Sara Hagerty's Blog

Coming to the end of a rich novel that accidentally changes your heart is like coming to the end of a part of your life that was good and beautiful and godly.

It feels wrong to have good things end.

Surely Eden starts right here and only continues until and through eternity, we might think. But having eternity written on our hearts means we have hues of heaven now but not its fullest expression.

In March 2021, I flew across the ocean to spend three days with a group of women—most of whom I didn’t know. We worshiped together, read His Word, belly laughed, and ate delicious food that we didn’t fix ourselves. We stayed up late and woke early and met with God … together.

It was strange—I expected almost nothing from this trip and was a bit reluctant to go (there is a high cost for the crew back home when Mama travels), yet elements of our time felt so holy I couldn’t give them words. He drew me away with these women and met each of us in unique ways there.

And we continued to meet every six months for three years. This “sisterhood” marked time for me. I didn’t know in April of 2021 that I was entering into one of the harder stretches of an already-hard season (in fact, when I sensed on that beach that God was leading me into a transition, I was quite sure the “hard” was lifting). Those twice-annual meetings were check-ins for my heart, alongside being bright lights in the middle of a long night for me. And these women made me laugh until I cried and pointed me to the One Bright Light.

In between, we prayed one another through new babies and new moves, weddings and funerals. I sent an SOS text for prayer during a crucible night for our family, and women dropped to their knees.

Things like this should go on forever, shouldn’t they?

When I was twenty, and there was talk of growing community in most of the circles I was in, the assumption was that we’d find our circle of friends early, be in the waiting room while the cord was cut, leave the back door unlocked for the exchange of kids from house to house, host one another’s kids’ bridal showers, and vacation together.

And while I’ve had one element of this with a handful of friends, another with a different set of friends, and a third with an even different set of friends, I still wonder if our youthfully-forged perception of this mythical never-broken-always-present-for-one-another community prevents us from seeing the God of good endings. (Or prevents us from seeing God as the end of all good things.)

This group of women was my cup of cold water in the desert: I needed laughter and tissues and healthy food and someone to sing the Word over me, and twice a year, I had that (amid dozens of hundreds of texts in between).

Why would we ever end something so good?

It’s a mystery, but it’s not my first.

I led a small group of eight women in my family room twice a month for almost six years. These women shared some of the hardest parts of their lives and showed up in each other’s dark hours … and then I felt led to end it. I felt a nudge from Him to shut the door at its emotional height.

It’s a mystery, but it’s not my first.

I was part of a small group we called the “fight club” (please erase any affiliation with the movie sharing the same title from your mind — we called it this because we would fight for one another’s hearts in God). Each of those women impacted how I saw God and myself. And … it ended.

This mystery of endings—each one different but communicating the same thing, like a bell on one long string—matures me.

While I have a few friends who have that rare but beautiful community of 30+ years of history — in which they really were in the waiting room on the hospital delivery floor of the same children for whom they hosted bridal showers — that is extremely rare. My 30 years of life and friendship have revealed that God can create those rare communities … and He also can bring to a close even the very best things.

God has “fixed all the boundaries of the earth … [he] made summer and winter.” (Psalm 74:17)

Even the long days of summer, when the creases between our toes always collect sand, and the sparkling covering of winter, when I don’t notice my weeds or dandelions and only see the blanket of white in my backyard, end. Year after year, they end.

As I look within, I’ve discovered that much of my fear of endings (as it relates to relational connections and the warmth of continuity in friendships and churches) is that I don’t trust that God will offer something out of the death I feel from an end.

If I’m honest, it’s a fear of being alone—and sometimes, it’s terrifying.

So, this free fall we experience when the best of things ends might actually be an opportunity to grow my trust in Him—the maker of endings and beginnings and the one who still knows my needs better than I know my own.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). I don’t learn this instinctually. I have to be taught by Him with my life.

As I said in The Gift of Limitations: 

He chooses the land’s end and where the rivulets form. He creates islands and inlets and peninsulas.

And sometimes, He ends the very best of things.

Said again: sometimes, he ends the very best of things.

{If you want to read more about endings — not just this current one I write about here, The Gift of Limitations is my favorite of all the books I’ve written … and endings, boundaries, and limits are what I write about more candidly inside those pages. The feedback I hear from y’all that have read it is blessing me deeply.}

The post When (really) good things end … appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

We all have unspoken fantasies about how we’ll live out our dreams, our calling … or our Easter celebration with our family. We don’t name them, but they take up space in our minds. They have a power of sorts. I wonder if the first day of school, the last day of school, or Christmas Eve might not feel so empty if I didn’t have those fantasies pinballing through my mind, unidentified.

I still dream that one day I’ll write a book from a mountain home, sitting in the sauna at night, sweating out my ideas, and hiking in the early mornings to prepare for a day’s labor with a view. (Except that books take me years to write … and I have a four-year-old who misses me when I’m away for two days.)

This morning, I imagined a quiet cup of chai with Nate, talking over today’s big event while the littles played quietly—forgetting that little kid squabbles always tend to happen on days with big events.

From book writing to planning for a family activity on a Saturday, my reach for the ideal setting has not (yet) course-corrected to match my actual days.

So here, I present to you the book I wrote with the dirt of earth underneath my fingernails, just released into the world today. (You can listen to the first chapter here, or download it here.)

In C.S. Lewis’ famous essay Learning in Wartime, he says, “If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun.”

What I used to think about as the upward and onward life — more ease, more certainty about the future related to the untouchable and unmovable things in my life, more surety of myself and others, et cetera, et cetera — is proving out of reach (and not just for the moms with seven kids). Friends in all corners of this country are fumbling; it’s wartime for many … facing cancer, losing parents, losing children, losing jobs, missing community and solid, trusted church leadership and even a safe place for their kids to go to school.

My last two years, combined with Lewis’ advice, tell me there is no better time to create beauty.

Lewis also says in his essay, “{every christian in university} must ask himself how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology…”

So I’m looking back on the two years I spent writing this book, which releases today, and realizing that what I did in the nooks and crannies of my life (assuredly not on the top of a mountain, but instead during little kid afternoon rest times, over weekends at a local hotel, and holed up in Nate’s office with my laptop and lukewarm takeout) wasn’t wasted time … but it was warfare.

Not in the traditional or spiritual sense that the word is colloquially used — but simple (according to Webster): a struggle between competing entities. There was one side of my life in these last two years that included profound and unexpected loss, surprising and pervasive sickness, and the disillusionment of having my actual life not match the life I thought I would be living at this stage. And then there was this other side …

… the early morning whispers from God with my Bible open and a break in the clouds, the friends who held my arms up when I thought the loss might consume me, the steady showing-up of God in the very small of my life, and …

… my writing this book.

The backdrop to my writing was less the snow-kissed mountains in the distance while I wrote, and more about the everyday arthritic-like pain of a life that feels constrained.

And now I wonder if some of the best of our creativity comes forth when we live less the life we dreamed of and more of the Matthew 16:25 wildly uncertain certainty.

So today, I offer you my act of warfare — my search for beauty. Somewhere in the middle of my grief and surprising pain, I had the thought to let myself feel His hand on my back … and write. Something about the “triviality” of this art felt necessary to find my way through.

Perhaps in the most challenging, most limited times, we were made … to amplify beauty.

{This book is my favorite of all that I’ve written. I’m thrilled to share it with you today. Though I did have that one weekend stint at a friend’s beautiful beach house, I mostly wrote this book in the dirty trenches within the war of life. (You may open your delivery package to find crumbled earth falling out from between the pages .)}

The post Creating in Wartime {so … I wrote a book} appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

When I was sixteen and a new believer, my eyes were always open for a miracle. I hadn’t looked for God over much of my life … and then, one day, I did. Then, looking became a part of my life. One of my friends told me how, as he wrestled with discovering if God was “real,” nearly every streetlight he parked under went out until one day, an entire parking lot of lights went dark as he pulled in. God breathed through the natural world to reach him.

Those were the days of miracles and not just miracle parking spots. I prayed for friends to come to know Jesus and they did. I asked for open doors and they opened.

God was everywhere … then.

And that early way of what I thought was book-of-Acts-living traveled with me. It wasn’t childish, it was childlike. But as my understanding of God and the Word and His role in my life grew with me, I’m not so sure my understanding of miracles did. While I lost some of the buoyant expectancy beautifully laced with childhood, I didn’t lose my perspective on the close-knit nature of God’s love and His willingness to move mountains just to reach me. God will move my mountain became my thinking.

You may know flavors of this: we get fixated upon one thing, one way, one path through. We show up for it each morning and fall asleep in its arms at night. And we call this the miracle. We liken it to childlike expectancy — God can move mountains. We’re like my four and seven-year-olds who perch themselves in our upstairs window seats scouring through the one break in the wintry trees for dad’s car coming home from work. “IT’S HIM!” Pause. “No wait .. not yet. But I see headlights, maybe this next car is him!”

We applaud others, like us, with faith like this — fixed on one thing.

All the while (I propose), God is often moving … a different mountain.

We consider ourselves to be young and wild and free, yet perhaps we’re more bound to a particular expression of God’s miraculous way than we’re willing to admit.

I lived here: full of faith for the shift. Of course, God wants to move here. The desire deep within me was good — it was for a good and right and holy thing. . . a “biblical” way. I considered Him to be celebrating my teeth-gritted faith.

But this particular mountain didn’t move.

And in the meantime, I created the exhaustion of my life: it was rooted in that celebrated, determined “faith.”

Some of what we think of as faith is deeply wearying to a soul that wasn’t meant for the specific kind of miracles we imagine.

But, as I sat perched, like my little girls, staring at that one single mountain for years — day and night, God was moving another behind me.

It turns out … God is everywhere.

And you might never have noticed it unless the mountain in front of you hadn’t moved when you wanted it to.

The post Redefining the Miracle appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

The phrase your dad or your coach told you when you were seven and standing on the side of the swimming pool on that 65-degree June morning during the first week of summer swim practice still plays in your head, doesn’t it?

Winners never quit, and quitters never win.

We create life pathologies from the lessons we learned before we were old enough to understand what the word discernment meant.

This email may be only for a few — you might just tuck it away for when you’re considering leaving a job or a friendship or a church or a neighborhood.

But I suspect I’m not the only one staring out my kitchen sink window with soap suds up to my elbows and wondering if it’s more than just my “quitter’s” heart making me think I need to lay something down. (I keep responding to myself like I’m that seven-year-old needing a quitters-never-win pep-talk).

Taking a break from pursuing that one relationship that feels one-sided … letting your child quit the sport you’ve invested years in helping them win … moving away from a volunteer role that was wildly fulfilling (until it wasn’t anymore) … ending a long-held family tradition — these still elicit the same feelings.

I felt the same about leaving a city as I did about leaving a bi-weekly Bible study.

No quitting feels like winning.

I remember the year we left the ministry that I, months earlier, announced to a ballroom full of potential donors I’d be a part of it for the “rest of my life.” We lived on the sixty acres a friend owned — renting their home-adjacent cottage — and I walked the property, confused and coaching myself. I crossed a small stream that was rapid from the recent rain and, in a flash, sensed that my own waters needed new, fresh surges. It felt treasonous to consider leaving the only ministry I’d ever known — something I was sure I’d never do. But His nudge inside of me invited me to … gulp … quit.

And I walked the figurative road of shame (that was mostly in my mind), facing the ones who had once seemingly revered me for staying on a hard, ill-cleared, and potholed road. I imagined the conversations I might have with those who couldn’t see me apart from my involvement in this ministry — and the conversations they’d have, behind my back, about my commitment to God and to the most essential things in life. My shoulders slumped for months in response to the hypothetical opposition that was mostly in my head.

Because I quit.

Read that word aloud and consider all that comes to mind as you say it. Sure, I gave long notice and I prepared those who would be going after me, but I still couldn’t shake that I was a quitter.*

But is there never a time to say uncle? For many earnest believers, ascribing to our unnamed but deeply fortified pathology, no, there is never a good time to say uncle.

What about a God who said uncle, Himself, in that dark Friday night? Is there room for a death in the life of believers who still want to live in hope and life?

Our one-dimensional hope leaves us presuming that to live in and out of it, it has to be linear. Shouldn’t it be that we conceive of a dream or an ideal, walk out that ideal (against all odds and challenges), and then see the fruition of our labor … the fruition of our hope?

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Romans 5:3-5

But could the perseverance and endurance Paul talks about be less related to persevering (pushing) through an external circumstance and more related to what happens in the heart? Some of the most significant moments of suffering in my life have been tied to letting dreams go and enduring with God as they die.

You see (if we’re honest), many of us are working harder than we want to acknowledge to try and keep a dream afloat. We’re unable to sleep and living under headaches and body aches (the whispers of a body made by God that He uses to speak to us) and thinking God is leading us to hang on for dear life when maybe, just maybe, He might be saying … it’s time to let go.

I’ve had about four iterations of large-scale “uncles” and many smaller ones, when I hit the fence line at the edge of my property and, instead of mustering all my energy, day after day, to hurdle it (to pursue the dream) as I’d done since I was young, I decided instead to fall down at the post. To land in my yard. To find God right there. Me: a quitter, God: the one who resurrects things, His way.

None of us likes it when dreams die and hopes throttle. Not one of us imagines there could be any sort of joy in walking away from something to which we’ve given the whole of ourselves.

But is there a gift in coming to the end-limit of us … with eyes open, considering that it might be the start of a new story He is writing?

The post “Winners never quit, and quitters never win” and other lies appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

I’m old enough to remember when people didn’t come up with “a word for their year.” I remember a few writers deciding to name their year with a word, a decade and a half ago, and the rest of us in the Christian world followed suit. (Am I correct on that timing? Perhaps this has existed since the early church, but somehow it was not a part of my experience.)

I like the idea. It feels like an important distinction — marking one year as different from the next (even when they most often blend into one another). It builds anticipation, creates a listening heart, and allows us to look back and examine.

But it doesn’t have a spiritual magic. In the same way that I don’t think God is impressed by my Bible highlighters that don’t bleed through the pages, or the way I categorize my journal, or how I structure my Bible study, I’m not sure He’s waiting with bated breath to give me my word for the year.

But He enjoys me and I enjoy naming my year, so I suppose that’s enough.

Every year, just as the calendar turns, I spend twenty-four to thirty-six hours alone … exhaling the year before and preparing to inhale what’s ahead. I always stay in the same place: a half-mile walk to a city park with a rose garden and stretches of green pasture under large shade trees. In December, the rose bushes are bare and the fountains — in this City of Fountains where I live — are frozen over or covered, but something about their placement makes my winter walks there once a year magical.

This year, as I walked the circle around the park and watched my breath against the 30-degree winter grey, I prayed about my word — this naming game that God graciously entertains.

Psalm 23 danced through my mind. I’ve read it so many times that I’ve accidentally memorized it. Like a metronome, my feet moved and my mind recited each verse … slowly, steadily.

Perhaps this whole chapter will be my one word?

Then I stubbed my toe on restore.

Psalm 23:3 He restores my soul.

I want this after some years of tired living, tired navigating a hard that doesn’t seem like it will lift. And isn’t the word we have for the year so often what we want?

So I dismiss it, hoping for pixie dust or some such to help me name my year.

And I continue to recite Psalm 23 and that particular verse, now out loud. My lips move slower, struggling against the cold as my body shudders. And in so doing, restore becomes …

Re-story.

I say it outloud: “re-story.”

Ah! This is it, I think. The story from 2023 bled right into 2024; parts of the hard of my life aren’t lifting. New year, same story.

But what if it’s a new year, the same story … and a different narrator?

Same main characters, same set, but a slant on the plotline because the narrator has changed.

Re-story: new year, same story, new Storyteller.

Somehow I know God’s take on where I am and what I’m walking through is different than mine. He has a different angle.

Even if this isn’t your word (and, by golly, tell me if it is!) … I’ll let you borrow it as a perspective. You — living the same story in a new year: perhaps you, too, need a new narrator.

Perhaps you need to be re-storied or have your story, told back to you, by Another.

The post Re-story appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

Several days in, this new year has felt less like the turning of a page and more like a run-on sentence. Shouldn’t there be a period somewhere in here?

I’d like to demarcate an ending and declare a new beginning, but only the calendar tells me it’s so. It feels a bit like September 22nd — the calendar telling me it’s fall while my bare feet burn on the pavement in 93 degrees.

Sometimes, the new year only reminds me of what hasn’t changed and my propensity to lean towards a new-year-new-you-new-start-the-breakthrough perspective.

But why?

In an earlier season of our lives, Nate and I were introduced to concepts about God that felt alluring. Enticing. They matched scripture, had scripture to back them (a must for us), and were full of promise. If we followed these tenets, these absolutes, surely just around the corner was life and hope and wide, never-ending horizons. Who wouldn’t want those?

No, this wasn’t the prosperity gospel; we knew to avoid that. These concepts included shadow references of suffering and struggle, but the thumping heartbeat was victory. Ever-always victory. And a “right” way of living that excluded ones who didn’t subscribe … who didn’t “get it.” We were all in. (Mostly.)

And we were twenty-five.

Our twenties were the decade of thriving, reaching, and aspiring. In our twenties, we set goals, cast vision, and quietly judged those who lived quiet and seemingly inconsequential lives. We didn’t call our heart posture elitism, but we lived as the elite, having discovered secret truths about God that held the keys to near-perfect clarity about navigating all of life.

Though we’ve lived enough life between then and now to reveal a God of story and mystery and paradox and nuance (all things not available during a life when the thumping heartbeat is victory, always and now), when the new year turns I can find those old grooves in the road, unthinking. Surely, the promise of leaving behind the old, constraining, limiting ways is attractive.

Even if you hadn’t traveled the ideological paths I have, I suspect I’m not alone.

What is the “same” that you brought into the new year? 

New year …

… same difficult person in your life

… same challenging church situation

… same loneliness

… same ailing parent or ailing child

… same paycheck (just a bit more padding from the Christmas cash your mother-in-law gave you)

… same leak in the roof or leak in your car radiator

… same job that drains you or child that drains you or spouse that drains you

… same sickness you had last year

Of course, if you carry that same into your new year, you (like me) might be predisposed to reach for some kind of thinking — any kind of thinking — that offers a way out. Any way out.

But the problem is that we subtly (often accidentally) craft theologies around victory that leave little room for the lanky ten-year-old boy who lived 23 more years before he walked on that water.

So, can we name it: it feels like lame resignation to show up for a God who waited four hundred years to reveal Himself. Soooo, we put a shiny foil on that and the new year is the perfect time to imagine that all the old will — poof! — disappear. Who wouldn’t want a Disney-reality, that if you just believe, your old limits and restrictions and restraints — your old ceiling — will disappear?

Except … except …

… if there is something to be had in following the God who made His own human frame to need seven hours of sleep and three meals a day — a savior who got hungry and burped and bled — perhaps we’d forfeit the shiny foil and reach for something much more lasting.

Friends, your new year with the same you and the same limitations can absolutely be … new. 

(Just maybe not in the way you thought.)

We spend untold amounts of energy waiting, interceding, watching for the crossing over — the breakthrough — and forget that Jesus saved the world the same weekend His skin split open.

Perhaps the new of this year isn’t that your wayward child returns home (keep praying for that!) or you finally get invited into the next tier of leadership at your church or your company — that you’re finally seen for what you can do — but instead that you find your breath and your voice and your song (that you find God), right in the middle of the most confining and infuriating part of your life.

The older I get, the smaller my life becomes. My travel radius in a day or a year, my fully alert and energetic waking hours, my productivity, my accomplishments, the number of gourmet meals I cook or parties I host are decreasing … gah, I’m even losing my eyebrows. That list may make you depressed, or it may make you feel not alone. And, perhaps, hopeful because … as my life has gotten tighter, smaller, and more confined, my heart, my understanding of being wildly loved by God, and my confidence in that love has grown notably larger. Exponentially larger.

My days are small. My life felt more confined this past year than ever, yet my internal life feels full … of promise.

His skin with scars and once-pimples and tan lines was a part of the story. Similarly, your too-small paycheck and your sick parent and your struggling spouse are a part of the most painful, marvelous paradox.

Happy New Year (same you), friends.

{And because this is bubbling up inside of me — because I’m living what I just wrote here, real time — I wrote a separate email series for those of you who want a few-weeks’ run through in finding the marvelous part of that painful and joyful paradox of the limited life. It’s free. You can sign up here to read more like this and get a few videos from me in your inbox.}

Until next time,

Sara

The post New year … same you {when the line between a new year is blurry} appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

I’ve never been full of memory. I only have two dozen or so memories of my dad — one of the most influential people in my life, both before and after he died — all of which cycle through my mind as sounds and smells bring me back to girlhood. In one memory, we sat on the stiff-from-underuse matching couches in our living room. He was leaning back, arms stretched out across the back of the sofa as I often saw him sit, and he was coaching me. My dad, the forever coach. This time, not coaching my tennis stroke or my runner’s gait, but I remember him saying “acceptance.” If I fill out the sentence in my mind, it would be: part of growing through this moment is accepting what you cannot change, Sara.

I suspect we had that conversation dozens of times in that same spot. I imagine my dad talked with me a lot about “acceptance.”

My dad didn’t talk to me much about God. This wasn’t a Biblical exegesis on the importance of accepting God’s plan for my life. He’d lived some hard years, and more would come — this was his speech to his own heart that he shared with me.

But my teenage ears listened without absorption. I didn’t really believe him. This was his speech to a crowd that I valued but couldn’t receive. I had decades ahead of me to change my boyfriend and change my hairstyle, and change the world. “Acceptance” felt like the weaker road.

But this past winter, I read these words from James and knew that God first whispered it to me all those years ago through my dad: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything” (James 1:2-4).

James didn’t say, “Accept your lot,” … but he did.

Because to consider trials a joy, we must first stop trying to change them.

You see, three decades into following God, I see a trend. As practical, technological limitations melt away, so does our understanding of how God limits us.

I used to call my best friend several times a day to reach her at home, and sometimes, even that didn’t mean I could talk to her. She had siblings in line to use the phone. I set a time in my schedule to drive twenty-three minutes to the grocery to pick up what I needed for dinner. Two-and-a-half hours later, I’d have food for our week. Today, I can see which grocery has the quickest Instacart drop-off to my front door. I ordered party favors for a kid’s birthday yesterday, and they arrived at my door today. I have access to more people, resources, and time in a day than I ever did two decades ago. There are now life hacks for almost all of my “everyday trials.”

The perceived value of experiencing “trials of many kinds” is mostly lost in the furious energy we put forth to avoid them.

This, coupled with a theology of God’s victorious abilities to conquer all, and you might just be like I was last winter reading this verse … bereft that the thing I wanted most (the good and beautiful and right thing) was something I couldn’t yet have.

So we do this thing — we are tenacious that way— we work and re-work and work again to get what we want (mind you, I’m not talking about the fancy car or shoes … I mean the deeply beautiful things in our lives that we want). And then, when our plans aren’t working, we throw ourselves onto the floor in prayer. We text friends and mentors and prayer groups, desperate: would you ask God to move?

It’s a re-purposed tenacity, this prayerfulness I knew so well in my youth, but I am more curious about it as I get older.

Because what about when God says “no” — or, rather, when His silence speaks that for Him?

There is a step after “no,” but before James’s words, “consider it pure joy” (and potentially many steps) that seems to have been significantly formational in my walk with God and my penetrating-through-the-skin understanding of Him in His Word.

It’s acceptance.

My Father’s words came through my dad.

Acceptance.

I’ve shied from accepting any hard lot in my life. On the surface, I might say that it’s because I don’t want to lack that Hebrews 11:1 faith — I want to be sure of what I hope for. But deeper (and if I’m honest with myself), many days I fight with “faith” because I’d like to do anything I can to avoid walking through the trial that would come — in my heart and life — if God said “no” or “not yet.”

So for you, who are like I was when I read those promising words of James on a cold winter morning without much promise for change: there might be one (or three) steps between where you are now, fiercely fighting to change or to thwart the thing which might become one of the greater trials in your life if it doesn’t move. (For you who surely can’t pivot right to the “pure joy” that James speaks of from the crazy-wild tenacity of heart that has kept you fighting in life and prayer for this thing you so desperately want.)

It may be time to begin to accept it — to accept it as it is in this moment, unchanging. Accept that person, or that job, or that marriage, or that friendship, or that dwindling bank account, or that house with the dated wallpaper … just as it is.

Gulp.

Because on the other side of acceptance might just be the joy of which James speaks. Not a put-on-your-happy-face joy — not forced or forged from habit or will. But the joy of having the burden to make this thing move lifted. The joy of Him carrying what you’ve hoisted on your back and dragged through your days — what you’ve slept with and awakened to, what you’ve carried into work and back home to dinner … what hasn’t left you.

You might want to call me crazy and say: I can’t accept the waywardness of this child, I can’t accept this injustice at work, I can’t accept my husband who continues to choose work over family or my wife who manipulates me …

It feels wrong to the parts of us that know God can move mountains at a mere word.

But, really, in the quiet of our rooms and the dark of our hearts, we’re often responding to the parts of us that simply don’t want to suffer. Acceptance feels even more wrong to those parts.

So, with you, I cry. Acceptance isn’t initially a welcomed part of my walk with God. It surely doesn’t preach. The valley God has allowed in my life has felt harrowing at times. So wrong. Why would I choose to accept that?

And yet, something finally began to shift when I stopped looking for every way out of the valley — whether in action or in prayer — and began to accept what He gave me. This journey of months, or longer, produced …

Joy.

Not a plastic joy, not a Hallmark joy, not the habit of joy.

But like a child who tumbles over bramble and brushes to climb the tree in the forest — the one that gives her a view — there is a beautiful strength and wonder (and height-reaching) and even exhilaration that comes after acceptance.

Perhaps we call it hope.

The post Is it faithless to accept your lot? appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

When I was 27, and God said “no” through an empty womb, I had more life ahead of me than behind me—more dreams on the horizon than stories lived in grit (where dreams meet the road). Everything felt like possibility — every new friendship, every neighbor that moved in, every 5K running training group, or book club, or Thursday afternoon Bible study felt laden with potential.

Life held promise, when it felt like God broke His to me. So, in some ways, the “no” was cushioned by so many other potential “yes’s” in my life. It didn’t echo deep.

But here I am, 20 years later, realizing that a “no” from God feels much different when surrounded by a life with less felt potential. We’ve had friends lose spouses to death … or to another man or another woman. I’ve had friends stand at their child’s gravesite and watched children stand at their mother’s gravesite. I’ve prayed friends through bankruptcy and cancer. When surrounded by more life behind me than (potentially) what is ahead, those “no’s” from God … they echo.

What do we do with ourselves when God says “no”?

Well, I know what we do, because I’ve done it — alongside many of you who’ve done the same: we wake up the next morning and fix our coffee in a daze and answer questions from our kids and drive them to their sports and we call our moms or dads to chat … all while feeling hollowed. We throw dinner parties and birthday parties and put on party faces on the sidelines of soccer games and party hats when our child turns six, not naming the ache but living underneath its thumb. Dazed. (And years or a decade like this — of not actively responding to the questions, emotions, and fears that come with a heavy “no” — produce lives that can look successful but which are vacant of true life.)

What do we do with ourselves when God says “no”?

After twenty months (and longer) of living one of the hardest “no’s” I’ve ever known — a “no” I never, ever anticipated — I’m looking back (with Nate), and here’s what we see:

I see my three-year-old and her response to “no.” Three seems to be the age when all of life’s desires culminate into unadulterated delight — pure glee — yet they also mingle with unfiltered emotion. (Let the reader understand.)

Her three is my 27 with a barren womb. I didn’t have profound loss, yet, in my landscape. My dad hadn’t died yet. This was a blip — a profoundly painful blip — but within my unspoken and unnamed worldview, then, all of life (mainly) was trending upwards. Much like with my three-year-old, tomorrow forgot yesterday’s sorrows. And thus, the profound sadness of not being able to bear a child stood on stage alone. I didn’t have to think about what all the losses of those nearest me and my own might mean for how I saw God. I had time to cry and a hands-free life, as this was in the days of thumbing the #1 three times to get a “C.” (I didn’t need to find time to cry.)

My questions of God were more near the surface, not calcified. So I asked them and lived them and experienced the roller-coaster of Psalm 30:5 tears and joy.

For my three-year-old Charlotte, “no” is hard. Perhaps harder than for any other of my children; she’s a determined one. One might call her a threenager, but we see underneath the surface a child with her gaze set on what she wants to do, who has great difficulty when her systems and plans are disrupted. This isn’t an email about parenting strategies; it’s about the human heart.

Charlotte hears no and she devolves, but it’s not too long before her next response: “Mommy, hold me. Daddy, hold me.” She tucks her curly head underneath my neck, wraps her left arm around my arm, and presses her body against mine. Sometimes, I can feel the fast flutter of her crestfallen heart. This child finds her calm wrapped tight in the one who delivered the “no.” And five minutes later … she’s digging her nubby fingers into the earth, searching for worms.

I did this better — I was more like Charlotte — when I was 27 and hearing “no.” A year ago, I told Nate, “I wrote a book about finding God in loss and yet here I am again, nearly fifteen years later, with an even greater ‘no,’ and I’m fumbling to find my way back there.” Fifteen years of life between that loss and this one means fifteen years less of the youthful optimism that fast-tracked that path. Fifteen years more funerals, more diagnoses, more “Did you hear that so-and-so got divorced.” Fifteen years more grit rubbed against my dreams.

This note isn’t just for the forty-somethings or fifty-somethings or sixty-somethings that have known more loss than you twenty-somethings — because all of life is fast-tracking toward loss in a way we didn’t conceive in the 90’s and early 2000’s. This note is for those of us who need reminding that the old path takes a little more time to find, but it’s the same:

Cry it out with God … but in His lap, with your head buried in His chest.

And you won’t regret the time spent there.

When I realized my no was a hard-no, possibly a no-never from God (gulp, tears flood my eyes as I type), I started not only to ask: What do we do with ourselves when God says a “no”? but also, is it possible for things to be “right” when they are not? … really, will I ever know peace or joy again while up against this “no”?

And I suppose I’m writing today to tell you that the answer I’m finding is … yes.

Because just like Charlotte, I’m finding that the same One who delivered a “no” can bring every inkling of myself into the safety that feels threatened by that “no.” God can say no, and yet at the same time give me that which I want most (which I thought would come from the “yes”), in Himself.

What a weird, wild concept: I mostly don’t realize that what I want most can be had in His lap, being held.

I was made to be held.

I come most alive when I’ve been held.

Life makes sense when I’ve let God wrap His arms around my life.

I find myself and God inside of His arms.

(And … and … I am most inclined to need His arms when He has told me no.)

So, I suppose this email has two parts: one is to say that some of you need to cry it out. You need to scream and cry and pout and pound God’s chest. Be a psalmist. We try to coach ourselves into a “right” response toward suffering when the best obedience and trust comes after a long, weepy, messy cry where we find God safe enough to handle and hold our big emotions.

And others of you, with tissues tucked in your couch pillows and mascara stains on your pillowcases — at the end of your tears and slowly, slowly starting to look for sunrise again — there’s a different kind of being held that happens for you, and for me. We’re here because we’ve cried it out on His chest, but the holding doesn’t end here. It’s here that we learn the story from His angle. It’s here that we start getting perspective. It’s here that the questions — though perhaps still without answers — can get turned into wisdom.

“And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.” I Peter 5:10

I am coming to terms with this: we can’t live fully alive in this life without the hard (the hard of hearing “no” from God) … and this hard is the seat from which the best of life begins.

The best wisdom, the best life-endurance, the greatest hopefulness and joy and peace and confidence and kindness and generosity — the things we all want most in life  — come out of what can happen after God says no, and we stay for a while in His lap.*

There is hope for you who are fielding a “no” … wild hope.

The post When God says “no” appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

I still remember where we were sitting on our olive green Craig’s-List-purchased couch (remember Craig’s List?) when she said to me, “I want a friend that is just like me. None of my friends are like me.”

She was eight, so I poked and discovered that “just like me” meant exactly as it sounded. They’d have the same interests, temperament, and favorite books. She expressed what many of us feel but rarely name or voice.

We want same.

Same feels safe. A known entity. Low risk and high affirmation of the things we care about most. We like a mirrored life.

When we redecorated our basement (after a pipe burst on Christmas Eve and sent us Santa Claus as an insurance agent), a friend helping me decorate said something like: Everyone is choosing the same look these days. You can get stools and couches that match the look you see in most new homes or … add pop and do it different.

Two months later, a friend showed me pictures of her newly redecorated basement: she had nearly the same stools and couch I wanted to purchase.

We like that mirrored life – it feels secure, cushioned, familiar. For example, charismatics like to share dinner with those who think and see like them, just as those in the reformed tradition may choose to circle up in a Bible study with those who think and see just like them.

All of us feel safe with same.

But Jesus prayed this when He prayed for us: “I … ask for those who will believe in me … that they may be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you” (John 17:21).

Could this mean that the ones who pray in tongues (and the ones who don’t), the ones who sprinkle baptize (and the ones who immerse), the ones who let women preach (and those who don’t) — that ALL of these are the ones for whom He prayed?

My examples could be much broader, and they’re not for a reason: I am suggesting here that perhaps the biblically orthodox* church across the street (that has different understandings of some of the more minor doctrines) might be one you can learn from.

{*We take orthodox from the original Greek and it means sound teaching. By biblically orthodox I mean: a broader church that clings to the historically-held tenets of the faith — we have these core, essential doctrines by which we stand. Beyond those, a secondary doctrine means “how it’s practiced.” The biblically orthodox church would share the same core doctrines of the faith, while (in theory) giving grace for the differences in how it’s practiced.}

I’m suggesting that there might be elements of your growth (and mine) that are stunted because, like my daughter once felt, we want friends who are just the same as us, and we’ve missed the heart of Jesus’ prayer. Or, rather, we wave at the attendees of those biblically orthodox churches across the street but surely wouldn’t want to learn from them.

More directly, we tolerate but we don’t receive.

Years spent walking through infertility, and at a time in our lives when we were straddling the road between two different biblically-orthodox streams, I was a magnet for input. In the same month that a friend suggested I finally accept that I’d never have biological children and receive the road God had chosen for me, another admonished me to fix my eyes onto the God of miracles.

Fifteen years later, I see the merit in both approaches.

If you read Every Bitter Thing is Sweet, you might remember the story of me standing in church and the days after that when I sensed God leading me to lay down my desires for a family. To let my dreams die. This was a significant turning point for me, to accept that my body was broken finally and to receive a road I never thought I’d have to walk. I found peace down that path. And, then, not too many years later, I woke up to the miraculous: two lines … too distinct lines. My body wasn’t supposed to do that, but He did.

I needed both whispers in my ear but at different times. (Some of you reading this are uncomfortable that I would receive one part of the advice or the other. Might I suggest that discomfort reflects our human reach for same-ness.)

A decade and a half later, Nate and I are walking through another profound loss. Because we’ve continued to toggle between both biblically-orthodox worlds (and many variations of them that include Bible-believing people), we have some friends suggesting a shift of circumstance (a miracle) may be tucked away in the days ahead and others whispering in our ears, “accepting this road and asking God to carry you through the ache of it is your way through.”

We need both.

And I’m distilling a much larger swath of differences in these two similar scenarios, but the more significant point is that we all might need both. Or many. There are many variations of biblical orthodoxy in 2023 — we have brothers and sisters of all shapes and sizes and languages … and Jesus asked God that He would make us one.

Not same.

To use Paul’s words, “If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?” (1 Corinthians 12:17-18)

Your church and mine likely have many ears, eyes, or noses. Like attracts like; naturally, we would. But when was the last time you read a book by a biblically orthodox author who sees life differently than your stream and with a pen in hand to take notes?

The climate surrounding issues like this seems much less heated than it was a decade ago, or even a mere five years ago. The bigger trashcan fires across America have distracted us from theological nitpicking … sort of. But at a core level, we may still be too picky about reading that book from a woman who also preached to a crowd of men and women or listening to that sermon from a man who talked about the beauty of suffering alongside his dying wife, with no mention of his prayers for her healing.

None of us were meant to carry the complete picture of God’s heart within ourselves or our church bodies. We each have a part. And a part that is terribly compromised if we merely acknowledge but don’t receive from the other parts.

If I can’t smell the apple pie a la mode, my taste is lost. If I can only see a waterfall but I can’t hear it, the beauty is veiled.

Consider: might it be time to take that charismatic or that reformed (though I’m not stating those are mutually exclusive) friend across the street to coffee to hear more of their story? Could there be a book that might speak to your soul from someone who believes in the inerrancy of scripture and who believes differently than you do about baptism … or suffering?

{Also, If you want to dive deeper into what the Word says about this concept here are a few places to start:1 Corinthians 12:12-31, Romans 12:4-8 (really all of Romans 12), Ephesians 1:22-23, Ephesians 4:4, Ephesians 4:11-16

The post That they may be one . . . not same appeared first on Sara Hagerty.

Just as I have difficulty eating peaches in January or squash in June, I wish I could put these posts into categories so you can decide if it’s your right season to consume it. If I could, this one would be in the “for those walking through a hard and unrelenting season” category — those looking for a bit of carrot to keep you going.

(The rest of you can read on, now having been told what to expect … or perhaps send to a friend who is in a season like the one I describe. Or maybe archive it to pull out when you’re in one of those, because aren’t we all finding that really nobody escapes from being “hard pressed on every side”?)

The year before we adopted Eden and Caleb (our first two children) was brutal.

I still have scents and songs that remind me of that time. And when I smell or hear them, I am back there in a flash.

We started our adoption after too many years of infertility (we’d wanted to adopt all along, but didn’t think we’d start the process feeling so tired from all the not-yets) and then we hit one hurdle after another in adopting them. I remember the dark morning on my way to meet a friend for a run before the sun came up: I got pulled over for more than just a few miles over the acceptable cruise velocity, and I started sobbing at the wheel, waiting for the police officer, certain (in my crazed state) that this would throw up one more paperwork hurdle for us in our adoption. It felt as if nothing — absolutely nothing — was working in our favor.

I flinched regularly.

And in the middle of it all, my dad was diagnosed with cancer.

We’ve had a few periods when I breathed Paul’s words, “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair” (2 Corinthians 4:8) as if telling myself what’s true when my mind kept telling me I was crushed in despair. This was one of those times.

I sometimes think of myself as the marathon runner I was at 22 — not needing much motivation beyond pure drive, “in it” simply for the satisfaction of being in it, and with little craving for the reward. But the gift of age and time is that our true selves keep pulling off our youthful masks … and I remember now that pure drive burns me out, and that I actually like (and liked) rewards. Then I look back and see when God gave me some of those sweet rewards — sweet consolation prizes — amid dark seasons like the one I described above.

That year and a half was our first “hardest ever year.” And we were also gifted a trip to the Cayman Islands and arranged another to the Amalfi Coast, essentially for free. Our room at the Hotel Marmorata on the Amalfi Coast was built right into the cliff. The water lapped against the rocks underneath our window as we woke, and we were served high tea in the afternoons. We held each other in the dark of the season we’d just known and the season that wasn’t lifting (my dad died three months later) and slept with the windows open, lulled to sleep by the sounds of seaside Italy.

I sometimes excused these gifts, wanting to downplay that I fully received them or even needed them — God is enough for me, I told myself and sometimes others. And while each year proves this to be more accurate in my heart than merely just out of my mouth, I also am finding that admitting my childlike humanity enables me to receive the breadcrumb trail He lays for each of us, as we die to the life we thought we’d live and receive the one He has for us.

I’m no longer that 22-year-old marathoner who was in it just for the joy of doing it. I grow weary from the length of time enduring hard struggles, I forget my goal, and the pain distracts me and sinks me some days. Many days.

And little rewards … they help.

Here I am, back again in a pressing and stretching season, and I now see a place for the consolations.

I vividly remember showing Nate a weak side of myself I’d not before admitted during our trip to Amalfi. The extravagance of God on that trip softened parts of my heart that hadn’t previously known softness. And the supple underside of softened hearts is where the best of prayer happens. I let Nate (and God) into a once-well-guarded place inside my heart.

Could it be that God understands that we are “but dust” (Psalm 103:14) and relates to us in our darkest hours, similar to how I relate to my six-year-old when she’s sick? Extra cuddles, warm blankets, surrounding her with comfort … and, yes, her favorite movie and favorite drink. “Sweet girl, you’re not going to feel this way forever. I’m sitting here right by your bed,” I whisper through the shadows in her room, into her ear that’s hidden under a tangle of hair, as I hold her hand.

“A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench” (Isaiah 42:3).

Friends, this is not a message of the prosperity gospel — “Love God, and you’ll see He’s the best travel agent.” No. This is a message for those of you enduring long stretches of big and little trials, looking for road signs when you can’t see the road in front of you. The psalmist in Psalm 94:19 says, “when the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.”

God sees your secret places of pain, and though He may not be moving in the one area for which you’ve been begging Him to move, He is reaching out His hand in the dark, cupping your face and whispering into the ear covered by your tangled hair, as if to say: I am here. I am moving. Keep watching for me.

The ultimate consolation is Him. The other consolations along the way are things like perseverance, character, and hope. And sometimes … the consolation comes in the form of a surprisingly radiant sunset or a gift from an unknowing friend at just the right time or a trip to Amalfi — softening our insides to receive the best consolation: Him.

As C.S. Lewis said, “One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.”

The post Consolation Prizes from God {something to resist …. or to receive?} appeared first on Sara Hagerty.