When the Walls Came Tumbling Down

When I was a young girl, I fell in love with words and story.  I scribbled hand-written pieces in my upstairs bedroom on that Tennessee hillside as the hemlock trees stood guard just outside my window.  I imagined a grown-up world where I could roam the globe with a camera strapped around my neck and leather-bound journals in my bag containing the stories of faraway lands and their stunning people.  Somewhere in my soul, a dream hatched.  Every once in a while, I shared it out loud, half-joking, half-hoping.  I imagined myself as the first National Geographic missionary photojournalist chasing God stories and catching them in my camera lens and moleskin journals.  I believed God could do something beautiful with His stories, and I wanted to write them for the world. 

Life rarely sends anyone a hand-wrapped gift tied with a lovely bow labeled "your childhood dream."  We grow and live and learn and make new dreams.  The old dreams form new shapes and take on new meanings almost without permission.  But those old dreams linger and surface during quilt-wrapped evenings where hearts are bared, and stories leak out. 

Today, decades removed from my teenage dreams, I found myself in a busy bakery in Korea Town in New York, listening to the most fascinating story from a woman I met for the first time.  And somehow, over espresso and Korean culture, I realized that I was holding a perfectly wrapped gift labeled "your childhood dream."  It seems I've held it always without proper realization.

My work sends me around the country all year long.  I go in church after church, speaking, training, and developing people and programs.  It's an honor to spend my life this way. I really can't tell you how it all came to be, except the Lord made the way.  Sometimes, I get bogged down in the "are you sure about this, Lord?" and wonder if it is all just a big mistake that I get to do this.  But God is always faithful to show me Himself in every city, assuring me of this work He's asked me to do.

Today, His faithfulness to me was breathtaking. And for the first time, I saw the God stories I've been collecting all along.  Tucked in a busy New York bakery, I opened the gift He's always had.  Faces and places, stories and moments filled with laughter, tears, and wonder began roaring through my memory like floodwaters bursting through old dams.

Everywhere I go, someone finds me in a corner and says, "can I tell you my story?".  These moments are never planned yet always sacred. They rarely get captured in photographs, but they are etched in my heart. These are stories of the faithful men and women that somehow feel welcomed in my presence enough to bare their souls and speak the beauty of their lived life.  I hold their words like a precious treasure.  It is their God- stories, and I am simply the catcher holding the beauty of a moment. They are breathtaking and sometimes heart-aching, but they always end in the stunning resolve that God is indescribably good.  And everyone always says at the end, "if you can use my story somewhere along the way, do it for the glory of God."

So, today, in that bakery, my once-upon-a-time teenage heart beat wildly when I finally saw the gift. It isn't National Geographic, but it is something far better.  It's real, normal flesh-and-blood-in-everyday-clothes kinds of stories that change the actual world that I've been holding all along.  And it is time to write them.

So, instead of my trusty teenage moleskin journal, I am sitting in front of this flickering computer screen eating leftovers from a church potluck in my little hotel room in New York City.  There is a raging hurricane outside, and while lightning flashes and thunder shakes, I write this first story to share with the world.

 It goes like this...

There was an older gentleman in rural Pennslyvania attending a seminar where I was teaching about adversity.  I dared the attendees to believe that hard isn't always bad; rather, it is ripe with good fruit for the picking if we are willing to endure. This gentleman was an unlikely attendee for this particular session marketed mostly to a younger audience. Nevertheless, he listened to every word.

I concluded the talk and was packing up my things.  With tears in his eyes, he came to me as I was wrapping computer cords.  He began telling me about the beautiful fruit grown in the hardest places of his life.  

I put everything down and settled in to hear each word.  He told me first about a flood that nearly took everything he owned.  He described watching the water rise and the fear he had for his children's lives.  He praised the Lord for sparing them.  After the flood, he decided to move to higher ground to re-build his home.  He was a man of meager means, so this home had to be built by hand.  He even borrowed a wood planer from a friend to shape the boards.  Nail by nail and plank by plank, he put back together his life.  He taught his then small daughters the art of construction and roofing, and building a home.  He needed their help.  It was too much for one man. Little girls and their burly dad put hammer to nail.  And in so doing, they watched God use the labor of their hands and turn it into the place they called home.

He then shared the deep grief of losing and burying one of his grown-up daughters in recent years from illness.  He recounted the heartache of having to sell his precious hand-hewn home.  He said, "that was some of the hardest work of my life, but it was the gift of my life."  It was where his faith and sweat and fatherhood came swirling together, and it was where he experienced first-hand God's unyielding faithfulness.  He didn't regret a moment of the labor, and he seemed to view that devasting flood with tender eyes.  It changed him.  It made him.  It altered his entire life story. It was stunning beauty from absolute ashes.

He chuckled with tears dripping off his rosy cheeks when he proudly recounted the strength and tenacity his daughters embodied through that journey.  It changed them, too.  They grew into strong, assured women that took God at His word. What should have been a dark day of devasting loss ushering a lifetime of hardship turned into a testament of God's faithfulness to bring the most beautiful things from nothing. What was meant for evil, God used for good.

He leaned in and said, "you better believe that I know hard isn't bad.  It is almost always the very best gift."

That gift kept giving at the very moment as we shared a silent understanding of indescribable grace far greater than adversity.  

And it gives on and on.  

May you experience indescribable grace woven throughout the most unlikely places. May you revel in beauty from ashes.