Tough Mud, Miry Pits, and Why God Won't Be Mocked

A blog-reader (and near friend) wrote me an email the other day containing these words:

l love the peace-speaking, life-giving nature of your blogs. You seem seized by your faith that the Lord can work out the differences in His Body—or at least help us live in peace despite them.

And then I read yet another diatribe about yet another divisive issue in the Church. And a biting tweet from someone who ministers effectively from an office about someone who ministers effectively from a garden. And then I heard someone snort behind me when a certain demographic was discussed.

Seized by my faith. Yes. But seized by my faith in a sovereign God. Yes.

Perhaps I'm simplistic, but I know how my brain works and the miles it runs every day, the questions it asks and the solutions it tries to find. I know how quickly I can survey the ground in front of me and how fast I can estimate the work to be done and the best way to do the work. So I don't think it's simplistic thinking that drives me to breathe deep at the factions, lift my eyes up and say, "But God."

We're all so concerned with defending truth, or at least our best white-knuckled version of the truth, that sometimes we forget that God guards His truth and He will not be mocked.

He will not be mocked (Gal. 6:7).

Westboro Baptist Church may seem to make a mockery of Him, but then Fred Phelps grand-daughter comes out and extols His name.

Chic-Fila may have walked into a hornet's nest, but then president Dan Cathy meets with GLBT spokesperson and puts flesh on the Gospel.

Mark Driscoll may tick a lot of people off, but Mars Hill Seattle is filled with hundreds of pastors who are on the ground, doing the work of the gospel and people are being saved.

But that's not all:

I have pounded my fists in the air and cursed God's name, and He still wants me.

He wants me?

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God will not be mocked and He will use arms, legs, hands, and feet shod with truth to take the Gospel to doubters and dwellers, skeptics and seekers, askers and atheists, pharisees and philosophers. He uses you and me—and all of us fools.

So the next time we're tempted to write a blog post denouncing yet another brother or sister in Christ, or type 140 characters about how we know so much more about another person's life or ministry calling, let's take a second and a second look at the miry pit from which we came.

He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. Psalm 40.2

He wants you. And He might have used a fool or two along the way to get to you.

Because, don't worry, He knows His sheep and they know Him. And His name is safe.

That God Doesn't Exist

Before I knew I would move a thousand miles from four seasons and local coffee shops, before I knew that my faith was going to fall apart on the threshold of spring and questions about tithing, membership, and provision, before all that. This all happened before that. I knew that God wasn't real and if He was real, He wasn't good, and if He was good, He wasn't good to me. What I couldn't wrap my mind around was why I'd been dragged through the whole charade in the first place. Why a decade of spirituality and suffering and questions and confidence? Why all that if He was just going to walk me into the desert, spin me around in circles, and tell me to sort it out from there?

One of the first sermons I heard preached after I moved down here was from a series about authority. In it my pastor, who was still in the middle of 18 months of chemotherapy for a brain cancer that kills most of its victims, said these words, "I believe that He did not cause my cancer, but He could have stopped it, and He chose not to."

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There are all sorts of mental gymnastics in faith, right? In that sentence above you could spend hours and weeks and months trying to sort out what each word means and how it plays itself out. You might decide you cannot serve a God who doesn't cause suffering, but could stop it and chooses not to. But in that one sentence, my mind stopped the questions and just believed.

Because here is the truth about what God promises and what He doesn't:

He promises He is good and He promises His word endures forever.

He promises eternity to His children and He promises justice to us all.

He promises His character is inscrutable and generations will speak of His faithfulness.

And those promises trump. They win. They win because they pile these light momentary afflictions of cancer and unbelief, suffering and fear, and they place them in the hands of a Creator, an Artist, an All Good God, and He blows away the chaff, the things that feel like wasted time and wasted energy and wasted you, and He makes all things new.

All things.

New.

Shelf Life

I have a shelf life of two years, three years max. Once I overheard someone say of me, "She's obviously wife material, my only fear is her aversion to commitment," and the words replay in my mind.

A friend told me last week the lies she tells herself the most are always in second person: you aren't smart enough, you aren't pretty enough, you aren't enough. I tell myself the truth, though, when I use the second person: you won't stick around long enough.

A man put his hand on my head many years ago and spoke these words: "He has given you a flexibility of spirit and there are those who will see you as a flitting butterfly, going from one thing to the next, but remember this: He has given that flexibility to you, He has made you adaptable and transient." I looked up from under his hand into the eyes of someone who knows my soul well, knows its propensity to fly the coop. I smiled; she smiled. But she still cried when I last left her house on my trek back to Texas.

The blessing of my singleness has been flexibility. It is moving quickly and easily, changing careers every few years, worrying little about accumulation of things or resources. It can be a selfish existence, but it can also be the quickest way to remember every single day this place isn't home and ought not feel like it.

The curse of singleness is the same curse on everyone—for man it is to work, to toil, and to commit; for me it is to birth, to nurture, and to commit. A pregnant friend told me once it wasn't until after the shock of knowing a child grew within her wore off, that she realized she had to be committed to this. Nine months of her body shifting and shaping, with an alien thing in her that would come out—the labor process terrified her. But she was committed not because she chose to be every second of every minute, but because the blessing is also the curse: it's a long painful commitment and there is no going back.

Though no child grows in me, and perhaps never will, I understand the angst of long, painful commitments, of nurturing when I feel like running, of entering in when I long to draw back. At times I feel unwilling to do this, to stay, to prolong my shelf life—I just want to go home. This week I want to go home to the northeast corner, some weeks I want to go home to my hometown, most days I just want to go home.

This morning I stopped on Romans 8 and stayed there, committed to it:

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

I rarely think of corruption in the way I think Paul meant it here. To me corruption is Wall Street businessmen and the Russian mob, politics and big government. But it also means to crumble, to rot, to fall apart. This is what we're doing, friends, all of us. Our shelf life is crumbling, rotting, and falling apart. We're bound to do it, all of us.

But.

But the redemption of our bodies is not long off, not at all. And this, oh this, I can count on and commit to—it's coming. If we're His children, it's coming. He's coming.

And He has no shelf life or homesickness or fear of commitment—He's in, all in, forever and ever.

Endure Patiently

I can't even tell you how it happened that we sat there and cried hot wet tears, barely looking one another in the eyes. I take much of the blame, though my heart ached with hurt and couldn't find healing. Don't let the sun go down on your anger?

Well, what about when it's not anger you're bedding down for the night? What about when it's joy mixed with mourning so deep you don't know what else to do but be silent? Be silent for fear that your muddled mess of joy and mourning will be trumped by the latter and seen as such. So I kept silent.

A friend tells me a few weeks ago that I present my life as perfect and I want to tell her to read a decade's archives of presentations. This? This place on the web? This is my sanctification in process on view for the world, and if that's perfect, well, I suppose I've arrived a thousand times over.

Once I heard a story of an old man on his death-bed. He was asked if he found himself sinning less as he grew older.

"Sin less?" He asked. "I was never more aware of my sin than I was a moment ago."

"Well, then, do you find it easier to repent?"

"No, son," he said. "I just find the gap between me and the Lord ever closing as I turn."

It was Annie Dillard who said, "Where, then, is the gap through which eternity streams?" and I think that gap is here, and here, and this moment, and this one. Eternity streams through these small moments, adding up to one final jubilee, one long trumpet call, when our angers and hurts and fears and sins are bedded forever, never to wake up, not ever.

Do I find myself sinning less the nearer I draw to that final day?

No. I find I know my sin more, and every moment more aware than the last. But do I find it's easier to find God, to know His nearness, and to trust the days to him? Yes. I do.

It doesn't make the hurt less, but this earthly Christian life is not for the avoiding of hurt, but the enduring of it.

...we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance... Romans 5:3

God, are you there?

I found the raspberry ale, the one I like because it costs more, some small round clementines, some ginger lemon tea, and I've been wearing my glasses all day and no makeup. An old tshirt.

You think you know what I'm talking about when I tell you this week was a beating, and you might know a fraction of why, but you don't know the whole of it. You don't know the tears started on Sunday and have fallen clear through the floor of my heart all week. You don't know the ache settled itself somewhere in my throat and caught itself there strangling me with my old friend Fear all week.

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In The Brothers K there's a page where the oldest brother, Everett, spouts prayers off at the dinner table in front of his devout Seventh Day Adventist mother. His prayer starts, "Oh, God, if you're there..." and proceeds onward. It's one of the most achingly poigniant pieces of prose I've read in a long time, the whole chapter, and what we find, sweet readers, is that Everett wrestles with the beautiful question we all ask. We all have to ask:

God, are you there?

We have to ask this question, we all do, because if we don't ever feel the full on, gawking, haunting lack of Him, we cannot feel the full on, grasping need of Him. And I want to say we ask the question once and done, and it's answered in pew-side confessionals, altar call moments, or gasping breaths on the floors of our bedrooms. I want to say the question is brought once to our lips and then in holy awe, He touches our mouth with a hot coal and we go, we go, we cannot help but go.

But even Jesus, there on the cross: "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?"

My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?

Are you there?

The heaviness of my soul this week was not death fringed around my doorstep or martyrdom for the cause of the Gospel. It was being jilted of an invite, being misunderstood by a friend, an unexpected email, feeling like a pebble instead of a pearl, a glance shooting disapproval my direction, an inbox that didn't stop filling with reactive messages all week and still. It was not having enough time to read or pray or write or be. It was leaving work and someone noticing my tires needing air and saying so. It was me saying I need a husband because I can't do this. I can't be alone anymore. Not if it means putting air in my own tires for the rest of my life.

It was the cross He asked me to bear this week. And it was a down-pillow compared to His cross.

But somewhere along the way I asked the question: God, are you seeing this? Are you going to battle for me? Are you going to defend me? Are you going to be near me? Are you going to sustain?

I wish, reader, I didn't have to wrestle with this question as often as I do. I wish belief came as naturally to me as unbelief does. I wish I had natural born faith instead of fear.

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I learned in one of my classes this week that we in the Church have been taught to believe belief leads to new birth, but the Bible teaches it the other way around: being reborn leads to belief.

And I nearly wept, right there, I didn't care who saw. I nearly wept because I can grab hold of this, because I know I'm reborn. I know it with every fiber of my being, I know Jesus is right and real and good, and His word is true and Holy and forever. And I know belief is born in the truth of my new birth and that's it. My birth, the new freshness and delight of my salvation, doesn't change because my belief is pushed on and what a comfort it is.

I felt the gawking, aching hole this week. I felt the lack of belief, but not the lack of birth, and I sit deep in this tonight. God is here, patient and parenting, battling and bearing on my behalf.

The Lord your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes.  Deuteronomy 1:30

Common Stones

Remember last week when I told you about asking for a fish and getting a stone? A friend told me afterward that sometimes we think we've asked for a fish and still receive a stone, and when that happens it's because we cannot fathom the unending blessing and goodness of God—what we're really asking for is a stone and what He is giving is a fish.

Protection, she called it, from what would ruin us, because He knows best what is best.

I hear that and receive it, but I don't like it. I don't like it because I like fish and I like a particular kind of fish and I see other people getting the fish they asked for and I can't figure out why He won't give me the particular fish for which I crafted a beautiful ask.

Instead he plops a stone down into my lap—it's hard, uncomfortable, and it's covered in dirt.

Well, what am I going to do with this stone, I'm asking Him.

And He's not answering. But it's not because He's not good—I know it's because He is good and sometimes answers come slowly, like rocks eroding in a river instead of fast like fish swimming downstream.

So I'm turning this rock over in my hands and trying to see the beauty in it. And if beauty cannot be found in it, I'm trying to see hope in it. And if hope cannot be found in it, I am trying to see His goodness in it. And the truth is that His goodness can be seen in every common and broken thing on earth.

How to die beautifully

There are things I ought to have learned in science class, but I was too busy hankering for art class to pay much attention. Did you know that the reason the autumn leaves are so spectacular in the northeast is because the weather has an indecisive air to it? It’s true. One night it’s cold enough to frost and the next day it’s warm enough to kayak in a tshirt. In the mountains the reds and oranges are deep and rich, and in the valley fields the green is vibrant and lush. The sky is almost always a steel blue, nearly grey, but still clear. I cannot describe this well enough, I know. I’m sure I tend to romanticize it because I tend to romanticize everything. It makes for a better story, see?

But trust me: it is beautiful here. Even today, while it rains steadily outside the side porch where I complete my wedding tasks of the day, it is beautiful (of course it helps that my wedding tasks for the day were to take buckets of flowers and make them into eleven presentable bouquets).

Tonight I’m going to leave these bouquets of roses and hydrangeas, seeded eucalyptus and ranunculus here on the porch. Outside, where temperatures will probably dip into the forties. I’ll leave them here. And for the same reason that the leaves get more and more spectacular, I have no fear for these flowers.

It goes against my gut to do this, leave them outside. Because flowers bloom in the warmest months, I assume that that’s where they’ll thrive best. But a year in Texas is teaching me that while the heat may force a bloom to open, it does little to sustain it.

We all need a little indecisive air, a bit of a chill, to be sustained.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day and she’s asking the right questions: why does it have to be so hard sometimes? Why does it have to hurt?

I don’t have answers for her. I’m finding the more I know, the less I really know.

But I know this: those leaves wouldn’t take our breath away if they weren’t dying in the process.

And I don’t like that. That makes me uncomfortable. I hate death, it is nothing but stings and barbs. But I love life because it is nothing but newness and cycles.

I love life because I know that I will die a million deaths until that final one, but each one makes me a little more vibrant in the process, and each one brings the promise of newness. That’s something I can plant my soul in.

This post was originally posted in October, 2011. But in honor of peak week at home, I'm posting it again. Enjoy your leaves northern friends!

WHO CAN help US?

A friend asked me recently if I had any thoughts to contribute about what it means for a single person to be fruitful and multiply. It was nicely timed because I'd just written a post on adoption as sons based on the idea that singleness brings with it a barrenness no one wants to acknowledge, so all of that Genesis stuff was fresh on my mind. But then I went to a wedding. And watched a movie about adoption. And RSVPed to a few more weddings. And listened to some friends talk about their new relationships. And held a newborn baby. And suddenly anything I thought I had to say or think about singleness or fruitfulness went the way of hoop skirts and handlebar mustaches, that is to say, extinct.

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I have this other friend. We don't get to see each other often, she lives on the other side of the 70 mile metroplex we call home. But usually all it takes is a glance at one another at church or a text or a simple thought and we're on the same page. She's a talented, beautiful girl, with a talented, godly husband. They live in a beautiful home they've made into a haven. People might envy their idyllic lives, and in some ways, I wouldn't blame those people, this couple has what many people only dream of.

But they don't have a baby.

And that's what they dream of.

She and I, we're the sort of friends who enter into one another's pain, and though it is not the same, it is the same: we both want what we do not have and there is no guarantee for either of us that we will ever get it.

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The longer I am single, the more women come into my life who struggle with infertility, a staggering number of painfully quiet pray-ers.

So I began to listen. I began to listen to their stories, to their mourning, to their agony, to the ways in which they felt inferior or on the exterior or incapable. I began to listen to their tears and their fears. And here is what I am learning:

We are all barren souls, empty wombs, and carved out holes. We, all of us, long for something not yet here and it might be as beautiful as marriage or a baby or it might be a simplistic as a big screen tv or better career. We want. We ache. We ache. Deeply in us for something to satisfy the gnawing inside of us.

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Another friend of mine left our church recently, choosing another church to call home for a season. Why? I asked him. To find a wife, he said. I stared at him—if you're a good man and you can't find a wife at my church, you're not looking to your left or right. But then I realized something: there's a gnawing in him. An ache. A barrenness. A desperateness.

"It is not good for man to be alone.

I will make a helper fit for him."

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I sit in need these days. I wonder how I could ever be a helper fit for anyone and then I remember Christ's words in John: I'm sending my Spirit to you! He will help you, guide you into all truth.

He has made a helper fit for us, all of us.

So friends, I just want you to know that I understand and you understand and more than anything He understands and we, all of us, are called to help. I help my babyless friends by reminding them of God's faithfulness. They help me by reminding me that marriage and a home doesn't equal completion. Women, we help our brothers by being approachable, willing to take risks. Men, you help us by not overlooking what could be the best spouse fit for you.

But more than anything the Holy Spirit helps us all by guiding, teaching, comforting, and filling us full, to overflowing.

You may feel alone, but you are not alone.

Deeper Church: Thirty Blackbirds or More

I've had a love/hate relationship with the Bride of Christ most of my life. In the times I have needed her most, I have felt failed by her, and in the times I have felt myself stray far from her, she has pursued and loved me. These are strange words to use about an entity, a full body of individuals, imperfect men and women stumbling through life and the Bible as clearly as they can, but they are true words. There is nothing on earth I love more than the Church. 

I have felt her failings near and I have chased her down in desperation—and there is no other place I would rather commune, break bread and share wine, than within her haven.

Ephesians 4 speaks of building the unity of the Church and oh how that resonates.

To see a whole body purified, strengthened, and grown into full maturity, ready to be presented to Christ—this I love.

And so I'm grateful that I've been asked to contribute monthly to a publication that pulls from every fold of her robes, every particle of her skin, and every joint and marrow, to build up and unify the Church as best we can with our earth encrusted words.

My first column is up today:

Bearing the Weight of Thirty Blackbirds or More

I pass a field of blackbirds every morning on my way from class to work. There are a thousand of them wide in a Texas spread and I can’t stop trying to count them with my mind. Thirty of them are perched on a shrub close to the ground, but its branches do not bend or weep. I marvel at its strength. I marvel at the lightness of the birds, all thirty of them.

This desert shrub carries the weight of the blackest birds and I think of Jeremiah 17 while I drive. Continue reading...

Soul

I'm all alone in a corner tea house in the middle of downtown Chicago. There are people walking through life in their rainboots and oxfords outside. It is afternoon and I am cold. The man across from me is wearing mint green pants and a group of Koreans just came in chattering, one tripping up the stairs in her Hello Kitty galoshes. I catch the eye of a man walking outside, I wonder who he is talking to on his smart phone. He dips his head against the drizzle and keeps walking. This weekend's conference is for Creatives. That's what we're called these days. These days in which we make adjectives into nouns and capitalize them with an air of ego, a dash of narcissim, and a whole heap of are-we-good-enoughs thrown in for good measure. We are a room full of introverts, stumbling through life in our too big for us boots and our too small for us dreams. At the end of today I realized that it was not a conference for Creatives or Artists or even Storytellers. It was a conference for souls.

I catch another eye outside the window of the tea shop, she has her nose buried in a pink scarf and her blond hair is falling messy around her pink cheeks.

We are not as alone as we feel.

Maybe the problem is that we just don't look at one another in the eye? Who was it who said that eyes are the windows to the soul? Cliched? Perhaps. But cliche becomes because there is truth hidden in lines like these.

Why don't we look one another in the eye? What are we afraid of? A human? A being? A person with a life and a story, one who is attempting to make something beautiful out of the cards dealt them? A soul?

So this has been two days full of ministry to the soul, the untapped region. Untapped because we are afraid of it enough in others that we begin to fear it in ourselves as well.

I know what my soul is capable of and I don't even know a fraction of what my soul is capable of.

It is capable, most of all, of worshipping itself, putting its eyes on the temporal, the carnal, the seasonal bounty. But today I have that inkling of hope again that He shows me the way to life, real life, is the fullness of worshipping Him alone.

That feels insurmountable, I'm telling you the truth. I got on a plane yesterday morning, put my head against the seat, and asked God, please, to refresh me, to fill my soul and the hurting parts, the lonely parts, the soulish parts of me that are wrapped up in this temporal kingdom. I have taken my eyes off the Creator, put them on the creation, and that creation isn't even worthy of a second glance if He is not my first.

If it is true what He says—that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and I believe it is true, then it must be true too that the only way to the Father is through Him.

I don't forget that, no, but I overlook it. I look over it and put my eyes on beautiful places, but they're not ultimate places or the fullest of places, they're just good enough places.

I catch the eye of a little girl who just came in with her mother, she looks away, taught so young that we take our eyes away from the beautiful thing that is the soul. I wonder if it is our mutual turning away that teaches us it is okay to look away from depth. If that is when we learn to take our eyes off the faith that is childlike and full, certain that He can do what He says He can do and He is Who He says He is.

And if that is true, how can we unlearn it on this side of heaven?

I hold the glance of a man in a flannel shirt walking past the window. I will myself to not look away and he, surprisingly, doesn't look away either. I turn up the side of my mouth and he nods his head at me and passes from my view.

Did God REALLY say?

One friend and then four more told me this week they hope for me what I hope for myself, and that is to be picked, chosen, and loved. More than one friend and a few more have said the word deserve and when they do the blackest parts of me come to my mind's eye and I disbelieve everything they say from then on. A lie may be small (Did God really say?) but its infractions are limitless.

Today I am driving home from class, the sunrise to my back and a row of 100 cars stopping and going, stopping and going in front of me. I am thinking of Job's friends. Their comfort to his plight was how any of us would respond—with good wishes and you deserves and reminders of good deeds checked off: So why is God not near then? Did He really say?

We speak statements veiled in questions, buffered by doubting inflections so our collective unbelief sounds less wrought with sin than it is.

To ask if God really said what He did indeed say is virtually the same as if to say He did not really say.

In class this morning we read a passage from Genesis that a man read over me a decade ago. He put his hand on my head and promised that if I would do as this man of old did, I would taste of the same richness of relationship in life he did. I set my feet there and I have not moved.

If you were to make a list of my good deeds you could check them off, each one. If you were to cup a portion of the love I have given, you could fill a lot of hearts. I say that because I have so many convinced that I deserve God to come through, make good on what was seemingly promised.

And yet He does not.

And He might not. Not in the way I think He should.

We read about how Abraham died before he saw what was promised and I wanted to shake my fist at God for one moment. How could you promise him and then not deliver!? How could you hold that promise far off like a carrot in front of the face of a working mule? All this, for this? For nothing?

It is no secret that I am doubting Thomas. I know Thomas more than I know any other disciple. I need to thrust my hands into my Lord's side, my fingers into his hollowed out hands. I need Him to walk through walls and I'm not ashamed of that.

Faith needs people who will ask and not stop asking.

But today I am seeing my doubt for what it is. My asks should not be statements punctuated with question marks.

They should bring me further into the light, not the darkness.

Further into His character, not my own.

Further into joy, not sorrow.

Further into what He did say, and not what I think He might have said.

MASTERING the CURVE: Dear Me

Dear me,

You were standing around the corner when a pastor's wife said, "pleasantly plump," and your face burned with shame because she was speaking of you.

You are thirteen. A woman because you have small changes happening in your body, but a girl still because you have smaller changes happening in your soul. You alone know the tag of your jeans says size six and you know your babysitter wears a two. She said so when she folded your clothes a few weeks before while your parents were gone for a week.

You feel the numbers between two and six as acutely as you feel your chest begin to grow and your too small face and your uneven teeth. You feel every inch between two and six and you feel the inches around your thighs, your waist, your hips, your chest. You cup your curves and you swear you will not love them. You will hate them until they know they are hated and you will carry the hate in the curves and nooks and shapes of your heart. You will bed the hate there and you will tell yourself in ten, thirteen, & fifteen years that this is why no man will ever want to bed you.

You, a five foot brunette, with clear blue eyes and a smile that fills your whole face when you let it, you grip that hidden tag on your jeans and swear it will not master you.

And it does.

All your life it has mastered you.

When you are 19 and your world falls apart, when death and divorce and courtrooms become your life, you will cook pasta for your younger brothers, determine to keep home safe because nothing else is, you will be a size 14.

When you are 23 you move to a foreign country and you spend every night on the concrete bathroom floor, vomiting and sick, you lose 50 pounds and you are gaunt, thin, a size six again. People will ask you what your weight-loss secret was and you will tell them you have bugs in your stomach.

When things begin to break again and you are 27, you create home and community and try to make it best where you are. You are a size ten when you leave New York. You bike to the grocery store, walk to the coffee shop, you are not skinny, but you love your curves because you are nourished and healthy.

When you are 29 and you live in the suburbs where everyone drives and eats fast food; you do drive but you do not eat fast food. You eat healthy food, local and happy. And still the curves they grow. You eat less and the curves are unloved again. The curves are starving and still they grow.

Those curves, those inches, and the tag on your jeans, they will master you, sweet blue eyed smiling girl. All your life you will feel them mastering you.

I wish I could take you by the shoulders, dear thirteen year old me. I wish I could take your face in my hands, lovely girl. I wish I could turn you around and point to a line of beautiful women, women who are not ruled by the tag on the inside of their jeans. Who are not ashamed of the 10s, nor boastful of the twos. Women who know that they are intricately designed inside, who look around their family and see that curves run in it—that aunts and cousins and grandmothers and mothers wear their curves too.

I wish I could do that for you. The truth is that I can't. But I can do this. I can tell you that near 20 years from now the mastering of your heart then affects the mastering of your heart today.

Today you looked up at your beautiful roommate, the one who is tall and graceful like a swan, slim with a flat stomach, who can eat anything she wants and never gain a pound: Do you ever feel like you're not enough? you ask her.

And she comes, sits down beside you, takes your hand in hers and dips her head and asks the God, the real Master, the one who knit you together and crafted you perfectly and knows your curves more than you ever could, she asks Him to be near, to minister, and to show you His love.

So here is what I can tell you, dear girl, He sees you. He knows you. He places you and puts you and covers you and never thinks about the tag on the inside of your jeans. He knows your sixes and your tens and your fourteens and He knows your cells and your biology and your DNA and your genetics.

He knows you.

Love me.

Written for Emily Freeman's Dear Me. 

If you would like to comment on this post, consider clicking over to my author page on Facebook and Liking Sayable. 

HOW to be a good INTROVERT

You don't get to be a successful introvert without having somewhat of a panicky gaze on your heart and head and all things you fairly constantly. What I mean is, if you want to know who's going to struggle with preoccupation of self more than anything, look in the mirror first, and then look to your left and right. We're everywhere—you can't hide from us. Why? Because we can't even hide from ourselves.

The benefit of this self-awareness is that if you want to know what I think about any issue, you can ask me. I will probably have a litany of thoughts on which I have ruminated and masticated until they're confiscated by some other mounting question. You want thoughts, I have thoughts.

The damage of this self-acuity is that when it comes time to put my eyes on someone or something else, I have so poorly trained my eyes in the direction they should go that I cannot hold my gaze for very long without looking away.

I can train this heart of mine to follow the tracks, but even that doesn't stop the train from derailing. The only steady things sometimes are the rails themselves.

The train has been derailing for me this year. It began with a glance away from beautiful Jesus and faithful Father, and it continued downward until my eyes have been setting somewhere south of healthy. So it's time to trust the tracks. Time to trust that training my heart will get me home and, oh friends, there is no other place I want to be than home.

The tracks for me are repentance and rest, quietness and trust—and if this post resonates with you, I would guess those are the tracks for you too. To do those things, though, it's going to mean sacrifice and I'm willing to do that.

Here are three of the ways my sacrifice might affect you:

I. If you primarily come to Sayable from Twitter, nothing will change there for you.

II. If you come from Facebook and you aren't a close friend, family, or colleague, I would recommend that you go over and Like this page. This is because I will be slowly be straightening the rails of life by keeping a close watch on what I ingest on social media—beginning by removing the amount of people on the friends list of my personal page.

III. I will also be shutting down comments on Sayable for a season. If you'd like to contact me, please do so through email, though understand it may take some time for me to respond.

I said above that I know my heart more than anything else I know, and the truth is that I love interacting with readers. I love hearing your stories. I love when you track me down, find me, and say, "Lore, your words, they have encouraged me and changed me." I love that. I love it mostly because I love knowing that the deep and agonizing work God does in me results in deep and beautiful work in you. But I'm afraid that sometimes all the words coming back at me don't bear the sort of fruit I want the beautiful work of God to bear. Please don't read into that statement or assume it to mean anything other than what I am saying: I want the work that God does in me to result in good fruit. If it does not, I want Him to prune it.

Thank you for loving me well and thank you for space. Thank you for always encouraging and thank you for challenging. I long to write for Jesus, but He lets me write it for you too, and I'm grateful for that.

TRADES

You listened to part of the transcripts this morning before someone who knows you better than you do told you to stop, before you'd end up in the closet, in a ball of tears. You've never seen New York like this. Eerily silent and dust covered. A city of the walking wounded. You stare into the eyes of strangers for five, ten, forty seconds before either of you realized that in New York City you don't do that. You avert your eyes, look away, avoid, but not this week. This week you stare. And you nod at the end, sighing in unison. You are both thinking the same thing after all: what just happened?

Every park is filled, every corner is filled, every mind is filled: what just happened?

Fences are filled with Missing Person signs and the homeless aren't the only ones laying, dazed, on park benches and curbs.

You know things are going to change you, but you don't know how much, or to what length. You don't know, for instance, while you watch planes crash into familiar buildings, that in ten years two of your baby brothers will be soldiers and men, stationed in countries torn by war. You don't know that in ten years every day you will pray for peace, mostly because peace means that they will come home in one piece.

You don't know that in the weeks to come, you will open the coffee shop every morning at 5am and you will listen to your fellow countrymen wake up to the news, giving their best war-plan strategies while they hand you their dollar-sixtyfive. You don't know these things. You don't know that freedom really does cost something, but in your wildest dreams you never imagined it would cost this.

You stumble through a shell-shocked city, one wrapped in yellow caution tape. You try to make sense of what just happened.

You don't know that everyone you know knows someone who knew someone and you find out years later that you knew someone too. You regret losing touch.

You love history because when you hear about what has happened, it helps make sense of what is happening. But when what is happening is happening in real time, in your life, around you, there is no sense to be made of it.

You just stare at strangers a little longer. You both nod. Maybe you reach out and touch their arm.

What should have made us afraid, for a few weeks there, made us brave.

(pinterest)

You're proud to be an American. You are. You pray for peace. You hate conflict. You hate that your baby brothers wield guns and wear uniforms. But you love your country. You loved it dusty and shell-shocked, and you love it bankrupt and tired. You loved it confused and bewildered, and you love it arrogant and corrupt.

But you love heaven more and you long for it. So you pray only this, but every day: even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly.

Come quickly. 

(Originally posted on the ten-year anniversary of September 11.)

OIL, WATER, and the LIES we tell ourselves

I’ve got layers of lies that I don’t even know about yet. Sara Groves

Here’s what happened:

A friend told me something and I believed her. I do that. I’m a believing, trusting sort of person. The thing is, what she told me was only half true. Not half true to her—she told me the truth as best as she could, but it was only half of the whole truth. I didn’t know the other parties involved, so what could I do? I believed her. This is what friends do.

But the water has sunk to the bottom and the oil has risen to the top and with it all the floating particles that are still coated with enough water that I can’t look into that cup without seeing more of the whole story.

And my heart is sick.

Because her true-to-her story was only half of the story and now I know the other half, and the other half is my friend too, and when you love oil and water, even if they hate each other, what can you do? You believe them both with as much grace as you can muster. This is what good friends do.

But at some point the whole thing gets shaken up again and it takes a while for things to settle and while it’s still shaken you feel sicker and sicker still because there are always three sides to every story, hers, his, and the horrible, awful, honest truth. With a choice so divided, what can you do? You choose truth. This is what the truest friend does.

To choose truth, though, means to lose other things, namely trust.

Today trust was lost and I mourn that. I mourn it so hard and so deeply because I have been lied to, though neither of them did the lying.

I was the one lying all along. And that is the most heartbreaking of it all.

Paul admonishes the Thessalonians to “aspire to live quietly and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you.”

I’m stuck on that today because I didn’t live quietly and I listened to the lies. But the lies were of my own making and they said something like this: You are big enough to handle the heartbreaking details of someone’s life all by yourself. You are big enough to have an opinion on lives that aren’t your own. You are big enough to discern truth from lies and from opinions and cries.

The truth is that I am not a part of the problem or the solution here; I am only a particle that floated to the top of his story, coated in the residue of her story. Just one small particle.

And if God did not give me the grace to handle this (at least without some amount of bellyaching), then it is probably best for me to simply bow out.