Anita Lustrea, Shelly, Melinda Schmidt

Last Wednesday, September 23rd, I was the guest of Anita Lustrea and Melinda Schmidt on Midday Connection, broadcast from Chicago’s WMBI and the Moody network as we sat before a live audience in Holland, Michigan and taped a show celebrating the twentieth anniversary of network affiliate WGNB 89.3 FM. After a delicious lunch, we chatted through an overview of The Silent Seduction of Self-Talk: Conforming Deadly Thought Patterns to the Word of God and fielded questions from the studio audience.

For me, the experience was different from my typical radio interview, where I’m tucked away in my home office, away from eyes that can see I’m in sweatpants, a tee shirt, and that my hair resembles the mashed forms and varied heights of crop circles, but without the symmetry.

I’d prayed for a music stand so I could attempt to discreetly hide the notes that always surround me at home, for those moments when my Swiss-cheese memory gives out at inopportune moments. (On days when my brain lesion is kicking up, I can forget my husband Dan’s name, and I hate to sound stupid when I’m talking about my own book.) But, alas, no third music stand appeared, and God gave me the challenge of “working without a net” and connecting with the audience eye-to-eye.

It was glorious — because beneath my nagging doubts, I knew I could sit back and relax, knowing God always shows up and provides exactly what I need when I need it most, even directing the flow of each interview.

I felt like a kid who’d been given the keys to a candy story as I sat with a live studio audience and talked candidly face-to-face about our struggles with inner dialogues and my story of God’s transformation of my relationships, once I understood the true purpose and power of self-talk. I

t was also an amazing gift to be able to share my story of sexual abuse and my journey to forgiving the serial rapist who molested me as a young woman. The audience response indicated how deeply the wounds of life can cut and how pain shapes our self-talk.

Many thanks to Anita Lustrea, Melinda Schmidt and the Midday Connection team at WMBI for providing this opportunity. Congratulations and thanks to Jack Haveman and the WGNB family in west Michigan in their celebration of twenty years on the air.

We all can learn a lesson from Kanye West if we can humble ourselves enough to listen.

Recently, during the Video Music Awards, Kanye jumped onto the stage as Taylor Swift was giving her acceptance speech for receiving the Best Femal Video of the year award. Taking the microphone from Taylor’s hands, Kanye announced to a stunned audience that Beyonce was more deserving of the award. Within twenty-four hours, Kanye was making what appeared to be sincere apologies for his rash behavior, and he received a poised, immediate, and gracious acceptance from Taylor.

It would be easy to judge Kanye for such rude behavior, except for the fact that we’ve all been there. We’ve all grabbed something out of someone’s hands when we didn’t think they deserved it. We’ve all felt the while-hot heat rise in our hearts when, in our eyes, our loved ones have been ripped off or defrauded. We’ve all wanted to grab a microphone a time or two (or maybe more) and holler out to the world that life isn’t fair, that someone else is getting the accolades when they don’t truly deserve it.

Interestingly enough, Kanye’s experience may have given him a glimpse of his inner world. The celebrity gossip mag Gatecrasher on September 27. 2009 states that hip-hopper Kanye West hasn’t been his typical brash self of late. In recent events, he’s been “reserved, quiet, and humble . . .” Perhaps Kanye’s tuned in to his self-talk and started listening. Perhaps he’s searching out what motivated him to jump to the stage that day. Perhaps he’s looking beyond himself  to the power of his influence on others.

We all take to the stage in one way or another dozens of times a day. We just don’t want to admit it. And without the spiritual discipline of self-evaluation, we often remain unchanged and blind to the way the world sees us.

Thank you, Kanye, for helping us see ourselves. May we all be willing to look honestly at ourselves in our worst moments, seek forgiveness, and walk on with humbled hearts that press in to the grace of God.

This summer my eighty-eight-year-old father underwent open-heart surgery. After spending nearly a week in one of Michigan’s finest cardiac hospitals, Dad was transferred to nearby rehab center. As a family, we’d done our homework and had gathered recommendations regarding the facility’s quality of care, maintenance standards, and the staff’s medical and rehab expertise. 

So when Dad’s care during the first twenty-four hours turned out to be . . . um . . . . let’s just say, sub-par, I was not only disappointed, I was alarmed. My father’s life and health were on the line.

I could have thrown my arms up in a huff and berated the staff when we were ushered into a room that smelled like dirty socks. (Dad was later moved at my request.) I could have thrown a fit when I was asked to hike to rehab and retrieve footrests for a wheelchair after my father nearly collapsed from over-exertion because he hadn’t been issued a wheelchair. I could have screamed at the rehab worker who told me the facility didn’t have enough footrests to go around, and Dad might simply have to hold his legs in the air. I could have thrown a temper tantrum when the nursing staff didn’t respond to my father’s call light after fifteen minutes. And I could have given the staff a sample of my lung capacity when I was told I was five minutes over the designated reservation time when I requested to eat dinner in the dining room with Dad (I’d been busy attending to his toileting needs in the absence of staff).

Instead of screaming and berating, I smiled, took notes, jotted down the names of staff — including those who were performing their jobs well and deserved commendation – and placed a call to management the next day. I stated my concerns politely, with documentation of names and specific instances of safety risks, then asked the manager what steps would be taken to assure that my dad’s needs would be met appropriately in the future. I mentioned that the facility had come highly recommended by the medical facility that had discharged my father, but that I felt it was important for me to share my concerns regarding quality of care unless I saw immediate evidence of improvement in several key areas. I also identified several staff members that had cared for my father in a manner I felt deserved recognition. The manager of this facility thanked me profusely and kept me on the phone for more than a half an hour, probing into the details of my experience. It was obvious that his desire was to provide excellent service for residents and their families, and he wanted to address key concerns. In the end, my family chose to keep my dad at this facility, when our impression after the first twenty-four hours had been to run for our lives.

As caregiving advocates, we cannot afford the luxury of letting off steam or ventilating our emotions when our responsibility is to stand in the gap for our loved ones. I believe that the caregiving advocate fulfills their role most effectively when they are –

Articulate:  Caregiving advocates must be more than communicators. We must be able to clearly articulate ideas, information, emotions, fears, and concerns in spite of our feelings of frustration. We need to hone the art of listening and speaking.

Decisive:  As advocates, we often stand in the gap as the responsible party for making decisions. Because those decisions are so often tough, it’s our responsibility to wisely gather and weigh information within the context of its life-changing implications for our loved ones.

Vigilant:  Vigilance includes many areas for the caregiver: the  caregiving environment; medications; our loved one’s physical, emotional, and social changes. If the one we care for is in a nursing home setting, be sure to drop in frequently, on all shifts, and to be watchful regarding the details. Report concerns immediately and document your reports.

Observant:  Watch for details and keep a notebook if you need to. Know the names of staff members and the shifts that they work. Be familiar with the details of your loved one’s surroundings.

Capable: Not everyone should shoulder the responsibilities of a caregiver. The task requires enormous emotional and physical energy. Consider who in your family may be the most capable for the task, recognizing that the role may need to be shared.

Appreciative: Show your appreciation for those who extend hands of care to your loved ones — not only to those in day-to-day contact, but to administrators and maintenance crews. Don’t be the squeaky wheel whose voice is only heard to express a complaint.

Teachable: The caregiving journey is long and difficult, and a teachable spirit will carry a caregiving through to the end. Be willing to listen and learn — from doctors, hospice workers, caregivers, family members, your pastor and church family.

Envoy: An envoy is someone who creates connections and paves the way. Your role as a caregiving advocate is to create the smoothest possible path for your loved one. Listen to their concerns and fears. Give them a voice. You stand in the gap for them, in a place of honor, extending Jesus’ hands of love.

The Flower of Grass

The moment I picked up The Flower of Grass, I was intrigued. The impressionistic watercolor cover drew me, but also the tagline: A powerful novel of a prodigal’s return. The mother of a prodigal, I wondered what the book might resurrect of my own emotional journey.

The Flower of Grass is an introspective yet engaging contemporary Christian novel. Written in a hauntingly lyrical, poetic style, James Robinson draws readers into an artfully spun web of emotional intricacy. John Allen returns to his small southern home town after the death of his alcoholic, abusive father. John’s been gone for sixteen years and returns to make amends with his responsible and care-worn sister, with his dropout younger brother, and to face the love he abandoned as a teenager. Characters, torn by the circumstances of life, do not face easy decisions. Loved ones die painful and agonizing deaths. The dreams they envision are torn from their hands by those who once filled their hearts with promise. Fathers abuse them. Lovers betray them.

Through incisive  insight and vivid imagery, this story paints portraits of the complexity of broken relationships, alcoholism, fidelity, and whether or not people can find hope in a world where fathers betray and abuse, and lovers walk out the door and never return. I recommend this book for anyone who has been a prodigal, who has known a prodigal, who has known failure, despair, desperation, betrayal, or lost love.

While not overly religious, The Flower of Grass presents a message of hope anchored to the biblical God of hope. The book makes use of limited profanity in keeping with the characters’ personalities and struggles. I recommend it to men and women interested in powerful fiction that digs to the roots of our human struggle with faith and our fallen nature.

The conversation was frustrating. A friend was describing to me how someone close to them had treated them unfairly.

“The next time this comes up, I’m going to dish back to them some of what they just handed out to me.”

“Do you think that’s the biblical thing to do?” I asked. “It might seem like the logical thing or the reasonable thing or the the thing you feel justified in doing, but do you think it’s the biblical thing?”

“Were you even listening?” my friend challenged. “Did you hear how he treated me?”

“What I’m asking you to do right now,” I countered, ” is to listen to yourself. I know you were raised in the church. You know what the Bible says. You say you believe it. But can you tell me where your faith actually intersects with your life on a day-to-day basis? Because right now you’re justifying living by a standard of fairness, rather than the standard we’re called to as believers. Start asking yourself some tough questions about what your life says about what you really believe.”

I thought about ducking as I waited for the swing. It never came. What did come was a prolonged silence.

The reality of our faith collides with the injustice of a sinful world in our self-talk–the place where we decide whether or not to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength and to love others as ourselves.

Even when life stinks. Perhaps even looking for ways to love God and others most when life stinks.

After all, isn’t that what Jesus did?

done

View the promotional video for The Silent Seduction of Self-Talk: Conforming Deadly Thought Patterns to the Word of God, and learn more about Shelly’s newest book that’s garnering attention from growing numbers of men and women as a life-changing resource for spiritual formation.

Recently, The Silent Seduction of Self-Talk has been ranked within the top ten books on Christian ethics and the top twenty books for Christian women on Amazon.

Tomorrow, July 5th, at 10:05, my interview with Shelley Irwin will air on GVSU stations 88.5 FM and 1480 AM. Shelley and I cover a broad range of subjects regarding my books and my writing, among them, “writing in the cracks”–the approach to writing that helped me complete five books in three years, in addition to contributing to three Bibles, while taking care of my dying father-in-law and my dying mother in my home.

Let me say quite honestly that this accomplishment does not make me more remarkable than most of my caregiving friends or more prolific than a great many of my writing friends. In fact, since joining great organizations such as the Advanced Writers’ and Speakers’ Association and the Christian Authors’ Network, I’ve come to recognize just how many caregiving authors balance similar lives. And most of us share a similar approach to our writing: we do it in odd places, at odd times, using whatever means possible at our disposal, and we can slip into writing mode at the blink of an eye.

So here are a few tips for how I do it. They’re simply a window into my writing life. (And they may give you an idea why it’s hard for me to flip off the writing switch when I go to bed at night.)

1.  Always carry a notebook, although I discourage propping it on the wheel of your car and drafting chapters as you drive down the road. A voice recorder works better for this. But for those moments when you don’t want to look like a CIA agent while you’re waiting for your dentist to call you in for your appointment, the notebook works better.

2.  Keep a notebook and pen at the side of your bed for capturing those brilliant ideas that come to you just as you’re drifting off to sleep, then keep you awake for three hours. And a bedside lamp that doesn’t throw too much light on your spouse’s face.

3.  Always carry a voice recorder. It can keep you out of ditches on the back roads of Illinois when the sudden urge to draft a chapter overwhelms you. In theory, of course.

4.  Get up just a little bit earlier in the morning and draft a few pages. Yeah, really. Don’t give me that look. You’re talking to a 50+ woman who’s AT the YMCA at 5:00 am.

5.  Use the time to write when you’re supposed to be doing other things. For instance, last night Dan and I went to a concert that didn’t really hit my blesser button. So I smiled sweetly and slipped off into novel land. I brainstormed scenes and created settings. By the time the concert was over, I’d come up with a few good reasons to grab my notebook.

6.  On long driving trips, take the computer and write. This works best when someone else is at the wheel. But when my husband and I recently drove from Michigan to Maine and back, I plugged my computer into the lighter of our car and drafted my way across the USA.

7.  Use your environment. Every day is an opportunity for research. Several months ago I accompanied dear friends to a medical center. During our visits there, I noticed a precious woman who regularly stocked the coffee area in the lobby. I immediately fell in love with her and decided to incorporate a version of her into one of my novels.

Just this week, a patient at my chiropractor’s office was running late. He and his family came tearing into the parking lot and poured out of their car like circus clowns before entering the waiting room bellowing and arguing at one another. He left his vehicle angled across two parking spaces, two feet from the curb. I filed the entire scene away in my mind for future reference.

Use everyday life for research on characters, scenes, motivations. Keep your eyes open. Read the newspaper. Watch the evening news. Listen to your kids. You never know where you’ll find an important tidbit of piece of wisdom.

8.  Above everything, feed your passion for intimacy with God and live out the biblical truth you already know. I can honestly say I don’t have a whole lot to say, apart from what I’ve learned from Louie Konopka, Gary Heim, Tim Hoyt, Don Pearson, and the entire pastoral team at my church. If you don’t attend a church that’s helping to equip you to engage with life empowered by the Spirit of God on a day-by-day basis, give some serious thought to what the real problem may be. I can’t stand it when I can’t get to church because I know Louie or one of my pastors will be presenting truth that can intersect with my life and change me. This is the true power behing my writing. Worship is writing. Prayer is writing. Time with the people of God and time alone with God is writing.

Be listening Tuesday, July 7th, when I’ll be hosted on Midday Connection with Anita Lustrea at 12:00 noon CST on WMBI, 90.1 FM and 1110 AM. Then on Tuesday evening, I’ll be featured on Christian Devotions SPEAK UP! with host Marianne Jordan from 6:00-7:00 at www.blogtalkradio.com/Christian-Devotions. I truly appreciate these opportunities to speak about my speaking and writing ministries and newest releases, Ambushed by Grace: Help and Hope on the Caregiving Journey (Discovery House Publishers), and The Silent Seduction of Self-Talk: Conforming Deadly Thought Patterns to the Word of God (Moody Publishers).

Discovery House Publishers, 2008

 

 

Dad with Mom last year

This Monday, July 6, my dad will undergo open-heart surgery for the replacement of a valve blocked by significant stenosis. Dad is just days away from his eighty-eightth birthday, which puts him in a category of less than 10% of those who undergo open-heart surgery.

We’d appreciate your prayers for my father–Paul Burke–over the next few weeks. Dad loves the Lord, and he’s a realist who walks out his faith with a practicality reflected in the three -dollar shoes he scooped up at Valueland and has worn into moccasins. No complaints as he flutters to the floor in an unoxygenated slump. No victim mentality about his aches and pains or the loss of his wife. Just a tad too much bragging about his kids and grandkids and a fierce longing to see the world set right.

We love you, Dad. And we’ll be there beside you.

In recent days the world has been stunned by the deaths of popular American icons–Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and Michael Jackson. No matter where my TV remote takes me, I hear the latest updates on Jackson’s death or see tributes to the lives of these people who were came to know in some dimensions through the medium of entertainment.

As my self-talk spins out at the end of the day, I relate to these deaths. It’s been just nine months since my family lost my mother, and we’re awaiting open-heart surgery on my father within the next few weeks. We all struggle with fears of losing those we love, of isolation, of rejection, of falling victim to the unfairness of life. Is life a series of cosmic coincidences? How do I live in a world where sorrow is as much a part of everyday existence as joy?

In the final days of my mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, she slipped into a coma. Knowing how she loved music and Scripture, I sang and quoted the Bible to her. When I’d stop, Mom would squeeze my hand, gently urging me to continue. I sang to her for hours–for days, always pausing at the end of each song or verse to feel the pressure of her hand on mine.

In the past year or so I’ve learned to wait for that same pressure of the Spirit of God in my heart as I read Scripture and pray and meditate throughout the day. Sometimes the Words of Scripture themselves flow into my heart with God’s reassuring voice. At times they stir me with reassurance or prompt me to move forward to act. But my self-talk has become a continual cycle of prayer as I commune with God throughout the day–chatting, confessing, asking God to show me how to love others through him. I’ve learned that self-talk is an avenue of intimacy with God as I link my fears, heartbreak, dreams, and desires, to his heartbeat for my life.

Sorrow is part of the broken world we live in. Thank God we have a Savior who faced the final curtain call on our behalf. One day we’ll all look him in the eye and know our flash of time on earth wasn’t for fame or fortune. The purpose that pulls us through this life  is to walk in the image of God and in the beauty of purpose he ordained for us: loving him with all our heart, soul, and strength, and loving others as ourselves.

This Is It.