Charlotte's Readers

I write Christian Romance, the Hallmark movie channel kind of story, without apology. At a writers’ conference, we had a discussion about the “unreality” of such offerings. I put forth the thesis that we have “too much” reality in life, and we want something perhaps less realistic, but more “happily ever after,” so we can dream of a better reality.

            My characters face troubles, in fact I portray heroes who “go through the Valley of Baca and make it a place of singing.”  Girls in crisis pregnancy, Missy Raines in Recovered and Free A man who was abused in foster care, Nick Costas in When I Am in Your Arms. An alcoholic who abandons his family and struggles to find his way home, Ian O’Malley in Recovered and Free. A woman who was sexually abused by her first husband and is ashamed she “failed,” because she through divorce, Lisa  and a grieving chaplain who was widowed, Bill Robinson, in Invisible Wounds.

            None of these characters had an easy life untouched by pain, but they all share the healing of love, passionate love. God created passion. He made us passionate creatures. He is passionate—passionate about the lost, the backslider, His creation. Sacred Passion, it’s His idea, and we are made in His image.

            As a mentor of young women in our Mothers of Preschoolers program since 1995, I teach young women that passion in marriage is a desirable and pleasurable necessity in marriage. I believe the marital union is sacred, but the marriage bed is undefiled. Truly believing that, I keep my characters sexually pure outside of marriage and sexually passionate once the vows are exchanged.

            Like fire, well-placed passion warms and delights, and ill-placed passion consumes and devours. Passion inside of marriage can be the “glue” that holds a marriage together. If we treat it as an unholy thing and throw it around, it can burn the home down.

            As passionate creatures, we both desire and need physical satisfaction. It is the third most powerful human drive, after thirst and hunger. Believing God designed this need to be fulfilled in the sacred estate of matrimony, we turn to our spouse. In the sexually licentious age in which we live, we are deluding ourselves to believe that more is better, and no commitment is necessary to enjoy “good sex.”  Thinking “liberation” is throwing off the shackles of “out-moded Puritanism,” and we have successfully achieved a fifty per cent divorce rate. We have left countless children shuttled between households that value sexual gratification over the security and joy of childhood. [I do not say that a man or woman should remain in abusive relationships that destroy them. I am pointing out that most divorce is scratching a momentary itch, refusing to work harder at being the adults in the home, and dishonoring our vows and covenants.]

            I am not naïve to believe this. I have lived it. I married in 1962. My husband is the father of all my children, and he is as committed to them as their mother. We have chosen to maintain our household through every storm and trial. “Happily ever after” doesn’t mean without work, sweat and tears, constant self-examination and the need to ask and give forgiveness or choosing to love when tough times come, but it is doable, and the blessings of shared history, shared family, security and, yes, passion, is a worthy goal.

God, our Creator, intended us for Passion–passion for God, for a noble cause, for a hobby, a vocation, or a lover. Sacred Passion is God’s gift, and His idea.

Followers of Jesus are filled with His passionate life, but even the natural man has passion, because we are created in God’s image, and He is passionate. Throughout our spiritual lives we experience varying levels in our devotion or passion toward God. At times His presence feels intimate, and we can scarcely breathe. Worship can lift us into His presence, or a stirring message, Depth of emotion can draw us into His arms. Walking through fear or loss, confusion or turmoil, we reach for Him Who is our strength, cling to Him and pour out our hearts to Him.

Every saint has known “dark nights of the soul,” when God’s presence is nowhere to be found and our hearts are dry. We lose interest in God, our vocations, perhaps in life itself, wondering if He even cares. But after we cling by blind faith, we come to a place where we realize he has remained faithful, even when we were faithless. We are i9ndeed carved on the palms of His hands. God is crazy about His kids!

Writers are a strange lot. We talk about our characters as if they were our friends-and perhaps they are, our best friends. I don’t just sleep with just anyone, and these, my companions, talk to me at night, waking me up, demanding a re-write, more detail, a closer look, another layer. Sometimes they let me off with a promise, but more often they stay in my head until I’m driven to attend to their demands.

As we approach Easter, many of us will be meditating on the Gospel stories of that period of time. The other day I stumbled upon the glorious morning when Mary went to the tomb brokenhearted. Through her tears, she didn’t recognize the man in the garden in till His beloved voice spoke her name,

“Mary.”

How could this be? It couldn’t be—but it was.

“Rabbi,” she said, incredulously.

And Jesus sent her on her way with this first post-resurrection evangelistic assignment: “Go tell the disciples . . . and Peter …” that He had risen.

And Peter. Why “And Peter?”

Peter was a disciple. In fact he had been one of the leaders of the twelve, the first to call Him Messiah: the Anointed One, the King for Whom Israel longed. (Only immediately thereafter to be called ‘Satan’ when the Lord rebuked him for his clumsy attempts to avert the cross.)

Why did Jesus say “and Peter?”

This little phrase has been marked many Bibles in my fifty year journey with Christ. It is one of my favorite little phrases, because I, too, am a Peter. I have denied Christ countless times: I’ve spoken too quickly, too thoughtlessly, too mindlessly, or I have not spoken at all, remaining silent in the name of keeping the peace, avoiding an argument, not offending.

I have known the shame of going over the incident in my mind again and again, weeping that I had denied my Lord, sure that I had caused Him pain, wondering if He, too, would turn His back on me.

And then that little phrases flashes  into my mind: “And Peter.”

“Tell my disciples . . . and Peter.”

And I know He knows my frame. He knows before the cock crows each day what I will say and do, and He hastens to assure me—not that it’s all right—but that He knew all along, and He still wants to make sure I know the Good News.

He is risen. And because He is risen, my sin is removed and in His Name, in the power of His Spirit, even my shadow can heal the sick. I can preach to thousands, travel to Rome, be crucified there.

I marvel at His love that reaches out to us in our most miserable times, when we are convicted of our sin and aware we are the worst of sinners, He reaches out to us in compassion. He remembers to tell us especially. He knows our unworthiness. He knows we are ashamed to lift our eyes to him. We have yelled at the precious babies He has given us. We not loved the husbands He chose for us. We have spoken unkind words, cruel words, and our thoughts—they’ve been even worse.

But we believe. Oh how desperately we believe, and we can remember another of His sayings to His disciples, this time to Thomas, who hadn’t seen His first appearance. Once again He knows our shame: though He was not visible, He knows Thomas said “Unless I see Him, I won’t believe.”

So He invites Thomas to come, reach your finger, look, reach your hand in My side. Then He adds those marvelous words “. . . because you have seen Me, you believe. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

We are that blessed company, we have not seen and yet believed, and I can hear Him say: Tell my disciples and Charlotte.”

Remember Elisha, who plowed with #twelve yoke of oxen? He was plowing hard ground!

As moms we can get caught up in plowing with twelve oxen and lose sight of the larger picture: we are serving God. Those little feet we wash are the feet of Jesus. Didn’t He say what we have done to the least of these we have done to Him? I remember once explaining that concept by telling a Christian friend I had sanctified diapers. She laughed at me. “Oh, Charlotte, you are too much!” she said.

I replied, “But I’m happier changing poopie diapers.”

Our work is done unto the Lord, whether in the home or in the marketplace. We aren’t just mom, or a secretary, or a plumber, we are #Jesus in disguise—His workmen and His witness. Our plows are our offering—and Elisha’s became that literally when he was called to lift his hand from the plow and follow the prophet. He burned the yokes and the animals as a burnt offering, forsook it all, and followed.

Thanks to God for the sacrifice of His Son, we’ll never have to offer our kids as burnt offerings, but a time will come when we have to let them go, we give them back to God, and we are called to plow other fields.

I want you to see that today’s  daily plowing, the plain old slogging it out, the doing of laundry, the mopping of floors, is not only our offering, it is our preparation.  We learn when we get blisters and the ox is stubborn, and the yoke shifts. We have to treat the blisters, train the ox and repair the yoke.

Did you ever think of Jesus as a carpenter for the first thirty years of his life? I bet tradesmen on their way to Nazareth would say to one another: “We’ll get that fixed in Nazareth, I know a carpenter there. . . .” His work spoke for itself: excellent. No shoddy work by the carpenter of Nazareth. Was it in the carpenter shop He first realized He could make all things new?

Today I can look back on the day my three year old crawled into bed early one morning and asked me why she always thought of me first. She was struggling to share with her brand new two-year-old sister we had recently adopted. I breathed a prayer for the Holy Spirit to give me an answer, and I explained about the sin disease we caught from our great-great-great grandfather Adam.  “Every man has that sin disease, and we all think of me first.”

“Jesus didn’t,” she replied, and I explained to her that Jesus was God’s Son, so He was born without the disease.

“I want to be more like Jesus,” she said, and when I told her He could live in her heart, she asked him to, right there. “Lord Jesus,” she said, “live in me.” Some days at the plows are magical days.

And nights, too—like the night I was singing one of my boys to sleep while worshiping God, and his little voice joined me.

Or the day Beth’s little sister placed her hand on my swollen belly and said “I wish I had grown in your tummy.”

Once again, God being my Help, I breathed a prayer. I moved her little hand to my heart and said, “You grew right here, Candace, in Mommy’s heart.”

Each of those mini-glimpses into the life of a mother are God-moments, eternal moments in themselves, but they are also learning moments, training moments. We think plowing is a chore—and it is—but when the Master says: “Come follow Me,” we are ready, because we have learned at the plow.

Now I sit in front of my computer day after day praying to communicate the Good News that Jesus is alive and He cares about us and all these moments make up who I am. The ungrateful husband, two-year old tantrums, the rebellious teenagers, they part of my history. I have slogged it out at the plow and learned. I have lived eternal moments in the daily grind—and you are, too—and it all has a purpose. God has a plan for you, and a future. Thank God for the plow!

Have you ever put yourself in the shoes of the fishermen who simply followed? Left their nets and their boats, their business and livelihood, and took off after an itinerant preacher?

When Elijah called Elisha, he burned his teams and their plows, revealing two things about him: he was a hard worker (twelve teams!) and he had a heart after God. He, too, abandoned his business.

We so blithely sing: “Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God,” but few of us truly do that. Joe went to Peru for ten days and came home to creature comforts. Most nights when I wash my face with a hot cloth, I say a prayer for those missionaries and indigenous pastors who give up those simple pleasures, and I feel a nagging that I’m not willing . . . .

I sit in front of my computer day after day praying to communicate the Good News that Jesus is alive and He cares about us. But I’m comfortable. The heat is on, food is plentiful (too much so!), and my computer is new–it even has an ergonomic keyboard!

No sacrifice this. Welcome to my world. But if the time comes when following Him does mean significant sacrifice, will we make that choice. God help us.

Joe and I are grateful to God for our place in life. We have health and finances enough to go and do. We recently returned from a trip to Duke Medical School where Joe volunteered, joining some other retired docs to help freshmen medical students prepare for their Physical Diagnosis test. He was impressed with the program, pulling in retired doctors to assist, the quality of the students, and their preparation–Duke is graduating good doctors. He had a grand time.

We made new friends, connected with old ones, and saw family in Durham and Fayetteville, N.C.

I worked well in the motel–the joys of being an author–have laptop, will travel–and I came home to good news: a contest entry submitted and accepted, and reassurance about contracts on the four-book series, the O’Malley Saga, for those followers of Missy O’Malley. Yes, Ian O’Malley, the Prodigal Father, does come home. (Read Recovered and Free to share the family’s struggles to forgive and move into new adventures in music.)

God brought us home safely through the snow–the drive was slow, but steady. Church services on Sunday were fabulous. Good to go, good to come home. Can’t get any better than this. Life affords us new opportunities.