fight

They don't tell you that all hell will break loose and it will all happen at once. All its fury brought down in one swoop and nothing to break its fall. If there was warning, perhaps, we might have braced ourselves, stockpiled, borrowed tomorrow's manna. But there is no warning for this sort of thing. The only thing it leaves in its path is a series of frozen memories: a boy on the top of a hill at sunset, a girl who holds you close while you sob, a friend who holds your cold hand in the room outside the courtroom, another friend who pulls back your hair while you heave everything you've eaten and felt in a year's worth of time.

We have grown accustomed to ashes and ashes, dust and dust. Everything we were made from and to everything we return. Dust. Man, you are dust.

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said: 
Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Dress for action like a man;
I will question you, and you make it known to me.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?   
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
   or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
   and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (cont)

I take comfort and joy in that. Comfort, because I know my place, and joy, because I know His.

Comfort, because these momentary afflictions are for a lasting glory, and joy, because nothing here is sacred unless it has been broken and poured out for me.

Let it do the work in you--all that brokenness, the fury of hell and its minions and the staggering mercy of the suffering brought on by car accidents and cancer--because how could it be worse? It could.

It could.

(deep inside, where the real fight happens)

Let it shove in, shove around, hurt, hurt, hurt. Break the fallow ground, sift the confusion, let it do the work in you. Because if it does not, this hell, these sobs, these heaves, if this does not happen, then the heart you will be made of will be no heart at all.

To be what you are crafted to be today, all hell will break loose yesterday.

I swallow hard, writing that, because I am not so far from my own hells that I forget the agony of the flames licking my face, my heart, my mind, those I care for most. I am in some ways closer than ever--because I see now. I see these things that threaten to steal my joy and I name them, death, disappointment, divorce, disease. I name them because they are not subject to me (as I thought for so long they were), but they are subject to One who is higher and more grand than I can ever know.

The one who set the foundations of the earth while He thought of me. The One who breathed the creation of the world while He planned for me. The One who stretched the lines upon it while He purposed my boundaries. The One who laid the cornerstones of the earth while He knew that His own cornerstone would die for me.

All hell may break loose, Job, but we're taking it, you, me, and everyone we know. We're letting it come at us with everything, we're dressed for action, we know our place and we know our Maker.

Attribute

She asks this morning what has made the difference and I'll tell you what I said: the nature and character of God.

That's it.

His character and nature never changed, of course, so it didn't swing around and ta-da my faith. No, it was faithful and good all along. What changed is that I began to frame everything else within that knowledge. When my car breaks down, He is good. When I have no money, He is wise. When I am lonely, He is faithful. When I am fearful, He is loving. He is all of those things when my car works, when there is money, when I am surrounded by good people, and when I am brave enough to risk everything. But what changed in me is that He never changes.

So here I am, back in Northern New York, driving roads where I've hugged their curbs, cursing God, passing coffee shops where I hunched over journals asking hard, hard questions, and around people who hugged me hard when I wept long. Here I am where every autumn scene makes me gasp with the pleasure of God and ache at how I never loved it because it was His and only because it was beautiful.

Yesterday our kayaks swept along the Grasse River and I sighed: God is such an amazing creator.

Another attribute. (One that's harder to remember in Texas than it is to remember here.)

The thing about His character is this: it never changes, but we do and so every experience is another opportunity to see Him more clearly, know Him more intimately, to treasure Who He Is over what He does.

Because at some point, your child may die, your boyfriend may refuse you, your car may break down, your wife may leave you, your bank account may be emptied, your sinfulness will surprise you, and your heart will break into a thousand pieces.

But you will not shake your fist at Him, no, because you will understand you cannot put Him in your debt, with your litany of good acts and faithfulness. You will bow your head and weep, perhaps, but deep in you, you will understand that He is doing new things with old character.

He never changes.

This is what has made all the difference in the world.

The view from my kayak on the Grasse River

True Stories

Around here, nobody knocks and everyone uses the backdoor. Around here, you talk over each other, interrupt freely and opinions are passed around like warm butter and cornbread at a chili dinner. I'm exhausted, but loved well and I suppose this makes up for it. I sleep well here because the stars are out and even with my blinds closed I know they are out there still. I sleep better under the stars.

It is hard to explain how beautiful this is to someone else. I try and it comes out sounding like a storybook life and I don't mean for that, because here there are hard, hard things happening and hard, hard story endings for people. But the beauty? The beauty.

The salmon are jumping, the tree tips are burnished orange, and the air is warm and cool at the same time. I am on the side porch, the water rushes past me below, there are voices from the kitchen, they're walking past me with their arms full of freshly picked apples, kayaks rest their weary bottoms on green, green grass by the garage cottage. Gulls sing to the herons and the herons stand taller still. The afternoon sun kisses my toes and God's mercy is on my lips.

I say to someone yesterday that it is like a marriage in my soul to be here. All the good, good things that I have learned this past year brought to this place I love so much and so deeply. All of that is quick on my lips in this beautiful place where in the past it has been so easy to curse God for all the times He didn't come through. The thing is, I say this morning into a microphone at the newest campus of my old church, God was good and coming through then too.

It is easy to live a facade wherever you are. Easy to live somewhere beautiful and have a broken heart. It is easier still to live within a beautiful body and cloister the brokenness inside. You feel that it will be safer there, that people only want to see the beautiful things.

And we do. Oh, how we do.

But it's the beautifully broken things that make the best stories.

And that's why I love it here. Because here, in this home, with these people, I am familiar again with my brokenness. I am reminded of my doubt. I say it in front of them. I say that the doubt wrecked me. Praise God. It wrecked me.

I had a conversation the other day with a friend. We are plain girls, we two, cheerfully scrubbed clean, unaffected, natural, confident, but no great specimens of beauty. We ask one another how difficult it must be to be beautiful, to have that to carry around with you always. It is easier, see, to be plain because people aren't as surprised when you open up the inside and show them the wickedness on the inside.

This place. It's so beautiful. God's kingdom. God's land. It's where He spread around the colors on His palette because He knew there would be little else to sustain when the going got rough. And the going gets rough here, I'll tell you. The going has gotten rough.

But I'll tell you what happens when something beautiful opens up and shows the deep, deep brokenness inside: it births beauty in the form of changed lives.

I am a life that was changed.

So happily ever after.

My view, right about now.

Seen

I've been asking for eyes to see the past few weeks. Until last night I thought that was a good thing. I thought it was good to see the whole picture, to see people, to not walk past the lame and the blind without stopping to ask, talk, and pray. This weekend is teaching me, though, that seeing doesn't matter as much as I want it to.

I think I want to see because I want to be seen.

Because the world is full of blindness and I don't want to be one more blind beggar, unfurling out my need and ignorant of others. I want to see.

Isaiah saw and instead of being seen in return, though, he was sent. He saw, saw his uncleanliness, and was commissioned. Whether it was on account of his uncleanliness or his willingness to be sent, I don't know. I think it might have been both.

I think God is looking for willingness, but he's also looking for the ones who stand, head bowed, saying "Woe is me." He wants us to be familiar with the brokenness of our own souls before we go about representing Him. He uses the sinner to show His sinlessness.

This paradox confuses me.

Jesus said "My food is to do the will of Him who sent me" and "I do what I see my Father doing." Jesus, God in flesh, knew His place.

I'm still going to ask for eyes to see, but mostly I'm going to ask for eyes to see my own sinfulness. I want to know my place.

And I want to see Him most of all.

(pinterest)

No matter how healthy our theology, we always come face to face with the God of our reality.

What I mean by this is that reality is the most raw way of showing us what we think about God. I once read Tozer who said something like this: "The most important thing about you is what you think about God." He was a smart man.

Because it is only when we are face to face with the caricature God we've made or the feeble God we imagine or the angry God we're sure He is, that we realize the depth of ourselves.

And our sin of making small.

I might argue that the second most important thing about us is how grand we think God is. Augustine said that the root of every sin is a disordered love and what else is a small view of God but the ultimate disorder?

But why why why is it so easy to assume that He isn't concerned with us? Our joy? Our happiness? Our creativity? Our intimacy? Our faith and our faithlessness?

When my eyes behold what my heart believes and my actions indicate about what I think about God, I am humbled. Because somewhere along the way I've bought the lie that I still have to do this on my own, that I still have to make it happen, and that He will not come through for me.

The truth about God, though, is nothing we're experiencing right now is out of his eye, nothing we're doubting right now is out of His knowledge, nothing we're scrambling for right now is out of His control.

What we think about ourselves ultimately reveals what we think about God.

This is probably not the best book for me to be reading right now, as it's all about leaving Texas and finding some other home. But, still, it's one of my favorites and sometimes says the wanderlust better than I can. Today he writes this:

[This city in Texas] makes you feel that life is about the panic and the resolution of the panic, and nothing more. Nobody stops to question whether they actually need the house and the car and the better job. And because of this there doesn't seem to be any peace; there isn't any serenity. We can't see the stars here anymore, we can't go to the beach without stepping on a Coke bottle, we can't hike in the woods, because there aren't any more woods...We drive around in a trance, salivating for Starbucks while that great heaven sits above us, and that beautiful sunrise is happening in the desert, and all those mountains out west are collecting snow on the limbs of their pines, and all those leaves are changing colors out East. God, it is so beautiful. It is so quiet. It is so perfect... [Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts]

You see why I shouldn't be reading this?

I say to a friend last night, change is my nemesis and my drug. The sure knowledge that something bigger and better is out there, over there, anywhere is what drives me. I know that God makes some people visionaries, but I also know that God makes those same people plant themselves firmly sometimes. So while I do not excuses my desire for adventure and change, I also do not deny that it makes eight month marks difficult.

I think one reason it's hard here is because I am so much of a space girl. I love mountains and water, but I do not feel hemmed in by them. Texas is big, space would not be a problem you would think, but for me, the endlessness of it feels claustrophobic at time. I feel like I need perspective.

Season and I go watch the sun set tonight and my series of photos journaling the set make the sun seem so small. But I crest the hill and there the sun is, a blazing pink orb, next to a tree 1 millionth its size, and the sun looks bigger. I just need a little perspective.

Tonight I sit here and feel the tears smart in my eyes, tangible evidence of pure self-pity. I shake myself and say, "This isn't it. And you're acting like it's it. You're acting like Texas-metroplex-landlocked-hot-suffocating-race is it and it's not. So buck up. Get some perspective."

I love the way The Message puts Isaiah 61:

"Put your face in the sunlight. God's bright glory has risen for you. The whole earth is wrapped in darkness, all people sunk in deep darkness, But God rises on you, his sunrise glory breaks over you. Nations will come to your light, kings to your sunburst brightness. Look up! Look around!"

This isn't it. Texas isn't it. New York isn't it. Tennessee isn't it. Pennsylvania isn't it. Montana isn't it. California isn't it. Europe isn't it. Canada isn't it. The globe isn't it.

The other day I heard someone say that the word Cosmos literally means Ornament. It's just decoration, just something to make the glory of God bigger and better.

And that is the only bigger and better I want to be concerned with.