Battle Cry
We continue fighting this month.
Last week we fought for Easy Laundry, and it was fun to read all the great comments on the Facebook link.
This week is a very different and important fight.
As we honour those who sacrificed for our freedom today, Remembrance Day, let’s also remember those under great spiritual attack.
The interplay of COVID-19, the US election, racism, and other ‘isms’ feels like WWIII in the making but one war has raged through every period of history—led by a tyrant who tortures souls.
Last month as I engaged in our church’s commissioning prayer at the end of the online service, and cried “here I am Lord” on the hotel room floor, I began to grieve for those unconscious on the battlefield—asleep to their purpose, drunk with addiction, dead to life, without vision.
Some of the very children who shone the brightest are under a dark cloud of deception.
When I get closer, past the labels, I see their happiness is a charade. Their eyes and haunting cries are begging for freedom.
I want to scream don't do this, your story is not written, come back!
Instead, I whisper Jesus come.
From flat on my face, heaving ugly cries of surrender, I know Jesus is carrying His cross to each one of us, tearing off labels, melting our broken bits and pieces together, and wrapping blood-stained strips of cloth around our wounds.
As the weeks went on I’d stand and find my knees buckling as the enemy took another cheap shot.
I won’t leave this battle ground, but am vulnerable when darkness comes.
It has been a relief to see a light glowing in the distance—a message of hope for our church and for all Christ-followers.
A pile of armor aglow.
I secure the belt (of truth) around my waist, then put on the breastplate (of righteousness). I step into fitted shoes (the gospel of peace) and fasten my helmet (of salvation). As I lift up the shield (of faith) a light blinds me. It is the sword (of the Spirit)!*
I take a step forward and raise my weapon like a torch in the night sky.
Do you hear it?
The most beautiful sound.
Children singing.
The war-torn hear it too, they begin to stir and cower under the light as their eyes adjust.
The singing continues.
And day by day I believe Jesus is removing scales from eyes and bringing life to hearts of stone.
My brothers and my sisters, suit up and join in the chorus.
Let's march through the carnage and search for our fallen friends until every last one is found.
Jesus will untwist all the lies of the evil one.
God’s image-bearers will be restored.
He will not leave one behind.
This is my prayer, a vision for all of us to join in heaven's battle cry.
An incredible rescue story is just getting started!
Share in the comments any prayers, visions, prophecies, verses, and words of life to inspire us to keep fighting.
*Ephesians 6:10-18
Still to come this month, we will:
fight for a no-fuss Christmas, and
fight human trafficking, with my guest Leah Rempel!
The tension we feel may not be something to resolve, but a place in which we are invited to be even more present.
To make space at the table. To embody meaning in the places already given to us. To recognize the ordinary of today as good ground for the kingdom of God to take root.
Clear what needs clearing off the table.
And set it like it matters.
Because it does!
The weeks following Christmas and New Year’s Day offer a rare gift—the space to pause and reflect.
After a December rich with the fullness of an abundant life, there is no need to hurry into what’s next.
Instead, we are invited to linger, to breathe, and to listen for the gentle, prayerful discernment that comes as a new year quietly unfolds.
I appreciate how author and podcaster Emily P. Freeman says she takes the whole month of January to transition into a new year!
I pray you give yourself that same grace.
We are midsummer. The sun is high, the songbirds sing, and the calendar is about to say goodbye to July. The garden tomatoes aren’t quite ready, and school supply lists are set aside a little long, but still—there’s a whisper of transition in the air.
Since finishing my spring seminary course in early July, I’ve found myself reflecting on how swiftly the seasons of life keep changing.
A missed call read “OJ Zerbin” on my phone recently and I froze.
What I would give for one heavenly phone call with that comforting, reassuring voice!
Somehow my contacts were synching with my husband’s and an old contact for my parents’ home phone appeared under that startling label.
It has been three years now.
Three years of missing, longing, grieving, wishing, hoping, retelling, imagining, believing—and healing.
Spring and Easter hold the bittersweet messages of death and life. A tragically beautiful reality I experienced with the death of my beloved dad on Good Friday, and the brilliant hope of resurrection life celebrated each Easter morning.
Chapter three of grief means I still ache when I recall hospital scenes and conversations from that final week, or when I reflect on the events surrounding my dad’s beautiful Celebration of Life.
Our six children were so much younger and smaller, and we've lived so much precious life since then…
Earplugs muted jazzy music and buzzing conversations as I sat at a coffee shop the day before Christmas Eve.
I was reflecting with an old friend affectionately known as “the poet,” the soulful side of me.
I named this part of me in a counselling session last winter along with “the workhorse,” a more driven and disciplined part of me who had signed up for a heavy load this past fall.
Naming these parts invited them to ride together rather than as rivals.
On Christmas morning, before unwrapping cross-country skis and poles and trying on my new boots, I opened a touching painting my husband had picked out at a conference in California.
Tears fell as I read the paragraph the artist, Jess Boldt, used to describe “The Wild One.”
Then I turned the frame over and looked into the uncovered eye of a mysterious yet familiar-looking horse.
When my spring seminary course wrapped up at the end of July, I found myself with a stack of books that were not required reading.
I settled into the sweet space, turning pages as slower rhythms of living returned.
One book that resonated was Henry Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son, a story of homecoming.
Nouwen commits an entire book to reveal what hours and days of sitting before the original, famous Rembrandt painting offered him.
Throughout the Bible, many significant relationships usher in the next stage of God’s plan to redeem the world.
John the Baptist and Jesus epitomize a dynamic biblical relationship, leaving a historical and eternal mark.
John’s life and ministry are an opening act to Jesus’s.
In this blog post, I celebrate the gift of friendship.
I am grateful to have been blessed with several deep friendships, some for a season and others forever—or forty years and counting!
On July 1st, 1984, I was gifted two bosom buddies.
As the country celebrated with fireworks, the Canadian anthem, and everything red and white, a baby tried to push her way ahead of her sister.
I am unsurprised that when we closed the door to babies a few years ago, desires grew beyond my home responsibilities.
I was out of survival mode.
Keeping six young kids fed, rested, and safe was easily a full-time job and a couple of part-time jobs combined in harder seasons.
While life is still full, this is mostly my choice and no longer filled up with meeting the most basic survival needs.
I recently found myself in a reflective place in parenting.
I was butting heads more often with one particular child while also being frustrated with my entire motley crew.
Thoughts were teasing me that I was done with this whole parenting gig.
Especially as I have been enjoying the more affirming parts of my adult life lately: guest teaching, workshops, retreats, worship team, seminary classes, and anticipating a part-time homeschool facilitator job starting in a few months!
I quickly tossed a book into my suitcase.
It was not from my seminary reading stack but a Christmas gift I had been slowly reading over the last few months.
I didn’t expect much reading time on our five-day family getaway to the mountains for my fortieth birthday, so a book with just a few chapters left was realistic.
As one of those odd people who rarely leave a book half-baked, I was determined to finish it for the sweet taste of accomplishment more than revelation.
‘Revelation’ sounds dramatic, but that is often my experience when words and God collide.
A few weeks before, I had been complaining that God seemed distant—he wasn’t speaking to me in the usual wordy ways.
During a little break on our trip, I turned to the final chapter in The Right Kind of Confidence and read the chapter title, “Deeply Rooted Confidence.”
I was out for coffee with a lifer friend, one of the few who grew up with me since the church nursery. I had texted the night before to see if she had an hour slot in her lineup of clients, and there we were on a Monday afternoon, getting all our words out in a beautiful space—not the brown Tim Horton’s booth per se, but a safe space built from years of sharing the highs and lows of life.
On a recent podcast, Simon Sinek said,
“When someone is struggling or in need, all they need is 8 minutes from a friend to hold space with them to make them feel better.”
What an honour to receive a text from a friend asking,
“Do you have 8 minutes?”
As emails arrived in my inbox at the start of this new year, it was amusing and a bit overwhelming that one after the other, they asked to steal the sacred time my family enjoys on Saturday mornings.
Four sacred Sabbath Saturday mornings in a row could be gone just like that!
I was relieved when I brought this concern to my husband, and we narrowed it down to one meeting that was mandatory and released the others from our calendar, typing “skip” beside each one in our Google calendar.
This past Saturday, we enjoyed our usual slow, extra special Saturday breakfast where Benj and the kids make some kind of delicious baking, usually topped with berries, syrup and whipped cream, and then piled into our minivan for one of our “experience” Christmas gifts.
We cross-country skid in the beautiful winter snow for the rest of the day.
Like never before, I am reminded that the Holy Spirit is drawing us into sacred rhythms of life if only we would listen.
A mantra or word to frame the next season or year is sometimes chosen haphazardly and other times with great intention.
After significant stress from a season of two parents battling and one dying from cancer in 2022, I thoughtfully chose resilient to depict my posture in 2023.
The demands of this modern world leave little opportunity to be still, let alone quiet.
It is comforting to know that throughout biblical and church history, in what may have been simpler times, practices of silence and solitude were as necessary as they are for busy individuals, especially Christian leaders, today.
Jesus pursued these spaces for himself and his disciples, leaving no question that Christ-followers must execute them.
For many years, my jogging stroller contraption was my ticket to any sense of “silence” and “solitude.”
Those words are in quotation marks because this setting is not the true definition of either. I had to keep my expectations low, so I didn't get frustrated by inevitable interruptions.
Hours were not flying by when I had six children eight years and under, but I had it pretty good.
My babies slept in a separate room within days of being born, and most of them consistently slept through the night within a few months, though my last one pushed the envelope here.
Still, there was always the possibility of an interruption (or more) on any given night—a reality of six young children.
There was no one to put me to bed while my husband was away on a backpacking trip this summer, so there I was at 11 PM eating the chocolate almonds he left under my pillow and scrolling through homeschool videos on YouTube:
Do I have enough planned for this next school year?
I could try this curriculum…
We really should learn another language…
Why not beautify our cursive writing?
Pause. Breathe. Remember, Charlene.
Be With Me
I'm leaving my wonderful husband and six kids at home in a few weeks and flying to join my mom and siblings at a cottage by a lake for several days.
I have been revisiting our home systems to ensure things go smoothly while I'm away, and this practical blog post will share some of my thoughts and practices on meals, chores and the big one, laundry!
I link to resources and previous posts on these topics as well.
When home systems flow, they facilitate physical, mental and emotional space for the more soulful parts of living, like relating and creating!
Here are my Top 3 Home Systems:
I interacted with the story of Job throughout my life as a faithful Sunday school student and church attendee; however, my first encounter with death and grief twelve years ago, when I had an early miscarriage, made it more personal.
The Sunday after my miscarriage, my tears fell in the hiddenness of this loss as I tried to sing along with words that echoed Job’s:
“The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised" (Job 1:21b).
But walking through cancer journeys with both of my parents in the same season trumped any heartache I have experienced.
The first half of this blog post examines Job exegetically, while the second half offers personal reflections.
The words to this poem poured out through many tears one afternoon while working on a paper that reflected the themes of time, grief and wisdom from Ecclesiastes.
Suffering and loss are inevitable life experiences for individuals and communities.
While grief is reflected in a myriad of postures and expressions, a sense of longing is usually present).
Suffering, “a feeling of more than one can bear,” involves a longing that can translate to hope in the right environment.
But today’s drugs of choice, including common coping mechanisms of denial and illusions of control, only exacerbate pain.
The Bible provides a down-to-earth model to process difficult emotions and lift one out of the “pit of despair” (Psalm 40:2).
Before examining a familiar passage of lament and the impact these expressions have on our spiritual lives, ministries, and the modern world, a broad biblical survey reveals God’s heart in suffering.
I mindlessly twirl the gold chain around my neck until I reach the tiny square locket that holds a picture of my dad and me on my last birthday and another of my family with my mom and him a few years ago.
It jolts me back to reality.
So much has changed.
I’ll turn 39 in a few days with my keepsake necklace representing the gaping hole in my heart.
My older sister sent me a Marketplace link the night before my 15th wedding anniversary.
I happily sent an e-transfer and drove a 60-minute round trip to pick up a sizeable wood-framed wall sign from “the back porch with the Christmas lights.”
That same night my husband measured and nailed the sign into a spot that had been waiting for something meaningful for almost four years.
It showcases a bold statement ‘blessed’ in scrolly letters, and I didn't see the deeper meaning until weeks later.
Around the new year last year, I was on a video call with two lifelong friends, sharing that it felt depressing to look at 2022.
We sat with our tears, knowing that outside of a miracle for my dad, who was battling acute blood cancer, a funeral was inevitable in the next year.
Death became a brutal reality by Easter weekend.
Still, 2022 was a full year of living for the rest of us. It's what my dad would have wanted.
And now it is time again, for reflection and anticipation—in this space between celebrating the birth of Jesus and the beginning of a new year!
If the faith my dad preached, while laying in a hospital bed, is not based on a fairy tale, then maybe with each new year, each new birthday, and each new Christmas, we can experience “a thrill of hope” as our weary souls rejoice in what is to come!
The sun was climbing out of bed on the continent of South America as my earbuds delivered these words:
"Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.” Mark 1:35 NIV
My reflex was an audible "yes" with a fist grab right there in the hotel bathroom, followed by a bashful giggle as I told my husband.
Long ministry days, which excluded even the opportunity for a full night of sleep, were wearing on my introverted nature.
Charlene VandenBrink
Charlene strings together soulful words for life’s beauty and struggles.
When not feeding her six children with good books and endless meals, she can be found walking and talking with neighbours, folding laundry while listening to a podcast, or reading and reflecting from her latest stack of books for seminary!
Charlene cheers on her husband, who has owned and operated Delize Inc., a general contracting company, for 18 years and counting.
They welcomed six children in eight years and are living the dream of growing, learning, and traveling through life together!
Opening my Bible before most of the house wakes. Lifting weights. Squeezing a lemon. Starting the day’s load of laundry. There is something deeply satisfying about ordinary faithfulness repeated day after day.
I love new experiences and the feeling of stepping into a story much older than my own.
These two desires naturally collide during international travel.
I want to see the wonders, and I wonder how an eight-hour time difference will affect taking my meticulously counted supplements.
This is 42…