Why Doesn't He Answer?

If you ask God for something and then you say you trust God will do as He wills (which is a good thing to trust Him for, because regardless of what or who you trust, He will do as He wills), you must be prepared for every manner of sniggering, sniveling, untrustworthy thoughts to enter your mind henceforth. You must know nearly everything and everyone will become an immediate threat to your joy and pleasure, even if they have loved you and proven it to you. You must realize every question and doubt plaguing your mind will relate to the Big Ask in some way. You must recognize the enemy creeps about seeking whom he can devour and devour he will do if he finds a way.

But you must also realize that God is on His throne and you are hidden in the shadow of the Most High. You must have your confidence not in the thing for which you have asked, but in the God in whom you have trusted. You must sit long, walk hard, pester deep, and touch hems of robes in clamoring crowds. And at the end of every day you must go home again and your home must be in Him only.

If you ask God for something and you never see the answer, it is not because He did not hear you or is not answering you. But it might be because you are looking too low, under branches, in dewy grass on meadow spreads, and He is high and lifted up, home in heaven with earth His footstool.

If you ask God for something and you never see the answer, it is because He is the last and final answer—and the last and better answer after all.

Why I Can't Be Your Friend Today

Preface: This is some regular reader housekeeping.  If this is your first time here, I hope you're not scared off by me being the meanie I'm about to be, and that if you have thoughts, you'll send yourself over to the facebook thread for commenting!  My parents used to force me to buy milk or make a bank deposit. My mother would set her face, straight ahead, mouth pursed, case closed: I would make the deposit or I would be grounded.

I was an introvert and the only cure for introversion was doing daring things. Like buying milk from the IGA.

We all laugh about it now, but I'm grateful my parents persevered with a painfully shy daughter. I'm also grateful for the leadership of one who quipped often enough: "Be a 'There you are!' person instead of a 'Here I am' person." I have learned to see people, to not be afraid of buying milk or moving across the country, to build relationship easily, and to not care how much of a fool I have looked.

The tension for me now is to stay the line between intentional relationship building and understanding that it is okay that the number on the list of close friends rarely changes. Three, normally, sometimes four. I've taught myself to trust easily, but I do not entrust easily.

Can I unpack this for you, dear readers?

Four Groups of People

Those I do not trust and feel no need to. These are the people who have not seen the gospel as their breath and bread. The strange thing is, this group is mostly made of up unbelievers OR seasoned believers who haven't let the gospel permeate their lives. They've had opportunity to pursue relationship with others and they've continued to squander it. My friendship with this group is limited to evangelism and/or less intentional discipleship.

Those I do trust, but feel no need to pursue a deep relationship with. This is probably the largest group. It's nothing personal, but it's probably because they have a close group of people with whom they're walking. This is mostly church folk, blog readers, and friends from various seasons of life. I don't need another close friend, and chances are, they don't either. I love the small glimpses of the greater body they afford us, but I'm not going to invest my relational first-fruits in them.

Those I trust and with whom I would consider myself in relationship. These are the people in my most immediate community. Because I've moved so much, this group changes often and I've come to expect those changes, and not mourn too long when they come. This is usually the group of people (15-20) with whom I do things socially, the intentional discipleship relationships I'm in, guys and girls both who count on me for counsel and friendship. I enter into their mourning and their joy.

Those I trust and entrust. This is the smallest group, never more than three or four people, all of whom live in separate states (these relationships have little to do with proximity). This group includes those to whom I entrust my confession of sin, the deepest things the Lord is teaching me, the deepest sorrows and joys of my heart, struggles of my flesh, and most of all—my time. I seek this group out regularly for their counsel, I trust it when it comes, and this is the group to whom I give my counsel freely.

Let me say that I firmly believe in responding to the Holy Spirit and so there is flexibility in each of these groups, and some overlap, but I do that at the Holy Spirit's leading and nothing else.

My Struggle

Time is something that whenever an inventory of my life is taken, I find to be the greatest struggle for me. Finances and belongings are rarely difficult for me to give, but time is. This is because time is what people ask the most from me—and contrary to the old milk buying days, saying "No," is one of the most difficult things for me to do.

If I've said "No" to you, or given you what seems to you an unreasonable timeline for when I'm available, or have clearly not pursued a deeper relationship with you, I'm truly sorry for how that comes across. It's not you, it's me. I promise. It's me. I understand you long to know me more, want to understand my heart on some issues, or just want to hang out sometime, but I'm afraid, for today, this blog is going to be the best place for both of us to have that happen. I did not set out to have writing be my primary means of ministry, but more and more the Lord makes it clear this is what today's portion looks like for me. The amount of interactions that result from this blog and other writing keep my inbox topped in the hundreds most of the time—and I still work a full-time job and am deeply involved in the life of my church.

Your Struggle

If you're longing to be known—there are so many people who are longing for the same thing and I am not one of them. Reach out. Befriend someone. I think you'd be surprised to find out their hearts beat with the same passion, same depth, and same love mine does.

Someone you know struggles to make deposits—not bank deposits, relationship deposits. Seek them. Find them. Pursue them. They are often times not at the center of the crowd, but on the outskirts. Make yourself at home on the outskirts until one day you find you're at the center, with two or three people to whom you entrust yourself.

Lives are changed this way.

I promise.

Heaven

Last night a friend of mine shared her desire to sit down and chat for a bit and then we both laughed. She's busy and she knows I'm busy—because we are not one another's primary ministry focus these days. She looked me right in the eye and said, "Hey, we get to spend eternity together. That's way better than coffee and what a relief." I almost cried.

Folks, we get heaven. An eternity with one another and most importantly Jesus Christ. He's where our focus should be today and for all eternity. What a joy to abide in that! 

All Things New, Even When It's the Same Old

Last year on this day it was a balmy 70 degrees. We spent the entire day out on the back porch in our pajamas, reading, reflecting, and reveling in the time together. Every year-end my ritual is to close out the year asking myself seven questions, declare the year over, and then ring in the new year with five expectant questions. I do this because I love Mondays and the firsts of the months, the thresholds of sermons and new babies. I love new. Whether I finish well or not matters little to me—I love the thrill of new.

The thrill of new has taken me all over the world, to life in different cities with strangers, to new experiences and new challenges, it has taken me places emotionally and spiritually that I never thought possible. It rarely disappoints.

But this year, at the end of 2012, I'm a little slow to ring in 2013. Maybe it's the melancholy skies, the raindrops outside my window, maybe it's the marathon 2012 was, or the marathon 2013 promises to be. I don't know. I just want to stay the moments, if I can. I know I can't, but I wish I could.

__________________

In 2012, some small miracles happened that let me take a month long sabbatical to spend working on a book. I know. A book?! It's a book that is nearly complete, but for various reasons I won't let out of my hands for some time, it just isn't time yet. But 2012 let me write it, and you all helped.

In 2012, I've had the opportunity to participate in the pilot year of a discipleship program at my church. For me it means waking up in the 4am hour, reading and wrestling through difficult portions of scripture, and attempting to do school again after many years absence. To spend ten months studying theology and each book of the bible, to grasp some principles of pastoral theology, and to be invested in by some great minds—2012 gave me that.

In 2012, all three of my roommates fell in love in a three month time span. I felt hurt, neglected, overlooked, and finally, beautifully seen by God in deep and rich ways. He did not give me the love I wanted, but He gave me some gentle fathering and better bread.

In 2012, I made it all the way through a one year lease and then some. This has never before happened to me in my life. We have just begun year two in this small home on Meadow Lane and never have I been more at home in a house. Thank you 2012 for making space for me.

In 2012, I walked into a publications scheduling meeting at work discouraged, tired, spent, ready for a change, though still deeply passionate about my job and place of employment. During that meeting I was surprisingly offered a position change for 2013 that was a direct answer to prayer in multiple ways.

In 2012, I asked for bread and fish and God did not give me the bread and fish I asked for. But He did not give me stones or serpents, as I'd come to expect, and this is growth friends.

In 2012, Sayable more than tripled her subscribers, more than quadrupled her readership, and quit using comments. She felt like work to me like never before, like trudging through mud to plant seeds where there is no guarantee of fruit. There are pockets of joy in her field, but to be honest, those pockets are harder to find. More readership means more accountability, more accountability means more joy—even if it is simply eventual joy. Thank you, dear readers, for pushing me toward the pleasant boundary lines, the places of deepest joy—even if it means staying out of other fields.

In 2012, God showed me what it is like to press through when the thrill is not there, when all things feel old, when nothing feels new, when skies are grey, and when it seems to rain on my parade. The Father is showing me what it means to stay the course, plant deep, subsist on today's manna, to let tomorrow worry about itself, to trust that if the only new I ever see is that final and glorious day when He makes all things new—that is enough.

Dayenu.

A Long Wait in a Long Direction

There's a song about heaven I've been listening to these days. The lyrics talk of meeting in the middle, welcoming Christ home, and about our wait.

I know this wait.

A few years ago a friend of mine liked a girl but she was undecided. It was the sort of elephant in the room we didn't talk about when it was the three of us together. So I was surprised one day when we were sitting in a room together and he said something like, "It's just hard, you know, the wait." Two pairs of eyes jolted to his and awkwardness fell heavy. "The wait?" I asked. "Yeah, the wait," he said. "The wait for what?" I asked, hoping he was talking about the wait for ice cream or the end of winter or the Patriot's next win.

Continue Reading over at Deeper Church...

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...

TRADES

You listened to part of the transcripts this morning before someone who knows you better than you do told you to stop, before you'd end up in the closet, in a ball of tears. You've never seen New York like this. Eerily silent and dust covered. A city of the walking wounded. You stare into the eyes of strangers for five, ten, forty seconds before either of you realized that in New York City you don't do that. You avert your eyes, look away, avoid, but not this week. This week you stare. And you nod at the end, sighing in unison. You are both thinking the same thing after all: what just happened?

Every park is filled, every corner is filled, every mind is filled: what just happened?

Fences are filled with Missing Person signs and the homeless aren't the only ones laying, dazed, on park benches and curbs.

You know things are going to change you, but you don't know how much, or to what length. You don't know, for instance, while you watch planes crash into familiar buildings, that in ten years two of your baby brothers will be soldiers and men, stationed in countries torn by war. You don't know that in ten years every day you will pray for peace, mostly because peace means that they will come home in one piece.

You don't know that in the weeks to come, you will open the coffee shop every morning at 5am and you will listen to your fellow countrymen wake up to the news, giving their best war-plan strategies while they hand you their dollar-sixtyfive. You don't know these things. You don't know that freedom really does cost something, but in your wildest dreams you never imagined it would cost this.

You stumble through a shell-shocked city, one wrapped in yellow caution tape. You try to make sense of what just happened.

You don't know that everyone you know knows someone who knew someone and you find out years later that you knew someone too. You regret losing touch.

You love history because when you hear about what has happened, it helps make sense of what is happening. But when what is happening is happening in real time, in your life, around you, there is no sense to be made of it.

You just stare at strangers a little longer. You both nod. Maybe you reach out and touch their arm.

What should have made us afraid, for a few weeks there, made us brave.

(pinterest)

You're proud to be an American. You are. You pray for peace. You hate conflict. You hate that your baby brothers wield guns and wear uniforms. But you love your country. You loved it dusty and shell-shocked, and you love it bankrupt and tired. You loved it confused and bewildered, and you love it arrogant and corrupt.

But you love heaven more and you long for it. So you pray only this, but every day: even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly.

Come quickly. 

(Originally posted on the ten-year anniversary of September 11.)

but His joy comes in the mourning

I’m tired. There, that’s out there.

I’m exhausted. No, I don’t have a little baby waking me up at all times of the night, or four kids to corral into fine formations, or a family to provide for or a company to lead. But I am just one person and being just one for 30 years can be tiring too. I’ve been getting up while it’s still dark most mornings and for this night owl, that’s enough to spin me into the oblivion of tiredness.

I sat across from a friend on Wednesday and we talked about what it means to enter into one another’s sorrow. How it means that we don’t just feel pity or empathy or a burden, but that we actually enter into it. We feel it. We know it. We know it as acutely as our own sorrow.

This goes for joy too. But somehow joy peddles us forward, while sorrow only seems to hold us down.

There are so many, many sorrows in me today. I can’t even give number to them and so few of them are my own that even if you ask, I won’t tell you anything is wrong, they are not my sorrows to tell.

My pastor back home told me once to do my homework in class: pray for a friend while I’m with them, counsel them right there, and that doing this would alleviate some of the burden someone with a gift of mercy is going to carry.

It was some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten and I rarely let an opportunity go by without praying for someone.

But sometimes mourning with those who mourn means that we ache with their unanswered prayers. Sometimes it means we wake up aching and go to bed aching. Sometimes it means we keep careful watch on our phone for updates and careful watch on the messages we send out, keeping watch over souls that have been entrusted to us.

I’ve been depressed before, no secret there. And this season feels acutely like those seasons before: I want to sleep, I forget to eat, smiling feels like too much work, work feels like too much work. But last night as I slid between my sheets and put my head on my pillow, closed my eyes and felt the tears brim to the surface, fall over my cheeks, I felt the Holy Spirit say to me, “There is nothing light about mourning, but there will be light in the morning and morning is coming.”

I woke up late this morning and for the first time this week the sun streamed in my window, a sliver of light across my comforter.

[PURE?] ENJOYMENT

"I enjoy your company." Because life is too short to mess around, I admit, I've asked a guy frankly on more than one occasion, "What's your intention?" The conversations are never fun, never comfortable, and never feel very fruitful. But it scratches the itch, gives them the opportunity to 'fess up, and lets me let my heart move on. In about 98% of these conversations I hear this one line: I enjoy your company, but...

This past weekend JR Vassar spoke at a conference for the home-group leaders at my church. He spoke on the Trinity and it was, let me tell you, enjoyable. It was heady and theological, it was convicting and reassuring, and it was life-giving and healing, but more than anything else, it was enjoyable.

He spoke about enjoying the gospel and never have I wanted to simply enjoy someone enjoying the gospel before as I did him. He's a brilliant guy with a deep love for Jesus and the Word, he obviously loves my church family and my pastors deeply, he's the pastor of a church plant in my native north—what is not to enjoy about this guy? But see, he wasn't talking about enjoying him, he was talking about enjoying the gospel—a different thing altogether.

This week, this month, I'll tell you, it's been hard to enjoy the gospel. There are some things weighing on me, family, time management, book details, the heaviness of my job, homesickness, tight finances, roommates, sleep, these things push in and crowd out my joy quickly.

I've started to enjoy things and people who enjoy the gospel, but it's not the same is it? It's not the same as enjoying the gospel. Enjoying the depth and richness that exists in being rescued from the clutches of death, covered with the righteousness of Christ, and called a son or daughter of a King. There's joy there, right there, sitting in that.

Yet I'm too busy enjoying the substitute instead of The Substitute, the creation instead of the Creator, the friend instead of the Groom.

But He's truly is the better choice. He is.

So here's my question to you today: what or who are you enjoying today?

Are you enjoying the company of a girl or guy because you haven't found "the one?" Are you enjoying religious things instead of God Himself? Are you enjoying the attention of your children, your readers, or even your spouse instead of dwelling deepest on the enjoyment that God has in you and you can have in Him?

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.

ADOPTION as SONS

Once I climbed to the top of a Himalayan foothill to watch a sunrise over the Annapurna mountain range in Nepal. The sunrise was brilliant and beautiful, but what I couldn't take my eyes away from was a small girl and her brother who stood in front of their broken-down stone home at the top of that hill. I took her photo and she took my photo, black and white film. And then I put my hand on her head and asked God to give me babies of my own. They did not need to be babies made from love and knit in my womb—I asked Him for babies from other worlds and other hills, babies with black hair and black eyes. I asked Him to make me an adopter.

That was seven Augusts ago and I never knew it would take so long for Him to lend His ear to my cry.

I thought marriage would happen in between then and now.

I thought a baby or three would have been knit already within me.

I thought I would have been there and back so many times, bringing home babies without homes.

But sometimes God lends His ears to our cries and sometimes His answers are, "Not yet."

I have friends who struggle with their womb's inability to make, hold, and keep a baby inside them. I have sat across from them and I have heard their cries, the cry of a mother who feels less a mother because she has no child to mother. And I have felt that angst in me too. Singleness brings with it a form of barrenness, though we won't say that of course. We won't say that because only the married should expect to have progeny, seed.

Last night I think about God and I think about the groaning of creation to be with our Father. I think about how desperately my soul longs for heaven and God and all that is eternal. I think about my adoption into a kingdom like His. I stand in front of my broken down home and he puts His hand on my head and longs to bring me home.

I think about a father who has already adopted his children, but who is waiting to bring us home.

And I think about my Nepali girl and her broken-down stone home, my hand on her head, my ask to God. I thank Him that He has lent His ear, been near to the needy and brokenhearted, the orphan and barren. And I thank Him that what feels far off is a mere moment, a vapor, a breath to Him.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first-fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Romans 8.22-23

RUNNING [away] WALKING

Last night we talked about being small and running away. Finding tall pine trees in our native north and shimmying our way up to the nearest branch, then climbing, climbing, climbing until we were at the top of our tower of Babel, touching God and letting Him touch us. And then we'd climb down, forgive our strict parents their brief irrationality, and go home.

Late last night as I drove home I thought about not stopping, just driving, finding the lowest branch and clawing my way out of here. Away from the metroplex, the bubble, the place where I am known and where I do not feel known.

Instead, I called a friend and left a message.

"Call me," I said. That's all.

I unhatched my plan without hesitation, with or without her, but she agreed and so we threw swimsuits, tshirts, and spare change into our bags and we left Dallas at 11:32pm.

Rolled the windows down and left.

We found a hotel a few hours later, convinced the kind gentleman at the front desk to let us go swimming and then we slept hard and hardly.

We woke at 7am and the city was still. I couldn't help but feel like this was what people have meant for the past two years when they have said that I will love Austin, that Austin will feel like home. We read and journaled at a coffee shop, strung a hammock between two trees, talked, talked, sat, and just enjoyed one another and the Lord. And then we drove home.

My heaven will be a still one. A quiet one. The sort of place I can fly fish or enjoy Debussy (who I hope will be there). My heaven will be a place free of distractions, where the groaning of creation has stopped and we have come to a grand rest. It is still.

I am learning more than ever that I cannot run the race.

Everywhere around me people are running the race. The prettiest. The godliest. The best. The most. The biggest. The fullest. The busiest. And I find even the mention of running the race exhausts me. I toe the start line and already feel the defeat. I can not run it.

I crave stillness. I crave quiet. I crave even the groaning of creation over the groaning of concrete roads and the suburban sprawl. I want to shimmy up my tree, find a solid brand on which to stand and I want to touch God.

We're on our way home, less than 13 hours later, and I tell her that all I really want in life is to be like Enoch. Enoch who walked with God and was no more.

"Your heart, Lo," she says. "He loves that about you."

And I suppose He might love that about me. I suppose He might. The bible doesn't say that Enoch died, it just says He was no more, that God took him. I can't help but think that God in His goodness, just took Enoch home with him, plucked him from the race of life, and brought him home where he belonged.

I wouldn't mind being like Enoch.

[In any case, all of you were right, Austin did feel like home to me. Thank you.] 

what HE OWNS

There are strange and common fears that arrest and pull us like a horrible secret or the last page of a well-loved book—we want to know the end, yet we know when we know it it will change our lives. 

This is the calamity of living forward—there are no rewinds or do-overs, what is known cannot be unknown. But life, as Kierkegaard said, must be lived forwards, there is no other option. 

I am making spring rolls last night, cutting vegetables and rolling them inside wet rice paper. She is saying things about a decision: this choice or this choice?

If it were about shoes or a shade of lipstick, I would not have an opinion because the good Lord gifted me with only five pairs of shoes and the want of no more, and lipstick belongs on the mouths of grandmothers in Roman Catholic churches and Ukrainian family reunions. But the choice in discussion is more weighty than things like shoes or lipsticks anyway. 

When she has given me all the options I answer honestly, with as much wisdom as I can muster from my tired mind and spent soul: whichever you choose will not change the trajectory of your life and God is still good, holy, and loving. 

This is all the wisdom I can offer when my hands are messy with hoisin sauce and my heart is messy with fears of my own. 

Because here is what I know of the heart of God and the whole of our lives: we are loved and we are held and, in the end, we are finished and completed. 

It is a great and grand fear of ours to feel that this vapor we live in will make or break the backs of many, and I don’t mean to rob from you the sense of destiny on your life. But I know this and sometimes I think it is the only thing I know: He is more grand and great and glorious than the dominos I will leave falling behind me and the catastrophes in front of me. 

Your destiny will not be robbed as long as He owns the house. 

And He does, friends, He does. 

SHAKE and BURN

One of the things that frustrated me about Christianity, and Christians in particular, was the notion that heaven was a place where we were supposed to want to stand around a throne singing three chord praise songs to a god who was the epitome of narcissistic.

And the truth is all I could think about was: God, don't you dare come back and destroy this world and make me float up on harps singing praises to you, because I haven't even had sex yet and that seems a pretty lame trade.

You can appreciate, I'm sure, why 'falling away from faith' was as easy as the child who 'forgets' his parent has asked repeatedly for him to leave his shoes at the door. Where there's no conviction, there's no joy in the obedience.

In 2010 faith finally became something tangible and intangible at the same time and I was okay with that, but I was surprised by the theology that wooed me into deep faith and a love I'd never known or felt before.

It was the understanding of eternity this theology embraced that was so enticing and beautiful to a girl who'd experienced nothing but the seeming harsh backhand of God in a life of pseudo-faith. These people pointed out the eschatological inconsistencies in the vast majority of evangelical milieus and I was hooked. Part of the reason I had felt so gypped in my faith is because it seemed a lopsided trade where God always got the bigger and better portion: I had to endure this, so He could get glory for eternity (albeit glory brought by white robed minions on three chords and a djembe)?

Now, it seems laughable to think that way, but back then it felt sickening and disgustingly true. My heart sneered at that sort of God, even when my actions betrayed me.

But this new theology (even if it was very old theology) talked about how the purpose of everything is to glorify God whose greatest act of love toward us was coming down, dwelling among us, and then stretching out, bruised and broken, and dying for us. And so it meant too, in the face of such love, such holiness, that in eternity everything that did not glorify Him would be consumed by the All Consuming Fire.

And this captured me.

All I knew was all around me, all inside of me and all overflowing from me was brokenness—a sick, cyclical, deep, brokenness—but I still liked who I was. I still liked parts of me that seemed real and authentic and individualistic. An eternity of robotic, white-robed, harmonic minions covering acres of white clouds seemed the absolute antithesis of enjoyable to me.

The Bible, on every page, from Genesis to Revelation, suddenly came alive now with God's ultimate plan of redemption. And it was not the burning of everything and creating new, but the refining of everything and restoring it to original intent. This captured me. This retained me. This fueled me. Why?

Because it means what I'm doing here on earth isn't a waste. The truthful, honest, real, authentically obedient things I am doing will be refined, but not disposed of. Not burned up. If they're bringing glory to God (even in their fractional sliver of goodness), He's delighted in them. He's like a kid who brings home pockets of strings, pebbles, a frog, a rubber-band: worthless to the naked eye, but treasures to him. 

That's a God I can serve. That's a God who I can feel loved by because I know I'm worthless to the naked eye, but I want to be a treasure, more than anything. I can't live under the fear of being burned alive a la Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins theology. And I can't live under the tyranny of being good enough to escape refining a la holiness theology.

But to know that every part of me that is disgusting and revolting is somehow, in a strange and ultimate way, in accordance with God's plan because He knows it's not there for eternity and He's not worried about me walking through eternity with a limp—oh, I can live there. I can abide there. I can find faith there. I can rest there.

“Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire." Hebrews 12:26-29

UNFETTERED

At one of the hip, earthy outdoors stores back in Potsdam they sell Life is Good paraphernalia—the grinning, flat-capped stick figurine who somehow gets his skinny behind up all sorts of mountains and down all sorts of valleys in one piece. There's one shirt or poster that reads, "Not all who wander are lost." J.R.R. Tolkien said it first though and I don't know how he'd feel about it being screen-printed with stick figurines on orange t-shirts worn by upper-class, Subaru-driving environmentalists.

When I first moved to Texas I allowed myself one month with my GPS. I think this was less than generous of me, but what's done is done. Now I use it whenever I'm going somewhere completely new, but for that one month everything was new, and I would have pulled my car over at every intersection and cried without it. After that month, though, I pulled the plug, stowed it in my glove-compartment, and got used to getting lost.

It was wonderful.

I was still self-employed at the time, so time was something I could spend as freely as I wanted and I wanted it freely. I wandered all over the Metroplex, mostly in search of nothing except my way. And I think I found it, eventually. I'm at home right now, lying on my bed, with an open window to my right, and my roommates stirring around in the living room, so it would seem I found my way.

There were times when I'd cry out of sheer frustration because the vast majority of the DFW Metroplex is acres of subdivisions; anyone who has ever tried to find his way out of a subdivision depending on his innate sense of east, west, and the direction of the sun knows it is about as impossible as telling any one of the sub-divided homes apart from another, which is to say, nearly impossible. I would pound my fist on my steering wheel and yell cuss words in my car at people who knew their way around and weren't being patient enough with me.

But there were other times when I would make a left turn, when my gut said right, and I would be taken down a lane with a canopy of trees all bowing their heads in welcome like a line of Japanese diplomats. I would return again and again to that wrong turn just to meet those bowing trees again.

Or, to avoid traffic, I would take a short-cut, which was a long-cut more often, but the reward would be finding a park or a subdivision where the houses didn't all look identical. Never in my life did I ever think that I would call anything about a subdivision a reward, but this is how I make lemonade these days.

Tonight my roommate, the one who knows more than anyone else here what I miss when I talk about New York because she misses all the same things too, stood up and instructed me to put down my writing assignment and go sit at this part of Grapevine Lake she'd found. I thought I knew which part she was talking about. Another roommate and I went last summer in August, when it was above 100 degrees, the water was low, the dirt was red and dry, there was someone's picnic garbage rotting nearby, and I was sure, beyond any doubt, that my first rattlesnake sighting was going to happen in that moment. I didn't want to return there. But it was a different place, she insisted, and so I went.

We didn't get lost on our way there, and only made one wrong turn on our way home (in an attempt to find a way to get there that avoided the highway), but it reminded me of how much I really loved my first few months here, when everything felt new, when every day felt like an adventure, and when getting lost didn't mean being late or disappointing someone or missing something important.

I am an unfettered soul, I know that. I used to think that it was my nemesis, to always long for freedom and always find myself bound down, but more and more I know that it's my blessing. I know that not everyone puts away the GPS or makes wrong turns on purpose, whether because they are in too much of a hurry or because they're too frightened of what they'll find when they get there.

At breakfast this morning with a friend we talk for a minute about heaven and the new earth, and how it is a place of complete satisfaction, where all the wandering and wishing we waste ourselves on here will be at last whole and nobody can take that from us.

I stood on a fallen log at the lake tonight, my mate standing in front of me, her head thrown back, the wind whipping her short brown hair, and I felt, for one glorious moment that we were practicing for heaven here on earth, unfettered and free.

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