‘Tis the Season to be…

Mary.

Tonight, for the 18^th consecutive year, I have the privilege of traveling to a Christmas outreach event to  dramatize  the life of Mary, mother of Jesus.  I’m taking a late lunch hour to type this blogpost with one hand while holding my sandwich in another. Do you suppose Mary ever multi-tasked? I suspect she did.

I have work emails stacked up in my inbox like airplanes waiting to land, boxes of Christmas decorations strewn throughout my home, and lists of gifts left to purchase for beloved family members, friends, and ministry colleagues. So why take time this Tuesday to fling a post into the blogosphere?

It’s because I hope someone reading this post right now will pause to ask God to bring eternal fruit from this Christmas Tea tonight.  I need your intercession; I really do. I learned long ago that I cannot even attempt this ministry without it. Prayer support has delivered us safely to several hundred such presentations since Mary and I began traveling together in ’93, and not one has ever been missed despite cancelled flights, illness, or extreme winter weather.

More importantly, prayer has made possible the experience I had recently in New Hampshire, when a lovely woman named Terry approached me at a conference. With tears in her eyes, Terry told me that she and her sister-in-law had seen the presentation many years ago in Massachusetts, and the message of salvation in Christ through the lips of His mother is what brought them into the Kingdom.  I cannot even describe to you the joy that flooded my soul when I heard that.

I have been completely inadequate to portray Mary right from the get-go. Nearly 20 years ago, I told the Lord that as a 40-year-old Norwegian-American I was not only too old but also the wrong ethnicity to portray a Jewish teenage virgin. But he reminded me that doing His work has never been about qualifications, credentials, or experience.

And now the big 60 is just around the corner, and I am still portraying the teenaged Mary. God performs miracles, but  He has not chosen to roll back my age. A few months ago, though, He revealed something about my ethnic heritage that absolutely stunned me. Maybe I’ll blog about that sometime. Right now it is a private, awesome joy I am pondering in my heart.

Tis the season to be Mary. I have never been adequate to the task. I never will be. But God had a surprise gift of knowledge  for me in this 18^th year that I never would have anticipated.

What task is He calling you to? Remember that God doesn’t always call the qualified, but He promises to qualify those whom He calls.

He did it for me, and He’ll do it for you.

The Perfect Thanksgiving Blessing

With Chaplain Barry Black, August 2010

If you are hosting Thanksgiving dinner, you probably have your menu worked out by now. But how about the blessing?  Most of us will pause on Thursday and offer up a few words of thanks before we pick up our forks.  May I suggest a purloined prayer as the perfect Thanksgiving blessing?

A couple of months ago, I had the privilege of lunching with Dr. Barry Black, Chaplain of the United States Senate. Tyndale is publishing Chaplain Black’s book The Blessing of Adversity in the spring, and lunch arrived in the midst of our meeting with the marketing team. My colleague Yolanda Sidney asked the chaplain if he would honor us by praying the blessing over our meal, and he graciously agreed.

Now you need to know something about this remarkable man.  If he chose to use them, Dr. Black would have more letters after his name than there are in the alphabet.  In addition to earning master of arts degrees in divinity, counseling, and management, he also has a doctorate degree in ministry and a doctor of philosophy degree in psychology. In the poverty-stricken neighborhood where Chaplain Black grew up in Baltimore (described in his first book From the Hood to the Hill), a man like this could only be described as one smart dude.

So when we bowed our heads to pray over that Wednesday workday lunch, I was expecting an impressive prayer – something long and eloquent. After all, this is the man whose prayers are recorded in the Congressional Record, right?

And this is the prayer I heard, the one that brought tears to my eyes in its simple, profound brevity:

“Dear Father,

There are friends who have no food,

and those with food who have no friends.

Today, Father, we are most fortunate to have both food and friends.

For this we most humbly thank you.

In Christ’s name,

Amen.”

Do you have friends with whom to share your Thanksgiving meal? Don’t wait to be asked. Ask around instead and find someone else who might be alone. That’s what we’re doing this year.

Our menu is set – the same stuffed turkey with all the trimmings we enjoy every year – and so is the blessing we will use– this beautiful  prayer we are borrowing from Chaplain Black.  His words are a reminder of how blessed we are when we have food to eat and friends to eat it with.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A Thing for Old Men

Photo courtesy of Whitmer Photography

I have a thing for old men, and I know just when it started.

Now I said OLD men, not older. The men who catch my eye these days are the ones who need assistance ascending the stairs at church, or the elderly widowers in the grocery store with puzzled expressions and hands that tremble on their shopping carts.

At a patriotic concert,  my tears pooled as a municipal band struck up a medley of hymns representing the armed forces, and the oldest men present struggled up out of their lawn chairs to stand, proud if not totally erect, when their branch was recognized.

No need to notify my husband about this quirk of mine. Mike loves me enough to pause in his crowded days to read my blogposts. And he’s the only older man (by a good six weeks) that I’m interested in. Besides, he understands that a daughter who has lost her dad still unconsciously looks for him in a crowd.

There – that tilt of a cap. See that unsteady gait. Stoop to talk, none-too-softly, with a wheelchair-bound gent in the assisted living facility.

Mike and I were at a church business meeting three years ago when an urgent call came from my brother urging us to quickly return to the hospital we had just left.  Dad had taken an unexpected turn and wasn’t expected to live long.  We rushed to Peoria, he rallied, and lingered two days longer until my sister arrived from overseas.

Dad was born into eternal life on the 19^th of November. I warily watch that date on the calendar approach each year as if it’s a strange dog coming at me on the sidewalk. I don’t know whether it will bite me or lick my hand.

So I do what people do who have lost a loved one. I honor him in my own way.

No cemetery visits, though those are fine for some. Dad’s not there – never has been.

No ignoring the date as if “ it’s-no-big-deal- because- everyone-loses-their-parents-sometime.”

Instead I write out my remembrance, tapping away in the early dusk of a Tuesday evening as if the computer keys will unlock my heart.

 On this coming Friday, the 19^th of November, I will attend the event saved on my calendar: another  church dinner meeting.  Mike and my mom will be there too. Together we will bow our heads around a table filled with members of our church family: old men, young ones. Older women, younger ones. Babies and toddlers.  The beautiful  Body of Christ.

And I have a thing for them all.

Freebie Friday: The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven

Congratulations to last week’s winner of Run to Overcome: Lisa Hansen of NYC!

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Many of you reading this post are parents. How would you feel if you were driving your car with your six-year-old child in the backseat and you made a left turn – just as you have a thousand times before -but this time an optical illusion in the road concealed the approach of an oncoming car?

In a split-second that  changes the rest of your life, you are thrown from the vehicle and your son suffers traumatic brain injury as well as an internal decapitation with his skull almost completely detached from his spinal column. First responders consider calling a coroner.

But your son survives, and when he miraculously returns to you following a two-month coma, he has incredible things to say about where he has been. He tells you of events at the accident scene verified by eyewitnesses, of unearthly music that sounded just terrible to a six-year-old, of angels who took him through the gates of heaven, and most amazing of all – of speaking with Jesus.

This is the story contained in the New York Times best selling book The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, by Kevin and Alex Malarkey.

I have to admit that I was skeptical when I began reading the Malarkey family’s story. I have no doubt that heaven exists, and I look forward to seeing it myself one day. But to read a description of heaven on this side of eternity as related by a child who insists he’s been there?

I rarely finish most books. I get what I need  from them and then move on to the next one. But I couldn’t put down The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven. Were it not for the news accounts, photographs from the scene and the hospital and testimony from paramedics and medical personnel, I would find it impossible to believe.

But listen to the words of Dr. Raymond Onders, Christopher Reeve’s and Alex Malarkey’s doctor: “The vertebrae were completely detached. The tendon sheath around the spinal column was severed near the base of his brain. The injury was so severe and so high on the spinal column, it is simply incredible that Alex survived.”

If medical miracles take place, why not spiritual ones? Could God allow a child to have an extraordinary journey into the world to come and then survive to tell us about it?  Jesus himself prayed: “O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding these things from those who think themselves wise and clear, and for revealing them to the childlike. ” (Matthew 11:25)

Alex Malarkey, age 12

 Everything I read in The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven is consistent with biblical truth. Whether you choose to believe Alex’s story or not is up to you, but his descriptions of Heaven, angels, and hearing the voice of God just may change your life.

To win a copy of this hardcover book, please leave a comment after this post.

Praying the Impossibilities

The worn piece of paper fell out from between the pages of my Bible. Titled “Missions Impossible,” it contained a succinct list of prayer requests for close friends from our years in New England. The concerns spanned the range of human need – prayers for children and churches, marriages and money – but they shared one characteristic in common: each represented a seemingly impossible situation.

I recall sitting in a small prayer gathering at church one night staring at another piece of paper. This one listed needs for which we had prayed just the week prior, although in some cases the requests went back many months or even years: a terminally-ill parent, a lost child, a desperately needed job. Those present studied the list and then each other, wonder on our faces. In just seven days, we had seen God do the impossible: heal a parent, restore a child, and supply a job.

Unfortunately, life is rarely like that. Though we’re taught as Christ-followers to persevere in prayer, sometimes it seems as if we’re beating on heaven’s door with bruised knuckles in the dark, as someone once said. We pray and plead for God’s intervention but heaven is silent. We call out to Him but we hear nothing in response.

A friend whose husband was battling aggressive cancer told me of the time she broke emotionally.

“I hate you God!” she screamed. “Why aren’t you answering us?” And yet even as the words left her lips, she had the strong sense of being firmly held, flailing arms and all, by a Father who cared deeply for the pain of His child.

In our darkest moments we might even echo the cry of Christ on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Where are you, daddy? The enemy seems to be winning. Are you really there? Do you truly care?

As I have prayed impossible prayers I have asked some of those same questions.  Why did her husband have to die, Lord? How can  my friend’s child live in such excruciating pain?  Where are you in this horrible mess?

Yet it strikes me that the very first question asked in the recorded history of the universe was not “Where are you, God?” but rather God’s calling out to Adam, “Where are you?”

Sometimes, like our first parents, it’s our own sin and shame that causes us to turn away from the One who made us. Contrition draws us close again, yet even when our conscience is clear our vision of God remains blurred. We prefer Him to be the benevolent Father who is bound by His goodness to bestow only blessings on His children, but we fail to see that a loving parent must also permit the growth that comes only through suffering.

“Push through the pain,” the obstetrician urged me when my babies were born. “Push through the pain.”

The discipline to push through the pain of seemingly unanswered prayer can spur spiritual growth beyond our wildest imagining. As David marveled in the Psalms, “Thou hast enlarged me in my distress.”

In the Scriptures, timing appears to be far more important to God than time itself. As we wait, God is at work in us conforming us to the very image of His own son. What He wants to do in us as we wait is perhaps even more important than what we wait for.

Like me, have you mistaken God’s silence for His absence?  He has not abandoned you. Persevere in prayer (Romans 12:12). Continue to pray the impossibilities of life, knowing that nothing – nothing! – is impossible with God.

And one day you might pick up that prayer list and find to your delight that it had “Mission: Possible” written on it all along.

 - 2010 Maggie Wallem Rowe

Freebie Friday: RUN TO OVERCOME by NYC Marathon Champ Meb Keflezighi

So what do Eritrean-born Meb Keflezighi and Winfield, IL residents Dick and Marge Foster have in common?

A love for running, and the will to overcome.

Meb is one of the most respected athletes of his generation and winner of the 2009 New York City Marathon. He will be defending his title in just two days, in fact, during the 40th running of the storied event. But what many don’t realize about the  35-year-old long-distance runner is that he came to America with his parents and 10 siblings with virtually nothing but the clothes on their backs and the will to survive. Meb spoke no English and had never raced a mile. Yet he became an A student and a champion.

In his new hardcover book Run to Overcome, Meb tells the story of his birth in a small African country ravaged by a brutal war where food was so scarce that he ate dirt to survive, earning the nickname “the kid with the bloated stomach.”

Now an American citizen, Meb stands at exactly my height- 5’5″ – but weighs 20 pounds less than I do despite consuming 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day. I was fascinated reading about his training regimen and his diet, which includes himbasha, a traditional Eritrean bread that provides the carbs Meb needs to excell as a runner.

Dick and Marge Foster

My friends Dick and Marge Foster started running later in life, at ages 69 and 71. They are now 72 and 74, and as Marge recently told me, “We are not ready to give up!” This Saturday they will be competing at Cantigny in their 17th 5 K.

  The Fosters didn’t come from a background of poverty but they share something else in common with Meb: a deep faith in God and a desire to give back to others. Meb has a foundation that addresses critical needs facing young people (www.marathonmeb.com).

The Fosters are leaders in their church and active in small group ministry, women’s Bible study, OASIS (Older Adults Still in Service), and hospitality to countless college students and dinner guests.

As a non-runner, I marvel at those of you who are. There seems to be a connection between having the discipline to complete a 5 K or a marathon and the drive to help others.  I loved reading Meb’s book, and it’s an equal privilege to cheer the Fosters on as they write this new chapter in their lives.

Meb Keflezighi

If you’d like to win a copy of Run to Overcome, you have several options:

1) Leave a comment after this post

2) Visit the website www.runtoovercome.com for details of the amazing contest sponsored by Meb’s publishing house, Tyndale. One signed book will be given away EACH DAY from Nov. 1, 2010 to Mar. 31, 2011. Monthly grand prize winners  will receive not only a signed copy of the book but also other free Tyndale titles as well as Sony and PowerBar products.

Of Mice and Men…and Women

With my dad, Truman Wallem

It’s been three years since anyone has called me Mouse, and I miss it.

Like a lot of people, I have a love-hate relationship with the little gray rodents. Lori, one of Mike’s fellow staffers at First Baptist, posted a simple note on Facebook recently about going downstairs to do laundry in her bare feet and almost stepping on a mouse. I was tickled by the torrent of comments that followed. It seems everyone has a mouse story.

 And I do too. One of my most vivid memories from childhood was slipping under the covers of my unmade bed one bone-chilling night only to find a tiny mouse warming herself. I don’t know who got out of that bed faster – her or me – but I can tell you that at least one of us learned a lesson. (I pull the covers up to this day. Most of the time.)

As I grew up, I often studied at the kitchen table in our hundred-year-old farmhouse. It was a great distraction from prepping for tests to watch mice pop their heads out of our four-burner stove, sort of like Whack-a-Mole at the county fair. With a dozen or more farm cats on the premises it’s not that we didn’t have professional rodent-control, but Mickey, Minnie and their brood preferred the heated house to the barn and kept us hilariously entertained.

 Mike and I lived in southern New Hampshire when our kids were small. One evening I opened the door to the attic stairs in our bungalow to find a mouse on the landing. Startled, the little guy streaked across the dining room floor where our son Adam, age 5, lay reading a book. The mouse ran right over Adam’s stomach and past Joshua the cat, who flicked not a whisker in protest.

The late missionary Amy Carmichael related a great mousecapade from her own childhood in Ireland: “Ours was a happy home and a religious one, and we were called daily to family prayers by the sound of a bell. Once I found a mouse drowning in a pail of water just at the moment the prayer bell rang. Not willing that any should perish – not even a mouse – I snatched it out and put it in the pocket of my pinafore as I scurried to join the family for prayer. I prayed the mouse would not squeak and betray me. It did.”

So why am I taking time to write a blog post about mice that few will ever read and that matters to no one but me?

It’s because I miss the one who called me Mouse.

It was my dad’s special nickname for me, and it fit. I was always small for my age, quiet (can you believe it?) and painfully shy. I’m no longer small (I wish!), or quiet (Lord, put Your hand over my mouth), and being shy is a social luxury I can no longer afford. So when Dad died on a heart-shattering November day three years ago, the name went with him.

When Mike and I visited ancient Corinth this past summer, I thought of the words of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect.” (1 Cor. 10:15 NLT).

 These days I keep a china mouse on my desk at work. It reminds me whom I once was, and who I’m not anymore.

And that’s reason enough.

How about you? Is there something in your life that is symbolic of whom you once were, or who you are now?