It’s been a rough few years. Long before the pandemic hit, our family grappled with the devastating diagnosis Sean’s dad received of throat cancer.  We watched him battle bravely, but eventually lose the ability to speak, then swallow. He went into hospice where we had the honor of helping care for him to the end of his life. But end-of-life is no walk in the park. As one hospice nurse told me years ago, “We struggle coming into this world and we struggle going out of this world.” I’ve never heard a truer statement.

Even before we were able to have my father-in-law’s funeral, my mother’s dementia took a startling turn.  We’d been watching my mom succumb to Alzheimer’s for months, but it was so slow that we’d hardly noticed the small things, and the small things turned out to be enormous things that my father was unable to handle on his own anymore.

Just two weeks after Don’s funeral, we made the heartbreaking decision to put my mom into memory care.  Soon after, my dad began to show alarming signs of memory loss and he followed my mom, but into the independent living wing of the same retirement center.

Though I’ve summed it up nicely here in a few paragraphs, anyone who has taken any of these journeys knows the angst, pain and even terror of it.   As my mom battled severe mania and my dad became engulfed in grief, I tried everything to help, but to no end. I replayed the last days Don had on this earth over and over in my head.  My mind wouldn’t stop, no matter what I tried.

Even though I felt that I was handling everything well on the outside, my body began to betray that false sense of pulled togetherness, and I began losing sleep.

Lots of sleep.

I started having nightmares. Waking up in cold sweats.  Falling asleep to then, only seconds later, wake up gasping for air.

And most strangely of all, I began fearing the dark.

Even as a kid, I was not, in general, afraid of the dark. I kind of liked it. I’d lay in bed and think, quiet engulfing me, moonlight, if I was lucky enough, swimming against the carpet around my bed. As an adult, I still loved it.  I’d sit out on my back porch in the warmer nights and try to glimpse a star or at least a satellite.  And as I hit midlife, dark was a welcomed companion as sleep hit me harder and earlier.

But everything was different now.  I hated turning out my lamp by my bed.  Instead, I read or scrolled through social media for hours, waited until I was nodding off, the phone hitting my face. I’d quickly shut off my light and close my eyes, praying for instant sleep. If it didn’t happen, I’d turn the light back on and start over.

I consumed melatonin and sleeping pills, none of which helped the dark seem any less dark.

And I started noticing how dark the dark was.  In November I took my sister for an early morning surgery.  We left her house in the country before 5 a.m. I walked out her front door to load a bag and felt swallowed up by the dark.

In the city there is always a light somewhere, some place. But on one-hundred acres of farmland, it’s black and thick and suffocating. Even the stars were gone.

I stood on her porch, afraid to even go to my car.  What’s lurking out here? I wondered.

It turned out to only be me. I was the one bringing all the fear.

After many months of this, I knew I needed help, so I sought out a therapist. As we worked through this gripping fear I was experiencing, she recommended a book called Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren.

The first thing I noticed was that the book was written by a female Anglican priest.  Having no real experience with the Anglican church, I wondered what this was going to be all about.

It turns out it was very Anglican, and one of the best experiences of my life.

The book begins by explaining the source of its inspiration, The Book of Common Prayer.  I grew up Baptist, then worked in the Methodist church, and now am with the Evangelical Covenant denomination, so I couldn’t say I’d ever cracked open the Book of Common Prayer, though I’d heard of it through the years.

But rather than dive into the topic with the formality that I expected, Tish Harrison Warren warmed up the hundreds-year-old prayer book and made it relatable, while emphasizing the rich history of it and the remarkable way we can lean into the voices of the millions of Christian brothers and sisters who’ve prayed these prayers before us.

Besides being personal in nature and deep with insight (for instance, she goes into the history of darkness, which was stunningly interesting), the book has its own lyrical quality that I found extremely comforting. I made a point of reading it at night. I wanted to challenge the notion that the dark had me in its eternal grip.

Warren points out how much we take light for granted. We’re scared of the dark so we switch on a light. Our ancestors didn’t have that luxury, and these prayers, the prayers of the night, were what kept them steady in the Lord as they waited hours for the sun. God was their light. Their only light for half of a day.

I highly recommend this book, especially if you’re going through what you might describe as “the dark night of the soul” in your life.  Are you grieving? Shifting in life?  Grappling with depression or illness?  Many of these things tend to strike fear and dread in us in the dead of night.

I learned from the book to embrace the night, and to remember that God is the Lord of even the darkness, and what amazing things he can do within it.

Available wherever you buy books.

Struggling with your job or career?

When you were a child, you probably had dreams of becoming a doctor, a nurse, a fireman, an astronaut. I remember from 1^st grade on I wanted to be a doctor.  I pursued that dream, even going to pharmacy school at the University of Oklahoma first so I could be a better doctor. As you know that dream was interrupted by a calling from God to preach the gospel and be a Pastor.  Some of you grew up and are fulfilling those dreams.  And if you are there is a good chance you feel satisfied with a sense of purpose and meaning.

There are also those of you that did not fulfill those dreams for all kinds of reasons, and you found yourself in a job that you are not satisfied with and don’t feel a sense of meaning and purpose. Another way to put it is you might have a career but have not found your calling.

Now when we think of a “calling” we usually think of a person who heard God call them into a ministry or mission, and that surely happens.  But I believe we all have a calling. Some of you in your career may not be aware that you are fulfilling your calling.  The Bible says in Ephesians 2:10 that we are God’s masterpiece created in Christ Jesus to do good works which GOD PREPARED IN ADVANCE for us to do. God created you for a purpose, a calling, of what God wants you to do.  We have the tendency to put God’s “calling” in a box, but let’s not limit it to just being in the ministry. I believe teachers, doctors, nurses, police, fireman, EMS workers, etc., are not just careers but a calling.

So, the question is, how do you know what your “calling” is?  The scripture says that God puts his desires in our hearts.  Our heart is where to find our calling. How do we do that?  Ask yourself, “What are the desires of my heart? What am I passionate about? What are the needs I see and would like to do something about it?  What feels exciting when I think about particular careers? What do I have talents and gifts to do?”

What you are good at is God-given to be used!

You might be thinking, “Pastor, you never had pastorship in your heart growing up.”  That is true, in a sense, but as I have reflected on it, I think God was putting it in my heart.  The mission of a doctor is to help sick people get well, get healing, get healthy. That is also what Jesus came to do. Jesus says in Matthew 9 that he came for the sick not the healthy.  He came to heal our sin-sick souls. One of the missions of a pastor is to help people get in a relationship with the “great physician,” Jesus Christ, to find healing and wholeness. So, I always wanted to help people find healing but didn’t realize it was spiritual healing not physical healing. My mom also always told me that God had something special for me, since I was born under very adverse circumstances, not to mention she didn’t think she could get pregnant again at almost 40 and had survived cancer.

So, when the moment came that a scripture jumped out at me and I heard words these in my head, “I have called you to preach the gospel and tell others what I have done for you I will do for them,” it ALL made sense.

The question is, do you feel a sense of calling in what you do for a living or is it just a job to pay the bills? Do you feel a sense of purpose and meaning in what you do or is it a struggle just to get up and go to work every day?   If it’s the latter, then it’s time to start looking at the desires of your heart, your talents and gifts and look to match those with a job or a career.  It can be scary to change jobs or careers, but the reward will be so worth it.  It’s time to do it!

RENE GUTTERIDGE’S CHRISTMAS DEVOTIONAL RECOMMENDATIONS   The Greatest Gift – Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas by Ann Voskamp If you’ve never read the lyrical prose of Ann Voskamp, it can take some getting used to, but once you’re into it, you’re into it.  Voskamp takes the small, nearly always overlooked parts of the […]

I’m sure everyone reading this right now prays in some way, fashion or form. You might have a habit of bedtime prayers or prayers in the morning.  If we are honest, some rarely pray on a regular basis unless there is an emergency of some kind. Let’s just admit it: prayer is hard. We are […]

As a young adult, I had to battle the stigma associated with being single. Society seemed, and probably still does, to demand that you fit the mold of being married and raising a family. Otherwise, you’re led to think there’s something wrong with you or you’re getting left behind. That begs the question, why do we want to fit in a mold anyway? Whose job is it in society to tell everyone what the status quo is and what’s normal and acceptable or not? Why do we listen or even care what other people think our lives should look like? There are more than 330 million people in the US alone. Do you mean to tell me every single one of us should be living the cookie cutter life of a suburban family, complete with a white picket fence and shuttling the littles to soccer games?

I spent most of my life single, and I’m here to tell you, I’m very proud of that and I wouldn’t have done it any other way. Of course, now that I’m 44 and 3 years married, it’s easy for me to look back and say how enlightening and empowering it was to be single, but would I have thought that 10 years ago? Twenty  years ago? Probably not. I didn’t have full perspective of how powerful that time in my life was until I got out of it. (Isn’t that how it always is? You never know what you have until you don’t have it anymore.)

What I learned in my “season of being single,” as I’ll call it, is a beautiful thing.  It’s something so many people think they already do and truly don’t, or people spend their entire lives looking for and never find.

Self-love.

Self-love is the thing we all need to be talking about. This is what we all really want, right? We spend our lives seeking validation from everything and everyone else… except ourselves. Why else would we try so hard to fit the mold? Or feel inadequate for not fitting a mold? What we should be doing is making our own mold that fits our true selves, actively discovering what we want our mold to look like and working to be the best version of that mold. It took me 40 years to figure out my own mold, and that was only after I spent years being unhappy because I didn’t fit the mold that was expected of me. I was 25, not married and no kids. Then I was 30, not married and no kids. Then 35…

I think it was when I turned 30, and spent my entire birthday crying because I wasn’t at all where I thought I’d be, that it hit me…why exactly was I sad? Am I lonely, yes, I think I am. Shouldn’t I be? I don’t even have a boyfriend. Am I sad I don’t have kids? No. I’m not ready for kids. Am I sad I haven’t bought a house? Yes, isn’t that what shows I’m successful in life? Or am I just feeling left behind because I see all my peers getting married, buying houses, making babies, and I’m nowhere close to having any of these things.

But then I dug deeper. Why in that moment in my life was I defining myself by what everyone else was doing? Isn’t that what we all do? In an age of social media, how can we not? We see a small glimpse into people’s lives, (what they decide to share anyway), and it tempts us to compare our lives to what we think theirs is. But I grew up in an age with no social media, and I still felt inadequate. That’s exactly what happens when we look outside for validation.

My “season of being single” taught me a lot of things. It forced me to learn how to love myself. When you’re alone all the time, you get inside your own head a lot. For some, that can be excruciating. There’s a lot going on inside our own heads. Deep inside, that’s where all our baggage sits. Who wants to sit alone and stare at all their baggage? I certainly didn’t. But for most of my life, I had no choice. Some people get engrossed in work so they don’t have to sit with their baggage. Others drink or do drugs. Still others busy themselves with superficial, temporary relationships that offer no depth, because going deep means to go to where your baggage is sitting. For me, I didn’t love my job enough to get engrossed. I drank socially, but it didn’t consume me. The thought of having another superficial conversation or relationship exhausted me so much I threw up walls so I didn’t have to socialize with anyone. So, then that left me with myself. Whether I liked it or not. I didn’t know it at the time, but this allowed me to become so tuned-in to myself that I slowly started learning what I liked. What I didn’t like. What I cared about. What made me feel right in the world. And most importantly, how God fit into all of that. I started praying to God, not because that’s what I was raised to do before dinner or before I went to bed, but because I genuinely wanted God to be a part of my life. When you continue to do something on a regular basis, over an extended period of time, it’ll start to have lingering effects. It wasn’t necessarily my goal; I didn’t really have a goal at the time. I was just trying to live day by day. But looking back at it now, I was developing a true relationship with God. I was also developing a true relationship with myself. I started recognizing the things that had value in my life and the things that had no value. I began to weed out these things of no value, because I found myself at a point in my life where I truly valued myself. The more time I spent with God and myself, the more I didn’t want to waste my time on things that had no value.

Perhaps it was also my sense of maturity growing as I got older, but by my mid-30s, obtaining a boyfriend was the furthest thing from my mind. At this point, I had shed enough tears, screamed into enough pillows, lain awake for enough nights, and endured enough lonely days. After I fought kicking and screaming for enough years, I learned to completely rely on God and His plan for my life. I lost my obsession for trying to make things happen in my will. I fully embraced God’s will and I became confident in the fact that when He was ready, God would bring that person into my life. I wasn’t going to have to figure it out all on my own. How liberating that became for me! I could finally relax. I didn’t feel pressure to force anything to happen, I trusted God had it under control. I was strong. I was independent. If I needed to do something, I didn’t wait for someone else to come along to do it for me. I watched a how-to video, got the tools I needed, and I figured it out. The more I did for myself, the more I loved and respected myself. I learned to not seek anything external to contribute value to me. It all came from within, because as my relationship with God deepened, so did my trust in Him.

And wouldn’t you know, the person God had for me was right under my nose all along. He was a friend of a friend, with whom I’d periodically spend time with in casual group settings. Little did I know God was working in his life, too. He was preparing us both for the person he had prepared for us… each other. For years, this person wasn’t even on my radar, and vice versa. It just wasn’t time yet. Sure enough, one day out of the blue, during one of our group social outings, he looked different to me. I noticed a spark. A butterfly in my stomach. A deeper conversation than we’d ever taken the time to have. It’s funny how we start to see things differently when it’s divinely orchestrated. I saw him, and he saw me in a completely different light. Needless to say, the rest is history, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say, timing was everything. If it happened any earlier, it wouldn’t have worked. Neither one of us would’ve been fully prepared to be the best versions of ourselves for each other.

I say all of this to say, learn to love yourself, trust God, and trust the process. Don’t compare your life to others. God’s plan for your life is for you only. He knows what he’s doing, and believe me, what He has planned for your life is well worth the wait. Let go, and let God.