Katy Claire has learned to cock her head to the side, target her daddy’s eyes, and say “pretty please?” All we can do now is just pray she never asks him to kill us or something.

After 11 years of wanting something on my back porch besides mold and an old Char-Broil, I finally got some simple patio furniture for Mother’s Day. I can’t tell you how much I love writing outside in the cool of the Florida summer day (2 – 4am.)

And speaking of the season, we just booked some family time at the beach for July —  headed over to the Gulf side for a bit this year. If you’re going west, too, look me up: I’ll be the one in the Saturn-sized sunhat, complaining about sand and holding a gallon of SPF 2073.

We’re more than ready for a little summer at the Adkins’ house, how about you?

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But for our regular Their Stuff Thursday, here’s an excerpt from a thoughtful article on Christian motherhood from Rachel Jankovic:

…While (God) delights in children, he does not speak of them in some cutesy photo shoot kind of a way. He compares them, not to tiny fairies, or dewy flowers, but to arrows. To weapons in the hand of a mighty man.

God does not tell us to desire the blessing of children because their cheerful voices will make our houses feel cozy. He tells us to desire children who will contend with the enemy in the gate.

It is natural and good that we delight in the little things with our children. God didn’t command mothers to rejoice over elbow dimples and the smell of a new baby’s head. He didn’t tell us to smile over them while they sleep, or to love the way they look in footie pajamas.

He didn’t tell us these things, because He didn’t have to. That is the natural love of a mother for her children.

But the love that we need, the reminders we need, is to love them, not for our own sake, but for what God is doing through them…

Read the whole article here.

Are you getting yourself or the family ready summer, too? How can I pray for you?

Leave a comment or email me using the contact form link at the top right.

I’ll write more about this whole concept sometime soon, but today I wanted to link to the story Pastor Mike showed in service yesterday at Grace.

I would never presume to say whether the Lord brought this trial to Ian and Larissa purposefully or whether He allowed Satan to sift them like wheat. Only God could know.

What I do know is that their story of trusting, worshiping and living Christ through their pain — and of truly, deeply believing and displaying that there is another life beyond this one — brings more praise to God than all of the tales of ease and blessing on earth combined.

They are sharing in both His suffering and His glory, right here and right now. As Larissa quotes Ian in one of the posts on her blog:

“I would do this (disability) all over again if i knew it would affect this many people. God is glorious.”

On dating sites like match.com: I think guys need to just man up and talk to girls face to face.

On not getting any gum at the grocery checkout: This world just isn’t always what I thought it would be.

On the Magic losing in the first round: Somebody get me a ladder, ’cause I need to punch Dwight Howard in the face.

On the fickleness of the female sex: These women. They always come back to the Adkins men in the end.

On relaxing and eating cereal: I’m living the life, man. You should try it.

On my styling of his hair: Is this what you were going for? I look like a guy from the 80s news.

On the best toys: When it comes down to it, you just can’t beat a kazoo.

On people: Everyone has their weirds.

Happy Friday, friends.
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True confessions time: fear is something I have to fight and pray about daily to keep at bay. I don’t struggle so much with fears of security or of harm coming to me to me or my family. I don’t fear the dark, or germs, or even death (although spiders do get a considerable nod).

What do I fear?

That God won’t be enough, won’t do enough, won’t care for me enough. I fear that the life He has planned for me won’t be as good as one I could dream up myself.

I fear and don’t trust, so I often try grab life and joy and peace for myself.

That’s why Pastor Mark Driscoll’s article this week “Four Reasons Why We Fear” hit me right where I live. Fear, he says, is really following false gospels, the belief that God is not in control — that something else can save besides Christ:

When we fear, we betray our trust and comfort in things other than Jesus. We try to control our life. We hold on to our money. We remove ourselves from community. We rebel against authority. We sin. We self-medicate. We self-justify. We turn Jesus into a therapist. We do all of this to live in a view of heaven…that we created in our own imagination.

I was also struck by Driscoll’s concept of our fears turning us into false prophets:

To be a false prophet is to incorrectly predict the future. Fear in our lives can turn us into false prophets, predicting things that may not — and most likely will not — come to pass. This often not only affects us but others in our life whom we influence.

In the Old Testament, God commanded death for false prophets — the stoning of those who put words in the mouth of God which did not come true.

I must follow that lead in my life, pounding out my fears about His goodness with the truth of the Cornerstone, the Rock of My Salvation.

Read the whole article here.

P.S. Excited to teach alongside some great women tonight at 101. Hope to see you there, Grace girls!

How often we do the same thing, measuring ourselves on the false balances of this world — idealized pictures of what it means to to be a successful woman, wife, and mother. How often we spend our lives striving to measure up to goals God never set for us in the first place.

God hates these dishonest scales. We end up paying so much more than we need to, only to end up clutching a bag of disappointment, an inadequate amount of hope in either failure or success.

The only Accurate Weight that finds favor with God is the righteousness of Christ, poured out on the scale on our behalf. We must clothe ourselves in it, moment by moment, to see ourselves clearly — accepted, covered and measured with grace.

_________________

Last week, The Pastor went to a church planter’s conference in town for three days. And then right when that one ended, he left to go to another one in South Florida for four. About the same time dad headed out, The Teenager began a week of 12-13-hour-a-day rehearsals for his spring musical.

Me? I didn’t cook a real meal for 96 hours. Also, I remembered what quiet sounds like. Half peaceful. Half empty.

Speaking of Mike being gone, I don’t do very well with that after the first couple days.

And speaking of the spring musical, the Teenager opened last night in Circle Theatre’s Singin’ in the Rain at the Rep. Between watching him tap dance, and thinking about what the School of the Arts has meant to his life, and seeing the faces of my friends who came out to support him, I had one of those moments — you know, where it’s all just so right and so sweet that you bow your head under the weight of blessing and thankfulness. God is good.

That’s about the tenth time I’ve said “God is good” on the blog this week. It’s a truth that’s close to my heart right now. I’m praying it’s close to yours, no matter what.

Katy wrote her name by herself for the first time two days ago. She also drew a picture of me with clowns and the Eiffel Tower and a blimp. I’m still trying to ponder what this could mean for my life. Suggestions?

Both of our toilets are kinda broken. This is bad. But what’s even worse is that Mike and I are going to try to fix them today. Together. By ourselves.

If I don’t blog next week, you’ll know what happened.

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I’ve been thinking about it this week because a couple of days ago, an old friend blogged that he feels God does not cause anyone pain, but rather only allows it.

He framed his post in terms of the Matt Redman song Blessed Be Your Name, specifically the line “you give and take away (Job 1:21).” He refuses to sing the lyric anymore, denying the belief that a good God could “take” anything away from anybody.

I was not surprised at my friend’s post or his anguish — he writes honestly and openly out of the deep pain that comes from slowly losing a family member to a sudden, terrible, terminal illness.

I have been in those shoes, struggling to sing those words. I grieve for his family, whom I love very much.

I was taken back by how many people who readily agreed with him in the comments and on Facebook, defining a “good” God as one who only gives and never takes. Many people admitting to humming through those lyrics along with my friend; several churches had changed those lyrics altogether, rewriting them into something they could live with.

Those are dangerous theological waters.

I absolutely believe that much of what we experience and define as “bad” or “taking away” in our lives comes from the fact that we live in a world cursed by sin and death, weakened with our own rebellious choices, and ruled by an enemy who wants to steal, kill and destroy. There is brokenness and pain that God simply allows to come our way in the story of our own fallenness.

But to say that God Himself never takes away from us or causes us suffering is to deny God the right to define “good” in our lives and in the universe. It ties the hands of God to our own finite values and judgments. And it limits the ways He can conform us to the image of His Son, who suffered so much.

I read a quote from from Tim Keller’s The Reason for God this week that frames it all in the context of your relationship with God and the Bible’s teaching, which is the story of how He works:

To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you. Does that belief make sense?  If you don’t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you.

God is all good. He never stops being all good or acting in a way that is all good toward us. But faith in a God who can only act in accordance with our own definition of “good” is not faith in God at all; it is faith in ourselves.

Thoughts?

I’m still waiting on many of them. I might hear next week. I might wait till heaven.

He is good either way.

But this week, I came face to face with one more thing God has quietly accomplished while I wasn’t even looking. I don’t always edit the baptism recap videos at Grace, but when I do, I usually wipe away tears as it comes together. There’s nothing like seeing the faces and stories of those you know who have met with the living God and walked away changed. He is good.

Last week during the edit, though, I cried for that and for something else.

I found myself reliving and rethinking conversations, meetings, brainstorming and prayers of six, seven, eight years ago, my hands held tight to Mike’s while we prayed for our church to one day reach across lines of culture and race and capture the hearts of the next generation.

As a couple of white suburbians, we didn’t know how to make that happen. We still don’t.

But He did.

He is good.

Watch an answer to eight years of prayer, as person after person from all three of our campuses displays His glory among the nations:

But since mom stuff has been the theme, I thought I’d hit it again for Their Stuff Thursday before I return us to our regular programming. I saw this essay, Forgiveness for Moms Who Fail, come across the feed from The Resurgence this week.

I loved Robert Jones’ contrast between distorted guilt and true guilt:

Most mothers labor under the weight of guilt — of frustrated ideals, imperfect performance, and deficient production. The laundry remains undone, story books unread, and tempers flared . . .

If this is you, the guilt you feel may be distorted guilt. We may wrongly place ourselves under a law we erect: “Good mothers should do X, Y, or Z,” even though X, Y, or Z may go beyond what God’s Word commands…Sometimes those false standards come from outside of us — the ideals of your church or small group, your mother’s model, your mother-in-law’s advice, or the latest book or blog post from your favorite Christian author. Sometimes they come from our own perfectionist hearts as we seek to establish and live out our own legalism and self-righteousness (Phil. 3:3–9).

On the other hand, your guilt may be true guilt. You and I certainly fall short of God’s standards every day. We fail to love the Lord our God with everything we’ve got and we fail to love our spouses and children the way we selfishly love ourselves….

I can’t tell you enough how sorting this guilt thing out — when I do — has changed my mothering, and in turn how free understanding the gospel has made me from day to day with my children.

Some guilty feelings are earned; others were never ours to bear. But for either, Jesus is there: “Instead of endless drips of guilt, God bathes believers in Christ with forgiveness.”

Read the whole post here.