Beyond Leaving Legalism: More Resources For Hurting People

Hello, favorite readers!

Now that Leaving Legalism has launched and is in the hands of all kinds of people who needed to hear its message, I wanted to let you know about a few additional resources.

affiliate link (In case you haven’t gotten your copy yet!)

Certainly, once you’ve read the book and worked through the helpful questions, you’ll be left with an additional need to pinpoint the issues that still come up from time to time. I’m not leaving you hanging!

First, a new series of follow-up posts will be coming to your inbox in the next few weeks. I’ll be addressing questions such as, “I left legalism. Now what?”, and “My family has ostracized me. I don’t know what to do about that.” These are tough issues to wrestle with, and my whole goal is to continue to point you back to the gospel and to the Bible for solid answers and reconciliation.

Secondly, there is a private group on Facebook called, appropriately, Leaving Legalism. It is a safe place for discussion, questions, and encouragement. We’d love to have you there. Click the link in the previous sentence or this one right here: Leaving Legalism Facebook Group.

Third, it is my heart’s desire that the message of Leaving Legalism get out to as many people as possible. Because I’m still raising a large family, I am quite guarded about my speaking availability, but I am starting to open up 2019 for conferences, women’s retreats, and one-day events. I’d love to talk to you about yours. Click here for speaking inquiries.

Fourth, speaking of speaking events, my husband Fletch and I will be at Sandy Cove Ministries this February for a weekend marriage getaway, and we’d love to have you there! We’ll be talking lots about hope-shifting and marriage and living free! (Even cooler than us? Andrew Peterson will be the Saturday night concert.)

That’s it! Let’s connect. And if you know someone hurting from the aftermath of legalism, invite them along. There’s room for everyone at this table.

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What If I Can't Find My Calling in Life?

What if you can't find your calling in life? What if it seems as if everyone else has a goal, a plan, and a direction, but you just feel as if you're floundering? And what's a "calling", anyway?

I'm way beyond my 20's and wondering what the trajectory of my life might be (hello, 8 children!), but I now have the majority of those kids in that stage of talking through, wondering about, and praying over their calling. Their purpose. What the heck they're supposed to be doing with the rest of their lives.

I triple love my adult kids. They are the most fun stage of parenting so far! 

Within a typical week, I have texted and/or talked to every one of my adult kids at some point, and on every topic from cultural memes to theology to finances (read: They need money.) I love technology.

This one came to me from our 18-year-old at a university in Southern California one morning in April, and I loved her honest questions and the ensuing discussion:

I was thinking, "What happened to asking why the sky is blue?". Phew, huh? But these deeper discussions are why I am so loving these young adult kids. And the part about understanding her better than google? Oh gosh. Insert the heart-eyed emoji here because this is the girl who told me when she left home that if she ever needed to know how to do something, she could just look up a tutorial online. Kinda crushed my mama heart, TBH.

How to Know What Your Calling Is

We have to tread carefully into this topic because no one can lead you to this path other than God. Yes, he uses people in our lives and circumstances, but he really is the only one who can give us peace and certainty about what he has for us. In short, I can't tell you what your calling is. No one else should venture there, either. Turn off the voices that are so sure they know what you should be doing with your life. Listen to the voices that point you back to God.

What Every Calling Boils Down To

Every calling, every life's purpose, every dream and goal and desire and life plan boils down to two things:

Love God.

Love people.

Both can be unimpressive. Both are usually extremely untidy. Both can be discouraging at times. Both are often hidden from the applause of the world. 

Both bring peace and joy and actual, authentic fulfillment, but not if we're constantly looking for our calling to be extraordinary.

The Truth About Most People's Callings (and Most People Is Probably You)

We should all be following what God has for us, but the truth is, most of us are called to the mundane: going to work, feeding our children, getting up each day and doing the same thing over and over. . .

In short, callings can be certain from God, but they are rarely flashy and exciting. Usually, we're called to do the hard thing. The unselfish thing. The sacrificial thing.

Sometimes the calling is to homeschool kids for two decades and then last week have the 6th grader announce he wants to be homeschooled through high school, which means your mundane homeschooling calling that started with great trepidation in 1997 won't be finished until 2025. (That's me, if you hadn't guessed.)

When Your "Calling" Gets Ripped Out From Underneath You

This is where the whole thing gets dicey. 

When we are sure about that thing we are supposed to be doing, that career we're supposed to pursue, that "best life now" that we know we should be living and it all gets ripped out from underneath us, it can be a whopping blow. I can name a hundred women who watched their callings sink to the bottom of the sea as they suddenly found themselves with an extremely needy baby, an unexpected loss of income, a debilitating illness, and any number of other detours.

A road block like that doesn't necessarily mean your life is over. I wrote about having everything but not all at the same time in this post: Yes, Young Woman, You Can Have It All. Sometimes our callings are just put on hold and the new calling takes over for a time.

And sometimes, we learn that God had that thing for us temporarily, or that he really didn't have it for us at all. 

Come to Terms With Your Calling

I don't want to kill your dreams. That's not what this post has been about. In fact, the role I have most adored over the past 25 years has been that of cheerleader. If you need someone to brainstorm and help you chart a path to your dreams, I'm your girl.

But as you're praying through what God might have for your life, I want you to consider one crucial question:

Am I adding something to Jesus?

Are you? It's a trap, and one every single follower of Jesus falls into regularly. None of us is immune. It's the classic case of an idolatrous heart that believes the lie that we can be greater than if only we have Jesus plus {fill in the blank}. 

As you consider that your calling is simply an outflow of two things (loving God and loving people), ask yourself if you're adding to it a hope to be something more because it feeds your ego or pride or simply makes you believe you'll ultimately have some sort of fulfillment through that career that really, only God can supply.

“The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”

— Deuteronomy 31:8

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The Cross Took Care of That

My friend Hannah has three sons with autism, all under the age of six. I’ll let that sink in a little bit, because that fact about Hannah alone is as extraordinary and overwhelming as it sounds.

But Hannah doesn’t come across as overwhelmed. She’s tender, often tearing up as we moms gather every Friday morning with one main thing in common: the parenting of kids with special needs. We share our struggles and our triumphs over a living room coffee table, and for some of us, our weekly gatherings together are the only place where we feel truly understood.

I want you to know Hannah as I know Hannah, because not only is she tender-hearted and kind and extraordinary and yes, sometimes overwhelmed, she is rock-solid. When she tells stories of the escalating tantrums her sons stage, complete with violent bouts of throwing objects at each other and kicking and biting, of the daily phone calls from school because of yet another behavioral issue gone down, of the screaming and the lack of sleep and the way in which their family has had to change everything about how they even live inside their home, she also reminds us that God is there in the chaos of their environment, that He gives her what she needs in each singular moment, that she knows, because He has always been faithful, that He is unshakably faithful. Hannah is a rock of a woman.

If Hannah were to read this, that’s what I would want her to know: that each of us feels as if we’re about to be pummeled by the next big wave, but standing outside of each other’s catastrophes, we can see the strength and courage and beauty of each other when we often cannot see it in ourselves.

I hosted our gathering on a late autumn morning before Thanksgiving, and only Hannah was able to come. We poured steaming mugs of tea and sat together at my dining room table. Hannah’s youthful smile was hiding behind weary eyes, but it emerged as it always does, especially when she talks about Jesus. Hannah doesn’t know the details of our story — of the legalism and religious gate-keeping we slowly shook out of nearly a decade ago — and so when I made an off-handed remark about doing something for God, she replied without any sense of self-righteousness, “Uh-uh. The cross took care of that.”

“Just when I think I’ve grasped the whole impact of the gospel, I am shown, again, how much I really want to prove to God that I am worthy of all that Jesus did for me. As if I could.”

Boom. If there were a word for the gospel slapping me fresh across the face, I’d use that. It would be better than “boom”. Hannah’s words caught me with my law-loving pants down and I felt thrown a little off-kilter, too. In that disorienting moment, I saw once again that in my heart of hearts, I am a legalist who continues to look for ways to add to what Jesus has already done for me. Just when I think I’ve grasped the whole impact of the gospel, I am shown, again, how much I really want to prove to God that I am worthy of all that Jesus did for me. As if I could.

For more than 40 years, I’ve misunderstood grace. Seven years ago we left a church culture that informed us of all we must do, how we must strive, work, gain, grasp, and earn God’s love for us. When God gently began to peel off the layers of religion, as He reminded us of Who He is and what He’s done (done: finished, already accomplished, put to bed), our lives began to change in remarkable ways. First of all, we finally understood what Paul was talking about in Romans 8. Truths like “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”, and “God has done what the law could not”, changed everything. The cross changed everything.

We began to grasp what it actually means to “live in the flesh”, too. For all of my religious years within evangelicalism, I was led to believe that those people who ran to sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll were the only ones living in the flesh. No one ever pointed to our own religious, law-loving hearts as also rejecting the freedom of living in the Spirit. But when God pulled us out of our legalistic environment, my religious heart finally understood that by trying to add to what God has already done, I was living far more “in the flesh” than all those heathens I thought were doing so because they wore their worldly sin on their sleeves.

“That’s what it looks like to live in the freedom of the gospel.”

We’ve been pursuing a relationship with the loving God now for the past seven years, and it looks very little like the old religious lives we led for nearly a decade before. Our choices are made in freedom, our daily lives influenced by the solid knowledge that God loves us, and there’s nothing we can do to make Him un-love us. But even so, I am, in my very human heart of hearts, still wanting to try harder and do more. And God shows His love has no bounds, no constraints, no end, when he brings into my life the mother of three little boys with autism and she looks me square in the eye and declares, “The cross took care of that.”

That’s what it looks like to live in the freedom of the gospel. It eternally redeems the worldly and it beckons and restores the religious, freeing both from sin and sure death. The gospel seeps into the dark corners of autism and uncertainty of every pedigree, and it declares, with a resounding boom, “The cross took care of that!”

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