Category: disappointment

Oct 16

Navigating Life’s Storms

 

So how are you feeling today? Happy? Frustrated? Overwhelmed?

Popular psychology tells us that feelings are “neither right nor wrong.” But I want to tell you that feelings do not necessarily mirror the facts.

I witnessed this firsthand a few years ago when my husband and I headed out with my boss, Dr. Marc Hirsh, and his wife, Elizabeth for our annual Labor Day weekend cruise on their thirty-two-foot Bayliner. The weather looked rather foul, but Elizabeth had checked with her brother who lives right on the Gunpowder River leading into the Chesapeake Bay, and he assured us the weather reports didn’t look that bad despite a hurricane that was heading northward up the coast. (We later learned he had accidentally listened to the wrong forecast!)

So we took off anyway, knowing that Marc and Elizabeth were seasoned boaters—although the whitecaps on the usually calm river should have been our first clue it wasn’t a good idea.

We had a short two-hour cruise ahead of us, but it wasn’t long before the white caps turned into three-foot waves. The wind whipped up, and then the thunder, lightning, and rain came. At first we all laughed and enjoyed the warm rain soaking us as the boat pounded through the waves. But then I stopped laughing and my stomach started rebelling. Elizabeth handed me a supply of Ziploc bags, which I started filling.

The waves were now five feet high and crashing clear over the top of the boat’s windshield, drenching us. It was nearly impossible for Marc to see out the rain-splattered windshield, and my husband and Elizabeth were trying to read the navigational charts and look for the numbered buoys, which would keep us in the correct channel away from large shipping vessels, shallow water, and crab pots. We were too far out to turn back toward home, yet not sure we could make it to our planned destination.

And then it got really bad.

Marc announced that according to the boat’s compass we were headed in exactly the wrong direction: south when we should have been heading north.

We all were sure we hadn’t turned around—Elizabeth was especially positive we still were pointing in the right direction. She was convinced she would have noticed if the boat had made an about-face. From past experience I knew she usually was right whenever the two of them had a boating disagreement.

The three of us looked at Marc, waiting to see what he would do. (Well, I didn’t look long because I was busy praying there were enough Ziploc bags.)

After a long pause, Marc posed his now-famous question: “Should I trust my wife . . . or the magnetic poles of the earth?”

It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d gone with Elizabeth’s feelings because she was so adamant about them, but his scientific brain won out and Marc turned the boat 180 degrees.

Within a few moments, we sighted buoys, which confirmed that we, indeed, had been going in the wrong direction despite all of us “feeling” otherwise.

The storm raging around us had distorted reality and our feelings had fallen fickle.

The same thing can happen in the storms of life. We can feel as if we’re unable to cope or that we have no hope. These are the times we need a compass—something that always will steer us in the right direction. A magnetic compass always will point you to the North Pole, and God’s Word always will point you to His unchanging truths and promises.

Isaiah 40:8 “The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever.”

Like Marc as he captained our boat that stormy trip, it’s your choice whether or not to trust the magnetic poles of the earth.

The grass does wither. Flowers do fade.  Troubles will disrupt lives. But God’s Word stands forever. Open up a Bible and let God speak the truth your anxious heart needs to hear.

Sep 25

Having some doubts?

Have the trials of life caused you to doubt God? Are you wondering why He hasn’t shown up in answer to your fervent prayers?

“Doubt rises up to obscure His presence and disillusionment settles into despair,” writes Dr. James Dobson in When God Doesn’t Make Sense. “The greatest frustration is knowing that (God) created the entire universe by simply speaking it into existence, and He has all the power and all understanding. He could rescue. He could heal. He could save. But why won’t He do it?”

Feeling abandoned by God is especially terrible to experience after you earlier felt a closeness with Him.

“Satan then drops by for a little visit and whispers ‘He is not there! You are alone!’” Dr. Dobson adds.

I can’t begin to explain why your loved one passed away or why your child has cancer or why you or your loved one have received such a dismal diagnosis. I agree with you that it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t seem right, and it certainly doesn’t feel like God cares.

 

Back in the summer of 1990 my husband was leaving the hospital where I was recuperating from colon cancer surgery and the car in front of him had a bumper sticker which read: 

“Is He really?” my husband muttered to himself that day.

The possibility of burying another wife had shaken his faith to its core and Ralph actually wondered how he ever was going to preach again.

But as he prayed and studied that week for his next sermon, he came to the conclusion that despite life’s really tough situations, we all are deeply loved by our Heavenly Father. And the way we can know that for certain, my husband concluded, is because God proved it once and for all two-thousand years ago when He sent His only Son to die on the cross for your sins and for mine.

My husband finished what was one of his most stirring sermons ever, by declaring that even if God never answered another single prayer on our behalf, He already has done enough. When God raised Jesus to life, He defeated our greatest enemy: Death…and that is enough.

 

So go ahead and ask God all your questions. But remember, God is not required to defend His actions (or seeming inactions) to you and you may never know in this lifetime the reasons for the suffering which has touched your life.

He asks only one thing of you—to trust Him even when it doesn’t make sense.

My husband and the bumper sticker were right–Jesus is enough.

(Be sure to open in your browser to listen to the music video below.)

Sep 11

How is your tent holding up?

I distinctly remember the last time my family and I went tent camping…and why we never did again after that experience.

It was the summer of 1983 and my pastor-husband convinced me that it would be fun for our daughters and me to join him on the youth group camping trip. So I packed up everything required for the overnight stay at a nearby state park and we borrowed two small tents.

Did I mention that our girls were 5, 3 and 15 months?

Fortunately,  we got everyone to sleep–Ralph in one tent with our 3-year-old and me in the other with the baby and our oldest.  But it wasn’t long before I heard my husband calling out to me from his nearby tent: “Stay really still–there’s a mother skunk and four babies heading toward your tent.”

I cautiously turned toward the tent wall and sure enough, there was a mommy skunk silhouette and four smaller shadows toddling behind. I held my breath as the critters walked so close their sides pressed against the canvas. Luckily, the skunk family kept moving without leaving behind any of their special brand of perfume and I literally could exhale.

I thought the night’s excitement was over until a couple hours later a thunderstorm erupted and my husband’s tent starting leaking –waking up Bethany.  My tent fared better, but the three of us had to scoot in really tight so as not to touch the soggy canvas walls.

We survived the rest of the night undisturbed by weather or wildlife, but I vowed never to take three little kids tent camping again and I happily have kept that promise.

 

So how is your tent holding up? You know, that earthly dwelling we call our body.

“Unless you are in peak form and full of vigor, you have already experienced frustration with this earthly tent. If you haven’t yet, you will. It grows old and weary eventually, and then it dies,” writes author Chris Tiegreen.

I know many of you reading this are experiencing frustration with your earthly tent or your loved one’s.  Maybe the storm already has hit and you’re wondering whether your tent is going to hold up. And perhaps you even can feel some “skunks” pressing up against as you dread the stench of more bad news.

 And for some of you, the worst already has happened to someone you loved.  Less than 24 hours ago, I got the news that another dear friend had taken her last earthly breath, just four years after receiving a cancer diagnosis.

I don’t know how any of us can face the storms and stink of this life  without God’s great and precious promise: “For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” 2 Corinthians 5:1

These tents are definitely temporary dwellings and that’s why they rip, get dumped on and wear out.  They are not our permanent residences.

“When hope in this life proves futile, when bodies ache and souls cry out, we can count on the glorious promise of resurrection,” Tiegreen adds. “There is an eternal house fitted just for us.”

I’m sure it will be the best Home ever and I doubt there will be any skunks!

Be sure to view this email in your browser to hear the music video below by Matt Redman, “One Day (When We All Get to Heaven.”

Jul 03

So Many Unanswered Questions


Twenty-nine years ago if I had heeded this quote from the creator of Peanuts, I could have saved myself many sleepless nights.

I was pretty consumed back then with trying to figure out how a healthy-eating-and-exercising-mom in her thirties could get cancer. Especially colon cancer for crying out loud! Colonoscopies aren’t even recommended for the average person until age 50.

I never smoked. I wasn’t overweight and worked out regularly at the local Y. I ate a high-fiber, low-fat diet including all our homegrown pesticide-free vegetables. In my mind someone who leaves the skin on their mashed potatoes and who shakes wheat germ on everything should not get colon cancer! Besides my little girls needed their mommy and my husband already watched one wife die a slow, debilitating death.

How? Why? What if?

Any unanswered questions keeping you awake at night?

If you’re trying to figure out exactly why you or your loved one is facing a trial right now, I’m afraid you won’t get any explanations from me. I don’t believe we can make sense of another person’s suffering—only our own. People often want to try anyway and they’ll preach and tell you why it all happened, but they’re not God and they don’t really know. It might make them feel better to think they have it all figured out, but I doubt it will do much for you.

And if you are the loved one of someone facing really difficult circumstances, please don’t tell them “everything happens for a reason.” Such a comment minimizes the sufferer’s feelings and implies that there’s a good, rational justification for what has occurred. I won’t be uttering that phrase to my daughter’s friends who have a 5-year-old  with  spina bifida and  a 7-year-old with an aggressive brain tumor. Instead I will pray that these dear parents, who love their sons and their Lord will run with their sleep-interrupting questions to the One who knows them best and loves them most.

I waited a long time for the Eternal;
He finally knelt down to hear me.
He listened to my weak and whispered cry. Psalm 40:1 The Voice Bible

Hear me, O God, when I cry;
listen to my prayer.
You are the One I will call when pushed to the edge,
when my heart is faint.
Shoulder me to the rock above me. Psalm 60:1-2 The Voice Bible

I’ll never know the answers to your questions or all of mine, but something I read in a book by C.S. Lewis has helped me to be more at peace with not knowing.

It’s found in a scene from The Horse and His Boy, part of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series. These classic children’s books (loved by adults, too) are set in the magical land of Narnia, which is ruled by a powerful lion named Aslan (who represents Jesus). At one point Aslan explains to a rich runaway girl named Aravis why some of the awful things that happened to her had to occur. She then asks Aslan what will happen to her stepmother’s slave, who was punished for falling asleep after Aravis had drugged her.

“Will any more harm come to her by what I did?”

“Child,” said the Lion, “I am telling you your story, not hers. No-one is told any story but their own.”[1]

 

Are you trying to understand your story? Take your questions to your Heavenly Father, who will either give you the answers you need…or the peace to live with the questions.

[1]C. S. Lewis, Horse and His Boy (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 202.

Excerpted from Peace in the Face of Cancer. Copyright 2017 by Lynn Eib.
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Be sure to open this blog in your browser to hear the music video below “Hold Me Jesus” by Rich Mullins.

May 22

“Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love… The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love.” Mother Teresa

 

I’m pretty sure the only thing “small” about Mother Teresa’s life was her stature. Nearly 50 years of sacrificially serving the “the unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for” hardly seems to qualify as doing “small things.” But there’s certainly no doubt that this diminutive nun, honored in 1979 with the Nobel Peace Prize, was filled with great love for the poorest of India’s poor. 

Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you head to Calcutta and take a vow of poverty (although health insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays may leave you feeling as if you have!). But I am encouraging you to ask God to show you some small things you can do with great love.  No matter how uncertain or bleak life looks, I guarantee you it will become brighter as you reach out in love to others in need.

Cindi, a cancer survivor who lives in the shadow of recurring granulosa cell tumors, says she wakes up each day “knowing my life is very different than most people.

“I’m either overwhelmed with thankfulness for still being alive six years past my diagnosis or just the opposite, and I am overwhelmed with fear that I might not be here for my daughter in the future,” she explains.

“The way I try to cope with it is to live outside myself,” she says. “It really helps to get out of my own crisis and reach out and love someone else. I try to offer acts of kindness toward others—visits, cards, small gifts.”

Cindi says she doesn’t have money or energy to do big things for others so one day she bought a bunch of $3 plants at Aldi discount grocery and gave them to folks who “needed cheering up.” Another day she and her daughter delivered bags of Pepperidge Farm cookies to friends going through hard times.

“I would say everyone who got them cried,” Cindi recalls. “You think you’re going to bless this person, but you walk away blessed. The Lord has given me several opportunities to encourage others and in so doing, I’m the one who has been encouraged.”

Doing small things with great love “really helps me to come out of my own health crisis,” she adds.

I realize it might not sound logical, but the next time you are feeling anxious or worried or discouraged or overwhelmed, try living outside yourself. Ask God to show you even one small thing you could do with great love for another person who is going through a hard time.

 

“Come be My light” were the words Mother Teresa heard Jesus speak to her heart as He called her to minister to the poor.

I believe He whispers those same words to all of us today—cancer survivors and caregivers included.

Come be My light to someone else feeling the darkness. Come be My light even if you think your light is a small one, it is better than no light at all.  Come be My light because when you shine it with great love, it is sure to be a blessing.

“Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world.
God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill.
If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you?
I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine!
Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.”
Matthew 5:14-16 The Message Bible 

Excerpted from Peace in the Face of Cancer. Copyright 2017 by Lynn Eib.
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Make sure you open this article in your browser so you can enjoy the song below by Kathy Troccoli.