How Far Would You Drive?

How Far Would You Drive?

They made a 12-hour drive to meet with us. A man named, Dimitri, and his friend came all that way for prayer. Dimitri seemed particularly tired and weak, but not just from the trip. He was dying of AIDS.

Back in the mid-1990s, my friend Jenny and I had a prayer ministry. We didn’t exactly set up shop. It started like spontaneous combustion. Evidently, it was God’s idea.

We met with a different person each week, praying for discernment and wisdom. Broken, hopeless, and weary people found us through word of mouth alone. We took no money for our time. It was a lay ministry under the covering of two pastors. Neither of us had seminary training or counseling degrees. I served mainly as the note taker. But Jenny was versed in spiritual gifts (as described in 1 Corinthians 12). She especially functioned in the gift of prophecy.

That day, we pulled our chairs close, held hands, and prayed. A period of waiting and listening followed. Dimitri had not yet told us his story. God revealed to Jenny, through individual words or phrases, strong themes that dominated Dimitri’s life. Some of the words were obvious like “abandonment” and “wound,” but other terms were mysterious like “sepulcher” or “malinger.”Continue reading

Eyes Bright Again

Eyes Bright Again

I pulled out a celebrity-gossip magazine that happened to be in my seat pocket on a flight to Denver. You know the type: oh-my-gosh,  The Perfect Little Black Dress of the Season—or—Three  Ways Your Partner Might Be Secretly Cheating! These kinds of articles seem to be the grist of today’s Western culture.

By the time the plane landed, I was made to feel thoroughly undersexed, unsophisticated, and deserving of costly beauty products. The underlying message? —If you aren’t really working on being one of the beautiful people, you’ll end up alone.

Modern culture promises us the moon with superlatives: perfect skin in three applications or idyllic sleep with the right kind of mattress. We hope to find ecstasy in a perfume, identity in an expensive car, and attitude in owning the latest gadget. These things make us feel more attractive, momentarily. We turn a head or two.

But attention doesn’t satisfy, because it only parades as love. Many sacred hours are wasted with this kind of distraction. It’s a pretext, a facade, masking our fundamental need for relationship.

Loneliness seems like life’s albatross. We are required to hold all relationships loosely. Beloved grandparents and parents fade in their vitality and pass away. Colleges and careers take us away from extended family. We lose our original sense of community, the familiarity of a hometown. Marriage has empty spaces with its own unique set of vulnerabilities. Children grow up and find their own lives, as they should. Even lifelong friendships can change overtime or be lost unexpectedly. Single, divorced, or widowed people may think loneliness is their singular struggle, but the experience is common to most everyone I know.

Through good times and hard seasons, loneliness still hovers. We seek out a diary, a dog, or an online friend, looking for solace in some kind of connection.

But down deep, the connection we really need is with God…Continue reading

To Live Anyway

To Live Anyway

What if someone rewrote the story of Little Red Riding Hood from the point-of-view of the grandmother? Or how about the wolf? Might be a very different tale.

God is sometimes known to orchestrate those kinds of shifts—putting us in someone else’s head—through a movie, a book, or even a conversation.

In 1998, two movies released within four months of each other, and both deeply impacted me.

The first one, Hope Floats, is a romantic drama about an unassuming housewife named Birdee, whose life completely crumbles when her husband reveals his infidelity in a very public way. Humiliated, she returns to her mother’s home to figure out her life in the aftermath.

The second movie, One True Thing, is a story of a young career woman named Ellen, who goes back to her childhood home to care for her dying mother. Ellen idealizes her father, a celebrated novelist and professor. Yet, she barely conceals her distain for her mother, regarding her as a shallow, ditzy, homemaker. Over the course of Ellen’s stay, she begins to reassess her view of her parents. Her admiration flips to her mother, as she realizes what her father has become. The reversal turns into a crisis for her, because she is also losing her mother to cancer.

Both Birdee and Ellen reel under the pain of broken dreams. Life turned out so different than they thought. The truth is, you can’t be human very long without experiencing some kind of heartache. I felt their strong inner conflicts. My own losses surfaced, and I wept bitterly.

Several years later, both movies were on the same TV channel back-to-back one afternoon. Was it odd, or was it God?

I decided to watch them again. However, this time something remarkable happened…Continue reading