Author: Heather Davis Nelson

finding words for my story

/ Heather Davis Nelson / 2 Comments

In my work as a counselor, the first place I start is in helping others find words for their story. Their story is there – they have lived it, the soul-shattering moments and the glory-filled ones alike, and yet finding words for their story can be hard. Not simply because it’s hard to speak of what you’ve never spoken out loud before, but also because you may not have the words to describe it. And so I will often suggest that they read something – the Psalms, for instance; or a book or memoir or a blog – to begin to find words for their story. I include these questions as prompts:

What stands out to you? What resonates with you? What do you say, “oh yes! That’s me!” about? Underline it; write that out; and begin telling your story.

In this month where I’m finding it hard to find words for my story (not because it’s difficult or painful, but it’s just busy and quite seemingly ordinary), I turned to a few favorite blogs this morning. And what I found put words to what I’m experiencing. My story of today. Enjoy …

Both are from Emily Freeman at “chatting at the sky,” my #1 favorite blogger and writer these days because of her grace-infused artful words.

First, from her post “one word that is sabotaging the art you live“:

But I’m just tucking them in to bed, you say.

I’m just cleaning the room.

I’m just filing the papers.

I’m just balancing the checkbook.

I’m just driving the carpool. None of this feels sacred to you.

Did you see the killer there?

Pay attention to when  you use the word just. Because whatever comes after that word is usually where you’re allowing the art to die.

Resist the urge to disrespect a task because it doesn’t feel important.

And in “the kind of movement that makes a difference“:

Rather than resenting my weakness, I believe Jesus is asking me to embrace my weakness. Being poor in spirit doesn’t mean despising self but releasing self from the expectation of being anything but poor. Small. Helpless. Worn.

My soul needs to remember the kind of movement that will make a difference:

Don’t try to handle your anxiety. Bring your anxiety into the presence of Christ.

Don’t try to fix your loneliness. Bring your loneliness into the presence of Christ.

Don’t try to hide your addiction. Bring your addiction into the presence of Christ.

Don’t try to change your attitude. Bring your attitude into the presence of Christ.

Don’t despise your humanity. Bring your humanity into the presence of Christ.

There is still responsibility, there is still action that comes from me. But my action is not to make right, to make whole, or to make better. My action is to usher my abilities, inabilities, failures and successes all into the presence of Christ.

Somehow, all of this weaves into what I’m living and learning right now as we study Romans together in our women’s Bible study and as we delve into gospel & community in our community group and as I counsel and write and tuck into bed and calm down tantrums in the in-between moments.

Thursday free write

/ Heather Davis Nelson / 1 Comment

I sit in a quiet, secluded room of the Y, looking out at the Norfolk skyline on the fourth rainy day (or so) we have had this week. A welcome respite for the dry ground, which has not received actual rainfall that counted since August 10.

And here is a picture of my soul this past month. There have been waterings occasionally, but nothing substantial. It’s been busy, busy with good and beautiful things like one last vacation at the beach and the twins’ third birthday and retreat speaking and community group and women’s Bible study and preschool. So I took a soul time out this morning, and I did a yoga class followed by this space. This space of breathing. Of noticing life rather than letting it rush me by. Yoga felt slow to my fast-paced world of efficiency. And isn’t that illuminating?

On a date with Seth last week, I realized a few things – that writing helps my soul to breathe and I haven’t been doing that enough this fall; that when exercise is pushed off my plate it means the plate is too full; and that weekends need to be empty when the weekday rhythm of a pastor and counselor’s family leaves us all coming up for breath at its end.

What am I doing about it? Well … this. Starting to get in the habit of writing again. Saying no to external demands to say yes to Christ’s whispered invitation to my soul to “Come … all who labor … and R E S T.” What helps you to rest? What keeps you from it? Do share. We all need reminders and ideas of how to pursue the rest for which we have been redeemed.

Five Minute Friday: “write”

/ Heather Davis Nelson / 1 Comment

For me, to write is to think. Ever since I received my first diary when I was in 5th grade from Aunt Becky, I have sought refuge for my thoughts and prayers through writing. Words make sense of the inner joy or conflict or anger or grief …. and to write is to feel as well as to think about feeling.

“Write” also feels like pressure. The command to write calls to mind memories of those awful blue books in AP exams or college or grad school, where you must write and then be graded and do so all within a confined, imprisoned amount of time. So I prefer not to hear the command, “WRITE!”

“Write” is an invitation to my soul. To come to the screen or the journal and worship. To worship with my words and invite you to do the same with yours. To focus on the One worthy of words and writing, and to find grace everywhere as I force myself to write about it. To write is to notice life, put it into a picture you can see and enter into some aspect of it with me. To write is to build bridges of relationship. To write is to appreciate the relationships built, to strengthen them as I grow thankful for the way writing makes me remember the way my daughter’s eyes twinkle when she’s laughing and the joy shared as friends and family connect in the very ordinary moments of life.

*****

Today I join Lisa-Jo Baker in her “Five Minute Friday” community. You can also join in here to write for five minutes on a different prompt each Friday.

when God’s wrath becomes beautiful

/ Heather Davis Nelson / 4 Comments

Yesterday I taught our women’s Bible study on the passage of Romans 1:18-32. It’s a tough passage. Nothing easy or pleasant or (at first glance) comforting here. The theme is God’s wrath revealed against human sin. And yet it comes not in fire and brimstone but in a gradual giving over to what our hearts desire. That’s what’s terrifying about it. There are four stages of this “sin anatomy” found here:

1. Worship exchange (verses 18-22) – Although evidence of God’s beauty exists around us in creation and within us in the form of eternal longings that can’t be satisfied by the world and a conscience, we suppress this and worship Beauty rather than its Author.

2. Truth exchange (verses 24-25) – Unmoored from a relationship with God, it’s easy to believe lies rather than truth. And it’s the only way my idolatrous worship can be supported – that I believe lies that arise from empty/futile/pointless thinking and a darkened heart. The darkness supports the lies and the lies build the darkness. To the point that I call evil good and good evil. It’s also evidenced in my guilt dysfunction – I feel guilty for what I shouldn’t, but fail to feel guilty for what I should.

3. Relationship exchange (verses 24, 26-27) – Inevitably, this leads me into using people around me to get what my heart craves (and worships) rather than lovingly serving them as fellow made-in-God’s-image beings. Sexual sin is a vivid example of this, and Paul does not skirt around this issue in Romans. Lest we begin to think we can judge another because “I don’t struggle with that …”

4. Identity exchange – This is the deepest descent, the natural place we end up when first starting with exchanging God’s glory for creature and creation glory. I become what I practice, and the sin I dabbled in now owns and defines me. “Murder” is listed side by side with what follows, and all of us are caught in the net of practicing the unrighteousness that justly deserves God’s wrath:

  • gossips
  • slanderers
  • God-haters
  • insolent
  • haughty
  • boastful
  • inventors of evil
  • disobedient to parents
  • foolish
  • faithless
  • heartless
  • ruthless

When honest, we are left in despair by the end of this chapter in Romans. Where is the hope for any of us or for the world? And what do you do with this? Apparently, one common temptation would be to (still) try to self-justify and use this chapter to judge others, for Paul launches into the following warning at the beginning of chapter 2:

Therefore, you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things.

But, thanks be to God, Romans doesn’t end with chapter 1, or even after chapter 2, or 3. [It gets more bleak before it gets better.]

For what all of this is leading to is the beauty of the great gospel exchange. In which God loved us so much that he was willing to enter into our messy world, messy because of us – corrupted by our fall from created intent – sent his very own Son, Jesus, to do the unthinkable. To exchange HIS holiness for our sin; to exchange HIS righteousness for our unrighteousness; to exchange HIS perfect record as the holy and beloved Son of God for our record stained with sinful idolatry – and pay what we deserve. The price of God’s wrath, which he alone experienced in all its furor on the cross. And the good news doesn’t stop there. Not only is God’s wrath paid for, but we are given Jesus’ life in exchange for our own – his beauty for our shame. And this is what we have been craving all along. All of our attempts to exchange glory for idols are merely attempts to run away from/cover/hide/escape the gaze of the all-knowing God, from whom we cower in fear because we know we aren’t worthy. But God, even in revealing his wrath, provides hope for rescue.

And this is how God’s wrath becomes beautiful for the one who is hidden in Christ through faith. This is the only way I could teach on such a topic yesterday and not leave in despair and hopelessness. I know that there is good news; but the good news implies that there is bad news. God’s wrath is real, but as a Christian, I will never have to feel its reality because Jesus took it all. This makes me weep for the mercy I’ve found … and this invites me away day after day after day to worship the Beautiful One instead of his gifts.

Five Minute Friday: true

/ Heather Davis Nelson / 3 Comments

True. Oh, how we need more of true in our lie-tattered world! Deceit hangs everywhere, literally. Looking down at us from air-brushed advertisements and billboards promising that their product is True Life. But their product is anything but true. The very premise of marketing is that truth can be acquired. And it can’t be.

Truth is what we live. Who we live out of, and whose Life we join ourselves to. My daughter’s name, “Alethia,” means truth, and in her sweet three-year-old voice she can tell you what her name means (much more readily than she can tell the truth when she knows she’s done wrong). We need ones who live true to the True One. Who not only speak of the truth of God’s Word, but speak of it in a way that is true. Which will mean lots of love, for love and truth are inextricably connected in the life of Jesus. The one who is “the way, the truth, and the life.” He walked in love that was true and truth that was loving. And so must we as we live out his True Life within us.

Can I be true to who He is making me to be? Not hide behind my fig-leaf approximations of identity? Will you be true, and champion me on the path of truth? Let us be true and live truly together.

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I’m joining up with Lisa-Jo Baker in her Five Minute Friday community today. How delightful to get a writing prompt each week, and be limited to five minutes only in which to write! Not perfectly – just words flowing freely.

why it’s hard to find lost things

/ Heather Davis Nelson / 1 Comment

Yesterday was a Monday in every deserved aspect of that oft-dreaded day. It began with lots of whining and tears and complaints (mine and theirs, at least the complaints). In my attempts to herd us out the door to get to the grocery store, we kept losing things. Shoes and socks that seemed to be mysteriously repelled by my daughters’ feet. The favorite shirt we/they wanted to wear. The water ink pen which is a “necessary” in-car entertainment. When calling my husband to vent, I absent-mindedly touched my earring – and realized the pearl was gone. He had given me this set of pearls to celebrate a birthday and the pending birth of our twins. A pearl could be anywhere! So then, naturally, the next thing I lost was my temper. If only I could never lose that in response to all the lost things.

When I calmed down, and could think and breathe at last, I began thinking about why lost things get me so much. It’s more than the fact that we seem to always be looking for something lost these days – the beloved lovey that we looked for in every aisle of the grocery store yesterday, for instance, only to find that it was safely at home after all – but it’s how much TIME it takes to find what is lost. It takes time. A lot of time. Patience. Detailed searching, often. And I don’t have much patience naturally. I feel like I have less time. And I am not a girl who loves details.

But in this calling as a mom to three-year-old girls who have beloved objects, short memories, and a propensity to misplace those objects, I am also called to search for lost things often. Probably daily is not too much of an exaggeration. Love for my girls means that I’ll search for what they love even if I don’t share their valuation of it. This kind of looking for lost things doesn’t come naturally for me, as I’ve shared above. And yet I think it’s one of the small sacrifices of motherhood – to take the time necessary to look for what’s lost.

In so doing, I am imitating no less than God the Father’s love for me and for all of us who are lost. He takes time to search me out; to find me. He used the parable of finding lost things to describe what his heart is all about – what the Kingdom of God is essentially. A lost sheep, a lost coin, two lost sons in Luke 15 tell the story to answer the complaints of the self-righteous grumbling about why Jesus spent so much time with those who were so obviously “lost.” In all three stories, there is much rejoicing and celebration when what is lost is found. Jesus is inviting the self-righteous to not only join in the celebration of those lost being found but also to join in the search of the lost. And the place this begins is realizing they, too, are lost. The last story of the prodigal son illustrates this so vividly. It ends abruptly with the father of the story inviting the older brother to celebration (he’s angry over the party for the younger prodigal brother who’s returned home). And it leaves us hanging. What happens next? We don’t know. It’s a question the self-righteous need to ask and then to answer. Will I come in, counting myself as a lost one found by my Father and thus able to rejoice when another lost one is found? 

Why don’t I think I have time to search for lost things? Sad to say, I haven’t even looked for the lost pearl earring for yesterday. What kept me from it?

  • I doubt that it can be found.
  • I don’t know quite where or how to look.
  • I’d rather spend time doing something else.
  • As valuable as the earring is, I know that it is replaceable.

My daughters with their lost loveys have a lesson to teach me, yet again. For the Kingdom belongs to such as these [children]. In the face of my unbelief, they remind me:

  • To have confidence that what’s lost will be found
  • To start looking wherever you are now
  • When something’s lost, that IS your #1 priority until it’s found.
  • What’s lost is irreplaceable.
  • There is no rejoicing like the joy over finding what’s lost.

Oh, that I’d share their passion and confidence for finding lost things when it comes to searching and finding for my lost peace of mind, for a lost friendship, for a world that’s lost its way. And maybe I could find a lost pearl earring as I do so?

Five Minute Friday: “She”

/ Heather Davis Nelson / 6 Comments

She is a picture of grace, holding a babe in her arms and leading another by the hand. She is the image of perfect, juggles life and work and marriage and kids and relationships with ease. She eats organic; crafts a beautiful home; sets up elaborate art projects to engage her children’s creativity; all while managing to stay connected to her husband and her God and her friends. And she never spends beyond her budget. She is loving to all, forgives easily, and knows when to talk and when to remain quiet. She has words of wisdom ready on her tongue yet refrains from gossip. She does not silently judge others who make her feel insecure. She does not struggle with the limits of her humanity.

She stands in the corner and silently condemns me when I struggle. She is the shadow of the impossible ideal I feel I must live up to – in order to keep life, what? Perfect? Beautiful? Smooth? She takes the place of God in my heart and my life. She masks him with her demands and deceives me into thinking that she is God.

God rescues me. He gently scoops up my weary soul, reminding me that it is not “she” who sets the standard but HE who sets the standard. And he’s set it high – impossibly so – but he’s fulfilled it already, and so I go free. Free of “she.” Free to be the “me” he is making me to be.

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Today I join Lisa-Jo Baker in her “Five Minute Friday” community. You can also join in here to write for five minutes on a different prompt each Friday.

links to savor on your Sunday

/ Heather Davis Nelson / 2 Comments

Good morning, friends! This Sunday morning, I am lighter than I’ve been in awhile because of completing yesterday’s retreat speaking on wisdom (and being reminded of the beautiful gospel truth I had the privilege of telling to these 70+ ladies yesterday, that I told first to myself – wisdom comes in a Person … more posts to come, I’m sure); and coming back home from our last week at the beach with family. A last week to soak up sunshine, the unmatched glory of an ocean-meeting-sky horizon, the break from go-go-go to simply be free from schedule and appointments and work, to focus on what (who) is most important: the sun-kissed faces of daughters; my tanned face husband; parents-in-law who shower us with love; my Creator-God as the giver of the gifts of this week.

And now, here comes the week out of its double-barreled shotgun. Church is up and running and in full fall swing for our pastor and counselor family. A little voice urgently summons me next door a full HOUR before normal wake-up time (really?!), and there are words I wanted to write and a week I wanted to pray through. And it’s easy to feel like vacation has evaporated like a morning mist. Oh my.

Then I read these words as another wife and mom anticipates her week, and I smile in recognition and I know I’m not alone, and that there will be grace for each challenge.

And a thought-provoking post on what I really need this September, which exposes my own similar struggles.

Finally, another pastor’s wife talks about finding Sabbath rest when Sunday’s the biggest work day of your week and your kids are young.

Enjoy, friends … now on to step 1 of this week: get some caffeine and try to love all the people in my house on my way to the coffee pot …

Five Minute Friday: mercy

/ Heather Davis Nelson / 1 Comment

Mercy. Grace for the undeserved. We are all undeserving. In a word, this defines God’s love for people. Love cascading into the hearts of ones callous towards him, unaware of our need for him, scornful and dismissive when we think of him. But he keeps loving because that’s what will redeem us. It’s what turns us into people who show mercy. Receiving such a gift.

I think of the faces of Haitians living in the streets, piles of rubbish next to their tent homes. Mercy is what you feel as a fellow human recognizing their dignity beneath the rubble. It’s hard to describe because it’s what we need; the air we breathe. We show mercy because we are always being shown mercy. Not to better ourselves or to prove that we do in fact love the poor and the undeserving. But because we are the poor and the undeserving every minute of every day. Each breath I take is mercy. The ability to think, to write, to love, to savor a sunset and beauty and the sweet hand-in-hand walk with my daughter. All of it is mercy, constantly rushing over me and into me and THROUGH me.

Does mercy run through me? Pride hinders it. Pride tells me I don’t really need mercy, that I’ve somehow earned the grace in which I daily stand. Mercy humbles me, brings me to my knees, the only starting point for any love.

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This is part of Lisa Jo’s “Five Minute Friday,” a five-minute writing prompt on one word every Friday. 

watering plants and finding wisdom

/ Heather Davis Nelson / Leave a comment

This will not come as a surprise to those of you who know Seth and me. Plants are an endangered species at our home, whether inside or outside. The past few summers, my dad generously helped us to landscape our front bed – meaning, we picked out a few “hearty” plants and bushes at Lowe’s, and I watched as he planted them, and I listened to his advice about watering them daily (twice in the heat of summer), fertilizing them, mulching them. And I have tried. Promise, Dad! We even bought a lawn sprinkler this year to water the little planties for 30 minutes at a time (or two hours once when I forgot to turn it off. Hello, high water bill).

But after months of diligent watering, we unintentionally took a few weeks “off.” We went on vacation, and thankfully it rained, and then I stayed on vacation from watering our plants. And then a week or two later, I noticed that they looked a bit wilty. Like this photo:

By the time I noticed, I scrambled to find the hose and began watering like mad, enlisting my two favorite little gardeners to come with me. I watered them until the soil looked saturated, hoping against hope to somehow make up for the lost watering time with some extra TLC that could be retroactive.

And that’s when it hit me. That what I was trying to do with my garden is what I often do with pursuing wisdom. I go a long time without nurturing my relationship with God in prayer, Bible study, and community – and then when the need for wisdom arises, I try to take a crash course in it overnight. It rarely works like that. Wisdom is the fruit of a walk with Christ. Just as in watering my plants, it’s easier for me to know when my heart has not been “watered” regularly than if it has been. If I’m daily watering my plants, I won’t notice much growth – it’s slow, steady, constant. However, if I miss a few days in the sweltering heat of the summer, then it will be almost immediately obvious.

What a picture for me of my need to daily seek God’s face, to ask him to reveal my pride that hinders me from obtaining wisdom, and come to prayer, His Word, and church to water my thirsty heart.