The Love of Laundry

I used to dream of canning peaches and hanging laundry on lines, letting it billow in the northern breeze. I was set on a life of simplicity, kneading bread dough by hand, peeling apples at a wooden table marked and scarred by time and use. Reading storybooks aloud to calico-clad babies and lighting candles every night on the dinner table. This was the life of which I dreamed and felt within my grasp. It never materialized and I felt the ache of that deep in my gut years over and over. Sand slips more easily through fingers than through an hourglass and it is so very hard to hold time for long. I signed leases and moved houses and states and tables. I forgot those dreams or buried them beneath convenience and the fear of missing out on real life while I waited for dream life to happen.

I spent years placing my hand over the ache of want, stilling my heart of its desires, trying to live well in today. Aren't we such foolish creatures? To think we can capture a vapor and own it for any measure of time?

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No bridal showers would bring me the things that made a home so I dove deep into thrift stores and bargain bins, my home made of second-hands and hand-me-downs. It feels lived in but I wonder how well I have lived in it? Someone else marred my table-top, someone else chipped my favorite bowl, someone else created my art.

But this is the life I love. This reusable life. It reminds me life is a vapor and time is short and things are falling apart and I am too.

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Richard Wilbur wrote,

The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember, From the punctual rape of every blessed day, And cries, "Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

I have never forgotten that poem or the autumn day in college when I first read it. Love Calls Us to the Things of This World and it means we must love the vapor too because it is the stuff of life—the laundry, the rising steam, the clear dances done only in the sight of heaven. We love the marred table and the calico clothes and the lit candles because these are not the meaning of life, but they help us remember the work, the dirt, the mess, the grit of life.

Convenience is not our friend, my brother and my sister, ease is not our aim.

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A threshold waits in front of me, a coming home of sorts. Marriage and life with a man so wholly different than me and so wholly loving to me, it makes me wonder how you start fresh with so many years behind you. So many scars and mars, chips and cracks—how do you make new with so much old?

I don't have an answer to that friends, but I know love does call me to the things of this world. It is an angst I wrestle with daily in these months. How to be distracted, my attentions divided by good things? Without love I am a clanging symbol, a noisy gong. And love is work. All of love is work. Beautiful work, like canned peaches and billowing laundry, rising steam, lit candles, but still work.

Let there be nothing on earth but the work of love, even if some days it looks only like laundry.

Bearing the Weight of Ten Thousand Sins

If I began this post with the words penal substitution, I'd lose half of you by the end of this sentence. Have I lost you?

If I have, that's okay, I'll talk to the rest of you.

The past few weeks I've been thinking of how easy it is for me to bear the weight of the sin of others. I feel it. It weighs me down. It drives me to my knees and to tears. The affects of it, and the effects of it, bear down on me, threatening to steal my peace, my joy, my hope, and my confidence. I feel the wrath of God, the just-ness of God in the face of sin. I tend toward mercy, but tremble under others' justice. My propensity is toward grace, but I see righteousness and holiness as endeavors worth pursuing.

But what happens when I can't bear the weight of your sin? When your unrighteousness soils my peace and your depravity wrecks my rest?

This whole week, as it makes national news, the refrain of In Christ Alone repeats in my head:

'Til on that cross as Jesus died The wrath of God was satisfied For every sin on Him was laid Here in the death of Christ I live

For those of you left, I haven't got much to say, save this:

I cannot bear the weight of anything, not my sin or yours. I cannot satisfy the demand of a Holy God or even a demanding god. I cannot satisfy my idols or my cravings, my friends or their needs, my dreams or my desires. Christ alone can, and did. And He bears the weight of it on fully capable shoulders.

Selah. 

Delivering Hope: What being saved through childbearing can mean for the unmarried

I woke a few mornings ago and felt the familiar void. It is no stranger to me and I know it acutely. I feel the angst of it in my belly, the fear of it in my heart, and the curse of it every moment.

A friend sent me a link to an old sermon in which the pastor preached a strong and stalwart message about women being saved through childbearing (II Timothy 2:15), and I turned it off five minutes before its conclusion. “Why did you send it to me?” I asked my friend because we have been having ongoing conversations about these subjects and my soul balks at the customary consolation prizes of womanhood. For one who grew up hearing a woman’s highest calling was to be a wife and a mother, yet finds herself as single as the day she came squalling into the world, a future swaddled in babies sounds bleak.

This is my call? To bear what I cannot bear? To hold up a bargain as impossible as Sarah’s to her husband. As impossible as God’s to Abraham? This womb is dead, or feels dead. Oh, I have plenty of years until it is pronounced medically dead, but the hope has died. It has died seventy times over and dies each day a little more.

It is 2013 and most of my good-church-girl friends married a decade ago. They are all declaring the babes in their wombs, “The last!” and I barely hope for a first. To them two or three is enough, the curse lasts far beyond pain in childbirth (Genesis 3:16) and they have seen enough of life to know promises about babies on schedules or Sunday-School attendance stars will not guarantee the safe arrival of their little ones to spiritual-adulthood. So it appears neither of us are saved through childbearing after all. We both limp with one hand held to God our helper and one hand anchored to earth our friend. Where is our salvation?

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In an early morning class last week we read Romans 4 and I wept tears in the second row. I felt them coming on again in this coffee shop on a Saturday afternoon. A thorough study of Romans is not for the faint of heart, and not for those who feel they have somehow escaped the curse by either perfect children or singleness.

The end of Romans 4 is about Abraham’s body, his circumcision of flesh, and calling into existence things that do not exist: his seed. God, who is the only author of life and the only bider of time, has made a promise that even with hope against hope still seems impossible. A father of many nations? A boy from these loins? From the barrenness of Sarah’s womb? If pain in childbirth was the curse on all daughters of Eve, it would seem Sarah’s only curse was she would never feel the twisting beautiful pain of birthing anything.

Anything but hope.

My friend was also in class that morning and I sent a text to him: “This is it!” I wrote. “Maybe this is part of how we are saved through childbearing!”

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Even if we never birth a child, we birth hope. We are built to birth hope. It lies restless in our womb, expectant in our hearts, and unlimited in its gestation. We are crafted to see the future, to look at what is not and believe God will still do what He said He would do. We are made to birth hope into impossibilities. I think about my sisters, those whose deepest desires are to take broken places and make them whole; who have been hurt, neglected, broken, and cast away, and who still come back strong and desperate to see wholeness birthed in dark places.

I can’t stop thinking about it all week. And I think about it when I wake early a few mornings ago, feeling the familiar ache of the barrenness accompanying singleness.

Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness. Faith in the hope against hope God was who He said He was and would do what He said He would do. Sarah, our barren sister, laughed at the promise and so Laughter was given to her for the rest of her days, a reminder that sometimes the only pain in childbirth we experience is 80 years without childbirth. A reminder that God is a God who saves and He saves by bringing life from dead things, hope from hopelessness.

Penned sometime this past spring. 

Whose Hearts are Set on Pilgrimage

I moved here with all my worldly possessions in a two door Honda Civic, sight unseen save for a week spent with a friend. No plan, no job, no home, and He made a way for me. Wherever I have gone, whoever speaks strongly into my life, they speak this verse, "A man's gift makes room for him and brings Him before kings." But the gift I have known here more than anything is the Gospel and the King I am before is the King of Kings. I know that's not what that verse means, though, so forgive my interpretation.

I have lived in this home for two years, and the one next door for one year before. Three years on Meadow Lane and it is the longest I have lived anywhere in more than a dozen years. I had forgotten how to live in a place long. Now I am afraid I have forgotten how to leave a place.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.

This spring I quietly checked my options—almost all taking me back to the motherland of the northeast. I also considered a move south to our new church campus. In the end, over coffee with a friend who admonished me to let myself love Texas, even if that meant suburbs, I begrudgingly agreed I hadn't. To love these acres of homes, all identical, all brick, all trying their best to be different, to make a statement—meant somehow that I would lose mine.

I am not a suburbanite. I have lived in farmhouses and stone houses, brick houses and bungalows, cottages and apartments, but never the suburbs. I have felt my heart come alive with the gospel in this home and my soul wilt every time I walk out my front door.

A home is what you make of it, isn't it?

In this home, behind these doors, we have seen three girls fall in love, all in the span of one summer. We have planned weddings and showers. We have piled so many of us on my bed I fear for its life every time. We have warmed ourselves around the fire with mugs of tea and good books. We have had conversations deep about Jesus and God and whether He is who He says He is. We have strung two hammocks and made a raised bed garden. We have painted walls and gotten jobs and quit jobs and this week, one will finish graduate school. We have fully lived here and this gift of a home has brought us before one another, kings of a kind.

As they pass through the Valley of Baka (the place of tears), they make it a place of springs; the autumn rains also cover it with pools.

Last weekend I packed all of our artwork and our kitchen. My books were next. We're sorting through belongings and trying to figure out who belongs to what and it feels like a divorce of my soul. These girls and this home. Even as they've made their exit with pomp and circumstance and wedding festivities, parts of them remain here and leaving this house feels like leaving this gift. Three years is nothing to most people, but three years of the same people has been God's best grace to me.

Sometimes my strength is my strength—and I know home is a place of strength to me. But sometimes my weakness is my strength and I don't fully know what that means except that God brings us through places of tears and makes them places of life, and surprises us by doing it.

We're leaving this house, and it's with the new roommates I'll take the next season. It feels like weakness and fear today, but God is the strength of my heart and brings me before Him.

They go from strength to strength, till each appears before God in Zion. Psalm 84

Worriers in Remission

I have a friend who worries she has "lost her salvation." I listen for long hours and ask questions because I had friends who did the same for me three years ago. My friends worried about me, but I want to go to bed without fear, so I lay my worry on the doorstep and cross over the threshold of trust every moment.

I ran into a friend while getting coffee this afternoon. Five minutes only and tears well up in both of our eyes—the world weighs heavy on shoulders not meant to carry it. Our Father is a better Atlas, rolling our globe on His fully capable back. We are worriers in remission. This is the life of the Christian.

I read an article today about a girl grown with Sunday School sashes and Memory Verse Answers. She doesn't believe in that god anymore and I see myself in her story. We didn't end in the same place, but there is time still. It is God who numbers our days and He knows every one of hers. My heart wants to worry about her, but my God clothes lilies and counts hairs—surely He has not fallen asleep at the helm of her life?

I don't mean to excuse trouble, but I know enough not to borrow it. Or to borrow it long enough to have it pierce my soul and my heart with empathy and then bring it to the throne with confidence—not that my plan will be accomplished, but that His will. And I don't mean to be lazy. Take my arms and my legs and my mind and my time, take it all, but give us Jesus, only Jesus.

“Therefore I tell you, 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? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble." Matthew 6:25

Broken Bodies and Victorious Limps

It is raining when I wake. I stretch my legs, hooking my toes over the end of my bed. I have not been able to shake the brokenness I feel these days. There is good news and bad and it comes simultaneously. The world is broken and we are in the world, and sometimes of it too. A new niece was born yesterday and a man who is like a father to my brothers died last night.

I was brought forth in iniquity.

There are those who excuse those words as poetry. But what is poetry if not man's attempt to make sense of what seems senseless or too mysterious for simple words? What is poetry but God's way of making beautiful what seems ugly? When science fails me and theology is too wondrous for me, I take comfort in mystery, in poetry.

An unsettling verdict, a drug overdose—"this world breaks every one of us, and later we are strong at those broken places." Hemingway did not believe in original sin, I don't think, but even the best and worst of us knows the cracked and creviced face staring back at us from the mirror. Are any of us whole? Really whole?

A week of conversations on brokenness, where baggage on original sin and depravity and hope circle and devour—it leaves me feeling brokenness more acutely. No one is unscathed, and especially not the one who thinks he is. We all walk with a limp and better that we acknowledge it than try to hide it. You're broken? Me too. Let us walk more slowly beside one another then, the journey toward the kingdom is not a sprint or a race, there are no winners—or losers. His glory is our collective trophy.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, you will not despise.

Brought forth in brokenness, brought forth in wholeness—either way, what He desires is the cracked and creviced child. The one who knows her sin and her faults, her needs and her Savior. The one who knows his helplessness and his fears, his limps and his Healer.

What need have we for a Savior if we can find a scrap of wholeness on our own?

Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. I Corinthians 15:51-57

All that Matters

Whenever there is some politically charged event or theological hot-button topic making the rounds, it can be tempting to be myopic about issues, especially issues about which we are particularly impassioned. Same-sex marriage, pro-life initiatives, gender roles, church membership—just a few of the polarizing issues I've seen just this morning. I've been mulling on the second verse of Psalm 50 all week:

Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth.

It's so short, so simple, so poetic—I wonder how there can be so much power in such a small bit of scripture. But these short lines tell me three things:

God is on His throne, out of Zion: He has not abdicated and will not. He is still King of Kings.

God is the only perfection of beauty: As much as we convince ourselves that a political majority or denominational thrust will move us into a more perfect society or Church, God is the only perfection of beauty.

God shines forward: He is the most progressive, forward thinking, eternal light we will ever need or experience.

A few quick thoughts on feminism

A few quick thoughts on feminism (a loaded word, I know) in the Church: If you beat someone with a wooden spoon, then try to show them its primary use is for cooking, don't fault them for never seeing the spoon as it was intended. The rise of secular feminism within the church, from what I can see from my small corner of the world, is many times (though not always) in response to a poor construct or a partial framework of God intention for men and women.

Essentially, if you beat someone over the head with theology that was either poorly enacted, poorly constructed, or poorly represented, and then you try to show them how beautiful the theology is at its heart, you're going to lose them. This is because God created us with an innate and beautiful sense of right and wrong. Wrong use of something beautiful results in something ugly. A rose on one end is a beautiful bloom and on the other a prickly weapon.

One of the ways I seek to change the conversation within my realm of influence is to remove the spoon for as long as it takes and show them how cooking at its heart brings life and substance, community and joy. I want to show the beauty of the thing at its starkest form, before I need the help of the spoon. The garlic and onions popping and sizzling on the stovetop while I dice tomatoes and mushrooms. The splash of wine, the story of how it came to be. These things are the beauty of creation in their plain form before I stir and toss with spoons and spatulas.

To follow the analogy, I want to remove what has been misused and made ugly from the situation until we can see the heart of God and the beauty of the Imago Dei and then when those trappings are gone, we can talk about intention for gender roles.

Just a few thoughts. I'm still working them out, but I thought it might help to put them before you so you can see how my brain processes these matters.

IF : GATHERING

I was 22 when I first wore mascara. In our home beauty was a scorned woman and adornment her harlotry. I asked for my first nail polish when I was nine and my father offered toilet water instead. I ran crying to my room and it was a family joke, but I still don't paint my nails.

My brains were my brawn and I was the first and only to graduate from college and twice over. I made a tent of my blankets, lit by a flashlight, and read Emily Dickinson, the plain and proper poet. Women are workhorses and beauty is fleeting; fear the Lord and the father, never be a robust and full and beautiful woman. She is the whore on the street stealing innocence from the eyes of boys.

Be smart, but not too smart.

A few years ago a friend told me what he appreciated most about me was my femininity, that I was wholly his sister and he my brother; that my femininity was trustworthy, and I wept from the backseat.

My womanhood is the biggest wrestle of my soul, every time I glimpse a peek at the beauty within, I convince myself of its vaporousness and it flees. Charm is deceitful, but it doesn't always say you are the most beautiful, sometimes it says you are the most unworthy.

My heart, more than anything, is to take the faces of women around me, wipe the black from the eye-rims and the red from their lips, point them to a mirror where their blemishes are bold and say, "This. This is the you He loves. This is the you He values. This is the you He came to redeem."

Because we are so hurried in our covering, so quick to fix, and slow to let bloom.

I have never thought myself as a teacher, but like Robert Frost said, "as an awakener." I want to awaken the worth in the heart of women, to show them their minds and hearts are as valuable as any other attribute, maybe more. I want to wake it in myself, but I know of no other way to do that than to do it alongside others. I want to ask the question: If, then?

If God created and it was good, then what?

If God knit us together, just as we are, then what?

If God formed our minds, our bodies, and our souls, then what?

If God, then what?

Will you join a generation of women in asking those questions?

On February 7-8, 2014 in Austin, Texas, we'll be gathering to discuss, dream, and determine what it can look like it we see God at the helm of us, and all of us poured out, blemishes and brokenness, and all to Him.

Sign up now for the IF Gathering.

Join Jennie Allen, Lauren Chandler, Ann Voskamp, Jen Hatmaker, and all of us as we work to awaken our generation of women to the beauty of God's goodness and design.

IF : LEAD We are gathering and uniting a team of women, who already lead our generation, and unleashing them to lead in their spheres of influence. Together we will create a community and foster an ethos – connecting, encouraging and collaborating together.

IF : GROW We are creating a blueprint for intentional equipping – reaching women with tools that are holistic, strategic and deep. By providing easy online access to a like-minded community and relevant resources, we will release women around the world to live out their purposes. // Online · 2014

IF : GATHERING A fresh, deep, honest space for a new generation of women to wrestle with the essential question: IF God is real… THEN what? This 2-day conference brings women together and wrestles out how to live out the calling God has placed on our lives. // Austin, TX Feb. 7–8 2014

IF : GLOBAL By partnering with organizations like Food for the Hungry, coming alongside women around the world, fostering relationships and utilizing our God-given gifts, our hope is that this movement will not only transforms hearts but leave a tangible impact on the world.

Sign up now for the IF Gathering.

Read what others are saying:

Jennie Allen Lindsey Nobles Jen Hatmaker Sarah Bessey Sarah Markley Logan Wolfram Kelly Stamps

A Life Full of Sabbaths

It's Wendell Berry all this month. I drink in his essays, turning words over and over in my mouth. I read him aloud, even when no one is listening. Last night as she spreads cornmeal on wooden boards, I read her three paragraphs to give context to the quote written on the chalkboard: Though they have no Sundays, their days are full of Sabbaths. He speaks of the cedar waxwings eating grapes in November. But he penned the poem The Peace of the Wild Things nearby then and poetry is meant to speak of the mysterious in the mundane and so he speaks of us, or the hoped-for us.

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This morning I read in Mark of Jesus healing on the Sabbath, the pharisees outrage, and the calm response of the Lord of the Sabbath: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."

How we have forgotten that. How have we forgotten that?

She is leaving to get bread flour to bake round loaves in the brick-oven. Do you want to come with, she asks, dropping her prepositional phrase and picking up her purse. I am drinking coffee on the side porch and nothing could bid me leave the wild rushing of the river in front of me and the song of the orioles above me. This is my sabbath and I am made for it, I think.

The last time I was home was a year ago, in May, and I have waited a year for these few days. They are not exactly as I imagined in my mind, other duties and events capped its full breadth, but it is a few days at least of quiet and still. I was made for this week, I think. The coals burned hot in the brick-oven the other night and faces gathered around the tables, children everywhere, laughter lingering. A phone call from Malaysia from a globe-trotting brother: you always sound so happy when you're home, he said, and it is true, except when it hasn't been.

I have lived this year holding my breath, it seems, waiting for the mornings when I could sleep past 4:30 or when I at least didn't have to hit the ground running, literally, as soon as I woke. I have lived this year waiting for Sabbath, guarding it with a fervor I didn't know I had. If anyone came near it, I would square my jaw and shake my head: it's mine!

I preened myself for my Sabbaths.

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Whenever I rest and really rest, empty my head of expectations (yours and mine), listen, really listen, I remember there is nothing of my doing in salvation; that salvation is one long rest in the same direction. There is work too, obedience and sanctification, moments of weakness and moments of strength. But at its core and its very marrow, the work of salvation is rest, Sabbath. It is to say, again and again and again, I rest in You, Lord of Rest. I find my Sabbath in you, Lord of the Sabbath.

The work of salvation is to live a life full to Sabbaths, even when there is no margin and little space, when there is demand from every outside element and every inside emotion. This is to trust that a God who rested when His work was not done—even when it was good—to set an example for His people: You are not done, children, no, but it is still good. And so rest. You are not made for Sabbath, the Sabbath was made for you.

All of Us Strangers Sitting on a Footstool

Somewhere along the way I forgot I had a story. It is more accurate to say somewhere along the way I forgot I was living a story.

There's so much noise these days and I don't know how to shut it out and down and over and out. Our home is a quiet place, filled with simple things, but it is a small place, and there is no hiding from life's noise. The coming and going, the phone calls with family, the boyfriends, the dishes piling, and the laundry. Some have said the single life is simple, but I dare anyone to say that to me who has had 32 roommates in a dozen years. As soon as I learn the rhythms and graces of one, she marries or moves and I plunge into another lesson with another girl. I cannot complain and do not: these girls have been family to me, each one of them slipping into her new life while I mourn her leaving, she has been family to me.

One and I are walking yesterday and the sun is setting, "You're going to move with me?" I ask her, because we will close up shop on this house soon I think. She tells me she doesn't know how to process the invitation that I would want her to meld her life with mine. I feel a sense of Naomi in that moment and she my Ruth: where you go, I'll go; only I am the one saying to her: where I go, you come. (Ruth 1:16)

It is foreign to us both, the togethering that happens with strange people in a strange land. And we are all strangers, I think, we just haven't awakened to its reality yet. Or life has been kinder to you than to me. Or perhaps, after all, it has been kinder to me than to you. We shouldn't bother ourselves with such things.

I am scrubbing the laundry room floor tonight and I know I ought to feel at home in this place, but it feels more a placeholder to me, a dog-eared page, a bookmark: Don't Forget What God Has Done Here. And I don't know if He means this house or Texas or this world, but it could be any and is all. We are all so enamored with making a place for ourselves when it is He who has made a place for all of us. His thumbnail is the sliver of moon, heaven is His home, the earth is His footstool, dare we even imagine we could build a place for Him? (Isaiah 66:1)

The air catches beneath the tablecloth as it settles centered, dust particles float, and I put the broom in the corner. The dishwasher and the washer both run, their steady hum sounding steady with the air-conditioner. It smells like lemon furniture polish and maybe the grapefruit in the bowl on the table. We have made a home here, placed ourselves in the center of our story. The doors revolve around us, the world revolves around us, and I wonder sometimes how little idea we have of His grandness and this home a vapor, our lives a breath, our whole story His.

Perfect Provision, Perfect Protection

No one has to be convinced that something went wrong somewhere in the bodies and beauty department. Stand in a grocery aisle and figure out how to beat those pesky inches, woo your disinterested man, and find more perfect clothes for perfect bodies. Something has gone wrong. So where?

It was at a tree. A food laden tree. Something good, beautiful, and delectable gone horribly wrong.

(Will Deutsch)

It began at the beginning of beginnings, Genesis, where food was made, food was eaten, and where all of our food issues began.

Strange, isn’t it, that one of our principles struggles is still there? With food?

We starve from it, binge on it, measure it out, disgust ourselves with it, pride ourselves on it, obsess over recipes, and TIVO our favorite cooking shows. Rarely do we see food as the perfect provision and perfect protection that it was designed to be. Provided for our health; protection from death.

God created food: a perfect provision for His creation. Then He clearly defined it as right or wrong: a perfect protection for his children. He set up His boundaries, endlessly good ones that felt good too, until they bumped up against the one ‘don’t’ rule: don’t eat of this tree.

Yet this is the tree from which they ate. First the woman and then the man.

Ignoring the plenty and subversively skirting the mandate by a subtle legalism, “God says don’t eat of it AND don’t touch it,” she fell the boundaries that God so lovingly placed on her and him and all of us.

Don’t we do this too? Don’t we see the plenty and choose instead the smaller portion, the lesser good? We add to the boundaries given. Sinking deeply into diets or delectable feasts, feeling helpless against the siren call that is food.

God calls out: Where are you? And we hide, behind exercise, behind enhancement, behind extra weight. We hide.

We hide because it is easier to hide than to be known. We’ve eaten off the tree of knowledge and now we think we know.

Yet still He seeks us. Pursues us. Finds us, shivering and scratching under the weight of man-made garments and expectations. I’m there. Are you too?

And all this because we added to what God said. He gave good boundaries and we made them smaller and tighter, thinking that more rules will keep us safer. God has said don’t eat of the fruit, but we think that it’s safer to just not touch it at all?

This is our great sin. This is our great fall. We add to what God has said and the boundaries become cages. We imagine He is a harsher God than He is.

We eat the fruit thinking it will make us like God and really all it does is make us into our own god. And we are powerless gods, always trying to find things to bulk us, beautify us, fix us.

All the while He is still giving perfect provision and perfect protection. The second time was in a much less beautiful environment. Dark, though midday, the place of the skull. A broken, bleeding, and bruised man. He is saying it is finished and we can hardly believe it is true.

So we are still adding to it. Principles. Practices. Helping God, we think, with clearer expectations on His people and on us. Don’t eat it, we say, or touch it. Or surely you will die.

The truth is that we are finished. Perfect in Christ’s eyes and through His provision. Nothing can be added or removed from you to make you more of who you’re intended to be in Christ.

He looks on you and sees clean, pure, perfect righteousness and beauty.

Dried Grass and Crumpled Flowers

When God knit this person together, He did so with an optimism of the best sort for everyone else and a pessimism of the worst sort for herself. If there is good to see in others, I will see it, and if there is anything out of place in me, I will caricature it until it is as ugly to the rest of the world as it is to myself. Others call this narcissism. I call it human-nature. We’re all plagued with an evil eye toward ourselves—even if our greatest flaw is thinking the best of ourselves and the worst of others. Thinking the best of ourselves comes laden with baggage of the self-sufficient, and who needs sufficiency of self if we have not been failed by all others because of our inability to keep them satisfied? “I don’t need nobody else, just me,” is the blight of men everywhere since the enemy fell from legions of angels whose sole concern was Other Than, if only because nobody else could satisfy self like self.

There are a myriad of ways out of this navel gazing—and trust me, I’ve tried them all—but the only one that works is putting two eyes toward the cross and centering them there.

Jesus did it for the joy set before Him, though, and we do a disservice if we do anything motivated by anything other than the same joy. Too often we talk about “bearing the cross” and “picking up our cross,” and I don’t want to mislead you, making you think anything about the Christian life is anything less than a cross. It isn’t. But it is so much more than the cross—and therein lies the joy set before us.

The narcissism that keeps us desperate for the approval of man, the compliments of others, and the affirmation of the achieved, is desperately flawed in that it sets its joy on something less than eternal.

So press on, friends, for the joy set before you. Endure the cross of your ugliest aspects and the gross imperfections of others—this world is a vapor and what lasts is so much more. Treasure, too, the beauty found in others and in yourself, but do it with an eye toward the eternal where the only One we’ll be making much of is Christ.

Polished Pearls and Unfinished Everything

I have always wanted to sell everything I own and buy the field. I have been the man who would give property, possessions, and pride to find the pearl of greatest price. A few years ago I did it. I sold everything I owned, packed what was left in my two-door Honda Civic and drove to Texas with no home, plan, or purpose. I found the pearl and nothing was worth more. When my best friend and I were young we made for ourselves a time-capsule. We put in it special mementos, notes from boys we liked, school pictures, concert tickets—junk to anyone else. We dug a hole in her back yard and planted it deep enough to let our friendship grow. When we dug it up in our junior or senior year it was covered in dirt, crusted with mud. Inside was safe and we have continued to treasure this tradition.

I think sometimes we are caught up in the idea that our pearl will come out polished and pristine. That we will have done the work, sold our belongings, bought the field, dug down deep, and the reward is something beautiful at first sight. But dirt isn't beautiful. And dirt-encrusted treasures are not beautiful.

The pearl we have sorted through mud and sand and tall grass and rocks for will not come out looking like it was worth any of the work at all.

There will be a time when we take the treasure home, rub it over with a soft cloth, wash it over with water, clean it up, and determine its worth. But we must not be selfish in our rush to determine the worth of what only looks like just another rock.

Today I am looking at the pile of stones before me. I asked—I asked for bread. I asked for sustenance and warm bread, and He has given me a pile of dirt-encrusted rocks. Friendships wrought with pain and surprise—not wrong, simply in process. Half-baked theological conclusions—not incorrect, simply unfinished. Relationships that never bloom—not trampled on, simply unopened. Ideas subject to time and space—not false, simply not full to fruition. To my eye this treasure has not been worth what I have given to get it.

The Lord is teaching me the process to a perfect pearl, a finely cut diamond, a shaped gold-piece, does not come without pain and it does not come without a grain of sand, a piece of rock, and a yellow vein in a dark cavern. The treasure is Christ and He wept in a garden, felt forsaken on the cross, and still has not come to take us home. We are his unfinished pearl and, in some ways, He is ours. He is already come and not yet.

Maybe none of this makes sense to you, and in some ways, I'm okay if it doesn't. This is my unfinished treasure, covered over with mud, stuffed full of meaning for me but junk to you. We are all standing behind dark and dim glasses, waiting to see face to face our dearest Treasure, and I never want to pretend my pearls are more polished than yours until that day.

Sticky Substances and the Spirit's Work

Two Tuesdays ago I burned myself; my hand brushed the side of the cast iron pan while my eggs sizzled and spit. I jumped back and let a loose word slip out. First instincts kicked in and I wanted to thrust my hand in a bowl of icy water but I reached for the honey instead. In my family honey was the remedy for allergies and colds, burns and cuts. We bought it by the bucket. Gracious words, these are like the honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the bones (Prv. 16:24)

And this is what I meditate on today because my heart was burned this week. Unknowingly, unassumedly, words cursed across my heart, searing and scourging. I want to self-medicate with quick fixes or find comfort in the coldness of a hardened heart, but I reach for the honey instead.

Honey pulls the swollen skin in, keeps the bacteria out, lessens the scar, and soothes in the process.

Lord, I confess I need honey. And I need it from You. I need what is sweet to the soul and health to these bones. I have been cracked and crushed and this week I feel pressed from all sides, fearful of everyone and everything. And, Lord, I don't understand why you use sticky substances to seal the Spirit's work. I don't know why what feels most natural and right, is sometimes not what is best. And, Lord, I want what is best.

And I trust you to cover me over with it, bathe me in it, and supply me with it as often as I ask.

So I'm asking.