Pick 'em

Whenever I'm in a situation in which pairs must be created and I'm in charge of making those pairs (accountability, confession, or prayer partners usually), I always tell the about-to-be-paired, "If you don't want me to pick your partner/team for you, and you don't want to be picked last, pick someone else first." It's my way of making sure as few people as possible feel like that awkward fourth grader who always got picked last for dodgeball teams (me). I'm a fan of this model because nobody wants to be picked last, but nobody also really wants to pick someone else first.

The thing is, both nobodies here are sitting in a form of pride.

I don't want to be picked last because I want you to see that I matter, I count, there's good stuff about me and in me.

I don't want to pick you first because I don't want to need you, I don't want you to see my insecurities and pitfalls and poor leadership skills.

But sooner or later, everyone gets picked. And the game goes on or partnerships are built. And some teams are winners and some are losers. And sometimes the winners find out later that winning isn't everything, and sometimes the losers feel like crap, but they dig in hard, see where they can improve, and eventually the last really are first.

So pick someone today. Be brave. Just find someone and pick them.

Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.  Romans 12:10

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.)

hey you

Hey listen, you. You hiding behind your litany of projects and your mountain of responsibility. You, with your put together persona and your perfect bouts of transparency. You, who reveals little to everyone but lets the world unveil herself to you because you are perceived as trustworthy and wise. You who picks up the burdens and carries them to the next rest stop. You who goes about your duties, shirking love and fearing commitment because it means you are needed and being needed is grounds for running away. Yeah you.

You’re the one I’m talking to.

And I’m saying this: you can’t hide.

You cannot hide.

Because you slip away, drive away, pull into a parking lot and put your head in your hands. You don’t cry because crying doesn’t help, but you sigh and you ask what’s wrong with you? Why is it so hard to be needed? Be wanted? Be loved? And how can you be those things and still feel like none of them?

You tell yourself the lies and then you tell yourself they’re lies and then you lie to yourself again and say it will be okay, that you’ll try harder next time, that you’ll say no next time, that you won’t feel the weight of the world next time.

But you do.

You stub your toe on the “too close, too long, too much” line and you back away slowly, desperate to grab your favorites parts of you back. You’re an introvert in an extrovert’s kingdom. You feel upside down because you’re called to decrease (which you like), but you’re also called to preach and make disciples and be discipled (which you don’t like). You feel inside out, like you’re walking around with your insides out and no one points and stares, they just expect it from you. They feel that they know the real you.

Here’s my heart, you say, it’s on my sleeve.

Here’s the only thing I have to say to you:

You cannot hide because I know where to find you, you’re always near me, like a second skin, like my own breath, my own heart. You’re like me.

And once, I was like you.

You cannot hide because I emptied myself for you, taking on your form, obeyed the sentence of death on my head, for you.

And you’re not beyond me. Trust me. You, with your litany of projects and mountains of responsibility: you still need me.

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.

I'm sans vehicle this week and I can't say I'm sad about that. It's just routine maintenance, loose ends and loose screws, nothing to worry about. But the trusty mechanic is a 40 minute drive away (you have to trek for worthwhile things like trusty mechanics these days, especially if you're a single girl in a strange city), and so the whole situation is a bit of a hassle.

One I'm happy for, though, to be honest.

I said to a friend yesterday morning that asking for help is hard, I'd almost rather do anything else than swallow my pride and say, "Will you help me?"

It's not the advice asking or the wisdom seeking that's difficult, I'll gladly get counsel from anyone. I know enough to eat the melon and spit the seeds. It's the actual physicality of the help, the action of help, the working hands, the rubber meeting the proverbial road. Or, in this case, the rubber literally meeting the road in the form of hitching rides all week.

It's so hard for me.

My parents raised me to be a pioneer and not the wander in circles sort either, but the real get your hands dirty, show the world what a work ethic is, brave new worlds sort of pioneer. They raised us to be self-reliant and resourceful. This works well best when applied to seven boys, which they had; it works less well when when applied to one girl, which they also had; and it works least well when that one girl reaches age 30 and has found herself a very independent sort who needs help often, but doesn't like to ask for it.

Relate?

The nagging dislike of the ask rears its head most often in regard to all things cars, but don't let that fool you. If I needed help with everything else, it would rear its head with it all. Pride hath no particulars, it seeps into every corner and strangles even the most able.

It's just that unless I have to ask for help, I wouldn't know that the pride was there, glaring, waiting to pounce, willing to pounce, wanting to pounce.

Sometimes we need a finger pointing back at us to show us what's already there.

My finger is my car. It always has been. And I think it probably always will be.

I am paralyzed by the unknown and everything beyond a speedometer, a clutch and a gas-tank is unknown.

Here's the clincher, though: I want to keep it that way.

Because I'm a learner, and I'm convinced that if I put my mind to it, I could figure out enough to get me by, to not walk into the crusty mechanic's shop with "I'm a Single Girl" written on my forehead. I'll bet I could throw out words like carburetor and radiator and mechanicator and other -ator words and impress them a bit. Probably impress myself a bit.

But here's what I've decided to do instead: be ignorant.

I shrug my shoulders, I confess that I know nothing, I turn my hands palm up, I beg rides, I ask for a liaison, I hand off my estimates, and I ask questions with my eyes. I give blank stares. I do this on purpose.

Well, sort of on purpose.

Because I need to need to ask for help. I know this. If I don't need to need to ask for help, I will craft my self-made kingdom and walk out a self-reliant life, and I will never have a finger pointing back at me, reminding me of my need.

This isn't about cars, you probably knew that. But it is still a bit about cars. It's a bit about finding the places in our lives where we feel raw and exposed, where our souls are given opportunity to worry and don't take it. It's about being intentional about letting our needs and requests known and feeling the weight of being here on earth, where we're not finished yet.

It's about oil pans and mufflers, yes, but more it's about swallowing my pride and asking for a ride. It's about tipping the mechanic well, because he knows something about which I've remained ignorant and should be valued for it. It's about shrugging my shoulders and saying, I don't know and I don't need to know.

He numbers the hairs on my head and cares about fallen swallows, surely He cares for me.