Yet

The nations shall see your righteousness,and all the kings your glory, and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give.

A friend and I have an ongoing conversation in which we always decide we agree, but in which I usually come back later with some grievance. He says that a woman who doesn’t feel lovely before marriage won’t feel lovely afterward, and I say that God loved us while we were yet sinners so it’s not too much to expect a man to at least try to follow suit.

I think we are both lazy in our estimation of what loveliness is.

You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

It’s been a whole year since I’ve felt lovely. I know it exactly because it was the second week of Lent last year that the little lie crept in and began to strangle out the good and beautiful that grew inside of me. A year is a long time for a lie to fester, especially if you put off addressing the lie until 365 days later. Which I am now doing.

Last week one of my classmates read from Psalm 139. He read it through once, quickly, then teased it apart a bit for us, then asked us to close our eyes and imagine we were saying those hallowed words to God Himself.

Tears pooled in my eyes and I could barely breathe at the end of it all.

I could barely say those words to a friend, a roommate, myself, but to God?

Later that night I was telling a friend what happened and I was embarrassed, not to tell her, but to even confess it myself. Even before a word is on my tongue, He knows it. He knit me together in my mother’s womb. He hems me in, behind and before. I am fearfully made. I am wonderfully made? My days were formed for me?

My days?

Even the past 365 days?

You shall no more be termed Forsaken and your land shall no more be termed Desolate but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her and your land Married for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.

It’s hard to not feel wasted inside, overgrown with weeds of lies and weeds of wishes. But that He formed these days for me? Every one of them? Crafted in secret, hewn in His hands, for His glory, these days?

Today I will disagree with my friend yet again: Christ loved me while I was yet a sinner, dead in my ways, covered over by thorns and thistles and lies as big as years. He saw that and called it worth loving, not because I was lovely but because I knew I would never be.

For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your sons marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you. Isaiah 62.2-5

Rob Bell's New Book and Questioning Faith

It was a poor grasp of theology that led to me to confess in early 2010 I did not believe and could not believe, nor follow, the God I thought I knew. It was one particular line a few months later that turned me right around and into the arms of a Father unlike none I'd ever known: a simple line of truth about Who God Was and Is, and who I am not. Did I believe before that? Was there a moment of salvation in 2010? Did I need to get rebaptized? These were the questions I asked myself and others eventually asked as well. Questions that needed answers immediately, I thought.

Rob Bell is coming out with a new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, and I watched the trailer for it this morning. Guy better brace himself because I don't care if you're the Pope or the President of the United States, the backlash about to unleash on him yet again is gonna sting. Should it sting? Well, that's a question I'm not going to address here, so take your snark and stinky attitude elsewhere—regardless of how much you love or hate him.

Here's what I will say: in early 2006 I got my hands on a copy of Velvet Elvis. First, it was the design of the book that appealed to me—I loved the space, the use of graphic elements in the book, and the smokey blue used throughout it. It felt fresh in my hands. I hadn't read a word and already I knew something beautiful was about to happen to me. I was right. My copy of that book is dog-eared and underlined, scribbled in with pages falling out. Someone was giving me permission to think and to ask questions.

All my life, and especially all my Christian life, asking questions was out of the question.

In Velvet Elvis I was able to wrestle with concepts and thoughts that had never been presented to me as beautiful or mysterious. I thought faith was something you got once and never lost, and could never understand why faith had always been so elusive to me. I was [am] a chronic doubter. Bell's book let me stick my hands in the side of Jesus, poke fingers through God made flesh and flesh made God. 2006 began four years of wrestling for me. What I wrestled with was never completely clear, and I see now it's because I was wrestling with mystery.

I had flesh on my Jesus—He looked like me and all the Christians I'd known my whole life: a bit radical, a bit bland, and a bit pragmatic.

But now I had permission to not understand the fullness of Jesus.

And that saved my life.

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

At the end of those four years, sobbing on my bedroom floor, confessing I did not believe and could not believe, what I came to realize is that I did not believe and could not believe in the God I thought was.

This God who was black and white, clear and clean, four points and a poem, and this God who could not be understood at all, an enigma, a full-on mystery—neither God satisfied the deepest doubts and longings of my soul.

Slowly He began to reveal to me that He was both mystery and proof, solid and spirit, firm truth and full life. He was both/and, not either/or. He was stunning in His characteristics and humbling in His holiness. His beauty was in His immutability and His changelessness was in His triune nature, God in three persons.

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

This is important because heresy will always exist and we must be stalwart to point it out, but we also must let each generation come to a place where they are wrestling with very real, very actual, necessary battles with and for their souls. If we do not fling open the doors to what the world brings at us in some respect, we will raise generations of robotic orators with no grounding to their faith. Can I endorse the content of Velvet Elvis knowing what I know now? No. But can I endorse the wrestling with faith that Velvet Elvis encourages? Yes. Without reservation.

We finished the book of Acts this morning in class and several of us offered reflections on what we learned, how we were challenged or blessed. Here's what Paul taught me more than anything in that book: He was ready in season and out because he knew his audience, he knew the Word, and more than anything he knew his God. He, Pharisee of Pharisees, Hebrew of Hebrews, persecutor of Christians, and mocker of faith, was brought low and shown the beautiful mysterious light of his Savior on Damascus road.

We all will have our moment of beautiful mysterious light, some will have it reading Piper or Edwards, some while reading Keller, Chan, Kierkegaard, or even Bell. Maybe it will take longer than we'd like for someone, or even ourselves, to see a faithful work of service behind us and a hopeful path set before us. Maybe some of us will have to hide out in the house of Judas for a few months or days or weeks.

As for me, I take comfort in this: Every knee will bow, every tongue confess, that He is Lord.

There is no mystery or question about that. It will be full-on, the most spectacularly beautiful culminating moment we could ever imagine.

Comparing Weight

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for usan eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison... I Corinthians 4:17

Tonight I'm on the phone with a friend and we're talking about the weight of glory like we know what we're talking about. We've seen our fair share of light momentary afflictions and we're both crying "Maranatha!" in our stronger moments.

Come quickly, we're saying, and in the meantime we're shouldering our share of the burden.

"Did you know that the Hebrew word for glory is the same word for heavy?" she asks me. She's in seminary and seminarians know these things. I tell her I didn't know that but it seems fitting, doesn't it? If you can follow it through, the weight of glory is the heaviness of glory is the glory of glory is the glory of heaviness is the glory of weight—and isn't it a beautiful picture when you put it like that?

This light momentary affliction is preparing us for the glory of bearing it through til the end. Finishing well. Finishing without comparison, because we know there is no comparison or coupling in heaven—we will be all too enamored with the King of Kings to consider our neighbor.

And let me be straight—our momentary affliction is not the stuff of real suffering, we have food enough and friends enough and He carries us through in the meantime. But our momentary affliction comes from the comparison we are so wont to do here on earth, and isn't it the way for us all?

No one else seems to struggle here or with this. No one else has to muscle their way through this experience, so why us? Why me? These are the existential questions of our momentary affliction. It is fitting, then, that Paul would use the word comparison when he talks of the weight of glory, isn't it? Listen here, he's saying, you who are looking around you and experiencing the stuff of the earth in deeper and more painful ways than your counterparts are, what it's preparing you for is a glory you can't compare, not even on your best day.

I imagine, for one moment, Isaiah in the year King Uzziah died, seeing the Lord in all His glory. Isaiah, who was undone by all that glorious glory. "Woe is me." I imagine the burning coal touching his mouth and his admission that he would go anywhere the Lord sent Him.

I imagine that and I can bear almost anything.

Swinger of Birches and No More

I'm joining the beautiful Micha Boyett today over at Mama Monk at Patheos. I wrote some reflections from a camping weekend recently and I'd love to have you join me over there!

There is a poem by Robert Frost I love. I suppose that's juvenile of me and I suppose I don't care if it is.

"One could do worse than be a swinger of birches," it ends and I always agree.

Whenever I am in the wild, or as we Americans call our twelve dollar campsites in our North Face gear and purified water in BPA free bottles "in the wild," I think about Enoch and I think about birches.

Continue reading...

How to die beautifully

There are things I ought to have learned in science class, but I was too busy hankering for art class to pay much attention. Did you know that the reason the autumn leaves are so spectacular in the northeast is because the weather has an indecisive air to it? It’s true. One night it’s cold enough to frost and the next day it’s warm enough to kayak in a tshirt. In the mountains the reds and oranges are deep and rich, and in the valley fields the green is vibrant and lush. The sky is almost always a steel blue, nearly grey, but still clear. I cannot describe this well enough, I know. I’m sure I tend to romanticize it because I tend to romanticize everything. It makes for a better story, see?

But trust me: it is beautiful here. Even today, while it rains steadily outside the side porch where I complete my wedding tasks of the day, it is beautiful (of course it helps that my wedding tasks for the day were to take buckets of flowers and make them into eleven presentable bouquets).

Tonight I’m going to leave these bouquets of roses and hydrangeas, seeded eucalyptus and ranunculus here on the porch. Outside, where temperatures will probably dip into the forties. I’ll leave them here. And for the same reason that the leaves get more and more spectacular, I have no fear for these flowers.

It goes against my gut to do this, leave them outside. Because flowers bloom in the warmest months, I assume that that’s where they’ll thrive best. But a year in Texas is teaching me that while the heat may force a bloom to open, it does little to sustain it.

We all need a little indecisive air, a bit of a chill, to be sustained.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day and she’s asking the right questions: why does it have to be so hard sometimes? Why does it have to hurt?

I don’t have answers for her. I’m finding the more I know, the less I really know.

But I know this: those leaves wouldn’t take our breath away if they weren’t dying in the process.

And I don’t like that. That makes me uncomfortable. I hate death, it is nothing but stings and barbs. But I love life because it is nothing but newness and cycles.

I love life because I know that I will die a million deaths until that final one, but each one makes me a little more vibrant in the process, and each one brings the promise of newness. That’s something I can plant my soul in.

This post was originally posted in October, 2011. But in honor of peak week at home, I'm posting it again. Enjoy your leaves northern friends!

WHAT did HE MEAN?

These days it seems authorial intent is an aside, an afterthought. What really matters is how the piece of music or poetry or prose made us feel and feelings are something we westerners are never short on. And so praise God for twitter and facebook, and someone thank Him for LinkedIn too, because without these outlets of immediacy, how would we ever know how anyone felt about anything? This morning a short twitter exchange:

Him: Sometimes I need to be reminded of what I sometimes believe. Me: Almost all the time I need to be reminded of what I almost never believe.

So this has me thinking about doubt this morning.

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In my Old Testament class we began our study of Deuteronomy today. It is, in short, the paraphrase of the previous four books of the Bible and, in long, an instructive to remember and rejoice, remember and rejoice.

Forget authorial intent and even my innermost feelings, remembering and rejoicing slip my mind more than anything else.

Remember: what God intends, who He intends it for, and why. Rejoice: that God has not forgotten me or His promises, or most of all, His faithfulness to His character and word.

The other night a friend challenged me deeply. I sat on my bed Indian style, while her words came across the phone, and eloquence aside, she finished with, "So get up off your ass and do something about this situation..." Lest you think she's of the coarse, unfeeling sort, she sent me an epistle of love the next day filled with all sorts of right thinking and gospel truth.

Why?

Because I forget. I forget what God has done. I forget what He has promised. I forget what He does intend and not just how it all makes me feel.

--------------------

This morning reading through the first few chapters of Deuteronomy with the rest of my class I'm reminded that there is cancer in that room and death, loneliness and confusion, joblessness and despair. In that room of 38 people who love Jesus deeply, who serve Him radically, who have been tapped on the shoulder by leadership at my church to come out and lead well, in that room of 38 people things do not always go well.

There are some of us asking: will we ever get to see the promised land? Has our sin been too great? Has His anger been too deep? Has our doubt been too strong?

And it's not because we don't know the gospel or the grand intent of God's hand: it is because we do not remember the gospel and sometimes forget the grand intent of God's hand.

So Deuteronomy is a sweet comfort to me today. Because it is a book about remembering and rejoicing—even if we never see what we think is promised to us. It is a book of history, of Ebenezers set at which to point and say, "Look what God has done thus far." It is a book about God's intentions, even when our feelings run rampant over truth.

Remember.

And Rejoice.

Deeper Church: Thirty Blackbirds or More

I've had a love/hate relationship with the Bride of Christ most of my life. In the times I have needed her most, I have felt failed by her, and in the times I have felt myself stray far from her, she has pursued and loved me. These are strange words to use about an entity, a full body of individuals, imperfect men and women stumbling through life and the Bible as clearly as they can, but they are true words. There is nothing on earth I love more than the Church. 

I have felt her failings near and I have chased her down in desperation—and there is no other place I would rather commune, break bread and share wine, than within her haven.

Ephesians 4 speaks of building the unity of the Church and oh how that resonates.

To see a whole body purified, strengthened, and grown into full maturity, ready to be presented to Christ—this I love.

And so I'm grateful that I've been asked to contribute monthly to a publication that pulls from every fold of her robes, every particle of her skin, and every joint and marrow, to build up and unify the Church as best we can with our earth encrusted words.

My first column is up today:

Bearing the Weight of Thirty Blackbirds or More

I pass a field of blackbirds every morning on my way from class to work. There are a thousand of them wide in a Texas spread and I can’t stop trying to count them with my mind. Thirty of them are perched on a shrub close to the ground, but its branches do not bend or weep. I marvel at its strength. I marvel at the lightness of the birds, all thirty of them.

This desert shrub carries the weight of the blackest birds and I think of Jeremiah 17 while I drive. Continue reading...

Soul

I'm all alone in a corner tea house in the middle of downtown Chicago. There are people walking through life in their rainboots and oxfords outside. It is afternoon and I am cold. The man across from me is wearing mint green pants and a group of Koreans just came in chattering, one tripping up the stairs in her Hello Kitty galoshes. I catch the eye of a man walking outside, I wonder who he is talking to on his smart phone. He dips his head against the drizzle and keeps walking. This weekend's conference is for Creatives. That's what we're called these days. These days in which we make adjectives into nouns and capitalize them with an air of ego, a dash of narcissim, and a whole heap of are-we-good-enoughs thrown in for good measure. We are a room full of introverts, stumbling through life in our too big for us boots and our too small for us dreams. At the end of today I realized that it was not a conference for Creatives or Artists or even Storytellers. It was a conference for souls.

I catch another eye outside the window of the tea shop, she has her nose buried in a pink scarf and her blond hair is falling messy around her pink cheeks.

We are not as alone as we feel.

Maybe the problem is that we just don't look at one another in the eye? Who was it who said that eyes are the windows to the soul? Cliched? Perhaps. But cliche becomes because there is truth hidden in lines like these.

Why don't we look one another in the eye? What are we afraid of? A human? A being? A person with a life and a story, one who is attempting to make something beautiful out of the cards dealt them? A soul?

So this has been two days full of ministry to the soul, the untapped region. Untapped because we are afraid of it enough in others that we begin to fear it in ourselves as well.

I know what my soul is capable of and I don't even know a fraction of what my soul is capable of.

It is capable, most of all, of worshipping itself, putting its eyes on the temporal, the carnal, the seasonal bounty. But today I have that inkling of hope again that He shows me the way to life, real life, is the fullness of worshipping Him alone.

That feels insurmountable, I'm telling you the truth. I got on a plane yesterday morning, put my head against the seat, and asked God, please, to refresh me, to fill my soul and the hurting parts, the lonely parts, the soulish parts of me that are wrapped up in this temporal kingdom. I have taken my eyes off the Creator, put them on the creation, and that creation isn't even worthy of a second glance if He is not my first.

If it is true what He says—that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and I believe it is true, then it must be true too that the only way to the Father is through Him.

I don't forget that, no, but I overlook it. I look over it and put my eyes on beautiful places, but they're not ultimate places or the fullest of places, they're just good enough places.

I catch the eye of a little girl who just came in with her mother, she looks away, taught so young that we take our eyes away from the beautiful thing that is the soul. I wonder if it is our mutual turning away that teaches us it is okay to look away from depth. If that is when we learn to take our eyes off the faith that is childlike and full, certain that He can do what He says He can do and He is Who He says He is.

And if that is true, how can we unlearn it on this side of heaven?

I hold the glance of a man in a flannel shirt walking past the window. I will myself to not look away and he, surprisingly, doesn't look away either. I turn up the side of my mouth and he nods his head at me and passes from my view.

what shines brightest

I haven't always been a peacemaker. I used to be a peacekeeper. I hoarded peace like a child with his Christmas stocking full of Andes Mints and Pez candy dispensers. I kept peace to myself, sure that if I could pet it, and feed it, and care for it, it would stick around. I kept it like a kept girl, made it work for me, paid its wages at the altar of hiding in groups and keeping relationships at arms length. I kept peace by repeating after myself that I was not at fault for the grenades flying over my head or the words flung across wooden tables or down long hallways.

Romans 12:18 says to live peaceably with all and, well, I have tried to do that. No one can accuse me of bringing wrecking balls into life's infrastructures in the past decade. No sir.

Tonight I think about the rest of that verse, though, or rather, the beginning of it: If possible. So long as it depends on you. Then live peaceably with all.

If possible. Meaning: when all other outlets have been explored, when I have sorted through the cans and wills and dos and don'ts of possibility. When I have exhausted improbability and taken no thought for the bullets colliding through my unchinkable armor. When I have braced myself for the fall that will inevitably come when I am most certainly misunderstood and when I am blacklisted from here til kingdom come. When it is possible, do it.

Stop writing the rebuttal. Don't blog the discourse. Don't preach to the choir or to the vagrant in the back row on whom you have your [plank-filled] eye.

Why? Because it's possible. It's possible for you to shut up, pursue peace.

So long as it depends on you. Meaning, and don't miss this: the world will spin madly on.

Eliza Doolittle sung a bit of theology for us all when she sang to Prof Higgins, "And without much ado we can all muddle through without you." So as long as we hold the beautiful ability to pursue peace with all men, we ought to. So long as it depends on us, we should trust that our meddling in affairs that bring an end to peace, well, people die on hills like that and we wade through the carnage for centuries.

Tonight I sat in a room with some beautiful people and we shared some broken things, some carnage, places where we didn't pursue peace or where someone didn't pursue peace and we were the wreckage left behind.

But here is the beautiful part of that: wreckage will be left while we wander this earth, but what's ultimately left, when the All Consuming Fire has come and burned away everything but what shines brightest, what shines brightest will be the Prince of Peace and we add nothing to that beauty with our earthly bickering.

SPEAK

Verb, Adjective, Noun. This is the order in which we speak of walking the fast dog, or eating the good meal, or painting the blue wall. This is our syntax, familiar, but not poetic and it is poetry that stills me this morning and coasts me by all day.

Noun, Adjective, Verb—this is the way David sing-songs his worship in Psalm 19:

The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul;

His precepts and laws are not millstones around my neck or burdens to slog through, but they revive my soul. They bring life to the ruminations of my mind, the emptiness of my own thoughts, and the deadness of earthly glory.

The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;

He has done it before and He will do it again. He has brought us thus far and He will bring us all the way in. He has begun and He will finish. This is the testimony He bears and this makes everything else pale in comparison. It is simple, easy, and profoundly wise, what He has done.

The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;

He gives us a blueprint, a "this is the way, walk in it," and a narrow path, and yet none of this steals my joy but brings me further into it. This map shows me how to lift up my head and rejoice in my heart.

The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes;

His commandments, though I do not always understand them, why they feel constraining and at times unfair, why they do not fit my western perceptions of righteous, just, and at times emotional desires, they are pure. They are absolutely pure, undefiled, a gift, and this opens my eyes to see His glory.

The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever;

Like Isaiah, I see Him and I tremble because He is so great and I am so, so small. But my fear is clean, without the earth encrusted baggage I attach to my fear of the dark, of being alone, or not getting what I want. This fear is palmed up and free. His awe endures forever.

The rules of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.

He can be trusted. He is righteous. Altogether righteous. Altogether true.

The kingdom is backwards sometimes and I have to remember that. The world says to love this way or earn this way or be this way or learn this way, and the Kingdom flips our syntax on its head: look this way, it says, look at your King this way and find the fullness of Joy there.

Falling APART

When I was in bible college I had a paperback bible, the cheap sort they give away in church seat-backs, the sort zealots cover with stickers identifying who they are apart from the words inside the book. My stickers were hiking destinations, a round REI one, a Life is Good stick figure standing on the side of a mountain. The truth was my bible was falling apart and the stickers were holding it together. The spine was all but gone and the pages were falling out in chunks, particularly in the New Testament. One of my professors took one look at it and quipped, "A Bible that's falling apart is a sign of a person who's not."

I swallowed the line that day.

I may have been in bible college but I was not a Christian. Not in the sense that I understood the Gospel was not self-help rhetoric, but a life-changing, redemptive way—the only way. This was before my brother died, before a group from the Bible college traveled 14 hours to my home for a funeral, and shared the gospel with me over broken bread and broken bodies on the eve of Easter. I had that bible with me that night, clutched it in hope there was hope out of this nightmare.

The church I found shortly after that Easter used the NASB translation and a teacher/professor/mentor there gifted me with my own leather-bound bible a few weeks before my 21st birthday.

But I never forgot what the first professor said about a bible that was falling apart.

And years later when my NASB was frayed and torn and falling apart and my life was too, I wanted to shake my fist at everything I thought to be true about faith, which was this: the harder you try, the better it will go for you.

It is ironic, then, that the person who gifted me with my current bible, a simple black leather-bound, was someone who had left the faith in a way. He'd wandered across the world and the United States for years, landing in our small college town for a few months, becoming my friend. We would talk for hours about faith and argue and he would frustrate me and I wanted to shake him so hard sometimes because it didn't even seem like he was trying.

It took someone who was falling apart to show me a bible that is falling apart is not the sign of someone who isn't. A bible that is falling apart might actually be a sign of someone who is trying to hold their world together.

I left my NASB back in New York when I moved here, in a trunk in a dusty attic, not forgotten, but not necessary to prove my worth anymore. I need it, though, for a class I'll be beginning soon and so my brother dug it out and is mailing it to me this week. He texted me a photo just to make sure it's the right one.

Holy. I said. Yes, it's the right one.

Holy is right, he said back.

Here is what I know about holiness: sometimes we bring rags before the King of Kings, rags because we have been torn and ravaged by life. And sometimes we bring rags before the King of Kings, rags because we have torn our own clothes, we have beaten our chests with candoitiveness and fortitude. We have shouted our worth and proved it by our piety. But in the end, it's rags we all bring before Him, falling apart lives, brokenness, emptiness, nothingness, and He breaks in, shouts our worth, and covers us with the finest robes, the signet ring.

And sometimes He does it in unlikely ways, through unlikely people, through people who are falling apart and a bible that isn't.

SLEEPING ALONE

I wake slowly, face-down, stretching my legs, cupping my toes over the end of the bed, feeling my calf muscles pull and retract. My head is lying flat, on 400 thread count white sheets. I am facing left, the breeze from my open window setting across my face, the window's linen blind pulsing steadily in the same breeze.

I spread my right arm out feeling the empty space in my bed. My heart sinks.

There has never been anyone in this space, but I still feel the void all the same. My bed has never been shared, I have never been cuddled too tightly, or felt the aching space of an evening argument which keeps two hearts and bodies apart. I have never had to fight anyone for the covers and when I am cold, I am cold alone.

I stretch my left arm out, toward the window, rest my hand on the screen. My heart breaks a little more every day. It breaks itself and heals itself, and it does it all under the watchful, loving eye of God, so I am not alone, though I feel alone.

I used to worry I would not be married by 24. Then I worried I would not be married by 29. Now I worry I will never come to terms with always being alone. It is a hard thing to share one's bed with no one and it is a hard thing to wake every morning feeling more undesirable than the night before.

Friends think they are consoling when they say marriage is hard work (who among us thinks it is not?) or when they complain that she steals all the covers or he snores or she likes to cuddle and he only like sex. They think this is consoling.

But it is not.

Because the night comes slowly, every blessed day, like the poet, Richard Wilbur, said, a punctual rape, same in, same out; but morning comes quickly and I spread my arm across this empty space feeling aloneness more than ever before.

Fabs Harford wrote about Fasting from Intimacy and this resonates in me because there is no monster inside of me more ravenous than the one who craves intimacy. I lean across the table in loud restaurants and ask hard questions. I hug tightly without discretion or discrimination. I touch the hands and shoulders of people I love, and sometimes barely know. I lean in. I do this because I am starving for intimacy and I am unafraid of that monster. I know he can kill me. But I know I will starve without his hunger.

Singleness is a beautiful thing and when I take account of the past decade I see a faithfulness to its beauty in my life in a way that only comes from grace, but I also see a succession of tiny funerals every step of the way. A cemetery full of them. Adventures I have had alone. Mornings I have woken alone. Moments I have reveled in alone. Each one bringing joy in its experience and mourning in its completion.

Life is meant to be shared and marriage is not the only way to share life, I know this, but the mystery of two flesh becoming one is a mingling that cannot be known by me, with my bed all to myself, 400 thread count sheets, open window, and quiet morning. And I mourn this.

Tim Keller preached a sermon called Jesus, Lord of the Wine, and he teaches how Christ is the Lord of the wedding feast, how His first miracle was in a wedding, turning water into wine and how this is a sign to us that He is for our joy. And not just our eventual joy, as the old Calvinists would have us believe, but for our present joy, our joy here on earth, in empty beds, empty hearts, and single flesh.

I meditate on this morning before I break my night's fast.

The hunger in my belly a reminder that there is a feast before me, whether it is the feast I envision for my life or not, it is a feast that brings joy somehow and in some way. And there are mornings when it will be hard, like this one. There will be nights when my fast from intimacy is painful and I shake my fist at God, or ignore Him altogether.

But He is for my joy and joy is there too, in the song of birds outside my window, the Roman blind shivering in the breeze, and the 400 thread count sheets, covers all to myself. There is joy there—a small, but ebbing joy.

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SOME OF OUR PARTS

I had to take Strengths Finder for work a few months ago. I had test anxiety, but it turns out I'm Intellection, Relator, Strategic, Input, & Ideation. I don't know what those mean when teased apart from one another, but together they make a whole and that whole is me.

(And I'm in the .08th percentile with those odds, so I have that going for me.)

(Or not.)

Have you seen the photo of the earth that has been circulating recently?

My computer screen at work is large, as large as the iMac comes, but at the end of the day, it's just a 27 inch iMac screen in a couple thousand square foot office, in one of the smaller towns in the DFW metroplex of Texas (probably the only really large thing in this equation). But I opened those high resolution photos and gasped at my 27 inch screen. I scrolled down to Texas second; New York isn't visible and I know that because it's where I looked first. There, under the cumulus clouds, on January 4th, it was life as usual for some on these parts.

Did you know that when you're looking at a photo of the real earth, there are no border lines or country distinctions? It is just land and sea, every man for his own, a grand and graceful show of glory.

Soren Kierkegaard said, "Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are."

Sitting in front of a 27 inch iMac I am faced with the fact that I am very, very small. And my distinctions are very, very meaningless. And my boundaries and borders are very, very nebulous.

I have a roommate who is a quiet voice of reason in our home full of opinions and personality, and she won't let us put her in any category, box or otherwise. If we say that she is an introvert, she shrugs her shoulders and rebuts with witticism. If we say she is peaceful, she points out all the ways she is the antithesis of peace. If we want to know her love language, she demands that we give and receive them all from her. I am grateful for a girl like her in my life, because aren't we really the sum of our parts?

I have been dividing things in my heart the past week, trying to determine where I land and why I land there and how to communicate it and if it needs to be communicated and this is what I have concluded, just tonight: I am a very small pile of strengths in a very large earth without boundaries, and the God who's adopted me has the whole World in His hands (and who's kidding who? He's got the whole universe on his thumbnail.).

What I am matters very little. Where I live matters less. What I do is a drop in the bucket. Whose lives I affect is minimal. Whose hands I hold is debatable. What strengths I have are susceptible. And what percentage I fall in is pitiable.

Someone said to do what makes you happy and here is what I know: there is no greater joy than being a minute part of a whole that shouts by its very nature of the Glory of God.

Enoch walked with God and was no more.

I could not do better with my own small life.

 World in Hands

The Gospel from the Red Light District

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

Flannery O'Connor

We're in a flat fronted van in rural Nepal, headed to the Himalayan foothills. Our driver only speaks Nepali and our host broken English.

"These lower caste." He says, his arms spread wide, encompassing everything we can see from small, square windows. A shanty-town, blue tarps, brown ground, bloodshot eyes, this was the price they paid for their last name.

"So there's no getting out of this?" I ask. "Not even if they get an education?"

"Education? No. These lower caste. No education for them."

"So how do they get out? What hope do they have?"

He shrugs, looks forward again. I wait for an answer. "Sometime they get jobs out of here, out of Nepal. Thailand. India. You know?"

It's a few years later and I am meeting a girl named Rehka. She shares a last name with that of my Nepali host years ago, but she's traveled to America from India. I ask her if she is Nepali. "Yes!" She nods, her eyes lighting up. "You know Nepal?"

"I know Nepal," I say. I remember the shanty town, the tarps, the hopelessness of faces caged in by genes and a system so unjust to my western ethnocentricity.

Rehka is beautiful, with the light, gentle look for which the Nepali are known. Her wide set eyes are bright, her skin clear, her smile brilliant. She laughs easily and is comfortable immediately among us. She sits gracefully on the floor of our office and tackles a menial task I've been putting off in the busyness of the week. She chatters in Hindi and English, switching easily between the two, even though neither are her native language.

She seems like royalty in joyful servitude. A humbling juxtaposition.

And yet, Rehka was sold by her older brother into a scheme more complicated than she could have ever imagined.

Mumbai's Red-light district: 

24 lanes—60,000 women for sale.

The caste system is as unjust as it seems to any westerner raised in an equal-opportunity culture. If "If you can dream it, you can achieve it," is the our mantra, then "Keep your eyes down, and get what you're given," is the mantra of the lower castes. Illegal activity, therefore, seems to be the only way for them to get a little pocket change—which is all her brother received in the trade for her life.

Rehka was drugged repeatedly and driven to Asia's largest Red-Light District in Mumbai, India. Passed from person to person, each one a different link in a chain that closed more tightly around her over the next week, until she was caged completely.

For the next few weeks Rehka was drugged intermittently and beaten regularly. When her resolve and will were finally perceived to be broken, she was delivered the news that she now owed an insurmountable debt to her captors which could only be paid back one way: sex.

In five years, a child goes from infancy to speaking in full sentences, writing simple ones.

In five years, a gangly middle-schooler graduates valedictorian.

In five years, a hard-worker at a blue collar job in America can make $125,000.

In five years, Rehka was raped an average of 20 times a day. About 36,500 sexual assaults. At the equivalent average of $1 an act, and yet she still could not pay the fullness of her "debt" to her captors.

When she met the director of our rescue program in Mumbai, she was broken and void.

I met her seven years later, carrying herself like humble royalty.

Rooms in Mumbai's RLD 

where girls are raped repeatedly daily

As I ask her about her story, she glows, recounting how excited she is to be a part of a ministry that is rescuing girls like her and rehabilitating them, loving them, counseling them, offering them something that supersedes any caste system: the gospel.

When she says this, I realize that the rescue of trafficked victims is so much more than beating a system, shutting down brothels, arresting pimps, madams, pornographers, and greedy older brothers. The rescue of trafficked victims is the reflection of the heart of the Father.

The Father says, come to me, all you who are weary, burdened, heavy laden.

All of you.

All.

The caste system seems to be the most unjust system of any religion I see around me, subjecting humans to begging, stealing, and selling humans. The sex-trade system seems to be a system of dogs, beating children into submission to horrific acts. The rescue of these girls seems impossible, 60,000 women in this one Red-light district ALONE. The finances insurmountable, a $32 billion a year industry globally.

But for the gospel.

The gospel.

The gospel breaks into these Hindi castes and levels them, setting free captives in Red-Light Districts and in shanty slums. The gospel breaks into my western ethnocentricity and levels me at my heart—these are humans, living, breathing, thinking humans, no different than me. The gospel is the only thing that can penetrate the hearts traffickers and victims alike—the only thing that can free them from the cage of greed and the brothel cage.

"Fear not, for I am with you;

   I will bring your offspring from the east,

   and from the west I will gather you.

I will say to the north, Give up,

   and to the south, Do not withhold;

bring my sons from afar

   and my daughters from the end of the earth,

everyone who is called by my name,

   whom I created for my glory,

   whom I formed and made."

Isaiah 43:5-7

Today is Human Trafficking Awareness Day.   

If you'd like to share this post on Twitter or Facebook, consider using this copy: A true story from @loreferguson on the Red-Light District: http://bit.ly/w4HFUr  #humantrafficking

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If this post impacted you, please consider making 

a donation to one of these fabulous non-profits. 

Sower of Seeds International—working to rescue and rehabilitate girls (full-disclosure: I'm employed here, but they didn't make me write this).
Unearthed Pictures—producing media to raise awareness.
International Justice Mission—a non-government organization working to shut down the illegal trade of humans globally.

A QUESTIONABLE BEAUTY

It happened when I was nine, a skinny fourth grader, mousy brown hair and a stubborn soul. I don't know what I was told to wear that morning, but I know what I wore because it is there, memorialized in color, on a 5x7 school photo. Glasses were new to me and I had picked out blue plastic frames; it was the 90s, but still? I wore a patterned blue shirt, blue shorts, sandals with blue socks. I thought this meant I matched. When the photos came, as they did every year, in a big white envelope, I stared back at the face staring back at me and that's when it happened. That's when I knew what I was sure everyone must have known all along: I was ugly.

It was the comparison of the girls beside me, their hair in ribbons and their pretty plaid dresses pressed and flounced. It was the realization that my hair would never be sleek and shiny, or blond. It was the truth that my features would always be bigger or smaller, while the features of other girls would always be more beautiful, more feminine, more anything than what I could ever be. It was a belief that I've carried with me my entire life: I'm ugly, maybe someday I'll be a swan, but today, I'm the ugly duckling.

So when my roommate asks me to resolve to love my body this year, its nuances and its curves, its imperfections and its perfectly crafted parts, I balk. I can't do that. Loving others comes oh so naturally to me, loving myself is always a resolution for next year.

When a friend asks me to write a blog on whether looks matter in relationships, I tell him that I'm probably the last person to write that blog.

When I have a conversation with a friend the other night and I'm talking about the doubt in my soul regarding so many things related to looks (mine and others), she stops me and says, "What are you afraid of?"

What am I afraid of?

I'm afraid of two things: the first is that I'll find what is not beautiful to be beautiful, the second is that I'll never be found beautiful.

So I want to know, really, what is beautiful? And does it matter what is beautiful?

WHAT IS BEAUTY

I say it often enough about nearly every person I know, every piece of art in my home, the spate of days we've been having in Texas, the sunsets that make me gasp, the conversations I have with friends; it is never difficult for me to find beauty in every single thing I know. I'm prone to finding beauty in so many things, my friends just roll their eyes now when another exclamation comes from my mouth.

But what is beauty outside the eye of the beholder?

What is beauty when it can be teased apart from shiny magazine spreads and museum walls and computer screens in a midnight bedroom? What is beauty when it is seen through the lens of the gospel and nothing less?

I only know to start with the fact that Jesus spent his earthly time and energy teaching us to turn a kingdom of classes into a kingdom of completion. His interest was in the poorest, the lowest, the outcast, and the richest, the most corrupt, the most beautiful. This morning my pastor spoke how Christ came to reconcile us to Himself and us to one another, but what most struck me is that Christ came to reconcile us to ourselves.

Ourselves.

Myself.

My self.

IMAGO DEI

Self love is not a topic I want to talk about when I think about beauty. Here's why: I want all the beautiful people to start loving the unbeautiful. I want the perfect people to start loving the imperfect, the unlovely. I want there to be an impact that is measurable, tangible, and I don't know that self-love is the most productive way of getting there.

But here is the argument I'd like to make: if we do not love the self we have been given, we are exercising ungratefulness toward the God who created us in His image. We are, in essence, rejecting God who dwells in our temporal temples.

And I would add this, when we reject what God has called beautiful in others, even if we ourselves do not find it instantly attractive, we are denying what God has created in them.

When I call that fourth grade photo ugly, I look at the imago dei, the image of God, and I blaspheme what He has called good.

When I look with a critical eye at the mirror tonight while I wash my face and brush my teeth, I blaspheme what he has called good.

Hear me when I say that simply because God has called it good does not mean it has not been broken by the fall. It has and this is my great, great comfort on days when I feel the curse of having the body of a woman and all the lovely things that entails in particular times of the month (!).

There is a brokenness that accompanies us wherever we go, hanging on to our backs like a trained monkey. But sometimes we chain that monkey to our own back, buying magazines, feasting our eyes on what is even more broken, in hopes that we can attain what? More brokenness?

DO LOOKS MATTER?

Yes. Oh yes they do. Praise God they do. Praise God that He put us here on earth with a garden to tend and pray to Him that we tend it well. Pray that we tend our own plot well and pray that we are attentive to the plots of others. Praise Him that He created different sizes and shapes and colors and genders. Praise Him for His creativity in design. Praise Him that we find anything lovely at all.

Paul says "Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." God help us to find beauty wherever we find these things. If we do, we will find that beauty is found readily.

DO LOOKS MATTER?

No. No, they don't. Not really. Not in the end of the story (which is really just the beginning). No, they don't matter here on earth where we will all either grow bellies or waste away to nothing, where the grey hair eventually goes white or disappears completely, where wrinkles grow exponentially, breasts sag, and strength fails. Beauty is so fleeting, so temporal, a vapor.

Gone.

But, which is more, and so much more beautiful, looks don't matter because one day everything that does not glorify the Lord will be purified out of us. Everything. Every sag, every wrinkle, every mark, every love handle--and, don't miss this, each and every perfect nose, every straight tooth, every sculpted muscle, every six-pack abdomen. Every health nut and every couch potato, every beauty queen and every street child. If it is not proclaiming the majesty of the Only One due glory, it will be consumed by the All Consuming Fire.

My fourth grade me and my 30 year old me. My best version of me and my worst version of me. My joyful reflection of Him and my mirror's sickening reflection of me. All of it will glorify Him. 

THE REAL QUESTION

The question is so much more than What is Beautiful? or Do looks matter? The question is, am I valuing what God values in me and am I valuing it in others?

No matter what my fourth grade photo instilled in me, He is the standard of my beauty.

The real beauty in that is because He is the standard, I know I can't ever measure up.

There is nothing good in me but what He has redeemed for His glory, so I am always the ugly duckling who was picked even in my ugliness. He didn't wait for my inner swan to grow. He's not waiting for some future version of me to materialize. He's not waiting for me to match a magazine spread or even grow happy with this earthly version of me. He's after me seeing the depth of what He's done in me. Through me. With me. For His glory. Alone.

He's after me seeing Him in the mirror.

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Related resources that I've been mulling on:  Do Looks Matter on the Gospel Coalition Blog New Year, New Self-Control by Jen Wilkin January 8th sermon by Matt Chandler (This will be online in the next few days)