God Is Enough

Update Week: On Life and Lice

/ Sara Vincent / Leave a comment

It feels as though the past three and a half weeks have been lived in survival mode.  Between race training and head picking, it’s been all I could do to keep us all afloat.  However, as of yesterday, it is with great joy and relief that I can now say We are lice free!!!  🙂

In the midst of just trying to keep things going, projects like Thirty for 30 have taken a bit of a back seat.  Matt has tried to do it at least a couple of nights a week, but I’ve had to take that time to do things like laundry, check school, or sleep.  Hopefully in the next couple of weeks we’ll be able to get back into the swing of some of those “hard stops” we have been trying to implement.

I’ve been asking God for the past few weeks the why of head lice.  We’ve had them once before and, while I hope to never ever ever do this again, I have been able both times to find the gift in them.  The first time, head lice forced us to stop.  We had been going at what seemed like a break-neck pace and suddenly, that all came to a screeching halt.  And, while inconvenient, it was definitely a gift.

This time I feel like God has shown me my own sin, my own idolatry.  He revealed to me that I had taken something good, something beneficial – the concept of a schedule and routine – and made it into an idol.  I was seeking so hard after something predictable that I could control that I had stopped trusting Him for the strength for each day, each moment.

I still love and crave routine and schedule.  I believe we were made for it and I know we all do better with it.  But I realize that it is not the schedule that will save us, nor will some ideal of a methodical, predictable life.  In the midst of running a small business, home education, life with kids, adoption, being involved with church and ministry, no matter how hard I try our life is going to be somewhat crazy and trying to force us to fit into a box we weren’t made for is only going to frustrate everyone and keep us from modeling our Savior to each other and those around us.

I am prayerful that as we move into the holiday season over the next few weeks that we will be able to slow down, to enjoy the season and consider its weight and worth.  But I also know that these years are fleeting and fighting the fullness of time will only leave us all empty.  So more than anything, I pray that God gives the grace to enjoy each moment, to soak up the wonder of it, and to savor the glory and peace He gives each day.  Because He is more than enough to meet all our needs.

For His Glory ~

~ Sara

On Being Blind

/ Sara Vincent / 2 Comments

There are days I want to crawl back into bed and hide under my covers. There are days I will excuse myself from the school table, the room, and go find quiet solace somewhere, anywhere. There are days when I bite my tongue hard to hold back the poisoned darts and still they fly free.

Today was one of those days.

I’m learning that I have a hard time being the responsible, get-stuff-done mom while still maintaining my laugh-out-loud-isn’t-life-fun persona. It seems I can only be one or the other. And I think this is why I cling so hard to summer. No school means we can go have fun and the house doesn’t have to fall apart. Warm weather and abundant sunshine mean laying by the pool, sitting on the patio, family bike rides, and just about everything else in the world that I love to do.

And I really want to be that mom year-round. But then, we would never do school or anything else hard because it would interfere with my schedule and our fun.

Unfortunately (from our fleshly perspective), God hasn’t called us to a life of fun. He hasn’t called us to bask in the sun all day every day while children frolic in the water. No, He has called us to work, and good deeds, and to count it all joy.

Joy. It can be hard to find when all you can focus on is the clock ticking down to bedtime.

Joy. It sits all around me at the school table and calls my name a billion times a day and needs my love and attention like it needs air to breathe.

Joy. It’s not always fun and easy and laughter. Sometimes it’s hard and ugly and comes with tears.

I lost my focus today and missed the joy in front of me. I admit, it would have been hard to find, even if I had been looking, but it was there.

It was there in the child who begged me time and again to play Five Crowns and who I kept saying “later” to and never did play with.

It was there in the mess of recyclables and scrapbook paper and the girls made furniture for their American Girl dolls.

It was there in their delight over tacos and bread dough and my iPhone.

It was all around me and I missed my chance to soak it in, to live in it.

**Lord, help me to focus on the joy all around me. I am living my own dream. You have blessed me beyond measure and I daily take it for granted. Forgive me, Lord, for my arrogance and my ungratefulness. Keep my eyes focused on you and your countless good gifts, even the ones that are hard to see. For your glory and for their hearts….Amen.”

Gold

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He knows the way that I take; when He has tested me, I will come forth as gold. ~ Job 23:10

The path of faith is one of sorrow and joy, suffering and healing comfort, tears and smiles, trials and victories, conflicts and triumphs, and also hardships, dangers, beatings, persecutions, misunderstanding, trouble, and distress.  Yes “in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (Romans 8:37).

Yes, “in all these” – even during storms, when the winds are the most intense – “we are more than conquerors.”  You may be tempted to run from the ordeal of a fierce storm of testing, but head straight for it!  God is there to meet you in the center of each trial.  And He will whisper to you His secrets, which will bring you out with a radiant face and such an invincible faith that all the demons of hell will never be able to shake it.

~ E.A. Kilbourne

~ from Streams in the Desert, July 12

Wingless Birds

/ Sara Vincent / Leave a comment

They will soar on wings like eagles. ~ Isaiah 40:31

There is a fable about the way birds first got their wings. The story goes that initially they were made without them. Then God made the wings, set them down before the wingless birds, and said to them, “Take up these burdens and carry them.”

The birds had sweet voices for singing, and lovely feathers that glistened in the sunshine, but they could not soar in the air. When ask to pick up the burden that lay at their feet, they hesitated at first. Yet soon they obeyed, picked up the wings with their beaks and set them on their shoulders to carry them.

For a short time the load seemed heavy and difficult to bear, but soon, as they continued to carry the burden and to fold the wings over their hearts, the wings grew attached to their little bodies. They quickly discovered how to use them and were lifted by the wings high into the air. The weights had become wings.

This is a parable for us. We are the wingless birds, and our duties and tasks are the wings God uses to lift us up and carry us heavenward. We look at our burdens and heavy loads, and try to run from them, but if we will carry them and tie them to our hearts, they will become wings. And on them we can then rise and soar toward God.

There is no burden so heavy that when lifted cheerfully with love in our hearts will not become a blessing to us. God intends for our tasks to be our helps; to refuse to bend our shoulders to carry a load is to miss a new opportunity for growth. (J.R. Miller)

~ Streams in the Desert, July 8

May you see your burdens as blessings this weekend and allow them to carry you to the throne of grace, my friends.

For His Glory ~
~ Sara

Pulling Weeds

/ Sara Vincent / Leave a comment

One throws piano books.  Another slaps her sister.  I hear a stampede of angry wails from my side of the bathroom door.  I am in the shower while the argument ensues; how to settle a dispute that has no witnesses while the shampoo runs into my eyes?

By the time I was their age my only sibling was an adult, off to college and living on his own.  I have no model to draw from for working through these difficulties.  I feel lost.

I send them to rooms, to beds, to think, pray, calm.  I brush my wet hair and pray myself.

There are so many issues, topics that seem to be suddenly glaring.  Areas in our parenting that are lacking.  Where to begin?

One calms down, another confesses her wrong-doing.  They go out to weed flower beds.  Youngest child proudly presents weeds to be placed in water and displayed.  Agitated from the morning, I take them grumpily, hiding behind a polite smile.  If I’m honest, I don’t want to put weeds on the counter, but I can’t resist her unbridled joy.

And it occurs to me, this is what we’re doing as parents.  Pulling the weeds of sin, working to get the stubborn roots, so that the beautiful flowers that are our children can grow stronger, healthier, more beautiful to the glory of their Creator.

While I’m being honest, it bears mentioning that I hate weeding, loathe yard work.  Which is why the children are outside pulling while I’m inside typing.  And while I can delegate yard work, no one else can do this work in their lives.  While God ultimately directs their paths and who they will become, He has entrusted them to us, their earthly parents, to do this difficult, unending task of pulling the weeds of sin that seek to encroach on the beauty He is creating in them.

And He uses them to expose (often glaringly) and work out the sins in our own hard hearts, the flesh that screams to be made first.

This parenting is a sacred act, making us more like His Son more than almost any other crucible that life gives, if only we will submit to His instruction.  And models aside, He will be faithful to lead me, lead us, as we seek Him daily to show us how to lead them.

 

Updates and Such

/ Sara Vincent / 3 Comments

It’s been kind of a long two weeks on the adoption front.  As the euphoria of our decision to adopt has waned, reality has set in a bit.   I have begun to wonder about different things, and worry has tried to take over.  I have desired to hold our little girl, and sadness has overwhelmed.  I have tried to carry on normally, not sharing this burden with my beloved, and I have drawn in on myself in quietness and isolation.

Last Saturday I finally confided in him what I was feeling, the fears, the emotions, the concerns.  He echoed all of them and understood.  He felt many of the same things.  Just talking with him about these things, I felt lighter, more joyful, more at peace.  I’m not at all sure why I felt I needed to protect him from what I was feeling.

Sunday my mind began to imagine having her in church with us, me holding her as the congregation sang in worship together.  It was all I could do to hold back the flood of tears.

Tuesday brought a fair amount of confusion and emotion that was finally resolved today.  It’s all good, as a friend of ours would say.  😉

We learned last week that it could easily be 18 to 24 months to bring her home after our paperwork is submitted to IBESR in Haiti and that can’t happen until after Matt is 35.  At the end of December.

I found out her birth date yesterday.  Such a gift!  One of the things I wasn’t sure we’d ever be able to know.  She will be four this month (four is one of my favorite ages!) and we will celebrate here in some way.  But, based on the time line we were given last week, she could easily be seven before she comes home.  There’s a big difference between a four year old and a seven year old.  And I am sad that I will miss out on some of my favorite years.  Adoption brings it’s own sort of grieving, I guess.

We plan to send in our agency agreement tomorrow.  I am thankful we are able to do this.  Thankful for this journey God has placed us on.  I know that He will see us through harder times than the past two weeks and all the timing is in His hands.  I trust Him entirely.  He is faithful.

Spinning

/ Sara Vincent / Leave a comment

What do you do when you feel God asking something hard, something impossible?  When your head spins at what it will mean, how it will change everything.  You have the chance to walk away, to say no.  But your heart won’t let you, because you know your God is bigger than all these things.  He is mighty and able to do more than you could ever ask or imagine.  How do you know the difference between emotion and the Holy Spirit?

My heart is both heavy and light – heavy with the burden of logic and reality, light with the joy and hope of the possibilities. Prayers are coveted.

 

God never rebukes us for risking too much,

only for trusting too little.

(Words I’m clinging to this week.)

A New Day

/ Sara Vincent / 1 Comment

I wish I could say that I went on yesterday to live in victory and walk in peace with my children.  Apparently they didn’t get the memo that we were starting fresh, so when I left the computer and their attitudes were still as crummy as mine had been when I sat down, I confess that I fell into despair again.

Matt came home at one point during the day and pointed out that what he had read in yesterday’s post and what he was seeing dragging around the house with the long face were not the same person.  😦

Some days you lose the battle.  Yesterday I lost.  I was tired and gave up.  I appreciate the comments and encouragement that many of you shared with me; they were and are a blessing.  My rational side knew the truth yesterday, but my emotions got the better of me.

But this is the beauty of grace.  Today is new.  A good night of sleep, a cup of coffee, and time in the Word, and I feel stronger.  I still quiver a bit at facing today, still feeling the bruises and tender from yesterday’s struggles, but I am ready to start again.  I am encouraged.

I read this today in my quiet time:

Steel is the product of iron plus fire.  Soil is rock plus heat and the crushing of glaciers.  Linen is flax plus the water that cleans it, the comb that separates it, the flail that pounds it, and the shuttle that weaves it.  In the same way, the development of human character requires a plus attached to it, for great character is made not through luxurious living but through suffering.  And the world does not forget people of great character.

Some day God is going to reveal this fact to every Christian:  the very things they now rebel against are the instruments He has used to perfect their character and to mold them into perfection, so they may later be used as polished stones in His heaven yet to come.

~ Streams in the Desert, December 2

And this Scripture reading went along with it:

For because He Himself has suffered when tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted.

~ Hebrews 2:16

Lonely as I may feel some days, I am not alone.  And the struggles we face, the girls and I, are not without purpose.

Have a blessed Thursday, friends!

By His Grace ~

~ Sara

Doing the Hardest Thing

/ Sara Vincent / 3 Comments

I once thought giving birth was the hardest thing I would ever do.  The months of discomfort, night after night of no sleep, the agony of waiting.  Then, the contractions, intense and unlike anything describable.  The pushing, the sweat and tears.

But then they are born, delivered from the womb, and sent out by God to be led by us.  This, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  Daily being faced with my own weaknesses.  Seeing my short-comings reflected back in my children’s lives.  Working through their failings and reliving my own.

The desire to give up, to throw in the towel, is intense.  The fact that I simply cannot is overwhelming, intimidating, and an incredible challenge.  My vision for our family and what I see within these four walls are painfully different from each other.

The past two weeks have been hectic.  My mind has been preoccupied with many things – birthday festivities, Thanksgiving foods, a neighborhood open house – none of these things are my children.  They have become a burden of sorts, and I have no doubt they can sense that.  And so their behavior reflects what their hearts feel and the clash continues between us.

I am reminded this morning that it is when I like them least that I must love on them most.  When I am distracted and burdened by the daily responsibilities, that is when I most need to put the house work aside and sit with them and read and reflect and most of all, slow.  Slow myself.  Slow them.  Slow this rushing time.

So, today we will do that.  The cleaning must still be done and so must some school work.  But surely there is a way to do that without losing them in the process?

This hardest thing, this raising of God’s children, can only be done on my knees, even on my face.  I do not know what to do, I cannot see the next step, but my God knows it and I must trust Him to lead me in it.  We face a mighty enemy that fights for their souls, and if he can’t have those, he will fight for their story, to make their story about him or about them, and not about the One who was born to die for them.  I stand today, overwhelmed and weary, and face the battle that lies ahead, knowing that I will remain on these front lines for years.  I stand, but I fall to my knees and cry out like Jehoshaphat as he faced the mighty army, , “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”

My eyes are on you, O Lord, show me the way to lead them to you.

Two Seemingly Unrelated Stories…

/ Sara Vincent / 9 Comments

…And a God who brings all things together:

A month ago, my purse was stolen.  Prior to that we had been experiencing months of trials that are common to life, but they just never seemed to let up.  Seven days after it was stolen, it returned.  All by God’s grace and for His good pleasure.  My heart was delighted by this and it seemed to be a turning point in how things were going for us.  Life just seemed to improve.

Today I called the cleaners and found out my purse is back.  The cost of having it cleaned was a decent amount more than I had planned on and I just wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to go pick it up right away.  I decided not to worry too much about it and I would trust the Lord to take care of it.

Last night I sent two girls to my parents’ house while Matt had meetings, the older two had ballet, and I got groceries.  I made one last stop at the Dillon’s near my parents’ home to grab some of the deals in the expiring ad (and to get some produce, because I am so over WalMart’s produce).  I loaded the few bags of groceries out of the cart and into the back of my SUV, dutifully rolled my cart up and over the poorly placed median, and put it in the cart corral.  I began to walk back to the car and the silly cart started rolling backward away from the corral and out into the lot.  I went back and pushed the cart back into its spot and that’s when I noticed it….someone had left an iPad in the next cart in the corral.

I considered taking it inside and leaving it with customer service.  Those who know me know that I assume the best of just about everyone I meet, but I had a very uncharacteristic thought of, What if someone inside decides they would like to have an iPad, rather than returning it? So, I decided to just take it home and try to figure out who it belonged to.

I wanted to protect the privacy of the owner, so I did minimal snooping.  I found a cell phone number connected to the iPad and tried calling it.  No luck.  I sent a text.  Never heard anything back.  Today I did some deeper snooping and found an email address.  No reply.  So tonight I decided to really get nosy and began skimming emails and searching everywhere I could for some more contact information.

Eventually, I found out the owner’s last name (I already had her first name from another page).  Then I was able to find her address.  I looked online to find a home telephone number, but couldn’t.  I nosed around some more.  I put together that she had a couple of kids going to a local high school….  And then something just clicked in my head (it was, in fact, the Holy Spirit)…. her last name, kids at a certain school, they lived in a particular part of town, could it be???

I called my veterinarian’s office (that sounds random, doesn’t it?) and spoke with the assistant who answered the phone.  “Ellen, this is going to sound like a really strange question, but is the doctor related to a (so and so)?”  A slow yes was her reply.  “I think I have her iPad,” I told her.  She squealed and put me on hold to go tell the doctor.  He was elated.  I drove out to his office to deliver it to him before he went home for the night.

Once I was there, we visited for some time and I learned that the past few weeks for him and his family have been much like those few months over the summer were for us.  The iPad had been a gift from him to his wife for their anniversary; she used it all the time and had forgotten it in the cart in her hurry to get home last night.  She was devastated.  He was trusting God to take care of the details.

By the time I got to the office, He had written me a “reward” check and also told me that Coco’s next round of boosters (that she’s due for this month) were on him.  I told him that it wasn’t necessary, but he insisted.  I told him the story of my purse and that this money he was giving me was enough to pay for the cleaning bill and leave a little extra.

And we rejoiced together that God is good and He is in the details and He works in amazing and mysterious ways.

Oh, He is glorious!  And He is so tender to us, His children.  What a thrill to be on this side of a God-thing today.  He is good!