Broken & Healed

I do not pretend to know much about the Church and her fears and doubts and joys and hopes and shortcomings and what preparation is needed, exactly, for when Christ comes for her. 

But I will say - this revolution of vulnerability, authenticity, and frank brokenness within the Church is beauty. In a first-world that is rocketing toward post-Christian, the time for all things real is come. This is a world that is crying out for a little dirt under our fingernails and dusty feet; because, as my Momma once said: "Sweetie, no one wants to sit & listen to someone who they think hasn't walked through anything."

So let us be vulnerable, let us be authentic, and by all means let us be frankly broken; but, Church...

let us also be healed. 

let us be righteous. 

let us be the sick that have been made well. 

let us be the slaves that have been set free.

I read an interview of a Christian who dealt with alcoholism. She had been sober for quite some time but continued to attend AA meetings. One of the questions asked was why she still attended the meetings, if she was doing so well, and her answer stuck with me.

[Paraphrased] One of the reasons, she said, is to remember. To be close to those still in the battle or just conquering, to remember where we came from. To remember life before victory so we don't forget. Another reason is to then encourage. To stand alongside those still battling and just conquering and say, "Me too. I was there too."

Let us remember our brokenness, but not dwell in it. 
Let us turn to those who are still battling or just conquering and say, "Me too. I was there too." 

On the cross, Christ's hands were vulnerable, and the pain was all too real, and He was physically broken, but, when Christ was broken, healing & redemption poured out from Calvary with a flood of grace.

We need to be honest about the fact that we had to die, Church. 

That Christ's physical death & resurrection made our spiritual one possible.

And then, with grace and humility and deep joy and hope, we need to recognize that Christ didn't stay in the grave, and neither should we.

And then, if our hands and feet our made dirty may it be not from sin, but from service. From reaching out to the still broken and leading them to a place of healing. May it be from the messy work of leading others to the cross.  

New Life

Love is dangerous. 

It redeems, you know. And redemption is never something to be trifled with because redemption incites change. Deep change. 

And the love of which I speak is not human born & fed, but divine. 

Let's face it, we humans are not perfect and while our love can have something of the hushed & holy, it can also damage. Because people can damage. 

God, though, God redeems and refines and restores. He does not damage. 

He might deconstruct, but always, always, always, His love leaves wholeness in its wake. 

And while love from another person can feel like a warm fire on a cold night, God's love comes like the dawn. Bringing not only warmth, but light & color & a whole new way of seeing things.

The love of God? It is good. 

It is good because it has no beginning and no end. 

It is good because it calls life out from those who were thought to be long dead.

It is good because it has not only been spoken, and written, but also lived.

Through death and back again.

I'm looking forward to Easter, more so than any other year. This spring has worked something new in me and I am desperate for any moment to be filled up and over with this new life that comes from Him loving me.

Maybe His love requires surrender? And, maybe, after twelve years, I'm just beginning to wave my white flags and His feet start pounding that long dusty path toward me.

I think the Father loved the Prodigal Son when his feet carried him away from home just as much as when they carried him towards it.

And Jesus has been loving me for a long time, much longer than I have been hit-and-miss loving Him. 

Why I Ask Questions

At first, the process of working through tough questions about the Christian faith frustrated me - the back & forth, the complexity, the hard truth that there is no quick answer.

For example, a big one for me is gender roles within the church, this issue is revisited ever-so-often in my head. Most times the waters are too muddy to come to any definite conclusions; and so, after wrestling for a few weeks and maybe clicking one or two of the pieces into place, I table it for next year.

Now I see the beauty in this process.

It will be comforting, if and when I come to a conclusion, to realize it is one that has had time to prove itself wrong.

One that is fed by more prayer & Bible study than can fit into a few hours & the wisdom and council of those who's walk with Christ has been tested and proved faithful much more than mine. 

I've come to find that rarely do I wrestle through an issue that is solely theological (or political, or logical, or philosophical for that matter). More often than not insecurities and flaws are neatly wrapped up in my paradigms & interpretations of the Bible. 

However, running into my insecurities & flaws when wrestling through questions I have about my faith no longer discourages me, because God has met me there.

The Arena of Questions, where I often battled myself & others, is where God brought the deep healing I needed.

And it seems, when entering this arena, in particular, the only armor I can wear is that of God, and not of my own hubris.

A helmet, a breastplate, a shield, a belt, shoes, and a sword.

Salvation, righteousness, faith, truth, the Gospel of peace, and the Spirit.

These are what I'm called to carry when I seek truth.

I remind myself that if I don't approach tough questions with humility, properly outfitted in the armor of God, I risk bringing injury to myself or others. I risk not being equipped to block the arrows of deception, of pride, of anger.

But when I do approach with humility, sometimes I can see God holding His breath, thinking, "Yes, dearest, that one... ask that one! I can't wait to answer you."

Life always comes from the asking when we ask & listen to His words.

His Word has always, always brought life.

That's why I ask questions. 

What do you do when you have a lot of words?

Lately I've become disillusioned with my dreams/goals that have to do with writing. I spend fifteen minutes cruising the web and think, Truthfully, does this world really need more opinions? 

This is a very sad question for someone like me to come across, as sharing my opinion is something I really love to do.

I used to think it was necessary because there's a lot of other people sharing their opinions that are different than mine, and isn't balance important? (Read: I'm right and they're wrong and everyone NEEDS to know this.)

Then I realized Jesus didn't "share His opinion" that often, except to the Pharisees. He more often than not told stories and seemed to be more about the doing than the saying. I wonder, sometimes, if Jesus walked the earth today, would He facebook, tweet, blog? Would He communicate grace through a social network and within 140 characters?

Or would He be that neighbor that you always see outside talking to other people in the neighborhood. Getting to know people, stepping into their lives graciously, cracking jokes, living life alongside people in a quiet way that changes them. You know, one of those people that's really good at loving others in real life. Not from behind a computer screen or a smartphone.

Before you think I'm spiraling into a pit of cynicism or attempting a poorly shrouded, tongue-in-cheek statement about how we're all addicted to the internet, let me say that these are genuine questions my heart has been turning over. I recognize the good that comes from the the ability we have to communicate in this day and age.

And not to point out the obvs... but I do have a blog.

Here's the question(s) I'm asking: What is the most God-glorifying way to use this gift of words? What's a worthy investment of my time while on this earth? Blogging? Writing a book that (best case scenario) a decent amount of people read, share their opinion about my opinion, and then forget about it?

I also don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Words are still powerful tools, and I feel God has gifted me with the ability to put them together in a powerful way.

I'd rather spend my life writing love letters to my husband, lunchbox notes for my children, and making every birthday, get well, or "just because" card I send the best. card. ever., speaking words of truth & life & encouragement into the daily routine of those around me, than write one book that does nothing more than sit on people's shelves.

Two things that break my heart: when people miss the love of Jesus and when they miss it because someone did a bad job of communicating it, whether by words or action, both of which this woman has been guilty.

Because of this, when I write something and think, "Yes. That's it. That's as close as my humanity will allow me to communicate the grace that breathes for me," my soul feels a step closer to my Heavenly Father. Sometimes I'm so full of words about Him that they bubble out of me and land on whoever is closest. Ask my husband.

I know I'm supposed to write, because it's how I worship; and, I don't want to attempt to use for my own glory what God gave me to use in the holy moments between He and I.

So I only write of how God has changed me, how He woos me, how well He loves me.

How He flooded my life with life. With a husband and now a son. With a biological family that is also a spiritual one. With friends that breathe grace with me.

For me, this is what's worth writing about.

Foreign Territory

It's a little difficult to be deep & emotive when covered with crusty snot.


I'm just saying.

Something about motherhood has forced all my introspective moments to mix into my practical ones. As a result I feel more steady, which is nice, but sometimes I miss the luxury of being able to turn off practical thoughts and simply emote. I especially miss this when I sit down and try to write. It used to be my feelings could run all over the page and the only structure was the words themselves.

Now, there is a constant, logistical ticker-tape running through my head.

"When does Z eat next?"
"What will we do for dinner?"
"Is it too late to drink a cup of coffee before his next feeding?"

This makes writing more of a challenge. I have to work harder to shut as many thoughts down as I can so the words come unhindered.

This morning I cried with Jesus because it was the first time we had spent some time together in awhile. It's so interesting how our own hearts can be such foreign territory. Having a child has led me into a new wilderness that I'm sure, as my friend said yesterday, will have valleys and quiet waters just as much as it will have hard mountains and deserts.

Maybe the first mountain is being satisfied with the things of this world, and I wrote this morning that He is better because He is and I haven't been acting like it.

That's how hardness occurs, I think, believing that something else is better than Him and then being disappointed when it comes up lacking. And then the hardness can dry out every area of our life and we wonder why loving becomes difficult.

Right now, in this season, He is better than alone time; better than sleep; better than being right when I argue with my husband; better than feeling angry when I realize I'm not; better than food; better than entertainment; and probably most of all, better than living for nothing more than my own happiness.

Oy, that last one is a whole subject in and of itself.

In short: This morning was one of those moments that I looked up out of myself to find Jesus still sitting next to me holding my hand.

Why is He so good?

Meanwhile, though the crusty snot is not incredibly fun, Z is as cute as ever. He's three and a half months old now and smack in the middle of the "everything that happens makes me scream like a pterodactyl" stage. He's also recently discovered his feet, as you can see below:

Can you even get over those ears on his hat? I couldn't either. 

*sigh* I love being his momma.

Goodbye, Summer. Hello, Conviction.

Well it's still blazing hot but my heart still does the same dance every autumn. Maybe it's being in campus ministry that resets my spiritual clock to begin new things every fall rather than January.

I just finished reading Crazy Love. Books have always helped me on my spiritual journey because I respond to the written word and I enjoy being able to go back over thoughts, opinions, and arguments and process them slowly.

In a nutshell, it definitely poked a few sore areas in my heart. To name a few: comfort, materialism, selfishness, apathy, laziness, etc.

This morning I told my husband that I want to know what I'm doing will result in Jesus saying, "Well done, good and faithful servant," at the end of this life. After further reflection, I can only say that's true some of the time. Most of the time I want to know what I'm doing will result in the people around me patting me on the back and praising my work.

And I wonder why it's hard for me to make changes. I'm not enough of a reason for me to change. I would like to think so, based on how much I enjoy attention, but I'm just not.

Jesus is a reason. He's a reason for me to change.

With all these thoughts percolating, I also asked God to either confirm (or refine) my calling. More and more, lately, I have this resolve that doing anything besides what God would have me do is a waste of time. I reach out to the women on a specific college campus, primarily through discipleship; and I love it. But I want it to be worth something besides my own satisfaction.

Then I read an article a friend posted on facebook. (Don't worry, I'm working on pulling this all together.) There's a lot out there about the American Christian church's need to change. About how we're selfish, bigots, homophobic, ignorant, materialistic, narrow-minded, political lemmings, etc.

And I'm not saying I haven't seen that before, but my experience has been different in my local body of believers. We're not perfect and I've been hurt by my church, but we are made up of people, after all. So these thoughts percolated some more and I realized that the difference, in my extremely humble and (hopefully) able to hear, "You're wrong," opinion, is discipleship.

True discipleship surpasses the shallow in someone's life and gets into the deep & often dirty. The parts that are uncomfortable, hard, require time and sometimes finances. People need. Discipleship opens up those needs instead of pretending as if they don't exist. Discipleship requires that those needs be answered, somehow. By listening, by pointing to Jesus, even by sorting out the healthy needs from the unhealthy ones.

The other thing about discipleship is that it's extremely difficult to do it well without realizing your own weaknesses and needs. You can't sit across from someone and hold their hand through brokenness without some of your own rising to the surface.

I think the Holy Spirit is stirring a lot of change in me, many areas that need to be chipped away. Areas of my mind that need to look a little more like Christ and a little less like myself. But today it seems the Spirit did confirm my calling. By the grace of God to try and help people look more like Christ. To do this with humility, because to be honest there's no one on this earth who knew Jesus in person, and even those who did walk with Him seemed to often misunderstand what He was about.

So, written prayers have always been a little awkward to me, but I feel like it's the only way to really end this one:

Give me the humility to desire You more than myself. The grace to see You in others instead of always needing to be right. And the love that transforms me and overflows to others. Start the change with me, Jesus. 

Resolution

I spent time reflecting on last year and decided there was much I would do differently. Regret is too strong a word and I've tangled with guilt too many times to dwell; however, I do want to learn. If 2010 was a year of remorse & redemption, then 2011 was a year of chiseling. My heels were plowed into my own self-will, and refused to yield much ground to change.

For lack of better elocution: It's time for fear and my own rebellion to cease getting in the way of what God is trying to do with my life. 

This brought me to James, which is a book that I avoided because reading it always left me feeling like a terrible Christian. (Again, the guilt.) I was reading through it last week, struggling with the same "not quite measuring up" feelings, when two unexpected verses dripped all through the cracks and dryness of performance and saturated my soul with hope:

"Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom; 

because judgement without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. 

Mercy triumphs over judgement!" 

James 2.12 (NIV)

And the Holy Spirit tucked His finger under my chin, lifted my head to gaze at Christ and said:

"This especially applies to you, dear one." 

I cannot express how that truth shakes the core of me & how if I understood this fully, it would completely change how I treat God, my husband, my friends & family, complete strangers, and particularly myself. I don't believe James unintentionally wrote about a law that breathes freedom in the midst of his exhortations toward action.

Have you ever met someone who has taken the truth of what Christ did and allowed it to radically change them? I mean deeply shake up and turn over all of their conceptions of who they are, and who others are, in light of Christ?

It is after this last year that I realized I am most definitely not one of those people and I absolutely long to be; and, that I cannot be one of those people, those God-bringers, on my own.

They not only speak and act as if they will be judged by the law that brings freedom, but they understand that they will be judged and it doesn't scare them.

It doesn't scare them because they have allowed the Gospel to instill the truth that Christ really has taken care of all of it and they fling their world-weary souls on their Savior and never look back.

Oh, to be one of them.

Rather than one of those waiting in fear & anxiety for the other shoe to drop, because surely the words "Judge" and "Lover" cannot be synonymous, ...

... or those who assume in hard-heartedness that such a love could not exist, that One who claims to be a source of complete freedom, but requires so much, cannot be trusted ...

... instead, to be among the joyful who run into the throne room of Christ and throw their arms around their Lawgiver, because they understood and have been longing to finally be restored to the One who judged them with mercy. 

Who gave them living water that they drank of & in turn, lavished on others.
Who gave them unshakable security & refreshing humility that they accepted & in turn, loved people deeply.
Who erased the striving, fear, guilt & shame that they learned not to run back to & in turn, were living testimonies of being more than conquerors.


To become one of these is a resolution worth keeping.