My Funny Valentine

There are a lot of qualities I believe go a long way in a relationship. Being a good listener. Possessing a consistent sensitivity to others. Having a relentless commitment to forgiveness. Also it helps if one of you is funny.

This works out well for me since the love of my life also happens to be a riot. Just the other day, he proved this once again when we were hanging out with our three boys and the two kids we mentor. With five feverishly energy-fueled kids and a few hours of free time to fill, Paul Stehlik had the hilarious audacity to suggest we go… wait for it…

to the eyeglasses store… to pick out glasses for, not one, but two members of our family. And this eyeglasses store happened to not be in the middle of a playground, as any normal person would hope it would be if they were taking five children there. It happened to be in Northpark Mall. On a Saturday.

But was Paul Stehlik deterred by this in the least? No. Because not only does he have a fabulous sense of humor, he is also brave beyond all sanity. This is another great quality he possesses.

So there we were, mixing seamlessly into the crowd at Eyemasters. Wait, I forgot I was talking about us. So there I was, watching Noah and D’Kyiran try on all the fabulous eyewear, while Sam was knocking the demo lenses out of their display case, while Ben was spinning the chair that didn’t completely knock the woman standing behind it to the floor. Her cat-like balance was most impressive. And while I was a little nervous that I couldn’t find Haylee in the mix of all this, I realized it was only because her statue skillz are Ah.maz.ing. It took me a few minutes before I realized that cute little pink-clad model in the store-front glass striking a pose with one hand on hip and the other in the air was actually my mentee.

But this is the beauty of having a spouse with humor, because while I was honestly starting to fray a little bit- and defying logic by still actually trying to find frames for Noah- Paul Stehlik had not lost his sense of humor at all and came to my side like the real life Rescue Hero he is. He sent me and Noah off with the glasses man for a fitting while he took over the troops.

And when I say “took over the troops”, I mean “he came back over to me a few minutes later by himself .”

By. him. self.

I think the half curious, half terror-stricken look on my face made him feel like I wanted to know where the four little human energy bombs were, to which this was his reply:

I sent them out to do some exploring.

I can hardly type this right now I am laughing so hard. But by my silent, blank stare in that moment I think he felt he should offer me some sort of reassurance, so he said, “There’s safety in numbers, right?”

Oh, Paul Stehlik, you crack me up. It wasn’t our four children you sent out that I was worried about. It was the rest of the general, unsuspecting public.

But you know what? They survived. And so did we. And Paul Stehlik, beloved, you created a few moments of bonding with precisely zero injuries sustained and no collateral damages inflicted whatsoever. You walk on the wild side sometimes, but somebody give me a shovel cuz you know I dig it deep down.

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by sarahonpurpose on February 13, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by sarahonpurpose on February 13, 2012

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The Child Asks Me a Question…

It starts and ends here: the child asks me a question.

“Mommy, can you come to Friday chapel today?” my six year old says. I tell him that I would love to do it another time but that I can’t today.

“Oh. Are you going to jail?” he asks.

“Yes,” I tell him.

And I spend the morning visiting and worshiping with the group of women I wrote about back here.

I listen to their small group discussion over the Bible lesson. It’s the rich young ruler we discuss, and we all at that metal table find our likeness somewhere in his shoes… wanting to hold onto Jesus and something else too… willing to fall on our knees and cry “You are good” yet not quite believing He’s good enough to leave everything for. We contemplate the young man’s response to Christ’s recitation of the law. He says, “I have kept all these since I was a boy.” I read his words and my heart says, “Bull. You have not. I know that game. That false sense of satisfactory performance. As if the sinful human who has truly lived under the law would have the audacity to stand over the law and say ‘done’.” The rich young ruler speaks my native language and it is pride, and I am on to him because I was him.

Then one of the inmates reads her own words scrawled in her workbook. She has not lived under any delusion of self-righteousness. Not for a long time. She knows her unworthiness. And the tears that redden her eyes as she shares her gratitude for God’s grace bring to mind Jesus’ words to the religious leaders in Matthew 21:31 “…The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.”

Literally.

Nonetheless, the women I sit with at that table are living with very challenging realities… lives marked with sure consequences, some of which will remain with them for the remainder of their time on this earth. And as I look around at each of them I think how might your life had been different had you started walking with Christ twenty years ago? If someone had intervened when you were…

It is the previous afternoon and I am at Edison Middle School… which is very different from my recollections of junior high. For instance, none of my friends had probation officers. Nor did we have full time police officers patrolling our campus. None of my classmates ever spent the day running up and down the hall screaming profanities, taunting the authorities to “come and get him” and then hiding all over the place until finally apprehended by the cops. We were real small town like that.

One of the older students wanders the hall past my perch at the welcome desk, and I ask him where he’s supposed to be. He mumbles that he walked out of so and so’s class because she threw a book at him and hit him upside the head and now his head hurts. I smile and tell him to get back to class and stop giving his teacher reasons to throw things at him. He smiles, knowing that he has not fooled me with his innocence but complains again that his head hurts. I shake my head, tell him I’m pretty sure he can handle himself and urge him to go learn just one thing. “Just one thing,” I plead with him, “You can do that.” And to my surprise he nods and goes.

Maybe.

It was a hard afternoon honestly. Hard to see the power of grace through so much broken. So. Much. Broken. The parade of f-bombs past my desk as the kids change classes makes me sit there and think how do you get this hard by middle school? How are things this broken this early in life? And even before…

It is hours earlier in the morning when I am at Carver Elementary to work with my kindergartners, trying in meager minutes to make up gaps that are already widening and stretching like a canyon between them and a future of hope and fullness. I walk into the class with all those little bodies hopping around. Like fleas.

Really. They are 70% human, 30% flea at that age.

Their teacher, who is also part angel, welcomes me with her beautiful gray hair and tired smile. “I don’t know if I’m gonna make it, Sarah,” she says with a laugh. And amid the sea of hugs that the little crowd of flea-humans come to give, one little girl calls to me. She is tiny, and she is the one I wrote about here. And the child asks me a question:

Are you still praying for me???

Yes, sweetheart. I am praying like mad. Like a person with eyes wide open to what might so easily lie ahead for you and wide open to the so much better– so much better– that might otherwise lie ahead for you. I am praying like mad.

 

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by sarahonpurpose on February 3, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by sarahonpurpose on February 3, 2012

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Letters on Life, vol II

Dear…

… rainy gray skies, you are beautiful. And though the lovely women who teach my precious children are no doubt feeling the brunt of your recess-thieving force, I am loving you.

… Sonya Carson, I just read the first three chapters in the story of your son’s life. You remind me of the staggering privilege of motherhood, and your perseverance kindles the fear of God in me.

… upstairs boys’ bathroom, I don’t know what they did to you. I am very, very sorry. For you and me both.

… Christy Nockels, would you please just come stay in my living room singing this song all the time? I couldn’t really pay you… or give you sanitary bathroom facilities either at this point. But I would be so happy.

… teenage neighbor, you apologized for disturbing me when you and I had an interesting afternoon with the Dallas Police and fire department. No apology necessary. God is going after you, and to be brought in for a closer view was one of the highlights of my week.

… Paul Stehlik, thanks for being willing to do brave things like battle through the unknown, talk about how you feel, and look our children square in the eyes and tell them we’re having oatmeal again for breakfast. I could not love you more.

 

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by sarahonpurpose on January 25, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by sarahonpurpose on January 25, 2012

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“I lift my eyes up…” and the days that teach me to do it more

I see it in her face. Or rather, it’s what I don’t see in her face. She is in kindergarten, and I am at the neighborhood school where I help out, and we are walking the halls to a room where we will work on writing sentences.

It is the first thing I notice about her: there is no smile on her face. Not a trace. Not in her eyes, not in her cheeks. She wears one of the most serious, light-less expressions I’ve seen on such a small person.

I sit down at a table with the two students I’ve brought and hand them a reader about the fair. I explain that we are going to write our own sentences about it after we read it together. She reads when I ask and listens when it’s time for that too, and when we finish reading she pulls out her page and brushes her long dark hair out of her face. Sits and stares.

“What’s your favorite thing at the fair? What would you like to write about?” I ask. She sits quietly, thinks.

“I see my dad,” she says, and starts to pencil it out on blank white paper. I turn to help the other student with his next word, when she says plainly, “My dad is in jail. He went to jail this Christmas.” My heart sinks down at her words, as it always does when conversations turn this way. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” I answer, meaning every word deeply and feeling all their inadequacy at the same time. “He stole a cadillac.” She looks right at me, waits for my response.

The other student is waiting as well. One waits for some kind of hope to a fatherless nightmare and one waits for help spelling “nachos.” And I am in the middle of them. I look at her sad little eyes and tell her that I know it is very hard on her for her daddy to be in jail, and she looks right back into mine and says, “Every night I cry for him.”

What do you say to a little girl who tells you that? And why should she tell me? She doesn’t even know me. I had asked her to write about her favorite thing at the fair. And yet her honest little heart, in a way that takes my breath away, holds out the most painful thing in her world and lets me hold a small piece of it with her. And in all its brokenness and pain, it takes the form of a gift right now.

It is gift to me. Gift to walk these halls. Gift to help them learn. Gift to see their smiles and give my own. And gift to be invited into their sorrow and to be one who gets to offer kindness. Gift upon gift. Grace upon grace.

And in its own small way, it is gift to her. It’s not all the gift I want to give her- the one that fixes all her problems and gets her daddy out of jail and out of trouble and changes his heart that changes his life and heals her family… those are not gifts in my power to give her on a January Thursday morning. But I blink back tears and thank her for sharing with me. I tell her I will be praying for her and for her daddy, because Jesus loves them both very much. And for a few minutes on an ordinary school day she gets to unexpectedly share her burden with someone who cares.

It seems like the painfully smallest of gifts to give, really just a tiny seed of truth and love scattered on soil that is so young and yet so scorched already. But the Farmer who scatters them is utterly good, I remind myself. And He knows how to grow the most amazing things from the tiniest most unlikely beginnings. Like a kingdom even.

And times like these grow me, train me to look again and again to the One “who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” … who knows how to make light from darkness, life from death and smiles on the face- even smiles in the heart- of a little kindergarten girl who misses her dad.

“I am the LORD, the God of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me” – Jeremiah 32:27

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by sarahonpurpose on January 20, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by sarahonpurpose on January 20, 2012

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An Exchange Program… of sorts. Not really. But kind of.

Anyone who knows me knows there are a couple of things that I get all fired up about and perhaps even a little “John the Baptisty” about, and one of those things is children who are in need- and particularly the responsibility we share as followers of Christ to care for them. And not so much even the responsibility… but the privilege. Not that it is an obligation to hang over us- shaming us with guilt if we don’t do enough, rather following Christ can deliver us from our empty desires for futile things and fuel us with passion to love and serve in ways that beautifully reflect how He first loved and served us… and in ways He specifically says are important to Him. If God had New Years Resolutions, it’s one of those things that would always make the list. To do what is right and just, to defend the cause of the poor and needy… “Is that not what it means to know Me?” God says in Jeremiah 22.

Along these lines, many of you share that passion and encourage me and spur me on by your pursuit of Christ in it (see also the family we hung out with the other night who have four kids under the age of five- 3 of whom are/were in the foster care system. Holy cheerios, you are my heroes.) And some of you have emailed me or called me from time to time, asking me if I know of any opportunities where your family can partner together to serve those in need. It is not always easy when you have little ones of your own to know where/how/when serving together as a family might/should/could look like. So for those of you in that boat, I throw out this one easy way your family can help “the cause of the poor and needy”…

Not long after we returned from Africa last fall, we were sitting around the table with our kids one Friday night and one of them asked if we could go to Breadwinners on Saturday morning for breakfast. After all, it is one of their favorite places and we hadn’t been there in forever and how come we hardly ever go there, PLEASE? So Paul and I affirmed that yes, Breadwinners is one of the all time worthiest reasons to put on 5 pounds just by pulling into the parking lot, but did they know that for the money we would spend on just one breakfast there for our family, we could feed an entire family in Africa for one whole month?

Seriously, we could eat one breakfast there, or an entire family could eat every day for a month.

Now, I am not lobbying for Christians to boycott all eating out. I am not claiming that we never go to a restaurant. There are times for celebration and feasting, and I am so not out to make anyone feel guilty. Let’s say it together, She is so not out to make anyone feel guilty. But I did realize from that conversation that we are maybe missing a great opportunity to teach our kids sacrifice. Why not have times where we choose to forego an expense SO THAT we could take what we would have spent on ourselves and spend it on someone else? Wouldn’t that be a great exchange to practice?

I admit, we have been fans of this idea for a while but we have been terrible at pulling it off. Usually we start with some generic idea of giving the money away, but days go by and it usually falls off the radar despite good intentions.

So, my goal is to keep at least one “exchange/make a difference” opportunity up on this blog. If the Lord should so stir you to use this kind of scenario as an opportunity to shepherd your kids and serve others… And if you perhaps are challenged like I often am in knowing a great way to make a difference now… then hopefully it will be one possible help in your efforts, as I hope it will help me be more pro-active in ours.

I’m starting things off with an opportunity to help fund an adoption for a family who is trying to bring home three beautiful children from Ghana. (A family that takes me way back to my Denton Bible days.) You can click on the picture of the shirts they are selling over on the left to see their blog and find out more about who they are and where they are in the process. There are a thousand ways to love and serve, and maybe for some this is one of them.

(Please feel free to pass on other opportunities to me that you think others might want to know about too.)

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by sarahonpurpose on January 17, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by sarahonpurpose on January 17, 2012

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  • meditating on…

    John 19: 41-42
    At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

  • listening to…

    Hosanna
    with Christy Nockels on Passion's God of This City album