Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

Laura Boggess

Wonder Woman {My Faith Heroine Series}

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PlaydateswithGodcoverIf you don’t know Laura Boggess yet, make haste to her blog. She is one of the most beautiful, lyrical, deep writers I know out here in the blogosphere…and in print! Reading Laura’s recently published book, Playdates with God, was an exercise in contemplation and serenity for me. I lost myself in her mesmerizing prose, and I know it’s a book I will return to time and time again. Today, Laura graces us with a story about her mother, her faith heroine. This one gave me a lump in my throat, friends – it’s a beautiful testament to the power of faith and prayer. Join me in welcoming Laura today (and for further reading, don’t miss this guest post she wrote here just a month or so ago).

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Text by Laura Boggess

When I was six or seven years old, I had a girl-crush on Wonder Woman, aka Lynda Carter. I waited eagerly each week for a new episode of her adventures, pretending in the meantime that I could repel bullets with my cool gold bracelets or make my brother tell the truth with my magic lasso.

It seemed to me that a heroine was someone larger than life, who had special powers and fought off evil at every turn. And maybe looked good in tights. I didn’t have a lot of real-life heroines. There weren’t many people in my young life that saw much worth investing in. But my mother prayed with my siblings and me every night. She did the hard work of taking four young children to church three times a week. By herself.

However, not long after my infatuation with Wonder Woman my parents divorced and our church family turned their backs on us. Life changed drastically and we became unmoored, drifting. I was angry with God. I was angry with my mother. It felt like she wasn’t protecting us. It felt like evil was winning. No dodging these bullets.

But my mother still prayed.

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It’s taken me a long time to understand what kind of courage it takes to maintain faith in the midst of the hard places in life. To hold on to the thin wisp of belief when our human frailty rises up within us and we make mistakes—this takes strength. To bend low and let grace cover the past; to truly believe that God made us for new beginnings … I’ve seen my mother do this with the purest humility.

As I read through 50 Women Every Christian Should Know, I was brought low by the stories of the not so shiny faith journeys these women lived. The doubt, the struggling, the angular paths they walked—these bits of story about real women living real lives illuminated God’s faithfulness to use the tattered bits of our lives for his glory.

We don’t have to be perfect. We don’t have to be larger than life. We don’t have to be these things because God is. And though my mother and I still disagree on many things when it comes to faith, she lived this lesson for me and demonstrated how a heart can hold on through incredible darkness.

That’s why my mother is my faith heroine. Not because she is larger than life or has demonstrated superpowers. But because she has been unafraid to offer her broken self to a loving God, over and over again. That’s the kind of heart I want. That’s the kind of faith I need.

Though I still wouldn’t mind having one of those magic lassos.

LauraBoggessAuthor of the recently released Playdates with God: Having a Childlike Faith in a Grown-up World, Laura Boggess lives in a little valley in West Virginia with her husband and two sons. She is a content editor for TheHighCalling.org and blogs at lauraboggess.com. You can connect with Laura on Facebook andTwitter.

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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Joy in Brokenness {and a giveaway of Playdates with God}

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PlaydateswithGodcoverIt’s book release season, can you tell? Of all the books I’ve read this summer and fall (and believe me, I’ve read a lot!), the one featured here today, Playdates with God: Having a Childlike Faith in a Grownup World, is one of my very favorites. I read this book several months ago, when the author, my friend Laura Boggess, asked if I might be willing to endorse it. Under a tight deadline, I read it quickly, but I knew I would read it again the moment this book landed in my hands in its final published form. I knew I would read it slowly this time, savoring each beautifully crafted sentence — and that’s exactly what I’ve done over the last two weeks. Laura is a remarkably gifted writer – her words sing off the page, and the images she creates are so lush, so rich, they have the ability to transport you to another place entirely. I am honored and delighted to welcome Laura Boggess to the blog today. Please, sign up for the free giveaway below, but even if you don’t win, give yourself a gift this fall and buy this book.

By Laura Boggess

As I was finishing up the last chapters of my book Playdates with God, Lucy Mae was dying.

It’s a book about joy, about moving closer to God and there I was, wracked with grief over the slow dying of the family pet. This dog had grown up with my boys—ten years she nuzzled their faces and chased after their feet. She was supposed to be around a few more years; she was supposed to keep me company when they left me to go off to college.

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But one day, out of the clear blue, she had a seizure and she never completely recovered. In the daytime hours I would write my book and read the words out loud to her as I’d always done—watching for some recognition in her sweet empty face. In the evenings, my two boys and I would take her for shuffling walks, covering only a sliver of the distance we used to walk in half the time.

Everything slowed and time felt like the cold hand of death slipping under our door.

In truth, nothing seemed right. I was realizing the dream of writing a book but I felt more and more alone each day as I watched the man I love battle clinical depression. He slipped deeper into despair as I stood by helplessly. Our eldest son became involved in a relationship we didn’t approve of. And one evening after music lessons, I rushed our youngest to the ER with what we later determined was a panic attack.

Our once secure and happy family was splintering all around me. What used to be my safe place was becoming a place of uncertainty and fear. Who was I to write a book about a Spirit-led life? The words I had penned just a few short months before when life was blissfully happy seemed to mock me.

And now Lucy Mae was dying. This sweet, innocent creature who had brought so much joy into our household—had brought us together in so many ways—was paying the price of a fallen world.

How could I possibly write about joy in the midst of such brokenness?

As her days drew to a close, Lucy Mae’s sweet life began to give to us in new ways. It was one of the last days and we were walking. She struggled with each step but, oh, how she wanted that walk. Watching her, my two teenage boys were silent. And the deep places in my heart spilled over with pity for our girl.

“Seeing her this way,” I said, “it makes me love her more. Even though it hurts, all I want to do is hold her and let her know we’re here.”

The boys nodded and my youngest picked her up. I watched how tender he was with her, how careful and kind.

“I’m glad for Lucy,” he said, tears threatening. “I wouldn’t trade our time with her for anything.”

I felt something new stir in my chest—a bigger kind of love, a love that doesn’t leave in the midst of pain. And I felt it then: joy. I felt how sorrow carves out room inside a heart to feel deeper, love deeper, and enter deeper into relationship—not only with those we are joined with in life on earth, but with God.

And when I sat down and typed out the final chapters of the book, I was companioned by this rich joy of knowing I will never be alone. This is why we give our love when it would be easier to give up and turn away.

Because a Bigger Kind of Love holds us. Tenderly. A love that wouldn’t trade us for anything.

LauraBoggessAuthor of the newly-released Playdates with God: Having a Childlike Faith in a Grown-up World, Laura Boggess lives in a little valley in West Virginia with her husband and two sons. She is a content editor for TheHighCalling.org and blogs at lauraboggess.com. Connect with Laura on Facebook and Twitter.

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{Email subscribers: please click here and scroll to the bottom of the post to enter the book drawing.}

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

When You Walk with a Limp {I am a Spiritual Misfit Series}

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Continuing with our week of Spiritual Misfit guest posts, I am so thrilled to welcome Laura Boggess here today. Laura has the sweetest voice you’ll ever hear (her West Virginia twang sounds like music), and her writing — music itself — will take your breath away. Mark your calendars, friends: Laura’s gorgeous book Playdates with God: Having a Childlike Faith in a Grownup World releases this October (and it’s available for pre-order – go right this minute and order it, because take my word for it, you are going to want to drink in her words). I had the privilege and absolute pleasure of reading an early version of Playdates, and I cannot wait to read it again, this time to savor its rich imagery and lyricism. You can connect with Laura on her blog and on Twitter.

 

“Today,” I said to Nasreen and Deidra, “I feel like one of my legs is longer than the other. I’m all out of balance—I keep missing steps.”

I shifted from one foot to another as they giggled and raised their eyebrows. We were on a retreat together in the Texas Hill Country and it had rained almost every moment, forcing us to stay inside by the fire and have strange conversations about disproportionate legs.

“Well, I am from West Virginia,” I joked. “They always say hillbillies have one leg longer than the other from a lifetime of walking the slopes.”

It wasn’t until hours later that I looked down at my feet and realized what had been tripping me up all day. In an attempt not to disturb my roommate that morning, I had gotten dressed in the dark. And right there on my feet was the evidence: one black and one brown. I had put on two different kinds of boots.

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“Maybe God wants you to be careful where you step today,” said Kelli—ever the deep thinker.

So I kept the mismatched boots on all day, walking slow through the moments—holding each one carefully in my hands and turning it over and over beneath my mind’s eye.

All these months later, after reading Michelle DeRusha’s book Spiritual Misfit, I see what an apt metaphor the boots are for my spiritual life. How many years have I treaded lightly, tiptoeing through God’s love? Always on the outside looking in, afraid of taking the wrong steps in this foreign land?

I was baptized eighteen years ago when I was seven months pregnant with my first child. I grew up knowing Jesus, but he was a different Jesus than the one I met on Sunday mornings as a grown-up. The Jesus I met as I sat in the pew, hand on my swelling abdomen, was grace-filled, intimate, gentle. I had caught glimpses of this Jesus over the years—especially through difficult times as a young girl. I had felt his comforting presence, had talked with him and drawn strength from his shelter. But I never believed I was worthy of such tender love, and so withdrew from that warm-embrace—sinking back into a life of rigid religion that all too often left me feeling hopeless and worthless. Who could live up to such perfectionistic standards? So different than the rule-bound, guilt-driven faith of my childhood, this new Jesus was someone I desperately wanted my children to know.

I never dared to believe he would want to know me too.

I recently celebrated another birthday and the older I get, the more I realize I will never understand the mysteries of God. I still sit in the pew, hand on empty abdomen, heart full with this realization: I am loved. I’m still learning the ways of mainline Christianity—the hymns, the prayers, the christianese. But the older I get, the more comfortable I am shedding those mismatched boots; recognizing we all walk with a limp and this wound is the blessing.

These are the days I dance barefoot through the parted waters of Love.  Beloved misfit among beloved misfits.

LauraBoggessheadshotLaura has an M.A. in clinical psychology and works in medical rehabilitation—counseling patients and their families through traumatic diagnoses such as brain and spinal cord injury, and stroke. She is a content editor at The High Calling, and blogs at lauraboggess.com. Watch for her new book Playdates with God: Having a Childlike Faith in a Grownup World, in October 2014.

Click here to purchase Spiritual Misfit: A Memoir of Uneasy Faith.

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Because Sometimes You Make a Cake for No Reason

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I baked a cake last Saturday. A lemon bundt cake with lemon glaze. When I saw the recipe at Katrina Kenison’s place, I knew I had to make this cake, in part because I admire Katrina Kenison and I want to be just like her, and in part because it was a cake-baking kind of day, all drizzly and cool and gray.

I bake a cake about once a decade. Brad is the baker around here – he makes the boys a homemade birthday cake every year, in fantastical shapes like Thomas the Train and Nemo and Bowser Jr. I’m the birthday cake dish-washer. Twice a year I sigh at the eight bowls of frosting in every color of the rainbow scattered across the kitchen and I wonder why we can’t just head to the bakery department at Hy-Vee. For Rowan’s second birthday Brad worked on a Winnie the Pooh cake for about five hours, and when he lifted Rowan up to the counter for his first glimpse of the masterpiece, Rowan yelled, “Elmo!!!” We still laugh about that.

Katrina claimed the lemon bundt cake was super easy to make. But I think that might be a relative term. Maybe super-easy for a person who makes a cake more than once a decade. Still, even though my glaze looked a little funky, in a slightly curdled kind of way, and even though Brad and Rowan sucked the juice from the lemon and made lemon rind lips before I realized I still needed the freshly squeezed juice for the glaze, the cake tasted good. So good, in fact, I ate two slices one right after the other, and then promptly cut a generous slab, wrapped it in tin foil and gave it to a friend. Some cakes, especially those with two and a half sticks of butter, are simply too good to have around.

Katrina wrote a beautiful story about her cake. She baked it every day when a friend was dying. He couldn’t eat much toward the end, just a forkful or two of this cake, but that was enough to keep Katrina baking and delivering cakes to his door until she didn’t need to anymore.

My cake story is a little more mundane. I made a cake on Saturday, and as it baked we read our books, curled into the couch, the sweet aroma settling into every corner of the house, the rain pattering on the windowpanes. We admired the cake as it cooled on the rack. I took pictures, because that’s what you do when you make a cake once every ten years. And then we cut huge slices when it was still faintly warm, and sat at the kitchen counter eating cake in the middle of the afternoon. I even made a pot of coffee, because you can’t eat two slices of lemon cake one right after the other without a cup of coffee in your favorite mug to go along with it.

And as I pressed the back of my fork to the crumbs on my plate and let the last remnants dissolve on my tongue, I leaned back on the kitchen stool, satisfied. Because sometimes, once every ten years or so, you have to make a cake for no reason.

So tell me, what was the last fun or decadent thing you did for no reason? 

{And about those multiple birthday cake pictures … I apologize – I got way carried away on the cake nostalgia!}

My friend Evi has a brand-new link-up, and I’m sharing this post over there,
because I’m sure God smiles when we bake a cake for no reason:

evi like chevy

Taking Pictures of the Dish Rack

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“So what’s with the pictures of the dish rack?” he asks, clicking through a half-dozen photos on my camera.

Oh…right. Those. Photographs of the kitchen dish rack that sits on the counter next to the sink. “Well, the light just looked really pretty reflecting on the metal, so I took some pictures,” I explain to Brad, a bit sheepishly.

So now I’m taking pictures of the dish rack.

This is what keeping a gratitude list has done to me.

It’s opened my eyes, my ears, my senses. I see God everywhere – in the backyard, in the faces of strangers, even in the most utilitarian household items – afternoon light slanting across the coffee table, the warmth of a blanket pulled from the dryer, a dish rack on the kitchen counter. And I can’t help myself. I feel such joy, so immensely blessed in response, that I list these gifts in a wrinkled notebook, on pages stained with splashes of grape juice, spattered with dried droplets of minestrone soup. Sometimes, so moved am I by this joy, this gratitude, I grab my camera and snap pictures. Even when the object is a ridiculous dish rack.

I am, as Isaiah says, “overwhelmed with joy in the Lord my God!” (Isaiah 61:10)

It’s a little silly, isn’t it? I mean, who takes six photographs of a hard-water-corroded dish rack? And if you peek at my gratitude list, you’ll see other oddities as well: smell of snow in the air…my new chicken friend (don’t ask)…Hilma’s donut recipe…old man slowly riding bike…baby playing with the Ramen noodle package in the grocery store…laughing at our lizard shedding…

But maybe, maybe, it’s not silly at all.

Because usually we miss them, don’t we? We miss the blessings.

God bestows hundreds, thousands of blessings on us daily, weekly, monthly, and we miss them; they pass us by; we don’t take time to look. The listing, the snapping of that shutter? It’s worship – a rejoicing, a thanking, a praising in the moment, in the now. An acknowledgement that we “are a people the Lord has blessed.”  (Isaiah 61:9)

The list, gift after gift spooling down the page, each item woven into the next, is a song of God’s love. And a song to God as well.

How do you take time to acknowledge and appreciate the many gifts from God?

With Ann and Laura  {on Monday}

 

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