God has begun the gradual metallurgy of fall. Outside my window, down to the left, He’s refining one tree into pure gold. It quivers ever so slightly each day as it moves from one degree of gilded glory to the next. Just beyond the edge of the dark green forest, I can see touches of copper and bronze. But the furnace of change heats so gradually, I cannot perceive exactly how the vista has altered from the day before. Like most things God does, it’s subdued, unhurried, and steady.

Like the trees, we too are ever-changing. We somehow lull ourselves into believing things stay in a constant state. But it’s not true. Even when we’ve graduated from those years of swift childhood and adolescent growth, we’re still bit-by-bit morphing into different people.Read more

I have a few treasures from my grandmother’s kitchen: her metal measuring cups, a buttery yellow mixing bowl, and her famous pound-cake recipe. A few years ago, when I dropped one of the mixing bowls and it shattered splintered sunshine on my apartment floor, I cried. Sweeping it up felt like sweeping shards of her into the trash. But there’s something I treasure even more than her well-worn tools or secret recipes: her legacy of hospitality—passed down like a precious heirloom wrapped in crocheted lace.
 
My grandmother was no Martha Stewart and for this I’m grateful. I tried following Martha’s directions once to make pretty little chocolate bowls for Valentine’s Day. Let’s just say that the directions included dipping balloons in warm chocolate, and that the result looked a lot more like an abstract painting (read: flung chocolate on the walls) than the beautiful edible bowls graced with dainty raspberries on the magazine page I’d torn out.

My grandmother’s hospitality was not Martha’s kind. No ornamental paper lanterns hung from trees, no flouted phyllo-dough hors d’oeuvres, and certainly no edible chocolate bowls. Lois’ hospitality wasn’t the kind meant to impress well-to-do neighbors, or to barb another woman with a twinge of jealousy.Read more

I expected him to come with wailing. Instead, he came with eyes open wide in quiet wonder. I now know that raw joy feels like a warm, squirming life clutched naked to the chest. It is alive and more beautiful than you’ve imagined.
 
He pulled a tiny fist to his mouth as his steely blue eyes met my own. We stared at one another, him blinking thoughtfully, me babbling words of delight and praise—my speech suddenly reduced to the stammered fragments of a child. I admired his long slender fingers, his soft skin, his head of downy dark hair. And my eyes bounced between his and my husband’s, like light dancing on the water on a still day.
 
When I suddenly remembered it was Sunday, nothing could have felt more fitting. For when you’ve prayed like Hannah, and been given a gift of grace like Samuel, holding that long-awaited treasure makes your heart swell with the gratitude and worship of a thousand Sundays. And you know deep within that this gift is a gift that can only be quickly offered back to the Giver in praise and adoration.
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D-day is just around the corner. Forty some-odd days to go until life changes forever. A month and some change until my husband and I will get to welcome the little life whose DNA twists and twirls with parts of him and parts of me. I’m more excited than I am afraid. Perhaps I should be more afraid.

Someone once said that to have a child is to have your heart go walking around outside your body forever. I don’t know what that’s going to feel like quite yet. But I know I’m about to be tempted with all the worrying that I’ve scolded my mom for since I turned sixteen or so. And I know that even someone with a PhD in babysitting, probably isn’t going to be enough for me to completely take my mind off the well-being of that little one at home the first time we’ve gone out for a night again after the birth.Read more

(continued from yesterday...)

Prelude
Secrets of the Umuvumu's ScarsRead more

Prelude
Secrets of the Umuvumu's Scars

The gash across the face of Emmanuel Mahuro, a seventeen year-old Rwandan native, is no longer an open wound. Today, like a jagged boundary line on a map, a scar juts down the plateau of his forehead, across the bridge of his nose, and up the slope of his right cheek. It is impossible to look into Emmanuel’s eyes without seeing this deep cut, a mark of division etched across his face — and the face of Rwanda — fifteen years after the genocide.

My first reaction to such scars is to avert my eyes. But to look away from Emmanuel’s scars is to look away from him. Strangely, as my eyes adjust to Emmanuel’s face, there is an impulse, not to recoil, but to follow the line of the scar across his skin. Emmanuel’s scar testifies to two realities. It is a witness to the human capacity for evil. To look at it is to hear it scream the brutality of an April that aches in the memory of an entire people. Yet his scar testifies to another truth: the stunning capacity of humans to heal from the unthinkable. To trace that scar is to discover the hope of a people who, despite losing everything, are finding a way to forge a common future for Rwanda.

Rwanda’s wounds, like Emmanuel’s, are agonizingly deep. Today, they are being opened afresh as tens of thousands of killers are released from prison to return to the hills where they hunted down and killed former neighbors, friends, and classmates. In the everyday business of life — purchasing corrugated metal for roofing, burying bananas in the ground to make urwagwa, and hauling harvested sorghum to the market — survivors commonly meet the eyes of people who shattered their former lives. How can they live together? This is not a philosophical question, but a practical one that confronts Rwandans daily.

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 A year and a half ago when I was raising support for my trip to Rwanda, I received a check that astonished me. The giver wasn’t someone I knew very well. That made the check, which nearly covered the cost of my flight, seem all the more astonishing. That gift had a funny effect on me. It made me want to live up to the trust that friend had reposed in me.

Just last week, Jose Abreu, a dear friend of Prison Fellowship, the ministry for which I work, died. Jose and his wife Mayra had once been crack addicts. For a time, Jose supported his small family through breaking into homes and stealing what he could to pay for both food and his addiction. Read more

Continued from 10/4/07...

But still many common objections can easily put the brakes on compassion. One of the objections is that prisoners are just getting what they deserve. After all, as the saying goes, “You do the crime, you pay the time.” Or as Paul puts it in the book of Galatians, “A man reaps what he sows” (6:7).

While this is true, the connection between crime and punishment shouldn’t necessarily short-circuit compassion. In the book of Hosea, chapter 11, despite Israel’s sin, God is still moved with compassion for His people. He asks how He could give them up and He concludes by saying, “All my compassion is aroused.” Or as Jesus looks out over Jerusalem, you hear the compassion in his voice when He says, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing” (Mt. 23:37). Christ has compassion on sinners and longs for them to change. Even while criminals serve their time and deal with the consequences of the sin in their lives, we can have compassion for them and long for their total restoration.Read more

A couple of months ago, I sat in a room of staff interviewing a potential candidate for a position with Prison Fellowship. After the usual peppering with questions, the candidate got a turn to ask questions of his own. He didn’t miss a beat. He wanted to know: “How do you do it? How do you have compassion for these people?” I was taken aback by the question. But it caused me to to retrace my steps on this journey of compassion the Lord has invited me on.

I had only recently celebrated my sixteenth birthday when I read Crime and Punishment. I remember settling into a hammock on my parents’ back porch not far from St. Petersburg, Florida, and being transported to the arctic cold of St. Petersburg, Russia, as I devoured page after page of the arrogant Raskolnikov envisioning, plotting, and finally killing an innocent old woman. As the investigating inspector circled closer and closer in on the guilty Raskolnikov, I found myself feeling paranoid. In fact, when my mom opened the back door to ask me a question one day, I literally jumped in fright. I knew it was only a matter of time before, we—I  mean—he, was caught. Read more

“One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” ~Andrew Gide

“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily.  To not dare is to lose oneself.”  ~Soren Kierkegaard

Sometimes in everyday life you hear people say, “I just wish God would show me He’s really there.” We’ve all felt that at times. But lately, I’ve begun to wonder if the reason we don’t feel God’s presence more is that we live lives that are so safely within the borders of what we know is possible in our own strength. Living so cautiously, coloring within the lines of cultural expectation, we give God very little reason to show up.Read more