You can read it here.

Enjoy!
Emily

It’s been a minute since “We are the World” debuted much less on repeat on the radio. I looked like this at the time they were making the song. What a time!

For years, people have told writers to “find your voice.”

I always hated that advice.

It sounds profound, but nobody tells you where to look. Meanwhile, every corner of the internet is busy telling you exactly how to sound. Write shorter. Start with a hook. Keep people’s attention. Follow this formula. Copy what works. Optimize for the algorithm. Double down on what gets the metrics.

The strange thing is that we’re all trying to stand out by sounding more alike.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

As I’ve mentioned before, I love a good documentary, and The Greatest Night of Pop ended up teaching me something I wasn’t expecting. I’m not a musician, but I love watching creative people work. Seeing how ideas come together always teaches me something about my own craft.

Halfway through the documentary, it finally clicked.

The recording studio was full of people who couldn’t have sounded more different. Michael Jackson. Lionel Richie. Stevie Wonder. Tina Turner. Cyndi Lauper. Kenny Rogers. Bruce Springsteen. Huey Lewis. Waylon Jennings. And then there was Bob Dylan, looking wonderfully uncomfortable because everyone knew this wasn’t exactly his environment, but you can’t miss his voice in the chorus of celebrities.

No one was trying to sound like anyone else.

That was the point.

Each artist had spent years becoming unmistakably themselves before they ever walked into that room. When their turn came to sing, you didn’t need a caption telling you who it was. You knew within seconds.

I listened to “We Are the World” again afterward, and it’s almost shocking how much texture the song has. Every voice has a different grain, a different rhythm, a different personality. It shouldn’t work. On paper, those voices don’t belong together.

But that’s exactly why it works.

The diversity isn’t a problem the producers had to overcome. It’s the very thing that made the song memorable.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve forgotten that.

Today’s creative advice often pushes us toward the middle. Social media rewards familiar formats. Algorithms learn what performs well and encourage us to make more of it. Slowly, almost without realizing it, we begin leaving behind pieces of us that made us recognizable in the first place.

The result is a world that sounds monotone.

Maybe finding your voice isn’t about adding something you don’t have. Maybe it’s about protecting the parts of yourself you’re tempted to edit out because they don’t fit the current formula.

Looking back, I realized every artist in that recording studio had already answered the question writers obsess over. They didn’t find their voice by following trends. They built careers by refusing to sound like the person standing next to them.

That’s what made “We Are the World” timeless. Maybe that’s what will make our work timeless, too.

In an age of algorithms, originality isn’t found by perfecting the formula. It’s found by preserving the texture only you can bring.

A praise song that gives an eternal perspective to our conversation today.

You have a song of praise that only you can sing. You have a storied life that is yours alone. Don’t dim your light or your praise. You were made to use the voice whether written, spoken, or creative to bring the One who made you glory.

Warmly,
Emily

I heard it said this week that people born after the year 2000 have an 8 second attention span. I’ve been doing a lot of learning about marketing messaging and how because of said attention span deficits everything has to be on the nose when communicating online. Yet my Gen X style is for my writing to be creatively filled with adjectives, turn of phrase, and puns.

I was watching 1998’s You’ve Got Mail the other day when Frank starts trying to explain Kathleen to Kathleen.

He doesn’t lead with what she does. He doesn’t say, “She owns an independent bookstore.” Instead he launches into this beautiful, dramatic description on his typewriter:

“She is a lone reed...”

It’s poetic, memorable, and a little over the top, but it made me realize something.

That’s how marketing used to sound, descriptive. We painted word pictures. Today we’d probably interrupt Frank halfway through and ask, “So... what’s her niche?”

Or we’d rewrite it as: “Kathleen helps parents raise lifelong readers through thoughtfully curated children’s books.”

That’s clear, to the point, and SEO-friendly…and boring. Somewhere along the way we traded thought provoking for scroll stopping messaging when I am still thinking on that lone reed today.

Don’t get me wrong, clarity and the direct nature of ad copy still matters. If people don’t understand what you’re selling, they won’t become a lead. But I wonder if we’ve become so afraid of not being understood by the masses that we’ve stopped being interesting.

The brands and creators I remember aren’t always the ones with the clearest elevator pitch. They’re the ones that made me feel like there was more to discover behind the magazine ad. I miss depth and a world that felt like what Kathleen Kelly represented.

She was long form living in a soon coming short form world. As Ella Langley sings, I just want to be her so bad it hurts so bad.

That’s what I hope to do with The Screen Door. To have a place for more embodied, Frank like writing. I hear longform is making a comeback!

Then one day it hit me that I know why! Even though I don’t have the skill set of any of these people featured in these documentaries, I identifed and appreciated what they were doing so much. I kept wondering, how are they speaking the language of my brain when I know nothing about ballet, cheer, screen writing, music, or concert tours.

When I realized that the creative process is the same for all of us, it confirmed to me even more that it can be taught or reclaimed if you’ve lost it. There is no greater feeling than having an abstract idea or ideas in your head and working through the process of bringing that from thin air into the real world. All of the documentaries I mentioned all started with the seed of an idea in someone’s mind.

Isn’t that incredible that there is a process to get that from point A to point B and it’s available to you and me (and we can pass that on to our students).

That’s why I captured the way I teach creativity into a system that can be easily applied and replicated in your classroom. The future needs creative thinkers and I’m here to help you get your students there.

Dropping soon…

1. You need a killer track or as I say a hook.

2. You have to "take it up a notch," but not too much.

3. After the build-up, the intensity needs to step back down to keep the listener engaged.

He follows it up with There are a lot of rules. Anyway... I've started to make a tape... in my head... for Laura. Full of stuff she likes. Full of stuff that make her happy. For the first time I can sort of see how that is done.

Much like how I create a lesson plan. A hook or story to get my students attention, bringing something in to peak their curiosity, and then to the step by steps to get them involved.

And much like this modern mix tape I made on Spotify last weekend inspired by the era that inspired Lesson Remix. This mixtape makes me happy.

If Lesson Remix were a mixtape. I hope this one makes you happy.

Speaking of Mixtapes. I don’t know that there was something I created more of back then than mixtapes. I would sit on the carpet, lean up against the yellow trunk (that still is in my bedroom today) where my boom box sat and I’d listen to Kix 106 until they played my favorite songs. My savings couldn’t cover all the tapes I wanted in the electronics at Walmart. So, I kept the radio on speed dial, convinced my sister to call in to request a song and prayed they’d play it quickly! Even better if I caught a shout out to us from the DJ, which happened from time to time!

Anyway, even making mix tapes was a creative endeavor, teaching me curation, and how to notice the way the music made me feel.

A few weeks ago I ran into a High School friend who recommended the Michael Jackson movie to me. He said, “As much as you love music, you’ll love it!” Little did he know I’d been working something inspired by my love of music, but that really has nothing to do with music all Summer. It was just another confirmation to keep going on this project.

The Summer before I started teaching Art full time, I wrote and illustrated a book. Part of the reason I did it was to prove to myself I was skilled enough to do the job. The book was “Eclectic Emily” and is an expression of what it felt like to be a creative kid growing up in a really small town pre-internet. The skill set that I gained from that project has paid dividends in my classroom as I’ve been able to share what I learned with my students, things I never learned in a classroom myself.

This became my hobby, discovering new things to push me out of my comfort zone so that I could push my students out of theirs. If I wanted them to grow, I had to keep having creative courage, too. So I went on to publish a second and third book (both with different types of illustration styles that I passed on to my students).

Then came social media marketing. I devoured Seth Godin books and youtube videos by Gary Vee. I built a marketing curriculum and helped them create their own product, mission statement, values, and branding.

During an unexpected Snow Storm last January, I took my unexpected break to accomplish another creative dream, one I’ll be diving into with my 9th graders this Fall, launching an online magazine. Once again, another project that stretched me in my creative thinking, project management, and skill level will spill over into classroom fun and value for my students…hopefully.

When May rolled around this year, I decided I wanted to get into coding. I wanted to develop a fun and functional product that solved a problem for me. So, I’ve spent this summer developing Lesson Remix. It’s been a blank canvas to think of a fun idea and make it come to life through a web app, design the branding, functionality, messaging, marketing, and the ideas that spin off of the original concept. I’m excited to see how I’ll apply this next school year.

My mom used to say of my Grandmama, she’s just with it (as far as keeping up with technology). I’ve heard the advice to stay young from an older gentleman, “Don’t let the old man in.” She didn’t. She stayed curious. I think that’s what cultivating creativity is good for, keeping us curious and keeping us going. Onward! In order to be great teachers we have to be life long learners.

And our students keep us young.

Elementary kids held their papers up in the air like little white flags. “Like this? Like this?” Over and over, from every direction of the room, before I could even finish giving directions. When their lines wobbled or their colors bled outside the shape, papers got crumpled. Some kids cried. Some just quit. They set the supplies down and folded their arms. They were done before they’d started.

Middle school was a different kind of hard. They weren’t confused. They were checked out. Art had no purpose in their lives as far as they were concerned, and two boys in particular made sure I knew it, yelling the latest TikTok catchphrase across the room mid-lesson, just to get a laugh. I didn’t know it then, but they were only the first wave of many social media trends to come. Six-seven anyone?

I believed and still believe that every kid in that room had a creative voice. Not a generic, everybody-gets-a-trophy kind of creative, but a specific one that was theirs alone. My job was never to hand them a template and grade how well they colored inside it. It was to help them find the thing only they could make and give them the courage to make it.

That belief didn’t match what I was looking at at the time. I saw a room full of kids terrified of being wrong, or convinced there was no point in trying.

I was stumped and discouraged, if I’m honest. I’d stand in front of a class and wonder how I was supposed to build a culture of creative confidence out of kids who’d already decided art was either a test they could fail or a waste of their time.

The easy path was already right there in my lesson plans, the cookie-cutter projects, where every finished piece looks basically the same, maybe with a Bible verse stamped on as an add-on so it counted as “Bible integrated.” Nobody cries over a project like that because there’s nothing real at stake.

Their comfort zone is what they were after and why they were holding their papers up asking permission to make a mark.

So I started shifting slowly and imperfectly from projects that asked “did you copy this correctly?” to projects built on story and meaning. I was exploring, failing, and trying again with their lessons just as they were with their art.

The outcomes got messier sometimes and less polished. A first grader’s version of “tell a story about your family” doesn’t look like a Pinterest idea, and I had to make peace with that. But something else started happening when parents began stopping me to say their child was still talking about a lesson weeks later, not just remembering it, but loving it. Word got around. Art camp filled up. After-school lessons filled up, every single time.

That’s the part nobody tells you about teaching differently: it takes years to find your footing. Some say five. I believe it, because I lived it.

Last year, my sixth year with that very first group of kids, soon heading into 7th grade, I stood in front of their self-portraits and my eyes got misty because for the entire school year, in any grade, I did not hear a single student say “I can’t do this.” Not one “What’s the point of this?” Not one “Is this right?”

The kids who started with me in 3rd grade are heading into high school now. My first 9th grade group in 2020 did cut-and-paste projects and directed drawings because it was safe, guided, and more my style than theirs. This year’s 9th graders are designing their own art magazine as a class, featuring projects they led themselves.

I’m the same teacher, in the same building, just six years apart and a lot of experimenting, failing, and many wins, too! I just had to keep the courage up to keep going and trust the process.

It took time to build my art program and weave in creative thinking. I’m still learning and iterating. That’s the fun part. It’ll probably take you time too, but if there’s a way to hand you what I learned so it takes you less time than it took me, I want to.

That’s the whole reason I’m building what I’m building with The Lesson Remix. My system works, and here’s the part I didn’t expect going in: it doesn’t just change the students. It made me sharper, too. I’m a better thinker, a better idea-generator, more willing to make my own messy, meaningful thing instead of the safe version. I’m willing to try and flop or maybe even get better at something in the process.

I don’t think I’d be writing you today saying I created a web app had I not developed these divergent thinking skills alongside my students.

Turns out it’s a double-sided blessing. It always was.

Creatively,
Emily

Coming soon…

Over time, I noticed that the lessons students remembered were not always the ones with the most impressive final products. The lessons students remembered were the ones where they discovered a deeper connection. A student would see an idea in a new way, ask a meaningful question, or recognize something about themselves, their world, or their Creator.

That was when I realized that I was not just teaching art. I was learning how to remix ideas.

At my school, every lesson has to be biblically integrated. When I first started teaching, I struggled to understand what that actually meant. I knew that I could easily add a Bible verse to the end of a project and call it a connection.

For example, I could say, “We made flowers, so here is a verse about growth.”

I could also say, “We painted self-portraits, so here is a verse about being created in God’s image.”

There is nothing wrong with including Scripture in a lesson, but I knew that I wanted something deeper. I did not want faith to feel like an addition that I attached after the lesson was already complete. I wanted faith to become part of the reason behind the lesson. I couldn’t find any ready made lesson plans on the market with this depth and the artistic taste to match.

I wanted students to understand that faith shapes the way we see beauty, creativity, identity, relationships, and the world around us.

So I started changing the questions I asked.

Instead of asking, “How can I add a Bible verse to this project?” I started asking, “What is the deeper story here? What truth does this reveal? What part of being human does this connect to?” That thought process changed the way I approached teaching.

A lesson about clay became a conversation about how God shapes and forms us.

A photography lesson became a discussion about perspective and learning to see people the way God sees them.

A lesson about imperfection became an opportunity to discuss grace, redemption, and the beauty of becoming something new.

The Bible was no longer something that I simply referenced. The Bible became part of the foundation of the lesson. It influenced the questions we asked, the conversations we had, and the meaning behind what students created.

Students were no longer just completing assignments. Students were thinking more deeply, sharing their ideas, asking questions, and creating work that reflected something personal. Students began to understand that creativity could become a way to express gratitude and worship.

Then I had a realization. If I could learn how to do this with Scripture, I could learn how to do this with other subjects too.

That question led me to search for connections everywhere.

I started asking students what books they were reading, what they were learning in science and history, and what topics interested them. I looked for ways to transform those ideas into creative experiences that matched their age and stage of development.

I started pulling inspiration from literature, science, history, current events, and the things my students already cared about.

Creating lessons this way was not simple.

I teach students from age 2 to 16. I teach preschool through high school, and I write all of my own curriculum.

Creating meaningful experiences for such a wide age range requires constant learning and adaptation. A lesson that inspires a second grader often requires a different approach than a lesson that challenges a high school student. A concept that feels natural for one age group might require a completely different explanation for another.

There were many times when I wondered how I was going to make it work. I wondered how I could create lessons that challenged my older students while still inspiring my youngest students. I wondered how I could make learning feel connected instead of like a collection of unrelated facts.

Over the years, I continued refining my process. I began building systems and frameworks that helped me take an idea and transform it into an experience. Somewhere along the way, I realized that I had developed a skill I never intentionally set out to learn.

I had learned how to remix.

A remix takes something familiar and combines it with something unexpected to create something new. In art that is called juxtaposition. When teachers take concepts and connect them to stories, students discover why it’s important. That’s combinant Thinking which means combining ideas across areas of knowledge.

That was the moment when I knew I had discovered something worth sharing.

After six years of experimenting, adjusting, and creating, I realized that teachers do not necessarily need more ideas. Teachers already have plenty of ideas. Teachers need a way to transform those ideas into supplemental lessons that feel intentional, inspiring, and have the power to fuel creative thinking.

That is why I created Lesson Remix.

Lesson Remix is the system I wish I had when I was staring at a blank curriculum document and wondering where to begin.

The brain that powers Lesson Remix is the process I have used to create lessons that combine faith, creativity, storytelling, and grow student curiosity.

I believe that every teacher is creative. Sometimes teachers need a framework that helps them recognize the possibilities that already exist within them.

The best lessons are not remembered only because of the projects students completed. The best lessons are remembered because students experienced a moment when something clicked. Sometimes creating that moment starts with a little remix. Stay tuned. Lesson Remix is dropping soon.

Creatively,
Emily

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The Screen Door is home to a few different things, and I wanted to make sure you know what you’re actually signed up for and how to fine-tune it so your inbox only fills up with what you want.

Here’s what lives under this roof:

The Screen Door — magazine style publication with long-form essays, personal writing, Works in Progress, and my creative process. There is also an audio rundown on what’s in each issue.

Teach Like an Artist — future facing lesson plan design, art-integrated teaching strategies, and behind-the-scenes thinking on building classrooms (and kids) who can think curiously and creatively. This one also comes with its own podcast.

If you’re a new subscriber here, you’re already set up to receive both so no action is needed. If you’ve been here a while, Teach Like an Artist wasn’t added to your existing subscription automatically. If it sounds like your thing, you can add it in about ten seconds:

👉 Manage what you receive here

From that page, you can turn any section on or off without unsubscribing from everything else. Nothing is all-or-nothing here.

I hope something here gives you a little more room to think, make, and believe something good is still happening in this world.

Creatively,
Emily

I told you earlier this year that The Screen Door magazine was to be a glimpse behind the scenes and the screen. Since this issue’s theme is “Work in Progress,” I thought I would release some pages as I get them done. One thing about my creative process is that sometimes I get a big idea or project going then get overwhelmed and I freeze. This stops the creative flow all together, then I kick myself for not being brave enough to continue. I find if I set daily deadlines for myself things get finished much more often that if I don’t. When I break down a project into one page a day it seems much more manageable. I say all this to help you have the courage to tackle your thing. Whatever that thing is that would make you feel better, break it down into pieces.

I also have this bad habit of getting really far on projects and then setting them aside because I have to go back to school and then not returning to them, but the ideas never go away. Sometimes I let those unfinished books (now stored on my hard drive and notebooks make me feel like a failure for not finishing yet, but this Summer I am reframing.

All of those words and exciting ideas are there for another time. They are evidence of projects I won’t have to start from scratch and time that was not wasted scrolling but creating. Every thing we attempt to do that is a work in progress teaches us something. The idea is to get things to completion, but sometimes it’s just the mental muscle built working on a new thing that gives the greatest benefit and skills that transfer to the future you that will be so happy you tried!

Without further ado, here is the first article from The Screen Door Work in Progress Issue.

Hi Friend!

Sorry it’s been a minute. Busy Spring! But, I’ve been thinking about this issue for a while and it’s coming together nicely. Listen to the podcast to see what’s coming your way soon.

Warmly,
Emily

The Days Are the Life

Do you have a minute for me to share some things that have been on my mind? This week on a podcast I heard one of my favorite writers give that advice about finding your writing voice. “Just write as if you are sharing thoughts with a friend,” she said. This episode is a bit meandering, but at the core it captures one of my favorite sayings of my former pastor “The days are long, but the years are short.”

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Transcript: Sunday night, I walked out of our church sanctuary and fell in line behind two women who I had never seen before. We had just sat through the funeral of our pastor, which felt more like a worship service to the Lord than anything else, which I think is the highest compliment to his life, as a man who lived to honor the Lord.

One of these women said to the other one, almost to herself, “Wow, those were some good days.” Her friend kind of did an elbow nudge. “You know what they say. You don’t know the good old days until they’re already past.”

I kept walking in behind them, but inside it just really made me want to stop and take note and write that down. Not because I haven’t heard that phrase many, many times before, but because it named something that I had been struggling to name; it put a title on something that I didn’t realize I was grieving.

I have been trying to write this essay for a week. I’ve tried to record the podcast version twice. I’ve gotten emotional both times. So we’re going to be emotional together, because I think that’s actually the point.

The funeral was for my pastor of 20 years, Brother Steve. His death wasn’t a shock to us. He had been in hospice, and we had been praying. We knew this may be coming, but all of it hit me in a way that I haven’t been hit with grief in a long time. I’ve had some losses recently of family members who had also had long illnesses. I just couldn’t figure out why this particular death felt different to me. I found myself searching for a reason.

Sunday morning I sat in my chair with my coffee and my Bible, and my heart hurt with grief. I have felt that way with some deaths in the past, with people who meant a lot to me. I kept thinking to myself how in the world has this happened? This is surreal. I don’t have enough strength to get up and go to church today. It felt like I couldn’t even put one foot in front of the other. Then I thought about how ironic is this that the person I’m grieving would want me to be in church, so I need to get up and go.

I turned to prayer, God, please just replace this feeling of hurting grief with a feeling of peace. He did. God gave me that peace that passes all understanding, so I got up and I went to church.

The whole drive there (we have about a 45-minute drive to church) I kept searching in my mind for why this felt so different than anything I’d ever experienced before. This is my pastor. He’s not in my family. He’s in my church family, obviously, but his death wasn’t sudden. It was something that, like I said, we knew might happen. But it just felt like something had shifted in our lives, an end of an era type of feeling.

I think those two women in the hallway really, really nailed it when they said what they said, because all those ordinary Sundays were the good old days. All those 20 years of going week after week to Bellevue, we hadn’t known that we were in those good old days while we were living them. Sometimes it’s only with looking back (to inform the present) that you can truly appreciate the meaning of a life.

What I thought about this week was how wonderful it is, and how unusual and extraordinary it is to hear the same voice from a pulpit open the same Bible for 20 years. When Brother Steve first started, I was 24 and newly married and trying to figure out that role, how to be a biblically strong and godly wife. I would hang on to his words about marriage as I tried to figure that out.

Then when I was a young mom in my early 30s, I was overwhelmed and tired and hanging on to every word, wanting to be a godly mother. I remember a sermon that he preached that referenced Susanna Wesley and how she mothered John and Charles Wesley. I remember buying every book he talked about in that sermon because I just had this desire to do everything the right way to honor the Lord in my motherhood. Brother Steve inspired that in me, to be a mom in consistent prayer.

Through national crises, Brother Steve preached us through. Through COVID, when time felt so disorienting, not being able to go to church; he was there to navigate us through. Through personal trials, too. Last year, I was unable to go to my church from January to Summer. It was like a second COVID for us because we were going through such a trial, and I was not even living in the same state as my church for a while. Yet his preaching reached through the miles. I would tune in, and when people would come in and out of the room, I would not turn his preaching down. I would not pause it. I’d keep playing it. I was able to listen when we were in Colorado. Once we got home, I did church from home for a while and his preaching faithfully reached me every week.

Sometimes Brother Steve was reaching out to my husband to encourage him through these trials. But then other times, the Holy Spirit just took something from the pulpit and it landed exactly where we needed it that week. Brother Steve wasn’t showing up at church thinking, hey, I need to preach to Zach and Emily. He was just saying, I’m going to faithfully do what God has called me to do. That’s what preachers do. Yet the Holy Spirit uses that to multiply that word across the congregation of people. We were just two of the people who were beneficiaries of his faithfulness to show up week after week. Our lives were made richer from the value that he added, from him leaning into his calling and being faithful to that.

I often treated these Sundays, I think, like they were ordinary, like they were just something we do. We go to church. And of course I love my church, anybody who knows me knows that, and I love listening to the preacher. I’ll often re-listen to the messages, take extra notes during the week, read over my sermon notes, all those things. Yet I think sometimes you just go through the motions and you don’t realize that all those Sundays are adding up to a larger body of days that are our life.

This is something I wrote down this week because I needed to put it somewhere before time swallowed it up:

When someone shows up week after week for over 20 years, faithfully, with the same unchanging word, you don’t think to be grateful in the middle of it. You come back and you let the Holy Spirit fill you up again the next week. You let the Word fill your heart again. You keep going. Yet all those Sunday mornings added up to a larger piece of what I’ll look back on as some really wonderful days of my life and the life of my family. My life was a container for those days.

I think so often in our culture, we’re expected to hear the death announcement, go to the funeral, fold the program up from the funeral, put it in your Bible, and move back on to the schedule we have on Monday morning. This was just one of those times I felt like I needed to cross some things off my calendar this week and really stop and think about the impact that this man had on the life of our family.

I think the grief that I’m feeling through this is not just the loss of an important person in our lives, but also the loss of an era of time that no longer exists. Brother Steve was our preacher during a time in American history and world history when things were so rapidly changing and evolving, yet his voice stayed consistent through that. So that was like a constant in our lives in a time when the world was upended in a lot of ways. Anybody who lives in this century knows this. Anybody who’s parenting in this century knows this. I think a lot of times we just hang on for dear life because things are so ever-changing, but yet our pastor was that steady voice in those times.

Then there’s a grief to all the stages of my kids’ lives throughout our church life, and to being in middle age in church, where you’re just kind of in this threshold of loving new people and saying goodbye to mentors. That’s why I write The Screen Door. I’m in the threshold of a lot of places in my life, and I think many people can relate to that.

I have a coffee table book that sits right inside the front door of our house. I have this large painting that I got from Hobby Lobby, actually, but it’s a stained glass window, and it reflects on the people in the pews. It strikes this memory of my first memory of being in church when I was probably three years old. I went to a Methodist church at the time. The stained glass windows are very colorful, and the light shines through. This painting reminds me of that. It makes me very happy when I walk in my house and I see it, or when I walk down the hall and see it in my living room in the mornings. Underneath it, I have a coffee table book written around 1999 or 2000 about Bellevue, By His Grace and for His Glory, that has a lot of the church history in it up until that time.

I thought back to these pastors who are the most long-tenured pastors at our church: R.G. Lee, Adrian Rogers, Steve Gaines, and now Ben Mandrell. On Monday morning, the Lord drew me to look at this book and think about the different personalities of each pastor and how, looking back in hindsight over all those days they preached, you can see how they were chosen and appointed and anointed for that specific time, for those specific congregations, for that point in history.

I’ll say upfront, these are going to be very short little descriptions. You cannot fit the ministry of a man in a few sentences. You can not boil the life of a man into a paragraph. So just bear with me as I’m looking at the huge arc of history and sharing what I see personally, from where I stand.

R.G. Lee came on the scene near the Great Depression. It’s really amazing that it’s been almost 100 years since he started preaching at Bellevue, yet we have audio recordings of him. His sermon Payday Someday had been preached over 1,200 times, and people would travel from all over to hear him preach it live. He had this real poetic, oratory type of preaching. He was in a world that was early in his ministry preaching to a culture who gathered information through radio and books. People could sit and listen to a long, poetic, wordy sermon and take it all in because they were used to an orator communicating the big ideas of the times. He was appointed by God for that time and that purpose.

Adrian Rogers stepped into the pulpit in the 1970s. I read an article this week written after he passed away where his friend said that Adrian had commented"I don’t know if they will respond to my kind of preaching.” Yet God knew Adrian Rogers was the man for the moment. His preaching was different than R.G. Lee’s, but it was preaching for that time and that generation. You needed someone with a lion-hearted spirit and a booming voice to stand strong against the tide of a culture that was changing. With Roe v. Wade getting passed and with the Southern Baptist Convention in upheaval, you needed someone to be a stalwart person for the gospel to hold the line. Dr. Rogers was that person. He also had these great, alliterated 45-minute sermons that packed a punch. He was a master at concisely communicating huge ideas in a way that was relatable to a wide variety of ages. He had a wonderful television ministry, and that’s actually how I ended up at Bellevue. We watched him on television as I was growing up. That’s how influential he was. People were literally watching him on TV and then also going to their own church.

Steve Gaines came onto the scene in 2005. What I see in him is that he was this strong man who brought courage to a congregation that was about to enter an era in history where they were going to need it. People needed courage to continue to be faithful, to share the gospel, to serve, to be the hands and feet of Jesus, to love God, love people, share Jesus, and make disciples in a culture that was becoming hostile toward the gospel. He came on the scene before smartphones, but had to preach and lead a church through a time when technology was evolving and changing at a speed we had never experienced before. More chatter, more noise, more confusion, more world problems, shrinking attention spans, a pandemic, and the return to a new way of life afterwards. Yet he was just a very consistent voice throughout all these tumultuous times.

I think about his football background, being a defensive player, and I picture someone who just takes the hits and protects the congregation. He was a shepherd watching over the flock, protecting the flock, but also giving the flock courage. Out of everything I got from him, it’s courage to do what the Lord has called me to do. He brought encouragement, but it wasn’t surface-level encouragement. It was encouragement undergirded with the Word of God. He encouraged us to memorize the Word and to pray the Word like it matters, and to believe it, and to know that we don’t just have to go to church, we get to come to church. We leave the service as missionaries, not as someone who heard a word and let it go in one ear and out the other. We leave ready to go and use what was given to us.

Now Ben Mandrell is our pastor, preaching at our church since the fall. I look forward to his sermons every week. As someone who has just come out the other side of a really hard and unusual trial, a trial where I’m literally seeing God restore what the locusts have eaten; I know there have to be other people sitting in church going through their own trials. People who have been in church their whole lives, but who the modern problems of this modern age pack a different kind of punch. I know from experience that Jesus is the only one who can fully relate to a lot of what I’ve been through, but Ben has this heart of the Wonderful Counselor, like Jesus is described in Isaiah. He has a voice that reaches the people in the pews who have been there their whole life and are hurting, and maybe the Holy Spirit needs to reach them in a new way. Maybe there’s somebody who has never been to church but has a hurting heart from just living in this broken world, and maybe that’s how we’re going to reach them too. Ben is also great with engaging shorter attention spans, a little like Dr. Rogers but in his own way, fitting a big message into a shorter sermon that’s still so deep you’re writing things down in your notebook on Tuesday and pondering something he said on Sunday. That is a gift and it’s something we need in our time.

I think all of this speaks to the fact that none of these men knew, while they were living in their times, that they were the man for the moment. They were just showing up and doing what God called them to do. You can’t see the days of your life while you’re inside of them. You can’t know the meaning of a moment when you’re in the middle of it. You can’t know the gravity of a life and the beauty of a series of days and years until you can only see some of these beautiful things by looking back on the arc of a life. Decades of Sundays put into something larger, a larger container than anyone could have planned. And that’s the beauty of faithfulness. Of showing up and doing what God calls you to do every day, even when you can’t see it, even when you can’t see the results, even when you can’t see any fruit from it. It’s the faithfulness to show up.

So I know we don’t know the good old days until they’ve already passed. But I’ve also been sitting with and pondering whether that has to be the whole truth.

Brother Steve used to say all the time, the days are long, but the years are short. He said it about parenting mostly. But I think it goes deeper than that. Our lives are a collection of days, and we rarely know what matters most until we look back and reflect. And I think, what if we started treating every ordinary day like this might be the one I would miss?

I had this happen recently. I’ve been so extremely tired this week. I think it’s just the changing of the seasons, the pollen, baseball season, and the late nights. I’ve had this undercurrent of grief, been pondering a lot of things that have been coming to the surface from everything going on this time last year. So I woke up one day really needing a day off. But then I started thinking about my little two-year-olds coming in, and taking the ninth graders to the square to draw. Because I’ve been writing and talking through this piece all week, even just trying to record it without crying, I realized this might be a day I would miss. When I look back on my life, these days in my classroom are going to be the ones I look back and say, wow, those were some fun days.

I think about days like this past week. I was sad on Monday; I wanted to call in sad instead of calling in sick. But I came to work, and I got the blessing of asking a rhetorical question to one of my third grade classes, and one of the little girls raised her hand and just gave her testimony off the cuff, how she was convicted of her sin, how the Lord saved her. And I thought, wow, if I hadn’t been here I would have missed that. That was beautiful. And that gave me inspiration to have my own testimony ready to give. I mean, if a third grader can do it, that’s amazing.

I know some days feel very significant, like the major milestones of our lives. But days like that, that simple day of the week at school, I thought, wow, this is amazing.

I think about showing up every day as a mom too, through all these stages and ages, some ordinary days, some hectic days, some days where you think, how am I going to get all of this done? But looking back now that my oldest is 17, a lot of my memories are just in folders on my phone and more memories in my heart. And I think back on the arc of raising kids, and yes, those days were a gift. Those ordinary days added up to my life, to these wonderful things about my life.

So I’m trying to practice being present. I’ve switched my phone to grayscale this week I put a little shortcut on there so I can flip it quickly. I’m trying to prepare for the summer, honestly, to not be tempted when I’m bored or have less to do to reach for my phone. Because when you put your phone in grayscale and you look at the apps you normally look at, it’s a lot less appealing. My daughter picked up my phone and said, “Mom, where’s all the color? You love color.” And I said, yeah, that’s the problem. The color is what draws me in and keeps me coming back. I’m trying to be more present because I’m realizing life goes really fast.

Like Brother Steve said, the days are long but the years are short but honestly, now the days are really short and the years are really short. My time of having my kids at home is growing shorter and shorter. I don’t want to look back and think I missed out on it because my mind was elsewhere.

We are appointed for this moment in time, not someone else’s story. We were called to live the life God gave us, the calling God gave us, in this time, in this moment, in this stage. Not somebody else’s life on our Instagram feed, not somebody else’s at our workplace. We have to stop and be present in our everyday and say, wow, God, you put me here for a specific story, just like these pastors I was talking about, just like everyone I look up to. They’re just going through and faithfully showing up for their everyday life and seasons, and those days stack up to the arc of a life.

So Sunday night, two women walked out ahead of me and they put words to the hurt in my heart. I know that they were right. The good old days were those days. But the good old days are also these days.

How wonderful it is to have a life to live and to recognize that you’re in the good days even while you’re in them. Even if your days are hard today. Even if you’re in the middle of a trial. Even if you’re in the middle of grief.

I’ve got a smile on my face this morning because I’m looking back to see what God has done. And I am choosing to look for the good and to be thankful instead of letting the negative side of life drag me down.

So this ordinary day might just be one of the days you look back on and think, wow, wasn’t that something? The voice you hear when you walk into church might be a voice you’ll look back on for years. The room or office you keep walking into at work, that’s your life. The table you come back to day after day to feed your children and clean up after them, those are going to be the memories you revisit one day. These ordinary things.

I know you, like me, don’t want to miss them.

So until next time, keep smiling and never, never give up.

Warmly,
Emily
Screen Door Magazine

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Issue No. 2 releases in June.

Warmly,
Emily

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