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Now What?

HAVE TOOLS, WILL TRAVEL

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We only have today. Let us begin.

Mother Teresa

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

Philippians 1:6 ESV

When Jesus refers to us as sheep in John 10, I’m pretty sure it’s not a compliment. I don’t think he’s calling us cute, fluffy, snuggable creatures, but implying we’re rather needy, stupid animals with a tendency to wander off, who fall over and can’t get up without help, and who are utterly lost without him. I have to say that description fits me to a T.

I follow people and things that aren’t my shepherd, I go wandering off, and I get knocked off my feet, lying with my legs in the air and bleating helplessly for days.

Even when life in my little sheep world is good and happy, I need his rod and staff to guide me out of the safety of my sheep pen into wide-open pastures where there’s ample food and life to be had. How much more do we need our Shepherd when life is more tornados and tarantulas than rainbows and unicorns? Like sheep of little intelligence, we stay tucked in the safety of our sheep pens, unaware or unwilling to step out and discover what’s waiting outside. There’s a whole pasture with freedom to roam, breathe, frolic, and waggle our little sheep tails with glee. It’s in these wide-open spaces we find freedom and joy and laughter; it’s where we find the freshest grass, and where we get to be fully ourselves, fully alive, even if life doesn’t look like a Martha Stewart commercial.

Out into Wide-Open Spaces

The context of John 10:1–9 is Jesus’s invitation into wide-open pasture, and it’s his continued and constant call and encouragement to us because he’s always got more for us. He calls us out because he loves every one of his sheep—no matter how stupid or how far we wander off—and he hates to see us trampled and shipwrecked by life. He wants us to live fully alive, confident we are known, loved, and precious, seen, forgiven, and valued. Our Shepherd came so we may live abundantly, with abounding, overflowing life in him. He always has more for us, now and forever.

Now that you’ve been through all seven practices, I pray you’ve stepped out of your sheep pen and started to taste the fresh, succulent pasture of his life and breathe fresh air. That’s exciting and I can’t wait to hear about it. (Just email me, I promise to write back.)

But the Thief Will Come

I was locked in the loo, our flight was boarding, and I was kicking myself for having a green curry the night before. The thought of being strapped to a chair, unable to make a dash for the bathroom while being trapped in a small metal tube leaving the ground at speed only made things worse. I popped a couple of Imodium and prayed. These are my go-to remedies: prayer, Imodium, and Preparation H—the holy trinity of every rectal cancer survivor caught in an emergency.

My prayers were answered. I made it. No embarrassing explosions or mid-takeoff calls from the flight attendant for the woman in 24D to sit back down. Another bullet dodged.

I might be cancer-free, but rather annoyingly I’m not struggle-free. Life rarely is. Whether it’s the inconvenience of a replumbed digestive system or worrying about Dad’s PSA counts rising again, our challenge will always be to keep following Jesus out of the sheep pen day by day, often minute by minute. It’s not easy. Storms whip through our lives, scattering debris far and wide, and as soon as one storm passes through, the horizon darkens with the next ominous onslaught.

Right before he promises his disciples “real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of,” Jesus warns that the enemy will come to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10). Boy, did he nail it. How often is a better life snatched from our grasp as we discover Mum’s memory lapses are the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, or the ex-boyfriend we still love deeply is getting married? When fear steals our joy, doubts kill any remnant of trust we were clinging to, or grief destroys our hope? Not to mention the next hard thing waiting to slap us around.

The bad news is the enemy is a devious @#$%&! and doesn’t play fair.

The good news is the battle’s already been won.

Thanks to the cross we don’t fight for victory but from victory. Jesus’s death and resurrection mean the battle’s been won, once and for all, and we get to stand in victory with him. How great is that? Did you know you had that kind of power?

When Jesus made himself nothing, taking the nature of a servant and humbling himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross (see Phil. 2:6–8), he gave us the gift not only of salvation, eternal life, and abundant life but of victory in him. We have authority over Satan, the thief. On the cross Jesus defeated the enemy, and now Satan is just trying to do as much damage as he can in his final death throes—damage to you and me and the abundant life we’re living. So the bad news is there’ll always be another storm cloud brewing and a thief to watch out for. But the good news is that even as troubles just keep coming, God has more abundant life to give us and won’t stop calling us out into his pasture to receive it.

Our challenge will always be to keep on keeping on, to keep using the practices to live fully no matter what. They aren’t just full-life-building practices; they are enemy-destroying practices. So, friend, I want to encourage you to take these tools and fight for your birthright—the right to thrive, not just survive.

Pack Your Tool Kit and Go

My ostomy bag (or as I liked to call it, my poop bag) and I were inseparable for six months. It was a miracle of modern medicine, freeing me to walk, talk, and poop all at the same time. But for all its medical brilliance and convenience, my little bag came with one big downside. As I’ve said before, it was temperamental and tended to leak. Now, I could handle this when I was at home, but heading off in public was daunting and stressful.

A wise soul advised me to make a little emergency pack to carry with me in case of leaks. I chose a cute little makeup pouch and filled it with everything I needed to change the bag and freshen up after an explosive emergency or leak. This little kit gave me the confidence to get out and about, knowing I was equipped to deal with whatever smelly crisis befell me. Oh the joys of rectal cancer. I still carry an emergency kit with me today, but the ostomy supplies have been replaced with Imodium, Preparation H, flushable wipes, lip balm, and headphones (how they always end up in there I’ll never know).

Being told I had a tumor the size of a Double Stuf Oreo in my backside and my subsequent slow demise into pure survival mode were the catalysts to finding these seven practices and learning to squeeze the most out of life despite everything. Like my bathroom emergency kit, they now travel with me wherever I go.

They are one of the many ways I constantly try to follow my Shepherd out into the wider, more open spaces of my life where I know he will feed and fill me no matter what’s going on.

I use these practices pretty much every week, if not every day. Whether my world is mildly shaken, moderately stirred, or massively shattered, I whip them out to see which one I need for the job at hand. If I’m struggling with a friend who hurt my feelings, I dive into my bag for vulnerability and choosing brave. When our teenagers aren’t home and their curfew has come and gone, I dig deep to find trusting God and pray for the bonus of parenting wisdom. During my annual scans I lie there as the machine cranks around me and practice gratitude for God bringing me this far. When my uncle David died last year, leaving me with feelings more of longing and nostalgia than grief, I wondered what it would look like to embrace the journey through this tangle of sadness and yearning for my childhood instead of running away.

Using the practices rarely changes our external circumstances; instead, the shift is internal. We see things differently, noticing love and connection, paths through the maze, or an escaping smile or giggle that we previously held back. We begin to thrive where once we’d only survived. It’s not perfect (not even close), but that’s okay because now we begin to see God’s rubies where once there was only rubble.

If life really is 10 percent what happens to us and 90 percent how we react to it,1 and I believe it is, we have the power to influence at least 90 percent of how we experience life. That’s huge and terribly exciting. So, whatever comes our way, let’s react time and time again with these life-giving practices, and God will turn our less-than lives into the more-than lives he came to give us.

Use It or Lose It

It wasn’t surprising my shot missed the goal. What was surprising was my playing high school lacrosse again in my midforties. It felt so good—if I ignored my burning lungs and the lead in my quads. It turns out you can take the girl out of the game but not the game out of the girl.

I fell in love with lacrosse in my first year of secondary school (the equivalent of sixth grade here in the USA) when I sported a chocolate-brown gym skirt, uneven pigtails, and an innocent desire to fit in at a school where Jo and Claire had already blazed a rebellious trail. As I sat with my old wooden stick on the red London bus I took home from school each afternoon, I did my best to ignore the local high schoolers’ jokes about the butterfly net wedged at my feet.

Thirty years later I was back on the field as assistant varsity coach at our kids’ school, and that day I’d jumped at the chance to make up the numbers when the girls scrimmaged at the end of practice. The trouble was, my heart was keen, my flesh was willing, and I’d even studied the updated rules, but my skills were rusty—horribly rusty. Hence the missed shot. Did I mention it missed by a looooooong way?

Use it or lose it. That’s what experts say about fitness, speaking another language, and your local bookstore, and I can tell you it’s definitely true for lacrosse skills. As I thundered toward the goal, the defenders crashing in for a double-team just as we’d practiced, I knew what I needed to do: dodge, fake, and aim at the corners. Except I’d lost the reflex to do it without thinking, so it felt wooden and forced and I missed by a mile.

I’d hate for you to close the final chapter of this book and have the same be true for you. After all, you’ve made it this far, read all the way here, learned new mind-sets, made the practices your own, and worked through some pretty tough stuff. You can’t let that hard work go to waste. These practices are for every—yes, every—day, not just the really tough ones. If we leave them in the back of the closet along with our thin jeans and the boots we bought on sale because we loved the price tag more than the design, they’ll gather dust, forgotten. Then, when life’s crashing in on us, sticks raised and screaming loudly, we’ll forget how to use them. We’ll miss the goal and life will win.

So let’s pop these practices in our bags and set off into the world, equipped for anything. Whatever life sends crashing your way, big or small, you’ll be equipped to score.

Remember How Far You’ve Come

You know what I should have done? I should have asked you to take a snapshot of your life before you started this book so you could take another one today and compare the two.

I love pictures of me the year after my son James was born. I look like a pea. I’m completely round—my face so saucer-like it resembled a full moon when I smiled—and I remember what a baby I was in my faith, having only met Jesus a couple of years before. But that’s not why I love them. It’s not just the smile that creeps across my face as I see my now twenty-one-year-old son nestled in my arms, but I look at myself now and see how far I’ve come. How my faith has grown like Jack’s beanstalk and the fifty pounds have come and gone (well, almost). And like any good before and after comparison, it stirs up hope, encouragement, and most of all, motivation.

So let me ask you, what did life look like before you dived into this book? How did you feel when you cracked open the first pages? Tired, exhausted, and overwhelmed? Wondering how much more you could take and when this heartache would end? Skeptical there was more? Willing to try anything because, quite frankly, it couldn’t get much worse?

Now how do you feel? I’m not asking you to look at your circumstances and see if things have changed for the better (but that would be brilliant for sure). Rather, consider how connected you are to God and others and whether you look at life differently. Has what you believe to be true about yourself, God, and what this life can hold changed, even if diddly-squat has changed around you? Do you believe God has more for you? Have you started to taste life’s sweetness on the tip of your tongue amongst the bitter and sour of what you’ve been dealing with? Most of all, are you breathing again?

Take a moment to think about then and now. If you had an abundance-ometer, would it have risen? How are your joy, peace, comfort, and trust levels? Have your laughter, gratitude, and hope tanks filled up since you began? If they have, celebrate! Tell someone. Email me—I’d love to celebrate with you. Share it with the world or your dog. Mark your progress. Small wins matter and slowly build; every little bit counts.

I pray you dug up a ruby buried in the rubble of a relationship, a diagnosis, or another hard situation. That would be wonderful. Hold it up to the light, marvel at its beauty, and let it shine. Enjoy the gift it is. If you’ve found one, you can uncover more. If you’ve taken one relaxing, life-giving breath, you can take another.

Even if your current battle has no end in sight, or if you can see the next one heading down the tracks as this one leaves the station, please know you are loved, seen, precious, and not forgotten—by me or by God. You’ve got this because he’s got you. What a team you make. He loves you, is with you, will not leave you, and has abundant life for you now and always.

Remember, life doesn’t have to be pain-free to be full. Now go live it.

I am a Thriver, not just a survivor.

I know how to find more whenever life hands me less.

I have learned to breathe again.