January 2023 Mobile Monthly Mission

Copyright 2023 Kat Silverglate

I suppose most childhood homes have their quirky expressions. Verbiage that leads to eye rolls, belly laughs or knowing nods amongst family insiders. Word combinations that make little sense to others, but to you and yours -- they are so naturally stitched into the linguistic fabric of your home that it strikes you as odd when a stranger sees it more like a white thread on an ebony coat.  

Back in the day, if you happened to be a fly on the wall at 222 Seventh Street and someone uttered the words…“what’s written…” you’d witness the rest of our family in a team eye roll speaking in water-ballet-esq synchronicity: “We know Mom, what’s written remains.” The music for Mom in the movie version of this scene would most certainly be the tourist swimming in the shark infested waters of Jaws – da da, da da, da da.

“What’s written remains girls,” was often followed by a dramatic pause (cue the daunting music) where she could assess whether our attention was genuinely undivided. Then she’d say it one octave lower in duplicate just in case we didn’t measure the magnitude of the first quake on the this-could-wreck-your-life scale. “What’s written remains… what’s written remains.” Surely if Jesus spoke these words today, they’d start with “verily verily I say unto you…”  It reverberated in us the way a slamming prison door echoes in a prisoner. Firm. Final. And not to be crossed.

None of us was quite sure what terrible experience caused her to repeat this warning with such bravado, but we knew we didn’t want to test it for ourselves. The wisdom was straight forward enough. Once one puts ink to paper, mistakes are identifiable. Words can be challenged. Cross-examined. Impeached. Brought back to haunt you. Used to embarrass or hurt you, or worse… others. The sisters in our family often celebrate the fact that we weren’t learning this lesson during the evolution of social media and the one-clickable proliferation of world-wide-words.

Even with that providential advantage, none of us emerged entirely unscathed. After writing a gushing love poem to my boyfriend in 9^th grade -- which the football coach discovered and read aloud to the team before evening practice -- I stopped rolling my eyes. The next day, I found the pit of teen humiliation when several burly guys approached me with Shakespearean flair -- “Our love is like the growing grass, from green to brown to green at last.”

Yep. What’s written remains.

While she intended to save us from the consequences of careless words, the mantra did something else. Something unintended. It wreaked havoc on my ability to finalize written works. A kind of finish-line paralysis gripped me when it came time to shift from drafts to finals, from erasable pencil to indelible ink. For many of my young adult years, this misfire rose most aggressively at the end of December when goals are set in anticipation of the 366^th turn of the calendar. It wasn’t the dreaming or the planning that was so hard. It was the set-in-stone-ness of a fixed path at the edge of an unknowable future that froze me.

I found myself asking...

I’d imagine there isn’t a single one of us who hasn’t made a perfectly logical main-highway-only, express-lane-all-the-way map of how we plan to go where God is leading us only to find ourselves off-roading because… well, because the Lord allowed our steps to be reordered. Years ago, driving to a youth event in a different state through a massive road reconstruction project, I saw a sign that read: “Prepare for Interruptions.” At a time before apps calculated alternative routes for waylaid drivers, I gritted my teeth through the single lane slowdowns and endless rows of orange cones while grumbling, “well this certainly wasn’t in the plan.” Turns out, that road sign pretty much described our weekend which was marked less by plans than pivots, more by adapting than advancing.  

When all was said and done though, we marveled at how God worked in all of it, especially the detours. The boy who got to see a distant family member at a rest stop. Preaching at a women’s shelter with zero advanced warning. Building crosses out of old logs. Staying up most of the night with a girl who had incredibly honest and profound questions. We couldn’t have planned it. Indeed, when I took our original plan and figuratively put a piece of transparent tracing paper over it to map out what ultimately happened, it was humbling. Not because we should have planned better (sometimes the case, but not here), but because God’s presence in the reroute was so wondrously magnified.

When we hold those preprinted planning tools at the start of our year -- the ones that encourage us to write our yearly goals, our monthly advances, our daily steps -- I wonder if we realize just how powerful this process really is. Not because we can count the check marks of what WE accomplished and cross off the ones that didn’t come to pass, but because we have a tool that allows us to magnify the Lord in the ordering of our steps. While my wise Mom's phrase -- what’s written remains – works well as a caution for careless words, it serves equally well as an encouragement for careful ones. When we have the courage to seek the Lord and then to reduce our best laid plans to writing, we end up with a tool that allows us to magnify the Lord. What’s written remains!

Isn’t that what we miss when we quote Jeremiah 29:11 out of context? When we quote it as if it is a promise of no detours? Or of clear sailing and blue-sky-only years? Here it is with no context...

This verse is so much more poignant when we note that it came in the context of false prophets who were saying, in essence, there won’t be any stinking detours (Jer. 14:13) or this particular detour will be shorter-than-predicted (Jer. 28:3). In that light, Jeremiah pens these oft-quoted words in a letter to God’s exiles. God's people who were far away from the promised land for a season. His words weren’t comforting because the detour didn’t happen (it did), or because it was going to be shorter than they wanted (it wasn't), or because it was easy (it wasn't), but because God was with them both there and in the future.

Our January Mission.

So, our January mission is simple. In the mission pack you received in the mail this month, you will find a thin sheet of tracing paper and a sticker with the word “Counted” followed by a blank line. Put that sticker on the top of the tracing paper and write the word DETOURS on the blank line. It will now say, "Counted Detours."

You will also find some recycled planning sheets. These will get you started. Prayerfully write out your daily plans in January. At the end of the day, pause to write down the detours. The unplanned. The reordered steps. Where did you notice God’s hand? Where did you find God on the path?

At the end of the month, use that transparent sheet to draw a map of His presence.

Consider inviting others to this exercise. Ask them about their detours. Listen to their stories. Share Jer. 29:11 as a reminder that God is/was with them on every one of those detours. Share your detour stories.

If you are not receiving our mission packs in the mail, we would be so delighted to start sending them! You can go to our website to sign up -- www.theridiculoushour.com or you can fill out our preference form. The best way to get started is to request packs in the mail AND one email a month. We really only send one and it has our audible story link and other digital content.

Share Your Story:

If you have a great detour story, feel free to “Donate a Story” on our donation page. Your story donations come to us in a simple email format. It is not posted to this website.

Let's Pray:

Lord, You come to dwell in our hearts. You are with us period. With us in the planned. With us in the reordered. With us period. In You, we have a present hope and a future. Give us the courage to prayerfully write down our plans. To boldly write them as we seek You. And give us the wisdom and wonder to map our reordered steps. To know You are with us there. To find You. Praise You. Share You!

Amen?

Amen!