As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.

~Proverbs 27:17 (NLT)

The thing is, I’ve never really liked cheerleaders. Maybe it was my all-girls-school upbringing where we were always encouraged to play the sport, rather than cheer on other, presumably male, athletes. Or maybe I just took one too many Women’s Studies classes in undergrad. Either way, I’ve never really been wild about the clapping, dancing, waving, pom-pom-wielding folks on the sidelines.

Until recently. The past couple of months have been fairly trying for me. I have been adjusting to a new work environment, learning a new area of law, and just not feeling so great about my ability to pull off the daily balancing act of being a working woman, a wife, mother and general co-manager of my household. On one particular day, I called my mother and was just in tears about one particular struggle I was having. After a brief “Mom?” to ensure it was her, I proceeded to unload all my heart’s trouble on her– brave, brave soul. After listening to an earful of my sobs and slobberings, my mother took a deep breath, and dived into the morass of my life.

With the skill of a trained therapist, my mother began to methodically ask questions, brainstorm, and make suggestions. She walked me through each possible solution step by step. She listened to my feedback, and gave additional suggestions and feedback of her own. She repeatedly told me that I was capable, that I could tackle this problem, that I could do it. By the end of the conversation, I had a plan and my confidence was restored. I felt so much better. (Thanks mom).

The other day, I was talking to one of my best friends about another challenge that seemed fairly insurmountable at the time. (I promise y’all, I have happy days and am usually fairly pleasant in my disposition!) She suggested prayer and fasting and said she would join along with me in doing so. Walking with me step by step.

There is so much value in having someone’s back. I wouldn’t know what to do if there weren’t people in my life who had mine. So often we all put on this tough exterior for the outside world. We put on this face that says we’re unflappable, unbothered, and tough as nails, and can get the job done. And there is certainly a place for that, I think. But there are definitely times when I’ve appreciated my cheerleaders, whether it’s been my husband, my mom or my best friends, who have come alongside and gave a rallying cry and encouraged me to keep it moving.

So, as it turns out, there is value in cheerleading. Who knew? Sending an encouraging text, a thoughtful email, or just a poignant conversation can help someone along the way. And why else are we here, if not to help each other?  Who have you done splits and a backflip for recently? Next time you think about it, or someone comes to mind, take a minute to mentally, (emphasis on mentally) put on your short little skirt and mid drift top and do back flips for someone. Tell your spouse they can achieve the goal they’ve set. Talk to your friends and make sure they’re not discouraged about whatever endeavor they’re participating in. Walk with a friend through their issues step by step. Tell them they can do it. Rah, rah, sis boom bah, and all that. It makes a world of a difference. 2,4, 6, 8, whom do we appreciate? (And I can’t believe I’m saying this): cheerleaders.

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. . . yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” ~Ecclesiastes 3: 11 First, let me just just address the obvious. Yes, …

Source: MAC by Any Other Name

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“He has made everything beautiful in its time. . . yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” ~Ecclesiastes 3: 11

First, let me just just address the obvious. Yes, it has been an incredibly long time since I posted. I feel like I should begin this post with “Cash Money Records takin’ over for the ’99” because I feel like that’s how long it’s been since I posted anything… However, I am back. A lot has been going on in the interim, namely, a new job! So excited about that. So it’s taken me a while to get my footing, but now that I have, I’m back and will return to posting more regularly, the Lord willing 🙂  Below are some thoughts I had a few weeks ago. Enjoy!

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“I just want foundation,” I found myself repeating in my  head. I looked mournfully at the MAC counter—an empty space in front of the register where a salesperson should have been. I glanced rather stoically at my feet where my one-year-old son had fallen out in a tantrum and had not yet gotten up. My eyes then traveled from my feet to my daughter, the three-year-old, standing beside me holding a bag of ice to her ear. I had arrived at daycare earlier that evening to find that her ear had swollen to mammoth proportions and was red and itchy.

Her ear reminded me of Will Smith’s ears and face when he got that food allergy in that movie with Eva Mendes. “What was it called?” I asked myself. “It’s that one where they go on a date on jet skis in the Hudson River,” I continued to think to myself. Drawing a blank on the movie title, I shifted my thoughts to the events of the day and how those events had landed me there, at the MAC counter, MAC-less.

I had left work an hour and a half earlier focused on a goal. I picked the kids up from daycare, drove directly home, gave my daughter some Benadryl and some ice, made quick PB&J sandwiches and headed out the door, determined to make it to the MAC counter before they closed. I had arrived to work that day sans foundation and my co-workers were looking at me like I had two heads.  I understood. I’m a person who wears makeup Monday through Friday, so to see me without it–to see the actual scars on my face, my uneven complexion–could be a little unsettling. My co-workers were used to seeing the illusion of perfection when it came to my skin, and dare I say, my life. But that particular morning, I was tired. I was late. And I just didn’t have the time or energy to put on the mask.

And really, I feel like that’s where God kind of has me right now. In my devotional time, I’ve been doing a study on finding my self-worth in Jesus. Through this study God has been showing me my inner scars and unbalanced, discolored places. Previously, I would get a peek of those areas and then quickly try to cover them up with the “foundation” of my life: my husband, kids and my profession. “See, aren’t we a perfect-looking family?” I’d ask the world around me. “No, there’s nothing wrong here. This lawyer-mommy-wife has it all together! I’ve got the career, handsome husband and beautiful kids to show for it.”

It’s one thing to put on makeup to enhance your face, your natural features. It’s quite another to put makeup on to completely transform who you are. (Think glam squad versus horror movie makeup artist). The Lord is now making me hold up the mirror to really examine myself without my foundation. I thought I was just enhancing my look, and the Lord is like “no, no, you thought you’re working on the set of The Walking Dead.” What a journey it’s been! And it ain’t over.

But in the process of washing off all of the caked layers of pretend perfection, I’ve discovered a gentle redeeming love and grace that allows me to look myself squarely in the face, observe my scars and discolorations, and call them good. I know that they are good because the Lord says so. I know that every scar and blemish has come from living, and is a testament to the hurt I’ve experienced (some of it self-inflicted). The scars are also a testament to God’s gentle love that has pulled me up and told me to continue on. Slowly but surely, God is showing me how to enhance, not mask. And that is foundation worth waiting on.

Dear friends, do you think you’ll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, “Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!” and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup—where does that get you? Isn’t it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense? –James 2:14-17 MSG

I’m notorious for praying like I don’t have two hands and two feet. Seriously. Every time I get ready to write a blog post, my prayer is always, “Lord, bless me with the words to say that will minister to and inspire others.” Sounds good, right?  But for Him to faithfully honor that prayer, I have to write–faithfully.

Take this post for instance; it was a good two or three weeks in the making. I believe God has called me to write this blog and to create weekly posts. I’ve been trying to work my way up to that, but if I’m going to be honest, I could put forth more effort where my consistency is concerned.  But while my blog collects dust between posts, my prayers are still going up. So the whole time I’m praying and asking God to bless this area of my life, and increase this area of my life, while neglecting the very area that He told me to tend to. If I believe I am supposed to be writing this blog, and I’m wanting him to do more in my life, then why am I not writing more?

I’m waiting on God to move and do things in my life, while simultaneously trying to ignore the fact that He’s asked me to do some things as well. It’s like I’m trying to have a staring contest with God, waiting to see who’s going to blink or move first. Who does that?  For the record, this post will probably be shorter than the others because I am, in a sense, yelling at myself. So glad you could bear witness.

In all seriousness though, this pattern of I-do-nothing-while-God-does-everything can’t be what He had in mind. Otherwise, why do I have a body? Why do I have a mind, a will and emotions? Because I’m supposed to be doing something, that’s why.

And you know what realization really prompted me to put my butt back in the chair and write? I could stay like this. Forever. If I know that God is calling me to do something and I don’t do it, I’m wasting my days. Let me give you another example, and just put all my business in the streets. Y’all know that’s what I do, anyway. I’ve asked God to increase the income of my household. Great. So, that’s my prayer. In the past, I’ve been not so great with money. I believe that God is asking me to do some specific things, one of which is to increase my financial literacy, before He blesses me with more money. Makes sense, right? Guess how quickly I’ve moved to pick up my Dave Ramsey book on money stuff? You guessed it: at. a. snail’s. pace. So I can sit up here and talk about how I’m just “waiting on the Lord” and feign a trial of endurance and patience, when really, God’s going through an actual trial of endurance and patience waiting on me. Fix it, Jesus.

After it’s all said and done, I have work to do, and I should get busy doing it. Lord, grant me the discipline, desire and tenacity to complete the things that you have called me to do. Amen.

So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law. 2 Listen! I, Paul, tell you this: If you are counting on circumcision to make y…

Source: That Time I Got It Wrong

So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law. ² Listen! I, Paul, tell you this: If you are counting on circumcision to make you right with God, then Christ will be of no benefit to you. ³ I’ll say it again. If you are trying to find favor with God by being circumcised, you must obey every regulation in the whole law of Moses. ⁴ For if you are trying to make yourselves right with God by keeping the law, you have been cut off from Christ! You have fallen away from God’s grace.   ~Galatians 5:1-4

I used to think that I had to work to earn God’s love. And it’s so funny that I would think that because growing up in church, I always heard the old folks say “salvation is free.” (And it is. Ephesians 2:8) I knew in my head that I didn’t have to do anything to earn salvation and redemption through Jesus, but Jesus’ love? That was a different story.

I had to work for Jesus’ love and approval. In my mind the two were equal. If I wanted the Lord to approve of me, and therefore love me, I had to work. So growing up, especially in my single, young adult years, I was at every church service. I was heavily involved in the young adult ministry and anything else Jesus-related that I could squeeze into my schedule. I wanted to please God. I wanted to show Him that I loved Him and hoped that in return He would love me.

I remember thinking when I was single that I had to walk out the single life in the exact. right. way. I didn’t even want to look at a guy the wrong way, for fear that God would be displeased with my actions. I wanted to show God that I loved him through my actions. I had to get it right all the time. I remember trying to check every box as I struggled to live the single life. I read every Michelle McKinney Hammond book I could get my hands on (which were GREAT, by the way), trying to make sure I was conducting myself the right way while I was single. If I wasn’t walking the single walk exactly how it had been drawn out for me in those books, then God would be upset with me, and wouldn’t love me as much. (And wouldn’t send me a man, I’m just gonna be honest. And I wanted a man!) But that thinking had me busy, and vexed, and scared to speak to any man who wasn’t already married. And I wasn’t very happy beneath the surface, and I didn’t even realize it.

As I reflect now, I realize that there’s nothing wrong with being involved in church and wanting to serve the Lord and his people, and wanting to behave in the way that God instructs me to. All those things are good. But in doing those things, my motive was wrong. And it was exhausting. Somewhere down the line, I got my wires crossed and thought that if I wasn’t at every service, if I wasn’t jam-packing every ounce of my schedule with Jesus-related events and being the good Christian single, then God wouldn’t love me. He wouldn’t bless me.

Recently, I have come to realize that the Lord loves me, just as I am. It’s so weird after all these years of being about Jesus to not have grasped that truth. God loves me even if I do nothing. He loves me and approves of me. He created me and thinks that I’m beautiful and good just as I am. I don’t have to work myself into a tizzy trying to prove to God that I am worthy of His love. That idea was mind-blowing to me. For so long I grappled with the verse at the beginning of the post. “What was I free from?” I used to ask myself. And even in reflecting now, I think that freedom that Paul is referring to, can be freedom from a lot of different things. But for me, it’s freedom from myself. I wanted to hold myself to an impossible standard. In my mind, I had to get it right all the time. And really, if I could do that, what would I need Jesus for?

If I’m going to really just lie on the therapeutic couch that this blog has become, I think I believed this version of God because it was one that I could control. If God really works this way in my mind, then I am in control of how much God loves me, and cares for me. But ultimately, I am not in control–Jesus is. Once I have received salvation, God’s love for me, his redemption, is not up to me. He’s already done it. I could literally plop down, sit cross-legged, and carve my name in the dirt all day, and He wouldn’t love me any less.

So now, with this new discovery, I have taken a minute to just relax and breathe and allow myself to be who I am. If I slip up and curse while I’m mad, it’s OK. The Lord’s grace covers me. If I don’t respond as I should to a co-worker or family member, or don’t act in just the right way towards someone, God won’t strike me down and turn his back on me. It sounds so extreme, but I really was caught up in this type of thinking for such a long time. There is freedom in excepting the salvation and grace of Christ.

I should want to speak in a way that encourages people, and behave in a way that is loving toward my co-workers and family members because that’s what the Lord wants and instructs me to do. But if I’m having a moment and get it wrong, it’s OK. There’s grace for that.

As an aside, this post was difficult for me to write because, in my mind, it doesn’t have that “knock your socks off” effect that my last post had.  But I’m finding out that God is not only in the major, in your face events, but He’s also in those everyday, quite lessons and revelations too. I love that about Him.

A few months ago, I was in a rather desperate place, really needing to see God move in my life. I needed to see something tangible to let me know that He heard me, and that my whispered prayers (an…

Source: The Hand of God

A few months ago, I was in a rather desperate place, really needing to see God move in my life. I needed to see something tangible to let me know that He heard me, and that my whispered prayers (and also screams and shouts) weren’t just futile attempts to cope with my pain. One day, while I was driving to work, I literally cried out to Him: “God, I need to see your hand!” Those were my exact words.

Now when I prayed–or rather, shouted–that prayer, I was expecting a particular response. Something like a phone call from one of my spiritually deep friends saying that God told them to tell me that He loved me, and that I was not forgotten. You know, something like that. Yeah, no. That’s not what happened at all.

I had left for lunch a few minutes early that day.  This is still the same day that I was shouting at God in the car. I was driving to Babies R Us to get stuff for my kids. As I was driving, I saw this young girl, late teens, early twenties maybe, walking along the side of the road, pushing her baby in an umbrella stroller. The road was rugged with no sidewalks, and as I was passing her, I saw the strain on her face as she tried to walk on the road without endangering her baby. Even as I drove by cautiously, I felt like my car was way too close to her stroller. And that’s what caught my attention.

It takes a whole lot for me to reach out to people I don’t know. That’s not a thing that I do–especially a stranger on the street. But that pained expression on her young face, seeing her struggle with that baby, it tugged at my heart. And I now know that heart tug was really the Holy Spirit tapping me on the shoulder.

I turned around in the middle of the street, rolled down my window, and posed a question to this young woman I didn’t know and had never seen before: “Excuse me ma’am. I know you don’t know me, but do you want a ride?” I asked, only half-confident that I was doing the right thing. “Yes!” she exclaimed without a moment’s hesitation. I could hear the relief in her voice.

I pulled over to the side of the road and helped her in. I have two kids. Her son in the stroller just happened to be about the same size as my son, and he fit ever so neatly into my son’s car seat. I folded up the umbrella stroller and placed it in my hatchback while she buckled her son into the car seat. We both got back in the car and I started to drive.

“Where are you headed?” I asked. “I’m headed to State Court. I have to pay a traffic ticket.” “Oh, I can take you there, no problem. I’m Whitney, by the way.” She introduced herself to me. I’ll call her Paige. We chatted during the short drive to State Court. She was a young, single mom who had moved down here from New Jersey. She had an unpaid parking ticket from back home that she forgot about. The ticket suspended her license, unbeknownst to her, which resulted in a ticket and her car being towed when she was stopped by the police down here in Georgia. She was working a minimum wage job, with no money to get the car out of impound, so there she was, walking to court to handle her ticket.

She was headed back to Jersey the next day to live with her mother who could give her more support with her son. She had some job interviews lined up in Jersey as well. Once she got a little money up and got back on her feet, she planned to come right back to Georgia to try it again.

We pulled up the courthouse. “I actually used to work in State Court,” I told her, “maybe I can help you. Do you know where you’re going?” “I have no idea,” she replied. I represented clients with misdemeanor cases in State Court for two years, so I knew the lay of the land. So we got out of the car, got the umbrella stroller, put baby in stroller, and headed into the courthouse. We located her designated courtroom on the screen in the lobby. It was the exact courtroom I was in before I stopped working in State Court and moved on to my present job. Imagine that.

As we rode the elevator up to the courtroom, I explained the courtroom procedure to Paige, the pet peeves of the judge, (one of which was children in the courtroom), and gave her general advice about how to handle her case. “It’s been a while since I’ve been here and there are a lot of new prosecutors,” I told her as I got off the elevator, “but maybe I’ll recognize a familiar face.”

As we walked into the waiting area outside of the courtroom, I looked through a conference room window and locked eyes with one of the prosecutors for that courtroom. And I knew her. I knew her well. She was talking with someone else at that moment, so we waited. Now, I was getting anxious. What was I going to say to the prosecutor? “Hey, girl! How are you? How’s the fam? Right, so I just picked up this complete stranger off the street and drove her here. Can you help her?”  

I laugh now, as I reflect on that moment, because that’s essentially what I said. After chatting it up, I explained the situation and told her that if there was anything she could do to help Paige, it would be so greatly appreciated. I won’t bore you with all of the mundane legal details of handling Paige’s case, but in the end, the prosecutor was such a huge help. Paige ended up getting her case dismissed and not having to pay any money at all. And the prosecutor wrapped up Paige’s case before lunch, so she didn’t even have to wait until her assigned 1:30 p.m. court time to handle her case. We got to the courthouse at about 11:30 a.m. We were finished by noon.

Paige and I exited the building. I was just shaking my head at this point. There was nothing I could really say. I was just in awe. We piled back into the car, baby and all, and I drove off, headed to her apartment. When I saw just how far she lived from the courthouse, I was blown away. During the 15-minute car ride,  I took in the route, all the way back to Paige’s apartment, just so I could get a feel for how long of a walk it really was. And it was a really long walk. An unimaginable, exhausting trek for a mom with a 13-month-old son in a flimsy umbrella stroller.

I pulled up in front of her building and asked if I could pray with her before she got out. She agreed and we prayed. She also lived on the very top floor (third or fourth level, maybe) of her building, so I helped her carry the stroller up the steps, while she carried her son. Once we got to her door, I wished her well and left.

I got back in my car, and just sat there and cried. I had seen the hand of God, but not in the way I was expecting. It was amazing. God used me to bless someone else, and blessed me in the process. I didn’t receive a reassuring word or a prophesy that day, but without a doubt, I had experienced God. The reassurance I felt from helping Paige was exactly what I had asked God for, and exactly what I needed. I had seen the hand of God, and it touched my heart.