing I could do something more than point them to Jesus in the middle of the night when their worlds are falling apart.

It was on one such night when I stumbled upon Annie Jones‘ “Oh, Pioneer: Song of the Unseen” while I texted back and forth with one of my old students. She writes,

“We are lampposts lighting the way for the lost and curious ones. Saying, ‘This is the way, Pioneer. The Good Life begins Here.’

This manna, falling from the sky as promise, is enough to satisfy our hungry lips. Mouths begging for more. Spirit breathing. There is plenty. How mystery sustains the most savage of a soul.

Come close to this, Pioneer.

Learn the language of your seeking, savage heart.

See what we are made for: breaking bread and drinking wine underneath stars with our Creator. A shared communion of enoughness. Giving thanks for our unknowing of the gentle way ahead, unfolding as we sing through momentary mystery. The Journey. There is nothing more spectacular to Belong to.”

Staring at the poem in front of me, I could hear Him, plain as day: This is what I’ve called you to. You are not your students’ protector or savior—I am. You are not the Light; you are simply a lamppost– a loving, encouraging voice along the way who can call into the darkness and say, “This way, fellow Pioneer. Come this way; it’s beautiful and Light on this path with Jesus.”

Nearly a year had passed since Eli and I sat starting at each other across her classroom table, wracked with the fear of the unknown for our girls. A few months had gone by since the winter night when I first read that poem. But not two days after I pulled it off the shelf to re-read it over spring break, a Facebook message between one of our former students, Eli, and I came across the screen of my phone:

“Hey guys. I decided I want to give my life to Christ but I need help. I really don’t know how to do this on my own.”

I blinked the tears out of my eyes and read the message at least five more times before letting out a weighted breath I didn’t even realize I’d been holding in for nine months.

“I told you I would take care of ‘your kids’. I love them more than you’ll ever be capable of. You can breathe and continue giving them back to Me.”

All too often my momma bear perspective skews my view of God and elevates my own power, protection, and love. But praise God for the moments when He reminds me that there is nothing that I do ever do to change or protect my students’ hearts; it’s Jesus’ love, His Spirit, His grace, and His acceptance that softens hearts, changes minds, and protects us all in the meantime.

May we as Christians, disciple-makers, teachers, parents, and momma-brained individuals learn to give the ones we love back to Jesus in prayer every day and instead call out the words of Annie Jones:

“It is this way, Beloved.

Here you will be found.

The search is over.

Hallelujah.”

“And I am sure of this, the He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ.”

(Philippians 1:6)

April 3, 2016April 6, 2016

Losing Jesus

“When the Passover Feast had ended, as their family was returning to Nazareth, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know it, but supposing Him to be in the group, they went a day’s journey, but then they began searching for Him among their relatives and acquaintances, and when they did not find Him, they returned to Jerusalem, searching for Him. After three days they found Him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions…”

(Luke 2:43-46)

“They lost Jesus? Wouldn’t that make Jesus’ parents… bad… parents…?” Trevor looked around at all of us as he spoke, clearly choosing his words carefully.

Andrew, our TLC Bible teacher, and I locked eyes across the giant classroom table and smirked, clearly thinking the same thing—How do we navigate this? Andrew laughed and forced out an, “Uhm, yupp…” Before I stuck my foot in my mouth, adding, “I guess losing your kid for a few days probably wouldn’t qualify you for parent of the year…” (I’m nothing if not terribly awkward as a teacher.)

“What?!”
“How the heck would you not notice your kid wasn’t with you for a whole day?!”
“How do you leave your kid in a totally different city on accident?”

Questions and comments poured out before Andrew redirected the conversation back to the day’s study of Luke. But hours and weeks later, Trevor’s question stuck with me.

How often do I lose Jesus and go a whole day (or multiple days) before realizing that I’m not with Him?

It’s a murky question if you want to get all “theologically technical” about it. I know that, as a believer, His Spirit is always with me, but I can guarantee you that I’m not always with Him. Sometimes Jesus goes left while I wander right, completely lost in my own plans and short-sightedness. Sometimes, like Mary and Joseph, I keep walking long after He has stopped somewhere, and I don’t notice until I’m an embarrassing distance away.

My wandering is rarely intentional. (Although my heart occasionally reminds me that my sinful ability to run from God and hide in the darkness of my humanity is still well in tact.) No, usually I lose Jesus doing “good things”.

I’ve lost sight of Jesus in serving people, in religiosity, in the church, in my job, in relationships, in transition, in busy seasons, and all too often, in my own selfish ambition. It kills me to admit, but my heart is no where near stayed on Him the way I wish it was. You would think I would have this whole “following Jesus” thing down, since I’ve jokingly been called a “professional Christian”, or more commonly, a missionary. But the hymn “Come Thou Fount” is still the one written in and on my heart: I’m prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.

And unfortunately, I typically don’t realize I’ve wandered away until I try to quiet myself before Him and feel distant, confused, or alone. In this place my prayers are stilted and repetitive. I feel stuck, frustrated that I can’t find Him or figure out how my heart got so far away from Him in such a short time. It’s in those moments that I’m reminded that finding Jesus isn’t something I can do in my own power. It’s not that God has not hidden Himself, but I can’t find my way back to Him on my own anymore than I could’ve originally reunited myself to God while I was yet a sinner. That is why Christ had to come– to reunite our flighty, sinful hearts with His complete, steady One.

I sat the tiny attic space above my bedroom that I’ve affectionately deemed as my “Jesus Loft” last week. After a whirlwind few days, I felt frustratingly far from God. I journaled. I read. I tried to sing to my favorite worship songs downloaded on my phone. Yet nothing seemed to draw me back into intimacy with His heart.

Exasperated, I chucked my pen across the loft and said out loud, “I give up. I don’t know where You went or how I walked off for the trillionth time. But I need you. I’m sorry I suck at following You, but I need You to come back for me. I lost You somewhere and I need You to find me yet again.”

I wish I could say that the heavens opened up that night or that my house shook with the audible voice of God, but the truth is that sometimes you just need to pray and go to sleep, trusting that Jesus will come for you in Love and His perfect timing.

After a few days of trying to be obedient in faith and praying my weird, stilted prayers (still feeling rather blah), Jesus met me in the lyrics of Steffany Gretzinger’s “Pieces” while I stood at my kitchen sink and washed perfectly ordinary dinner dishes.

Daughter, I don’t give My heart in pieces.
I don’t hide Myself to tease you.

My love’s not fractured
It’s not a troubled mind
It isn’t anxious, it’s not the restless kind
My love’s not passive
It’s never disengaged
It’s always present
It hangs on every word I say
Love keeps its promises, it keeps its word
It honors what’s sacred, cause its vows are good
My love’s not broken
It’s not insecure
My love’s not selfish, My love is pure.

As the song goes, His Love is always present, never disengaged. Even when we feel lost or He feels far off, He is nearer than we can see or believe. I don’t understand the phenomenon of His Love, but the cry of my heart stems from exactly that place of confusion. It’s a cry of frustration at my lack of faith and understanding— one that imitates the father of the demon possessed boy Jesus encountered in Mark 9. It’s a prayer that seems so repetitive and so over prayed as someone who feels like she should have it all together, but simply doesn’t…

Lord, make my heart believe.

Would You help me to see and know that Your love is always present, always pursuing me, never broken or disengaged?

Jesus, we long to believe that while we may lose You, You have never lost us. You are always pursuing us with Your perfect love, Your sweet Hesed.

“For the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.”
(Luke 19:10)

March 17, 2016April 6, 2016

When the proverbial plane crashes

I knew the Lord had brought me to Alaska, but the end of first semester was a train wreck. (Or to be more “bush-correct”, you could say it was a proverbial plane crash.) By the time it was over, I was beyond burnt out. I was struggling with what I can now recognize as compassion fatigue and PTSD. I was spiritually overwhelmed, constantly feeling like I was losing the battle against the strongholds of addiction that raged in my house. By the time I’d realized just how far in over my head I was, it was too late. My little TLC plane had fallen out of the sky and was in flames around me.

I sat in our house with my face down on my kitchen table and my hands entangled in my hair, sobbing at one in the morning. Every few minutes I would catch a word or two from the serious conversation between my boss and one of my students in the other room.

I pulled my face up off the table and caught a glimpse of myself in the window. The woman staring back at me was gaunt; the way her black mascara had dripped over her sunken-in cheeks scared me. I stared in shock. Who is that woman in the window? That can’t possibly be what I look like. I tried to turn my head to examine myself from another angle but my muscles were so tense my neck wouldn’t turn. Instead I laid my forehead back on the table and ugly-cried until my stomach hurt. What are you doing Lord?

Eventually I ran out of tears and simply stared at the grain of the wood in my table. I couldn’t figure out where my “good” God was. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that He would ever lead me (or had actually led me) somewhere that felt so unsafe.

Lord, have mercy. Please. Where are you? I pleaded on repeat, as if those were the only words I knew. The first half of David’s Psalm 77 rang in my ears.

My boss eventually emerged from the other room. Lowering himself into the chair next to mine, he asked how I was doing. Unhealthy. Unsafe. They were the only words I could choke out, even though I knew they didn’t make sense as an answer to his question. I tried to focus on the logistics of what I needed to do with my student, but as his lips moved, my brain wandered. I’m ‘doing Your work’, Lord. You brought me here. You gave these girls to me, and me to these girls. Yet I feel like I’m dying. How could you let this happen?

It’s every missionary’s worst nightmare—that moment when the prayers for protection and safety, the ones that people back at home prayed over you before you left, seem to have worn off.

In that moment I was left to wrestle with the fact that because God is sovereign, that this was exactly where He wanted me. He knew this would happen. He knew I would feel unsafe. He knew it would be dark and I wouldn’t be able to sense His presence, but somehow I had to trust that He was still there…

He had called me to the depths of myself—my deepest fears and wounds—in His loving goodness, for His ultimate glory. I knew the theology, yet there I was, weeping, begging God to show up and replace my suffering with a feeling of safety, even though I’d always said I would do whatever it took for the people around me to know the love of Christ…

~~~

Around these parts, we pray for our pilots in church on Sunday and before almost every meal. To us they’re not just pilots—they’re family, my friends, my friends’ husbands, my bosses, my students, me.

I’ve learned a lot about trusting the sovereignty of God from hearing pilots and their loved ones pray. Our pilots all have their fair share of plane crash stories—some minor, some major, all mildly terrifying. Yet when they pray, they ask for wisdom as they fly, not for safety, even though many of them understand what it feels like to be in a plane that’s going down. FlyingSideways These men and women have been there; they’ve felt a complete lack of safety akin to what I felt in December.

They’ve all said, “Yes Lord, I want to follow you. I want to serve the people of Southwest Alaska by bringing them their groceries, the fuel they need to survive, and their loved ones, no matter the cost.” (After all, none of us could live and minister where we do if it wasn’t for our valiant bush pilots.) And thus, we cover our pilots in prayer, just as my church family in Colorado prayed for me as they sent me out as a missionary.

But even within that covering of prayer, many of them have walked away from a plane with it’s landing gear folded or it’s wings ripped off.

They know what it’s like to question God’s plan with every fiber of their being while simultaneously fighting to trust the theology and truth of His sovereignty. They’ve managed to praise God just moments after feeling the least safe they’ve felt in their lives. And they still wake up every morning and fly despite all of this because that’s what God’s called them to– even when it feels dangerous.

The prayers of our pilots have challenged me to stop praying for safety, and instead pray to be exactly where God wants me to be— even if it seems horrible and hard, maybe even traumatic at times.

What if we all prayed that way? For wisdom rather than safety, for His will rather than our own? It seems strangely reminiscent of The Lord’s Prayer if you ask me…

After all, Jesus never promised His disciples they wouldn’t suffer or be unsafe (Look at the life of Paul if you doubt me.) Similarly, the Lord never promised David that life, even life as a king, would be easy. (The beginning of Psalm 77 is pretty solid evidence that it wasn’t.) But God did promise He would be David’s refuge when the excrement hit the stone-age ventilation system… He never promised me that living in Alaska would feel safe, but through His word He has promised to be my refuge and physician when my proverbial plane crashes and I’m left climbing from the burning wreckage.

~~~

I woke up the morning after our proverbial plane crash, disheartened and dehydrated from crying every spare ounce of fluid out of my body. But being the stubborn woman I am, I was determined to salvage something (anything) from the wreckage. I threw my Bible and journal on the table I’d wept on just hours before, and got brutally honest with the Lord: “I don’t feel safe. I need to feel safe if You want me to stay here.”

Do you? Is safety the call I’ve put on your life, Kacy?

Etched below God’s rhetorical question in my journal are the words that I pray I’ll be able to live my life by, everyday–

Alright Lord, things might not “get better”. I’m coming to terms with that. It’s a very real possibility that You’ll continue to ask me to walk into (and live in) places that are hard and desolate, almost completely devoid of light, and call me to expose all of my pain so Your light might shine through this brokenness.

You might not deliver me from living in an unsafe environment, but I know this mess is a part of Your plan. And Abba, if You are going to use this hot mess to draw people in and glorify Yourself, then dammit, this is exactly where I want to be; safety or no safety…

“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsake; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in You.”

(2 Corinthians 4:8-12)

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