journaling – Sheila Dougal

4 Ways to Unwrap the Gift of Waiting on God

There’s a lot of waiting on God in the Bible. Joseph’s waits in prison, wrongly accused. Israel waits in captivity, suffering for her idolatry. Roman occupied Jerusalem waits for the Messiah after centuries of hearing nothing from God. And we wait for Christ’s return while we sow the seed of his gospel sojourning here. Waiting on God is an act promised to receive blessing according to the scriptures (Isaiah 30:15). And it’s the meditative focus of Advent. During the Christmas season we have opportunity to think about what or who exactly we’re waiting for. In the midst of parties, shopping lists, cookie exchanges, decorations and concerts, it is easy to miss the gift of waiting on God. Sometimes it takes hard circumstances for us to wake from our busy stupor and embrace the sober gift of longing for our coming King. It took a hard situation for me to exchange the stress of the season for savoring the sweetness of waiting on Jesus. If you find yourself in a painful, confusing, not-at-all-jolly season while the world around you rings bells and sings carols, I invite you to come aside with your Bible, a pen and paper and start unwrapping the gift of waiting on Jesus this Advent.

Waiting When Life Doesn’t Get Better

My youngest son was born two days after Christmas 13 years ago. That year, while I was burdened with his growing body inside mine, I was also heavy laden with a load of fear, sadness and shock. My husband was seeking a divorce and I was about to give birth to our second son. Along with the heavy anxieties of those cares came a stronger arm of grace to bear me up. In those days I began to learn what it means to wait on God in faith amidst my fearful circumstances. In the year my son was born, I started to learn that hoping in God and having faith in him meant waiting with expectation for Jesus, not waiting for everything in my life to get better.

That year, I began journaling in a discounted spiral-bound notebook I found at a local grocery store. With a poinsettia and the word “Faith” on the front, that journal became the place where I started a practice that has continued until now. Every year around Christmastime (sometimes the first week of the new year) I spend some time prayerfully reading God’s word with a specific look for how the Spirit would direct me in the coming year as well as reflecting on the last year’s entry and reality.

As I look back over the years, each year, I see how God is faithfully doing what he promised. He is using all things together for my good, to conform me to the image of his Son. Although I’ve seen God’s answer to my slow-to-believe prayers, my circumstances haven’t changed much. Thankfully, my husband and I are still married. But the marriage hasn’t been without its very difficult times. It’s not like I can say I have hope because God turned life in to a fairytale story of happily ever after. Not at all. I’m still praying for salvation to come to my household, and save every member. I’m still praying for God to rid me of being a coward and a man-pleaser and make me a woman of God who laughs at the days to come and fears God not man. I’m still a tired mom, who deals with depression and fears. But I do all that with a periodic lifting of my head to remember that I’m waiting on God. Advent is a good time to lift our heads and call to mind our hope.

Capture a Remembrance of Your Hope

Even if writing or journaling isn’t your thing, making a yearly tradition of using a small journal entry as a way of focusing your attention on Christ and his coming may help you look up and focus on the gift of Jesus. Here are four suggestions for how you might capture a yearly remembrance of your hope in the One who came to save his people from their sins, and is coming again to consummate our joy in him.

1) Cast your circumstances on him. Put in the journal the circumstances that are causing you to long for him. Is your marriage a wreck? Is your child dying? Have you lost a loved one? Are you lonely? Depressed? Anxious? Afraid? Tell him! Write it down. The Bible calls us to cast our cares upon the Lord because he cares for us (1 Peter 5:7). In Isaiah, Hezekiah took the threats of his enemies and laid them out before God and called on God to intervene. In the gospels, people brought their sick selves and loved ones to Jesus. When you bring your troubles to God in writing, you start to realize how much you long for him to do what he promises to do one day: Make all things new (Revelation 21:5).

2) Call to mind his promises. Look up scriptures with words like “hope” and “wait” and “trust” and “faith”. You’ll find some promises and prayers that will help you worship while you wait this Advent. Like this one, “From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides you, who acts for those who wait for him.” (Isaiah 64:4) Write it down. And turn those specific scriptures that grab you into prayers for yourself and others. Pray that God will help you hope in him.

3) Cry for your kids, or someone else’s. A yearly advent journal is a good place to put prayers for your kids or for kids in your life, maybe cousins, nieces, nephews, grandkids, kids in the neighborhood, kids at school, kids at church, etc. God doesn’t want us to hope in our kids. But he does want us to hope in him for our kids and to give our kids Him as their hope. “…that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God…” (Psalm 78:5-7). Writing down your prayers for the next generation is a wonderful way to build your anticipation for Jesus.

4) Cry for new desires. It’s easy during the holidays to get distracted by things we want. Whether it be material things like a new phone, or clothes. Or relational desires like a new friend, or a happier marriage. Though there’s nothing wrong with those desires, if they consume us, we’ve missed out on real joy. In the midst of God’s chastisement Isaiah prays that God would be gracious to his people, because though they may be sick from head to toe with sin, his people really were longing for him. In their distress they waited for God their Savior. It says, “Your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul.” (Isaiah 26:8). Over the years I look back and realize that often the name of Christ and his remembrance wasn’t the desire of my soul, but as I have cast my cares and called his promises to mind and cried for my kids, he’s developed in me a longing for new desires. He has created in me a desire for his name and remembrance. He has caused me to embrace waiting on him.

Life’s circumstances can be horrific, mundane, depressing, chaotic or just distracting. But when we lift our eyes off the circumstances, tell God about them, cry for his help, seek his grace and wait on him we experience the gift of anticipating our coming King.

confessions and desires of a world-digesting writer/eater cell

Merriam-Webster defines a writer as: (noun) One that writes.

Big shocker.

I’ve been writing, well since I was about 5. First just letters, then short, three word sentences without punctuation, then onto complete sentences and paragraphs. By seventh grade when I had Mrs. Spicer for English I was writing essays and stories and poems and loving it. In between there around the age of nine I started journaling. For me, writing has been a way to process my thoughts, feelings and circumstances. When Jesus became real and beautiful to me at age sixteen writing was the way I processed what I was reading in the Bible and the conflicting feelings I was experiencing as an insecure girl wanting to find my place in the world. I wrote a play for my youth group and more essays and poems and filled a few more teddy bear and flower decorated journals.

Between those early teen years and now I have married, graduated from nursing school, labored two sons into the world and moved several times. In between those words are years of trials and joys. Some too hard to speak about. All digested in the writings of my private journals. Also in there somewhere I discovered the blog. I had no idea. Up till my discovery of Blogger all my writings were private letters, journals, poems and word docs. As women in my church, close friends and family encouraged me, I began to blog more.

In the past 10 years or so of blogging I have been introduced to the endless voices in the public square. It’s quite overwhelming actually, the volume of published content by anyone and everyone on the internet. A simple google search on any topic will give you pages and pages of links from the famous and professional to the stay-at-home-mom who managed to squeeze in a half hour of blogging in her day full of household management tasks and human-raising efforts. (A thought-provoking article here about the tsunami of un-governed writings and teachings available on the internet for the consumption of the church and it’s implications.)

In the beginning of my blogging efforts I set out to promote my blog- reading other blogs, commenting, participating in mommy-blog contests, etc. And then my marriage took a dive into troubled waters. During that time I stepped away from public writing and became aware of my mixed up priorities and the praise-seeking sin at the root of all my efforts. Writing had ceased to be a tool for processing life. It had become an obsessive exercise to be known. I hated finding that out about myself. But it was the beginning of dealing with a besetting sin that was dragging me down on my race of faith.

As I returned to meditating on God’s words more and processing what I was finding there in private journals, I slowly returned to selectively writing on my blog again. This time with a decision not to self-promote or to check stats or seek comments, but just to offer in a public way my meditations on God’s word and life with a prayer that it might encourage someone out there.

Writing for me has never been an identity or profession. To me, calling myself a writer because I write is sort of like calling myself an eater because I eat. It’s a fact. Big deal. Writing is the way I chew on life and digest it. Ignorantly I’ve sort of thought everyone does that. Having two sons who don’t enjoy reading or writing like I do has taught me that not everyone experiences life best with books and ink and words. Not everyone feels a sense that heaven might smell a lot like the intoxicating paper pages scent of Barnes and Nobel.

Somehow, the process of digesting life that is so necessary for me has encouraged others. I’ve been told it’s a gift. I haven’t thought of it that way. But listening to others and hearing God say, “Do your part in the body of Christ! Use your gifts for the good of the body,” (my paraphrase of Romans 12:3-8), I have started to take more seriously the stewardship of a gift God has given me to process the Word and the world in writing for the purpose of pointing others to him. I want to do this while thinking of myself soberly and less. For me this means beginning to submit public writings not just here on my blog at my will, but to men and women in the church (worldwide) who can help me steward this gift for the good of the church and God’s glory.

Desiring God has been a source of much encouragement to me in my walk with Christ and so was the first venue through which I have submitted a couple articles and have been so humbled to have published there. The decision to submit writings to editors and people who give feedback and criticism and sometimes just a simple rejection opens me up to learning to take this gift God has given and start stewarding it for the multiplication of his kingdom. I’m excited to learn. I really don’t feel comfortable calling myself a writer because I need to write. But I do feel comfortable calling myself a glad and happy servant of my Servant King Jesus to the people he loves!

I mean, I am a nobody. Really. There are plenty of famous and much better writers out there. But, I am a cell in this body. And maybe it’s just another cell or two that needs to fight off some invading sin or needs help to lift it’s spiritually-anemic head. If that’s one of the ways God wants to use my life I say a hearty, “Yes!”

If you’re reading this I’d appreciate your prayers that I would seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness and forget about myself and be more others minded for their good and God’s glory in my writing. Pray that I’d learn to use writing as a means of building up the church and bringing God glory.

May God build up his people, even with a world-digesting writer/eater cell like me.

Of barely burning embers, a bruised heart and a Beautiful Savior

I came to the end of another journal today. I’ve kept a journal since I was 9, and I still have all my journals from age 13 on.

Looking back is hard. And some of the reason it’s hard is pride. It’s flat out embarrassing looking back at some of the things I thought, wrote and did. I look back and know for sure, my God is so merciful and patient and faithful to me, though I have been a liar, a thief, a gossip, sexually immoral, quick to trade Jesus in for a man who would make me feel good, and much more. I’ve been a coward and a complainer, but Christ has been to me the God-Man, drawing a line in the sand, lifting my head, withholding his right to condemn me, and making me want to go and sin no more!

I’m tired of fighting sin! I long for the day when my thoughts aren’t a battle from the moment I open my eyes and depression doesn’t suck me in like a black hole. But, by the grace of God, I’ll keep fighting the good fight of faith in Christ.

There are so many hurts from the past. Oh, that I would see with eyes of faith; that I would see God’s promises kept and Christ’s beauty forged in the fires of my life and the aroma of His goodness emanating from my brokenness. Yet, I find at 39, at the end of another journal (one that started as a determination to keep the promise of my youth in marriage and to pray for my husband), that I am a smoldering flame where I thought there was fire. I am a bruised reed when I thought I was a pillar.

And I lift my trembling hands and bend my weak knees and cry out tired prayers and rest all my hope on the One who doesn’t put out irritating smoky embers like me or crush cowardly broken reeds like the one I find I am after life’s trials thus far.

I wanted to be a “woman of valor”, but peering past the obviousness of the condition I find myself in, I see my Lord stirring a flame and splinting what’s broken, and a long way off, I catch a glimpse of what I long for: to see Him face to face, and to be made like him, finally fully redeemed.

So I press on. Looking back so I can recall His faithfulness despite my folly, but then forgetting what’s behind, because He’s given me today. And it’s a long obedience in the same direction with the promise that He who began a good work in me, will be faithful to complete it compelling me to put one foot in front of the other.

A bruised reed He will not break, And smoking flax He will not quench; He will bring forth justice for truth. -Isaiah 42:3

Quieted,

Sheila

Second living of the past few weeks

I have been planning our yearly summer trip to Oregon, trying to keep a semblance of order yet keep the vacation in our summer break, doing the daily things that keep a home running and in the back of my mind through it all I have blog posts going through my brain. Smile. Sigh.

Time budgeting is much like money budgeting for me. I find if I don’t set aside the allotment for the necessary I’ll spend it all on the unnecessary. But then usually the necessary uses up so much of the budget that there’s not much room for the unnecessary. Writing isn’t unnecessary to me, but if I don’t get up early enough or stay up late enough the opportunity to write is missed. Problem is its usually throughout the day that I think of things I want to write. I find myself jotting down thoughts on scratch pieces of paper or in the many journals I have floating around wherever I go. I have a bunch of pictures of meals I’ve made in iPhoto. One of these days…

There’s a terrible bunch of knotted up muscles descending from my left jaw, down my sternocleidomastoid and trapezius accompanied by a hideous grinding/crepitus sound from the base of my skull on the right side when I turn my head. I’m convinced this is all due to the damaged TMJ on my left side that, after years of gab, grind and grub is permanently flawed. I don’t know what to do about it. Do I see a dentist? A chiropractor? An ENT? A physical therapist? My family practice doc? What would they do about it?

About 2 months ago I started experiencing pain with squatting in my knees- left worse than right. I ignored it and joked about approaching 40. Its gotten worse to the point getting up from a sitting position or sitting down is causing a stabbing pain in my left knee. A week ago we went fishing, I climbed up the rocky trail to our car, pushed off with my left leg in a lunge position and the pain just about brought me tumbling down the trail. Since then, I cannot squat, lunge, sit, climb stairs, get out of my car…anything that involves bearing wait and bending my left knee to a 45 degree angle, without some serious, eye-watering pain. This is really messing with my plans to keep doing Crossfit style workouts 3 days a week. My husband thinks its a torn meniscus. I know what they do for that. I don’t like that option. And I thought men were the stubborn ones when it comes to medical stuff.

I’m only 38, but my body feels things I didn’t expect to feel until my 50’s.

We’re planning to drive the famous Pacific Coast Highway in California, from Morro Bay to San Francisco next week. I love the ocean view. I like mountain views too, but if I had to choose, I’d choose ocean. Desert view isn’t very high up on my list… but it has a beauty.

I am so looking forward to this trip. A Geek Squad guy at Best Buy named Connor (with an O like our Connor who umps Little League) helped us buy a GPS for the trip and wrote out some must-see places in Santa Cruz, San Fran and Half Moon Bay for us to consider stopping at on our trip. Apparently he’s from the area.

At the end of our PCH California trip are my precious nephews, sister and her man. The boys can’t wait to go fishing. I can’t wait to hug my sister and nephews and listen to their sweet voices. I treasure the time I get with my family in Oregon. I wish I could just stop by and visit Aunt Kandace or head to grandma’s house for the day. I’m very thankful for the friends in AZ who have become family to my boys. Nevertheless I wish I could be closer to my mom and dad and family.

After my sister we’ll move up to where my mom, dad, brother, grandmother, grandfather, nieces, nephews, sister-in-love (as opposed to law… saw that written somewhere and loved it!), and house full of more nephews are. We miss them all! My boys would literally move in with the house-full clan if they could! They look up to my now graduated from high school nephew Ethan, and the next in line Nolan. They treasure the play time with Avery and feel like big brothers when they get to be with Liam and Quintin. The always leave that house wishing they had “10 brothers.” Sigh.

I’ve been thinking about what my “voice” is. Writers talk about finding their voice. It feels weird to call myself a writer. I write, but I guess I wouldn’t consider myself a writer unless I was published. Is a person who rides bikes a cyclist? I guess. I feel more comfortable with calling myself a journaler. Maybe that’s my voice. Journaling.

Ann Voskamp is one of my favorite blogger-writers. She’s definitely a writer. Her voice- poetic, encouraging, meditative. I leave her blog encouraged, agreeing.

Pastor Craig is another favorite blogger-writer. In fact, right now, theirs are the only blogs I read regularly. I’ve also read a book from each. Pastor Craig’s voice is humorous, insightful, editorial. I leave his blog smiling every time!

I don’t know what my voice is. A few people have told me I have a different way of putting things that helps them understand. Interesting how that works. Interesting how a person can use words to open doors of understanding.

Hupotosso is a word. We unpacked it a bit using an online Bible Study Tool at the last ladies Bible study for the summer last night.

The Bible really is a living book! It’s inspiration is inexhaustible. God’s word opens doors of understanding that no one can shut and shuts doors of understanding that no one can open. To voluntarily yield yourself to the authority of another is God-like. To fight for your rights is human. To suffer for doing what’s right is divine. To fight back is fallen nature. To entrust yourself to the One who judges justly is Christ-like. To strive to prove you’re right is what we all do. To be a Christian is to be a hupotosso-er. We do not follow a weak, mousy, doormat. We follow the Creator of the Universe who humbled Himself, who bent low to lift us up, who huppotosso-ed and saved us.

I read Ann’s post about an encounter with a stranger in an airport. He asked her what “kind” of Christian she was. Her answer resonated with me:

Isn’t being a Christian rather like being pregnant? You either wholly are or you really aren’t — is there an in between? How did we become known as “kinds” of Christian instead of being simply, humbly, loving Christians? What if following Christ was about a living faith not about wearing faith labels — about living Christ-behaviour, not living in Christian boxes?

Quieted,

Sheila