Talk it In/Out

I process internally. I'm rarely ready to discuss anything or contribute anything to a conversation until I've chewed on and distilled every possible scenario in my head. Because I'm bent this way, I always think it is more helpful to process things internally. You know who doesn't agree? All of my friends.

Yup. For some reason I seem to attract verbal processors like hipsters to coffee bars. Nearly every one of my close friends is someone who wants to hash and rehash every thought process. They want the counsel of many, and talking through things helps them distill the good counsel from the bad.

The downside? They want to do that with me.

I don't seem to mind it when they want to hash around their own problems in that way, but when they want to process my situations in that way, nine times out of ten, I end up feeling bullied or not heard. I feel like a project to be fixed instead of someone to just be heard. But all they're doing is loving me the way they love to be loved.

However, when they want to talk over things with me, and all I do is listen, they can feel like I don't care about their problems. I do. I really do. I'm just not ready to give my thoughts until I've thought through them.

The other side of the coin is I'll have thought through a situation for a long, long time, and come to someone with every possible angle considered. I'm rarely looking for their advice, I just feel like I need to say, "Here's what I've been thinking about." But because I'm coming with a neat bullet-point list, the problem figured out, the best option to take, fully processed, my friends can feel like I'm the one bullying them.

It's a no win, right?

Well, without Christ it's a no win.

James says, "Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger." Because I am naturally bent toward that, I can take this verse and vilify everyone I know who just wants to "talk it out."

But the book of Proverbs says, "Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed." So which is it? Shut up or get talking?

I don't think it's either or, honestly. But I do think we need to keep three things in mind in every relationship:

1. The necessity of keeping the Holy Spirit and Fruit of the Spirit central in every conversation we have. When we're motivated by the things of the Spirit, we're going to be motivated not to be heard or responded to, but to be like Christ in our listening and in our counsel. Good advice is meaningless if it's not empowered by the Spirit. Likewise, good listening is active listening, not just thought-filing.

2. If you're an external processor, be mindful of trying to do so with internal processors. It can feel bullying, even if you mean it in earnest helpfulness.

3. If you're an internal processor, be mindful of bringing your fully processed ideas to external processors. It can feel condescending, even meant kindly.

Sometimes the best thing, even for verbal processors, is to be slow to speak. And sometimes, even for internal processors, it is to seek the counsel of many. Above all, the counsel we need most is Christ's, and the voice we should be listening to the most is His.

Worshiping at the Bar

I'm not a live show girl. Celebrity doesn't impress me and groupies crowd my space. The best concerts happen in my car on road trips from north to south and back again. I am the singer and the audience and my wheels hum along. But the stamp on my hand and the heels of my booted feet belie me tonight. There is wholeness when watching an artist at work. I say to a friend yesterday, "You're not a compartmentalized man with faith in one box and parenting in another, fiction in one and politics in yet another. Be all you, which is more biblical and less transcendental than it actually sounds."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

We are shoulder to shoulder, heads above heads, the smell of beer and crisp Texas winter all around. There is grit and tenderness and the girl in front of me danced wildly one minute and sobbed into the arm of her friend the next.

Music does this to us, I think to myself.

Or maybe it isn't the music at all, but the lyric of life being lived right in front of us. This artist-woman whose age is there, in the wrinkles on her forehead and the veins on her arms, is living it. Her voice cracking at inopportune places, as if there are opportune places for that anyway. She is a mother to all the rising folk artists I love, and she is the one I love more than all of them combined. But she is older now, and wrinkled and still so very, very beautiful.

This is what life does to us, when we live it. Not compartmentalized and neat, sectioned off into safe places and dangerous ones. We live it all, splayed out, because this is who He made us to be.

I think of Jesus on the cross. For some this was God's great artistry, the deus ex machina—the predictable surprise ending. But it isn't only the vulnerability of His son crying out that we stand our faith upon, but the jubilant rising of Him three days later.

There is nothing compartmentalized about this life, not for the Christian, and not for the pagan either. All of life touches and dances and weeps and were it not that way, we would be puppets or robots or, worse still, skeptics, all of us.

I am practicing for heaven tonight, swaying with the bar folk and the church folk, the worshipers at the stage of their god, staring at the imago dei there in all her creator's glory. Whether she testifies of it or not, even the rocks will cry out.

None of us can help it.

We are who we are, full on, splayed out, in ignorant worship or intentional, we cry out.

Pot, Meet Kettle

My first blog was on a Live Journal domain (remember those?). I took its name from a Burlap to Cashmere song that, to this day, I still don't really understand the full meaning behind. I just knew I loved the three words strung together. The year was 2000 and my family was turned upside down in about a year. You name it, we experienced it in that year. I didn't know where to turn, or to whom, and so I turned to anonymity. I became a blogger.

In 2000 a blogger was either Jason Kottke, posting links to interesting content on the rising web, or it was an angsty teenager ranting about life. I wrote voraciously. Sometimes three posts a day. I didn't care who read, or if anyone did, but I began to find a community of other bloggers. There was this brotherhood among us of sorts, people from all over the United States who stumbled on words not their own but which could be. I don't have other words for it but divine. It was divine in the sense that it was almost otherworldly at that point. There were no dating sites, chat rooms were still a little strange, actually meeting someone in real life was rare and coated with suspicion. But it was also divine in the sense that it was a timely gift from God.

I spent years working out my salvation on the pages of the internet. By the time Sayable was birthed in 2008, I was one of the seasoned bloggers. My readership was still small by comparison, but in the annals of history, I was nearing mid-life at least. Every thought I've had about God has somehow been worked out on Sayable, or its younger siblings.

Writing is sanctification, if you'll let it be.

This morning I opened my feed reader and read, as I do every morning. I find more and more often, I am just skimming. I open the posts with catchy titles or intriguing photos, so I am guilty of that which I complain of, I know. But I am so weary of the noise of blogging: the effort to churn out content instead of cherish the conviction.

One of my favorite quotes is by Lindford Detweiler, and I'll never forget it. I love it so much that I screen printed it and it is the welcoming art as you walk into our home:

Music and art and writing: extravagant, essential, the act of spilling something, a cup running over...The simultaneous cry of 'you must change your life, and welcome home.' I've been trying to write songs again, and I've been hitting a maze of dead ends. I want the songs to reveal something to me, teach me something. It's slow going. I'm not sure where I'm going. Uncertainty abounds. But the writing works on me little by little and begins to change me. That's why I would recommend not putting off writing if it's something you feel called to: if you put it off, then the writing can't do the work that it needs to do to you. Yes, I think there's something there. If you don't do the work, the work can't change you. (No one expects to change overnight.)

I'm weeping even now, as I read over that quote again by one of the finest lyricists I know. Here is a man who lets the writing do the work in himself. And I want that, friend and fellow writer, I want that for us. No matter what work it is that we put our hands to, I want it to do the deep work in us. The hard work, the cleansing work, the sanctifying work.

Blogging is hard work, I would never tell anyone otherwise, don't make it easy by simply building a platform or gaining readers. That is not the point of blogging, and it is not the point of writing. We write to do the work in us, and God willing, in others. The publishers will use those big words about marketing and growth, but at the end of the day, those things will steal the soul of the writing you need to do.

Writing is sanctification and writing is God's blessed gift to only a few of us. If you are a writer, don't sell that sanctification for a contract or a deal. Turn your palms up, slow your mind, and do the upside-down work of the kingdom: your name always decreasing, ever increasing His.

Wipe that Glass

The first thing we know about God is He is Creator. He takes nothing and makes something. He makes many somethings. More somethings than any one of us will ever see in our entire lifetime. Staggering.

I understand God as Creator, but if He is Creator, that means He is infinitely creative—and that is something I will never be able to grasp or understand.

He is involved in every iota, every molecule, every atom, every gene, every thought, every action—and He is infinitely creative, which means He never stops creating.

Just thinking about that for three minutes staggers me.

But it becomes so real, so personal, when I think about all the ways He has been creative with me—and the accompanying realization that He isn't finished with me yet. He is still creating, still teaching, still growing, still perfecting, still forming.

So an infinitely creative God, constantly creating and recreating His people, is a God who can be trusted to not make mistakes. Every scrap of my spectacular story, every rag of my richest rich, every moment of my mind—these form who I am and who I am becoming. He knew the washed up, backwards, inside-out, upside-down story He'd bring me through and He knew that through the mess I'd see Him.

And I'd see Him through a glass dimly, but that dirt and grime, that's mine. I own that grime. God let me have that grime because otherwise I'd never understand His holiness, His set-apartness. Now all I can do is never stop asking Him to wipe that glass clean.

I love that.

I really love that.

I love it because it's my hope, more than anything, that we'd spend our lives helping others to clean that grime. To take a rag and say, "You too? Me too. Let's clean it together. Let's see Him more clearly, love Him more for Who He truly is."

I don't know what your grime is, but I know God knows it. He made it, every atom and molecule. He knows your issues with fundamentalism, gender roles, abuse, theology, culture, suffering, depression, death, divorce, fear. He knows it all. And He's so creative that He knows how to draw you in, grime covered you, and show you Himself, holy and splendid, majestic and clean.

It's spectacular.

Counting Down

It is midmorning and I spread the logs apart, the time for morning fires over, the day's work ahead. The embers still crack and spark and I stare at their orange and grey glare for a few minutes more. There has been a dormant joy in my heart these last months. Depression is never such a stranger to me that I don't recognize her creeping around the eaves and windows of my heart. We are old enemies, she and I, and old friends too.

She is different this time around. She knows where my faith lies and my certainty rests, and it isn't in my hope or future, but His glory. I count all my hope and future as loss in the surpassing joy of knowing Him. But I have to count it and the counting never ceases.

If all I count are the blessings and joys, will I hold to tightly to the losses when they come? I ask it rhetorically but I ask it earnestly. I know idolatry, we have been friends too. If I do the math, it must only be that I decrease and He increases. In this life only one of us gets to live. It is in heaven, in final glory, that we are both alive.

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose," said the man who would be a martyr. I look around me and grasp at things, hopes, dreams, losses, always keeping, never giving.

God, help me lose.

Help me spread wide the logs, chance the death of flame, let the embers burn themselves out, and help me do the work of the day. Help me count as loss all things—even good things. Turn my wins upside down and my face to you. Let my counting not be accumulating but subtracting til there is nothing left but You.

Sleeping Through a Year

My word for 2013 was rest and it wasn't until yesterday that I saw the humor in it. I came into 2013 sleep deprived and exhausted. By the time I finished the year long theological training program in May (in which I needed to rise by 4:30am to make it to class on time), I wanted to swear off middle of the nights for the rest of time. This year sleep has been my elusive friend and favorite companion. In other years I'd have said I was depressed, but this year was different. I honestly was tired. I was soul tired, heart tired, mind tired. I wanted emotional rest, yes, but really, I just wanted to rest.

There were so many times this year when I resented the sleep I craved. "What is wrong with me," I'd ask myself. I've never been a snooze-button pusher and I would press it three, four, five times every morning. I'd keep myself up later than I needed, simply because the thought of more than seven hours of sleep sounded lazy, unnecessary, and entitled.

I know there are some of you who may roll your eyes at the luxury of being able to press the snooze button at all; your alarm clocks cry themselves awake intermittently through the night and early into the morning. It's okay, there are other things you get that I don't that are much nicer, so we're even-steven.

As I reviewed my year, asking myself a dozen questions I ask every January 1st, I realized I've been given exactly what I asked for, rest, but I hadn't seen it for what it was. God gives his beloved rest and sometimes that's just plain shut eye. Sometimes what we seek is a haven, a quietness, a trust, and strength, thinking that will bring us rest, and rightfully so:

In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. Isaiah 30:15

But sometimes we just need to trust the times and sunlight and darkness, and just go to sleep.

I'm grateful I slept through 2013. It wasn't the rest I thought I wanted, or craved, but at the end of the year it was the rest I needed. I can trust that because God never sleeps, never slumbers, always keeps watch over His children.

He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. Psalm 121

My word for 2014 is work. Let's see how this one turns out ;)

The Promise of Place

Grey Texas days are my favorite. Because they are so rare, or because I love grey more than blue, I don't know. Back home trees enclose me and so I feel safe. Here there are no towering pines or old maples, so I take the clouds instead and find a haven in them. Being away for a month was good for me. I did not miss Texas, but I missed place.

The truth is I feel misplaced these days. Misplaced by God, misplaced by men, misplaced, mostly, by myself. I have never felt comfortable in my own skin, but these past months I have felt a foreigner even to myself.

Who is this person? I ask as I roll over awake in the morning, when I hug a friend, when I try to explain myself, excuse myself, examine myself. I feel a stranger to her and estranged from her. As though I've forgotten how to take my own pulse, as though I am unsure I have a pulse.

That sounds hyperbole and I know it, but I feel it all the same. The creeping darkness of discouragement snatches away courage, not its opposite, affirmation, as it might seem.

It is a dark day outside and there are dark days all around us. Have you felt it? I am not prone to pessimism except when I am.

I am reading Hebrews this morning, about Abraham and the promise, and I remember the promises God gave him: land, east and west and north and south; descendants as many as the stars; a son, a babe, just one. Just one.

God put Abraham in his place and gave him place and then gave him a place in history. We know him because of his son, and his son's son, and his son's son's son and so on. Because God took a man on a mountainside, an old man, and gave him place.

I wonder sometimes if Abraham knew the gift of place on that day. If he knew he was destined for good things, a forefather of faith and many mentions in the canon. Or if he only stood there and just believed what God told him.

Romans says that Abraham's faith was credited to him as righteousness (Rom. 4.22). The truth is my righteous anything has felt like a failure this year, but faith? Faith, not in the promise itself, but the giver of the promise? The promise of place, not for place's sake, but for the promise-giver? Faith I can muster up, if I try.

He said He's prepared good works for us (Eph. 2.10) and I have to believe that. When good anything feels very far off and very impossible today. He has prepared a place for us (John 14.2) and whether that is here, in this home, or in a new heaven and new earth, God said it.

Father, help me to know my place. That the very safest place for me is at the foot of the cross, as a temple of the Holy Spirit, as your daughter, as a discipler and learner, a friend. Most of all, help me to see Christ in His place, high and lifted up, seated on the throne, parenting a world, and following the direction of His Father, wholly unconcerned with His place even while He prepares a place for us.

Do the Work

If something is difficult for you consider two things: The first is it is difficult to do because it is worth doing.

I read a quote the other day, "Let’s allow our tables to distress at their own pace, as a result of years of real conversation and sometimes awkward – not so picture perfect – meals." There is something holistic and beautiful about the long obedience—parenting children, crafting a book, making a well-made meal, sanctification. These things, as Lindford Detweiler said, "do the work in us." We need them to do the work in us. Simply because they are difficult, doesn't mean they ought to be avoided.

The second thing to consider is the task is difficult for you because you are not the best person to do the work.

There is no shame in not being the right person for a particular task or creation or job. If you have something to say, but struggle to form the written words necessary to say it, consider that God might have designed you to live that something, instead of write it. If you yearn to make furniture or meals or art—and yet they don't come easily and somewhat naturally, consider that you are not meant to make furniture or art or meals. But perhaps you are meant to make people laugh or to be a good storyteller. Or perhaps you are simply meant to make a good cup of tea and set a place at your table for someone who needs to be listened to.

Jesus swept sawdust for 30 years before His public ministry.

That comforts me so many times in so many ways. Sweeping sawdust was what His Father called Him to do, faithful and steady, until His Father was ready for Him to do good works of a different sort.

Embrace the difficult work of today. It is working in you a more lasting treasure.

Righteousness and Peace

I was reading Psalm 85 this morning and it spoke of how righteousness and peace kiss each other and I thought, "How beautiful." Under the reign of God, justice and peace join together, are for one another, perfectly complementing one another. There is no hierarchy of one over the other. They simply are, and then they meet, and they join in intimacy.

God, help there be more evidence of that in my life.

Keeping Your Heart and Giving it Away

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. Proverbs 4:23

It's a misquoted, misused, and abused little proverb that has given a lot of people a lot of heartache. Here's all it means:

Life happens, it springs forth out of you and me and everyone we know. Life is beautiful and messy and complicated and confusing and joyful. And it can be all those things without all those things being wrong or evil.

So keep your heart, know it, put it daily before the Lord, because you will create beauty with it, you will mess things up with it, and you will complicate life with it. But our hearts are not eternal and these angsts of life are not either.

When you guard your heart, guard its greatest treasure, Jesus alone. And trust that He is doing all the guarding necessary too.

Copying the Creator

It was the his third strike. He was a baseball player, so he and I both knew what that meant. Out. I was a TA for an English class in college. It was my first semester as a transfer student. I hardly knew my way around campus and I'd been tapped on the shoulder by the chair of our department to assist one of the English professors.

The first inkling of plagiarism seemed innocent, an uncited source; the second instance seemed lazy; but with two warnings under his belt, he handed in his third paper full of paragraphs I found in their entirety in a few minute google search.

I don't know what happened to him when I reported the situation to the administration, though I knew they didn't handle that stuff lightly. Looking back I wish I'd been more careful to explain why this wasn't acceptable. I had plenty more opportunities in my years as a TA to do so, but I never did.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Allegations of plagiarism by Mark Driscoll are all ablaze right now and they seem justified in some ways. Whole ideas or outlines have been lifted, slightly altered, and used as his own material. I would flunk a student for doing that, and yet—haven't I done it a thousand times?

In recent weeks I chew on John 3:30, "He must increase. I must decrease."

Whether you're a college student trying to get a passing grade or a pastor churning out books written by a ghostwriter, there is an element of "increasing" present that I'm not sure is healthy. I would argue too that even bloggers must wrestle with this dichotomy. If it is true that we must be ever decreasing and increasing Him—what does that say about all our platform building?

We may not be building a tower of Babel to reach God, but what have we made our god in His place?

This isn't easy wrestle through. God gives gifts to men and finds joy when we use them for His glory—but I wonder sometimes how many of us are like my college student: trying to get a passing grade. It doesn't matter who we seek approval from—if we seek it from men, we're in sin, and if we seek it from God, we do so in vain. If we are His children, we have His full approval in the righteousness of Christ.

I have one finger pointed at you and three back at myself here. I seek the approval of so many other than God and I want less of it. More than ever, I want to shrink my footprint—or at least my byline. More of Him, less of me.

God help us, we are all guilty of plagiarism. The wise man's words "there is nothing new under the sun," assure of us that. You are the author of all truth and we merely regurgitate it, chewed and masticated, hardly a form of its original beauty and intention. Help us to copy you, emulate you, take our truth from you—and if another steals words from us, let us hand them over willingly because we truly own nothing apart from You.

Next: part II

Three years ago I interviewed for this job because my roommate worked here and said I oughta. I don't know if it was because she worked here and liked me, or whether they liked the fact that I was brutally honest about my mistrust of ministries and God at that point in my life, but they hired me. Today is my last day. 

I boxed up all my personal items, filed away all the projects I've worked on for three years, cleaned off my desktop, and in a few minutes all traces of me on this computer will be gone. It's a closing of a chapter, yes, but it also feels like a death of sorts. I love this place. I love these people. I love my iMac. I love my external hard-drive who I named Beaker (and I hope he'll always be called that). Three-quarters of our staff is in India right now and half of who's left is gone already for Thanksgiving. It's a quiet day here. I won't miss being in an office, but I will miss this office. It's been a healing, redemptive, creative, and fun ride.

What will I be doing?

Good question.

I told my man yesterday that I have a loop running through my head: You're so stupid. Millions of people are looking for jobs and you just quit yours with no real plan.

That doesn't sound like Jesus, he said, and he's right.

Here's what I'll be doing:

Writing. Big surprise, right? But it's true! It's true! I have a few projects up my sleeve and I'm just trying to figure out the right time to tell you all about them. Should I tell you now and get you excited and expectant and then let you down if it doesn't work out like I'm dreaming it will? Or do I just whistle while I work, pretend there's nothing to see here, and tell you to move along? I don't know. What does one do in these situations?

Speaking. Yup. I know I'm an introvert and crowds make me claustrophobic, but for some reason speaking doesn't. I really enjoy talking about the goodness of God. It's not about me at that point, it's about extolling Him—and I love that. I'm available to speak at women's retreats, college groups, conferences—if you're interested in booking me, fill out this form and I'll be in touch. I'll also be teaming up with Lauren Chandler and Tara-Leigh Cobble (two of my faves) to speak. Here's our brand-spankin' new website if you'd like to book us!

Designing. I love graphic design and I'm grateful I can make a living doing something creative and fun like this. My print portfolio is available here. Let me know if you need wedding invites, book covers, business branding, etc. I'm fairly versatile and I like the challenge of new projects.

On my knees. I'm serious about this one. I've been self-employed before and I love it. But this go-round feels a little more risky than it's felt before. I'm not sure why, but I'm praying, asking for faith and confidence in His ability (and joy) to take care of me.

Today I'll sling my bag over my shoulder, heft a box of things I collected at my time at Sower of Seeds International Ministries, and I'll leave my office for the last time. I'm sad about it, really sad. But I'm grateful for what God did in and through me here.

Goodbye sweet place.

Snow and Sweet Tea

Our house gets a sliver of sunlight in the morning, when it has risen above the neighbor's roof and not yet above our roof. Sometimes I stand in that spot for a few minutes before the day gets ahead of me and I'm scrambling for a moment anywhere. In the north houses splay their windows in full sun, rows and rows of them on the south side, east side, west side. Where there is sunlight we let it stream in. In Texas it is not the same, and for as good a reason—though not the same reason.

I miss the streams of sunlight though.

It is halfway through fall and at home the leaves have all dropped from the trees and they stand like a row of wet cowlicks on end, black and stark. Here the leaves in my front yard have just changed colors and the hedges are their ever green.

I am going home for several weeks in December. I haven't seen snow in over three years. Not real snow, the kind that piles and sticks and keeps you homebound. I know my northern friends will curse me for this, but I hope they'll give me grace for my wishings since it is still before Christmas and everyone likes snow before Christmas.

After Christmas the snow, no matter how new it is, takes on a dingy look. Shoveling the walk, deicing the car, even sledding and snowball fights—all of them are a bit less fun.

Four winters ago I walked down the street of my small town one night at midnight. The snow was falling quietly, laying a clean path before me and erasing the footprints behind me, the street-lamps had taken on their snowy glow (you northerners know the glow I speak of). I burrowed my mittened hands in my coat and turned my face upward toward the snow, let it fall against my face, disappearing as soon as it touched my warm skin.

We have no way of knowing, sometimes, that we experience something and it will be our last for a very long time. I think we would bottle it up if we could, capture and keep it, like the treasures I keep in an old cigar box on the shelf in my bedroom. I think we might be more selfish with things like sunlight and snow and seasons. I know I would be.

I confess I am not a nostalgic type. Not in the sense that I keep things and pieces, but I keep memories. The feel of snow on my face and sun on my socked toes. I keep those memories, but I feel them slipping and it makes me sad, a bit. The same way, I suppose, a Texan would miss their wide open sky or BBQ or sweet tea.

Sweetest Frame

There are sweet idols in my life. Tempered steel overlaid with silver. Carved wood overlaid with gold (Isaiah 30:22). These are the things that bid for my time, my affections, my joy, and even my mourning. They care not what kind of attention I give to them, only that my whole attention is given. This past week we finished 11 weeks of studying 1, 2, & 3 John. We gathered one last evening in the sanctuary and a friend led us singing through The Solid Rock. My favorite line from the hymn comes in the first verse: I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus name.

It is my favorite line, but most times I cannot bring myself to sing it. It simply isn't true, and most of the time I doubt even my desire for it to be true.

The sweet frames in my life seem not so sordid as they really are when held against the surpassing beauty of Christ alone—and yet, oh how they make such palatable feasts.

Once someone told me my faith seemed like a crutch, a way to deal with a broken family, untimely death of my brother, and a move away from all familiar things. I carried those words with me for a decade, asking myself if this faith was less paramount and more crutch, something to buffer me while all around me the world gave sway.

It wasn't until the past few years I began to see, though, that if my faith was a crutch (and I believe it is), it was because without it I could not walk or stand at all. The sweet idols walk beside me but crumble when the slightest weight is laid on them—these cannot carry me through to the beloved face of Christ. Only He can do that and He promises He does—and will.

I can trust the sweetest frame, but that frame will falter without fail. But to wholly trust in Jesus name? It may be a crutch for a limping me, but it leads to the ultimate Healer and I limp gladly, trusting in the Sweetest Name.

A Body of Grace

Tara-Leigh Cobble is one of God's great blessings to me in this season. A few weeks ago we were in the car on the way home from dinner with friends and she was talking me through some thoughts she'd had following a month long fast. I practically begged her to write them up for me to post on Sayable, so I'm happy to share her words with you all today. 

“Do not be anxious about your life, 
what you will eat or what you will drink, 
nor about your body, what you will put on. 
Is not life more than food, 
and the body more than clothing?” Jesus, in Matthew 6:25

I've exhausted myself for years, watching successes stack up against failures. I've felt the blows of vanity and insecurity, pride and despair, all stemming from the same root: my body.

A righteous relationship with food always seemed just beyond my reach. And while the bulk of my food choices are healthy ones, I'm bent toward gluttony, specifically toward mindless eating in social situations. I've always been jealous of the people who can get away with those little indiscretions, enjoying a handful of dark chocolate almonds at a Christmas party without wondering if their pants will fit on Monday. For me, there is no margin for error. Slight deviations from a strict diet have never paired well with my DNA.

For most of my life, I've been content to let vanity control my approach to gluttony (as though vanity were a lesser sin), instead of killing them both with equal vigilance. I exercised my way through those occasional party cheats. But as my pastor often says, pitting sin against sin is no path to freedom. So I prayed for obedience and discipline. I established the habit of yielding each food decision to God before I sat down to eat. “God, what’s on the menu for this meal?” I asked. If He is my Lord and Master, if He owns the body He purchased on the cross, then He gets to call the shots, right? So I prayed and obeyed.

Vigilant obedience is a good thing, unless it is a means to an end instead of a means to God's glory. When I realized my “obedience” wasn't yielding the effect I'd hoped, I despaired. Surely my Lord and Master wanted me to be thin? Why weren't the pounds falling off in response to my yielding to Him? 

I began to monitor myself with greater detail. This time, the sin in the ring with my gluttony had a pretty name that is listed as the fruit of the Spirit: self-control. But this wasn't Spirit-prompted self-control; it was sinful control, fearful control. Since God and His menu weren't helping me, I needed to take back the reins. Calorie counting and attention to food origin are good things, but they have a way of taking up more brain space than the Gospel. They gradually consumed my thoughts. That doesn’t sound like freedom to me – that sounds like bondage.

I'd pitted gluttony against everything I thought could take it down – vanity, vigilant obedience, sinful self-control—and I lost every time. Where was the freedom and victory His Word speaks of?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Not long ago, while I was on tour in Europe, I sat alone at a restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. I had already gained three pounds during the month I'd been on tour. As I browsed the menu, I asked Him my question. “God, what's on the menu for this meal?” But this time, instead of the “egg white omelette with spinach and tomato” that I expected, I sensed a prompting in my spirit, a redirection. It felt like He asked me a question in reply: “What does a woman who is deeply loved by God eat for breakfast?”

“A woman who is deeply loved by God” doesn’t gorge herself, trying to fill a void, because she finds satisfaction in the great love of God. “A woman who is deeply loved by God” doesn’t starve herself, trying to win love and approval, because she rests in the great delight of her Father. That kind of woman doesn’t measure herself against what she isn’t, what she once was, or what she wants to be in the future, because she knows she is fully loved in the present.

I paused, thinking through the question. Then I chose my meal. It was still the egg white omelette, but somehow my heart felt different – not fearful or punished, not like I was pulling myself up by my bootstraps or muscling through the act of obedience, hoping for a reward. Instead, my heart felt like it was being courted by a generous, loving, attentive King.

This has become the question I ask myself at every meal. As a result, I have different thoughts when I look in the mirror at the body my food choices had sustained, the choices made in response to God’s great love: “This is what the body of 'a woman who is deeply loved by God' looks like.” Even though that body looks mostly the same.

Maybe my DNA isn't inferior after all. Maybe it's God's grace toward me – His way of making sure I can't get away with favoring certain sins over others. Maybe my body and this struggle are two of the tools He is using to point me back to His great love and His total sufficiency. God's love freed me up to eat to the glory of God. I was no longer wrapped up in weight gain or loss, no longer trying to sin my way out of a sin pattern. God loved me in my sin, and God loved me out of my sin.

“So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” 1 Corinthians 10:31

Tara-Leigh is a touring musician, speaker, and writer, and I want to also take this opportunity to point you to her newest project (and the one I'm most excited about for her), Kiss the Wave. Tara-Leigh says it's "a book about celebration. I want to tell you personal stories that I pray will bring joy, hope, and a richer intimacy to your own relationship with the God who loves you deeply, the God who is "a rewarder of those who seek Him" (Hebrews 11:6).

I hope you'll consider checking out her Kickstarter Project and giving toward it!