faith

You Don’t Need to Change the World

March 3, 2015 by Edie Wadsworth 11 Comments

from Day 12 of my Lenten devotional email series on the prodigal son and yes, it’s never too late to join us!

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Texts: Psalm 126, Gen. 21:1-21, Mark 6, 35-56, Luke 15: 16

“He was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.”

When I left my job as a family doctor and became a “stay at home” mom for the first time ever, I was determined to figure out how to put dinner on the table. Mostly because EVERYBODY IS ALWAYS HUNGRY at my house. They want dinner. As in, EVERY single night. And breakfast and lunch and snacks. FORTHELOVE.

But how hard could it be, right?

MmmHmm.

REALLY hard is how hard, as all you moms can surely stand up and shout a hearty AMEN. And despite the fact that I write about feeding my family quite a bit, I still struggle with it some days. A lot of days, actually.

But slowly over months and years I became pretty proficient at feeding us. And somewhere along the way I realized that as simple as it sounds, feeding my people is part of God’s work for me. It’s a beautiful and sacred thing. It’s so ordinary and necessary and life-giving and humbling and rewarding.

But it also drives me crazy—thinking of new things to make, the constantly dirty kitchen, the millions of dishes, the sheer amount of times you have to handle the food by the time you’ve eaten it and are cleaning it up. It’s easy to dream of a bigger purpose for my life. Wasn’t I made for more than this?

I don’t know if I was or not but I do know that Jesus spent His life feeding people and caring for their most basic needs. The God of the universe thinks so much of feeding people that the night before He died, when He gave His last will and testament, he told his disciples to carry on the sacred work of feeding His sheep.

In the prodigal story, the younger son is in the far country and he’s squandered everything he received from his father’s estate. He’s so hungry that he’d take pig’s food. And no respectable Jew would ever have considered that.

But the scripture says, no one gave him anything. That verse haunted my dreams at night when I was studying the prodigal story last year. No one gave him anything. He’s outside the fold. He has wandered from the pasture, like all sheep do. Like you and I constantly do. He is in dangerous territory because he has rebelled against the one person who always made sure he had food—his father.

And there’s more feeding in Mark’s Gospel today where a crowd shows up for Jesus.

5,000 men and their families. And they’re hungry. The disciples want to send them away but Jesus simply says, “Give them something to eat.”

We are the sheep of God’s pasture and it’s not our job to change the world. It’s our job to stay in the pasture and eat. And eat and eat and eat some more. To receive His Word, to receive the Supper, to stay close to the Shepherd.

Then mostly by our fumbling, we can lead other lost sheep to the bounty of God’s table so they can eat too.

Our job is to eat and then share that good food with our neighbor, starting with the ones who live in our houses.

You don’t need to change the world.

Just make dinner.

It’s practically the same thing.

Me & My Self-Righteous Lent

February 19, 2015 by Edie Wadsworth 9 Comments

This is day 2 of my Lenten devotional on the prodigal son. I hope you find some hope and encouragement here. Click Here to Download the 40 day devotional study!

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Texts: Psalm 8: 1-6, Gen. 1:20-2:3, Mark 1:14-28

Eight years ago, I observed the season of Lent for the first time. We had just joined a historic, liturgical church and I was completely fascinated by the rich history & ritual of it all, things I had seriously doubted and even mocked when I was 25 and knew everything there was to know about serious Christianity. (insert a little compassionate hug for my 25 year old self)I wanted to do Lent right. I wanted to be the best at Lent. I wanted to repent and remember and deny myself like nobody’s business. I wanted to show those Lutherans what Lent could really look like if an over-achieving (perhaps slightly self-righteous) evangelical got a hold of it. I went into Lent with all the serious spiritual contemplation I could muster, complete with a journal to jot down all my spiritual growth. And oh the spiritual growth I was anticipating. If there had been a #christiangirlinstagram hashtag back in the day, I would have worn it out. (Do yourself a favor and follow @johnbcrist on Instagram.) (#christiangirlinstagram is a parody on how we as christian girls like to document our devotion to the Lord in ever more creative ways. It’s painfully hilarious.)

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If Lent were the equivalent of me taking a walk, I looked down at my feet the whole time, admiring my awesome cowboy boots, or my spiritual progress, as it were. So I say this very much from experience that the greatest temptation during Lent is not that you won’t be able to keep your Lenten discipline. The greatest temptation is that you will constantly take your spiritual temperature, wondering if you are in fact becoming better and better. I’ll give you the cliff notes of my first self-righteous Lent. The way you’ll know you’re making progress is that you won’t see any progress at all. What you’ll see is more sin, more selfishness, less discipline, more temptation, less patience, less love. Why? Because the more you hear the Word & meditate on it, the more sin it will expose in you, like turning spotlights on the dirty corners of your house.

If your Lenten journey is really successful, you’ll get to the end of it and wonder how you can still be so far off. And that’s exactly the point. Lent reminds us how lost we are, how self-absorbed we are, how far we are from ever being what we were created to be.

When we finally despair with our pathetic attempts to be more spiritual, when we finally put to death all our preconceived ideas about being holy and righteous, when we empty ourselves of ourselves, He will fill us with all good things. And those good things will turn us outside ourselves toward our neighbor. We will finally look up and realize that we’re not walking just to walk. We’re walking with our neighbors, who despite our weak and faltering faith, need us. And they don’t need us to be super spiritual overachievers whose Lenten journals are full of deep insights. They just need a cup of water or a maybe some soup, perhaps even someone to finally make them laugh.

In the Gospel reading for today, Jesus calls his first disciples and the text says they “immediately” went to Capernaum where Jesus healed a man possessed with an unclean spirit. They didn’t have a goal setting meeting on how to best plot their spiritual growth. They looked around and saw that the world is hurting and dying so they got right to work.

Let’s not succomb to the very real temptation to watch our own feet as we walk this road together. Look up. Look around & outward. And when we stop worrying about ourselves and our own progress and begin offering our gifts of love and healing to our neighbors, we will see the beauty of His life in us—a life meant to be poured out for others.

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The ONE Thing I Got Right Today

February 2, 2015 by Edie Wadsworth 22 Comments

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It’s been a Monday around these parts. Maybe even worse than a typical Monday. Perhaps a bulleted list is in order. This is what it has looked like so far:

Laundry chaos (I apparently stacked every outfit I wore in January on the sofa in my bedroom. It wasn’t pretty. It took two hours to pilfer through it and get its contents to their appropriate places and when I finally got to the bottom, I found my hair dryer. Which I have looked for in EVERY CREVICE OF THIS HOUSE, cursing family members under my breath for taking said hair dryer.)
Email chaos—No matter how hard I try, when I finally sit down to pay the email pied piper, I find important things that should not have been neglected FROM A MONTH AGO.
Refrigerator chaos—I would describe it for you but then you would excommunicate me from the human race.
Workroom chaos—Currently in this room, we are: working on a puzzle, finishing a science fair project, watching as 87 pieces of clothing hang to dry, working on 957 other random projects, doing watercolors, eating lunch, and prepping for a webinar tonight. ALL IN ONE ROOM. That is approximately 12×14. And holds a washer/dryer/2 printers/2 computers/2-4 people/1 million books. #goodtimes
Paperwork chaos—It’s tax gathering time. Which means I now need to collect all the receipts in the free world and take them to my accountant. This activity could put me in the ground.
More chaos which would only bore you and further incriminate me1

I confess all that for a reason. As a funtional first born and an overachiever, I don’t like it when it appears I’m slacking on my job. I like to measure up, to exceed everyone’s expectation of everything. I’m always secretly measuring myself but what I keep forgetting is that all the important things are things that can’t be measured, that no one sees. I try to measure them anyway. Am I becoming a better wife? Am I becoming more spiritual? Am I growing in my faith? Am I growing as a mother? Am I managing my own life well? That’s part of my list and I bet yours looks similar. Today, I didn’t measure up.

I look around and see so many things that are always tending toward disorder. And if I don’t tend to them daily, they feel like the weight of the world. When I got up this morning, I knew it was all waiting for me. I slept in until 5, probably subconsciously to delay the inevitable. The dishes from last night’s Super Bowl food were still in the sink. I missed two deadlines and needed to get those projects sent in first thing. Twenty packages waiting to be mailed.

But I promised myself that February would be about the small things—the daily disciplines that don’t seem like much at the time, but when compounded over a lifetime make a world of difference. So I shut out the voices and sat down with some true nourishment. I read this with my daughter:

We give thanks to you, O God; we give thanks, for your name is near. We recount your wondrous deeds.

We stopped right there. Because I wanted to hear it again, “Your name is near.” That phrase has been like a balm for me today. His name is near. His name is near.

Then I made breakfast and sat down to enjoy it. Then I wrote in my journal. I wrote “His name is NEAR.”

And finally I started in on the chores for the day, but with help. Because His name is near. And I will always have a tendency to let my creative pursuits cause me to neglect all else. Things will always have the tendency toward chaos. I will never be finished with my work. I will never really conquer the laundry pile. But I will always have a comforter because the Name that is above every name is near to me. He put His name on me at my baptism and welcomes me to His table every Sunday. He makes promises to me in his Name that He keeps.

The one thing I did right today had nothing to do with my to-do list. It had nothing to do with productivity or efficiency.

The one thing I did right today was to stop talking and measuring and just listen.

To the One whose name is near, Christ—the living God.

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And speaking of living in your calling in the midst of chaos, I’m doing a series of Lenten devotionals beginning February 18th by email only. You will get near daily emails from me during Lent with a couple of videos. If you’d like to be a part of it, you can join by filling out the form below!

Only Love

January 9, 2015 by Edie Wadsworth 9 Comments

* A little love from the archives, with new content resuming next week.

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None of us escapes it. We are a bruised and broken people, in desperate need of a rescue. We are all plagued with sin, doubt, fear, greed, selfishness, addiction, evil, and most assuredly self-righteousness. We are harsh and unkind and lacking in mercy. Or we are weak, undisciplined, and lacking in courage. But we are all the same.

Fortunately for us, our Father knows it all. He is not surprised or angry or aloof.

He doesn’t seek revenge but only redemption.

He became one of us to know the depth of our struggle and He is right there in the dirty midst of it all.

He won’t leave. He won’t lose His nerve. He will never give up.

So, when your strength has left you and you can’t hold on……

Don’t worry. Love holds. Love never fails.

He, who is deeply acquainted with your grief, will bear the weight of it all, even this, and will never grow weary.

Trust in your Father, who works every circumstance for the homecoming and healing of His glorious children.

He will not rest until you are remade and restored.

He will persevere until the end, because of Love.

Only Love.

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What It Looks Like to Care

December 8, 2014 by Edie Wadsworth 12 Comments

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What does caring look like?

It looks like a baby in manger who will become one of us to know our pain and sorrow.

It looks like Jewish boy who even at 12 years old knew the importance of His Father’s house.

It looks like a man whose days were filled with touching people and healing them and giving them life.

It looks so clearly like a cross, where One Man bore the collective guilt and shame of us all, trading His life for our ransom.

It looks like an empty tomb, where the resurrection of One Man sets the rest of us free.

And in turn, it looks like you, learning from Him and living your life for someone else in a ‘myriad of petty little unsexy ways everyday’.

Bless you today and blessed be the name of the Lord—the One whose caring changed the world.

Where Can the Anger Go?

November 9, 2014 by Edie Wadsworth 16 Comments

“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel of both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back–in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.” ~Frederick Buechner

I hit send on my memoir and my eyes filled up with hot tears, which came spilling over faster than I could catch them. Then I climbed in bed, curled up in a ball and slept for two hours, mascara smearing the pillow and the arm of my shirt. When I woke up, I looked outside and wondered how long the trees had been blazing with autumn. Writing your story is like deep sea diving for long stretches of time, coming up for air only long enough to bring items from the past onto the boat so you can see them more clearly and try to discover what they mean. Some of the things I dug up made me sad, many made me laugh, and others made me angry.

The anger surprised me most because it’s almost impossible to make me angry. Or thus says my pride. I’ve never been able to stay mad, almost no matter what the circumstance. But the anger was there, right there in the light of day and there was no denying it. I got angry when I looked back at a little girl that no one protected. I got angry at the times I felt abandoned and alone. Then I got angry at myself. For heaping my pain onto people who never deserved it and never saw it coming.

The anger that rises up in us needs somewhere to go, because if it lingers in us too long it becomes like poison.

A few days later I heard a song and I saw in it a picture of what our Father does with all that collective wrong we heap on each other. He comes in with guns blazing to mow down our demons, the ones tormenting us from without and perhaps especially the ones killing us from within. And in the strangest turn of events, he takes all that evil and wrong and pain and hurt and anger on Himself and dies on a cross to save both the oppressor and the oppressed within us all.

This is love that we can’t even fathom. This is the compassion of a Father who will go to every length to protect us from all the enemies that threaten us, those that rage against us and those that rage in us, bearing in His body the world’s collective misery so that you and I can go free.

He gives us His life and in turn takes on our death.

This is what it means to be cherished and protected against the gates of hell.

He lays Himself down on the altar and willingly becomes the Feast, the innocent One ravaged for us all.