You Are Enough

Jesus, You never promised the easy road, I know this. Your word says you didn't even have a place to lay your head at night.

I walked, once, in the house of Peter in Israel and imagined you there, itinerate and nomadic, resting your head on the dust covered stones when sleep came. I do not envy this life.

Sometimes I am so persuaded by the wide paths, the pleasant boundaries, and the promised clarity of your voice, but you don't always work like that. Sometimes the way is narrow, the boundaries are thorny, and your will seems very far off.

We've been praying for your will to be done, but yesterday I realized we've been praying all wrong because your will is being done. Right now, in the waiting, in the difficulty, in the groping blindness, you are working your will throughout all the earth. I play a game in my mind, The Providence Game: If you have only done _____ in my life so ____ would be worked in someone else's life, then it is enough. The Hebrews called this, Dayenu: "It would have been enough."

The Son of man had no place to lay his head and I have places aplenty, and it is enough.

The Son of man was beaten and bruised. I'm just trimming our grocery bill down a bit and there's enough.

The Son of man carried his cross through the streets. I'm learning to carry a husband's burden and it's good enough.

The Son of man bled and died on a cross. I'm merely making an inventory of our life and stuff, and we have enough.

Someone asks me every day what the plan is and I answer honestly every single day, "We do not know, but Christ is enough." I believe it and say it so I would believe it more than I do.

Jesus, I don't know what you're doing and I don't know what your future will is, but I do know this: the easy path and the high road is not what you've called us to. You've called us to look at today and say, "It is enough because You are enough."

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world. John 16:33

These Extraordinary Pains and the Ordinary Days

G.K. Chesterton said, “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children," but we don't much like that do we? It's been a weekend where I've been laying low for multiple reasons, the principle of which is I miscarried again and the secondary of which is I slipped on black ice and have a swollen scraped knee to prove it. I was meant to be at my brother from another mother's wedding this weekend in New York, but canceled my flight at the last moment because the church family here had a week for the books. It's really been seven months for the books—my books at least—but this was the culmination of it, and when your job is to shepherd, you don't abdicate when the storms howl around the flock.

Nate still can't find full-time work.

I came home from the member meeting at church yesterday and fell into bed and cried the sort of tears we reserve for death of a loved one or agony of the deepest kind. The sort where you hyperventilate and your husband can't fix anything so he just lies beside you and rubs small circles into your back. I mostly cried but said words too, words I probably didn't mean and some words I probably did.

Half our friends say the first year of marriage is the hardest, but we think marriage is a breeze, it's all the other things that are the hardest.

He read the Chesterton quote aloud to me a few weeks ago and we've come around and around to it, in these horrible ordinary days. Both of us have believed the lie that if you work hard things will go well for you, if you honor those around you, you will be honored, if you pursue your passions, you will do your passions. We are unafraid of hard work, honoring those ahead of us, and the pursuit of passions. But what we have found is vanity of vanities, it's all vanities. These things themselves are not useless pastimes, but they certainly aren't the guarantee of extraordinary lives. My pastor in Texas said once, "You can't put God in your debt," and also we can't put life in our debt either.

Circumstances are not what we planned, nothing about this year has been what we hoped for or thought we'd gain. Here we have been small and faithful people with secreted hopes for greatness. But that is not the Kingdom is it? The backwards upside down kingdom.

Tonight we lit candles and ate pizza from a box, and joked about how this might be our last meal and when we should put the house on the market. I have emailed a realtor on the east coast and Nate has put in months of 60 hour weeks applying and interviewing. There is nothing glamorous in these ordinary days. They are beautiful because they are life, but they are painful, disastrous even, and not at all what we thought they would be.

Earlier this year in the three month whirlwind, where everything good was happening and as quickly as it possibly could, I remember saying to the Lord, "It is so good to feel your love so tangibly these days, but I hope I remember it when everything good isn't happening." I think a lot about Job these days. I have walked through many painful months and years before, but never saw myself as kin to him, but now I do. The difference is I trust God in these pains, and though he slay me, still I will trust him. And it makes all the difference.

For the ordinary people in the painful ordinary days, trusting Him—and not our plan—is the extraordinary difference.

Big News and Blank Slates

Two weeks ago I sat on the couch in a therapist's office. The couch was the micro-fiber kind where the color changes depending on which way you've run your hand or where you're sitting. From my vantage point it was light grey. I was there because I witnessed the shooting—and nobody comes out of that unscathed. But ten minutes into my verbal dump (She'd called it an "Intake Meeting," which is just an official way of saying, "Tell me all your junk.") the shooting was at the very bottom of a very long list of very hard things this year.

"It sounds like to me," she said, "you're in survival mode and you have a lot of grieving to do."

It was a statement, but there was an inflection at the end making it a question. And my shoulders fell. I ran my hand along the couch, it was dark grey now.

I mentally ticked down the list of things to grieve this year and she was right. Moving away from friends, our church, our community, losing the newness of an unknown baby, Nate losing his job, my job being more complicated than I could have imagined: yes, we are grieving and surviving each day feels like a win if we can do it.

. . .

It seems to me we Christians are very much about the testimony of "have suffered" or the theology of "we all will suffer," but very few of us want to talk about the suffering in the middle of it. We pep-talk our friends by telling them All The Good Things They Have to be Thankful For! We use exclamation points and all caps, because, yes, God is good, this is true. But it is also true that God, in his goodness, does hard things. The big news is good, but the small news is bad, and the small news makes better press.

This year has been arguably the hardest yet. The gift of a wedding came smack in the middle of it, timely and gratefully. But it does not change the bookends of January, February, and March, or the last six months. There are some days I feel like I can't breathe. That's not an excuse, but it is a reason.

I've disappointed a lot of people this year, fallen short of their expectations, not been able to enter into their sufferings, rejoicings, or difficulties in ways I wanted to. I've faced my humanity in a way I never have before: my inability to meet with every person, respond to every email or text, think through every situation, or be healthy, happy, and hearty through hard things. I remember a quote from I Capture the Castle, "Wakings are the worst times—almost before my eyes are open a great weight seems to roll on my heart." That great weight rolls on my heart every day without fail.

I'm not asking for sympathy or forgiveness—though I'd love both. But writing all this out is an attempt, small as it is, to ask if you're a praying person, would you pray for our 2016? God isn't limited to New Years and Old Ones, but I suppose he likes a clean slate as much as anyone—seeing as he started with the first one.

. . .

In 2016, I hope:

To write about my marriage. To actually live and write into the depths, goodness, hardness, and beauty of it, without fear for how it will be received. I have struggled to write about marriage because of how my unmarried readers long for it and how my married readers compare theirs to it. The beauty of writing vulnerably is everyone identifies. The mess of writing vulnerably is everyone compares.

To mourn the loss of some really beautiful things the Lord gave and then took away. A solid community, a safe neighborhood, a healthy church, a baby, singleness, time/energy to write, financial independence, Nate's job, confidence about where we'll be living or where Nate will be working in the next year, confidence about anything, really.

To be okay with not being okay. To not submit my fears, frustrations, sadness, limitations, and difficulties to a job description or a perception of what being a good Christian is or what people perceive from reading Sayable. I am not a good Christian, only a broken one.

To prepare more people with the reality that I will disappoint them. I am not the Christ. Nate and I talked this morning about nine relationships in my life in the past three years where I failed to prepare them for my humanity and they each carry the disappointment still. I want to learn to not over-promise and under-deliver—because no matter how hard I try, I will always under-deliver. I never pretended to be perfect, and have tried my best to show that I'm not, but I want to say it more in the same breath that I point to the One Who Is.

To remember God has written our story before the foundation of the earth. He knows it intimately, the losses and the gains, the fears and failures, the joys and pains. We may skip over all those small moments, thinking they are meaningless or there's no time, but He ordains each and every one for His glory and our sanctification and joy.

No matter how blank the slate of 2016 seems to be, He has already filled it and knows the ten-thousand moments within it.

Stinking Christians

We’ve come by our attraction to transparent communities honestly—we have been hiding since the third chapter of Genesis. We ache to come out of hiding and to walk in the freedom of Eden again. There are little secrets in us all, taunting us with their presence: “If everyone knew this about you…” And what if?

I always find it slightly generous of God to have asked Adam the question he already knew the answer to, “Where are you?” Generous because the answer to that question was not for God but for man. Who of us truly wants to face the question, “Where are you?”

Where is your heart?

Where is the meditation of your mind?

What are you thinking about? Obsessing over? Hiding?

Where are you? On the grandest scale of human emotions and proclivities and circumstances and seasons, where are you?

God didn’t ask the question to find the answer. He asked the question because the next words Adam spoke would teach us all, “I was naked and afraid, and so I hid.”

Half the battle warring inside of us is won with those words: I am naked—uncovered, exposed. I am afraid—fearful, worried, full of angst. I am hiding—withdrawing, retreating, running away. And aren’t we all, Adam? Aren’t we all? But most of us will never say the words because we like to talk more about the testimony of yesterday than the valley of today.

A transparent community is not simply one where we talk about what God did yesterday and how we came to enlightenment and grew and how today will be different. A transparent culture of confession is one where we say, “Here is where I am today and I am afraid I will always be like this and my inclination is to hide it away.” That is true transparency. That is true confession.

Eating the fruit made Adam and Eve see the destructive nature of wanting to be like God and we still eat the fruit of that fruit. We want to be like God in a thousand different ways. We want to, like my pastor from Texas says, “Wear a superhero’s cape.”

But humans don’t need capes, they need the skins from the sacrifice, the shelter of the Most High, the mantle of God, the robe of the Father thrown over them as they limp home from squandered inheritances and life beside pigs. Real humans, children of God, stink of the pigsty under the pristine robes of the King.

Stop pretending we don’t stink, friends. Say the words, “I am naked. I am ashamed and fearful. I am hiding.” Let us gather at the threshold gate and run toward home where the Father waits to clothe us with the sacrificial covering of His Son.

To Walk Right Through It

I wake this morning in the still dark hours and breathe deeply, in and out. Deep breaths are a luxury I have found in cities stationed a mile high. Everyone said they would come and this morning they finally did. I have rarely thought to thank God for my physical breath, the act of inhaling and exhaling, but since moving here I do. Before we came here we went on a weekend trip to Austin with two friends. In the car they told us of the steps involved in healthy transition. I think grief was in there somewhere, and ethnocentrism, perhaps there was also difficulty breathing, but I can't remember.

Something akin to fog was in there though and sometimes the fog is so thick in this season I can't see a way around it. I work every muscle to remember names and stories and people and faces, to be faithful with the task in front of me, to remember the time for writing will come again eventually, just not today. Everyone knows the thing about fog is you must just go right through it. You dim your headlights, trust the road ahead, move slowly, and go.

I read Psalm 91 today:

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”

The shadow of the Almighty is still a shadow, I think to myself, and shadows are something akin to fog. I think of how the Israelites were led by a cloud and Elijah prayed for one and how God created all of them. Shadows don't feel like walking in the light, but they are still evidence of light, and this I remind myself daily these weeks and months. There is a stayed joy and faith in me, a steady, calm peace pulsating through me. We have not taken wrong steps or made poor decisions, but even good steps take work and wise decisions take time, and sometimes the fog must be waded through.

We lay there in the dark this morning and he knows I am thinking hard, "What's on your mind?" he asks, and I can't answer. Too many of these days feel like too much. We wonder aloud together if the fog will lift and when and how. The truth is we have no promise that it will, but we do have a cloud to lead us, and the shadow that falls from it, and we are sheltered in the midst of it, and He is faithful and kind and good.

Of Garden Roses and Name Changes

I spend all morning at the social security office and at the DMV(s). I go armed with a Texas driver's license, a passport, a birth certificate, a marriage license, two proofs of residency, forms filled out, and find, once again, bureaucracy is all about that inconvenience. A name change is all I get after several hours in lines and in traffic. (Tell me again why they don't put all of the DMV services in just one building?) A whole day off feels thwarted when I finally get home, plus I'd forgotten to drink coffee in the morning. I slump in our estate sale chair and sulk silently to myself: nothing about this season feels like it's easy. The first three months of our relationship, pre-marriage, were brimming over with blessing, but also ease, in some ways. God just felt so faithful and so surprisingly good around every corner. But the last three months—post marriage, post move, post new church/job/community/city—sometimes I wake up in the morning and want to bury my head back in the pillow. It's all so much new.

I tell a friend today I've finally decided to give myself a year to acclimate. If, after a year, I can feel like myself in just one of these new identities, I will consider it a win.

I make coffee, open a cookbook, and get under a blanket to read. Something about food and traditions makes me feel like everything is going to be okay. Our daily rituals together: French press in the mornings, breakfasts of eggs (three for him, two for me) and sweet potato hash, some sort of fruit and greens, sometimes bible reading, and then again at night, slicing vegetables, browning meat, setting the table, lighting the candles. These are the times I feel most myself, and most like someday all of this new and foreign will feel as comforting as the sliced cherry tomato on the wooden cutting board or the amount of time I know it takes to make a perfect steak on the cast iron. These are rudimentary things, but sometimes it is the comfort of the small things.

I page through the cookbook and find a garden rose in it from six months ago, when he first brought me flowers he picked from his garden. They were in a short Mason jar and I knew I would love him forever then. Has it really been six months? Forever is such a very short time and such a long time too.

I know these months of transition are only months, and soon a year, five years, ten will have passed before I know it. I want to slow time sometimes, still it, just to remember, but I also want to speed time, run through it, because it is so hard. We miss our friends and our community, the people who love us best. We miss laughing hard and loud and deep and long, and beers out on the back porch. We miss being known. We are our best friends and favorite persons, but we miss who we are when it's not just us.

Today my name changed from Lore Ann Ferguson to Lore Ann Wilbert and he came and sat down beside me on the estate sale chair: "Thank you for taking my name," he said, and I said, "Of course, what other name would I ever want to take?" And it occurs to me that a name change is a very small thing that takes a very long time to grow accustomed to. So too with life here, I suppose. What is a new address? Nothing, really, but also it is everything too.

Three Sinful Things to Say in Conflict

It is the work of providence, I suppose, that I have been reading about conflict in the church at Philippi these last few weeks and Nate is reading The Peacemaker. I somehow always imagined marriage to be ripe with conflict, but the truth is that ours hasn't been, or if it has, we're delightfully oblivious (that is not to say we have not had conflict, just that we do not stink of it every day). But for all the lack of conflict within our marriage, our entire relationship has been surrounded by conflict among those we love. Which, if you know either of us, is a grand cosmic joke between the Trinity: "Let's put these two passive, peace-loving, conflict-adverse people together for the rest of all time, okay?!"

"Yeah! And let's put them in ministry where they'll be surrounded by conflict all the time!"

"Grand idea!"

It was an exclamation mark fest, I just know it.

For all our natural passivity, though, the conflict swirling around us has been a blessing of sorts. Oh, we don't like it, don't mishear me, but it has been a "severe mercy." Through it we see God's mercy, our sinfulness, and the persistent unfinishedness of the Church—so in this, it has been a blessing.

One thing I am consistently surprised about, though, is the pervasiveness of modern psychology in the midst of conflict between Christians. Phrases like, "You've broken my trust in you/him/her/it," "I was wrong, but...," and "You shouldn't have waited until I'd sinned five times in this way before coming to me." It makes me wonder, truly, how broken is our theology if these are the words coming out of our mouths?

You've broken my trust. One of the best men I know is a biblical counselor across the street from my Texas church family. He told me once, "The bible never says we ought to have faith in another person, it only says we should place it in God." To displace my faith from another person is actually a good thing—it points me toward a God who cannot and will not fail. When our "trust has been broken" in another human, be encouraged, it was never meant to rest on them. Trust God.

I'm sorry, but... The most beautiful thing about repentance is there is no "but..." after the brokenness. To add a "but you..." or "but they..." after our admission of guilt (no matter how justified we may feel in our counter-accusation), takes away the weight we're meant to feel in our mourning over sin and the staggering beauty of a God before whom we stand fully approved and full loved as his children. One of my favorite passages on our response to sin is when Paul says to the Corinthians, "Ought you not rather mourn?!" So often we apologize and run quickly to a counter attack or run quickly to a false sense of security. Brothers and sisters, there is no security in coming out on top. Do not consider equality as something to be grasped, become obedient to death. He raises to life.

You should have told me sooner. There are two sorts of people in conflict that I'm observing: the first tends toward quick righteousness and the second tends toward prolonged grace. In the midst of conflict, the latter typically will overlook a matter (to God's glory) four, five, six times before finally coming to the brothers or sister and entreating them to righteousness. The former who desires quick righteousness typically responds, "Why didn't you come to me sooner!?" and so excuses their sin. Friends, overlook a matter, as much as it depends on you, extend grace, pursue peace, forgive seventy times seven without saying a word. The modern concept is that if we bottle up our feelings we're somehow doing ourselves a disservice and betraying our hearts. I have good news for you: God holds every one of your tears in his capable hands, He knows them and cares for them and has paid for every one of your sins—even the ones five times back. When you cover a multitude of sins with the love of God, you are not doing a disservice to yourself or to the accused. It is kindness that draws us to the throne and love that keeps us there.

Make no mistake, Christian, our theology is on display in the midst of conflict. Our belief in the gospel and its permeation in our lives comes through in those confrontations, apologies, stalemates, and  arguments. God, the ultimate reconciler, though, has given us clear directives for the ministry of reconciliation. Conflict does not surprise or bewilder Him, He has made a way and set an ultimate example of humility, obedience, and persistence through His Son. Trust Him. Believe Him. We will always be disappointed by people but never by Christ.

When We Struggle More Than a Season

Every spring my social media feed bursts with photos of children sitting in fields of bluebonnets, an annual tradition in Texas. It’s purported to be a crime to pick a bluebonnet, our state flower. (It’s not.) It’s definitely a crime that I’ve lived here for five years without ever coming close enough to a bluebonnet to be tempted to pick one.

In Texas, bluebonnets mean spring. With such little variation between seasons, we get stuck in a cycle of light green to dark green to brownish green to less green and back again. As a native of the Northeast, my soul craves the ebb and flow of nature’s clothing, the predictability of life and death, and the knowledge that within three months change is coming.

Similarly, Christian culture has groomed me to believe that as sure as spring, summer, autumn, and winter, my spiritual life operates in seasons. Elation. Joy. Discouragement. Fear. Worship. Obedience. Death. Life. During extended times of doubt, someone is always ready to tell me, “This is just a season; wait it out!”

But are they right? (Keep reading at Christianity Today...)

Fear of Flying and Dying and the Death of Me

I am not so afraid of death as I am of dying, the long slow fall into oblivion. And it is not attached so much to plane crashes and car accidents as it is to the slow death of the everyday. The "punctual rape" Richard Wilbur calls it and it is vulgar, yes, but true of sorts. Every day a little more is shaved off my life and I grow a little closer to the final sleep—and eternal wake. It is the every day dying I do to myself that pains me so much. This is the real dying I fear.

I wake this morning crippled by fears: what ifs and whens, hows and whos. The conversations I must have and the questions I must ask and the corrections to be ministered and the challenges I must accept and the prayers I must pray and the asks I must petition. These seem insurmountable when I list them out in the still dark hours. How, God? and Why Me? —these are the questions I ask.

The thing about death and dying is you can't stop it. He who numbers and knows our days held the date in his hand before the foundation of the earth. The thing about death and dying to self, though, is it seems like you can stop it. Don't have the conversation. Don't submit yourself to correction. Don't give up what you want. Don't let go of this grudge or that fear or this offense or that dream. Hoard it all in the belief that you can have it all and take it with you when you breathe your last.

It's an illusion, see. The belief that we can keep our lives and also we can keep all that is life, or what seems like life. Christ came to give life abundant, but the greatest lie we believe is He won't and so we must get it ourselves.

I believe it sometimes. Do you?

I fear flying and car crashes, death and dying, yes, but right now I fear conversations and submission and saying, "Not my will, but thine," far more. The irksome presence of people and demands and desires pressing on me more than I want them to or think I deserve them to.

My pastor recounted a story to me recently about pastoring people and the expectation that sometime they'd finally get it together and his job would be easier. But that's not the job of a pastor, he said, the job of a pastor is to shepherd sheep and it never ends.

I think this is the role of the person too, at least the Christian person. To shepherd sheep. Dying, bleating, complaining, fussy sheep, who smell and press in and run away and push back—and to wake every morning ready to do it again. To come and die, to lose our lives that we might find them in the face of the great shepherd who leads us—yes us, yes you—beside still waters and restores your soul in paths of righteousness.

And all this for His name's sake. For His glory. For His renown.

Seven Thoughts on Idolatry

I.

I am not like those Israelites in the wilderness, the ones who handed over their riches to make the likes of a golden calf. I clutch to my idols in their original form. I do not trust a maker of any sorts with my valuables, I trust only myself. I adorn myself in them.

II.

I wonder sometimes if all the Israelites gave Aaron their jewelry on that day, or if there were some who held back because an idol in their hands was better than one melded with a hundred thousand other idols.

III.

Remember when Rachel hid the idols of her father's household in her satchel? She carried them with her just in case. Just in case God failed her, just in case He didn't come through, just in case the unseen God wasn't as dependable as the seen gods. Just in case He didn't give her what she wanted.

IV.

Sometimes the only way you can spot an idol is to have it wrenched from your hands. Empty hands can reveal idolatry.

V.

Sometimes idols in the ancient Near East were the big kind you envision in temples, massive stone or golden statues with people prostrate around them in every form. But common ones were small ones, pocketed bits of clay and wood and rock—things they could pull from their pockets at a moments notice, to fill the void, cure boredom, feel validated, and seek answers from.

VI.

The message to the idol worshipper is the same as to the law worshipper, the same to the younger son as to the elder, the same to the Gentile as to the Jew: that idol and that law will only reveal your need for a Savior and a Father.

VII.

Underneath the gold and silver plated idols was the stuff of the earth: clay, wood, rock. All that glitters is not gold. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Then you will defile your carved idols overlaid with silver and your gold-plated metal images. You will scatter them as unclean things. You will say to them, "Be gone!" Isaiah 30:22

Creating the Weak

A few weeks back I sat across from one of my pastors while he delivered the news of my deficit. The words came in a halting tumble, the words of a messenger, not the accuser. "Do you see evidence of this in your life," he asked. I let out my breath because no accuser is louder than the enemy in my own head. I am all those things and more, the list never stops, never ceases; pile on the claims and I will swallow every one.

"I have heard the claims," I said, and I've been checking my heart and home and hearth to see if there is any wicked way in me.

He leaned in as I recounted the weeks leading up to this moment and when I finished he said, "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't want to bother you," I said, because it was the truth, but also because I was afraid.

. . .

I don't remember when it was that I realized if God knit me together, with all my parts and pieces, then he knit me together with all my proclivities and purposes. That the same careful attention he gave to my shape and my size, he gave to my mind and my heart.

For the girl who had only ever known a deep and turning angst in her soul, this made a poem out of a pauper. I had always wrested with depression, anxiety, an unnerving panic at inopportune times. But I had also seen purpose and beauty and a haunting art to all of life too. The horrible badness about me cut me deep enough to let the piercing lightness all the way in.

Even the mundane moments, the 10,000 little moments, all of them little crosses, little funerals, the little concerns rising—these all turn me again and again to Him.

. . .

"There is an impulsivity to you," he said. "It's part of what makes you a treasure to us. You're, what's the word, bohemian? Never going to go with the flow, always on the fringe, an artist. As you submit your weaknesses to us, I don't want you to lose the treasure of those perceived weaknesses. It's what makes you you."

. . .

It has taken me a very long time to learn—and I haven't learned, but am learning—that the world is full of people to whom one way makes sense. Wrestle this way, no, not that way, this way. Be this way. Stand over here. Be this. Eat that. Don't go there. Advice is a thousand times more common than real affirmation and real affirmation is so heavy laden with flattery we most times can't see anything straight.

And this we know: in our weakness, He is glorified. In our weakness, He is made strong. In every way we cannot do, it is because He has done. In every "I don't know," or "I have failed," He says, "Come to me all you who are heavy laden." And in this we rejoice.

I did not rejoice, sitting there, across from a pastor who loves me, knows me, who is for me, and, which is more, who is for Christ formed in me. Who of us rejoices when we hear our accusation? But I rejoiced later and 10,000 times since. Every day a reminder that I have miles to go before I arrive at eternity's door. Every day a reminder that God knew what He was doing when he knit me—just as I am and full of so much more.

As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. John 9:3

Perfecting Faith at 4am

So much of faith, for me, has been finding it again. Some have been given the gift of simple faith, easy, a natural bow into belief. That is not my story, nor my portion. All my faith has been wrestled for, won, lost, contended for, gained, slipped away, and shattered—again and again. Whenever I think I have found it, I find (most times) what I've found is myself and sometimes I am the greatest enemy of my faith.

I am not a fitful sleeper—sleep comes quickly to me and stays deep until morning most nights. But I slept fitfully last night, waking every hour. I was hot. I was cold. I was tense. I was afraid. I was contending.

Perfectionism is my vice and faith is its greatest gain. I set my sights on lesser things, sure, perfect thoughts, perfect writing, perfect design, perfect diet, perfect words, perfect image, perfect clothes, perfect home, perfect friendships. These elusive gains, for me, shadow the ever escaping faith I so desperately desire.

I ache for simple faith. I long for it. In the middle of the night I groan for it. I beg for it, pleading that he would so captivate my mind and heart, that I would be so fat on the feast He has provided in himself, that faith would slip into my heart and hands and stay for life.

But he has almost always withheld the gift of perfect faith.

. . .

For the past few weeks—at church, at small group, at our kitchen table—Hebrews 12:1-2 has been in our mouths.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

It is nearly 4am and I have been lying there, in my twisted comforter and sheets for an hour, wrestling with the current capture of my mind. II Corinthians 10:5 says to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ—but what about when the thoughts feel so enemy, you're sure Christ won't want them in his fold?

I stop on that thought: the idea that Christ wouldn't want my rags, that his righteousness wouldn't cover my wrestlings, that his goodness wouldn't provide for my sin—and I remember "Jesus, the author and perfecter of my faith."

Even my faith is not mine to perfect?

Everything in my life feels out of my ability to control, and faith is too?

. . .

Someone called me brave the other morning and I responded I have nothing to lose, but the truth is, I am brave because I am afraid of losing faith. The only way I know to keep it is to contend for it. But if Christ is the perfecter of my faith, then it is his to keep and hold—and contend for on my behalf.

I fall asleep in this truth: my faith belongs to Him, to grant to me in his time, his way, through his purposes, and for his goodness. It is his to perfect, not mine. And it is his to perfect in me—not mine to be wrestled for and won. The command for me in Hebrews 12 is to run with endurance. Faithfully asking for faith, obediently walking in obedience, gracious receiving grace. All his, perfecting in me the gift of faith.

My Strange Bedfellow

For as long as I can remember I have wakened to guilt. It is a pulsating thought with root in no particular sin or crime, just a carried burden that I have done the world, and the Lord, an irreparable wrong. It is not a quiet guilt, but a raging one. It consumes me on some days and on the days when it doesn't, it reminds me it is coming soon for me again. I remember Augustine's, “For what am I to myself without You, but a guide to my own downfall?”

Guilt is my roadmap to repentance—even when I'm not sure what it is I'm repenting for.

. . .

This morning I woke with my aching friend, I stretched my legs and he stretched himself alongside me, making sure to not leave any part of me untouched. My head first, then my heart, down to my burning belly, and my weary knees. He is not a good friend, his only aim to buckle me before I've seen the sun. Some mornings I cannot even fight him, we have grown accustomed to our daily ritual.

That I will disappoint the people in my life often and daily is no surprise to me, I find apologies falling from my mouth more than any other words. But that I have disappointed a God who makes unrecognizable demands—this is what frightens me the most. What is you want? I beg. I'm holding my life to him in trembling hands, leaving no part untouched, no part unsubmitted—and he is disinterested in all my small offerings.

"I want you."

. . .

The guilt I carry stems from the inability to tell the difference between being wanted for what I can do and being wanted just as I am.

I know what I am just as I am and there is nothing good or desirable or holy or clean enough to stand before a Holy God.

I know what I can do, though; it is a list a mile long and growing—always in an attempt to be found desirable and wanted.

The besetting sins of perfectionism and comparison are, I am learning, the roots of this bedfellow of mine. But it is not just simply perfectionism and comparison in regard to men and women—though it works itself out to be that—it is the deepest, rawest, most fearful part of me that cannot stack itself up to my Father. I fail, miserably, every time.

This morning I am reading Romans 5 and tears spill over on verse six:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

I stay there for a while. Thinking of the timeline of my salvation, the present help in time of trouble, the future hope of glory—but thinking, mostly, of the before the foundations of the world. When I was at my weakest—my near non-existence, that I was chosen. Not when I was at my strongest, my most helpful and helped, my shining moments, crowned with achievement and success. He stooped, condescended, reached down, and plucked me from the mire that is my mind and my will and my emotions: including my persistent guilt. He loved me like that.

I may go to bed with guilt and wake with him for the rest of my days, and in my less than optimistic days, I am certain I will. Perhaps it is my thorn, but perhaps it is my mercy. My severe mercy, like Vanauken wrote: "A mercy as severe as death, a severity as merciful as love." Perhaps it is God, who is love, loving me by showing me the weakness of me reveals the strength of Him?

Pockets of Treasures

Last week I rounded a corner in a Nashville convention center and came to face to face with three elders from my local church. One hugged me and I nearly cried. I haven't been home in three weeks, and was only home about two weeks before that, and will only be home a few weeks before I leave again, this time for overseas and then other states. I don't know where home is right now.

Tonight I sat on the far left side of the sanctuary, where I always sit when I'm home, and I hardly recognized anyone sitting around me. We are a big church, but a small service, and I still felt the ache of everyone moving forward but me.

I told someone tonight I feel like I'm a kid with a pile of treasures, none of them making sense, all of them seeming valuable, but no idea where they belong or when.

I thought I would grow out of this.

Does everyone feel like this?

Like life is one series of mountains and molehills and ebbs and flows and you're always waking up wondering where time went and if you're too far behind to catch up, or too far ahead to stop now?

I don't want to waste my life. I don't want to waste it and I'm terrified of wasting it.

Faithfulness seems so mundane in a world ripe with success and achievements. I want to live a minimalist's life, but I do it loudly, punctuated with images of what I'm doing and quotes of what I'm reading, hoping my simplicity will stick—if to no one else, at least to me.

But I do want to live a quiet life, and sometimes I resent the Lord for not allowing me the wallowing permitted to those who live behind closed doors and high fences. I dream of a house on a mountainside or an ocean inlet surrounded by pines. I dream of poetry and a fire in the fireplace and dinner on the table, a husband-partner, and children too. I have always dreamed of those things, unwaveringly since I knew how to dream. And those things have always been withheld because He knows those treasures are not what is best for me today.

Frederick Buechner said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet," but the questions I'm always asking are, "Where is my deep gladness? And what are you hungering for, world?"

The world's hunger, as best as I can see, is to behold His beauty, and this I find is my deep hunger too. And if my gladness is found in his temple, his Holy place, then it turns out the pile of treasures in my pocket are not many, but one. Just one thing: to dwell in His house, to behold His beauty, to meditate in His holy place. This is the one thing I need and the one thing for which the world hungers. This is the unwasted life.

Silent Sanctification

I've written here, more than a decade's worth of doubts, fears, concerns, questions, deaths, heartbreak, joy, moving, lessons, and learnings. In many ways this place is the very public working out of my salvation. Were you to peruse the archives you would find much poor theology and even more narcissism. This page has been my heart splayed out for anyone to read and I've bled myself dry for it.

Last night I said to a friend: sometimes silence is the best sanctification, and I numbered all the things happening in my life right now that I can't talk about publicly. At least not this publicly.

There's so much of the blogosphere that lauds transparency and authenticity, but even that is rife with trophy stories and humble brags and I am strangled by the fear that I will join their ranks if I so much as whisper the words aloud. The truth is that even good things bring with them deep breaths and open palms. I do not know how this or that will turn out and I can't even guess. And I don't want to give you the opportunity to guess. Because I am selfish? Perhaps. Because I am fearful? For sure. But also because some things are best worked out in quiet, gentle, and still ways. Sometimes our rest is found there, in the stillness, in the peace.

Sometimes writing in this place has been the best sanctification for me. But today silence might be my best sanctification.

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