on Kyria.com
Beautiful Battle: A Woman’s Guide to Spiritual Warfare
A book review
I must admit right off the bat, I’d never been one to buy into “spiritual warfare.” Though I’ve long believed evil was as real as the hand in front of my face and that Satan has his own grubby hands at work in this world, when people would claim they were “under attack” from dark forces, I worked hard not to roll my eyes.
Under attack seemed a bit much. Especially for the bits of dumb bad luck they’d go on to regale. But then I wrote a book called Grumble Hallelujah and went around speaking about our need to lament—to grieve but then grumble our, well, hallelujahs when life gets rough. And each time I’d share a story of finding God’s goodness or faithfulness in the midst of misery, wham! A fresh batch of misery would hit. Each time, it hit a little harder, pushed me down a little further. Each time came a wicked whisper: Gonna praise him now?
Then I was foolish enough to claim increase as my word for 2012—and go public with my longing for God to “increase my faith” (and bank account, if he wanted!). Where life had begun to feel on the “upswing,” circumstances took rough right turns. Where I had longed for greater faith, suddenly situations pressed me to doubt God’s very existence. Questions like Does he even hear you? Is he even there? looped through my brain as I prayed.
Continue reading Beautiful Battle: A Woman’s Guide to Spiritual Warfare...
May 10, 2012Avengers, Sarkozy, Summer, and Girls
Four recent events that matter to your ministry
Consider these recent events and how they might affect your ministry.
Avengers Assemble!
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May 7, 2012The Spiritual Practice of Saying Yes and No
Learning how to respond to life’s many invitations
I’ve written two books. If I were asked to write a third book, I don’t know if I would say yes or no. I would have to discern. I would have to listen to know what would give me life in this season. Right now, starting a book feels less appealing than the invitation to notice the myriad of transcendencies just out my door. Still, I have said yes to the invitation to write some “shorts” on spiritual practices for Gifted for Leadership. These short articles might leave me time to dabble in the transcendencies. But how did I come to the “yes?”
Saying yes is part of my nature. (Saying no is part of my husband’s nature). I came from the womb saying yes. It is a congenital propensity. My mother says I said yes to everything. Yes to climbing corn cribs; yes to hauling my brother onto farm equipment; yes to putting him under the gasoline spigot; yes to filling his overall pockets with eggs from the chickens. It hasn’t changed. I still don’t want to miss out.
Have you heard of the acronym FOMO? Fear of Missing Out? A chaplain at Harvard told me FOMO accounted for the compulsive busyness of students and faculty. I suspect FOMO fuels more than students and faculty. It fuels “yeses” of every possible ilk. FOMO keeps us at it. We accept every invitation we get. We burn the candle at both ends. We strive, we work, we travel, we win so we can say we’ve been there and done that. We have lived.
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May 3, 2012Letting My True Self Lead
My ministry is more powerful when I can be the person God made me to be
I would sit on our front porch, my lap filled with jean cutoffs and a bundle of embroidery threads. For hours I’d create sunflowers, peace signs, and butterflies across a canvas of Levi blue.
Back then I remember returning home stoned, to my family seated at the dinner table, “Leave It to Beaver” style, with my empty chair waiting. As I sat, I hoped against hope that my friends told the truth when they insisted that, unlike cigarettes, marijuana smoke was undetectable.
Last year, when a friend and I swapped rebellious-youth stories, I realized that when I stopped smoking pot, I stopped embroidering my jeans.
Creativity was a huge part of my childhood. I filled canvases with modern art and reams of wide-ruled notebook paper with Poe-like prose. Yet in my 14-year-old mind, when I came back to Jesus, I reasoned that I needed to flush my artistic bent down the toilet along with my stash. And the loss has taken a toll on what Thomas Merton might call my “true self”— the self that is made in God’s image to do what God has gifted me to do
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April 30, 20127 Ways Women Sabotage Their Leadership, Part 2
Understanding how we undermine ourselves
Over the years I have met many fantastic women leaders. I lean forward to hear their every word and am always grateful to spend a spare hour with them over a cup of coffee or on a walk. I have also met some not-so-great female leaders—the kind whose staffs live with a low-grade fear in their eyes. How can you ensure you fall into the first category and not the second?
This is the second in a two-part series on ways women can undermine themselves as female leaders:
Continue reading 7 Ways Women Sabotage Their Leadership, Part 2...
April 26, 20127 Ways Women Sabotage Their Leadership, Part 1
Understanding how we undermine ourselves
Over the years I have met many fantastic women leaders. I lean forward to hear their every word and am always grateful to spend a spare hour with them over a cup of coffee or on a walk. I have also met some not-so-great female leaders—the kind whose staffs live with a low-grade fear in their eyes. How can you ensure you fall into the first category and not the second?
Here are seven things that, if left unchecked, can undermine you as a female leader:
1. Allow “It’s because I’m a woman!” to slip into your thinking. This subtle shift in vocabulary can slide into our lives when we’re not paying attention and change the way we see ourselves and others. We can start to perceive criticism as discrimination due to gender when gender doesn’t have anything to do with the issue at hand.
Continue reading 7 Ways Women Sabotage Their Leadership, Part 1...
April 23, 2012How Joy Helps Us Discern God’s Will
The desires God puts in us bring us energy and life
Have you ever wondered how you could know God’s will or recognize God’s voice? Does God give you a brain and expect you to figure things out for yourself? Or does God have a blueprint—a Plan A—for your life that you can miss? Is Plan B just as good? How do you discern God’s movements in your life anyway?
I doubt there is one right answer to these questions because each of us has our own unique and unrepeatable relationship with the Divine. God spoke to Abraham and told him to pack up and leave his hometown. But he didn’t give a destination. Abraham seemed to wander out into the unknown without an argument. On the other hand, when God called Moses and gave him a destination (Egypt), Moses protested and had it out with God. God directed each of these men in a different way. And the Holy One’s presence went with both of them even though they both made mistakes that seemed to derail God’s plan from time to time.
The good news here is that human failure doesn’t stump God’s story—because God’s story is never just a story about Abraham or Moses or us. We all have parts to play. Parts that call for plenty of awareness, listening, and knowing how to say “yes” and “no” along the way. But we don’t have to make our way in fear. God has all the loose ends in his hands.
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April 18, 2012The Titanic Need for Authentic Leaders
How do you exercise authority without pretending you have it all together?
Sometimes I’m embarrassed to admit that I would rather jam out to My Chemical Romance than contemporary Christian music. “His Banner over Me,” frankly, gives me heart palpitations. But “Welcome to the Black Parade”? Now that preaches. This may seem inconsistent with my profession as a writer and professor of Christian spiritual formation and leadership, but actually, nothing could be more emblematic of the changing leadership paradigms in the church.
Out of the shadows of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Americans started looking for a new kind of leader. We’d already begun to move from the “control and command” style of leadership that characterized some of history’s greatest leaders—like Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher—toward a type of leadership that focused on people’s needs rather than the objectives of the leader. This transformational leadership style focused on modeling the way, enabling others to act, inspiring vision, and encouraging the hearts of followers.
But September 11 changed that. Frank Rich of the New York Times aptly summarized the national ethos: “On a day when countless children in America lost their fathers, the rest of us started searching for a father, too. When a nation is under siege, it wants someone to tell us what to do, to protect us from bullies, to tell us that everything's O.K. and that it's safe to go home now.”
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April 16, 2012The Longings of a New Generation of Women
Understanding why it’s time for a change
In recent times, the Web has been alive with banter about our generation of women and why we feel discontent with women’s ministry. I believe our discontentment comes from a good place, though at times we can be a mess about it. We are a reckless, passionate generation of women, who long to know Jesus and change the world.
For those of you who aren’t sure what all the fuss is about, maybe it would help for you to understand where we’re coming from. This is about more than dissatisfaction with the status quo. Here is what we are longing for:
Honesty.
We would rather be a wreck and honest than polished and plastic-feeling. We long to come together as broken sinners who all need Jesus. We don’t want to pretend.
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April 12, 2012Bra Straps, Battery Packs, and Other Divine Accoutrements
A true story for women in ministry
One Sunday before leading prayer in worship, it occurred to me that perhaps the most significant question of my entire ministry career was facing me that very morning. Standing in the sacristy (fancy word for room where the sacred stuff is kept), our Tech Guy mumbled a bit and nearly chewed off his lip with an anxious chomp, “Um, well, where do you want me to hook the battery pack?”
You see, I was sporting the wrong outfit to appear in front of the church that day. A hip little dress and what I thought were the most fantastic boots. But no belt, belt loops, or dress pants upon which to hook that little clip that keeps a lavalier microphone in place. Tech Guy and I stared at one another. He walked around me in a circle, now pursing those chewed-up lips like Clinton Kelly.
“Don’t you have anything else I can clip this too?” His raised eyebrow indicated he already knew the answer and I just had to catch up. “Shoot, well, um maybe my bra strap?” Tech Guy and I abruptly deflected our eyes to the battery pack now strangely laden with hints of sexual misconduct.
Continue reading Bra Straps, Battery Packs, and Other Divine Accoutrements...
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