May 2010 | Elaine Olsen

"… live on"

May 12, 2010

{For you, friend, you know who you are.}

“… and yet we live on.” (2 Corinthians 6:9)

My right hand is aching this morning. Truth be known, it ached all night… a sharp twinge located in the center of my hand, just below my middle knuckle. I’ve felt it before. It flares up from time to time when my fingers and keyboard collide at a rapid, unrelenting rate. This has been one of those times for me… one of those weeks that has authored an unusual amount of connection between my fingertips and my computer. I don’t mind it much; I really don’t think about it often, especially while in mid-typing mode. But when the computer screen grows dim and the lights go out and my hands find their rest at my side, the pain sets in reminding me of an important truth regarding the call of Jesus Christ upon my life.

Kingdom work is sometimes flanked by the painful ache of a sacred obedience.

If we are Christians, if we dare to name ourselves with the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, then we are to be heartily invested in his kingdom business. We don’t get a pass when it comes to doing God’s work. Vocationally speaking, we may hold a variety of titles behind our names, but spiritually speaking, the only holding of our hearts that matters is the One who titles us as his. And when we get this—when we finally arrive at the place of realizing that all of our earthly endeavors are meant to be the fertile soil upon which the King sows his seed—then we readily accept the fullness of that calling, ills and aches included.

The Apostle Paul understood the strain between a painful ache and a sacred obedience. He willingly chose his “ache,” chaining himself to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and believing that every temporal pain of his flesh was achieving for him an eternal glory that far outweighed them all. At any point along the way, Paul could have chosen otherwise… could have freed himself from the physical and emotional misery that invaded his flesh. Instead, he persevered in great travail and suffering so that the church might know the culminating truth of the cross. So that the church would grow. So that you and I, some 2000 years down the road, might know what it is to “live on” despite the carnage and chaos going on around us and in us. But don’t take my word on it; take his…

“Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way:
in great endurance;
in troubles, hardships and distresses;
in beatings, imprisonments and riots;
in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger;
in purity, understanding, patience and kindness;
in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love;
in truthful speech and in the power of God;
with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left;
through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report;
genuine, yet regarded as impostors;
known, yet regarded as unknown;
dying, and yet we live on;
beaten, and yet not killed;
sorrowful, yet always rejoicing;
poor, yet making many rich;
having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” (2 Corinthians 4:4-10).

I’d never seen it before… Paul’s “live on.” When reading this familiar passage I’m tempted to stay mired in the pain of it all, in imagining how my own life fits into the litany of sufferings he vividly details in his letter to the church at Corinth. Yet it’s there… two simple words that admonished the readers back then and the readers right now to “live on.” To not stay entrenched in the ache of our sacred obedience to Jesus Christ, but to “live on” in spite of it. To press on to take hold of all of that for which Christ has taken hold of us. To keep putting one spiritual foot of faith in front of the other until we press through to victory and can realize, even as Paul realized, that we possess everything, even though the world labels our possession as nothing.

The painful ache of a sacred obedience.

Some of you are living your ache today. Some of you are all too familiar with Paul’s suffering because yours, at some level, mirrors his. You may not be locked in a prison cell or experiencing the physical trauma of a flogging, but I imagine there are many of you who feel the emotional and spiritual intensity of some chains and some wearing and tearing away of your flesh that feels comparable in their depth to Paul’s.

Some of you are expending a lot of your faith on behalf of God’s kingdom gain while seeing little results. Some of you are standing on the front lines of a tenacious, spiritual battle where the line is wearing thin and your reserves have run for cover leaving you alone to fight it through to victory. Some of you are tired; sleepless nights have claimed your good sense and the energy for a new day has long since been usurped by the previous night’s wandering of your mind. Some of you are hungry; a famine of soul is crying out for the bread of heaven, yet the manna seems to have missed your acreage during its morning dispensation. Some of you are working hard, enduring long, speaking truth, and loving lavishly; still and yet, the payoff seems minimal and our Father’s notice all the more. You feel “unknown” and as an “imposter” upon the soil beneath your feet.

I hear you. I feel you. I cannot fully understand what it’s like to be you, but like you, I, too, have known moments, days, and seasons of feeling the painful ache of a sacred obedience. I cannot perfectly aid your comprehension as it pertains to the questions and “whys” behind your struggle, but I can, like the Apostle Paul, give to you a couple of words that have carried me through a great many aches in my past.

Live on.

Don’t die mid-stream. Live on. Press through. Receive everything as if it were happening to our Lord Jesus Christ and then, live on. For of this I am certain… you are known by our Heavenly Father. He sees your sacred obedience and regards you and your faith as genuine in his eyes. If you remain faithful to live on in Jesus, despite the carnage going on around you, then there is nothing in your past, present, or future that will come to you that will be able to undercut the witness of God’s kingdom via your flesh. Nothing. You can live on because Christ lived on. So did Paul; so have countless, unnamed others who have gone before you, who will follow after you, and who, in this moment, stand beside you to cheer you on toward victory.

I am one of them, friends, and I need your encouragement today just as much as you need mine. We’re on the kingdom road together; it’s no mistake that we have found one another in this season of living. God intends for us to be here… to love one another in the strength and power of his Holy Spirit and to live on together until we move home to heaven. It is but a moment from now… a single breath that will transport us into our “next” where our living on will live on in living color and before the very face of God. Believing and fully trusting in that moment, friends, brings me rich perspective for every temporal ache I experience that is connected to God’s kingdom end. Even so I pray, Lord Jesus, keep me obedient.

Keep me obedient to live on. Keep my friends as well. Amen. So be it.

peace for the journey,

basement dreaming…

May 10, 2010

*Note: Just in case you’re the one reader of this blog who hasn’t heard, my book “peace for the journey: in the pleasure of his company” has released. Just in case you missed the book trailer, here it is again (truthfully, I need to keep this out in front for readers, but haven’t a clue as to how I might incorporate it into my header, etc. Help Tekeme friends!).

And just in case you’ve hopped over here to find out the first three winners of an autographed copy of my book… here they are, as drawn by my three kids that are currently home (please e-mail me your snail mail, and I’ll get these to you this week): Amelia drew Danielle @ Sojourner, Jadon drew Cindy @ Letters from Mid-life, and Nick drew Laura @ the Wellspring. Some of you have asked regarding getting an autographed copy from me. I’m willing to send you one, but I cannot offer you free shipping like some of these other venues. The cost of ordering from me is $15 per book and $5 shipping for up to 3 books. Please e-mail me your interest.

With my next post, I hope to address some of the questions/thoughts/kindnesses you’ve had for me over the past week. Truly, you are more than I deserve, and I am grateful for every grace you’ve extended in my direction. There will also be another occasion to win a copy of the book, but for now, I simply wanted to write my “heart” with this post and to “speak in the daylight” what God has “whispered to me in the dark.” Shalom.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“‘What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.'” {Matthew 10:27}

“Mommy, I don’t mind playing by myself in the basement anymore.”

“Why daughter, what led you to change your mind?”

“Because I’ve discovered that the basement is big enough to hold my dreams.”

***

This was the conversation I had with my daughter in the early morning hours, not on the stage of real life but on the stage of my subconscious—a place where dreams have a habit of displaying their truth in a way that sometimes seems so real, I have a hard time separating reality from fantasy. This time, however, there was no mistaking the dream for reality. Why?

For starters, when I awoke I noticed the above conversation scrawled out on the pad of paper that sits on the nightstand by my bed—a good indication that something took place in the night that I wanted to recall with clarity in the day. I’ve learned to keep the pen at the ready, even in sleep. Secondly, we don’t have a basement. Lastly, even if we did have a basement, I’m fairly certain that, at seven years old, my daughter wouldn’t be ready to make such a bold proclamation regarding her fear of the dark and of being alone. I certainly wasn’t ready at her age to tackle the haunt of the basement that accompanied most of my childhood dwellings. I’m not certain I’m ready to tackle it now, but at forty-four I’m walking ever closer to being able to say with all the confidence of a dream walker…

I don’t mind playing in the basement anymore, because I’ve discovered that the basement is big enough to hold my dreams.

The basement. When I was a child it represented a few different things for me:

Isolation.
Darkness.
Mystery.
Quietness.
Hiddenness.
Confinement.

While growing up, the basement really wasn’t the place where my family lived corporately. We did our living upstairs. We ate upstairs, slept upstairs, and talked upstairs, all the while relegating the basement as a place of individual exploration and retreat. As a child, descending the stairs into the basement seemed like more of a punishment to me rather than a place of escape. To their credit, my parents went to great lengths to make our “underneath” a pleasant getaway for my sister and me. We had a playroom filled with toys and an open invitation to come and to live out our imaginations within its borders. I was more inclined to RSVP my acceptance if my friends or sister would choose to join in the fun, but to go it alone? To freely choose my isolation over the corporate adventure that was taking place in the upper chambers of our home?

Not likely.

I was too scared. Too frightened of what I could not clearly see. Too unsure of what might happen while on individual safari in the basement. Too afraid that I might miss out on the excitement of upstairs living. Too uncertain of the silence that surrounded me. Too confident that the silence would soon be replaced with sounds I couldn’t handle… with suspicions I couldn’t manage.

No, back then basement living wasn’t for me. My fear kept me from it, and if I’m not careful in this season of living, my fear might keep me postured accordingly… confined within the safety of the upstairs without ever venturing downward to discover the foundational beauty that resides beneath a well-structured home. A well-fortified heart.

Basements aren’t all bad. As I think about them tonight, some forty years beyond my initial understanding regarding their worthiness, the basement represents a few old things for me with a new twist:

Isolation, moments away from the world in order to be alone with God.
Darkness, not to hide me but to grow me.
Mystery, the secrets of an unseen God that cultivate my trust and replace my fears with faith.
Quietness, permission enough to settle down and settle in on what God has to say.
Hiddenness, permission enough to move away from life’s stage in order to allow God a moment beneath the lights.
Confinement, closing off the world’s crowding so that my heart and thoughts and dreams have room enough to breathe… to formulate and to incubate in a safe place with a good God.

I’ve been to the basement in recent days, friends. Long before “peace for the journey” ever made its entrance onto the stage of Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Winepress, it made its entrance into my dreams. It was a seed that germinated in the “basement” with God—a season in my life when I faced my fears and risked the isolation, darkness, mystery, quietness, hiddenness, and confinement of the downstairs in order to hear the heart of God regarding my dreams… my pen.

What birthed there, births now in living color for you to witness. Nothing about the journey in between those two births has been routine or predictable. This has been the most unpredictable road of faith I’ve walked in forty-four years. I hope to flesh that out a bit more for you in days to come because I think, perhaps, we’re tempted to assume that basement dreaming and the faith building therein always have to work themselves out in predictable measure. That somehow, my journey with my dreams has to resemble yours and vice-versa.

Basement dreaming with God is never without individual color and imagination. In the midst of your isolation and quietness with God, a foundation of faith is built that will best be able to hold and to fortify the dreams of your heart. What is erected there between the two of you will serve as your solid footing for the season to come. Don’t let anyone tell you that your house has to be built according to a structured set of blueprints… that dreaming only comes in one shade of color. Dreams come in kingdom shades of color, and the last time I checked, our Father’s palette was limitless.

You will get there, friends. Perhaps a trip to the basement might be in accordance with your next step of faith. Don’t fear the descent; instead, embrace it knowing that with each step into the darkness, God’s light shines brighter. I don’t imagine it will be long before your time in the basement will take on new meaning for you even as it has for me. Life in the upper chambers will concede some of its worthiness to the lower level, understanding that without the basement’s underpinning, the floors up above could easily disassemble into piles of rubble.

The basement is big enough to hold all of our dreams… is safe enough to grow them… is isolated enough, dark enough, mysterious enough, quiet enough, hidden enough, and confined enough to allow us open access to our Father’s heart. His heart is where our dreaming meets with the reality of his goodness and where our fear is replaced by a simple faith—a settled confidence in the One who authors all faith journeys and who promises to perfect them along the way and as we go.

God is where I want to live. He is where I want to dream. Accordingly, I don’t much mind playing in the basement anymore. It’s a good place to breathe with God, to grow an imagination, and to exist within the sacred possibilities of what he’s imagined on my behalf long before I made my entrance into this world. This week, I invite you to join me in the downward descent to God’s playroom so that his up and coming plans for your life might have a moment or two beneath the spotlight. It’s going to be good, because HE IS GOOD. As always…

peace for the journey,

~elaine

"peace for the journey: in the pleasure of his company"

May 3, 2010

Every now and again, a day lives beyond predictable expectation. Routine is replaced with something different, and ordinary succumbs to the shadows of something extra. Today is one of those days for me. I’ve spent the last five years contemplating its arrival, imagining how it might “live” for me… to finally arrive at this point in my writing journey where my thoughts are gathered together between a front cover and a back one to serve as a collective offering of my heart to Jesus and his world.

Today, my imagination is put to rest, at least temporarily. Today, I experience the fruition of a dream that was embedded into my spirit long before I ever held a pen in my hand. It was a dream given to me at the earliest of ages by my father whose imagination coupled with his love for telling the “story” worked their magic into the fabric of my fragile understanding about how life should live—

With details.
With expression.
With questions.
With emotions.
With the expectation for a good ending.

My daddy never failed to bring about that good ending. In doing so, in giving a good finish to the sometimes wild and fantastic bedtime tales that he created in his mind, he painted for me a rich metaphor about how the “story” will end for me, for all of us who’ve come to know and to love and to trust the Storyteller. God’s finish doesn’t live without punctuation, friends. The blessed “amen” will come for each one of us, and we will be at final rest with our souls.

But until we arrive there, there is a journey to be walked… a story to be lived via our flesh. Along the way and as we go, I don’t imagine much of it will live as we anticipated on the front end of our book’s unfolding. The chapters in our lives have a way of keeping us on the edge of our seats in anticipation of the next page, the next plot twist, the next narrow escape, the next victory—all of which are certain to be part of this odyssey we call the Christian life.

Today’s book release is my next page—not the only page in my journey, just one of them. A day of something “extra.” A day of living a little bit beyond the “routine and normal” that usually fills a twenty-four hour period in my life. I don’t take it for granted; it is a gift of gracious grace offered to me by the Storyteller who has seen fit to allow a small portion of kingdom influence to flow through my pen. What God chooses to do with that portion and where he chooses to take it belongs to him and him alone. I’ve long since given up on trying to manipulate and manage his “story.” It’s simply and profoundly too big for my menial attempts at human administration. Still and yet, God affords me a moment or two of personal witness—of interjecting my “two cents” worth of sacred understanding into the mix—knowing that even the smallest offering of my heart will add to the beauty of a final masterpiece that will one day adorn the throne room of heaven.

And so, without any further words of coaxing regarding that offering, I give to God and to you this book—a little bit of “peace for the journey.” In doing so, I pray and humbly petition the Father that, through this offering of my heart, you will more fully know the Storyteller and what it means to rest “in the pleasure of his company.” He’s been my pleasure for forty-four years. He is my pleasure today. He’ll be my pleasure for all eternity.

To order your copy of “peace for the journey: in the pleasure of his company” visit any of the following websites (please note… some of these venues offer FREE SHIPPING when ordering multiple copies):

WinePress
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
CBD {shipping dates are longer here}

If you live in my area and want a signed copy of the book, please check with me later in the week as I am expecting a shipment of books. Also, I am giving away three copies of my book to readers who leave a comment on this blog post (you do not have to have a blog to leave a comment; simply sign-in as an “anonymous” commenter, leaving me an e-mail address so that I can notify you if you win). In addition, you can increase your odds of winning a copy by promoting the book in the following ways:

1. Announce the book on your facebook status–either linking back to this post or linking the video trailer to your status: video trailer

2. Announce the book by writing your own blog post, linking back to this particular post, adding the video trailer to your post by using the embed code found with the youtube link: (if you don’t know how to do this and want to include it, e-mail me, and I’ll walk you through it… very simple).

If you choose to do either or both of these, make sure that you leave a separate comment on this post informing me of each, thus increasing your odds for a win!

Thanks for helping me out, friends. Truly, you are more than I deserve, and I am grateful for your participation in my life. You make me want to be a better writer, thinker, seeker, and sojourner on the road toward peace—Jesus Christ. As always…

peace for the journey,

PS: A final word of thanks to Shirley and Susan (a.k.a. “runner mom”) for adding their artistic expression to the photographs found in the book trailer and for Susan’s photography found in the book. Your generous hearts have given me “peace” in this journey of publication and have added to the overall beauty of the book. I love you both!

Monthly Archives: May 2010