Tracking number

The LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore. – Psalm 121:8 (NIV)

The verdict was in: My old laptop couldn’t be fixed. My computer guy tried—ordered an internal jack to replace the bad one that was causing the screen to flicker and a too-frequent-for-comfort loss of power. But he couldn’t get into the computer to replace it.

In the days preceding the verdict, I’d prayed about the decision whether to buy a new laptop or repair the old one. So when I got the news, I told my husband, “That’s my answer.”

I’d already pored through Consumer Reports and visited the websites of the companies that made the models that were my top choices. I’d pretty much made up my mind which laptop would suit my needs and pocketbook. So when a little “chat with a representative” window popped up, I clicked on it.

I told the rep I needed it no later than Friday. It was Monday. I was scheduled to fly back to Colorado Springs the following week for another writing stint, and I needed the laptop in time to set it up and get somewhat used to it before I left.

“No problem,” he wrote. “I’ll schedule it for expedited shipping at no extra cost.”

So I ordered it—a nice, sleek laptop that was half the size and bulk of the old one. And I had enough money left over to buy a much-needed all-in-one printer.

In the confirmation email the company sent me was a tracking number—by clicking on it, I could follow my order en route from the distribution facility across the country to my home. And that’s what I did. From Tuesday to Thursday, I watched the laptop’s progress from Carlsbad, Calif., to San Diego to Indianapolis to Pittsburgh to Johnstown to my home. I even had a pretty good idea the hour it would come. I all but sat by the front window all day. Then did the happy dance when it arrived.

And so God watches our progress from birth to death. We’re all “special orders” to Him. You’re the apple of His eye (Ps. 17:8)—beloved, precious and honored (Isaiah 43:4). Some of us are on an expedited route and will arrive home sooner than others. But most of us, I daresay, are going home by way of ground shipment, which will take longer and will have more “parking spots” and bumps along the way.

Our Heavenly Father knows every stone, every pothole, every mountain and valley, every river that must be crossed—and does the “happy dance” when we finally arrive on the doorstep of our eternal home.

Dear God, You saw me before I was born and scheduled each day of my life before I began to breathe. Every day was recorded in your Book! How precious it is, Lord, to realize that you are thinking of me constantly! I can’t even count how many times a day your thoughts turn towards me. And when I waken in the morning, you are still thinking of me! (Psalm 139:16–18 LB). Awesome! Thank you. Amen.

Special-Tea: Psalm 121

More Tea: Psalm 139, 1 Peter 3:12, Jeremiah 24:6, 2 Chronicles 16:9

Virelle Kidder: Finding her song

“I never planned on being a writer,” writes Virelle Kidder in her latest book, The Best Life Ain’t Easy, But It’s Worth It (2008, Moody Publishers). “I literally fell into it one brilliant June morning in front of the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.”

When she writes “literally,” she means it. The two slipped discs in her neck and lower back caused by the fall required 15 months of neck traction and a cervical collar.

“Not welcome news for this mom (of four teenagers) in high gear,” she says. “There was little choice but to settle into my new contraption and learn to listen to God all over again.”

After a few weeks, she began to look forward to the time alone behind that bedroom door, reading God’s Word, listening for His voice, and just resting. “The perfect escape,” she called it.

“Within a few months the strangest thing would happen,” she writes. “Something like a song begging a voice echoed from a place before unknown. Day by day, it drifted through forgotten rooms in my soul where faces and voices I’d once loved still lived. I longed to bring them to life again, to listen and linger over ideas once muffled by my busy life.”

What, she wondered, was she to do with this? Tell someone was the answer.

So she told her husband the stories that bubbled from her heart and soul—in the morning over coffee in the bathroom while he shaved. Steve’s interest surprised her. “Tell me more,” he’d say. One day he said, “You need to write these stories down. Our children need them. Others need them.”

And so she did. Mothering Upstream was published in 1990 by Victor Books. The song had found a voice.

Today Virelle is the author of six nonfiction books, a retreat and conference speaker, and a writing teacher and mentor.

But she’ll be the first to tell you it isn’t easy. Writing, especially nonfiction, requires a transparency most find uncomfortable. Opening your heart and life to an unseen reader, hoping your words will reach across time and distance and touch another’s life, means being vulnerable. But that’s the only way to be authentic, she says. Because it’s in the sharing of your very real pain that others identify with you. They know you’re real.

Says Virelle, “Writing became my song to sing back to God.”

Adapted from her memoir, The Best Life Ain’t Easy, But It’s Worth It (Moody Publishers, 2008) and published in the Upper Case, the newsletter of the St. Davids Christian Writers Association, Winter 2010

Visit Virelle's website.

"No eye has seen, nor ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Corinthians 2:9 NIV)

Virelle's book, Meet Me at the Well: Take a Month to Water Your Soul (Moody Publishers, 2008) has spawned three satellite ministries: Virelle's "Meet Me at the Well" women's retreat, a companion Meet Me at the Well Bible study, written by Jocelyn Hamsher, and an inspirational music CD by Lisa Troyer. You never know what God has in store for those who trust and obey. For more information, click here.

Michele and Virelle, Fort Pierce, Florida (March 2008)

FATHER'S DAY SPECIAL: Someday you'll understand

Honor your father and your mother. – Exodus 20:12 (NIV)

My dear Michele, the letter began. Perhaps by now you are over the mad spell at me for scolding you the other night…

Printed on motel stationery and folded neatly in a yellowed envelope that bore a State College postmark, the letter brought back a memory from my high school years. I settled on the game room carpet while snowflakes twirled in the winter wind outside and let my mind drift back to a midsummer night when I was 15. . .

The warm July sky sparkled with a thousand pin-lights as my friends and I walked through town. It was just the kind of night that holds magic for a teenage girl on the brink of growing up. Heady with all the freedom and fun, I’d neglected to call my parents to tell them I’d be late. We had no cell phones in the 1960s, remember. By the time I climbed the front porch steps, it was past midnight. Dad waited at the door. . .

This is the first time you ever stayed out late without calling and letting me know your whereabouts, the letter continued. I was actually sick with worry after walking up to the bazaar and not finding you there. By that time I was imagining everything.

I couldn’t remember Dad ever being so angry with me before. After an ugly scene, I stormed up to my bedroom, grounded for two weeks. The next day Dad seemed to have gotten over his anger, but I treated him with icy silence. By the time he left for work Monday morning, I still hadn’t spoken to him. Since he worked out of town through the week, I knew I wouldn’t see him until Friday. The letter came Wednesday—after my mother told me that he’d gone out in his pajamas looking for me, even searching the bushes along the sidewalks I would have taken had I come straight home.

As I read Dad’s words that long-ago day, my stubborn resistance melted away as a father’s love triumphed over teenage pride. One moment of panic, I realized, doesn’t cancel out years of steadfast love. Four years later Dad died.

It is so hard for a parent to be cross with a child, but sometimes it is necessary for your own good, he wrote. Perhaps when you have children of your own, you will understand how we feel.

I thought of my own three children. They’d all had me frantic with worry and fear at times as I imagined the worst.

“Yes, Dad,” I whispered softly, holding his letter close to my heart. “I understand.”

Thank You, Father, for parents who loved me enough to discipline me when I needed it. Help me to be a parent worthy of being respected, valued and honored. Amen.
Special-Tea: Hebrews 12:5-11

U-Turns allowed

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! – 2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV)

It was the Friday morning before Memorial Day. I’d just emailed my column to the newspaper and planned to spend the rest of the morning finishing the budget work, paying bills, and finalizing the grocery list before going to town for my biweekly shopping trip. As I put the kettle on for a second cup of tea, I glanced at the time—10:30 a.m. Would I have time to enjoy it? I had to pick up the lawn mower bearings we’d ordered a week earlier before noon, and the place was closed Saturday.

Knowing my penchant for procrastinating, pushing deadlines, and convincing myself I had time to “do one more thing” (or dawdle), I figured I’d better get out of my jammies and head for town—now.

I was about a mile from home when a thought popped into my mind: Did I turn off the burner under the kettle? I remembered thinking about it, but couldn’t remember if I actually did. I checked the clock on the dashboard. I was pushing it, but I had to go back. If I'd left it on, I wouldn’t have a house by the time I came home from town.

I made a U-turn at the intersection. Good thing. The water was boiling away when I stepped into the kitchen.

God allows U-turns, too. Look at St. Paul. Now, if there was ever a hard nut to crack, it was Saul of Tarsus. A fiery Pharisee, he was galloping to Damascus to search for Christians so he could throw them into jail when he was literally thrown off his high horse.

“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

The words pierced his soul, as he lay on the road in the intense light, blind. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting. Now stand up! For I have appeared to you to appoint you as my servant and my witness.”

Saul made a U-turn and, in his own words, “I was not disobedient to that vision from heaven.”

The Bible includes many other examples of people who made U-turns: the prodigal son, Zacchaeus, Mary Magdalene, and Matthew, the despised tax collector turned disciple who wrote the Gospel that bears his name.

Author Allison Bottke made a U-turn in 1989—and went on to produce nearly two dozen books of stories of folks who found themselves in hot water and made U-turns. (Read Allison’s testimony.)

“No matter what we have done, no matter where we have been, it is never too late to change direction,” she says, “because God allows U-turns!”

What about you? Are you needing a turnaround? Do you need to go back to where you went, or did, wrong and make things right?

Remember, no one is so far away that God cannot see, hear, or help. In the words of Anne Graham Lotz, “He forgives and forgets, creates and cleanses, restores and rebuilds, heals and helps, reconciles and redeems, comforts and carries, lifts and loves. He is the God of the second chance, the fat chance, the slim chance, the no chance.”*

Make that U-turn now. God is waiting at the intersection.

Thank you. Lord, for allowing U-turns. Amen.

Special-Tea: Acts 26:4:20

*Anne Graham Lotz, My Jesus Is . . . Everything

Up and away

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea:
Even there thy hand shall lead me, thy right hand shall hold me. ~ Psalm 139:9-10 (NKJV)


As my oldest moved through his sometimes tumultuous high school years, I'd jokingly threaten to hang a huge banner on the front of the house for his graduation party: Good-bye, good luck, good riddance!


Then graduation day came all too soon. Two days later he left home for the first time, taking a job on a drilling crew that left early Monday morning and didn't return until late Friday.


The house was too quiet. No one picked up the youngest and turned him upside-down and shook him until until he squalled. No one teased the dog so much that she scrambled crazily around the house, growling and yapping. No one devoured half the mashed potatoes almost as soon as the serving bowl hit the table. No one barged into the bedroom at night as I was falling alseep to say, "I love you, Mom. You mean a lot to me."


The time had come. The nest was beginning to empty. For all my bravado, I wasn't ready.


That was 17 years ago. Since then, I helped my daughter move halfway across the country two months after she graduated from high school to take a job in Kansas at the age of 18. After she dropped me off at a motel the night before my flight for home left, I knelt down beside the bed and prayed and cried. She now teaches high school math in South Carolina, 700 miles away. We see her and her family once a year.

Our youngest, who received his college degree a year ago, isn't too far away, but he's talking about eventually moving to North Carolina. As I watch him drive out the lane, heading back to Johnstown after a visit home, a familiar emptiness settles in the pit of my stomach--that same emptiness I felt when we'd tear down our campsite after a camping trip, when we watch our daughter and her family drive away after a too short visit home.

A parent's job is to train up children in the way they should go--then let go. From Number One to Number Three, the letting go didn't get any easier. It isn't any easier now, when the youngest has been gone for 6 years and the oldest lives next door with his wife and three children.

But I find comfort in an old song I began humming after the first one left home: "Vaya Con Dios" -- Go with God.

Letting go is never easy, but knowing God is with them wherever they go, whatever they do, soothes this lonely mother's heart. My children are God's children, too.

Thank you, God, for reminding me that You love my children even more than I do. Amen.