Why We Need Deep Roots

I passed a young, beautiful tree that had been toppled in the thunderstorm that we had this morning. It surprised me because the storm was not that fierce. The Lord whispered to my heart, "Shawn, strong storms require deep roots. I know what I am doing. Be still and know that I am God." Psalm 46:10

The Two Worry-Free Days of the Week

"Take up shield and buckler;
arise and come to my aid.

Brandish spear and javelin
against those who pursue me. 
Say to my soul,
'I am your salvation.'"
Psalm 35:2-3 (New International Version)

I wanted to share this amazing devotional I read with you out of Springs in the Valley by L.B. Cowman. It has helped me to put in perspective all that is going on in this country and in my own life.

There are two golden days in the week, upon which, and about which, I never worry--two care-free days, kept sacredly free from fear and apprehension.

One of these days is Yesterday; yesterday, with its cares and frets, all its pains and aches, all its faults, mistakes and blunders, has passed forever beyond my recall. I cannot undo an act that I wrought; nor unsay a word that I said. All that it holds of my life, of wrong, regret, and sorrow, is in the hands of the Mighty Love that can bring honey out of the rock and sweetest waters out of the bitterest desert. Save for the beautiful memories--sweet and tender--that linger like the perfume of roses in the heart of the day that is gone, I have nothing to do with Yesterday. It was mine! It is God's!

And the other day that I do not worry about is Tomorrow; tomorrow, with all its possible adversities, its burdens, its perils, its large promise and poor performance, its failures and mistakes, is as far beyond my mastery as its dead sister, Yesterday. It is a day of God's. Its sun will rise in roseate splendor, or behind a mask of weeping clouds--but it will rise.

Until then, the same Love and Patience that held Yesterday holds Tomorrow. Save for the star of hope that gleams forever on the brow of Tomorrow, shining with tender promise into the heart of Today, I have no possession in that unborn day of grace. All else is in the safe keeping of the Infinite Love that is higher than the stars, wider than the skies, deeper than the seas. Tomorrow is God's day! It will be mine!

There is left for myself, then, but one day in the week--Today. Any man can fight the battles of Today! Any woman can carry the burdens of just one day! Any man can resist the temptations of Today! O, friends, it is when we willfully add the burdens of those two awful eternities--Yesterday and Tomorrow--such burdens as only the Mighty God can sustain--that we break down. It isn't the experience of Today that drives men mad. It is the remorse for something that happened Yesterday; the dread of what Tomorrow may disclose.

These are God's days! Leave them with Him!

Therefore, I think and I do, and I journey but one day at a time! That is the easy way. That is Man's Day. Dutifully I run my course and work my appointed task on that Day of ours. God--All-Mighty and All-Loving takes care of Yesterday and Tomorrow.

--Bob Burdette

All the tomorrows of our lives have to pass Him before they can get to us.

Jesus, take up your shield and buckler and arise! Come to my aid. Say to my soul, "I am your salvation!" Don't let me ears alone hear that, but the deepest part of my being where the terror of tomorrow lies and the regrets of my yesterdays fester. The enemy wants to hold me paralyzed. Please come to my rescue, my Jesus! I need You so desperately in the hours when my mind cannot shut off. Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I and be my Refuge, my High Tower. May I run to You and know that I am safe.

Is Love Worth the Risk?

My sister just delivered a ten pound, one ounce baby girl last Wednesday. She is absolutely gorgeous. As I sat holding her, I thought about how helpless she is and how her very life depends on her parents' love and care for her. My niece, like every other baby, came into this world with a God-given expectation to be loved. We all did.

And then life happens to us.

I grew up in an environment of continual goodbyes. It was a reality of being a missionary kid. Life was a revolving door through which people came in and out of constantly. Someone's departure or arrival was continually shaking up "normal" for me. I did not know how to love people and protect my heart from the deep scars burned on my soul from those goodbyes. Because of the small size of my community, the same people were in almost every part of my life. Graduations at the end of the school year meant that I may never again see those I said goodbye to. I still get a gnawing sense of dread when I hear "Pomp and Circumstance." I sat in the bleachers and bawled at my son's eighth grade graduation even though he wasn't leaving home for another four years. I am sure those around me thought I was being overly dramatic.

There was a slow and steady erosion going on inside me concerning my ability to love that I was not aware was happening. I married my husband seven years after my own high school graduation. The first time I was confronted head on with what had been hidden inside of me was when I attended a women's retreat as a very young mom. It was through the speaker's own transparency that her voice became my own. She had lost her father at a young age. Tragically, she decided she would marry a man whom she could love at arm's length. A good man, one who loved Jesus, but a man whom she had convinced herself she could survive losing if life ever took him away from her. She loved him, but never allowed herself to love the way her heart longed to love him.

Her words so perfectly summed up my own thinking about my marriage and, suddenly, I realized how I had tried to protect myself from the possibility of being crushed emotionally should I ever lose my husband. All eyes were on me as the sobs welled up out of a place in my soul that I did not know existed. I ran from the room to try to compose myself. The truth had penetrated the fortress I had unconsciously constucted to try to protect myself from the risk of loving and being hurt.

Loving at arm's length is one of the greatest tools used by Satan in our families. That mindset is selfish. It is cruel. It robs us of so much. It doesn't let us live fully with those who deserve to be loved with no self-protecting conditions placed on them--like our own children whose tender hearts can be easily and irreparably damaged without the grace of Christ. Those who are innocent are the most deeply hurt when we are convinced that loving them fully is too great a risk to us.

The Lord has been so patient with me, so very faithful, as He has taken my bruised and deceived heart and tenderly replaced the lies I had believed about loving deeply being too risky for my heart.

Is love worth the risk? I have asked the question a thousand times.

I am a person who needs to see that something is worth the risk before I try it myself. God the Father knew that. He knew Shawn Lantz would be born and that empathy would be the most powerful way to reach my scarred heart. And so He provided His perfect Son to a world that would reject Jesus Christ and not love Him back. Jesus endured betrayal, misunderstanding, unfathomable injustice, and was killed for loving those who were blind to the healing His love offered to their scarred and broken hearts.

Because Christ risked so much in loving me, I can love through His strength in those very areas where I used to shut down my heart. I can face the fear of rejection, goodbyes, and grieving deeply without walking away emotionally destroyed.

Is love worth the risk?

I am slowly learning the answer to that question is a resounding yes!

Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
¹³ By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. ¹⁴ And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵ Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. ¹⁶ So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. ¹⁷ By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. ¹⁹ We love because he first loved us.   1 John 4:11-19 (NKJV)

Living in a Saturday World

Have you had a season in your life when you felt as though you were undergoing a full-out satanic assault? Life is one mass of confusion, uncertainty, and full of fear. Although you may normally be an "up" person, one who tends to be hopeful, this time of life can be characterized by leaving you feeling depressed and hopeless. Many times you may wonder if God hears you or has forgotten you altogether. And if He has heard you, why, oh why, does He not come to your rescue?

Psalm 88 is a true picture of someone who is severely depressed and under attack from the enemy. There is no resolution in the psalm. That very fact brings me tremendous comfort that I am not the first person to feel this way. God knows and understands the confusion and gives permission for me to voice it.

We are in our sixth month of dealing with job loss for my husband. If someone had told me that it would have lasted this long in the beginning of the ordeal, I would have fainted on the spot. I could not have imagined anything, other than a severe illness or death of a loved one, being more frightening than that. The Lord has provided for us in ways I would have never dreamed or imagined, but my heart longs for stability again.

My husband will fly to California tomorrow to say goodbye to his brother who is being moved to hospice care soon. I have watched him deal with numbing sadness as the waves of grief have battered him. His brother's illness came on very suddenly. Rob has a sense of urgency to get there while his brother is still lucid. Death is cruel and ruthless.

Today is Saturday after the horror of Good Friday - the day that the stone on the tomb was still firmly in place. Two thousand years ago, the closest friends on earth to Jesus Christ were shocked and numb at the events that had happened just 24 hours before. The betrayal of one of their own had set off a chain of events that had devastated and shattered their expectations of what life with the Son of God would look like. Only two of the inner circle of Christ's friends, Peter and John, had the courage to stay and watch what would become of the One they knew as Messiah. The most horrific and unexpected scenario, one they had never imagined, played out as their beloved Friend was nailed to and died on a criminal's cross. Wasn't Jesus supposed to rule and reign as King? How could someone who was dead rule? Impossible. The despair that must have overwhelmed them is beyond my human comprehension. The crisis of faith that must have confronted them must have threatened to take their sanity.

We live in a Saturday world where the ravages of sin and the despair of the human condition seem to be the only true realities. We have no vision of what is to come because we do not comprehend what God is doing in, through, and for us. The promises of God seem to mock us as Satan screams mercilessly in our ear that we are fools for believing in a God that could let us go through what we are going through. Saturday is when Satan foolishly thought he had won. He had forgotten that Saturday would become Sunday.

Sunday, that glorious resurrection Sunday, is coming! And Satan knows it. He knows, better than I do, that God cannot be unfaithful to His promises to us, no matter what my Saturday world looks like. To those of us who have made Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord, setbacks are set-ups for God's glorious resurrection in our lives.

Satan is a defeated foe. Christ's death and resurrection have made a public spectacle of Satan and the demons. I must believe that and rely on the character of my faithful God when I am faced with an all-out satanic assault to try to make me doubt in my heavenly Father's care and everlasting love for me.

Sunday is coming!

That truth gives me courage to live in a Saturday world.



When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, ¹⁴ having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. ¹⁵ And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.      Colossians 2:13-15 (NIV)


We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. ⁴We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. ⁵ We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ.   2 Cor. 10:3-5 (NLT)


 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. ¹¹ Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. ¹² For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. ¹³ Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. ¹⁴ Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, ¹⁵ and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. ¹⁶ In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; ¹⁷ and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, ¹⁸ praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints.   Ephesians 6:10-18 (ESV)