Broken Bodies

I wake broken today. It is barely light outside, my weekend, my rest, and I feel unrested and restless. I go back to bed. I read for an hour, then pull on a flannel shirt, find my way to a cloud covered lake and wish, like Joni, that I had a river to skate away on.

This brokenness, it is present in ways that prick and pin me against myself, against the mirror of my soul, showing me myself and the ugliness within.

I call a friend a few hours later to confess the brokenness, but she has had a hard day and she tells me stories for forty minutes and at the end I am too tired to say the simple words: I'm broken. And so I tell her instead the good news belonging to some friends and I leave my brokenness out. I am ashamed to be broken and ashamed to have it so tight around my throat, constricting and felt.

Tonight I am meant to stand at the front of our sanctuary, our place of rest and worship, and I am meant to serve the bread and the wine alongside another. And perhaps they will have felt their brokenness today too. Perhaps they will know their humanity constricting and tight. Perhaps their heart will feel as fragile as the wineglass they hold, as broken as the bread I hold.

Here is what I know of brokenness and here is what I know of communion: it cannot be done alone.

As He has entered into our sufferings, born a babe in a cruel manger in a cruel world, body broken and bruised, we enter into His. And as we enter into His, we enter into others. And as we enter into theirs, they enter into ours. We share the broken body, the poured out blood, we partake of Him but we do it with one another.

We cannot do it alone. Any of it.

But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. I Peter 4:13

Endure Patiently

I can't even tell you how it happened that we sat there and cried hot wet tears, barely looking one another in the eyes. I take much of the blame, though my heart ached with hurt and couldn't find healing. Don't let the sun go down on your anger?

Well, what about when it's not anger you're bedding down for the night? What about when it's joy mixed with mourning so deep you don't know what else to do but be silent? Be silent for fear that your muddled mess of joy and mourning will be trumped by the latter and seen as such. So I kept silent.

A friend tells me a few weeks ago that I present my life as perfect and I want to tell her to read a decade's archives of presentations. This? This place on the web? This is my sanctification in process on view for the world, and if that's perfect, well, I suppose I've arrived a thousand times over.

Once I heard a story of an old man on his death-bed. He was asked if he found himself sinning less as he grew older.

"Sin less?" He asked. "I was never more aware of my sin than I was a moment ago."

"Well, then, do you find it easier to repent?"

"No, son," he said. "I just find the gap between me and the Lord ever closing as I turn."

It was Annie Dillard who said, "Where, then, is the gap through which eternity streams?" and I think that gap is here, and here, and this moment, and this one. Eternity streams through these small moments, adding up to one final jubilee, one long trumpet call, when our angers and hurts and fears and sins are bedded forever, never to wake up, not ever.

Do I find myself sinning less the nearer I draw to that final day?

No. I find I know my sin more, and every moment more aware than the last. But do I find it's easier to find God, to know His nearness, and to trust the days to him? Yes. I do.

It doesn't make the hurt less, but this earthly Christian life is not for the avoiding of hurt, but the enduring of it.

...we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance... Romans 5:3

Middle of My Might

I wake in the middle of the night and this is my favorite time. The heater groans in still air and the traffic has ceased on the highway near my home. I read once that good writers and good theologians woke themselves in the night hours to pray and read, or write, and I know I fool myself that I am or could be both, but I still wake to pray, to read, to write. It's the disciplines of a godly life that fail me most. Because I am a recovering legalist perhaps? Or because the vestiges of licentiousness still breed in my soul with an alarming rate, I don't know. I do not discipline my body, nor make it my slave, so I am not pray-er, reader, or writer, if the truth is told.

I am only a pilgrim, a wayfarer, a sojourner, and my weaknesses, oh, they show in inopportune places and inopportune ways.

David is my comfort, that murderer, that adulterer. He bests my worst sins and still puts me to shame with his heart after God. Is Christ my water? My bread? My food? No? Seek on.

If redemption is the whole story of God, and I might argue it is, doesn't it make sense that we the redeemed need to be redeemed? And what is worth redeeming but that which has no worth? Green stamps and soda cans, cardboard lottery tickets and oh my soul. Worthless all, but if attributed worth by Someone, that is the whole story of God.

This morning I ache when my eyes open naturally in the dark and I roll over, turn the light on. Who will rescue me from this body of death? Will hard work? Determination? Discipline? Prayer?

Who is a Person and that Person is Christ alone. He is my bread. He is my water. My food. My redeemer and my help.

Seek on.

Did God REALLY say?

One friend and then four more told me this week they hope for me what I hope for myself, and that is to be picked, chosen, and loved. More than one friend and a few more have said the word deserve and when they do the blackest parts of me come to my mind's eye and I disbelieve everything they say from then on. A lie may be small (Did God really say?) but its infractions are limitless.

Today I am driving home from class, the sunrise to my back and a row of 100 cars stopping and going, stopping and going in front of me. I am thinking of Job's friends. Their comfort to his plight was how any of us would respond—with good wishes and you deserves and reminders of good deeds checked off: So why is God not near then? Did He really say?

We speak statements veiled in questions, buffered by doubting inflections so our collective unbelief sounds less wrought with sin than it is.

To ask if God really said what He did indeed say is virtually the same as if to say He did not really say.

In class this morning we read a passage from Genesis that a man read over me a decade ago. He put his hand on my head and promised that if I would do as this man of old did, I would taste of the same richness of relationship in life he did. I set my feet there and I have not moved.

If you were to make a list of my good deeds you could check them off, each one. If you were to cup a portion of the love I have given, you could fill a lot of hearts. I say that because I have so many convinced that I deserve God to come through, make good on what was seemingly promised.

And yet He does not.

And He might not. Not in the way I think He should.

We read about how Abraham died before he saw what was promised and I wanted to shake my fist at God for one moment. How could you promise him and then not deliver!? How could you hold that promise far off like a carrot in front of the face of a working mule? All this, for this? For nothing?

It is no secret that I am doubting Thomas. I know Thomas more than I know any other disciple. I need to thrust my hands into my Lord's side, my fingers into his hollowed out hands. I need Him to walk through walls and I'm not ashamed of that.

Faith needs people who will ask and not stop asking.

But today I am seeing my doubt for what it is. My asks should not be statements punctuated with question marks.

They should bring me further into the light, not the darkness.

Further into His character, not my own.

Further into joy, not sorrow.

Further into what He did say, and not what I think He might have said.

OIL, WATER, and the LIES we tell ourselves

I’ve got layers of lies that I don’t even know about yet. Sara Groves

Here’s what happened:

A friend told me something and I believed her. I do that. I’m a believing, trusting sort of person. The thing is, what she told me was only half true. Not half true to her—she told me the truth as best as she could, but it was only half of the whole truth. I didn’t know the other parties involved, so what could I do? I believed her. This is what friends do.

But the water has sunk to the bottom and the oil has risen to the top and with it all the floating particles that are still coated with enough water that I can’t look into that cup without seeing more of the whole story.

And my heart is sick.

Because her true-to-her story was only half of the story and now I know the other half, and the other half is my friend too, and when you love oil and water, even if they hate each other, what can you do? You believe them both with as much grace as you can muster. This is what good friends do.

But at some point the whole thing gets shaken up again and it takes a while for things to settle and while it’s still shaken you feel sicker and sicker still because there are always three sides to every story, hers, his, and the horrible, awful, honest truth. With a choice so divided, what can you do? You choose truth. This is what the truest friend does.

To choose truth, though, means to lose other things, namely trust.

Today trust was lost and I mourn that. I mourn it so hard and so deeply because I have been lied to, though neither of them did the lying.

I was the one lying all along. And that is the most heartbreaking of it all.

Paul admonishes the Thessalonians to “aspire to live quietly and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you.”

I’m stuck on that today because I didn’t live quietly and I listened to the lies. But the lies were of my own making and they said something like this: You are big enough to handle the heartbreaking details of someone’s life all by yourself. You are big enough to have an opinion on lives that aren’t your own. You are big enough to discern truth from lies and from opinions and cries.

The truth is that I am not a part of the problem or the solution here; I am only a particle that floated to the top of his story, coated in the residue of her story. Just one small particle.

And if God did not give me the grace to handle this (at least without some amount of bellyaching), then it is probably best for me to simply bow out.

KILL your DARLINGS

It's humility that's got me down these days and I suppose that's not a bad place to be after all. I have no wish, desire, or need to draw any more attention to the recent happenings in the faith-blogosphere in internetdom. If you caught whiff of it, it was enough, and if you were in the unfortunate position of being a blogger yourself who is used to having people look at you for what to tweet and retweet next, well, even worse. I learned my lesson with KONY 2012—acts of division among the body are not my cup of tea, no matter what's in the water.

I sent a draft of a post of political nature to a blogger friend last week along with the question: should I post this? It wasn't the post itself, though, that made him warn me against posting it, but the subject: "People don't come to Sayable for this, they come for grace, for encouragement, and for the gospel." Or something along those lines. I deleted the draft and went on my merry way. In college a creative writing prof quoted William Faulkner in our class saying everyone needed to "learn to murder their darlings in their writing, and for pete's sake, Lore, would you quit murdering your darlings?" I've never been too married to my words.

But if there is one thing that these sort of hurricanes in the blogosphere teach me, it is that we maybe ought to perhaps at least divorce our darlings, sit down quietly, and let the Holy Spirit do what he does best—namely, to teach and guide his habitats into all truth (John 14).

So I've been thinking about humility this week, how low can we go, and all that.

John said, "He must increase, I must decrease." And Paul determined to "boast nothing but the cross." And I think we could learn a bit more from these apostolic fathers.

At the root of pride is the feeling that we have the corner on the market (or theology, or politic, or semantic), and the price of meat is just going to keep on rising. We feel, in error, that if we do not guard this piece of the pie with everything our mamas gave us, the whole world will go without pie. And what a pity that would be.

But the cross? The cross levels it. It somehow levels the misapplied doctrine, the faulty readings of scripture, and the sinner who can't stop sinning. We don't like to say this because we don't like to murder our darlings. We don't like to cross out the possibility that upon this doctrine He will build His church. But the truth is He's building His church and He's invited you and me to come along—pick up the bricks and slather the mortar. He's building it with or without us.

He's building it of people who know the only way to be first is to be last. He's building it of people who know the difference between close-handed and open-handed theologies. He's building it of people who will reach out to the least of these (even when the least of these thinks they're the greatest of these). He's building it of the little people, and dare I say, the little bloggers and tweeters and facebookers who think more than twice about stamping their feet, calling foul, and jumping on bandwagons, or defending their ilk with wit, sarcasm, and theology.

So maybe you didn't weigh in this week or maybe you never weigh in or maybe you were hanging laundry, shuffling littles, and clocking in at work this week and never caught a whiff of anything amiss. Whoever you are and wherever, He's building His church and He's looking for the lowly and humble to come along with Him.

He's looking for people willing to die on no mountain but the one on which cross stood tall and offered all: righteousness in Christ alone.

SHOOTING STRAIGHT

I knew it was going to be okay when I learned that I was an arrow—shaped, sharpened, and shot to hit a target the archers couldn't hit on their own.

I knew it was going to be okay, that my parents, my churches, and my own heart were all archers in their own right, forming and formulating strategies to wage war. And sometimes my parents, my churches, and my own heart would go to bed at night, lay down their arms, and rest knowing they had done all and stood well, and now it was time to rest.

This past weekend one of our pastors spoke about fatherhood and I broke.

I broke because I have failed as a daughter and have been failed too. Because in my family there is estrangement and brokenness. There is a failure to acknowledge the good that was and the bad that shouldn't have been. I broke because all of my misconceptions about God have been rooted in a failure to understand that parents are only earthly shadows, not even a particle of the real thing—and I have gotten it backwards. I broke because my pastor read this verse: For [our fathers] disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness.

As it seemed best to them.

Best. To them.

I broke, more than anything, because if there is one thing I come against again and again it is the failure to recognize that my life's circumstances, and the people in them, are mere archers. They have done their best to craft me and shoot me straight as it seemed to them. But I am the arrow—ultimately hitting the target is not up to them, it is up to me and the Master crafter.

We are a reactive generation—holding up our parents and churches and even our own wicked hearts at times, and we are saying, "None of that now! They have done us wrong! A new way! A better way!"

But here is the truth, more than anything: the better way, the best way, is to trust that every way that seemed best to those we feel failed most by, was part of the best way for God to discipline us for our good, that we may share in His holiness.

He took all our collective brokenness, the unfair rules and poor theology, the bad politics and dysfunctional church environments, even the abuse and shame, He took all of it, bore the fullness of it, and whatever He has given to us to bear is for our good. We get to share in His holiness because of it.

Even broken archers can shoot straight arrows and even broken arrows can still hit targets.

He's already won the war for us.

Like arrows in the hand of a warrior

are the children of one's youth.

Blessed is the man

who fills his quiver with them!

He shall not be put to shame

when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

Psalm 127:3-5

COZY REPTILES and OTHER PETS WE KEEP

And I will put enmity 

beween you and the woman...

Genesis 3:15

We found the chair for $25 dollars at an estate sale in the fancy section of Dallas. It’s everyone’s favorite. I do most of my writing in it because it is my favorite, and also because it is nestled in a corner by the fireplace for when it is cold and by the window for when it is hot.

Yesterday I was sitting here, as I am today, scribbling away at some inconsequential writing and I looked to my left, where, 12 inches from my face, along the length of the window ledge, on the other side of a mesh screen and nothing else, lay a snake.

This was no little garter snake, this was the epitome of all my greatest snake fears. He was a full five inches around and a grand four+ feet long.

He was 12 inches from my face.

I’ve not kept this particular fear a secret. It was my greatest hesitation in moving to Texas, hearing stories of finding snakes in pantries and laundry rooms is enough to keep me far, far away from any of that business. But I surmised that God loved me enough to keep the snakes away.

It is not the fear of being killed by one that frightens me so deeply, but the fear of a snake finding itself comfortable where he is not welcome.

I heard an illustration once, and I’m not sure of the validity of it as a true story, but as an illustration it was brilliant. There was a woman with a pet baby snake who let the snake sleep at the end of her bed and as he grew he began to sleep more and more closely to her, cuddling, she thought, close to her for companionship. Soon the snake began sleeping uncurled, stretching himself along the length of her, and he began eating less. She was worried so she brought him to the veterinarian who told her the snake must be killed immediately. "Immediately?!" She was heartbroken. "Yes, immediately. That snake is measuring you and starving himself because he is preparing to eat you. Kill him immediately."

The illustration was about sin, of course, and the way we have our pet sins sleeping close and inching closer until they are measuring us in order to eat us alive. The story was more potent to me, probably, because it was about a snake—a koala or a flamingo wouldn’t have had the same effect. But I think that’s because God really wasn’t kidding when he talked about enmity between us and them.

My roommate and others kept assuring me yesterday that the snake wasn’t poisonous, even if it was unnaturally large for this area, that he wasn’t interested in eating me alive or lashing out at me venomously. But it is not death I am afraid of, I promise—I welcome the sight of heaven these days.

It is comfort I am afraid of.

It is sitting in my favorite chair and looking to my left, 12 inches from my face, and seeing a snake sunning itself on the window ledge, where he does not belong and where he especially is not welcome.

Sin, which this week I am so aware of in my life, and so startled at how closely it comes to me, measuring the length of me, the health of me, and the comfort level I have with it, it is sin that frightens me.

Last night one of my pastors, talking about sonship and the law and the great hope of the gospel, wept as he shared a particular area where he’d been tempted recently and how it was an uncomfortable wrench for his soul. He sought prayer from his brothers and his wife that morning, but it wasn’t until he simply stated the gospel truth: that he was called and chosen and a son of God, secure in his salvation and not a slave to sin any longer, that the temptations lifted.

I think about that this morning because I would like to think that all it will take to rid our backyard of this intruder is some timely and truth-filled words, but the truth is that snakes are more easily rid than sin.

Sin's only antidote is the gospel and the gospel is the simplest answer to come to us in the hardest ways.

For if you live according to the flesh 

you will die, 

but if by the Spirit 

you put to death the deeds of the body, 

you will live.

Romans 8:13

foxy

"Why did you lie to me?" She asked."Because," he answered, "I am a wild animal."

These lines from Fantastic Mr. Fox stick with me this week. The wildness of my sin taunts me, teases me, tempts me. I like to think I am beyond the big sins, but the truth is that it is the small foxes that ruin the vineyard and my sin-foxes are the wildest of them all.

It's the surprise of sin that frustrates and confounds me. I cannot get past the surprise attack on my soul, my actions, my mouth—the things that leap to my touch, tongue, and thought. Did I just say that? Do that? Be that?

The past few weeks I've been thinking about what walking in the Spirit means. What does it mean the walk in what the Holy Spirit has given me for today? He's given me a portion to do and a portion of comfort and help for today. But what am I doing with it? Am I walking in it? Not hording tomorrow's portion, scooping up manna that will mold by morning, but trusting that I have what I need for today?

This is all well, fine, good and easy with the tangibles like finances and cars, homes and roommates and spouses. But when it is applied to my soul and my sin, well, here the needs get blurred. I need to stop sinning, but rarely do I apply the Spirit to those besetting beasts. I'm more likely to rely on my own good works and white knuckles to beat the foxes back to their dens. I don't face the wildness head on with the Spirit and the gospel.

And I'll be honest: it lands me more humiliated in the end and not necessarily more sinless.

I'm learning more and more that the disciplines of this Christian life are not to reach some cycle of peace, some plateau of sinlessness. The discipline is to walk and walk and walk—to pilgrimage, my favorite psalm reads. To walk and walk and walk, to do it with faith and hope and love, to do it in victory and to do it in wild hopelessness. To seek and find the Holy Spirit, the comforter and helper.

Because on the inside we are wild, but He has loved us more wildly and ferociously still.