We All Need a New Beginning

I love the dark early morning. 

The windows are black, the house is still. There is something almost sacred about those quiet pre-dawn hours.

I make a hot drink and snuggle on the couch with my favorite blanket, devotionals, and my Bible. My kitten crawls onto my lap and snuggles in. I am in my happy place.

The dark windows slowly turn to gray. The sunrise is coming. I can’t see it directly from my favorite spot on the couch because the window faces west. But steadily a rainbow grows on the western horizon, signaling the coming day. Three hundred and sixty degree sunrises and sunsets are features of the rural Texas landscape that never grow old. 

From my window I see the field behind our yard, with mama cows and their new babies. The field slopes down to a pond, from which rises a gentle morning mist. On the other side of the pond, another hill rises to crest with a line of trees, forming the horizon. The shifting colors of the horizontal dawn rainbow brighten steadily.

A new beginning. Darkness turning to light. Making rainbows of hope along the way.

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I have had seasons of struggling with anxiety. The anxiety is worst in the very middle of the night.

In these hard seasons the clock almost always reads 2:00am when my eyes shoot open. My heart pounds. My mind floods with worries. There is a full-on battle happening in my body.

I know there are spiritual aspects when anxiety hits; there are physiological aspects as well. I fight the battle with prayer, with Scripture, with herbal tea, with protein.

"Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Psalm 30:5b

And in the morning? When my eyes squint open again and the light streams in my windows, there is a palpable shift towards hope. Every single morning is a new start. 

"The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.” Lamentations 3:22-23

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God’s Word is full of new starts, story after story of second chances and new beginnings. How we need those stories! 

My favorite online ministry, HelloMornings, is starting a new session next week, and this time the Bible study is all about new beginnings! I had the privilege of writing the third week, which focuses on David.

Oh that David, what a guy, right? Man after God’s own heart. Great- (times a bunch) grandfather to Jesus. Adulterer and murderer. Yeah. David’s story is for all of us who have steered wrong along the way.

And that would be all of us.

David, Noah, Abraham, Peter, Paul… they all needed new beginnings just like you and me.

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Will you join thousands of women around the globe as they seek to grow in being intentional about starting their day with God? You will be so blessed. You can join a group here, but hurry because registration closes soon!

This session I am so excited to share that for the first time the HelloMornings Bible study workbooks are available in print! You can order a physical copy through Amazon. Or you can get a digital download (with an audio option) here.

You can also enter my flash giveaway - yep, I have some digital copies (plus audio if you'd like) to give away! Yay! You can enter through the Rafflecopter widget below.

The flash part is because this is a speedy giveaway - don’t put it off, it is only open TODAY, closing at 11:59pm PST on Friday February 10.

I will announce the winners first thing on Saturday so that you have time to get your download before the session starts. If I can’t connect with a winner on Saturday I will select a replacement winner on Sunday. Big thanks to the HelloMornings team (I'm especially looking at you Kat Lee!) for making this giveaway possible.

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New Life...

bluebonnets in the sunset along our fence line

Spring is here on the farm in a burstingly glorious way this year.  All that death and drought last year? The rains poured and poured and poured starting in November, and boy howdy has the earth made up for lost time!

We're just all about new life right now... babies everywhere, flowers exploding from every cranny, butterflies dancing and swirling across waving fields of grasses.

So how appropriate that my topic over at Do Not Depart today is new life! Here's a snippet...

New life is pressing out with a passion, from what seemed dead.

I look at that hungry caterpillar and see it too. In all that hunger and wriggliness I see a promise for the future, a promise of new life. And I see my old self.

Here is the amazing thing… 

Click over to read the rest!

 

She is coming!

Photo Credit

I am sitting in a still dark house. Unfamiliar noises sing the night song of this place, keeping tune with my waiting.

She is coming.

Brand new person... longed for, prayed for, waited so very much for... she is coming.

Her mother called me not long ago, the special ring I set just for her waking me from sleep like a double shot of espresso.

“Looks like baby girl is going to come tonight.”

Adrenaline flew me through the house, gathering bags and keys and whispering the news and goodbyes to my family.

The dark road seemed so very long. Country roads near midnight when a baby is coming are long and windy and full of surprises. Not far from my house I veered to barely miss a newly dead deer in the middle of the highway.

Half way there little one’s father called.

“Just checking where you are.”

I told him and heard, “We may be having a baby at home.”

My hands gripped the steering wheel as I fervently prayed and pressed a little harder on the pedal. Nine days overdue, and she had waited long enough. She wanted out!

A minute or so from their house he called again. The neighbor had stepped in to sit with the sleeping older children and they were on their way to the birth center. Our silver vans passed in the night, lights blinking a greeting. Those two flicks of my hand on the light switch held my whole heart.

The house seemed expectant somehow. Father's coffee mug was still warm on the table. The neighbor and I exchanged hugs... I had met her only once before, at a birthday party, but in the dead of night with a baby coming, we were sisters. Two mothers remembering and rejoicing.

After she left I walked onto the porch to stare at the bright moon shining through the trees. I wondered and prayed. Back in the living room, the cradle and bouncy seat and swing and stroller all lined up like servants waiting to greet their mistress as she entered the castle hall.

And now I sit and I wait with the sleeping house. Wait for new life to enter here, for two little boys to wake up to the best surprise of their lives, a baby sister. And I pray and pray.

Come into the world gently, little one. You are so wanted.

Update: Little Emma entered the world just 13 minutes after this posted. Her birth was smooth and peaceful.  She is beautiful just like her mama.

Lessons From the Garden ~ New Life Springs Forth From Death

It's funny how we become depleted.

The river of energy that keeps a mother going, occasionally gives out in a gush when crisis hits.

But more often it seems that a slow leak allows it to trickle out.  If left unstopped that mother may soon find herself gazing around in dismay at her life all a-mess.

It's not always that she has made poor decisions.  Yes, there are times when she might say yes too many times.

But sometimes things just pile one upon another in ways that are beyond her control.

There is a rhythm here on the farm, an ebb and flow of seasons... a time for raising chickens, a time for breaking new ground in the garden, a time for allowing the garden to dry up and die.  As the years pass, we begin to learn the language of our farm and understand the seasons.

Now, April, is a season of new life.  Babies.

Baby pigs.  Baby cats.  Baby cows.  Baby chicks.  Baby plants.  Everywhere renewal, life just bursting through.  It is a time when the farm calls out to me loud... work here, be here, live all this goodness.

And yet April is also the season for retreats, and book sales, and Easter and fundraisers.  It is the season when we are thinking of finishing up our school year, and what we need to do to round out our academics.

A few nights ago, at the end of another full day, I stood at the sink of dirty dishes and just felt tired.  Dirty dishes, again.  So much left on the to-do list.  Heaviness settled and I fought back tears.

Perhaps what I should have done then was to whisper a prayer and dive in, but instead I asked my husband to pray for me, for my constant struggle against my lazy sin nature, then I picked up my camera and walked outside.

It was a lovely soft spring evening.  I walked through bird song to the baby pigs, and watched them through slats in the fence as they vigorously nursed.  The walk calmed me.

I kept thinking about renewal.  New life... transformation... fresh starts.

Fresh starts don't always come through brand new things.  Despite what our consumption driven culture tells us - buy this! start new! bigger and better! - real life, the created world, tells us something else.

Life comes from life. Babies come from their mothers, drawing their very life from their mothers' own body.  There isn't new life without a giving.

Life even comes from death.  The flower fades and droops to the ground, in its death bearing seeds of life to the soil, seeds which will spring up and bloom the next year... life from death.

I left the pigs and headed to my garden.  My garden is a weedy mess this year, woefully neglected, a blinking red neon light on my to-do list.  The only thing I have planted is tomatoes.  A few weeks earlier I had picked up tomato starts.  Shortly thereafter we had a surprise freeze... forecast said lows in the mid-40's, I woke up to frost on the grass.  Most of the starts were frozen. 

I planted them anyway, hoping.  Because I know about renewal.

Now, into the tangle of weeds I walked, scanning my planted row hopefully.  And there, in the crook of death, in an angle between green stem and dead withered branch, new life sprung.

This is it.  This is how I can live in this world of sorrow and suffering and tragedy.  This is how I can wake up each morning no matter what and have hope.  This is where I draw my energy from when it is leaking out.

From the brokenness comes healing.  From death comes life.

Then a shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse,
    And a branch from his roots will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the LORD will rest on Him,
    The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
    The spirit of counsel and strength,
    The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
~ Isaiah 11:1-2 ~

It is a mystery that defies explanation (although we try, oh how we try)... in Jesus' death we have found life.  Real life.  Always and forever life, not just after our earthly bodies perish, but now, NOW!

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.
~ 2 Corinthians 5:17 ~

Drinking in living water from God's very creation, His whispers to my heart from the life bursting out on our little homestead, I was refreshed that evening.  The leak was plugged, my energy renewed.

I capped my lense and walked back in the house to find my husband sweating over the sink. I rushed to assure him my prayer request was not a veiled hint and he turned, smiling gently, to me.

He put his arms around me and said, "'Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?' (James 2:15-16) You asked me to pray for you.  I am praying for you."

He turned back to the sink and began to lay out a family plan for managing the kitchen work. From the broken places, newness coming forth again.

Today I am thinking about the broken bread, the broken body.  In these next few days before Easter brokenness will be much on my mind.

But brokenness is deep in my heart.  It is the unceasing reminder that I would be perishing if it were not for the miraculous fact that life springs from death.

My life from His death.  Hallelujah!