Lisa notes

Call or Text? What’s the Best Way to Talk? – Day 13 of Handmade

By LisaNotes October 13, 2018 31 Days Handmade--Finding God in Your Story 7 Comments

Talk

I checked my email folder for Jeff’s travel information. I pasted his Southwest flight number online at FlightAware. His plane had arrived in Nashville.

I called his cell. No answer. I didn’t leave a voicemail because I know he doesn’t listen to those.

I sent him a text. But got no reply.

Text or Call

When we send our messages into the world, they’re not always received.

And yet we’ve never had so many options for communicating. 

  • Do you prefer calling or texting?
  • GroupMe or Messenger?
  • Blog comment or tweet reply?
  • Snapchat or Instagram?
  • Facebook post or FaceTime?
  • Email or snail mail?

Or, ummm, actually talk face to face in person?

With more choices comes more responsibility. Like it or not, we have to think twice now.

When we choose the wrong medium, even with the best of intentions and careful wording, our message can be garbled. Misunderstood. Confusing.

To communicate appropriately, we have to match our message with the medium. I snapchat with my daughters, but I send emoji-less emails to colleagues. I include lots of OMGs and !!!! to Jeff, but try to keep emotions out of my tweets (most of the time, anyway).

God Shows Up Where?

And God?

God can and does show up in any and all of those mediums, plus more.

He reminds us to be wise. To be loving. To be conveyors of truth and grace and respect when we communicate, whichever platform we’re on.

I waited for 30 minutes for a response from Jeff. My phone still didn’t ring or buzz or vibrate. So I started the process again. This time he answered on the second ring. Whew. He just hadn’t noticed my first call or text.

So there’s that. Even with our best efforts, we can’t guarantee our message will be received if we don’t hear a voice or see a face.

Some things may have changed a lot.

But other things always remain the same.

Three Questions

Here are our three questions of the day:

(1) Do you prefer receiving a phone call or a text?

(2) Have you met online friends in person?

(3) What medium does God use to reach you most often?

* * *

What are your answers? Please share in the comments.

My answers

(1) I almost always prefer text for short exchanges. But sometimes you need to hear the voice.

(2) Yes, I even went to Guatemala on a mission trip with online friends.

(3) I see God through other people in real-life conversations but I also hear him through blog posts and emails and any of the other avenues that we all talk to each other.

More here

  • 26 Surprising Ways to Encounter God
    Not as connected to God as you’d like to be? Experience 26 surprising ways to encounter God in just a few minutes per day.
  • How Do You Hug God?
    Sometimes I resent that I can’t touch God with my hands, hear him with my ears, see him with my eyes. Jesus used his touch often when he was here. And now?
  • To Hear Voices, Listen
    He apologized for talking too much but I told him don’t be sorry for that. I wanted to hear him. In hearing others, we often hear straight from God, too.
  • 6 Ways to Hear from God
    Discerning God’s will is rarely easy. Here are 6 ways to hear from God, revised from J. I. Packer’s “Knowing God”.

Get the whole Handmade series here

 

Which Side Are You On? The Great Divide – Day 12 of Handmade

By LisaNotes October 12, 2018 31 Days Handmade--Finding God in Your Story 8 Comments

Divide

We like to play dominoes at my house. Usually Mexican Train.

But some people use dominoes to create a chain. They line up hundreds of dominoes in elaborate patterns.

Divide - Which side are you on

Predicting Each Other

Then with one slight nudge on only one domino, the whole chain is set in motion. You can predict its exact direction and outcome.

Sometimes we do that with each other, too.

With only one question, we predict everything about a person.

For instance:

Do you love President Trump or do you detest him?

Depending on your answer to that question, we’ll predict how you’ll answer a whole array of other questions. We’ll label you right or left and be done.

Other one-question-only issues that can start the domino effect include:

  • Believe Brett Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford?
  • Allow more people into our country or build a wall to keep them out?
  • Stand or kneel for the National Anthem?
  • Fox or CNN?
  • Arm our teachers or keep guns out of the schools?

There seems to be a great divide.

And people on both sides claim the name of Jesus.

Lord, have mercy.

Trade in the Dominoes

I do believe with God that all things are possible.

But two years into this, I don’t see us closing the gap that divides us.

Instead, it just seems to widen.

Maybe we need to abandon our domino set of questions entirely.

And ask different kinds of questions instead. Ones that would help us understand each other clearer and less stereotypically. If we’ll really, really listen to each other’s answers.

  • What are you afraid of?
  • What do you need to feel safe?
  • What do you need to be healthy?
  • In what ways is your family hurting?
  • What blessings can you share with others?

Because I still have to believe, deep down, that we’re all more alike than we are different.

At our foundation, we all want safe environments. We all want good health. We all want meaningful work and purpose and relationships. We all want to be treated with respect and for others to be treated with respect, too.

We agree on those things.

God, we need your help on all the rest.

Three Questions

Answer any or all of our three questions of the day:

(1) Is anyone in your family left-handed instead of right-handed? (Not a political question!)

(2) How closely do you follow politics?

(3) How can God use believers to bridge gaps between people instead of cause more division?

* * *

What are your answers? Please share in the comments.

My answers

(1) We all happen to be right-handed in my immediate family.

(2) I follow politics very closely, more in the past two years than ever.

(3) Maybe actually serving each other in the name of Jesus with actions instead of trying to convince others with words that we are right and they are wrong?

More here

Get the whole Handmade series here

Handmade - Finding God in Your Story

Oil the Hinges – Day 11 of Handmade

By LisaNotes October 11, 2018 31 Days Handmade--Finding God in Your Story 1 Comment

DAY 11 of Handmade Series, #Write31Days

DOORS

Doors are solid.

They’re intended to block the way. To keep what’s inside in, and to keep what’s outside, out.

Door - Are your hinges oiled

Except . . . when they’re open. Open doors remove the barriers. They allow the freedom to travel in and out, back and forth.

It’s the hinge that makes the difference.

A hinge allows room for movement. For opening. For closing.

Because of the hinge, change is possible.

Our acceptance or decline of opportunities from God often hinge on our attitudes, our faith, our surroundings.

Are we keeping our hinges well-greased?

Three Questions

Here are our three questions of the day:

(1) Which door do you open and close most often at your home?

(2) Is there a person or situation that comes in and out of your life?

(3) What door do you want God to open for you now? What door do you wish he would close?

* * *

What are your answers? Please share in the comments.

My answers

(1) Probably the door to the bathroom. Or the door to the garage.

(2) I have a crazy relationship with my running watch. I’ll lose it for a few months, then it’ll pop back up, out of the blue. I bought a new watch after I misplaced the old one again, which I subsequently left in a car out of town. But surprisingly, a week later the old watch resurfaced one more time. (I need to be more responsible, yes?) More seriously, I also have a young friend who rushes into my life occasionally with big needs, then lays low for awhile after that.

(3) I’d like an open door to deploy with PAR, our local disaster response team, for hurricane relief, in either North Carolina or Florida. Only two weeks ago exactly, Jeff and I were enjoying beautiful, calm weather at Panama City City Beach, and now it’s been upended by Hurricane Michael.

More here

  • Who Will Open the Door?
    Mr. M didn’t answer the door last week. Will he tonight? People pass through our lives so quickly.
  • Portals for God
    Look for portals—openings—that God wants to reveal himself through your routine tasks. Unwrap these gifts of grace; enjoy them to the fullest.
  • When God Parts the Waters, Walk Across
    Opportunities come to us in different ways. But if God parts the waters for you, walk across.

Get the whole Handmade series here

 

How Do You Worship? – Day 10 of Handmade

By LisaNotes October 10, 2018 31 Days Handmade--Finding God in Your Story, Worship 11 Comments

DAY 10, OCTOBER 10

How

Sometimes we know what to do. And even why we do it.

But how?

How do we do it?

How do you worship

How Do We Worship?

How is often underrated.

How is the nuts and bolts of intent. It puts the movement in our lives.

When we think of what we worship, or more precisely, who we worship, many Christians automatically think of God. And hopefully that’s accurate.

When we think about where we worship, one place is the building we gather on Sundays. And also everywhere else we go should be a place of worship.

But how do we worship?

That can look different for each individual.

church of the latter day dude

On Sundays our worship may look similar to others within the same walls. But from building to building, it can vary greatly.

And on Mondays-Saturdays, how we worship can definitely look different from day to day, from person to person.

Think this week about your how, as much as your what, where, or why.

And not just on Sundays. But every day.

Three Questions

Here are our three questions of the day:

(1) Are you a screamer at ballgames or concerts, or are you one who sits silently and enjoys?

(2) What’s the norm for worship at your church? Contemporary? Traditional? Quiet? Noisy?

(3) Have you changed how you worship through the years?

* * *

What are your answers? Please share in the comments.

My answers

(1) I don’t really yell crazy like a lot of people of games, but I do like to be enthusiastic.

(2) Our church’s worship is contemporary with a bit of rowdy participation from the crowd.

(3) My church of origin was very conservative and very still. Our singing (a cappella only) was to be vigorous, but that was it. Sometimes it was; sometimes it wasn’t.

More here

  • Raise Your Hand If . . .
    She asked, “Why do people raise their hands at your church?” That’s a good question. How would you answer?
  • Let the Body Worship
    I grew up being very still during singing with the church. That’s fine. Still is. But sometimes, when God is in the house, how can a body contain him?
  • I Need Your Worship
    If I feel the words drying up in me, I glance at her to remember why I’m here. For Someone bigger and greater than me. I get that by watching her worship.

Get the whole Handmade series here

Handmade - Finding God in Your Story

Breathe in the Inspiration
Day 9 of Handmade

By LisaNotes October 9, 2018 31 Days Handmade--Finding God in Your Story, Discrimination, Encouragement 17 Comments

Inspire

I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free… so other people would be also free.
– Rosa Parks

Day 9 Inspire

For the hanged and beaten. For the shot, drowned, and burned. For the tortured, tormented, and terrorized. For the abandoned by the rule of law. We will remember. With hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice. With courage because peace requires bravery. With persistence because justice is a constant struggle. With faith because we shall overcome.

I was fighting back tears.

We hadn’t even paid to enter the museum yet. But standing there in front of the cashier, I wanted to just hug her and cry.

I am white. She is black.

And I’m at the entrance to The Legacy Museum.

It’s the brainchild of Bryan Stevenson, the inspiring lawyer who heads the Equal Justice Initiative and author of the everybody-must-read-this-book Just Mercy.

The location itself is chilling.

The museum is built on the site of a warehouse that once housed slaves in Montgomery, Alabama. Montgomery was the capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama. And Alabama was among the top two slave-owning states in the United States.

That should be enough to make anyone cry.

But it gets worse. Once inside, we listened to holograms of former slaves inside jail cells, shackled and worn. They told their stories. They pleaded for our help.

We then walked past exhibit after exhibit of hard things, horrible things, things that should never have happened.

Yet they did.

It doesn’t end with the past though. The museum continues forward into this era of mass incarceration.

You can sit across the table with a video of a prisoner. Pick up the phone, and he tells you his or her story. You’ll cry again.

We later walked through The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It’s dedicated to the thousands of lynched African-Americans.

If a lynching was documented in your county of the U.S., there is a heavy steel monument hanging from the ceiling with your county’s name and the names of the lynching victims.

There are over 800 monuments here, representing over 800 counties in America where over 4,000 human beings were documented to be lynched by other human beings.

That doesn’t include the undocumented. Who knows that number?

lynching memorial

I looked for my county. It was there. And 3 names.

  • Daniel McBride
  • Joe Harris
  • Alex MacDonald

I wondered about their stories. About their mamas. About their children…and the children they didn’t get to have because their lives were cut short by lynching.

On the other side of the structure are corresponding steel columns laid in rows on the ground. These are only temporary. They are there until a representative of each county claims their monument and establishes one on their own soil.

Raise Up Memorial for Peace and Justice

“Raise Up” sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas on the grounds of the Memorial for Peace and Justice

We then left Montgomery and drove to Selma, Alabama. We walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

It’s another very sobering site.

rosa parks

the Rosa Parks magnet now on my fridge that I bought in Selma

Our history has multiple dark chapters.

Yet also hope. And little by little, alongside hope came change. And with change came healing.

Love never stops breathing into humanity.

Love inspires us to never give up.

Love emboldens us to always move forward. Despite the darkness. Despite the pain. Despite the affliction.

Keep breathing in love. Be inspired. Press on.

Three Questions

Here are our three questions of the day:

(1) What book have you read more than once?

(2) What speaker or author or friend inspires you?

(3) What is Love inspiring you to do in this season? 

* * *

What are your answers? Please share in the comments.

My answers

(1) The Power of Now

(2) This week I’m inspired by those who speak their truth, specifically the courage of “Science Mike” (Mike McHargue). He’s begun telling his own story of being sexually assaulted, even though he’s not ready to tell it fully now. Or maybe ever. It happened years ago. And that makes no difference.

(3) I’m inspired to lean in to hear hard stories and to look for ways to make a difference, however small they seem.

More here

  • How to Stay Soft in a Hard World
    She’s seen so much badness. Yet, she’s still touched enough to cry for this bride. She still has a heart. Where can I get one like that?
  • Hey You, Overweight Runner
    Hey you, overweight runner. You’re my hero today. When we see somebody doing a hard thing, we are encouraged to do a hard thing, too.
  • Honor the Wounded
    When someone gets hurt for the cause, they deserve an extra salute. Shouldn’t we all participate in their healing? Honor the wounded.

Watch about The Legacy Museum here

Why Build a Lynching Memorial Video

Equal Justice Initiative Racial terror lynching has a legacy that must be confronted.

Watch more videos about the Museum and the Memorial here

Get the whole Handmade series here

Handmade - Finding God in Your Story

Step Out of Your Comfort Zone – Day 8 of Handmade

By LisaNotes October 8, 2018 31 Days Handmade--Finding God in Your Story 10 Comments

DAY 8, OCTOBER 8

Comfort

The promise of stretching is not success, it’s learning.
– Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Day 8 Comfort Zone

I like my comfort zone. It feels safe. It’s not scary.

But I can run in circles inside its borders. It doesn’t push me outward into the world.

And it’s outside of my comfort zone where real growth usually happens.

So sometimes I have to get a running start to break out of my comfort zone. Other times I just tiptoe out of it, one inch at a time.

God is good at calling us out of our comfort zones.

Is he calling you out of a comfort zone now?

Three Questions

Here are our three questions of the day:

(1) What’s your favorite comfort food?

(2) Who is good at comforting you during hard times?

(3) When has God called you out of your comfort zone? What happened?

* * *

What are your answers? Please share in the comments.

My answers

(1) Chocolate chip cookies – they’re my go-to treat. After hundreds of them, I haven’t gotten tired of them yet. They taste like home to me.

(2) It depends on the issue. Jeff is helpful at alleviating my guilt when I need to say no to something. My girlfriends and sisters and daughters give good comfort about relational things.

(3) God calls me out of my comfort zone almost every week. For example, it takes me awhile to get comfortable in volunteer opportunities I get, but then something will change in it and I’m uncomfortable all over again. Yet God keeps showing up with me anyway, even in my awkwardness.

More here

Get the whole Handmade series here

Handmade - Finding God in Your Story