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  • 01.25.2008 I Hate Myself
    11 Comments

    Why do I hate myself? Because I feel like I’ve sounded like a spoiled brat to a sweet girl whose home-literally-is the Pine Lake Motel. She really says it best in her blog: http://www.pinelakemotel.blogspot.com
    I want to genuinely apologize for belittling something that is rare in this country–a hardworking American family, taking pride in what God has entrusted them with. I am really sorry, I just never thought about the fact that it belonged to somebody. What nobody has said on either blog, is that the Pinelake has undergone a renovation since those pictures I posted on my blog. They painted the brick and added trusses made of thick dark wood. It truly looks good, but I didn’t add that in my first blog (because it seemed funnier not to clarify).

    Second, about the whole Altar Call “debate” going on in the comments: I was not trying to put up an argument for or against having altar calls in church service. I, honestly, don’t know where I stand on that issue. I think a little brotherly Christian discussion is good, as long as we all know that it’s not what matters at the end of the day. Spar on if you need to, but just keep it nice (like you have…I think). I actually had somebody walk up to me and, laughingly say, “Well you USED to be Baptist.”

    Whew! My first controversy and it all happened in the same day. I guess when you put “stuff” out there, you have to be willing to take what comes back to you 🙂



  • 01.23.2008 Altar Call
    15 Comments

    I’ve been a Christian for a long time and a Baptist even longer. Therefore, I have been present at a LOT of altar calls. I guess you all know what those are…the time when the preacher, at the end of the service, calls for anyone who would like to make a public profession of faith to come forward (people also go down to just kneel at the altar and pray, or ask the preacher questions, or join the church…). Basically, they all end with, “If the Lord’s leading, won’t you come today.”

    I think it may be a requirement in the Baptist church to do this after every meeting. Jeremiah’s grandfather was a Baptist preacher, and they even did it at his funeral! While I think that they are a good idea, there have definitely been revivals or seminars I’ve attended where I felt like the speaker basically guilted half the congregation to come forward :). I say all that to tell you, that oftentimes the preacher will ask anyone who has made a decision to pray with him, and then he’ll proceed to pray a prayer that ends with you being a believer. I pray that prayer EVERY time. Then they usually ask you to raise your hand or come forward if you prayed it, and I never do. You see, while I’ve had the Holy Spirit living in me for 17 years or so, I felt like it never hurt to ask Him to come in one more time. When somebody starts saying, “If you have ANY doubt that if you died driving home from here tonight, you would find yourself in the presence of the Lord, then you need to pray this prayer with me right now.”

    That’s some pressure, isn’t it? ANY DOUBT…ANY. Well, I am here to confess that I sometimes have felt doubt. Can this all really be real? Doesn’t it sound a little too good to be true, that the King of the Universe died a gruesome death, just so that I could spend eternity with him? I love magic and mystery, but I spend so much time telling myself that the books I read aren’t real, so could the Bible just be another elaborate story? These questions have never plagued me, but I have thought them. Therefore, when that preacher has said ANY DOUBT, I have always been ready to add a little more security to my promise.

    Then, Mom. I always thought that if God chose to take Mom, I would really start to struggle with those questions that have always wanted to creep into my heart. If one of my rocks of faith was wrong, what would happen to my own faith? I am here to proclaim to you that the exact opposite of what I believed would happen, has happened. Our God is beautiful and mysterious, we can never understand His ways, but He is also all-knowing. I believe that if he had healed Mom, miraculously, like I so desperately begged Him to do, then I would have had a quick fix. An adrenaline rush that probably would have lasted for a year or so, followed by a truly awesome story to share with others for the rest of my life. Now, those who saw the miracle first-hand would have hopefully believed, but do you think that every person I shared her story with on the street would have believed? To believe in a God who does miracles, you must first BELIEVE in God. My testimony could never be as convincing as the argument He’s already made for himself in His word.

    So, that was the hypothetical, but what’s the reality? The reality is that I sat in a church service last week, and I heard the guilt trip shpill at the end, and for the first time my heart didn’t quaver. A smile came across my face, and I thanked Jesus that I didn’t have to wonder any more. He has carried me through a raging fire, but He showed me how to tuck my face into the hollow of his neck, to shield me til we reached the other side. He’s put my feet back on the ground, but he’s still holding both of my hands and coaxing me forward. He’s become so real in my every-day, that I don’t have to be immersed in His word or prayer to feel His presence. He is real. He is dwelling within me. He has shown himself to be enough no matter how hot the fire. And now I can smile through those altar calls.



  • 01.18.2008 Jesus Gift
    20 Comments

    When someone that you love desperately is stripped from your life, aren’t you supposed to be left with only the sweet memories? I feel like this is what “they” say happens…I know that for me this has not been the case, and I didn’t really realize it until I received a surprise gift from Jesus.

    My Mom was a wonderful, beautiful, gifted woman of God, BUT she (like all of us) had her flaws. Like the way she loved food. I can remember being little and getting all “A’s” on my report card. The reward for this feat was being allowed to pick what restaurant the family would go out to for a celebration. I can still see Mom putting on her make-up in front of the bathroom mirror and convincing me that what I REALLY wanted was Red Lobster–just think about those buttery cheese biscuits, she said–and I should run downstairs quick and tell Dad before I changed my mind. There weren’t a whole lot of restaurants to choose from in Dothan at that time, and I think she was worried I would pick Taco Bell. You’d think this little manipulation would have gotten better with age, but she only got more particular. She spent a lot of time in Birmingham between doctor’s check-ups and treatments, and she NEVER left without a sumptuous meal. She might tell me that, “Oh, she didn’t care what we ate. Your pregnant Abby, why don’t you pick.” But as I listed one restaurant after another, that cute little nose of hers would squinch up in utter disdain until I named the place she’d been wanting all along. Never mind that it was the FishMarket and the THOUGHT (much less the smell) of fish at 12 weeks pregnant sent me running for the nearest restroom, it was what she wanted.

    Or, more seriously, there were the little jabs she could throw in, under the guise of helping me. There were few times she walked into our house, without a comment like, “Abby, we really need to clean out these closets” or “I don’t know how you can stand to leave those clean clothes piled up without folding them” or “Are you sure you can thaw chicken out in warm water like that?” or “You aren’t really going to spank her for that, are you?”

    So, unbeknownst to my conscious self, I was fighting off the pain of not having her, by focusing on the things she did that made me mad. I would feel a jabbing pain at the fear of Pace not remembering her Bebe, but a vision of that disdainfully squinched nose would pop into my head. Or I would ache to talk to her after a disagreement with Jeremiah, and those guilty feelings she used to impose would creep into my heart. In essence, I was losing who she was 99% of the time to the ugliness she displayed 1% of the time, in an effort to cope.

    So, on my last night in Dothan, I was foraging through a stack of notes on the kitchen counter. Suddenly, I see what looks like my name scribbled across the top of a sheet of paper in Mom’s handwriting, and I catch my breath. When I realized that it wasn’t really my name, and instead it was Alz. (I want you to realize here that Mom’s faith was so strong that some of the last notes she made were how to prevent Alzheimers 🙂 Here she was distended with cancer but worried about getting Alz. when she was 80), I was overcome with grief. I realized that I didn’t have anything that I could think of where I had my name written in her handwriting.

    I tucked the notes away, thankful for the little scraps with her handwriting and everyday notes like, “Roast started 5:33.” Then I headed back to my room to continue the mountain of packing. This is where Jesus jumped in. Besides the fact that He led me, there was no reason for me to walk over to the little tin bucket, tucked away under my nightstand, filled with random books from high school. I started flipping through the titles, and had laid aside a little notebook that I didn’t recognize, when I thought I might better check and just make sure there was nothing written in it. As it fell open in my lap, all I registered was my name peppered across the pages in the handwriting that I’d longed for.

    I flipped back to the first page and realized that it was a journal that Mom started in January 2000. I wept…hard as my heart was kindled by the joy of remembering her day-to-day. The errands she ran, movies she watched, chores she’d finished, and meals she’d planned. However, the true gift was even greater than these everyday reminders. That journal had begun as a record of her “mundane,” but it became an in-depth record of the sweet beginning of mine and Jeremiah’s relationship. As I cried and cherished every word, God reminded me who my mom really was. A best friend, who loved me so much that she took the time to chronicle every hand-hold, phone conversation, and kiss between me and my new boyfriend. A mom who didn’t tell me, but instead wrote down, how she and Dad knelt and prayed for us after we walked out the door to go on a date. A mom who listened to her excited 17 year-old daughter so closely that she could even recall in her journal that night the way I’d said Jeremiah put his hands in his pockets while he talked. As the love and memories welled in my heart, the realization of the bitterness I was creating was forced to the surface.

    Jesus led me from a place where I was clinging to a scrap of paper with Alz.–that sorta kinda looked like my name in Mom’s handwriting– to a place where I held a journal filled with not only my name, but her recollections on how THE love in my life began. She might have been overly opinionated about things that didn’t matter. She might have made me feel like my house wasn’t clean enough. But more than that, she loved me and celebrated my life fiercely, and I am thankful that Jesus gave me a tangible reminder of that.