Eyes to See

In less than three weeks now, Glennon Doyle Melton, creator of Momastery.com will be speaking at our church. I am the lucky (terrified) duck who will be on stage interviewing her. Glennon is remarkable because she has a way of making room for people, a way of inviting them into love. Her blog is like a church itself (or what a church should be) -- a place of community and growth and service and love.

Recently she wrote a blog post entitled Cool Ashes Don't Burn about being a witness to others' pain. She talks about how we all need to be seen and heard and that we all need acknowledgment that our pain is real. This idea resounded with me because it's something we do naturally for our own friends and it's something we sometimes need to have done for us. But I wondered why. What makes this so powerful? And then I thought of Hagar.

Genesis 16 tells the painful story of Hagar, slave to Sarah, and ultimately a second wife to Abraham. Sarah could not conceive, and she was tired of waiting for God's promise to be fulfilled, so she let Abraham take Hagar so that a family could be built that way. But once Hagar was pregnant, she began to despise Sarah, and ultimately Sarah mistreated her. What a mess.

Hagar ran away, and when she was on the run, she ran into God himself. God told Hagar to return to her mistress, but he also gave her some promises about the boy she was carrying in her belly. Hagar obeyed the Lord and returned to Sarah, and she also gave a new name to God: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”

God saw Hagar's situation -- she was a woman without choices. She was a slave, and she was commanded into a bad situation in which the only possible result would be even worse for her. I find it difficult that God didn't really change things for Hagar -- she was to remain a slave. But God did "see" her, and he did give her a son and promise that her descendants would be too numerous to count.

Sometimes we want God to do more than see, don't we? We want him to DO. To FIX. To CHANGE. I am fairly certain he does that too, just rarely as quickly as we want. He is the God who transforms. The God who transfigures. The God who wastes nothing. The God who makes the bad good. The God who gives us beauty for ashes. But first... First he sees. Glennon's post is a great reminder that we can participate with God in this great thing he does: we can see too.

All You Don't Have

Years of difficult finances and debt have left me somewhat enslaved to counting the dollars and "figuring things out." It's a terrible way to live, and I've felt trapped there by circumstances with no way out despite my endless "figuring." But last Sunday at church I heard God's unmistakeable voice in my head saying, "Stop counting your resources." It got me thinking about Gideon and self-reliance and miracles.

God charges Gideon with attacking the Midianites, but he also says this about Gideon's army: “You have too many men. I cannot deliver Midian into their hands, or Israel would boast against me, ‘My own strength has saved me.’" (Judges 7:2) Gideon started with an army of over 30,000 men, but ultimately God used an army of 300 to defeat the Midianites.

As American Christians, I think we are big fans of the gospel of self-reliance. We love the idea that God helps those who helps themselves, despite the fact that there's no Bible reference for that one. Grace makes us uncomfortable. Lack of personal responsibility even more so.

I am all about personal responsibility. I love it so much, because if something is up to me, then I can make it happen. If it's someone else's job, well they might not do it. But if it's mine, I know I will. Yes, I just might be a bit of a control-freak workaholic, and God just might have been working on that in me for the past decade or so. The reality is that despite my best efforts, I cannot fix my mess. I don't have the resources to do so. And I am not just talking financial resources. I'm talking about all kinds of resources -- time, emotional reserves, ideas, opportunities, wisdom, love... I cannot resource my way to the changes that need to happen in my life. I don't have what's needed, but God is telling me he doesn't need me to.

Transfiguring things is something we cannot do, but it IS what God does. I come with water, and Jesus makes the wine. It is a miracle, plain and simple. This is what I hear God calling me to. He's saying, "Let me transfigure things. Give me your water, and I will give you wine. See what I can do with all you DON'T have."

I lack the financial resources to change our financial picture in any real way. I lack the emotional reserves to not feel pulled down by difficulty, to live life lightly. I lack the time to devote to writing because I am fixated on the financial resources I need to earn. It's the beginning of a new year, and I feel invited to a miracle. What can God do with all I do not have? We shall see. We shall see.

Making Room

Christmas is over, but I am being hounded by a message sent home in my son's preschool papers. It was a brown construction-paper nativity scene with stickers to place for Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. Inside the stable was a piece of paper that said "We are all innkeepers." I cannot stop thinking about it.

Like the innkeeper, we all have a choice to make, except that we get to make that choice again and again and again. Will we make room for Jesus? Will we make room for him in our happiness and our sadness? In our successes and our failures? In our darkness and our light? Are there places we think he cannot or will not go? Are we afraid he won't come into some places or afraid that he will enter some places we keep for ourselves?

This Emmanuel, this God with us, will come in anywhere. The whole born in a stable thing makes that perfectly clear. What is more vulnerable than an infant? What is dirtier than a stable? There is no place in our lives that Jesus is afraid of. There is nothing too messy for him, although sometimes I think it's easier to let him into our messes than into the things that seem like they are going well.

At the beginning of this new year, I am asking myself, how will I make more room for him? My life is maxed out -- full of demands and responsibilities and people to love and take care of. I can't "make" time. For me the only answer to making room is to see Jesus in the now. God, the I AM, is present in every moment, so making room is a matter of seeing in a new way. It's not even so much inviting God into the present moment (although sometimes it may be that) but more of seeing that he is already there -- God with us, God with me.

Yet I think God is asking more of me. I am that cliché of a woman, who can make time for anything and anyone but not so much for herself. I make little time for writing or the things I want most, but I hear a whisper asking me, "Will you make room? Will you make room for you? For your gifts?" I am not sure why I resist my own self so much, but this morning I am wondering whether making more time for the things in my own heart won't be its own way of letting God in. When I write and do the things I love, I think I make room for us both.

My heart is its own inn. What good does it do to say yes when he asks for entrance if I'm not truly occupying the space myself? Here's to a new year.

Night and Day

I live inside the Psalms. They give words to my days, an endless source of comfort and help. On Sunday these verses from Psalm 74 jumped out at me:

Yet God is my king from of old,
Who works deeds of deliverance in the midst of the earth.
...Yours is the day, Yours also is the night;
You have prepared the light and the sun.
You have established all the boundaries of the earth;
You have made summer and winter.

Some Christians like to think there should only be light. That if there is darkness in your life, you are at fault. You should pray more, believe more, and worship more until the darkness goes away. The darkness is just not meant to be.

I think God and the Bible are much more nuanced that most Christians. Psalm 74 says, "Yours is the day, Yours also is the night." There is day and night in my life, all the time. I don't think we can live with an ounce of peace if we have to endlessly fight the darkness in our lives; if we can't just say, this, too, is a part of life. I think most Christians are wrong, quite frankly. At least the loud ones anyway. I live in light and in dark, and Emmanuel lives in it all with me. And thank God for that.

Focus

Yesterday we went to a nearby state park, just me and the littlest. It was one of those summer days that makes me wish every day would be like it and fear that there will never be another as perfect: sunshine, dry air, a breeze, warm. The boy plunged into the cold creek water, squealing again and again. He did a circuit through sand and mud, and then ran in, as deep as he could go. I dug my feet into the mud and listened to the breeze rustle leaves, the water run over rocks, and the boy sing, "You're my best mommy. You're my hero." .

It is easy to see the glass half empty. Some days I can think that this isn't the shape my life was supposed to take. And certainly by now I should have had some time to think my own thoughts and sleep past 5:30 a.m. I should have been helping my older boys figure things out and accomplish what they need to accomplish to set them on the best trajectory into adulthood. I should have been working more, earning more. College is upon us. Instead my days have been consumed by a relentlessly demanding little one. A complicated boy. It feels like he takes everything from me and leaves me with very little for anyone else. I can grow somewhat resentful if I let those thoughts sink it. I worry that the situation makes his brothers resentful, and surely it does sometimes.

But yesterday we went to the creek. We kicked up cold water and searched for shiny rocks. Later we sat on a boulder beneath a tree and just listened. "I like it here," he said. He kissed me and hugged me. I would never have been listening to a breeze, squishing my toes in mud, or splashing in cold water yesterday if it were not for him. My glass is not half empty. It is overflowing. Some days I just need to remember that.

The Stuff That Burns

During worship on Sunday, I saw a picture in my mind of a huge field of dead grasses. I felt that God was showing me that the dead grass represented the things that have died inside of us. Our dreams. Our hopes. Even the deadness of our very selves — our ability to accomplish what we want or to live the way we want to live. Our failures are dead things. It seemed to me that some of these things had not just died once but had died repeatedly. The child you hope will stop using drugs but keeps getting trapped again. The financial picture that never seems to change. The baby you have been waiting for. The marriage you expected. The dream that once upon a time seemed so real and close to fruition that has instead slipped further and further from your grasp to the point that you no longer grasp for it. Dead. Dead. Dead. Again. Again. Again. Things so dead that you have given up on them entirely. Those dead things.

Jesus died too, you know. He was truly and actually dead, and to my knowledge you can't get deader than dead. You're done for when you're dead, and that's how lost dreams and dashed hopes feel. But here's the good news: dead grass is easily ignited. And that spark that ignites the grass is the Holy Spirit. We don't know when he will drop a spark on our dead grasses, but when he does, they will light up and the fire will burn for miles.

I think most of us regret the dead things in our lives and think somehow we should have prevented them from dying. We should have done better. We should have made it work. We should have prayed harder, had more faith, held on tighter. But that's garbage. God doesn't need our strength or our "perfection" or our good ideas. I also don't think he needs our prayers or our faith or our obedience (at least in the way we think he does), though some would likely disagree. I know he doesn't need our success — we're the ones who need that. As Paul said, "That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong." God loves to use our weakness. I think God really wants us to know it's not on us to make things happen, it's on him. This is why he chooses the foolish and the weak. Unfortunately, the way we often learn all of this is by watching a lot of things die.

In God, we can actually embrace the dead things in our lives, thank God for them, and live at peace with them. We can do that because we know the dead things are fuel for life. As Jesus said in John 12: "Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds." The life reaped from the death of Jesus is still rippling across this earth and will keep rippling. Don't be discouraged. Someday, I don't know when, what has died inside of you will be ignited and generate more life than you'd planned on. Buckle up. This isn't the ride you were expecting.

A Big Cup

On Sunday I brought the three-year-old up for communion. Our church has a family communion time for the kids before they go to Sunday school, and I appreciate that. When I was a kid, my parents wouldn't let me take communion, despite the fact that I prayed for salvation at least weekly, if not more. I was a fearful kid.

This week during communion, I was struck by how long it takes Son4 to drink the very small cup of communion juice — several swallows — and in that moment, it felt profound. It should take several swallows — the cup of salvation is a big cup. I wonder why, then, we try to make it smaller. Why do we try to exclude people from it?

Jesus died one death, but the blood that flowed then is still flowing. It is for the salvation of all who believe. But for Christians since then, it has often been seen as the cup of salvation for all who believe AND [fill in the blank]. For some of the earliest Christians, it was the cup of salvation for all who believe AND are circumcised and don't eat certain things. For many American Christians these days, it might be the cup of salvation for all who believe AND aren't gay or for all who believe AND aren't pro-choice. I am just saying that some people might see it that way. I am fairly certain that many of us who call ourselves Christians fill in the blank in one way or the other, or at least we used to. I am asking myself how I fill in that blank or how I used to fill it in.

Why do we do that? Why do we try to exclude people from salvation? ... Because, really, I think that is what Christians often seem to think they are qualified to do. Frankly, I am happy to leave that task up to God himself, the only one who could possibly have the required wisdom and understanding.

When I look at Jesus, I see someone who blew away the boundaries of religious exclusion. "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." Judgment is an exhausting burden. We are not meant for it. So let's drink from the big cup and join Jesus in inviting everyone to drink too.