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life{in}grace

live with more presence, passion, & purpose

Edie Wadsworth

A True Confession

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Lenten Devotional Day 23
Texts: Psalm 26:1-7, Gen. 44:1-18, 32-34, Mark 12:28-44, Luke 15:21

“And his son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.’”

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He came home for lunch like he does everyday; and from the look on his face, it must have been a long morning.

It was a Monday, and usually that’s injury enough. After his sandwich and a brief chat about what we had going on that evening, he said (with the slightest irritation in his voice), “So what’s going on with all the spray paint in the garage?” ALL the spray paint, I thought? You mean those one or two bottles right beside the bust I’m painting? But it took me a minute to get my words out because I was thinking maybe the girls had their own spray painting project going on that was adding to the spray paint extravaganza.

“Um, well, I was just painting a bust, that’s all. I’ll be done this afternoon.” “Yeah, well, I was just wondering because it’s a mess.”

I could hardly wait until he drove away so I could go investigate this spray painting “mess” as he called it.  And besides, I’m a creative. Mess is what I do on the way to making something beautiful.  He for one, should know this by now.

I walked out to the garage and saw my little bust of Aphrodite with two cans of spray paint lying empty on their sides and one can still standing at attention. I was baffled. This man has lived with me for 15 years and has seen more than his fair share of painting messes—WAY BIGGER messes than the one currently littering his garage.

Twenty minutes later, I got a text, “Please forgive me for my sorry attitude at lunch. Love you.”

Confession and forgiveness is the only way to survive marriage—the only way to truly survive life. And one thing I know about Stevie is that he’s quick to confess. I love that about him. Confession is about trusting the other person to receive you with grace, trusting them with the hardest parts of yourself.

Confession is not hard with God. He knows it all already. He forgives before we ask. He knows that our confession is feeble and fumbling and so like everything else in life. We borrow even that from Jesus, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”

The prodigal’s confession is short and is marked more by what he doesn’t say than what he says. He doesn’t make excuses. He doesn’t plead his case. He doesn’t make one concession for himself. He just confesses, with full trust in his father’s forgiveness. Confession is not actually about us, it’s about Him and His love— love that bids us lay all our sins at His feet.

Confess to your Father, without fear and without excuse. He forgives, every time, without fail. No matter how big the mess.

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From my Lenten study—Click Here to Download

Why I Struggle With Belief

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From the Lenten devotional, which is still available.  Click Here to Download


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Texts: Psalm 38:13-15, Gen. 29:1-30, Mark 9:14-32, Luke 15:18-19

“I will arise and go to my father and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.’”

Well, the snow finally gave way to warm sunshine this weekend, and not ten minutes after we ate our brunch of broiled salmon, soft scrambled eggs, & cowboy potatoes, a tree swallow swooped in outside the glass doors trying to get our attention. Being the good bird man he is, Stevie jumped up from his feast to watch our friend dive and hover and search around the homestead for his gourd. This is our first tree swallow sighting of the season, and since they usually return to the same nest year after year, we feel a warm familiarity with the guy. Before he had even finished his coffee, Stevie was on the lake bank lowering the gourd to clean it out and make sure everything was ready for spring nesting. It’s probably too early for them to be back for good but it was fun to see the first real live sign of spring.

The prodigal is not quite home yet either, which seems evident by the fact that he wants to earn his way back into the family by becoming one of his father’s hired servants.

He realizes he has sinned against heaven and against his father. That’s an important start. But like us, he figures the solution for that is something he is capable of doing—if he tries hard enough and is earnest enough—if he joins enough Bible studies and goes on enough mission trips.

Ken Bailey in The Cross and the Prodigal says,

Sadly, the prodigal does not yet understand the nature of his sin. He thinks the issue is the lost money. It isn’t! It is the father’s broken heart. The problem is not the broken law but the broken relationship. If he is a servant, he can get a job, earn the money back, and pay his debts. But if he is a son of the house, such a solution will not satisfy his father.

And such a solution will not satisfy our Father either.

The grace that He freely gives us as His children is a stumbling block to us. We don’t fathom it, and we don’t really believe it. In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus heals a boy with an unclean spirit, and then he tells the father of the boy, “Anything is possible for those who believe.”

The father speaks the most honest answer ever spoken when he says, “Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief.” And the kicker is that the belief we need is itself a gift from Him—one that we must receive by faith. And we trust in our abilities more often than we trust in His grace.

We have come to God looking for a transaction. But our father is not looking for day laborers. He is looking for sons and daughters to whom He can lavish the gifts and mysteries of His kingdom. We want to show Him our skills and talents, and He wants to show us His Son. We want to tidy up our outsides, and He wants to raise us from the dead. We want glory. He chose suffering. We have been wrong at every turn, and He has met us at every turn with love and forgiveness.

We want to flitter around the edges of our Father’s abundance, and He wants to kill the fatted calf and make merry in a feast that never ends.

Lord, we believe. Help our stubborn unbelief.

What’s Keeping You Stuck

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I think the path to living the life you were created to live often looks like being willing to suffer the pain of exposure, being willing to admit, at least to yourself, that things are not as they should be—that you often fail to measure up to the standards that you or society or your church has set for you. That you’re still a mess of epic proportions.

Often what we do instead is hide away. Hide our emotions, hide our sins, hide our stories, hide somewhere safe behind the thin veil of religion, pride, status, wealth, a job, a degree, an addiction, or the self-obsesssion that often comes with trying to so hard to be what we think the world wants.

And we all do it.

This week I had my own bout with it.

I’m down the final edits to my book, as in dotting the last i’s and writing the dedication page. In the past two weeks, I’ve had a complete melt down and actually tried to calculate how much money it would cost per month for me to pay the publisher back the money they gave me as an advance.

I couldn’t sleep for night’s on end. My editor talked me down off the ledge all week. Why all the internal drama? I’m scared about telling my story. I’m worried that I won’t be able handle the exposure and the vulnerability it will inevitably bring. Over and over, I said to myself, “You have a great life, why would purposely inflict this kind of stress and angst on yourself.”

My best self answered, trying to remember the verse about giving an account of the hope that is within you. (1 Peter 3:15). Then I looked that verse up and it says at the end that when you speak of the hope that is within you, do it with fear and humility.

He knew we’d be afraid. He’s knew we’d fear ridicule and misunderstanding. He knew it would be humbling, maybe even at times humiliating.

Then I read this quote:

“What shames us, what we fear most to tell, does not set us apart from others; it binds us together, if only we take the risk to speak it.” Starhawk

The subtitle for my book, maybe my life is: The story of a girl who walked through fire to find her way home.

It’s so true. I have the scars to prove it. And the hardest truth? I was sometimes the one holding the match. Those are the chapters that are so very difficult to share.

I’ve hidden behind so many things in my life, but I’m here to tell you that what awaits on the other side of that thin scary veil is the freedom and abundance and life that only Christ can give, when we’re willing to make ourselves completely vulnerable to His loving fire.

He didn’t come to make us comfortable, He came to make us holy and he’ll have a lot of chaff to burn off in order to do that. We submit ourselves to Him, trusting in His mercy that comforts, His grace that sustains, His righteousness that covers, His cross that saves.

All that to say, you’ve been given work to do, a story to tell, and people to serve.

Don’t let fear keep you from doing in the world what only you can do. Yes, there will be fire and yes, there will be pain.

The alternative is to stay closed and stuck.

BUT. If you open yourself, your mouth, your heart up—in the process, you will learn to live fully alive in your giftings, free from what has shamed you and caused you to hide yourself, free to finally love and serve the people God has put right in front of you with everything that is in you, free to walk through fire to find your way home.

I’m so thankful to walk this stretch of road with you— fear, fire and all.

 
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My spiritual memoir, All the Pretty Things, is now available for preorder.  Keep your receipt number to claim your preorder bonuses once they are released!

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Keep Learning, Keep Serving

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Some people in my life think I made the dumbest possible decision when I left my family practice career. How do I know that? Well, they told me.   You went through all that schooling? Took all those tests? Gave up your twenties? Lost so much sleep? Went into debt? All to get a degree that you don’t even use now?  Not to mention the income loss.

Yep. All true. Guilty as charged on all counts.

But if I hadn’t had the courage to take a leap of faith (and a huge loss of income) and walk through some really dark days,  I wouldn’t have discovered the ways that I am most able to serve the people in my life.

There were clues to it all along.  I noticed that if someone came into my office wrestling with deep emotional issues or spiritual unrest, my heart beat a little faster and I knew I had something unique to offer them that they probably wouldn’t get from just any family doctor. Treating high blood pressure usually didn’t evoke the same response.

I wanted to speak into people’s life with my words more than my prescription pad.

And it shouldn’t have surprise me because I had always had a love affair with words— from the little red journal I carried around as a older child to the very bad poetry I wrote as a teenager. (I’m sincerely sorry to everyone who was a victim of my poetic injustice.)

Over the years, my best offerings have come from my struggle & vulnerability.  But learning to hone in on what part of my life and message really resonates with those I want to serve isn’t nearly as easy as it seems.

I’ve been writing online for 8 years and I’m STILL learning how best I can add value to people who wander upon my site.

And much to my family’s benefit, I’m finally making a living at it.

Instead of using that income to increase our standard of living, we are using it invest in education—for our kids, for ourselves, and for those who we can bless.

These days a portion of the income I make as an entrepenuer is reinvested into my own education.  So I can be a better mom, wife, friend, writer, creative,  blogger, wellness teacher, etc.  I keep learning so that I can increase my impact in my own house, and in my little circle of the world.

It’s an investment that is so worth making.   I keep learning better ways to provide value for the people in my life.

So did I waste those thirteen years that I was training to become a doctor?

Not at all.  If medical school taught me anything, it taught me that there’s so much I don’t know.  It taught me the value of learning.  And there’s a certain humility that comes with admitting that we still need to keep growing, that we don’t know it all, that we don’t have the right skills, that we need to be always and forever students of this great big wonderful thing called life.

Which brings me to my current job/calling/vocation as a blogger and wellness enthusiast.  When I started out my journey as a creative entrepeneur, I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea what to write about or what my particular gifts were. I just knew I had a message and I wanted to share it.

Enter my dear friend Ruth.

She has a brilliant logical mind and her skill set is so different than my own.  We became friends and mentors to each other.  As she was building her own skills and business, she helped me find clarity in my own, sifting through ALL THE THINGS that I love and am interested in to find the pieces of gold—those few unique things that I am good at that other people can benefit from if I share them.

And that’s the sweet spot—the things that you uniquely offer that the world needs.

Last year, I took a few modules of her online course for writers/bloggers and it was phenomenal. I decided not to purchase the full course because I was writing a book and was already taking a writing course.  But this year, I’m signing up to do the whole thing.

A blogger who’s been blogging for eight years needs to learn more? Absolutely.

Because after finishing a book and dipping my toes back into the online writing space, I need some guidance. I want to offer the most value I can and still have time to do all the things at home I want to do.  That’s not an easy balance to strike. And it can all be so overwhelming.

I’ve spent enough time with her to know that her insight and unique way of breaking down complicated processes into simple understandable steps is so very valuable.  Every tip she’s ever given me for blogging has been golden.

Maybe you have a message you want to share too.  Her teaching will save you so much time and heartache and will be the shortest route to finding your own clarity, your own sweet spot.  And you will learn the secrets to start making an income from home. She’s brilliant at walking you step by step.

Here’s how you will know if it’s right for you too?

Take her free video course and she’ll tell you. The first email will be sent today and then you’ll get the others in the next few days.  If you decide to take the full course after that, I’ll see you the inside!

Daddy’s Funeral & My Inheritance

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From my Lenten study which you can download for free.  Don’t worry that you’re a few days behind, you can work through it at your own pace. I pray you will be blessed these 40 days.

Click Here to Download


Day 4: Give Me What Is Coming to Me
Texts: Psalm 12:1-6, Gen. 3:1-24, Mark 2:1-17 {Luke 15: 11-12}

“And Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give the the share of the property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them.”

My sister and I split the cost of my Daddy’s funeral.
I was 27 years old with two kids in my 3rd year of medical school when he died. I was on my psychiatry rotation and was beginning to wonder what it would be like when I finally went crazy. (That’s a chapter in my memoir, for what it’s worth.)
Not only was there no inheritance to be had, there was no life insurance either. Right before he got lung cancer and liver failure, we took out an insurance policy on him and kept it for years. Lean financial times, our growing families, and my medical school expenses made it easy to let it lapse. He died the next year and in the midst of the worst heartsickness I ever remember experiencing, we had to deal with the stress of paying for his funeral. Those were dark days—days when you wish you had a father to guide you through the fog.

The commentaries I’ve read on the prodigal son agree that the father in the story of the prodigal son was set to leave quite an inheritance to his sons. He had servants and land and animals, though how much of those things we aren’t told.
But the boys didn’t seem that interested in a relationship with their dad, as much as they wanted what his wealth and status could offer them. In fact, when the younger son asks for his inheritance while his father is alive, he is basically wishing his father dead.
In the Old Testament story for today, Eve is the same way. She grasps for something of her own, some secret wisdom or knowledge that could be gained apart from God, as if He were trying to keep something good from her. It destroyed everything and tore at the fabric of the way God made the world—a world in which He gives us all we need and we receive His gifts in thankfulness.
But we don’t do that, do we. At least I don’t.

I think I know better what I need than He does, so I strive and grasp and want and long. For a better everything. A better life, a nicer house, a richer marriage, a shinier car, a bigger bank account, more influence, and on and on until the sick cycle of my wanting becomes an addiction to everything I don’t need. This life He gave me, the one I actually live in, never seems like enough.

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So I set out, just like the prodigal son and just like Eve. In search of something to call my own. It probably plays out the same in your life, too. We haven’t so much broken our Father’s commandments as we’ve broken His heart.*
All He ever wanted was to give us everything.
In the Gospel lesson, as always, Jesus rescues us, reminding us that only those who are sick need a physician—those who are sick in their sin and despair, those who are sick in their pride and self-sufficiency, those for whom enough is never enough.
So we’re in good company when we find ourselves barred from Eden, in the far country of the pig pen, sifting through the broken parts of everything we’ve snatched for ourselves. Jesus came to open back the gates to heaven, to restore us to Eden, to find us wallowing in our own selfish mire and bring us back home to our Father.

And there, He will make the lame walk and the blind see. He will set about with a feast for us prodigals like you’ve never seen. He will finally gift us with our full inheritance, and we will weep to know that the *gift* he always wanted to give us was Himself.

Click Here to Download

If you know anyone who would benefit from this study of God’s love, share this post!

I will also be reading through Grace Upon Grace during Lent and discussing it once a week on Pericope. This book is AMAZING.

The One Reason We Need Lent This Year {and a Free 40 Day Devotional}

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I spent most of the last year writing my memoir, much of which dealt with the complicated relationship I had with my Daddy. The loss and pain of it drove me into the scriptures, looking for comfort, looking for answers, looking for fathers.

I landed on the story of the Prodigal Son, or maybe I should say it landed in me.

I spent months in that story, reading books and commentary, and in general, trying to figure out what Jesus was telling us about Himself in that story,  about what kind of Father we have in God.

We need Lent because we have forgotten. We need Lent because we are lost. Our doubt about the Father’s love, our besetting sins and our own piercing self-righteousness have blinded us to what we were made to do and who we were made to do it for.

Lent is a time for remembering what kind of a Father we really have and to what lengths He will go to find us and rescue us. Lent is a time to retreat with Him, to confess to Him how utterly dependent we’ve become on everything but Him. Lent is a time to remember what it means to be truly loved, to be held up from the fray of the world’s chaos, to be carried home by our Abba Father.

Lent is about our repentance, yes. But more importantly, Lent is about His forgiveness.

We walk with Him to the cross so we will KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt that this sacrifice was FOR US. God forgives us, not because of our growing discipline or holiness, but for the sake of Christ, alone. Want to give up sugar? Fine. Want to fast on Fridays? Perfect. Our bodies and our resources need to be brought into submission so that we can use them to serve our neighbor, not ourselves.

But remember, Lent is about Him and how He has set his face like a flint to go to Jerusalem to die for the sins of all mankind. We need Lent because we so desperately need Him.

He alone is our homecoming, standing “far off” waiting and watching everyday for His beloved to return.

In case the observance of Lent is brand new to you, this post might be helpful.

*I’ll be using the texts from the PrayNow app for the Lenten season along with the story of the Prodigal Son. I’m so thankful to have you here and pray you will be blessed by this time together.

Blessed Ash Wednesday to you.

For the free pdf of my Lenten study, click the link below!

(If you’ve already subscribed to my blog, it will tell you that you are already subscribed but then it will send you a copy of the study! If you are not yet subscribed, you will be sent a confirmation email and then once you confirm your email address, you will be sent the study. Comment below if you have trouble.)

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Click Here to Download

If you know anyone who would benefit from this study of God’s love, share this post!

I will also be reading through Grace Upon Grace during Lent and discussing it once a week on Pericope. This book is AMAZING.