Okay, the truth of why I haven't been writing is because there's some unrest in my soul that won't be satisfied by pithy prose or good, deep soul writing. It's the sort of unrest that is wrought in the deepest parts of me. The rubber hitting the road in the vernacular. The part when all the sweet nectar of gospel centrality drips onto things I want to call already good enough.

The truth is that God is hitting on some nerves recently. He's saying, oh so sweetly and gently, hey, I'm not just interested in you being delivered from sin or doubt, I'm interested in the best and good parts of you too. He's offering some gifts to me that I never thought I'd want or be worthy of wanting. And I'll be honest: I still haven't plumbed the depths of my desires beyond the desperate need for His love. To me that desperate need is the root of all my sins and victories. It is the beginning and end of every joy and every fall. I need His love and His love is the only antidote.

This is humbling, but it's also humiliating, to be honest.

Because sometimes the world looks at the preciousness of God's gift and points and laughs. And sometimes the church looks at the preciousness of God's gift and thinks it is always a joy and light burden. The truth is that is a lonely path to walk when God bids a man to come and die. Because we're not just dying to what we call bad, we're dying to what we call good too.

So that's where I'm stuck these days.

I'm stuck on the desperate desire for good things and the deep knowledge that God's gifts are always better than good enough.

I say to my beloved friend the other day that I feel like God is giving me an option, right now, He's saying,

I don't like choices.

I like to walk through every open door until one is closed in my face. This makes choice easy.

It is so much harder to know that God has good plans and purposes, but lets us look at two open doors and find the most joy in the choosing of one.

Of all the things I miss (which are few and real, like people), I miss my books the least.

One would think that having hauled around hundreds of books for a decade of my life, I would miss them. But I don't.

Instead I am learning to read.

I have been reading Tony Woodlief's Somewhere More Holy for about six months now. And by read, I mean I have been stealing snatches of it when the house is quiet and my soul is heavy, the former a rarity, the latter an often occurrence.

Today I am barely into chapter seven when Tony begins to talk about the unloved and unlovable:

It's a subtle poison that seeped into her skin, as it does many children. It's acidic, etching into your mind: these good things are no yours to have. If anyone tells you what a fine job you've done, think instead on your failings. When someone gets angry at you, instinctively assume he is right to do so. If someone offers you love, remember that he doesn't really know you. Maybe that's what keeps so many of us running from God--His awful claim to know us, as he peers out from beneath his blood-stained brow, whisper with thirst-swollen tongue that he loves us even now, even as He hangs on his man-fashioned cross. We run away shaking our heads and bitterly chuckling, thinking nobody in his right mind can look into the black hearts we secretly carry in our chests and still love us that way, that we can be lovable only so long as nobody really knows us.

I have to close the book. I have to lay it on the table in front of me.

Because my deepest fears are staring me in the face, in black and white, size 12, Times New Roman.

It is a subtle poison that has seeped into my skin. I call it the fear of being known, but really, the deeper fear is the fear of being unknown, unloved and unlovable.

For years of my life I have heard people talk about the love of God and the love they have for God and I have assumed that this love would not be mine to give or receive. Some of us are just not built that way, I would tell myself. Some of us just have different portions from God, I'd console myself.

But the truth is that it was still my greatest fear: that I would go through life soaked in this acidic poison, the poison of disregard. Unloved. Unlovable. Unable to love.

In the past year, in the unraveling of my faith and the new realization of what the gospel really means, I have felt this love birth in me and be toward me. And yet it still feels foreign. My first response is still to cower, to make excuses, to assume that anger or injustice toward me is right and good, to dwell on my failings. I am having to retrain my head in view of the gospel to respond with the gospel.

And it is hard.

It is hard because deep down within me I know that there is nothing good in me and even the most sincere kindness toward me is undeserved. It is difficult to know that I am nothing and He is everything, but because of my nothingness, He wants to give me everything. He isn't worried about me making a mockery of His gospel and this is what I most fear. Does my pitiful representation of Him mock the gloriousness of Who He Is?

Is my unloveliness disqualifying me from entering into His loveliness?
Is my unworthiness exempting me from partaking in His wholeness?
is my faithlessness removing me from resting in His goodness?

He is answering slowly, patiently, sometimes taking six months, sometimes longer, but answering no. No. Nothing disqualifies me from His love. Nothing.

My first recollection of the verse was on a cross-stitched sampler hung strategically close to a brass rimmed clock. I know this was strategic because I spent a lot of time staring at the clock. I suspect I wasn't the only one and so my piano teacher capitalized on that by placing the sampler close to it. Either that or she had subpar decorating skills because everyone knows the first rule of decorating is grouping things in odd numbers. A sampler + brass rimmed clock = two things. Bad choice.

I honestly forgot everything I learned in two years of piano lessons. She kindly suggested to my parents that perhaps I'd be more well suited to something athletic like soccer or horseback-riding and I heartily agreed, thus releasing me from a wood and ivory prison.

But I never forgot the verse.

Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast. You know it, right? It's probably the only passage in the bible that even humanists or atheists would be able to grudgingly accept. Who doesn't love love?

I'll tell you who: me.

Yeah. Me.

To be honest I didn't know how to love love because I didn't feel loved and I didn't know how to love. I faked it fairly well. I skirted it very well. I avoided it often. I pretended it much.

(To be honest, I still do.)

But here is what I am so overwhelmed with these days: love!

I used to hear people talk about loving Jesus or feeling loved by Him and I honestly, honestly, thought to myself nearly every day, "I guess some people experience that, but I'm pretty sure I never will."

I read 1 Corinthians 13 this morning, though, beginning with the beginning. And I realized, maybe for the first time, what Paul meant when he said "I am nothing."

He meant, and don't miss this, don't miss this: he meant that if you are doing it, but you are not feeling it, it means nothing.

He meant, if you are saying it, but you are not experiencing it, it means nothing.

He meant, if you are prophesying it or claiming its mystery, but you are not rooted in it, watered by it, saved in it, it means nothing.

But the hope comes when we get this, and please don't miss it: we love Him because He first loved us.

So it's nothing we have to conjure up, it's just going to be natural, the overflow, it's going to surprise us to find how much that love is present, palpable, propelling.

I know that there are some of you who will read this and think, "I guess she's experiencing that, but I'm pretty sure I never will," and I want to encourage you to separate what you are doing with who you are and, most importantly, who God is.

If you can shove aside what you DO for the kingdom and just stand, see God for Who He is, apart from what He does, apart from how you feel about Him, apart from all the trappings of secular culture and church culture--what remains is love.

The greatest of these. The greatest thing.