I’m now home from our 25th anniversary celebration in Clearwater Beach. Pondering storms and focus. Three of us four Rickers have been long-battling a fairly serious physical storm, even as we intentionally focus on the Son. Storms feel confusing. They don’t make sense. They’re a test. How do we get to the other side? What should we do? What now, what next? The list goes on. Here are a few short lessons I’ve learned from our storms. As always, I pray you’re somehow encouraged and blessed. When you start to feel overwhelmed, meditate on the Word and the good that …
Raging Seas
Shaken Heart Waves ride high, licking the sides of your boat, toppling inside. Water deepens, clawing tightness in your chest. Jesus had snatched this boat at the end of a long, crowd-saturated day, so he could reach the other side of the sea. With Jesus asleep now, you feel abandoned. Must you and your friends battle this storm by yourselves? In a howling gust, your boat couldn’t be more tossed and you know you’re going to drown. What in the world? Shouldn’t Jesus at least see this mess he threw you into? Winds roar so loud you can hardly hear …
Through God’s Fingers
That pressing test that rocks your world? It’s either from the hand of God or from the hand of the enemy. The fact is, it must first pass through the fingers of the Almighty, sift through the shape of His mercy. In other words, rest easy. If God isn’t the one nudging you forward through this trial, stretching you into His image, then He’s allowing the enemy to be used for your good and His glory. Even in your vulnerability, you can trust God’s Sovereignty. Satan’s on a rope, and God will always help you cope. God’s got your back; …
My Journey Into Print
Once Upon A Dream… [box] Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you your heart’s desires. Psalm 37:4[/box] Today we’re going to do something a little different, and dream about dreams. Some of you shared your dreams of breaking into print. By pulling back the curtain of my own adventures, perhaps I can inspire you to embrace something new. As a child, I knew nothing about authors, just that I wanted to be one. God’s call came like a whisper, a flutter of possibility. Maybe I could influence people and make a big Kingdom difference. I started journaling …
Songs in the Sky
A Second Chance… “Cheryl, check out the rainbow!” I scrambled for my camera, but when I finally dashed outside, the colors in the partial rainbow had mostly faded to nothing. Not another wasted camera op! Last month it was the baby ducks trying to (unsuccessfully) jump the curb in front of the Mayo Clinic. Then it was the twelve huskies pulling a man on his bike. Now this? Resolved not to let it bother me, I hopped in my dinghy and, with each paddle-stroke, encouraged myself to ponder the week’s blessings. One, we were at Strawberry Lake Christian Retreat, our favorite …
Prayers for the Undeserving
[box] “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” John 13:34 [/box] As I have loved you. You must love one another. Quite the request, Lord. It was in your heart all along, wasn’t it? “Love my people. Do unto others. Feed my lambs.” It’s a breeze to love you, Lord, so perfect and kind. But people? Even the best pastors, leaders, teachers, people who know better… They fail. You want me to love them with complete, sacrificial love? Pray for those who hurt me? Forgive them deeply …
God’s A Planner
For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.” Jeremiah 29:11 Satan is our disaster-planner, but he’s not the writer of our future. God is. Best of all, God is into the details, right down to our cellular level. Consider the word disaster. An “aster” is a star-shaped structure that forms during cell reproduction. It’s formation is crucial to sustain all future life. We know Satan “disses” or disrespects all things “life,” especially Jesus, the author of life. That’s why …
Christmas Screams
When the valleys seem deeper, longer than the heights, depths of our mountaintop times, He is here. If we could see Him we would break into shouts of joy. He is here. He is here with His itinerary that makes Satan’s schemes look like child’s play. Satan doesn’t want us to see him, doesn’t want us to sense him, doesn’t want us to “consider it pure joy when we suffer trials of all kinds.” We’re not ignorant of his devices. We know he has a plan with our screaming pain to… reawaken unforgiveness, inflict fear and anxiety, load us with …
Can-Do Attitude
The power of positive thinking jumps to a whole new level when we add the Christ-factor. “For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.” Phil 4:13 When we’re in His will, He strengthens us to do everything. What could be more positive? Some say, “I know He wants us to love all people, even difficult people, and to praise him in the midst of all circumstances, even crazy family circumstances, but do you really think it’s possible to stay Christ-like, self-controlled and patient when life falls apart?” As a sensitive, easily-rattled person prone to ask this herself, …
The Big Fail
“Simon Peter followed Jesus, as did another of the disciples. That other disciple was acquainted with the high priest, so he was allowed to enter the high priest’s courtyard with Jesus. Peter had to stay outside the gate. Then the disciple who knew the high priest spoke to the woman watching at the gate, and she let Peter in. The woman asked Peter, “You’re not one of that man’s disciples, are you?” “No,” he said, “I am not.” John 18:15-17 The “other disciple” is said to be John, the one writing this gospel. John took advantage of his acquaintance with …
A Time To Die?
Leaves litter the ground, reminding me how seasons bleed, one into the next, as quick as a blink, while God waits for us to catch new vision. I kick back on the swing, crunching my feet in fresh crisps of color as I mull over memories of my dear Aunt Shirley. How strange I can’t call her anymore. As sudden as a Minnesota temperature drop, her brain aneurism leaves my own brain reeling. I crumble squeeze a bright orange leaf, blink away pictures of us splashing together at her cottage, of us wizening from sun and water, coming out smelling …
Dear God, Why Can’t I Have a Baby?
One in six couples suffer with infertility, feeling ostracized and alone. “Too make matters worse,” says Janet Thompson, “few churches offer support groups to counsel this large overlooked group.” After surgery for a ruptured ovarian cyst at age twenty-one and newly engaged, the doctor told Janet that her ovaries were cystic and looked like those of a 90-year-old woman. “Sorry, you’ll never be able to have children.” Three years into marriage, Janet was miraculously pregnant with her daughter Kim! Still, Janet couldn’t shake the worry that maybe Kim would have trouble getting pregnant too. Years later, her fears proved …
The Beautiful Choice
Choices…. [box] God could have made us robots, marching to His heart, forced to love completely, obeying from the start. Instead He made us separate, with built-in modes for choice, so love would prove more precious when we finally hear His voice…[/box] I wrote this as a young teen in the trenches of a choices… I was the girl who believed if someone didn’t like her, there was something terribly wrong with her. Have you ever met someone who was so insecure about relationships that she sometimes controlled, manipulated, and strangled them? Love, by nature, can’t be forced; it necessitates choice. …
Secrets & Mysteries
I love talking to God in the morning when everyone’s asleep and it’s quiet, except for my husband’s snoring, (which reminds me how much I need to talk to God in the first place! <grin>) You can’t put a price tag on prayer. We get to connect with the God of the universe ~ the mysterious Father who gave us the Son who gave us the Spirit so we can connect back with the Father! “Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty?” Job 11:6-8 Millions of books have been written on God, …
In My Distress
[box] “In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me. From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry.” Jonah 2:2[/box] Jesus Whispers: Your troubles are safe in My ears. I don’t always answer the way you expect, but I answer. When people hurt you, don’t carry the burden of judge and jury. That’s my job. I’m the only who sees the heart. Pray for your enemies, leave room for my discipline, and allow my grace to flow through you. Freely you have received; freely give. When you’re …
Beside My Cross
In truth, be rooted in Easter Love today, light and free as a tree bud, purposed and held together by Divine dwelling in your small, simple swelling. You’re your Branch’s crowning hope-jewel, Heaven’s waving, waiting, merry-making tool. The Easter Seed broke to tell your glory story, singing you to fullness, clothing you in new, death-defying nature, securing all you could ever want to be, simply, in Me. Nothing speaks of our potential and value to God like the cross. The cross is why we have a glory story. Because of Christ’s sacrifice, we can wholly lean into grace, …
Relax When People Are Dying?
“The perseverance of the saints consists in ever new beginnings.” ~ Alexander Whyte Staring like a morning zombie at the last bucket-sized mound of Minnesota snow in our backyard, I collapse on our family swing and enjoy the budding trees and chorusing birds. Ah, yes… Finally the semblance of spring! Why can’t every day be a bird-chirping, sit-in-the sun kind of day? Who invented stress anyway? How’d you do it, Lord? How did you bear the weight of the world, the sentence of shame and death, a teacher’s worst time-line (three years to turn your disciples into world-changers), without taking …
A Word to the Dying
Cindy Finch Suffering from roller-coaster emotions? I wish I could tell you some sweet little words that would make it better. But I can’t. You are on a long, hard journey. But you are not alone. When you’re reduced to nothing but grit… and even that is diminishing, God promises to hold you in His tender care and stand tough on your behalf. Watch His light shine brightest in your darkness. To the Terminally Ill: Hold hands with God; He knows the way. Do everything you know to do; then leave the rest to the all-powerful One. Let Him choose …
King of the Sewer
Crisis When my friend, Cindy Finch, was pregnant with her youngest son, Brandon, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. “You’d be dead in a few weeks if you didn’t come to see me,” her oncologist told her. When doctors gave Cindy the most aggressive cancer treatments available, they said, “they’ll either kill you or save you.” Cindy became sick beyond functioning; but by a miracle of God, the medicine worked! Five years into remission, Cindy was thrust in another test: The treatments had caused her to develop serious heart and lung failure. Open-heart surgery removed the damaged …
Touching Invisible Places
To be loved and understood is the cry of the human heart. Someone knows you inside in out, remembers what you’ve been through, and how it affects you today. He hears your silent prayers, and knows when your cherished dreams are dashed against a rock. At a women’s missions event this summer, a woman from the next table motioned me over. She was crying. She told me she’d just read “In Tune” from one of the postcard poems I’d placed on each table. I learned that the woman propped up in a wheelchair beside her was her daughter. She had …