When He Feels Far Off

"He is near."

I say that a lot these days. In the hallway. In class. In this space. At my kitchen table last night while a candle flickers, light playing off our faces. I say it to convince others but I say it to convince myself too.

He is near.

He is near because his word says he is near. Because he is Emmanuel, God with us. Because He came to earth as a baby and wrapped in rags and humility. He is near because he was a suffering servant, drinking a cup that wasn't taken from him, even when He asked. He is near because he walked through the valley, in the shadow of his own death. Near because he is God, encompassing, creating, drawing, loving, shepherding. He is near not because we feel His nearness, but because He says He is near.

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Three comforts if you feel He is not near:

1. His nearness is not a feeling, it is a truth.  The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. Psalm 34.15

We may be in the same room with one another, not touching, but there is usually the feeling of presence. But what about those times when you don't feel that closeness? In my office my chair back is to the door so it is the office joke to startle me. Sometimes I don't know someone is standing there for a long time. I can't feel their presence, but it doesn't change the truth that they are standing there, feet behind me.

When we feel far from God it is important to note that our feelings cannot be trusted. Primarily because being apart from God is not a place where we will be sitting in truth. But also because our feelings are simply untrue in this case. God cannot be far off, He omniscient (having infinite knowledge), omnipotent (holding unlimited power), omnipresent (present everywhere). That is the truth. Our feelings are important, but they are important mainly to God and that is the most important thing when we feel far from Him.

2. We know it's true because His word can be trusted. For the word of the Lord is true, and all his work is done in faithfulness. Psalm 33.4

When we doubt our feelings, when it seems He is not coming through, not answering us, or has turned a cold shoulder to us, it is time for us to first confess those emotions to Him. He is not surprised by our doubt. He is not scrambling for a plan B. He is not trying to sweep up the pieces of our lives. He is God and we know that because His word says He is God and words, right there, in that beautiful book, breathed by the Spirit and recorded for us can be trusted. Dreams, emotions, prophetic words, others, feelings—these fail. His word does not fail.

3. We can trust His word because His word does not return void. So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. Isaiah 55.11

God can not be mocked. No, even more, He will not be mocked. He won't stand for it. So neither will His Word. That may seem jeering and standoffish to us, but if we come a bit closer I think we will see what a warm blanket that promise is. That promise means that He is for us, His children, His interest. That promise means that He is deeply involved in our cares and our feelings as they concern Him. Why? Because He won't be mocked. He won't be standing there on that final day wondering what went wrong. That means we're safe, we may feel unsafe, but if you're His child, you're safe. He's got this.

Why?

Because He is near.

How to Get Things Done in Time

A good reminder for me on days like today, in weeks like this week, and in whole seasons like this season, is that I have 24 hours to steward and so does everyone else. I feel acutely the reality that I have 24 hours, but it is often difficult for me to remember that everyone else I know also has only 24 hours. I'm feeling pressed and crushed and persecuted and torn down. I'm feeling like there is never enough time or enough energy or enough hours in my day to accomplish what I feel like I need to accomplish.

A few weeks ago Tim Challies wrote about being busy and I go back to that post often, especially the last few lines,

"This is what disturbs me most, that my busyness, or the perception of busyness, makes me less effective in the areas in which I want to do well. That cost is too high to tolerate. So let me say it again, primarily to reassure myself: I’m not busy. I have all the time I need to accomplish the things the Lord has called me to."

There are so many areas in my life I want to do and I want to do well. I don't do much halfway and I rarely do anything if I don't know that I can excel at it in some sense.

This is pride and while it simultaneously brings me to the end of myself and to the foot of the cross, it also simultaneously puffs me up and drains me out.

I ask a friend the other day why God would call us to something that we couldn't follow through on all the way and the more I think about that question, the more I realize that the entirety of the Christian life is encapsulated there: we have been called something that in and of ourselves, and left to our own devices and power, we cannot ever be: righteous, whole, and holy.

I have 24 hours today and it took me eight minutes to write this post. On one hand I feel as though I wasted those eight minutes and I do not have eight minutes to waste today. On the other hand, though, I have to know that if God has called me to do it, He has given me all the time I need to accomplish it. That's His promise to me. I only need to be faithful and trust He is at work within me and without me.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Ephesians 2:8-10

When You Don't Know What to Do

There is a paralyzing fear that grips the temples of its captive and pounds in every step in every direction. It is a paralyzing fear built of doubt. It creeps in slowly at first, comes with indecision and an inability to make a firm and stayed plan. It strangles slowly, giving credence to two good options or the lesser of two evils. It tightens its grip, bringing with it death that sounds like, "What if I'm messing up my life [or someone's life] by making this decision?"

This fear is verbalized as a doubt in oneself: am I making the right decision? Am I doing the right thing? Am I changing the course of my life with this choice?

But we know that whatever doesn't proceed from faith is sin and where should our faith be borne but God?

This paralyzing fear is nothing more than idolatry on stilts.

It is the course of our life (a mere vapor, dew on the morning grass; vanity of vanities, the preacher said) set high on faulty holds. It is the person we'll marry perched atop a totem. It is the person for whom we'll vote sitting on the tip of a flagpole. It is this school or that school, this church or that church, this place or that place wrapped into a head and set upon a body. It is the idol of self and it is passing away.

If God is Creator and we are the created, then we trust Him to be creative with our lives—even in unexpected and surprising ways. Even in ways that cannot be figured on graph paper or whiteboards. If God is God and we are mere mortals, flesh, dew on the morning grass, than the only master plan that matters is His. He has no plan B.

And your Plans A, B, and C will fail anyway, trust me, and I'll pray it's sooner rather than later. You're welcome.

So here is what we do:

We eat, we drink, we go into this city, we leave this place, we make His name great right where we are, we make His name great in the place He calls us to next, we delight, we find joy, we breathe.

We make decisions born of faith in Him, not in us.

We commit to life because of Him, not because of our convenience.

We marry to reflect His nature, not because we don't want to be lonely.

We commit to our church because she is His bride, not because she is always beautiful.

We covenant in life because we know the end of the story and, for Christ, it is already finished, and so for His children it is too.

Go make a hard decision today. Go and do it in peace.

He is not only with you, He is for you.

Selah.

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.

Swimming in the Shallow Waters

Do you have a few minutes? I'd like to sit down, share a cup of coffee, chat with you. I'd like to look at your face, see you eye to eye, know the way you shift in your chair and the way you brush your hair back from your face. I want to know the sound of your laugh and the things that make you feel insecure about yourself.

I want to know you.

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When I set out to write in this space it was 2001. My life as I had known it had fallen apart or was being ripped apart. I didn't know the first thing about blogging. Certainly never thought a stranger would read what I wrote and never had any illusions of grandeur. As the poet Adrienne Rich said, "I came to explore the wreck, the words are purpose, the words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done, and the treasures that prevail." That was the first tagline on my blog and it remains an important one to me.

Diving into the wreck, using words to find purpose, to find my way, to see the damage and the treasure—this is why I write. This is why I have always written.

But the past two years more and more people read here. Strangers. People from all over the world are reading these maps, these purposes. And the deeper the numbers go, the more I want to swim in the shallow waters. It feels safer to not come out and say how I really feel about some things. To keep quiet on matters about which I feel strongly. To omit needless words, as E.B. White said, but sometimes to omit needed words. Because I am afraid of the wreckage—not the one that has already been made, but the one I might make with my words.

I have never wanted to be a confrontational writer and I still don't want to be. But I had a conversation recently with someone and his words sit heavy on me: your faithfulness to the craft of writing, the poetry you spin with your words, must never come before your faithfulness to the truth of what you write.

In other words, pick a seat or get off the ride.

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So I'm going to do something a bit scary: I'm going to come clean about some things in the coming weeks. I'm going to tackle some subjects that never make me squirm to talk about in real life, but make me all sorts of uncomfortable talking about online.

Because the truth is that I have picked seats on these rides, but I just didn't want anyone to know where those seats were.

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But here's what I want you to know: I want you to know that I wish I could sit down across from you, so I could know you and you could know me and we could be real people with real thoughts and real stories and real lives. It's really easy to write things on the internet and cast people in pale shallow lights. It's easy to create a monster from a man and to polarize politics. It's easy to assume we're right because these days it seems less and less about authorial intent and more about how that piece made the reader feel.

So here's what I want you to know, and I'll restate this many times in the coming weeks: this is not about making you or me or anybody else feel anything, it is about the intentions of my heart—and so too the intentions of your hearts.

You can't know mine and I can't know yours, so come play, but play nicely, because we're all walking out of a wreck and we're all walking into one—let's find the purpose, the map, and the treasures in them all.

Yeah?

How to make a home

It is well past the first day of autumn but we have not shivered until today. Tonight I came home late and turned the lights off, save the string of white lights strung above our mantle. I lit the candles and the fire and am sipping tea while one roommate curls up in a cowl-neck scarf and eats leftover chili. Here is when I feel most at home in what is not home, and what I am coming to learn, may not ever be home.

I read a blog yesterday about a mother in Dubai who is making home there, as best she can, amidst all the things that war against her natural instincts.

The world clatters into our haven and tries to thwart us at every turn; we know it waking up and we know it going to sleep. The poet Richard Wilbur called it "the punctual rape of every blessed day" and the language may be harsh, but the days are nothing if not harsh, no?

I thought as I read her writing, home is hard however you make it. She has children underfoot and a husband to cheer and mountains of laundry and I have none of those things. But I do have bills to pay and a home to keep clean and a car whose check-engine light came on today, flashing at me in a fury. And I do these things alone, which, I sometimes think, is just as hard as doing them with a whole family underfoot.

Who of us chooses our cross and bears it well?

But home is what we make of it and we are all making home into something. This whole summer home has felt like a burning log, something bold and beautiful and soon to be only ashes. That is melodramatic, I'm sure, but how many of you with your picket fences and backyard gardens and daily schedules would handle the division of your home any better? I don't mean to compare, I just mean to say, be blessed and stayed in your covenant family because for some of us the front door of our American dream is a revolving one, always taking someone away.

I have to remember that home is what we make of it, but it is only our home for today. Tomorrow it might not be the same, it might not feel the same, and it might not be what we planned.

I have a friend who is getting divorced this year, nobody told her it would be this hard, she said through tears on the phone last week. I didn't know what to say because I did tell her once that it would be this hard. Another friend lost his wife two years ago. He parents on, but life is not what he expected, he says, and what he plans now for his daughters is that life would be an adventure, surprise built into their life. One more friend plans for her future, but there are so many variables she is learning to hold one hand open and one hand loosely—better to not plan too hard, too much, too deep.

When I was young, I'm not embarrassed, I dreamed of being a homemaker, donning an apron and making soup from leftovers. I still do dream of that in my moments of weakness, when I sit myself in a pile of self-pity and bask in the pool of what I think I deserve. But I am finding more and more that making a home is not so much the decor and menu and chore-charts and laundry. Making a home is making do with what I have today even if what I have today is not what I dreamed of having today.

But it is something.

Tonight it is white lights on the mantle and a lit fire, a roommate in her wool sweater and tea, quiet, calm, full and rich. For tonight I am home.

CROSS CARRYING

I've been thinking a lot about how the world lauds balance, but Christ built his earthly kingdom on tension, not balance. Sometimes it means being in the crowd, sometimes in the closet, sometimes doing miracles, sometimes keeping quiet, sometimes fasting, sometimes feasting. The world wants us to be even, chill, predictable, to embrace zen, practice slowing our reaction times and composing an eloquent response. But Christ says, no, pick up your cross and follow me.

Carrying crosses knocks us off balance.

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.

WHO TOUCHED ME?

It's 8am and I slept in. It's no secret in our house that my bed is the favorite—roommates take naps in it when I'm gone and sometimes they take naps in it when I'm in it reading or typing or staring. But mornings in my bed are my favorite and they are rare. I told everyone who asked that this was the last week they could have a piece of me. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner filled up, and I hit last night going down hard. I knew it would be like this and I did it on purpose. I'm going to be saying no a lot in the coming weeks and months because saying yes to one thing means saying no to other things. God has built in an upcoming season in which I'll have two projects that will need to take precedence, forcing me to say no, no matter how much I want to say yes.

A friend told me a few weeks ago that there's a sense of celebrity in human-nature—everyone clamoring over everyone else to brush shoulders with someone else, network higher, garner more followers, get more likes, podcast more talks, meet more people, drop more names, and

I just want to stay home and drink tea. _________________________________

Last night in church I felt the spirit go out from me. I sat in the back row, the corner chair, and I felt tiredness creep up and the weariness set in. I felt lost in the crowd, seen and at the same time, unseen by the only One I want to see.

I was reading about the woman with the hemorrhage in the Gospels, she who dragged herself from her home, covered her face so she was unrecognizable, and touched the hem of his robe. "Who touched me?" he asked and his disciples were incredulous, "Who touched you? In this crowd? Who touched you? Seriously?"

"I felt the spirit go out from me," he said. "Who touched me?"

I stop on that and reread it. "I felt the spirit go out from me."

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It's easy to feel lost in the crowd, isn't it? Where touch is pedestrian and plain, where being noticed feels impossible and oh so possible all at the same time? Where healing feels a hem of a robe away and holiness is near? Where we're all so desperate to be noticed, to be known, to be heard?

I’ve been part of the crowd recently. I follow them. They follow me. We all run circles around the real One we want to see. We do ministry. We are ministry. We lift up the hands that hang down and strengthen the feeble knees. We run in packs, rubbing shoulders with the people who are already in.

We even touch His robe once or twice, or at least touch someone who’s touched His robe.

But He’s not stopping the crowd for us. He’s not questioning His disciples for us. He didn’t feel the power leave Him when our hurried pressing met his woolen dressing.

That was reserved for the one who pressed through all of us just to get to Him.

Last night I felt the spirit go out from me, but not because I am like Jesus and know so acutely the spirit inside of me, but because I am flesh and blood, real and broken, and if I do not run to Him over and over again asking for more, I will feel the lack. There was no time this week, no time to press in, close to him, crowding out the other voices and distractions, to touch the hem of His robe for the healing of my bleeding soul. To take from him the Spirit He freely gives.

But to come close, to touch Him, He knows this and stops everything for that moment. He sees past the crowd and gives freely His spirit.

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.

SPEAK

Verb, Adjective, Noun. This is the order in which we speak of walking the fast dog, or eating the good meal, or painting the blue wall. This is our syntax, familiar, but not poetic and it is poetry that stills me this morning and coasts me by all day.

Noun, Adjective, Verb—this is the way David sing-songs his worship in Psalm 19:

The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul;

His precepts and laws are not millstones around my neck or burdens to slog through, but they revive my soul. They bring life to the ruminations of my mind, the emptiness of my own thoughts, and the deadness of earthly glory.

The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;

He has done it before and He will do it again. He has brought us thus far and He will bring us all the way in. He has begun and He will finish. This is the testimony He bears and this makes everything else pale in comparison. It is simple, easy, and profoundly wise, what He has done.

The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;

He gives us a blueprint, a "this is the way, walk in it," and a narrow path, and yet none of this steals my joy but brings me further into it. This map shows me how to lift up my head and rejoice in my heart.

The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes;

His commandments, though I do not always understand them, why they feel constraining and at times unfair, why they do not fit my western perceptions of righteous, just, and at times emotional desires, they are pure. They are absolutely pure, undefiled, a gift, and this opens my eyes to see His glory.

The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever;

Like Isaiah, I see Him and I tremble because He is so great and I am so, so small. But my fear is clean, without the earth encrusted baggage I attach to my fear of the dark, of being alone, or not getting what I want. This fear is palmed up and free. His awe endures forever.

The rules of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.

He can be trusted. He is righteous. Altogether righteous. Altogether true.

The kingdom is backwards sometimes and I have to remember that. The world says to love this way or earn this way or be this way or learn this way, and the Kingdom flips our syntax on its head: look this way, it says, look at your King this way and find the fullness of Joy there.

Falling APART

When I was in bible college I had a paperback bible, the cheap sort they give away in church seat-backs, the sort zealots cover with stickers identifying who they are apart from the words inside the book. My stickers were hiking destinations, a round REI one, a Life is Good stick figure standing on the side of a mountain. The truth was my bible was falling apart and the stickers were holding it together. The spine was all but gone and the pages were falling out in chunks, particularly in the New Testament. One of my professors took one look at it and quipped, "A Bible that's falling apart is a sign of a person who's not."

I swallowed the line that day.

I may have been in bible college but I was not a Christian. Not in the sense that I understood the Gospel was not self-help rhetoric, but a life-changing, redemptive way—the only way. This was before my brother died, before a group from the Bible college traveled 14 hours to my home for a funeral, and shared the gospel with me over broken bread and broken bodies on the eve of Easter. I had that bible with me that night, clutched it in hope there was hope out of this nightmare.

The church I found shortly after that Easter used the NASB translation and a teacher/professor/mentor there gifted me with my own leather-bound bible a few weeks before my 21st birthday.

But I never forgot what the first professor said about a bible that was falling apart.

And years later when my NASB was frayed and torn and falling apart and my life was too, I wanted to shake my fist at everything I thought to be true about faith, which was this: the harder you try, the better it will go for you.

It is ironic, then, that the person who gifted me with my current bible, a simple black leather-bound, was someone who had left the faith in a way. He'd wandered across the world and the United States for years, landing in our small college town for a few months, becoming my friend. We would talk for hours about faith and argue and he would frustrate me and I wanted to shake him so hard sometimes because it didn't even seem like he was trying.

It took someone who was falling apart to show me a bible that is falling apart is not the sign of someone who isn't. A bible that is falling apart might actually be a sign of someone who is trying to hold their world together.

I left my NASB back in New York when I moved here, in a trunk in a dusty attic, not forgotten, but not necessary to prove my worth anymore. I need it, though, for a class I'll be beginning soon and so my brother dug it out and is mailing it to me this week. He texted me a photo just to make sure it's the right one.

Holy. I said. Yes, it's the right one.

Holy is right, he said back.

Here is what I know about holiness: sometimes we bring rags before the King of Kings, rags because we have been torn and ravaged by life. And sometimes we bring rags before the King of Kings, rags because we have torn our own clothes, we have beaten our chests with candoitiveness and fortitude. We have shouted our worth and proved it by our piety. But in the end, it's rags we all bring before Him, falling apart lives, brokenness, emptiness, nothingness, and He breaks in, shouts our worth, and covers us with the finest robes, the signet ring.

And sometimes He does it in unlikely ways, through unlikely people, through people who are falling apart and a bible that isn't.