Category Archives: remembering

Remember, God can replace anyone’s heart

Today I got in my car and drove away from my house alone. Again. However many Sundays there are in 28 years, that’s how many Sundays (minus a few Christmas and Easter Sundays) I’ve been going to church alone.

Almost every Sunday I have to fight the numbness that threatens. Going to church every Sunday can become so routine that you forget exactly why you’re going. It’s just what you do. Going to church every Sunday alone, while the man you love stays home to work on his latest project, throws pain at the numbness that won’t let going to church become a routine. It’s like arthritis of the heart flares up every Sunday, but I’ve gotten used to the pain.

My life circumstance lie to me week after week. They tell me God’s not there. And if he is, he’s can’t reach my husband and sons. And if he does, they wouldn’t embrace him. And at times I find myself lost in complaints, bitterness and blaming like the dwarves from The Hobbit did when they lost their way in the Mirkwood forest. I need to remember what God told Ezekiel to tell the people of Israel when they were generations deep and poisoned in their own Mirkwood forest.

“ I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.

– Ezekiel 36:24-28 ESV

God promised to give his people a new heart and new spirit. And he has. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve experienced it myself.

I’m not a Bible scholar, so I won’t go into the when or how the fulfillment of this prophecy happened or will happen for Israel. But I know there was a time in my life that I didn’t care about God. I cared about me. I didn’t want to walk in God’s ways, I wanted God to give me my way. And I don’t know how he did it, really. I mean I know the right theological answer, but I can’t tell you how he made what beats inside of me every day long for Jesus. All I know is, I have a heart I didn’t have sometime before age 16 when I heard Jesus call me to follow him.

And I’ve seen it in my sister’s life. God took out her heart of stone and gave her a tender heart that loves Jesus and people.

I need to remember. I need to believe. I don’t know when or how, but my God is a heart transplantor. He takes out hard hearts like the one I’ve seen resist the gospel for 28 years, and replaces them with hearts that love Jesus.

He’s the only one who can.

Memorial Day: Remembering when you don’t remember

I’m a generation X-er.  The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Shock and Awe headlines of March 2003, are the acts of war I remember.   And as close to home as the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan have been to me, no one close to me has lost their life in the battles of the past 16 years.  Memorial Day could easily become the symbolic start of summer for me and nothing more.  But I’m a mom of teenage boys, and I hear the news headlines and appreciate American history and the value of human life too much to let that happen.

For me, remembering those who have lost their lives serving in the military means intentionally remembering when I don’t remember.  It means purposefully reflecting on what it means to me that I live in a country where over a million people have given their lives in combat.

My 12 and 14 year old sons know war mostly in terms of first person shooter games (something I’d rather they never knew).  They hear headlines and know the story of 9/11.  For them, the history of war is glamorized.

My point is, neither I nor my sons know the impact of loosing someone we love to war.  So I decided to have the boys use Google to calculate the combat deaths from every U.S. military conflict.  Once they added all those lives up, they had come up with 1,243,493 sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers given for us.

We never knew one of them.

Their lives and deaths weren’t glamorous.  They weren’t perfect.  They weren’t Marvel comic heroes.  But they put themselves in harms way in the moment they lost their lives on a mission to protect this country from the evils of foreign oppression and dictators.  Without them, the country my sons and I live in may not exist.  Both they and I need to take the time to remember those we don’t remember so we can foster gratitude and soberness and thoughtfulness about this country and our roles here.

I asked my boys to write either a poem or essay… some sort of reflection on the 1,243,493 souls who gave their lives in military combat for the freedom of citizens of the United States.

Connor, my 14 year old wrote an essay, “Why These Lives Matter To Us.”  Ryland an acrostic using the words MEMORIAL DAY.  Me, a blog.  Our stopping to think and reflect on these lives with our words is important.  It’s a way to honor the ones remembered.  Even when we don’t remember.

While writing this over my Twitter feed came a tweet about the book The Things Our Fathers Saw: The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation is on sale on Amazon for $0.99 in the kindle edition.  We’ll be reading some of that tonight too.

As a Christian, my ultimate homeland is not the United States of America, but I want to be a blessing to her and honor those who laid down their lives for sojourning Americans like me.  I also want to be a sober minded, serving citizen and a mom who passes thoughtfulness and gratitude and the gift of remembering on to her kids.

How are you intentionally remembering the 1,243,493 today?