Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

Kimberly Coyle

Celebrating Holy Week: A Free Audio Devotional

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My friend Kimberly Coyle is a beautifully gifted writer, and this year, she is offering something really special to help us quiet our minds and turn our hearts toward Jesus this holy season. If you had the opportunity to listen to Kimberly’s recent audio series for Advent, then you know what a special gift this new Holy Week series is. I know I, for one, desperately need this invitation into quiet contemplation as we enter Holy Week this year. Please join me in welcoming Kimberly Coyle to the blog today, and please do subscribe to receive her Holy Week audio devotional series, which will arrive free in your in-box on Palm Sunday and continue through Easter.

Post and photo by Kimberly Coyle

Confession: Easter is not my favorite holiday. This is an unpopular opinion in Christian circles, especially when one is a former pastor’s kid who has celebrated Easter Sunday since she was a wee one wearing a new, twirly skirt for the occasion.

Childhood Easters often felt forced–the long morning at church, the best behavior, the quiet dinner afterwards as my parents recovered from greeting an oversized congregation–the celebration of holidays like Christmas came far more naturally to me. Based on the consumerist creep into the Christmas season, I’m not alone. Most of us celebrate for weeks, allowing Christmas to permeate every part of us: from our homes, to our music playlists, to our waistlines. We are hardwired for joy, a celebratory people, who revel in a sense of expectation, in giving and receiving.

Christmas is mystery. It is desire. It is the best kind of waiting. And it culminates in the most human experience of all time–the act of giving birth. Christmas is labor, life, the cry of an infant, a mother’s breast engorged with first milk. It is earthy. The soft bleating of barn animals and the pungent scent of dung and hay and sweat surround us. We can feel the wonder of it settling into the marrow of our bones.

Easter is celebration, yes, but it is prefaced by brutality–a kind of cruelty we can hardly fathom. Easter is a war between Heaven and Earth, between sin and salvation. It is otherworldly–an earthquake, a shroud of darkness, a veil inexplicably torn in two. It is a cosmic battle we celebrate with chocolate bunnies and a spiral ham.

Every year as Easter approaches, I hope to connect more intimately to Jesus. I’ve begun to observe Lent, and while this prepares my heart, I still feel a sense of disconnect from this time in the life of Jesus. He crosses over a threshold where I can’t easily follow. This year, I decided to approach Holy Week with a sense for the humanity behind it. I wanted to enter into it, bringing my full self to the cross with Jesus.

When I see the cross and the resurrection through the eyes of the witnesses present, I can enter into the force of it through their stories. The resurrection was prefaced by confusion, betrayal, and grief. At the foot of the cross we witness weeping. We hear the crowd’s mockery. We feel the fear pulsing through Jesus’ followers, and the empty triumph of the religious leaders. We identify with their humanity–the sight and sound and feel of each moment through their senses.

This is how we enter into Easter. We come bound to our own flesh, and to the flesh of those who came before us. We enter into the death and resurrection of Jesus through the physical experiences and the inner turmoil of the witnesses. To look up at Jesus from the foot of the cross with his mother Mary, or to weep in the courtyard with Peter has put skin on this season for me.

I want to spend time with these men and women a little longer, so I created something for us to share this Easter season. I’ve recorded an audio devotional for each day of Holy Week–a meditation on the Journey to Resurrection through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it.

These short audio devotionals are meant to help us center our thoughts on Jesus even as we hide Easter eggs and stuff our baskets with bunnies. The first devotional will land in in-boxes on Palm Sunday, and will arrive daily thereafter until the day before Easter.

If you’d like to subscribe, you can do so by clicking here, and the Holy Week audio will arrive your inbox, as well as my weekly blog posts.

As we wait for Palm Sunday to arrive, I’ve created three spring printables for you to download and print for free. It’s my gift to you as we wait for spring to show her face at long last here in the Northeast. I hope you enjoy them!

What Are We Building?

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Kimberly Coyle has been here as a guest poster before, but I just can’t help myself: she’s such a beautiful and talented writer, I had to ask her again. Please welcome Kimberly here today, and be sure to visit her blog for more of her wise insights and gentle, lyrical writing.

 

church windowAfter fourteen years out of the workforce, I started a new job a few weeks ago. I haven’t written about it because the change is so new, I wanted to be sure I stuck with it. I habitually quit things—historically, much to my husband’s chagrin, I quit jobs.

My feelings about it lie fresh on the surface, like a new layer of skin after a sunburn peels away. On any given day, I gently inspect tender pink feelings of working mother guilt, sadness over the delay of my full-time writing dream, and elation over the fact that people actually pay me to leave my house wearing real clothes a few times a week.

I studied to be a nurse, and in a sad twist of fate, I realized upon graduation that I hated wiping bottoms and inserting catheters and pretty much everything related to my career. But, I didn’t hate helping people. And so I stuck with it, plugging away at awkward hours of the night, bone-weary, covered in bodily fluids.

Even after eight grueling hours on my feet caring for the sick and infirm, I clung to the belief that my hands built permanent things. Healing may be temporary, but making a difference in someone’s life gave me a sense of purpose and permanence.  Nursing is a noble profession, truly one of the most servant-hearted, Christ-embodying careers across all fields. And I couldn’t cut it.

Fourteen years later, after building many other things, like children and book chapters and endless essays, I found myself in a position of needing a part-time job. A friend mentioned a new role at my church, and quick as a blink, I had the job. I send emails. I organize stuff. I manage calendars. I do not use my nursing degree or my hard-earned parenting skills or many of my writing ones either. But, I don’t hate helping people. In fact, I love it.

I am a drop of water in the raging river of a large, dynamic organization. If I don’t show up, anyone else can fill in the space I leave behind. Even though my work feels small, it makes the greater work of the pastors possible. I help create space so they can care for souls. Together, we build permanent things.

Fred Rogers famously said that one way to cope with frightening news and terror-inducing situations is to look for the helpers. Look for the people who re-build rather than tear down. Look for those with hands of mercy, those who reach out with a cup of water, who offer a kind look, who love with the spirit of a servant.

I’m discovering that most of this helping work is done in the quiet, in the smallest of ways. It isn’t flashy. Others may never even notice. It is simply joining your droplet to the larger body of water, contributing to the greater work. It is leaving behind the impermanence of degree and titles and chain of command, and using our lives to build something that moth and rust won’t destroy. In God’s Kingdom, we build permanent things.

KimberlyCoyle3Kimberly Coyle is a writer, mother, and gypsy at heart. She tells stories of everyday life while raising a family and her faith at her blog,  kimberlyanncoyle.com. She writes from the suburbs of New Jersey, where she is learning how to put down roots that stretch further than the nearest airport. Connect with her on Twitter @KimberlyACoyle, Facebook, or on Instagram @kacoyle.

Leaning into Fear {My Faith Heroine Series}

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Oh how I love this woman. I first met Kimberly Coyle three years ago (or has it been four?!) when we roomed together at the She Speaks conference in North Carolina. We called it She Freaks because we were both so unhinged over the idea of pitching our book proposals to agents and editors face-to-face for the first time. Right away Kimberly and I realized that we share the same wacky sense of humor, and we’ve been online and in-real-life friends ever since. Seriously, this girl can WRITE. AND she takes beautiful pictures. Multi-talented I tell you. Please put Kimberly at the top of your must- read list. She blogs here, and you can find her on Twitter and Facebook, too.

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Story by Kimberly Coyle

I don’t remember exactly when she stepped into my life, but when I opened the first page of her book Walking on Water, it was as if I opened the front door to my heart and she walked right in. She took a seat in the loneliest corner, and she hasn’t left me since.

I know little about her faith practices—the small ways she served God or her daily acts of faith or her prayer life. I know only what she chose to reveal through the pages of her books, but I do know this: she kept asking the hard questions around art and faith, and she learned to lean into fear when she didn’t have all the answers.

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Madeleine L’Engle came to me in a time when I needed her most, when I could not reconcile my desire to write my way through life, with my desire to serve God as well. In my mind, art and faith diverged like those two roads in Robert Frost’s yellow wood, and I couldn’t understand how to serve one without cutting off the entrance to the other.

Madeleine was the first to tell me that the creation of art is an act of faith. That in art, there is no difference between the secular and the sacred—there is only true art, and all true art is incarnational in nature. She showed me through her words and through the example of her life, how holy it is to pursue the very thing I feel created to do. Where I felt myself splitting in two between my desires, her words became the healing salve that knit the two halves of me back together.

Her fierce intelligence, her way with words, her ability to serve God and her family, and  her art pulse out to me from her books like a beacon of light. They shine in the dark when I question my ability to keep putting one word in front of the other. When I question my faith. When I question my place in this world and wonder if I will come out on the other side of all these questions with an answer. Her words flicker with hope, with a desire for excellence, and with the insistent message to lean into the fear, for it is there we find courage.

Madeleine is gone now, but her words still sit in that same corner of my heart, and I no longer feel alone. Her books continue to give light, her courage strengthens, her resilience and intelligence inspire, and her deep faith in a Creator God who also calls me to create, guides me home.

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KimberlyCoyle3Kimberly Coyle is a writer, mother, and gypsy at heart. She tells stories of everyday life while raising a family and her faith at her blog, kimberlyanncoyle.com. She writes from the suburbs of New Jersey, where she is learning how to put down roots that stretch further than the nearest airport. Connect with her on Twitter @KimberlyACoyle or her Facebook page.

This post is part of the My Faith Heroine Series in conjunction with the release of 50 Women Every Christian Should Know: Learning from Heroines of the Faith. Click here to read other posts in the #MyFaithHeroine series. 

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Authentic You: Uncovering a Life that Speaks {day 14}

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When I yowled to my friend Kimberly about the book edits coinciding with the 31 Day project, she immediately offered to write a guest post for me. Don’t you just love her generous spirit?! And because of Kimberly’s gift, I was able to spend all day yesterday on the book edits, and I am very, very close to finishing. Alleluia and thank you, Kimberly! Please do stop by her blog, and visit with her on Twitter, too. Kimberly has an amazing ability to chase beauty and capture it in her gorgeous prose. Today she gives us some insights into living authentically.

 

Around the time my youngest child turned two, when we lived in the thick of toddler tantrums, I began having meltdowns of my own. My daughter’s usually occurred in the toy aisle at Target, but mine were mostly behind closed doors. I could be found quietly sobbing in the bathtub or lying in bed at night, blood pulsing hard and my thoughts a roar into the silence.

I spent my twenties learning how to be a wife and a mother. I skipped the part most twenty-somethings take for granted–the years they spend figuring out what they want to be when they grow up and discovering who they are as individuals. When I realized my last baby was no longer a baby, that she would soon attend pre-school leaving me with a few hours each week to myself, I floundered.

I floundered and then I melted down. Repeatedly. More than once, my husband found me in tears, asking myself over and over what I would do with my one “wild and precious life”, as Mary Oliver says. After much emotional upheaval, I realized the pre-school years offered me a chance to discover my true self, the authentic me that didn’t walk around in a sleep-deprived and diaper-induced haze all the time. I didn’t know how deep my own God-given talents and giftings lay buried, but now I had a wee bit of time to begin unearthing them.

I asked myself the question “Who am I and what is my calling?” every day for years. I began to look for the areas of my life that brought me great joy, those rare moments in which I felt fully myself and fully alive. I prayed and cried and fought and tried, and in frustration, finally agreed to allow God to show me. I thought I would find myself in serving, in teaching Sunday school or working in my chosen profession of nursing. Instead, I found myself in stories. I discovered that my authentic and fully alive self is found in the written word, in my own words scrawled across a blank page. Not only did I meet myself there, I met God there too.

I am taken with the first chapter of John, where Jesus is described as The Word, because this is exactly who He is to me. I understand words and how they speak. I’m also taken with the story of John the Baptist in that same chapter. He is repeatedly asked, “Who are you?” by the priests of Jerusalem. John is a man who knows exactly who he is and who he isn’t. He admits he is not the Christ, but he also tells the priests that he is the one Isaiah spoke of, “The voice of one crying aloud in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord’.”

John knows his place. He knows his call and his purpose. He is not afraid of his authentic, locust-eating, skin-wearing, wilderness-dwelling self. He knows he fulfills the words of the prophet, and the purpose of his own words are to point to the One who is coming.

I love John’s assurance. I want this kind of assurance for you and I want it for me. We may not fulfill the words of a prophet, but we are the fulfillment of a vision created and set in the heart of God. Let’s lean into who we are created to be, and allow God to use our truest selves to speak of The Word and His kingdom that is coming.

Kimberly recently moved from Switzerland back to the United States where she lives with her husband and favorite little people. She copes with life’s biggest questions by drinking lots of tea, writing, and God’s grace. You can find her writing at www.kimberlyanncoyle.com or tweeting @KimberlyACoyle.