Q & A: Tuesday Wrap-Up: Week Eight

March 11, 2014 By

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Somehow this picture from my surfing cache seems to capture our little band,
hanging out together in the water, encouraging one another to go deeper!

As I read through the linked posts this week, and re-read the comments section, I was just overwhelmed with gratitude for each one of you who has been reading along through this series. I truly didn’t have a clue what I was doing when I opened the door to this and I am so glad that our small band has stuck it out to the end! Thank you all for your thoughtful, sensitive, loving responses to me and to one another all the way along — this is, sadly, a somewhat rare thing out here in the wild and wacky world of the internet, the Christian internet, and I’m thankful that we took the time to care about the words we wrote and about the people who received them.

This week’s question stirred the waters more than most, I think. Some of us have been hurt by Bible-pounding in the past, by a church community (or a family) that pulled words out of context and applied them with a sledge hammer to tender hearts. May I just say how truly sorry I am for the ways in which the church has wounded you? And used the Bible to do it? 

These poignant words made my heart hurt! 

I soaked up the teaching not to succumb to a lazy belief in a wishy-washy god who just wanted to love everybody. It seemed that mention of God’s love always had to be tempered with the requisite counter-balance of His justice. It’s hard when every time you think of someone loving you, your mind adds “yes, but . . . ” Maybe part of the reason the Bible has seemed crammed with “hard” things to me, is because I have trouble accepting the love of the One Whose word it is.

I’m learning to rest my weight on His grace and love instead on my own anxious efforts and promises to do better. After years of regimented personal devotions, I don’t read my Bible every single day, anymore. I don’t have one specific time of prayer. I don’t have a plan. But I’m delighted to find how God’s word has taken root in me even through the difficult years. Verses of comfort surface, sometimes when I am half-asleep, and I am reminded of Jesus’ promise that the Holy Spirit will remind us of Christ’s words. I’m treasuring Bible verses that tell me of God’s love, tenderness, and care. And for now, I’m just leaving those hard things on the shelf. My brain is healing. 

This beautiful book of ours, which can be a rich source of both comfort and challenge, has too often been used to batter people. One writer wrote about the power of one group’s particular interpretation of just thirteen words in Paul’s second letter to Timothy:

The hard bits that ruled my life for so long, are still a part of my life.  When I look at my wedding photos and think of my family who should have been in them, when I hear one of my children asking who ‘that lady’ is, when they’re looking at a photo of my mother, when I wish I could talk to my sister like sisters do… so many things I have been robbed of, because of the way 13 words have been interpreted: ‘everyone who confesses the name of the Lord must turn away from wickedness’. (2 Timothy 2, v 19)

I’m not bitter, but I am hurt.  I will be hurt until the day I get to heaven, because there’s no getting round this one.  Sure, the raw edges have healed, but it’s like an amputation – just because the stump has healed, doesn’t mean that the limbs have been restored.

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Some of us are paddling hard, some of us have been through the rough bits,
and some of us are taking the ride of our lives! And we’re all in it together.

One wise writer reminded us that we sometimes bring our culturally influenced mindsets to scripture when we read. He challenged us to shed the dualistic worldview that colors too many interpretations, to choose instead to see the wholeness of the human person, and of the word of God. 

In our day, the science/religion debate seems to me like a debate between a pre 17th century cosmology and a 17th century cosmology.  I feel that as the 17th century cosmology – that everything can be explained by the laws of physics – a mechanistic materialism viewpoint – as this view becomes more prominent: the dualism of the Greeks becomes more attractive.  It is almost as if contemporary religious thinkers accept fully the 17th century cosmology, but say “yes, that may be true, but there is another realm, the spiritual realm, and we have the key to that realm.”  “All you have to do is say the right words and you can be a part of this realm too, you can be saved and enter heaven.” 

Our traveling poet returned home with some rich words to share, underlining the importance of the Holy Spirit at work in us as we read and wrestle with the Word:

so I read with an interpreter
the Holy Spirit
gifted, poured out 
and into me

how much better
to request living water
and let go, trusting
He will make all things
the hard, complicated
sticky things
clear in His perfect timing

help me then, Lord
to remember to release it all
that my answer to 
what do I with the hard things?
would be
I lay them at His feet

Two writers wrote lovingly of their growth in understanding using more contemplative practices for reading the Bible. One combined prose and poetry to create a beautiful reflection:

Over time, my ‘bible-thumping-in-your-face-are-you-saved?‘ days gave way to deeper reflection and grace. Made space for the ‘not knowing’ aspects of faith.

Now I am leaning toward the Contemplative and finding church is everywhere 

So why should I, with great temerity,
expect You to reveal all things to me?
Should I not make room, give space
for the protective nature of Your grace
Allow for Your Spirit to open my eyes
in a gradual way ~ day after day
Knowing I can only handle so much
surprise, information, knowledge, as such?

The second referenced a wonderful book by Ruth Haley Barton (“Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation”) and included a great outline for the practice of lectio divina, which I heartily recommend. 

It is listening in a spirit of silence and of awe for the still, small voice of God that speaks to us personally.

It’s different than in-depth Bible Study, which is much needed and important to the understanding of scriptures.  Many of us have done a lot of that already, but this is a reflective reading.

Reading a passage of scripture, I listen for a word or phrase that strikes me in some way, stands out from the rest. And I pay attention to the words that bring resistance, for it is often in the things I resist that I find God has something to say to me. 

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At the end of the day, it is good to rest on the water and enjoy the view!

The last of the linkers (linkees?) came at this question from a different angle, and from a different background — and reading her words was both informative and delightful. She took the word ‘hard,’ which most of us defined as difficult to understand, and stood it on its head a bit by defining it as describing those things which are difficult for us to do. What a great insight! Sometimes it’s easier for us to roam widely around a perceived error or culturally dense decree or some other fine detail in scripture which doesn’t demand one thing from us in day-to-day life. 

There are many passages which, with more cultural and historical understanding, become less confusing. We spend a lot of time on those but to me they are not really the hard parts.

The parts of the Bible that are hard for me are those parts where I learn that God wants me to live differently. When his expectations of his covenant people are laid out before my eyes and I know that I fall short. Not only that, I know that I don’t always want to change. But what I have found is that it is hard not to. If we keep at it, if we let the words work their way into the innermost parts of our being, change often happens.

SO true — all pieces of this! Often we don’t want to change, but if we hang in there, if we keep reading, and, as this writer suggests further in the essay — if we spend quiet, contemplative time with those words that are hard for us to live — we do find ourselves being changed! Amazing.

Readily acknowledging that some in our community have been battered by biblical misinterpretation and even abuse, she shared a different story:

No one ever used the Bible as a weapon against me. It’s just a place of great discoveries. New stories, new meanings in familiar stories. Poetry, proverbs, Wisdom, history, law, letters, gospels and even the still very odd in my eyes Book of Revelation. They are all wonderful treasures and they change me.

When I read the Bible I am learning about God and about God’s relationship with his people. I am one of those people. I am learning how God wants us/me to live.

EXACTLY! Our Book is a gift to us, despite the attempts of too many to use it as a weapon. It is, as the psalmist says, ‘sweeter than honey,’ and is one of the primary ways in which the Holy Spirit works within us to conform us to the image of Christ. Thanks be to God!

 

At this point, I am still uncertain if I will be undergoing surgery to repair the torn tendon in my left ankle, so I cannot say with what frequency I will be posting in the next few weeks. I’ve got several book reviews coming up AND about 4 columns/posts at two of the online magazines for which I write. All of these will show up over the next month or so; they’re in the queue and ready to roll.

I’d appreciate your continuing prayers as we make decisions and hear options. 

Filed Under: biblical reflection, Blogging, community, Encouragement, God's gifts, Hard Things, hope, Living the Answers, Living the Questions, Q & A

Great Lent: The Hard Lessons

March 4, 2014 By

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Ash Wednesday.

It’s exceptionally late this year, and still, I am not quite ready for it.

The first Wednesday after Transfiguration Sunday, every year. From light to dark, from triumph to seeming defeat, from intimations of divinity to the deepest confirmation of humanity — that’s how the church year flows.

We enjoyed communion together on Transfiguration Sunday and a lovely reflection on Light, with a capital “L.” I loved the candles everywhere, and a couple of old hymns mixed in with the more contemporary music of the day.

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I have written many times about the power of the sacraments in my own journey, the bread, the cup, the font. These simple, tangible things speak so loudly to me, reminding me of the heart of our story — God come low, encased in flesh, suffering as we all do, finding glory in the small things. (Remember those lilies of the field?)

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The candles everywhere this last Sunday were another tactile reminder of spiritual truth: we are called to shine, to reflect the Light that is ours because of Jesus, to be lamps on the hill, steadily showing the way home. 

These days, however, my lamp is flickering at best, on its way to extinguishing at worst. And right here, right here, in the midst of the low light — this is Lent for me in 2014. I find myself sidelined, unable to do the things I am used to doing. So I am looking for quiet activities, challenges, practices. So, I will be reading through the New Testament with Margaret Feinberg and Shelly Miller. And I will try to be gentle with myself and with those I love, as Elizabeth Esther has invited us to do. 

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And through all of that, I am trying to pursue my word for this year, this difficult year, with it’s difficult word — obedient. 

I am also working through several books, written by friends I’ve met online. “Found,” by Micha Boyett, “Spiritual Misfit,” by Michelle DeRusha, “Unfollowers,” by Ed Cyzewski (and Derek Cooper), and “Love Idol,” by Jennifer Dukes Lee, to name four.

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And it’s that last one that has me over a Lenten barrel this year. Jen is asking us to name our ‘love idols,’ those things that get in the way of fully entering into the identity that is ours because of Jesus. Our hunger for approval, our insatiable need to perform so we’ll be loved, our try-harder, there’s-not-enough-to-go-round roller coaster-riding attempts to earn accolades/acceptance/inclusion/identity.

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And I gotta say, I’m not likin’ this exercise very much. Not much at all. 

All my life I have worked hard. I have mastered certain skills, learned to smile through the pain, proven myself competent and capable, convinced that I need to do it all myself because I am strong! I am sturdy! I am BIG! 

Painted in WaterlogueBut when I receive those ashes tomorrow night — when I read and hear the familiar words, “From dust you were created, to dust you shall return. Repent and believe the gospel” — I will be struggling not to dissolve in a very un-sturdy puddle.

Because this Lent, I am painfully aware of how very, very dusty I am. I find myself needing to ask for help, to let others do for me what I am oh-so-capable of doing for myself, thank-you-very-much. Because right now? I am feeling my limits, I am carrying my infirmities, I am feeling hemmed in and strung out and so, so tired.

I have learned how to be quite self-sufficient in my life. I can take care of myself (and several others) without too much difficulty most of the time. And that has led me to a very tricky place, a particularly painful bend in the road. I cannot do what I am used to doing. I simply cannot. These split-tears in the peroneus brevis tendon of my left foot have me hobbled, literally.*

I need to be still, not active. I need to move slowly, not quickly. I need to stay put.

And everything in me is resisting this reality, fighting against it with anger and discouragement and confusion.

And I.AM.STUCK.

Whether I like it or not — and I most assuredly do not! — I cannot be self-sufficient for a while. So I am being forced to look at this idol of mine, full frontal, and it is not a pretty sight. 

For too many years, I have relied on my sturdy constitution, a moderately good mind and my natural interest in caring for others to distract me from the truth: I cannot do this life on my own. I need other people to help me through and most of all, I need to acknowledge that God is God and I am not.

So as Lent unfolds, I will be searching my heart, opening the closets of my soul, and blowing the dust out of the corners of my mind in an attempt to get my priorities straight.
The idol of self-sufficiency has got to go. 

What is being asked of you for Lent this year?

 

 

*And I may very well be facing into surgery and a long recovery. Your prayers would be appreciated.

Joining this with Michelle, Jen, Jennifer, Laura.

Filed Under: Blogging, community, Confession, Hard Things, Lent, Lenten Journey, personal journey, Spiritual Formation, Suffering

Q & A — Tuesday Wrap-Up: Week Seven

March 4, 2014 By

Painted in Waterlogue

What an amazing collection of words have flown around the blogosphere this week, just here, in our small corner! Thanks to each of you who linked a post on this week’s question — which was: Why do bad things happen to good people?   And thanks to each of you who contributed to the comments thread, too. We’ve been pushing through some tough stuff the last few weeks and I am grateful to each of you for hanging in for the duration, for wrestling well, and for sharing your insights and your questions with all of us.

Every one of the posts this week spoke to some piece of my heart and I encourage you, if you have not already done so, to read each one. Our group is small enough to make that very doable, indeed. It will be well worth your time, I promise.

A pastor friend in Pennsylvania, on the verge of a major move with her young family, wrote an exquisite post this week, weaving together quotes from three writers, and touching on birds, dancers and Mercy. I dare you to read these words without tears!

You are not lost, dear ones, you are held, though you may not yet be aware of it. 

This Mercy, this tender mercy, it is the key to endurance, the doorway to hope, the promise of joy in the midst of deep and tragic sorrow.  

I have only waited for a little thing – a house, a home, a promise – and maybe this song I sing seems as foolish to you as the voices of the birds did that snowy day.  What can I say to convince you?  

There are not words, my friends. 

So I’m singing today in the face of winter, singing from a place I’m coming to know, lifting notes that crack and fail to carry just as often as they sometimes soar.  I’m singing this song of hope in the waiting, pressing these tender shoots of green against the snow and ice, dancing these slow, strange steps with a Partner I cannot always see.

Spring will come, love will unfold, and when it does, you will be found in its midst, held, protected, embraced.

Oh.My.Word.

Another friend from the cold east revisited an old post of hers, a beautiful prayer of thanksgiving after reflecting on deep losses in her life:

You knew my path.

You provided people who
journeyed with me,.
people who did not give answers,
but gave themselves.
And now I can thank You,
not that you allowed the loss –
but that you knew my path
through the loss.

You knew all I would learn
as I processed this deep loss.
And You did not spare me.

You knew I would learn to
“Pay Attention . . . ”
to  see more clearly
your activity in the midst of
daily life.

You knew the self-awareness
that comes from processing grief
would give me the confidence
to stand on my own two feet.

You knew my path.

Everyone who contributed to the conversation this week affirmed the truth of that last line, despite incredibly difficult circumstances for many of us.

A voice of deep wisdom, reflecting a life of rich experience and conviction, took a two-pronged approach. He looked briefly at the historical roots for what he finds to be an American political and religious heresy — the belief that “God’s favor is manifest in material blessings.” To me, this is an important idea, one that we need to think through and speak against, primarily because the logical antecedent to such thinking is that suffering and struggle are indications of God’s disfavor. . . which is what gives rise to exactly the question we’re looking at this week! Prong two sprang from his own personal journey right now, as he walks through a terminal illness:

So from April until September I was in bed on my back. 

But during this time, I realized that I could still pray.  I spent many quiet hours in bed, just being quiet, meditating and praying. 

The treatment I was on failed and in September I started Chemo Therapy, so that as I was trying to recuperate from the surgeries, my body was taking a hit from the chemo.  But that period of quiet, of lying for months on my back gave me the serenity to deal with my status in this life/death cycle.  I don’t consider my situation as a “bad thing” that is happening to me.  I have a wonderful family and church community, and I will live until I die.  But God is with me.

But God is with me. YES! Right there, in the midst of the struggle — this is the gift of Presence, the fulfillment of the promise given as Jesus ascended into heaven, “Lo, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Another voice, again one of deep wisdom born of chronic illness, gave witness to the ultimate story of bad things happening to a good person — Jesus himself:

He didn’t deserve to die. We don’t deserve His sacrifice. Bad things happen to good people. Sadly, this is a sinful, fallen world.

We live in an upside-down, here-but-not-here-yet Kingdom where we begin to accept the cloud of unknowing is part of belonging. 

And we look to the cross. Consider Calvary. Weep for the loss and rejoice in the resurrection. Marvel that His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. 

All He asks is for us to lean on Him. Rest on His word. Seek strength and help in time of need. Find comfort and share it with others.

Meanwhile, we live with smoke and mirrors, with mystery and mayhem, with pain and with promise, with unanswered questions and faith. . . 

Prayer draws us nearer to God’s heart and there we find all the comfort and reassurance we need to keep us afloat. We begin to see an open door of hope through the painful places.

Though we may still emerge with unanswered questions, in the listening and leaning we learn to release the pressing need to know and rest in trusting all that we do understand.

Our traveling poetess returned home just in time to contribute these lovely and succinct words:

I am learning to surrender
my need to know
giving up the why?
again and again
I find myself confessing
my heart on its knees
let it be enough to know that You know
so we can move on
to the now what?
remembering we are still in Your arms
even when nothing feels safe
or certain

 help us turn the question
on its head, and ask instead
why do we deserve all the good poured out upon us?

 grace, Your grace alone

I loved these words, offered just prior to telling the stories of  ‘three good men,‘ each of whom suffered greatly, two of whom died in the midst of the pain. As always, stories are powerful tools of Truth, especially as we are trying to live the questions. . .

Nobody is actually good. Really, we all deserve much worse than we get. It’s one of those things you decide to believe to be humble and reverent, while somewhere inside you’re mad because these bad things just don’t seem right. 

And these words? Wisdom way beyond the writer’s years!

Suffering catches us in the middle of things and feels like chaos. The attempt to lay out sensible reasons and answers feels to me like trying to lasso a tornado. I remember declaring vehemently to a friend: “I don’t want God to tell me why Dad died, because I know I wouldn’t really understand it, and no answer would seem good enough.” I find it disturbing that in their arguments for God’s sovereignty, some people seem to stretch “God works all things together for good” to “all things are good.” I’m confident both God’s power and His love will survive without that kind of mental gymnastics. I hope that as we all continue to grow and to know God better, that we will learn to see how He touches us as whole people, beings of body and mind and heart. We don’t have to make God work for us. He is present with us–as present with our broken hearts as with our careful theology. We don’t have to make everything work. Because He is, and is with us, no matter what.

 These opening words surprised my by their logical clarity — why didn’t I think of that?

No one seems to feel God has to explain why good things happen, and everyone seems quite at ease with bad things afflicting the Bad. Of course Good things happening to Bad people is often fodder for a few outraged headlines, but in the end, we are concerned with ourselves, and we rarely consider ourselves bad.

This same writer then continued to dig deep and to speak to her own greatest fear — that her children would suffer:

I have been so scared at times, not knowing, simply not knowing.
And not trusting.
I am not ready to let them be free. Free in the loving care of Jesus.
I hold my daughters in chains.

Bad things must not happen to the fruit of my womb.

And I am thrown again on the passage from Romans 8 where Paul insists that nothing can keep us from the love of God. Surely that is the most important thing for us to hope for.  That we are never separated from God’s love. . . 

My head accepts things far more readily than my heart. Should serious harm ever come to my dear girls I make no promise I won’t rant and rail and I am sure I may well doubt the love of God. And I will have need of friends who will sit with me in the dark times clinging on to my old certainties for me whilst I can not.

May my love for my daughters set them free to follow Christ and lead me to love, serve and intercede for all his daughters and sons.

My lovely young friend from New Zealand poured her heart out on her brand-new blog, agonizing over a national tragedy in her country and over her own terror for the safety of her husband and children. This post got injured in the link-up and was only connected late in the day yesterday, so if you have not read it, I urge you to follow the link and read every word:

Despite praying for their children’s protection, their parents, families and friends were left grieving and devastated.  And the question nags at me – why do I pray for my family’s protection when God may chose not to answer it?  What is the point of praying this way?

The best answer I’ve got is that I can’t not.  I ask God to protect the ones I love, because I trust Him, and because that is my part.  My part is to ask, His is to answer.  I have no control over the answer, but if I have at least asked, then I have done my part. . . 

We got to the part of the service where we have communion, and as we were singing the song following communion, I was hit by a revelation.  I had just had communion, which somehow joins me both to Christ, and to the rest of His body.  I knew that my family (still in the cult I left) would have had communion earlier that morning, and I thought about Diana and all of the rest of the people I am getting to know on the interwebs, who would be having communion while I was asleep.  I thought about my sister-in-law who died a month ago, and remembered the line in the Anglican liturgy that talks about the whole body of saints, those who have gone before, those who are here now, and those who are to come… and I realised that in some way, despite all our differences of denomination, location and even state of being, we are ALL ONE in Christ.  Taking communion is actually a point of connection with my family, who are believers but major on the minors, my friends, who are believers who happen to live on the other side of the world, and my sister-in-law who was a believer and is now ‘in Christ’.

For some reason, I’ve never really seen it that way before – despite our worst denominational efforts, we are all part of one body, and the griefs, tragedies and heartache that we have to deal with cannot change that.

I don’t really know how that ties in to why bad things happen to good people… except that it is all a mystery.  How this whole thing works, good or bad, is a mystery.  We truly are living in the shadowlands, and there is so much we never see or understand.  I cannot trust that God will always answer my prayers the way I want Him too, but I can always trust what I know and have seen of the character of God – He is kind, just, merciful and ‘has compassion on us because He knows that we are dust.’

You all did such stellar work and I am so grateful for every one of you. Please read through the comments section, too, because there are some gems in there. Here are just two:

Asking “why” only wearies me and makes me a bit crazy. Because there are no answers I try not to go there. My prayers in times of sorrow are usually ” please let me feel your presence and walk with me”. I look at the world and no one is without their own private grief. Why should I be exempt? The rain falls on all of us. And so does the sunshine!

 

I have to work from the foundation of this truth…God is Love… And true love never forces Itself on anyone….so much of this suffering is at the hands of other broken people…and so often people wonder ….why won’t God deal with that rebellious son….husband…but what that means most of the time is…why doesn’t God shorten my suffering and deal hard with the other person….but if we think about it…when we want God to be the ” enforcer” in someone else’s life…where are we willing to let Him be the same in our lives….where do I want my free will to be violated. 

God has been good to us, to give us each other for this stretch of the journey. My thanks to each of you as we head toward home this week.

Friday’s question: What do I do with all the hard/weird stuff in the Bible?

 

 

 

Filed Under: biblical reflection, Blogging, community, Confession, death, Encouragement, Hard Things, Living the Answers, Living the Questions, personal journey, Q & A, Suffering

Q & A: Tuesday Wrap-Up – Week Six

February 25, 2014 By

Painted in Waterlogue
In the midst of nausea and exhaustion this week, I was delighted to see some newcomers joining their posts to the link-up and to meet a couple of new folks in the comments section, too. It has been such a joy to listen in as you all talk to one another (and to me), asking good, hard questions, offering personal experiences by way of answer. At this stage of my life, it’s the personal stories that tell me the truest things I know. It’s not theological debate, it is most certainly not drawing any kind of line in the sand. It is story. Stories of God’s faithfulness, stories of feeling lost, stories of being found. So I thank you for sharing your stories with me and with each other. I truly believe this is how we grow, that this is how the pieces come just a little bit closer to fitting.

One new contributor told the story of finding safety in a women’s group, of hearing heart-felt sharing and coming to see how beauty shines brightly right in the middle of the broken pieces:

Because our lives are full of broken shards but God makes art with the pieces. No one escapes the hammer of a world turned against itself and we live shattered in a million jagged pieces. We walk around cut and try to put together the pieces with a good night cream and a pep talk.

Oh, yeah, I’ve heard enough pep talks in my day – I’ve even given a few too many pep talks in my day! but all that is really needed is a sympathetic heart, and ears tuned to hear the whisper of redemption, even in the midst of the hard places. 

Another new friend spoke powerfully of redemption found in the bleakest of circumstances, giving testimony to the promises of God made real in the midst of deep sorrow:

So, as always, I took it to Jesus. My all time, ultimate healer. I cried out, through my tears, and much pain, asking Him how was I going to get through all of this?? I said, I am totally broken, never going to be whole again. Jesus said, ‘No, No, No!! You are wrong my daughter. I am the Potter, you are the clay. I will collect all of your broken pieces, put them together, and recreate you. No, you will not be quite the same as you were before the stroke, but, you will still be you, AND YOU ARE WHO I LOVE!!

An online friend dug through her archives to find one of my favorite of her posts from mid-2013. And she quoted one of my go-to lines when the waters of my life become rough and unsettled:

And I didn’t know what to make of it all, only that it wasn’t going well and I couldn’t fix it, not any of it.   

But somewhere in the middle of it all, as I stood desperate in the kitchen, the words of Julian of Norwich came to me.  Julian, who lived her life cloistered in a cell with two windows – one that faced out on the world and one that faced the alter and cross.  Julian, who lived in a time of war and plague and deep anxiety, yet dared to believe and claim that we are all held, all sustained by the love of God, her words echoed through me,

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Julian’s words sank into me like an anchor, a life-line, restoring, reconnecting me to the One who is life, the One who was and is and will make all things well.  So I wrote them down on contact paper and posted them over the sink.

In the midst of several new contributors, there were some wonderful post from our ‘regulars.’ I loved these words about the sacrifice of relinquishment:

The shards of our shattered hopes and dreams become a marvelous mosaic in God’s hands.

When we take those broken pieces of our lives, frayed fabric of our days, torn edges of our thoughts, tangled threads of our theology, gaps and holes in our flawed and imperfect understanding ~ all become sacrificial surrender, holy offering, and a handing over to the Master Potter and Architect of our souls.

He alone can fully mend, heal, renew and restore to better than it was before. We seek, ask, do our part, trust, rest, and leave the outcome up to Him. 

It isn’t easy. Everything inside cries out to know and understand beforehand. Relinquishing control is a challenge.

Another regular contributor used the book of Ecclesiastes as the still center for his wonderings about making the pieces fit. The words of The Preacher in that great book of Old Testament wisdom has been speaking grace and peace into this writer’s life for decades:

I think we miss the point of the third chapter of Ecclesiastes – There is a time and place for everything under the sun.  This chapter is usually used as a consoling text – take heart, it all fits together.  What is usually not understood is that the point of Ecclesiastes is that we will never know how it fits together.  What this chapter is doing is listing all of the contradictions of life: birth, death, war, peace – they are all a part of the human experience.   There may be a time for each experience, but it is not given to us to know when that time is. “ Vanity of vanity’, saith the preacher,’ all is vanity.”  

A long-time friend-of-the-web posted a link to his post from earlier in the week, just because I asked him to. I loved the way he wrestled with the very question we’ve posed for the week. . . without even knowing the question had been posed! And he used humor to do his work:

We unpacked life, layer after layer, and the more I thought about it, the more I considered the breadth and scope of our time here. It’s a wild ride; isn’t that cliche? Apologies. I’ve always been predisposed to cliche. Old habits die hard. Shoot; there I go again! Let me try again, because if at first I didn’t succeed, and all of that. We unpacked life and I considered how it is composed  of a series of both unfortunate and fortunate events. I considered how both pain and joy are gifts, how they teach us what it means to be alive to the presence of God around us, in us, and through us. Without pain, where is the need for communion with God? Without joy, where is the thankfulness cultivated by God at work in us? Joy and pain, yin and yang–they bring the balance to this thing we call grace. All is grace. This could become cliche if we let it, almost the stuff of silver linings. But it’s much more than that. Consider it. The snow of winter–its melting gives way to the shoots of spring. The sickness of the child–it draws us deeper into our need for trust in an eternal God. The community of faith, the wife, the children–they keep us moving forward.

And a newer-web-friend did the exact same thing this week! She wrestled with the ideas we’ve been tossing around and agreed to link her beautiful musings with our conversation. I loved discovering that the Spirit of God is hovering over the waters of the internet, blowing similar truths in a variety of directions. Here are her words about ‘holding the reins lightly,’ — written before my own were penned:

The spiritual reality is likely the most important, the most real, but I can’t let it crowd out the rest. If I’m going to write honestly and live honestly, I can’t forget the ground beneath my feet. I can’t forget what 5 pm feels like.

And it isn’t only honesty at stake. It is also love. If I am going to love my neighbor well, I can’t stop seeing the dirtiness of my own patch of dirt. I can’t forget that we are all together in this land of muddy snow and headaches and 5 pm yelling.

Maybe, the trick is not learning to hold on to two true things. Maybe, there aren’t two realities: one spiritual, the other temporal. Maybe there is only the one. Maybe I must learn to see without splitting everything in two.

Maybe, there is glory in the dirt.

YES!! “Glory in the dirt,” living right, smack-dab in the middle of the paradox, holding the joy and the sorrow together. And as we work to hold the various pieces of our life together, forming some kind of cohesive whole, this regular contributor reminded us of where the center truly is:

Others have suffered too and continue to do so. I weep for them and do what I can (and I know I can always do more) to build a kingdom of justice and peace. To comfort the weeping and console the hurt.

(And these others are the only ones who know if they too have been blessed through their suffering. That is not for me to say.)

In all this my only certainty is that Christ loves each and every one of us with a heart that yearns for us to be at peace, to know our common humanity and to live in his Kingdom.

Love. God’s love for us. That holds all the pieces together. And I hold on to that.

I want to hold onto that, too! But there are days, even seasons in our lives, when it’s painful to do even that, close to impossible to hold onto the reality of the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. A writer new to blogging, but not new to this blog, asked these questions as she wrestled with this topic:

And what to do with the fact that most of us are hurting for one reason or another – everyone has their own pain, and some days even that knowledge is almost overwhelming, and I wonder how God could have created the world in the first place, knowing how much anguish and suffering would occur…

I don’t know how to make it all fit.  Life hurts. God is good.  How do these two things make sense together?

At this point, the only answer I have, is to give up the questions.  The only way I can find peace for my mind and heart is to stop trying to make it all make sense, and turn my eyes on Him – not for the answers He can give me, but to find rest for my soul.

Like a child, hiding in his mother’s lap when it all becomes too much, too overwhelming.

The only way I know to make all the pieces fit is to stop trying to make them fit, and hand them all to God.  To stop trying to see the ‘bigger picture’ and make it all make sense, and instead focus on Him and His love for me.

He loves me!  And I can trust Him to make it all fit.

And this is the very best place to land, isn’t it? In a place of trust and relinquishment, choosing to believe that God is big enough to handle all the confusion that we carry inside our souls.

The last link in the list this week spoke about sacred space and what a gift certain places on the planet can be for us, speaking peace into our restlessness and hope into our despair. I can so relate to this! For me, that sacred space is either at the beach or in my own backyard, surrounded in both places by the wonders of creation: 

This. This is why I come here Here I am reminded of your existence, of your character, And why I can trust you when the pieces don’t fit

And I am reminded. I can hold in tension two truths about life Sometimes it’s hard, desperately difficult Sometimes it’s good, heart-stoppingly beautiful And You are present In both. For today it’s enough for me.

And for today, this is enough from me. I have neither blog space nor energy to dip into the comments this week. Please know I read (and usually reply to) every single one and I thank God for your willingness to engage these questions each week. Together, we are living into the answers — even when we cannot discover a cut-and-dried, formulaic set of words or ideas, we are still living into the answers.

Friday’s question: Why do bad things happen to good people?

 

Filed Under: Blogging, community, Encouragement, Hard Things, hope, Living the Answers, Living the Questions, Q & A

Q & A: Week Six – Holding the Reins Lightly

February 21, 2014 By

This week’s ‘Living the Question:’ How do I make all the pieces fit?

Next week’s Question: Why do bad things happen to good people?

Links to each post in this series can be found in the introductory portion of this post.
 Waterlogue (3) shoreline viewSo, it’s been a week.
Not one of my favorites,
and I’m looking for the lessons in it.
So far, I don’t like what I see.

Because what I see is the truth:
some days, life stinks.
People you love deal with worrisome things,
you feel like you’re caught
in the middle of a personal
third-time’s-a-charm kinda deal,
only there’s no charm to be found.

And that close encounter with a good God
you had last week?
Well, that’s last week’s news.

But then. . .
you read words that nourish,
or you spy a photo that 
gives your soul wings.
A bird calls,
the breeze blows,
and the sun shines brightly
on the water.

And you remember.
You remember that this is
what it means to be
a human person,
living on planet earth.

There is so much pain,
struggle, outright evil.

And there is so much beauty,
goodness and wonder.

Together. Always together.

And most of it is way beyond
our power to control.
Yes, we are invited into a
partnership, of sorts.
A dance, with the God of the Cosmos,
who chooses to work stealthily,
covertly, through very leaky vessels.

Like you. And like me.

And there is no explaining it,
not any of it.
Except to say
it is, indeed,
a mystery.

And the bigger mystery,
at least to my eye,
is this one:
the good stuff.
All the good stuff:
the beauty of creation,
the selflessness of some,
the revelations of modern
science and technology,
the miracle of a true friend.

Large or small,
new or old,
I cannot find a way to
tell you why there is anything
redeemable at all
in this crazy, wide world.

If I think about it at all,
which I do, on occasion,
I ‘get’ the bad stuff,
the ‘nature, red in tooth and claw.’

But I can’t for the life of me 
figure out why
a hummingbird hovers
so perfectly,
or when love happens,
or why it lasts.

I can’t reason it out,
make it fit the facts.

So I’m learning to live in the 
valley between,
holding two realities in
creative tension,
very, very loosely.

And in the process,
I’m learning more about God
and more about myself
than I sometimes wish I knew.

But then, that’s the way with questions, right?
That’s the way with questions.

Waterlogue (4) paddle surfer

Not sure I feel exactly upright this week, but looking at this photo, ‘watercolored’ through a phone app, reminds me that it’s good to keep afloat whenever possible! Just these few quiet reflections for you all today as I continue to recuperate from the flu. I did find this wonderful comment today, from one of our regular conversationalists to another in the comments section of one of their blogs. A lovely summary statement of ‘making the pieces fit,’ I think. Please let me see your words on this important question. Maybe by wrap-up day, I’ll have a few more to add, but I’m not countin’ on it!

“I feel like a ‘work in progress’ too! What else can we be unless we determine to stop growing. Sometimes the chisel cuts, sometimes the smoothing away of rough corners hurts. But unlike works of art we take part in our creation and moulding. And we know that the desired outcome is nothing less than to make manifest our unique beloved perfection.” – from Juliet’s comment on Joy’s blog

Click on the froggie to link your specific blog post. It looks different because it is different. Starting last week, they changed the system.

Filed Under: Beauty, Birds, Blogging, community, Confession, Encouragement, Hard Things, hope, Lament, Living the Answers, Living the Questions, Mystery, Q & A, Surfing!

Q & A Tuesday (well, Wednesday!) Wrap-Up: Week Five

February 19, 2014 By

WaterlogueThis fuzzy version of a photo of mine sort of sums up this week. Not one I want to remember, to tell you the truth. And no, I have not missed the irony of such a week when immersed in a series that has taken a turn toward wrestling with suffering. Somehow, the isolation, upset and disequilibrium wrought by a nasty stomach virus seems fitting, don’t you think? 

I am grateful for your faithful reading of a too-long essay last Friday and for the responses you formed, either here in the comments or on your own blogs. As always, you make me think and you remind me that we don’t take this journey by ourselves. There was some beautiful, lyrical work done out there in response to this question and I can see that most of you have already learned a lot about living into it.

I don’t know about you, but these lines just sing to me right now, as I slowly find my way back to normalcy. Such a beautiful ribbon of love woven through this:

And all through this week, though I am ashamed to admit it, I am also proud that I have at last really heard the declarations of love surrounding me. I have stood up tall and accepted that I am loved.  The dam broke, the river flowed and in the middle of it, swirling and twisting in delight, there was I, there Am I, bathed, buoyed up and revivified by this living water of love. I heard the message in hugs, smiles, kisses, on Facebook and Twitter, through the post, in the holding of a hand.

I am powerful and vulnerable. The Spirit dwells in me and I am loved.

We all need weeks like that, don’t we? Weeks that remind us of the truth, weeks in which we accept the truth and live it. I’m looking for one of those weeks to drift my way soon!

Our most frequent poet is on a road trip this week, but another of you posted a lovely verse, reminding us that we don’t do this suffering thing alone:

If each person is an island , then
we’re all floating in a communal sea
desperately trying not to drown
It takes courage to swim against the tide
when there’s no sheltering place to hide
Until a safe harbour hoves into view
tugging gentle on our heartstrings
willing us to steer strong and true
Vessels rest weary, depleted, worn,
storm-battered, tattered, torn
Ready to refuel and be restored again,
seeking respite for a little longer
we prepare to face fierce winds and rain
Now with our Captain at the helm
these surging tides no longer overwhelm

A new contributor this week dug through her (awesome) archives and found this gem from a Lenten meditation last year.

“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” says Jesus.

To be human is to feel pain and sorrow, to sit breaking and broken as the tears roll down.  We hold-on for as long as we can, clutching tight to the old, the known, and then finally, letting go at last, we feel the fear of falling as the thin skin of safety, the strong walls of that which holds us give way to something more. 

And all along the dark, dry and narrow passage that leads us continually from death to life, the gift of tears comes to water us, to nourish our thirsty souls and the seeds of life within. 

Thank God for that gift of tears!

I read one post this week that just shredded me, and I asked its author to link it up for all of you. I am so grateful for her story about a church that welcomes brokenness, and makes a safe place for sorrow. If you have not already done so, I encourage you to read each of these posts in their entirety. They are all wonderful:

I believe the brokenness is beautiful….I think God does too.

I long for the day when the fire pit is pulled right inside. When there is space for brokenness and space for healing. I long for a time when my story and my church are not the exception, where people say to people:

Isn’t church the place where all those broken people gather and love on each other?

The brokenness is an offering. Even before it is healed. The brokenness is holy too.

Two of our ‘originals’ took advantage of the extra day for linking and each of them spoke eloquently of their own journeys through sorrow, discovering how to live loved in the midst of it. One young woman wrote eloquently of visiting old grief from the vantage point of several years, and learning so much from the journey:

My journal entries for my Composition 1 class are very much the assertions of a good girl. Reading them now, I feel sad for her. Why did she try so hard? Why did she force everything through her good-girl grid? Why did she skate, skate, skate over the top of her life?

All this helped me trust God with my suffering in new ways. As I wrote my pages about death, I remembered and chronicled what I actually saw and felt. I wrote it mindful of God’s love with me then, of His seeing and caring for me as I really was.  When I lived the experience, I was always trying to figure out how I should act, what I should do. Not until ten years later did I allow that it had all been too much for me. I accepted myself to have been a young, sad, overwhelmed daughter in an awful situation and I knew God’s compassion for me. I did not have to explain the shadows, did not have to bring God, like a lantern, into them–He was already there, with me.

And she shared the sweetest song, one that she wrote about dealing well with her grief after the passage of time. Hop over and listen.

And an older friend (closer to my own age!), talked about the same kind of process from the vantage point of decades and how the words of a friend/advisor helped her learn to let go of the comparison-game in thinking about her own journey through the valley:

And then  few months later
I told you I felt guilty
as I compared
my loss of a brother
to my sister-in-law’s loss of a husband.
That was surely worse,
wasn’t it?

And you reminded me not to quantify grief.
Everyone’s grief is their own, you said
and cannot be compared
to another’s grief.
Losing a brother is different
from a wife losing a husband
from a daughter losing a dad
from a son losing a dad
from a father losing a son
from a mother losing a son.
and even though
you had lost a brother
you did not lose my brother.

For grief minimized is pain unaddressed. And the pain is carried for years buried beneath the living of life only to re-surface. 

There was richness in the comments again this week, too. A good reminder that the bedrock of ‘living loved’ has to be our connection to God, not to anyone else:

Imagine close to 75 children, surrounding you singing a beautiful birthday song while they handed me a big sheet signed by everyone with words about how much they loved me. The song went on for about 5 minutes while I stood there in tears. It is wonderful to feel loved, but it is fleeting. Knowing you are loved by God is the rock under the doubt of human love, but I don’t always put my feet down. Anyway, thank you for this wisdom. It truly is the key to withstanding suffering. The physical suffering can be tolerated in a variety of ways, but not feeling loved cannot be tolerated. It is constant pain. Loving ourselves helps us love others, as you know, and is our first duty every day.

And this richness, from one who has learned to live loved over her lifetime:

if we don’t truly believe God is love and everything comes through his heart of love…we filter the sorrow and suffering of this world with the wrong lens…it’s knowing we are loved that buoys us in the seas of the unknown..it hold us through the dark…this revelation of His love has transformed my relationship with Him and others…not that I have arrived…but this scandalous love of His has changed the trajectory of my life and has brought me to a greater place of rest. I feel like I have just put my toes in the waters of His great ocean of love and we have now and eternity to dive into the depth of the sea of His Love. 

A good reminder that the ‘sliding scale’ of suffering I referenced can be problematic at both ends of the spectrums – underplaying or overplaying:

You mention a sliding scale when it comes to suffering. VERY good point. We often are too quick to minimize what we’re facing, going through right now – or at the other end of it – maximizing it. Lord help us to see clearly our situations and then open up our hearts to you and let it pour out. THEN we can open our hands to receive the grace we need for that moment.

And a great reminder that not all suffering is physical in nature:

As with physical pain, we all experience emotional pain differently. Emotional pain cannot be seen, or compared. We empathize and console by gently walking alongside.

Another addition to the pile of stuff that can get in the way of living loved looks exactly like this:

I struggle with condemnation, as if Jesus’ blood wasn’t enough to pay for my sin……..as if! As if my groveling and feeling bad will make it better. (We looked at Romans Chapter 9 at our Home Group the other night…this is fresh in my brain. :-) Does that make sense? My greatest giants are the ones I fight in my head but I’m getting better at throwing the truth at them, much more early and often.

And a late commenter summed it up quite well, don’t you think?

Learning to feel loved is a life-time quest for so many, and that’s why we do such silly things. The Buechner quote was fantastic, as it shows the dichotomy of living in this world, between one existence and another. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to be a struggle. And if I really embodied the fact that I am loved, then that changes everything !

My thanks to each of you for your faithful reading and commenting and writing. Even in the middle of a yucky week, your words have lifted and encouraged me. And I am grateful.

If all goes well, I’ll be back here on Friday with a new question to wrestle with and live into:

How do I make all the pieces fit?

 

Filed Under: Blogging, community, Encouragement, Living the Answers, Living the Questions, personal journey, Q & A

Q & A: Week Four – The Gift of Tears

February 7, 2014 By

WARNING:

THIS IS A MUCH LONGER INTRO THAN USUAL. FEEL FREE TO GLANCE, SKIP OR IGNORE:

This week marks the halfway point in my original layout for this series. I designed Q & A around a set of topics I’ve been noticing as I read around the Christian blog world; six basic concerns that surface repeatedly and that often feel more than a little bit unsafe and scary to many people. When I wrote the introductory post for Q & A, I solicited additional questions from you. Two of you wrote back with a whole series of questions that crystallized around two main areas, which brought my total topic list to these eight:

1. Why is there so much talk about obedience?                      (January 17)
2. What’s with this ‘more of Jesus, less of me’ stuff?              (January 24)
3. What’s with all this talk about ‘sin?’                                (January 31)
4. Is there room for my tears here?                                       (February 7)
5. What do we do with our suffering?                                  (February 14)
6. How do I make all the pieces fit?                                       (February 21)
7. Why do bad things happen to good people?                       (February 28)
8. What do I do with all the hard/weird stuff in the Bible?   (March 7)

As you can see, these questions are broad, and fully half of them deal in one way or another with the huge topic of suffering. That is intentional. I don’t want to waste time, space or effort by delving into too much detail on any one topic, yet the facets of suffering are many and require careful parsing out. As we work our way through this list, you’ll notice that my reflections will always be general in nature, not specific. I don’t want to open a can of worms with any of these, but I do want to foster a safe space for discussion and conversation, rather than debate. Disagreement is welcome, as long as it’s kind and open. We don’t have to agree about all that much, actually, to be connected through the goodness of God made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. I am ordained in a small, evangelical denomination that I love. (You can meet us here.) We hold only six affirmations:

We affirm the centrality of the word of God.
We affirm the necessity of the new birth.
We affirm a commitment to the whole mission of the church.
We affirm the church as a fellowship of believers.
We affirm a conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit.
We affirm the reality of freedom in Christ.

And it is that last one that I cling to whenever I find myself in disagreement with another Christian on any topic that isn’t directly connected to those first five affirmations. There is room to ‘agree to disagree,’ and for the last 35 years, I have been privileged to be a part of a church family that lives that truth.

This time table for our conversations, our ‘delving into the mystery,’  overlaps by two days with the beginning of Lent this year. I am hoping to do another daily devotional series during Lent; the last time I tackled that was 2012. So, after Easter, if there are further questions that you would like to work through, please let me know and we’ll have at it during the weeks of Eastertide. I am also open to continuing the Q & A format as an occasional series, so let me know if there is ever a topic you’d like for us to address together after we’ve finished this series. Thanks so much to everyone for your wonderful contributions to this endeavor.

As you can see from the schedule, the question for next week is:
What do we do with our suffering?

 

My reflections for this week do not fit the surfing theme! Instead, I am focussing on three treasures of mine, things I have always kept nearby on my pastoral and/or personal desk, things that teach me some important truths every time I look at them.

DSC00945

Treasure Number One: One weekend in early April, nearly thirty-five years ago, we had a brief respite after a huge rainstorm that lasted almost a week. So we piled our three kids in the car and drove an hour west from our home in Altadena, towards the ocean. All of us walked out onto the beach and immediately noticed that there were thousands of tiny shells scattered all over the hard, damp sand left behind by the ebbing tide. We don’t get a lot of shells in southern California. Sometimes; after a big storm, we might find a few here and there. But this was just stunning to see — and delightful. We all began to gather as many as we could in the hour we’d set aside for beach-walking.

My middle daughter, who has always had great observational skills, was the champ that day, bringing back several handfuls of these beautiful, delicate things, almost all of them scallop shells. We rinsed and dried them and I kept some of them separate from the several baskets full of shells that have always adorned our homes over the years.

These were special to me. They were small, very small. And they were perfect. Something about them spoke to a deep place in me. Ever since then, I have had this clam shell full of them sitting on my desk(s), either at home or in my office. 

DSC00944Treasure Number Two: Within the first two weeks of moving to Santa Barbara to begin my very first (and only) paid position on a pastoral staff, I was browsing among some of the quaint shops on State Street in my new hometown. I quickly located a place that remains on my top 10 list to this day, a tiny, crowded shop that features jewelry, brightly colored linens, wonderful seasonal decor, and collections of tiny things. Do you see that basket? It’s about an inch and half square. And can you see what’s in it? Five tiny loaves of bread and two small fish. Does that sound familiar to you?

DSC00930

Treasure Number Three: The last piece of my favorite trio is this small carving of the weeping Jesus of Lithuania, a gift from a friend who used to be my boss. This is what Wikipedia (yes, I know!!) has to say about this figure:

Wooden carvings of Rūpintojėlis, “The Jesus who cares for us,” are often seen at crossroads and in cemeteries. He always rests his head on his right arm, his left hand rests on his knee, a crown of thorns on his head shows drops of blood, and his face is full of solicitude and sorrow.

The pose may represent Jesus’ anticipation of his crucifixion, after his scourging and crowning with thorns. It is also said to depict Jesus after his resurrection and before his ascension. One legend has it that Jesus traveled throughout the world wearing his crown of thorns; during his journeys, he sometimes sat on stones near the road and wept.
(italics mine)

At first glance, it might seem to you that this last piece of the three is the one that relates most readily to the question of the week. And, in one way, that is indeed true. This is a small copy of a figure that appears all over the country of Lithuania, a figure that encapsulates the suffering endured during communism’s rule, that reminded faithful Catholic believers that Jesus had not forgotten them in the midst of their suffering. His tears made their own more bearable somehow.

In truth, however, it is also the shells, and those tiny reminders of the miracle on the hillside, in combination with the weeping Jesus figure — all of these together — that help me to remember and believe that my own tears are seen by God. Not only are they seen, they are treasured, collected in God’s bottle and remembered. I believe that my tears, and your tears, are gifts from God and to God.

And also? Your tears and my tears are gifts to the larger body of Christ. 

Tears are small things, you see. Tiny, actually. Just droplets of water that flow from our eyes when we’re feeling deep emotions or when we’re enduring physical pain. Did you know that the tears that come when you are peeling onions or blinking at a fierce wind are not a chemical match for the tears you shed in either pain or joy? ‘Real’ tears carry toxins away from the body, they are a cleansing agent, a release. And part of God’s design.

I also believe that they are evidence of the Holy Spirit’s good work within us. I believe that tears can be a charism, not unlike tongues or prophecy, wisdom or miracles. No, they’re not listed anywhere in scripture. But I believe it nonetheless. For me they are the gift that came when I asked for the gift of tongues, the gift of a special prayer language. I have not received the language, but the tears spring forth, unbidden, many times when I pray, when I counsel others, when I read the Word. And over and over again, I have learned that they are gift.

They are also often sign, providing a ‘pay attention to this’ inkling that God is up to something in my heart or the heart of another. Yes, they are tiny. But they are perfect — just like the shells. And they represent what God’s Spirit can do in and through us when we relinquish what we have, when we let go of our tendency toward too-tight control over our emotions and our thought life. A lesson that I remember whenever I look at the loaves and the fishes.

God, you see, can do miracles with very small things. And sometimes, those very small things are our tears.

So, why then, I wonder, do so many Christians shy away from them? Why is the predominant mood on Sunday morning too often one of incessant good cheer, hail-fellow-well-met, I’m-fine-thank-you-I’m-just-fine? In truth, the Sunday morning good cheer wouldn’t bother me so much if I were confident that the tears that I KNOW most people are carrying in their bodies and their spirits were given permission to flow somewhere in the midst of the community, maybe on another day of the week! 

What worries me is that too many Christians simply do not feel safe admitting that they carry those tears, believing instead that they have managed to flunk the primary test of authentic discipleship. Where is the JOY? they wonder. Where is the gratitude? I have Jesus, why am I not ‘fine?’

What I want to say — what my beautiful shells and my small reminder of miracles and the figure of our crying Jesus remind me — is that life is not always grand. And that is to be expected.  Injustice abounds. Wars rage. Children die. Health gives way. Minds deteriorate. Relationships break apart. Jobs are lost. Bad habits persist. Doubt looms large. Everything is not just hunky-dory all the time, you know? We are so.not.fine.

And. . . there is this, oh-so-important piece of our story:

Jesus wept.

Hang onto that truth. With all that is in you, hang onto it. Our holy book is laced with the language of lament, fists raised to the heavens, tears streaming down the cheeks. Because tears are a part of what it means to live as human creatures in a broken but beautiful world. Tears are a primary means of release, of communication, of grief, pain, loss and even of joy and gratitude. It all melds together, you see. Mourning and dancing ‘kiss each other,’ and all of it is part of what it means to live a full, real, human life. 

This is a huge topic, so many layers to be unpacked and wrestled through. But for this week, the most important answer to our weekly question is YES, there is room for your tears here. In fact, they are welcome here. Because if you let me see your tears, then I know you are giving me a gift; you are giving me the truth. You are letting me in, so that I can weep with you, and then together, we can weep with God.

When we offer our tears to one another and to the living, loving God of the universe, we are allowing ourselves to be truth-tellers and image-bearers more powerfully than at almost any other time in our lives for precisely this reason: we know a God who weeps with us. And his name is Jesus.

Thanks be to God.

 Next week’s question: What do we do with our suffering?   

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Filed Under: Beauty, biblical reflection, Blogging, community, Confession, Encouragement, God's gifts, grief, Hard Things, Lament, Living the Answers, Living the Questions, personal journey, Q & A, Spiritual Formation, Suffering

Q & A Tuesday Wrap-Up: Week Three

February 4, 2014 By

DSC00878I’m thinking maybe this week’s topic — SIN — felt too big for some of our usual conversational partners, because a few voices are missing this time around. We picked up a few new ones, however, and so the conversation continues to be rich and challenging. My thanks to all who linked and to all who left comments over the weekend. We’re wrestling things out together and I am glad.

I write with some frequency about my own journey with Jesus from fundamentalism to what I hope is a more grace-based space on the faith spectrum. What has surprised and saddened me as I continue to explore the world of faith blogs is the number of people who have been terribly, sometimes irreparably, burned by the church. My own experience is decidedly NOT that and I want to say that as clearly as possible. Yes, I had to unlearn some of the things that my earliest church experiences taught me. But my emotional connections to that early church are strong and universally positive. There were people there who loved me, worship was beautiful and thoughtful, and I actually loved earning ‘spending money’ for the treasure chest of goodies that Bible memory work made possible to the serious young student!

Some of you cannot say the same. Perhaps these words sum up what too many of us have experienced as a result of early church experiences: And I am still getting my head around how to achieve the balance between hating sin yet not hating myself. Maybe you get stuck there too? 

Reading this paragraph, however, brought hope that we can, by God’s grace, learn to move away from old paradigms and embrace the truth of the gospel:

I begin to glimpse how death connects to sin, not as some arbitrary punishment, but an intrinsically linked growth–plant from root. Sin no longer seems like failure of some cosmic test, but some dark and awful thing that wants to eat us alive. God is not removed on some academic seat waiting for my proper supplication in order to expunge my “F” with Christ’s blood and replace it with His “A.” He is stooping beside an angry Cain, urging him, “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” He is eating with the sinners, insisting, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” He is sitting beside the four-year-old girl who has shut herself in the closet to pray, again, not to go to hell. And though she doesn’t love Him–doesn’t even want to love Him–yet, He loves her.

One essayist hoped to wax eloquent and speak in theological terms about the concept of sin, only to find herself falling into a familiar pattern, one that reminded her that “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak!”

Our thoughtful, neighborhood poet gave us two pithy, thoughtful examples of her good thinking, one in the comments:

oh to have His eyes
that cut through fog
to see the heart of us, the heart of all
and with a breath of His Spirit
He brings clarity we can’t find in our own power

pondering long before I blog…

And one on her blog:

so I need not think long about sin
I need not give too much power 
to the darkness, no
I won’t deny His sacrifice
I instead choose freedom
choose light, choose life

Our conversation this week was enriched by the addition of two voices in a lower register, with links to two essays by thoughtful writing men. One wrote about our need to look sin square in its dark face in order to embrace the light. And the other pointed us in the direction of systemic sin, looking at the lectionary passages for the coming week.

Sometimes we have trouble looking at the judgmental texts of Jesus. If we take these texts as condemning individuals, they are harsh indeed. But if we understand that they are judgments against systemic sin, a general cultural abandonment of the values of their religion, we can pay more attention to them and learn from them.

I wonder about the general materialism of our culture. Might not this be such an example of “systemic sin?”

Each week, I am moved by and grateful for the comments that are offered on the weekly topic/question. Here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order:

“I took my first deep breath of grace. I am still breathing grace and always in need of more.”

“It seems to me we often forget that in the very first place God created us all. Deliberately. Desiring us. Loving us. Sin is what gets in the way of our loving relationship. It is not the ESSENCE of our very selves”

“I was raised in a church where I knew that Jesus died for our sins, but I didn’t really understand that it was a free gift of salvation and that I could be changed by the power of Christ IN me.”

“Obviously we know there is sin and evil in the world. But I’m not sure that the Augustinian “original sin” idea is the only way to account for it. You know the Celtic church was less influenced by Rome and therefore by Augustine, and they believe that one is born in holiness and returns to holiness at death. Now a lot happens in between, but I like the sense of the holiness of our life, derived from the fact that we bear God’s image and are born in his holiness. I think this speaks to our value, to our ability to choose to follow Jesus, and to have the offering of our life in discipleship to be a process of continual transformation. Which doesn’t mean that forgiveness and grace is not needed, but is more part of the process than the main thing.”

“Loves comes first…doesn’t it break a heart wide open when we see a place of blindness in our lives…places we have walked in ignorance …and His love opens our eyes…and we see through the lens of His love how wrong we have been…and the waves of grace come over us…He saw it all the time…and His love never stopped…His love patiently and continually called to us…called us out of the fog into the light…”

And to wrap-up the wrap-up once again, our Kiwi friend gave us a gift that looks like this:

I DID behave badly, and cause problems and stress. But nobody seemed to be able to see anything more than that – that underneath all those problems was a little girl, scared, alone and desperate for someone to love her. So when I was told that God couldn’t bear to look at me because of my sinfulness, and that He only wanted to look at Jesus, it made perfect sense! Of course God would feel that way, just like it seemed everybody else did.

It took leaving everyone and everything I knew and creating a completely new life (which also involved a new church) before I started to believe any differently. I had always known that God loved me, as long as ‘me’ was submerged and invisible in Jesus, but ever so slowly I started to learn and believe that I was of value to God. Not just as a container for Jesus, but as me. That God loved my strong will, and had intentionally given it to me (it wasn’t a design flaw after all!), that He loved my sense of humour, and that He actually liked me! Gasp! This was a completely earth-shattering revelation. God cared for me so tenderly and kindly in those first few years of transition that I started to be able to trust Him, instead of only fearing Him.

I am still – alas! – a sinner. And I am still often overwhelmed by how very far I am, from even my own standards, let alone God’s. The difference now is that I am getting better at knowing that God loves me, and that I give Him joy… even in my sinful state, He SEES me. The real me, the one He made and loves. It’s the difference between thinking that God looks past my pitiful attempts at goodness, sees my great sinfulness, and says “I knew it, you’re just a fraud!” and thinking that God looks past my sinfulness, sees my heart, the daughter He loves, and says “Come back to me, I miss you!”

WONDERFUL words from all of you – I thank you!

Week Four will be up a little after midnight on Friday morning and the Linky will be open until the following Monday at 4:00 in the afternoon, PST (If I can remember how to correctly program the dang thing!) Our question for this week: Is there room for my tears here?

  

Filed Under: biblical reflection, Blogging, Encouragement, God's gifts, Hard Things, Living the Answers, personal journey, Q & A, Surfing!

Q & A: Week Three – Remembering What Comes First

January 31, 2014 By

Welcome to Q & A, a weekly series of ‘living the questions,’  questions that we often struggle with as people of faith. You are invited to read along, to comment with as many words as you like (just keep them in a conversational tone, without sharp edges, please), and/or to write a reflection of your own and link it back to this conversation. Each week the linky will be open from midnight Thursday/Friday until 4:00 p.m. on Monday (PST), allowing time for weekend wondering and writing. Then, each Tuesday, I’ll attempt a wrap-up post, with links, to help us begin to ‘live into the answers.’

This week’s question: “What’s with all this talk about ‘sin?'”

Next week, we’ll wrestle with this one: “Is there room for my tears here?”

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Interesting surfing weather this week. I took another trip out to Coal Oil Point and discovered that the entire coast — and at least 200 feet inland — were shrouded in fog. The sun shone through it, which actually made it more difficult to orient myself, as the light bounced around the thick air. As I walked that gravel path, I thought to myself that the entire experience was akin to trying to write the essay for this week. SIN is a huge topic. An important one, and for most of us, absolutely central to our understanding of who we are, who God is, why Jesus came to earth, and what the cross means. So wading out into this particular topic is a whole lot like wading out into the fog. It’s harder to see what’s coming at you, it’s tough to find your fellow travelers, and it feels decidedly more scary than the exact same water does on a sunny day.

In my introductory post for this series, I featured photos taken at the exact same spots along the path that you’ll see here. They look decidedly different today. This weather feels slightly threatening, even a bit frightening and pretty much mirrors my feelings as we delve into a discussion about sin this week.

So . . . here we go.

Remembering back to my earliest years in Sunday School, at about age 4 or 5, I can see a little booklet. It had no words, just different colored pages, and the teacher used it to tell the gospel story. I don’t remember all of the pages and their contribution to the overall narrative, but I do remember these: a deep black double page to represent the state of my small, 4-year old heart, completely darkened by something the teacher called ‘sin,’ then a bright red page which represented the spilt blood of our Savior, then a white page, to indicate my now-clean heart if I said ‘yes’ to Jesus, followed by a shiny gold spread, which assured me of my eternal destination.

Oh, I loved that book! And I loved that story. And I wanted that white heart, yes I did. And I definitely wanted that shiny gold future. This little tool was meant to be a good, simple means for helping children begin to understand some of the truths of the Christian faith. I’m not sure, however, that those truths actually sank into my little heart as intended.

And here’s why:

Children that age are just beginning to understand about good and bad behavior; they have no real concept of ‘sin.’ I think I internalized the message this way: Jesus wants me to stop doing bad things; if I don’t stop doing bad things, I am a bad person and I cannot get to heaven. So, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I worked very, very hard for a very, very long time to be a very, very good girl. 

And I began to believe that my sinful self was the most important thing about me. Otherwise, why did Jesus come? Why did Jesus die? 

Because I am a sinner. Everybody is a sinner. And that’s all that matters about us: we are sinners.

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I had a sense of diligence, of always working hard to be better, of trudging through life, walking the straight and narrow  I was a church girl — and I loved church, don’t get me wrong. I was a church girl in conservative southern California (and no, that is not an oxymoron. . . there was a lot of fundamentalism in CA in the mid 20th century). And every single invitational sermon I ever heard in the first twelve years of my life was centered around how sinful I was and how much I needed to be assured of a place in heaven someday. So by cracky, I’d better raise my hand, walk down that aisle and say ‘yes.’

I overstate. A little. But I think you catch my drift, right?

Then we moved and began attending a different church, one where I came to know Jesus in a much different way. The central truths were the same; it was the presentation that differed. More layers were added and the story of salvation took on deeper, richer hues. There began to grow in me the sense that maybe there was something more to be found in Jesus than forgiveness.

Forgiveness is powerful, wonderful stuff – and it is so very important. BUT. There is also Restoration. Empowerment. Redemption. Transformation. And I was deeply moved by the stories of Jesus I read in the gospels, the way he moved to the edges, called out the best in people — even people the rest of society had already written off, like Mary Magdalene, the Samaritan woman at the well, Zacchaeus.

Jesus saw something else in them that no one else seemed to see: he saw something worth his time, worth his goodness, worth his invitation. He saw them.

He also, of course, saw their sin. And he did not ignore it — he exorcised, he healed, he questioned, he called for newness. But here’s what I began to understand during my adolescent years and then reflected on more and more in my 20s and 30s:

Jesus saw beneath their behavior, beneath the swirling demons, beneath their bad reputations. He saw something else, something real and true and more important, even than their sin: he saw God’s image in them, and God’s design.  And then he reached right in and pulled that beauty out so that others could see it, too!

Take a look at these two photographs for a minute.

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When I put my camera up to take this shot, I saw only water with my naked eye. My camera, however, showed me — ever so dimly — that there were surfers out there! At least four of them! And then, I hit the ‘enhance’ button in iPhoto and voila! There they were, in sharper contrast and detail — four strong surfers, doing their thing, despite the messy day.

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God can see us, my friend. He can see us beneath all the fog of sin and brokenness.
Not only that, God LOVES what he sees, desperately, passionately, eternally. God hates sin, that is true. God hates anything that cuts us off from relationship, from ‘walking in the garden’ together. That for me is the clearest, simplest and best definition of the word — ‘sin’ is anything that separates us from God.

But God loves us. And that means that sin is NOT the most important thing about us. Our created humanity is. That’s what needs rescuing, that what’s needs saving, that’s what needs restoration, that’s what needs transformation. 

And that’s why Jesus came as one of us: to show us what it means to live a fully human life, with all of its ups/downs/struggles/joys/questions/answers. And to show us that neither sin, brokenness nor death has the last word. The cross followed by the empty tomb become the place where heaven and earth meet, where God shows us what it means to be a ‘king,’ where power and authority (and forgiveness and redemption) are redefined forever.

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I’m not sure how or why the dominant picture of the atonement — what happened in the incarnation/death/resurrection — became sin-centric in the last few hundred years. It has not always been so. Scripture teaches us that many things happened with the Great Event of Jesus.

Indeed, we do need to grapple with, understand and relinquish our inner ‘bentness,’ our direction-toward-sin, and we need to do that each and every day. Confession is good for the soul, and by that I mean it is good for the soul. It reminds us that God is God and we are not.

But. BUT. When we focus so much of our attention, our study, our prayers, our worship, our conversation on what a mess we are (even though we are, indeed, very messy people!), we take the focus off of God’s ongoing work of redemption and transformation within us. We lose sight of our utter loveliness to God, despite the messes we make, despite our proclivity for willfulness and idolatry. 

LOVE COMES FIRST. And if we can allow ourselves to be loved, without apology or hesitation — well, the earth moves,  you know? Read the story of the Forgiving Father in chapter 15 of Luke’s gospel. Read it through carefully and prayerfully. The father loves that boy long before he sees him coming down the road. Long before the boy repents of his sin. Long before anything.

Love comes first.

 “To God be the glory, great things God has done!” 

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I look forward to your comments and any reflections/responses you’d like to link up to this week. Even through the fog, there are great rides to be had! I am grateful for all the ways you are choosing to ‘live the questions,’ and then ‘live into the answers.’

Next week, we’ll wrestle with this question: “Is there room for my tears here?”

Filed Under: biblical reflection, Blogging, community, Encouragement, God's gifts, hope, Living the Answers, Living the Questions, Mystery, personal journey, Q & A, Surfing!, The Sea

The House That Hope Builds – A SheLoves Link-Up

January 28, 2014 By

This piece is a bit of a strange one, at least for me. I’ve been inspired by the prose songs written by Sarah Bessey and Idelette Mcvicker over at SheLoves Magazine. And this month’s theme was hope. So this is a song for the house that hope builds, using as inspiration two quotes, one from an author and one from a poet, both of whose words are genius.IMG_4114

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for.
And the most you can do is live inside that hope.
Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
– Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

This is an essay of sticks and mortar, foundations and rooftops, sturdy walls, open windows and a wide, wide front door. This is an ode to life, in all its complexity and wonder, it’s murkiness and pain. This is a song of beauty, written in a minor key, one that resolves now and again to a glorious major chord. This is a hymn of praise and a psalm of lament. This is an acknowledgement, a breathed prayer, a testimony, a promise . . . that hope rises, even from the valley of darkness.

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
     – Ellen Bass

This is an encouragement to sing, to shout, to dance. And this is glad permission to weep, to wail, to wonder. This is a weaving of many colors, each of which enriches the whole; a smorgasbord of many flavors, some of them sweet, some decidedly bitter. This is a call to courage, a plea for patience, a painting done by candlelight, revealed in the brightness of day. This is Life, and this is where we live it. Right here, right now.

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Will you build this house with me? We have a ‘firm foundation,’ promised us from the beginning of time, known to us in the breaking of bread. We walk with the Master Builder, the one who knows our name, the keeper of the keys, the giver of grace.

Will you build it with me?

Will you come and stand by my side. Yes, wherever you are, imagine you are standing shoulder to shoulder with me and all those who build this place. Now, will you look up? What do you see? A starry sky? A cloudy day? A canopy of trees, a row of rooftops, a scarlet light wending its way through a blue, blue dome?

Whatever your view, stand with me and look. Let your gaze relax, your mouth drop open, your lungs deflate, and then draw in the freshness you need for the task ahead.

Are you ready to work?

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What’s that in your hand? What do you bring? A flagon of tears, collected from lost boys and girls? A bowl of laughter, flowing up and over the edge? A story of love and losing? A tale of lost and found?  A poem of love’s declaration, an ode to your broken dreams? A saga of satiety and fullness? A pitcher, poured out, yet ready to receive?

IMG_3624Everything is welcome, each piece necessary. For what we build is a glory. A crazy quilt of pattern and plain, a castle keep built on strength and also on weakness. These walls will withstand the wildest of winds, the roof will shelter and keep us.

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Come with me now, let’s dig in and do this. We’ll whistle while we work, and let the chips fall where they may. For this is the house that hope builds, the place where everyone belongs.

Shall we begin?

Linking this with the fine people at SheLoves, their January link-up on HOPE. Maybe you could do that, too? 

 

Filed Under: Beauty, Blogging, community, Dreams/Dreaming, Encouragement, God's gifts, hope, Mystery
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