While I was home last week a few people mentioned that they loved the 30 Day Challenge and a few people mentioned that it was a bit too much for them, too many posts building up in their feed. It got me thinking about you, my readers. I want to write for me, but I want to write for you too. That's the point of saying something, right? To communicate?

So, if you don't mind, can I do a quick survey? There will be some of you who assume that I know you read my blog and know what you like, but still? Chime in? Please?

There will be some of you who have never commented or emailed or let me know you're reading (ahem, Manilla, Vancouver, Kansas City, San Francisco, and many more -- you think I don't see you there, but I do =)), please tell me who you are, what brings you back here, what material has blessed you and what sort of thing you can do without.

Before I ask the questions, let me say this: A year ago someone who shall remain unnamed (but to whom I will link because she loves attention and likes it when I talk about her here) told me that she was tired of seeing me write about a particular subject endlessly. That counsel/rebuke/complaint has stuck with me over the past year and has made me both be more careful in my handling of the subject and also careful about the frequency with which I write about it. So your words matter! And don't worry about offending me please! I promise I won't be offended.

Here are the questions, thanks so much!

I heard someone say this morning that when we've grown accustomed to disappointment, we take the posture of disappointment. He called this form of expectation "resentment waiting to happen."

I thought, how true.

How true it is that we have this lofty idea of how things ought to be or should be or might be and when it pans out differently, we are crushed? I have said more times than I care to count (usually some evening in a kayak on a river at home) "I'm just done expecting anything of God because He either doesn't hear or He doesn't answer." This became the number one reason for the unraveling of my faith in the past year.

I asked, God answered (usually no), and I pulled out the resentment that I'd been saving in my back pocket.

This week, as I've been thinking about faith, I've been trying to be mindful of where my faith rests. I don't want it just IN God, I want it in specifics of His character, otherwise it's too easy to get derailed when the picture I have of Him fails.

It's easy to have specific expectations of people; we know exactly what we want from them, ask us, we'll tell you. And I think we can even articulate what we want of God as well, but when we talk about putting our faith in something else besides the accomplishment, we're talking about putting it in God's character. This is a more difficult matter altogether.

His faithfulness feels far off.
His goodness feels misplaced.
His love feels earned.
His peace feels confused.
His healing feels prolonged.

It is so, so, so difficult to remember Who He Is.

Regardless of What He Does.

If you came to faith because you were promised a wonderful plan for your life, or you felt you needed a life change, or you were sure that He would be the answer to your issues, good. He is and does all of those things. But I guarantee that someday soon that plan will feel afar off, your life will feel unchanged and your issues will raise their ugly heads. And I pray it's sooner than later. (You're welcome.)

But if we come to faith each day, every day, and if our faith grows each day, every day because of Who God Is, I can promise you that all of those hard, hard things will still happen, but you will not find yourself failed, pulling resentment out of your back pocket.

The thing is, God does not owe us anything. He doesn't.

He IS. And that is enough.

I've been thinking a lot this year about faith (no, kidding right?). When you find yourself staring at the floor of your faith, when there's nowhere to go but up, and when the descent into the valley has taken you places in your mind you didn't think you could go, well, on the upside, you find yourself thinking about faith a lot.

A friend posted some great thoughts on faith this morning and I've been stuck on one part of it all day:

"The real question about faith is “What is the object of your faith?” I’m glad you have faith, but faith in what? The Bible? Your confession? Praying perfect prayers? Hyper-faith teaching conceives a faith in faith. Other misguided doctrines teach faith in spiritual disciplines. The gospel teaches faith in Christ (1 Cor. 2:1-5)."

Faith in faith? How familiar does that sound? It probably doesn't sound very familiar because most of us wouldn't say that the object of our faith is more faith. But I'd venture a good guess that were we to whittle our prayers down to their barest bones, we would find at the helm and horizon a straight plane of faith. We ask in faith for an increase of faith to bolster our failing faith in faith. Where is God in this equation and what need have we of Him when our faith is the ultimate goal.

For so long I have prayed "I believe, help my unbelief!" and trust me when I say I would not take back a breath of those prayers. That line sustained me, gave me hope, comforted me, challenged me, blessed me, and helped to usher in that belief I so desperately wanted.

But it is lately that I see that that father of that boy prefaced his prayer with this lone word: Lord!

Lord!

God. Jesus. Christ. The Way. Truth. Word. Life. Creator. Spirit. Teacher. Brother. Friend. Lord.

He is our Object and He is our end-goal.

To make faith or health or wealth or blessing or rest or contentment or healing or a good ending to our story on earth is not and cannot be the goal. This is why we are so broken when God does not heal or when He does not give wealth or when the blessings seem far from us--because our faith was in a good thing, but not the best thing. He is the best thing. He is the first thing.

He is Lord. First and only.

Sometimes you just need to go outside.

One thing I didn't know about Texas is that the wind howls around here, especially in the springtime. I suppose I'll be glad for it in the hot summertime and I'm grateful for it now, when the temperatures are already in the 80s most days. I know tonight I'm enjoying it.

I love houses in the north because there are always lots of south-facing windows and the sun pours in all day, every day. It's hard sometimes to live in a home where only one window gets sunlight throughout the day, the rest are shielded from the hot sun that's soon to come. But the nice thing about our house is that the through-breeze is spectacular. Open the french doors on one side of the house and the windows on the other side and it's a regular wind storm in our living room.

I love that.

I've been thinking today about how we build our lives, crafted for the life we choose, shaped to shield and shelter, provide and protect. I've been thinking about the many places I've made my home over the past ten or fifteen years and how each of these places has uniquely shaped the person I am today. Those places also offered me the unique tools for which the crafting needed.

It is easy sometimes, in this place where I am so happy to live, to compare to my past homes, to line up what each place offered me and how each place affected me and make Texas come out on top. I'm not blind to the fact that I have found much joy in Christ in this place and so it would be easy to assume that places where joy felt far off weren't as good. That isn't my intention. What I mean is that chiseling is painful and most times only brings about joy in the aftermath. I am aware I am abiding in the aftermath in some senses.

But I am also aware that God is the great builder and creator and He knows in what sort of house I need to live in each season of my life.

He has south facing windows for long, dark winters of my soul and open breezeways for springtime relief and fireplaces for times when I need to hunker down in and rest, front porches for when my life must be lived on the outside.

He knows the culture and the temperature and the design that will bring us nearer to Him and He is faithful to move us into places and times to accomplish His will.

This all may seen vague to you and perhaps it is to me as well. But I don't mean for it to be.

What I mean to say is that I am grateful, so deeply grateful, for the cultures and theologies and lessons and challenges that have come from every home I've had. I am grateful for them not because they are the continual, sustainable, and life-altering in every season, but because in some season, they were right what I was meant to be learning and just the tool to teach me.

A sculptor would be foolish to cease his masterpiece halfway through, and God is no different with us. He is unchangeable, but His shaping and shifting of us is changeable and His mercies are new. For this I am so grateful.

Today marks six months in Texas.

I made promises before I left New York. I said I didn't know what the plan would be but that within six months I'd have a plan. I thought that my plan might mean six months here and then a few months in Tennessee or Virginia; North Carolina or Pennsylvania were also possibilities. I thought that after six months in the metroplex I would be peopled out, flatlanded out, suburbed out, and ready for the east coast again or at least the mountainous south.

(You can take the girl away from the mountains, but you can't take the mountains away from the girl. Or some cliche like that.)

All I mean is I really thought that this place wouldn't be home.

But this week, as my dear friend packed up and head back to our mountains, as I have a coffeeshop conversation with a fellow northerner, as I book a ticket to spend a week up north, I find that this really is home to me right now.

The other night I stood in the doorway to our living room, where we live and breathe and eat and laugh. The lights were low, just a lamp and some music in the background. And I sighed deeply.

Not because I felt at home, though I did. Not because I love our home, though I do. Not because I'm grateful to be here, though I am.

I sighed because I am so aware of God's ability to surprise us and how He is in the small details. The ones that led me to a sermon last winter, to reconnect with an old friend, to impulsively buy a ticket to Fort Worth a year ago, to sell tables and books and things once held dear.

He was in the details of time and circumstance and moments and pleasure and soul sickness and my hardened heart in a friend's green carpeted living room. He was in the car with another friend when I exclaimed "He is not good!" He was in one pastor's warning to not do things out of order and in the encouragement of a teary eyed friend to dig deeply for my heart's desires.

He heard all of those times, those weeping moments, those frustrated cries, those angst-filled questions and deep, deep doubts. He was there orchestrating the recipe for His ultimate glory and my joy.

He was in the packing up and setting out, with no job, no plan, no home, only a small glimmer of the hope that His goodness might be found when all else has been cast aside.

And I know that it might be hard for some people that I am here and not there, in the north, with the mountains and spring bursting out, the kids that I love so much and their parents I am blessed to know. I know it might be hard that I have found a surprising home here and not there.

But here I have found God. I have finally turned around and seen how His goodness has pursued me relentlessly in every one of those hard moments.

He is here and here I have found my home.

I was just going to sit by myself, way up high in the back of the sanctuary, where the bad kids and late people sit. Back there. I was going to just sit and try to worship, try to focus, try to hear. But then he said to go find someone, group ourselves in twos or threes and pray for one another. The room is 95% packed with men, so I look to my left and right for a group where I won't feel so conspicuous. Tonight is not a night for conspicuousness. I briefly consider pretending to receive a phone call and ducking out the back door. There are 900 people in the room, I won't be missed.

But there is another girl sitting there, a row behind me and several seats over. I pick up my Bible and bag and sit down next to her, say my name and get on with the business of asking God on behalf of another. But I am sour and there is no hiding that. My heart is sour and though I don't know this stranger, I feel okay saying the truth: that today is a day and this week is a week where I need extra grace.

We don't get time to pray, we are women, after all and we spend our three minutes pouring our hearts out. At the end, after the teaching, before I can get the words out of my mouth, she says them to me, "Can I pray for you quick, before you leave?"

And this is how we make a friend.

But this is also, and more importantly, how we are made aware again and again of the need for grace.

I am so prone to living on yesterday's grace, last week's sustenance. I forget the daily bread. I forget the ask that must happen every day and multiple times within that day. I forget it while I am staring at my laptop all day long at work, moving margins and resizing images. I forget it when I come home and spill every nasty and frustrated thought that has pulsed through me this week to my gracious roommate.* I forget it when I buy a coffee at Starbucks and then promptly spill the entire cup after only one hurried gulp. I forget to ask when I am sitting in that back row.

Every day I need grace.

Grace upon grace upon grace.

Not even for others, I am finding. I cannot even begin to offer it to others when to myself I am preaching a false gospel instead. This is the gospel I have been preaching to myself this week: you are worthless, you are sinful, you'll always be eaten up by guilt, you can't succeed, nothing you do makes any difference.

And the truth is, well, that is the truth. But it's not the whole truth. And I forget that part of the gospel. I forget the grace part, the part where I don't deserve and that's exactly why I get it.

*None of those frustrations were about her. She's a lovely soul who never frustrates me, ever. Praise Jesus.

day thirteen of 30 day challenge put down by one Jason Alan Churchill Thorburne Morris.

If someone had told me ten years ago or even one year ago that there was no perfect answer to everyman's question, I might have bailed then. Thank God, literally, that no one told me, and I pray that you're not who I was then and ready to bail after this sentence.

The truth is that I do still have questions, so many questions. I kick the dirt in the yard this evening, asking them. Why have you made me this way and what is your plan for me? What are you waiting for and why do I have to wait so much longer than everyone else? Why do you allow suffering and why do you allow the people I love to suffer? Why do so many people stand openhanded, waiting, waiting, waiting? Why don't I understand everyone's point of view and how would it change me if I did?

These are the questions I ask and they are not new questions to me.

The past few weeks questions have trickled into my inbox, asking me to address some certain demographic, challenge them, confront them, absolve them in my next post. At first I felt the temptation to do so. When the world looks to us for answers, what can we do, after all, but point them to Jesus and how could I pass opportunities like that?

The truth is that I can, though, and I will.

The truth is that we are all going to build altars of our questions unless we sacrifice the lamb of doubt upon them and call it a done deal. And He has already done that.

Splitting the veil in two, opening the way to the Holy of Holies was God's answer to our doubts and our questions, every one of them. Our difficulty is that even a place most holy cannot answer the questions we ask because we are asking in the wrong direction. He does not make his place among religion and crafted temples. He makes His place among His word and the Holy Spirit.

He keeps enough of Himself held back that we are drawn, caught by our questions in a web of His intricate holiness. Holiness that we cannot know the fullness of while we inhabit these mere tents, these temples of the Holy Spirit, these temporary dwelling places.

My best sends me an email today containing this song and I listen on repeat for a long while because I am asking a tough question this week: why?

The answer is this: so that you would know Me in My resurrection and so you could fellowship in My sufferings.

That answer does not satisfy, I know, and if you are one of those, like me, who would bail at costs like that for unanswered questions, then I invite you to ask your questions to my inbox. That is a question that only grace and the gospel can answer and it matters not your demographic or your station. The answer is the same for all of us:

Him alone.

day twelve of 30 day challenge put down by one Jason Alan Churchill Thorburne Morris.

It feels sometimes, I say to the girls in my small group tonight, that we're working our way through this half of Genesis too quickly. I can't absorb all the things I'm learning or even figure out what I'm supposed to be learning we're going so quickly. Five chapters a week might not seem like a lot, but when your God is putting allusions to the gospel in every chapter you don't want to miss a thing.

It's Abraham we're parked on now, and have been for a few weeks. And something stuns me tonight while I eat my tomato basil sandwich on the veranda of the corner bakery: a test from God.

You know the story: God asks him to sacrifice his son, his only son, Abraham consoles himself with the possibility of secret plan that has yet to unfold, God provides the lamb, etc. All of my life whenever I think about this passage I think "where is God testing me to see if I'll be faithful? Where is he waiting for me to mess up or not obey quickly enough so that He can gently or not so gently push me back on the right path to sacrificing all that I hold dear? What is He going to ask me to give up now?"

Tonight though, as the sun dips behind the horizon and people brush past me on their way to get ciabatta or coffee with cream, I am sitting there stunned.

God wasn't testing Abraham to get a gauge on his faith. He was providing a circumstance in which the only way out was a picture of God's promise made good. It wasn't about Abraham's faith, though that helps with the story of it all, we need that to keep us on the edge of our seats, to keep us guessing what will happen next.

Well, I'll tell you what happens next: exactly what Abraham knew would happen next. God's promise would be just as good on the way down the mountain as it was on the way up the mountain.

Why?

Because His word does not return void.

I think about that so much. I think about the seeming voids in my life. No this. No that. Nothing of this. No sign of that ever happening.

The truth is that God doesn't exist in a void and neither do I. His promise is true today and His promise is true tomorrow. Abraham knew that and that's why it's not a story about how Abraham wrestled with sweat on his brow, hemming and hawing his way to Moirah, shaking as he bound his son to an altar and raised a knife above his head. That's the picture of Abraham I've always had. That's the flannel board story I see in my head. I see a shaking, wondering Abraham.

But I think what God really wants us to pull from that passage is that He wasn't testing Abraham, he was letting Abraham test Him. He was saying to Abraham, "Try me? See if I'm faithful. I am. I'm everlastingly faithful."

But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting
to everlasting on those who fear him,
and his righteousness to children’s children.
Psalm 103:17

day six of 30 day challenge put down by one Jason Alan Churchill Thorburne Morris.

Today we touched the pottery at Anthropologie. We ran our fingers along the the insides of flowered cups, across markings made to identify their sizes. One-third. One-half. One-fourth. Measuring cups. I think of the verse I am rooting in my heart these days, mixing in the ingredients for faith:

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. Romans 12.3

It's so easy to trip on the goodness of God these days; He's everywhere if I just look. Even the second-best things start to look like him. I settle for a little of this and a little of that, until my cookery has resulted in a mess and I'm back again for His sort of Wholeness.

I think about how God measures out our faith and this makes me bristle. Faith is the one thing I like to think I can control in this two-way relationship. He can dole the grace and love and salvation and holiness He wants, but let me have my faith. Let me cup it in my trembling hands and offer that alone to Him. Sometimes, though, I am like the father of the demoniac "I believe, help my unbelief." I do it and He does it. It's a joint venture.

But today, today as I touch measuring cups in a beautiful store, I think about how He measures out the right amount of faith for us to give back to Him. We boldly approach the throne of grace with confidence, but it's really just His kindness that draws us there. I am stuck on that. Too often my boldness gets in the way of His kindness. And so I thrust my way into situations, not hearing the small voice to my left and right, "Don't go there. It's not right. It's not good timing." Instead I take out my own measuring cups, walk across wire, dare God to defy my deft abilities.

See what I can do? See what I can measure out to You? See how far I can go on these cups of faith?

And He does.

He sees.

He sees and says, "Child, that's why I said you should not think of yourself more highly than you ought. Because you can't do it. You can try. But it's better, it'll taste better, it'll come out better, if I do it."

So today is a humbling day. Tomorrow will be too. I anticipate that this lesson will take me weeks and years to learn, I'm just too good at falling back on my own propensity to find God on my terms.

(photos from Anthropologie--aren't they pretty?)

I wake this morning to the sound of rain pounding on our back porch. I lay still and listen. I guess it's fitting that the weather would be inclement today. It's probably snowing at home. And I'm sure it's icing in more places. Inconvenient to the holiday travelers.

This week I think about inconvenience.

Not the stuck in traffic or the grocery store is out of your cereal kind of inconvenience. The dramatic kind, the sort that interrupts your day or your life with news you never expected or always dreaded. The "Mary, virgin, you're going to have a baby" sort of inconvenience.

So many times I wonder, checking the tenderness of my heart, "God, do you mean this for me? Now? This thing for this moment? Couldn't it be later? Better? More? Less? Anything but?" Even joy feels inconvenient sometimes. I want to hang on to the apathy or fear because it feels more comfortable there, more fitting for a kid as disappointing as I am.

I think about this all week: why is virginity so important for the mother of Jesus to possess? I think all my life I have assumed that the reason for her virginity was because only purity can beget purity and this might be my Catholic heritage hanging on a bit. December 8th, my birthday, falls on the Day of Immaculate Conception I've always been told--perhaps I am destined to think about such things. To me, this woman in white and blue is the epitome of purity, the only picture of what God requires from those he can use.

I realize recently how contrary to the gospel that thinking is.

And I may speak heresy here, forgive me, I'm still stumbling around these truths.

I think God could have used, just as easily, a stained and worn woman, a broken and cast aside girl, someone with a story of sins a mile high, and he did. They are written there in the lineage of Jesus---Rahab and Tamar, near Leah and Bathsheba, women who strung the threads of sin into their story, who bought their impurity at the hands of deceived men.

This morning I land on this: it was not her virginity that prized Mary above them all, she who was not sinless, who had committed sins of fear and envy, disobedience and untruth. She was not holy and this was not her reward, this Inconvenient Conception. It might have been any girl in that lineage, at any time. Her child was not the reward of her purity, He was the result of the miraculous.

And this is the only reason why an impossible conception was hers.

I think about that this morning. I think about the inconvenient things, the broken things, the difficult things, the ways I have worked for honesty and purity and faith and sometimes seen no reward. I think about how God does miracles in the middle of impossible situations and surprises the world with his methods. Not as rewards (His grace is more beautiful than a system of that caliber), but as proof of His goodness.

I weep on that. As this year closes out, as I think about how faithlessly I began 2010 and how broken I was midway through. I think past regrettable ways I have acted and unfortunate things I have said. I process the reward I have now, this almost inconvenient peace (or at the very least, unmerited peace).

I think to myself: Thank you Father, that you do not always save the best things for the best behaved, thank you that sometimes you choose us on the merit of the miracle alone.

I am no theologian, but I am a sinner and I suppose this makes it okay for me to write about things like this. Theology is just the way we see Jesus and, God Knows, I need to see Jesus.

I am captured by one recycled thought, a repeating theology that is changing me. A present theology. There are things, I am learning, that have the power to change us at once. I am calling them 180 Theologies--these things have the power to turn us from one direction to the other in immediacy. We are changed. We who were dead are now alive. These things are remarkable and astounding, miraculous to anyone who asks.

But there are also what I'm calling Present Theologies in my mind these days. The gerunds of the Christian grammar: being, ongoing, growing, being, being, being! The things that are happening. The things we understand at once to be finished, but we understand again that they are never fully finished. These things are miraculous too, I'm finding. Taking captive thoughts. Unveiling Christ to ourselves and others. Being built to be a dwelling place for the Spirit.

The cross is finished, has finished it for us, all of us.

But we aren't finished yet.

I love that. I love that!

It is so easy to catch ourselves in where things went wrong, which iota of the gospel we didn't understand, which theology failed, which principle led us down the wrong path. Instead, if we choose to meditate on the -ing of the gospel message, we are set up for a hope and a future. Rome wasn't built in a day, neither was Paul, and praise God, neither am I.

In Texas my body doesn't know it's winter, but my soul does. I wake this morning and it's still dark, but I'm not interested in burrowing deeper into the down. I lay still and listen to my home wake up. I'm in no hurry these days. Everything moves slowly about my life.

I'm okay with the quiet of the soul, the winter where death doesn't hurt quite so badly as it has in years past.

I am saying to someone yesterday, with tears in my eyes, "If only you knew me a year ago..." and I am not bragging. I used to think that all pruning was painful and all death was an enemy, that the falling of leaves meant I would be left standing there naked and revealed. I am finding though, that God makes sacrifices to make sure we're still clothed. The shame that comes is not from the revealing of our deepest parts, but instead the fact that we know we cannot do it all alone.

The concept of being a lover of the light and exposing all things hidden is not a strange one to me, I've mouthed this for years. But the reality of uncovering the hiding things, revealing the secret sins and not drawing back when the light hits the dark stuff of my heart--these are hard things for me. We are not adept at revealing, we hide first and we make excuses second.

Because it is easier.

Because it is, at first glance, less painful.

Because it is dangerous to stare at winter across the seasons and say we're up for the challenge.

Because our example of exposure is a man, stripped bare on a cross, crowned with thorns and crying out to the only one Who could save him and wouldn't.

God turned his face away.

And we think that He will do the same to us. Or, at the very least, others will do the same.

I think this morning, though, that though we are to emulate Christ in all things, his death is not to be ridiculed by our assumption of the same treatment.

God's response to Adam was to cover him; discipline him, yes, but cover him.
God's direction for Christ was to follow through til the end, turn his face away and turn the sky black.

And tear the veil in two. Expose the weaknesses of the old covenant, say out loud in so many ways, "I am doing away with this! No more do you have to shed blood or stand naked! No more do you have to fear wrath or play chess with My goodness. I'm covering you once and for all."

I don't know why, during this advent season, my thoughts are always on the resurrection or the last supper. I wish that that they were more Christmas worthy. But I'm grateful for the winter and you should know this. I'm grateful for the stripping bare, the naked trees and dead leaves. I'm grateful for the fading life and ensuing life. I'm grateful for the cross and the willingness of a man who exposed it all for me.

But I'm most grateful that I am covered.

He Defends His Cause

"He defends His cause."

That's what the heading to Psalm 74 says in my bible. Then David goes on to give God a litany of reasons he feels He is not defending His cause: your foes have roared; they set your sanctuary on fire; they profane your name; we don't see any signs; why do you hold back your hand?

I wept with a friend the other night, a litany of reasons making us sure God is not defending his cause. There has been a burden on my heart for weeks now for another friend, one prayer fighting for space amongst the others: why, oh God, won't you pull through for them? I get an email last night asking: where is God in the middle of this?

I won't deny there's a flame of hope in me making it easier for me to have faith, and I won't deny that at the thought of the gospel my tears are close at hand, it is easy for me to see God these days. But I'm not so far from three months ago, six months ago, a year ago, that I forget kicking the tires of my totaled car or shouting at God for His lack of provision. I haven't forgotten the lump in my throat walking through the doors every single Sunday, the guilt accompanying a girl without faith. I'm not so far from asking "Why do you hold back your hand?"

I remember that.

Another translation captions Psalm 74 this way: He remembers His cause.

What that means is, "I remember how hard this is; I remember how difficult it is to believe in Me; I remember your pangs and your tears and the pain that accompanies all of these questions. I remember you."

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

Sometimes I think God's cause is to bring heaven to earth. I think His cause is to prove to us that we are peons, but He is gracious to us anyway. Sometimes I think God's cause, His end-goal, is to establish a grand kingdom with Him as King. Sometimes I think He is heading up his army of pro-bono volunteers to work this grand plan of His, kept secret from us until the very end.

But today, this week, this month, I remember that I am His cause. I am part of His kingdom on earth, part of the army who prays, "...on earth as it is in heaven." I am his cause and Jesus is the way.

And He remembers me.

And He shapes and crafts these hard things through which I walk for me.

And He defends me. My squabbles and failures and falters and wrong turns--He defends against people who might object to them being a part of His design for me.

I know how selfish this sounds, how egotistical I must be to believe that God isn't more concerned with wars and rumors of wars, starving children and world politics. But this is why I am a Christian after all. Because He has dipped Himself down to earth and made Himself real to me. Because I haven't been forgotten.

Because thousands of years ago He delivered a message to a young girl-child, impregnated that single girl, birthed a baby in the middle of squalor, raised that boy in the sight of people who wanted to murder him, nailed that man to a cross and accomplished His plan for His Son.

Because He defends His cause and we are His cause. We are the cause.

I am staring a pile of goodness. Folded fabric, salt and pepper shakers, mint candies, and Yogi tea. Artwork by kids I love and and trail mix are the way to my heart. I never think of myself as receiving love by receiving gifts, but when on a Saturday morning there is a knock at our front door and two packages arrive from the snowy north, I find myself feeling quite loved.

There is something about being known and perhaps that's why the gifts mean more. Perhaps if the boxes were filled with generic or obligatory gifts, they would mean less. But each fold of grey and orange flannel, each ceramic button, and each favorite tea bag says, quite personally, "Hey, Lor, yeah, you. I love you. I know what you love and here is how I'll love you."

A week ago I had a conversation with my roommate about Christmas lists. My family never made Christmas lists. I suppose it was something about being grateful for everything we got on Christmas, or perhaps the element of surprise was too important to risk losing to a litany of wants voiced. I don't know. She asks me what I'd put on it, and I name something partly in jest, not because I want it, but because I need it and I won't spend the money to buy it on my own.

The next day a birthday card from Florida arrives in the mail with a check in it, a note at the bottom clarifying that I buy exactly what I'd joked about needing. I hadn't mentioned it to anyone but Season, but somehow, the knowing is there. I chuckle at God's retort to my jest: you think that if you ask for bread, I will give you a stone?

I begin a retort back, "Well, sometimes you have given me a stone when I've asked for bread." But I stop mid-sentence. Because I am learning that God gives us exactly what we need in exactly the right way and time.

We finished the first half of our study in Genesis this past week and I am weeping in the car on the way home, weeping because we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses who never saw the Bread they'd been promised. For thousands of years it seemed they were given stones in the form of war and destruction, repetitive sacrifices and rules, but no Messiah.

Why us then? Why did God choose for us to live on this half of His fulfilled covenant and not them? Why not the fathers of our faith?

It must have hurt to feel unknown by a God who made promises with no seeming end in sight.

How good it is to be known and to be blessed by things that answer prayers and feel right in my life; how beautiful it is to open a box of joy, and how life-giving it is to receive.

But how good it is too, to hold on to years of stones, piling up altars of remembrance, Ebeneezers of Thus Fars, things that feel cold and lifeless in their season, but point ahead to a promise.

"I know you, even now. And I am coming through for you! I am coming down for you! I will dwell among you! I am your bread! And I am coming!"

Call me narcissistic, I'm calling it thankful. I just spent an hour or so reading through this year's posts.

It seems apropos to do so, on the first day of this last month of 2010. In one month they'll hand out hundreds of slips of paper at my home church and mine will go back in the box, that's what they do with the absentees. Part of me is glad; I remember what I wrote on that slip of paper and it was nothing good.

So I guess I just wanted to know what this year shaped up to be. I guess I just wanted to know, akin to pinching myself, how did I end up here?

The truth is that I don't know and I'm not sure it even matters. Here's what I do know:

I know that God is good, which is odd, because that is the principle thing I struggled with this year and the one thing I said repeatedly when I dared open my mouth about the struggles of 2009-2010: God is not good.

And I am not saying that God is good because I have somehow reached the nirvana of spirituality or there is overflowing goodness in my life (take a look at my bank account, the broken shock in the back of my car, or the gnawing loneliness I feel sometimes). I'm saying God is good because I'm learning that God's goodness doesn't fluctuate based on the circumstances of my life or heart. God's goodness is continual and constant. God's goodness is present regardless of my health or wealth. And, most of all, God's goodness doesn't depend on my goodness toward Him.

This is life-changing for me.

It is life-changing for me because in the past I've been good because I wanted to see the goodness of God; like a barter system in my head, a tally-marked faith, I tried to rack up points to get Him on my side. It is life-changing for me because God is not only more interested in us seeing His glory, He is actually disinterested in our attempts to get our own. This puts things in perspective for me.

All my righteousness, filthy rags.
All my habitual deeds, garbage.
All my attempts to prove my worth to Him and others, junk.

But all my junk, gold.

Here's what I said to a friend the other day, but I didn't say it first: Jesus didn't come for the well, He came for the sick. And if I'm not sick, I have no need for his goodness to be displayed, no need for a hand reached down. I have a lot of junk and it all came out this year, every feeble, wobbly, gross, insecure, doubtful bit of it. My junk is the only thing that qualifies me for a glimpse of His goodness.

And if that's not good, I don't know what is.