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Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

faults

Broken, Forgiven

April 27, 2012 By Michelle

Quieting the scrape of metal chairs, the conductor taps his baton with three sharp raps on the metal music stand. The reed smells faintly of mint and moist wood as I wet the cane once and then again with my lips. Fingers positioned over the holes, I take a deep breath and play, mouthpiece vibrating between my teeth.

One foot taps the linoleum floor as black notes ebb and flow on the white sheet in front of me. The brasses blast bold, trumpet, saxophone, trombone, tuba, while flutes flirt, skipping breezy through grassy meadows.

I glimpse parents and grandparents, Kodaks poised as they sit crunched knees to backs in folding chairs.

The band plays. I turn sheets on the stand.

And then…

It slips through my hands like a silk scarf, hitting the floor with a crack audible over the heavy thud of the bass drum. One black piece rolls beneath the oboist’s chair. The other rests next to my left penny loafer.

My clarinet has broken clean in two, in the middle of the sixth grade band concert.

I reach down behind a tangled curtain of long hair, retrieve the pieces and hold them together with sweaty hands, pretending to play, blowing empty air. Music notes blur through the welling.

Stealing a look at the audience, I seek out my father. I know where he’s standing. He leans against the painted cinder-block wall at the back of the cafeteria, arms crossed over his chest.  

The conductor pivots toward the crowd, bows and turns back toward the band. He motions to us, and we stand and bow, too.

I walk toward the back of the room, weaving in and out of parents and children embracing, a half of broken clarinet in each hand. When I finally make it back to where he still stands with arms crossed, I hold the pieces out to my father.

He reaches out. And pulls me in.

Do you ever remember a time when you received unexpected grace?

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Filed Under: faults, fear, forgiveness, grace

Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday: Shards

March 19, 2012 By Michelle

Rowan dropped the sugar bowl yesterday morning about 15 minutes before we left for church. The full-to-the-brim sugar bowl. As he kneeled on the counter to reach for the box of Life, he knocked the covered bowl from the shelf. It bounced off the counter, hit the floor, broke into 9 pieces and spread a swath of sugar halfway across the parquet. Then he burst into tears, because he knew what I was going to say. He knew because I tell him nearly every day: “Don’t kneel on the counters. If you need to get something use the stool or ask me.”

“I’m sorry,” he squeaked, his face scrunched scarlet, tears rolling down his cheeks as I flung open the cabinet to grab the dustpan and broom. “Are you mad?” he asked, as I tossed ceramic shards into the trash and shook sugar granules from the bills strewn across the counter.

“I’m highly irritated, highly irritated,” I muttered, teeth clenched as I brushed the grit from the bottom of one bare foot and then the other over the open trashcan. “Highly, highly irritated.”

Forty-five minutes later I saw in the pew as Pastor Greg preached on Acts 1:1-11, which includes these verses about being God’s witnesses:

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:8).

I admit, I felt pretty good about myself when I read that verse: “Hey, I’m a blogger; I write every day about God and faith. I write a newspaper column about faith. That’s witnessing, right? I’ve totally got that one covered.”

That is, until Pastor Greg mentioned that our first priority as Christians is to witness to those closest to us. Oikos, he called it, the Greek word for “household evangelism”:

“Witness starts in your smallest circle of family and friends, with the people in your own home and those closest to you. And then it ripples out from there.”

That’s when I remembered the sugar bowl.

Why, I wondered as I sat in the pew with my arms crossed over my chest, am I much more willing to offer grace and forgiveness to acquaintances and even strangers than I am to my own family members – my own children and my husband?

Why is it so easy for me to let a stranger off the hook and not my own child?

What kind of message about love, forgiveness and grace do I send when I don’t willingly accept my child’s sincere apology?

What kind of oikos is that?

What if a co-worker or a neighbor had knocked that sugar bowl onto my counter and strewn sugar across my kitchen floor? Would I have muttered, “Highly irritated, highly irritated,” through clenched teeth while I cleaned up the mess? Would I have ignored her apology? Would I have turned my back when she expressed her sorrow and remorse?

Of course not. “Oh no, no, don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it all,” I would have consoled. “It’s fine. It’s just sugar; it cleans up easily. No problem at all,” I would have said.

I would have handed out the grace card without a second thought, the grace I didn’t offer my own child.

Yesterday morning I missed an opportunity to react as Jesus would have. I missed an opportunity to demonstrate love and forgiveness and to teach a lesson with kindness.
Yesterday morning as the sugar bowl lay in fragments and my son cried tears of regret and remorse, I missed the very best opportunity to serve as God’s witness, right in the middle of my own kitchen.
What about you? Are you more willing to grant grace to strangers than you are to those in your inner circle? And if yes, why do you think that’s so?

Welcome to the “Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday” community, a place where we share what we are hearing from God and his Word.

If you’re here for the first time, click here for more information. And if you are a new participant, would you leave me a comment or send me an email to tell me it’s your first time here, so I can be sure to stop by and say hello at your place?

Please include the Hear It, Use It button (grab the code over in the sidebar) or a link in your post, so your readers know where to find the community if they want to join in — thank you!

Please also try to visit and leave some friendly encouragement in the comment box of at least one other Hear It, Use It participant. And if you want to tweet about the community, please use the #HearItUseIt hashtag.

Thank you — I am so grateful to have you here!

Filed Under: evangelizing, faults, forgiveness, God talk: talking to kids about God, grace, New Testament, parenting, Use It on Monday

Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday: The Forest through the Trees

February 6, 2012 By Michelle

I am a complainer. I’ll put it right out there. I complain. And I whine, too. And I’m prone to disgruntled crabbiness. I am, as my boss once called me, “a glass half-empty.” It’s true.
I think my glass-half-emptiness often stems from my inability, or rather, my unwillingness, to see the big picture, to see the forest through the trees, as the age-old saying goes. In the midst of hardship, I typically get caught up in the burden of the moment. I can’t see beyond it. And I forget, of course, about all the moments in the past in which God has come through for me already.
In this way I am very much like the Israelites who complain and moan and groan to Moses, and to God himself, during much of their time in the wilderness. For instance, yesterday’s reading (Exodus 16: 9-21) began with God’s response to the Israelites who had relentlessly complained about their hunger and thirst:

The Lord said to Moses, “I have heard the Israelites’ complaints. Now tell them, ‘In the evening you will have meat to eat, and in the morning you will have all the bread you want. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.’” (Exodus 16:11-12).

We roll our eyes at the Israelites, muttering to ourselves, “I can’t believe that they distrusted God after everything he’d already done for them! Weren’t the plagues enough? Wasn’t the Passover enough? Wasn’t the Red Sea enough? Didn’t they know he would come through for them again? Didn’t they know he would never abandon them and leave them to starve in the wilderness?”

It’s so easy for me to criticize the Israelites. It’s so easy for me to identify their flaws. It’s so easy for me to see their bigger picture.
But yet I can’t see my own.
I am every bit as distrustful, every bit as blind.  I lose myself in the hardship of the moment, unable to see that everything will be okay, just as it has always been okay.
In the last few weeks as my family has walked this familiar road of illness and grief, I’ve said to my husband more than once, “I don’t think we’re going to make it. It doesn’t feel like we are going to make it. It’s too hard.”
And Brad has pointed out, more than once, that we will indeed make it, that we have in fact made it through a similar period of grief and anguish before. Brad reminds me that life does indeed resume again. Joy is found and laughter returns and normalcy – a different normal, but “normal” all the same – comes around again.
He’s right, of course. Not much more than a year ago we walked this same road with my mother-in-law, Janice, as she slowly succumbed to cancer. And although it was extraordinarily painful, and we still miss her deeply, we did recover from that place of hopelessness and fear. And life did return to a new normal.
I know now that God was with us all along on that difficult journey. And that knowledge, along with Brad’s comforting reassurances, are enough to help me broaden my gaze from the difficult moments in the present to the bigger picture at hand. On some days, I can even see the whole forest.
Do you easily get caught up in griping about present discomforts, or are you pretty good at being able to see the bigger picture?

{29 Days of Quiet resumes here tomorrow}

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Welcome to the “Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday” community, a place where we share what we are hearing from God and his Word. 
If you’re here for the first time, click here for more information. And if you are a new participant, would you leave me a comment or send me an email to tell me it’s your first time here, so I can be sure to stop by and say hello at your place?
Please include the Hear It, Use It button (grab the code over in the sidebar) or a link in your post, so your readers know where to find the community if they want to join in — thank you!
Please also try to visit and leave some friendly encouragement in the comment box of at least one other Hear It, Use It participant.
And if you want to tweet about the community, please use the #HearItUseIt hashtag.
Thank you — I am so grateful to have you here!

Filed Under: doubt, faults, grief, hope, Old Testament, Use It on Monday

The Hard Work of Christmas: A Guest Post by Nancy Franson

December 21, 2011 By Michelle

Each year I make traditional Swedish Pepparkakor for Christmas, and each year doing so is one of my least favorite tasks. Working from a family recipe handwritten by my sister-in-law, I roll and cut out nearly a hundred thin ginger cookies; a job which keeps me on my feet for several hours. I wish I could cut the recipe in half and make fewer cookies, but it calls for only a single egg and I have yet to figure out how to cut a raw egg in half. Although I enjoy them, Pepparkakor are hardly my favorite cookie. The dough is dry, crumbly, and hard to work with. The older I get, and the more excess weight I carry on my hips, the more my joints object to the hours I spend standing at the counter rolling out crumbly dough.
So why do it? Although I love preparing for Christmas, I can allow the work to become exhausting. If I dare to tell myself the truth, I know that behind all the effort, energy, and expense I invest in my Christmas celebrations, I’m really just trying to create an experience and make happy memories. Somehow I must think I can recapture those “happy golden days of yore.” I imagine my efforts might be able to create an atmosphere of “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” among those in my home and gathered around my table.
The problem is, I’m not sure there ever were happy golden days of yore. As I think back to Christmases past, I remember the year my baby daughter was inconsolable because she was cutting teeth. Another year we had to evacuate our home, leaving behind newly unwrapped gifts, because our furnace was belching black smoke. And one Christmas, just as my family gathered around the table for dinner, we received word of the death of my husband’s grandmother.
No matter how much work I put into the celebration of Christmas, I am incapable of creating a merry one.
And although the song tells us, “There’s no place like home for the holidays,” home can also be a place where unresolved conflicts and lingering tensions reside. This year as I wait for my adult children to come home for Christmas, I am keenly aware that our family dynamics mirror those which are a staple of holiday-themed sitcoms and movies. I fear I could easily slip into old patterns of nagging, criticizing, and preaching; treating my adult children as if they were still children. Patterns of behavior and family dynamics change slowly, if at all, apart from the work of transforming grace.
For me, the tasks of of trimming the tree, shopping for gifts and, yes, even baking the Christmas Pepparkakor aren’t the difficult work of celebrating the holiday. The hard labor of Christmas comes in daring to believe the truth of the story, that the incarnation of God makes things like love, forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation possible and real. The hard work of Christmas asks me to live in the reality that Christ came as a baby, offering the gift of transforming grace.
Actually, this hard work of Christmas isn’t really hard at all. It’s impossible. “Apart from me,” said Christ, “you can do nothing.” So when I attempt this hard work of incarnating the incarnation, of living the love of Christ and loving those around me well, and as I fail as I am so prone to do; Christ calls me to receive his gift anew. He reminds me that I am able to love only because He came, demonstrating that He loved me first. He invites me to believe that His forgiveness and transforming grace are real and available to my family and to me. He dares me to believe I don’t live in a holiday movie or sitcom. I live with imperfect people in a fallen world plagued by heartache and sin; a world into which a baby was born in order to make all things new.
Each year I bake traditional Swedish Pepparkakor for Christmas, but not out of duty or obligation. I bake them because my mother enjoys them, and I love my mother. It’s a small gesture, a simple gift offered in love. But the labor of rolling out crumbling cookie dough becomes, for me, an affirmation of faith. Through a simple gift of ginger cookies I am privileged, in a small way, to incarnate the love of Christ; affirming that I believe the story is true.
Nancy, thank you for gracing us with this reflection today — I am so very grateful for your friendship!
Please visit Nancy at her blog, Out of My Alleged Mind, and follow her on Twitter. You will certainly be glad you did!!
{that’s Nancy, on the right, with Deidra and me at the Relevant 2011 conference! She was just as wonderfully zany in person as she is online!}

Filed Under: faith, family, faults, friendship, grace, guest posts

Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday: The Fair-Weather Gift-Lister

October 10, 2011 By Michelle

{Just getting back from Massachusetts after a surprise birthday party for my mom and dad, so today I’m posting thoughts from some recent Bible reading, rather than from an actual sermon, since I was in the airport instead of in front of an altar yesterday!}

Counting through the 700s on my way toward 1,000 gifts, a la Ann Voskamp, and on good days, on days when the sun slants golden on dewy grass and the kids clear their cereal bowls and wash the toothpaste gobs down the drain and don’t screech like baboons before 7 a.m., the gifts pour one after the other from pencil to paper.

On days when work projects flow smoothly and the team gets along and deadlines are met, and on days when dinner sits steaming on the table at 5:30 sharp and we don’t forget about soccer practice until four minutes before it starts, the gifts flow easily like sparkling water in a mountain stream.

On those days I’m really good at recording the gifts.

But I am a fair-weather gift-lister. Because on some days, no gifts are listed at all.

The days when the youngest tries on six pairs of pants in dim morning light and rejects each one, tossing them rumpled onto his bedroom floor, howling with indignation that none of them, absolutely none of them feel good. Days when the oldest sits slumped in the wing chair pouting about choir practice and refusing to eat breakfast. Days when the printer calls and there’s a typo on the magazine cover but they’ve already run 20,000 copies. Days when I’ve got my head buried in the recycling dumpster outdoors in search of the missing field trip permission slip.

On those days — the ugly, chaotic, crabby, frenetic days — I forget to count gifts. Or worse, I assume there are none. I don’t look.

The journal sits on the kitchen counter untouched, save a sprinkle of bagel crumbs scattered across its pages. The pencil has rolled onto the floor, where it’s wedged under the cabinet amongst the spilled lentils from last night’s dinner.

I believe Ann Voskamp when she states in One Thousand Gifts that God creates good out of bad. I believe this is true. But the reality, at least for me, is that this belief is much easier to live out in theory, on the pages that slide through my fingers, on the pages between the front and back covers of her book.

The reality is that I fail, more often than I would like to admit, to count blessings when they don’t come easily.

I’m not the first one to make this mistake. The Israelites did the same thing during their wilderness wandering. So focused were they on what they lacked, on their suffering and pain, they neglected to notice that God sustained them with food and water and shelter all along. They were blind to the miracles in their midst.

“They, our forefathers, became arrogant and stiff-necked and did not obey your commands. They refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them.” (Nehemiah 9:16)

How easily I forget about God’s miracles when I am faced with difficulty. How often I forget to listen. How quick I am to close my eyes to the gifts that are presented just for me, even in the midst of chaos.

“The secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt He is,”  writes Ann.

It’s difficult, this hard eucharisteo.

“We don’t have to change what we see,” Ann says to her angry, discouraged son. “Only the way we see it.”

So I keep practicing, day in and day out. And I pray to God to help me seek and find him where I doubt he exists and to change not what, but the way I see.  

I suspect I may be counting to 1,000 and beyond.

Still counting…

700. Sunflowers on the table
701. Sweet scent of cut grass
702. Rowan waving from the top of the school stairs
703. Bee with pollen legs
704. Bike rider bellowing, “Hello!”
705. Tylenol
706. Single pine needle glistening in morning sun
708. The man who picks a bouquet of flowers for his wife every week
709. Blue sky glimpsed through skylight
710. 72 degrees

Welcome to the “Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday” community! If you’re here for the first time, click here for details and instructions on how to link up.

Or you can simply copy the code for the “Hear It, Use It” button in the sidebar to the right, and paste it into your own post. [Please include the button or a link in your post, so your readers know where to find the community if they want to join in!].

Be sure to come back on Thursday for the Hear It, Use It Round-Up, where I highlight a handful of posts each week and encourage you to visit, soak up the lessons and leave a postive comment.

I love hearing what you have to reveal each week about how God is speaking to you through his word, and I am so very grateful for your participation here!






Filed Under: 1000 gifts, faults, gratitude, Old Testament, Use It on Monday

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Triple Type A, “make it happen” (my dad’s favorite mantra) striver and achiever (I’m a 3 on the Enneagram, which tells you everything you need to know), but these days my striving looks more like sitting in silence on a park bench, my dog at my feet, as I slowly learn to let go of the false selves that have formed my identity for decades and lean toward uncovering who God created me to be.

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