My little girl was just sixteen months old when her younger brother arrived. I rocked her to sleep every night before he came. She was not one who slept through the night, and I had wakened with every cry, holding her again at various hours and countless times in a night. As each week fell into the next she began to show her growing displeasure—her annoyance, even—at my protruding baby belly as she tried to find a place on my shoulder where it didn’t get in her way. I saw this as a kind of symbolism for the impending change to her small world and tried to use those days where I had enough arms to hold each child as an opportunity to affirm her invaluable place against me.

I researched how to prepare siblings for the arrival of a new little one. I placed her tiny hands on my belly as the baby kicked and explained that he was talking to her. I took her to appointments to see his black and white sketch on the screen of the doctor’s office where she lay nestled in the crook of my arm as I pointed to toes and elbows of “her baby.” After many months, an appointment to my doctor’s office resulted in the instruction to drive straight to the hospital, for labor had begun early. Instead, we first drove back to the house to tell our two little ones where we were going, to have one last moment as the family of four familiar to us all to navigate before receiving the tremendous gift to be five; to give them a hug and kiss before sleeping away from them for a few days; before introducing them to their baby brother whose arrival would change their world as they knew it.

I had been concerned she would resent him. But she didn’t. She welcomed him, she kissed him, she longed to care for him from the moment she saw him. She didn’t hold it against him seemingly at all. It was me. I had not read that, I had not prepared for the fact that it was me she could feel abandoned her or betrayed her. While always close to her daddy, she suddenly attached to him with an adhesive that forbid another to come close. As hours and days melted into weeks and then months of eternity for me, she resisted all of my attempts to hold her, to be close to her, or to care for her even when she was sick. Each morning as my husband left for work, he had to peel her off of the safe zone of his shoulder and she would crumple to the floor in a pool of sobs that would break your heart and crushed mine. Her beautiful round, light brown eyes were flooded with an ocean of hurt, full lips trembling through the sobs. I tried so hard and so gently to get close, bending down and holding my arms out to comfort her. But she refused and angrily pushed me away, choosing to ache entirely alone. I felt deeply rejected, but even more, it literally pained me to see her hurting so much and opting to endure it alone rather than allow me to provide comfort. So I stood at the distance she demanded, tears streaming down my own face as I watched her struggle day after day. “All I want to do is to love you, to help you, and you won’t let me even comfort you,” I felt and audibly whispered.

And a parallel was not lost on me, with an awareness never considered before. For how many times have I refused to allow God to come close in comfort and instead in my anger and lostness, forced Him to a distance in favor of my lonely puddle of fear, confusion, and grief?

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Longing to Comfort →

Like many Generation Xers, I have spent a great deal of my life asking questions. In retrospect, it seems that more than a few of my plaguing inquires were the wrong inquiries. In fact, more than a few of my questions were probably even unanswerable. But it took me a while to be able to admit there existed such distinctions. When you are a child and inquiry is your way of gaining a handle on the world around you, you come to believe that every question is right, and every inquiry deserves an answer that satisfies. And there is some truth to that comforting thought: questions are valid and answers should satisfy. Later, when social pressure begins to stress conformity and asking questions carries the risk of embarrassment, we learn to repress our inquisitiveness, even as those who still see the value in inquiring minds offer the ready assurance, “There are no wrong questions!” And this may be true as well, particularly in a classroom. But it does not mean that one cannot ask an unanswerable question or inquire in such a way that simply fails to cohere with reality. Is your idea blue or purple? How much time is in the sky? I imagine a great number of the questions we ask along the way are in fact quite similar.

When it comes to faith, we are actually instructed in the Christian religion to carry into it some of the qualities we held as children. I suspect a child’s passion for inquiry is one of the traits Jesus intended in his directive: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” But the childlike expectation that every inquiry is capable of being answered to our satisfaction, that every question is capable of being answered now (or even answered at all) is likely not the quality he was encouraging us to keep.

Regardless, Jesus readily received the questions of those around him, whether they were asked with ulterior motive or childlike abandon; no inquiry was turned away. Of course, this is not to say that he always answered, or that he always satisfied the questioner. Actually, more often than not, he replied with a question of his own. “Who gave you the authority to do what you are doing?” the scribes asked. Jesus replied, “I will ask you one question; answer me and I will answer you. Did the baptism of John come from heaven or human origin?” Knowing they were stuck between conceding to Jesus’s authority and risking the wrath of the crowd, they refused to answer. So Jesus refused as well.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Right Questions →