Laura Parker

“Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.

It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.

I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world. 
 
It is not the magnitude of our actions but the amount of love that is put into them that matters. 
Jesus said love one another. He didn’t say love the whole world.

Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus. 

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one. 

If you judge people, you have no time to love them. ”

-Mother Teresa

As  I look over these quotes, I am especially struck by the first– the challenge that love doesn’t need to be extraordinary, but that it is important to ”love without getting tired.”   It seems like so often in our world, and in my own assumptions, the dramatic gets applauded before the faithful.  And yet there is great value in God’s economy to loving sacrifically even

on a Tuesday

with the laundry

when no one notices

and you’re tired.

Have a favorite Mother Teresa quote to share?  Which of the above strikes you today? 

I had a hard day today.  Disappointment.  Miscommunication.  Delays.  Other than a super-cute new haircut (thanks, MB), things were a disaster. 

The chaos of moving overseas mixed with the weariness of parenting sick children left me feeling like I began the day,

behind.  

The list seemed overwhelming and the plan for the morning became quickly skewed by errands that took too long and bickering from the backseat.  And I can’t say that I handled it beautifully–I overindulged in icecream and eventually locked myself in the bathroom for a five-minute cry.  But here’s the thing–tonight was the Daddy-Daughter dance in our small town at the local Cultural Center.  It was an event we had anticipated since last year when she had the “best night of her entire life.”  We had bought the Daddy-shoes,  the girl-corsage, and the Goodwill-dress, and at 5:30 pm, I was faced with a choice.  Despite my own hard and exhausting day, my little girl had a date with her daddy and she needed me to curl her hair and find her shoes.  And I was reminded that

parenting does not afford me the luxury of wallowing.

In fact, any true relationship or genuine love doesn’t allow it either.

Wallowing in self-pity, a bad mood, and my own irritability is really just selfishness at it’s core.  It is in essence saying that my troubles are more important than your needs.  And that’s just not something I wanted to tell my six-year-old princess tonight.  

And I’m thankful I didn’t . . .

. . . because wallowing doesn’t make smiles like just getting over it does.   

Have any anti-wallowing tips you would like to share?  What works for you to get out of the pit?

Our good friend (you know who you are TZ) just gave us the history behind the song, “God of This City.”  Amazingly enough, it was written by a Christian band who happened to be playing in a brothel in the heart of THAILAND.  Amid toursits who were searching for empty pleasure and girls who had empty eyes, a band from Ireland wrote the song spontaneously on stage in this dark, dark place.  Check out the following three-minute accounting of the experience from Bluetree’s lead singer . . .

Ava shows her American Team Spirit . . .

29 Days until we leave the U.S. for Chiang Mai, Thailand.

5 plane tickets bought and paid for.

93% monthly support needs met.

100% basic outgoing expenses raised.

5 suitcases to pack.

1 12-month rental contract for our home, signed.

98 days ago that I was ready for winter to be over here in CO.

4 hard goodbyes already said.

13 years of  youth ministry, ending today.

1 car sold; 1 still to go.

128 items on the to-do list (a rough estimation, of course).

50 little Asian girls we are excited to meet and learn to love.

150% grateful for the generosity, prayers, and support people have given us.  

Friends, I am so sorry for the abrupt two-week quiet from this site.  Let me tell you the story of why . . .

A Most Important Skill.  I have never run a marathon.  In fact, running anywhere for 26 miles is not a feat I even remotely aspire to.  If I can make it through a half of Oprah on the treadmill, I feel pretty good.   And yet, I think I still recognize the single most important skill for any marathon runner, and its not how fast the timed-mile is nor is it the level of physical endurance the athlete possesses.  It’s not the quality of her tennis shoes or how many hours she has trained before the big race.  Without question, the most important task any runner must master is simply to stay on the right course.  An athlete can possess incredible stamina and speed, can have spent hours at the gym in training and have natural abilities, but if she is running towards a tree in the middle of a field instead of the actual finish line, she’s going to end up one very tired and very disappointed runner.

My Own Tree.  “Babe, we gotta get to bed,” he suggested at 11 o’clock, for the third time.

“One more minute, really,” I promised by the light of the computer screen.  “I am seriously almost finished with this graphic header.”

Two a.m. came and went, and still the laptop was open, and I was obsessing.  Desperately unable to lay down the unfinished task and refusing to accept less than perfection, I hid out in the quiet of night, feeding my ego with how professional my little blog looked.   My outlet of writing and developing websites had become an addiction.  Instead of me controlling it, it was controlling me.

And I awoke the next morning with a cloud of guilt and exhaustion shadowing my day.  I knew my computer-time had gotten out of balance, I knew I had disrespected my husband last night, and I knew I was becoming unhealthily consumed.  And that morning as I was supposed to be homeschooling my children, I heard the enticing whisper to pick it up, again.  The kids were playing well together, and the web-world became my own personal siren beckoning the ship of my focus towards it.  45-minutes later, I found myself  pounding out more nit-picky details on my blog and feeling quite proud of the graphic I had laboriously spent four hours on the night before.  And then I hit a button. 

The wrong button.

And everything I had been working on for the last several months on my blog, disappeared.  Formatting was gone, fonts were abstract, images were skewed, and the graphic that had consumed me the night before was completely erased.

The Gift of Discipline.  So there I found myself, diligently running a type of marathon.  But, over time, my feet had gotten off the right path.  Subtly, I had begun to take a small step left, then another and another, until I found myself that morning out of breath, sweaty with exertion, and looking up only to realize that I had been running to a tree in the middle of nowhere instead of to the finish line.  And I felt like hitting that wrong button was a gift from Jesus to me.  It was a dramatic discipline that revealed to me that I had gotten off the marked path and that I was running in the wrong direction.  My priorities had gotten mixed-up, and I had given control to an  inanimate object and the temporary candy it was feeding my soul.

Re-hab.  And, so, friends, I am in re-hab right now.  I am trying to re-learn what it means to maintain balance, to enjoy an outlet without allowing it to become an obsession, to stay on the right track.  I am humbled that my sight can quickly get fixed on the wrong things, and I am convicted that my choices oftentimes are motivated by “selfish ambition” instead of extravagant love.  I may write much less frequently in the future, and the graphics on this site may never reach perfection.  But, I am learning to be all right with that.  After all, there’s a price to be paid for any form of re-hab.

“He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he can’t lose.”  -jim elliott, martyred American missionary   

“God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in His holiness.  No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful.  Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.  Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees.  Make level paths for your feet.”  – bible, hebrews 12:10-12