Category: Christian Life

Transformed by Love

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This post was originally given as a speech for the annual gala event of a local chapter of Safe Families for Children. 

There are plenty of voices telling us why we do the work that we do to care for our community–to reach out with hope and compassion to those in crisis. But I would like to reflect with you about how we do it.

Whether or not you have stories of your own yet, I’d like to paint a picture for you so you can imagine yourself in these scenarios, and then I’m going to have the audacity to suggest that I have a magic formula for making it work.

Imagine you agree to host a sweet six year old and then you trip on the stairs and break your foot the first night. Imagine you are keeping a one year old with full-time daycare but then the daycare is unexpectedly closed two Mondays in a row. Your daughter throws up. Your heater stops working. You wind up in bed with the flu. The basement toilet quits. Oh, and the back door handle is broken.

My point is that Safe Families is ordinary, and it happens in the middle of our ordinary lives. Sometimes our ordinary lives feel really, really messy.

I wasn’t the mom with the broken foot, but all the rest of that was my life last month. I had just finished a major grad school audition to boot. After months of exhausting preparations, I just wanted to relax.

But we’d said yes to a few weeks with a precious little guy who needed shelter during a short-term crisis. It was a Sunday morning and he was fussing on a changing table in my guest room as I slathered his eczema with cream. I was bleary-eyed and grumpy and didn’t really want to help. I was basically The Grinch.

I’m telling you this because I want to make a point that not only does ordinary life get messy, but our hearts are sinful and bent towards selfishness.

Years ago I nannied a child who I did not love. I’m not proud of this. I’m here to tell you from experience that simple tasks are a drag when you don’t want to do them. If you don’t know what I mean, ask your kid to clean her room when she had plans to play. Being the caretaker for a child I resented was hard. Making lunch and wiping noses was joyless and annoying and draining without love.

Exhausted as I was on that Sunday morning last month, I thought back to those nannying memories. I had enough experience under my belt to realize that I could not afford to be the Grinch. Sharing our life with this baby would be way too hard unless I loved him.

I’ve been thinking a lot about love over the past year. How the love of God shapes what we do. How we’re designed for love because we’re designed by God. How we’re designed for connection and for attachment, to God and to each other.

I’ve been thinking about how I’m made to be with Jesus and to love Jesus.

Why is it that it’s valuable for a child to attach to you even for a few weeks if that’s all you have? Why will you look into his eyes and tell him he’s beautiful? Tell her you’re glad she’s here? Why will you care about her if you won’t ever see her again after this month? I think it’s because we’re designed to be connected, and when you give a child the gift of connection you are giving her the gift of her inherent design and dignity. You are giving him the chance to Be With. To know that he’s not alone.

All of us need that. We crave connection with those we love. I think most of all that’s because we crave connection with Jesus.

So here’s my magic formula. I looked down at that little guy on the changing table and I thought of that verse we like to quote, “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.” We get a lot of mileage out of the “least of these” phrase in our circles of mission and service work. But what jumped out at me that morning was the other half.

“You did it to me.”

For just a moment I saw Jesus covered with sores. If Jesus were covered with sores wouldn’t you want your name to be on that list of caretakers? Wouldn’t that be the opportunity of a lifetime? And wouldn’t it be embarrassing to show up grumpy for that assignment?

Loving that little boy was an opportunity to love Jesus. That is what we are doing when we love each other. When you bring a pizza to a host family you are feeding Jesus. When you spend your Saturday at the park with a six-year-old you didn’t know last week, you are spending your Saturday with Jesus.

You can see it another way if you’re not careful. I know this from experience. You can see the cost and the mess, because it is costly and messy and really exhausting. But if we look carefully we can see Jesus in each other and all this work can become an opportunity to be with him and to love him.

This is what we’re designed for: to be with Jesus and to love Jesus.

I want to encourage you to look beyond the broken foot and the broken door handle and open your heart to the friends of Jesus.

I believe when we do that our work is transformed into joy, and that joy will transform you. You won’t see another task added to your load. You’ll see Jesus, and you’ll see people he loves being loved by him (through you!), and you’ll see yourself caught up in his love as your heart opens and grows and you add to your family one more time: one more person: one more pizza: one Grinchy heart-size bigger than you were before.

That is my prayer for each of us as we give generously from our own lives in our various ways, as we bring hope and love to our community. Let’s be a team of eager love-bringers. Let’s connect to each other and connect to those we serve. Let’s see Jesus in each other and be transformed by love.

 

Baptismal Identity

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There are times when my human inclinations and my Christian identity come into conflict with each other. All my spirituality cannot carry me unscathed through the fires of hurt or anger, disappointment or discomfort, loss or loneliness.

Yet a Christian is one who has been marked with the cross of Christ, gathered into his identity as the beloved Son of God. With this identity comes a mission, and it is a simple one: love, grace, peace – words that are so ubiquitous as to be easily overlooked. But hidden underneath their surface is an inexhaustible treasury of the very nature of God. It is this treasury that I am called into; that I am literally immersed in as I go through the waters of baptism.

Christ’s prophetic call to those who would follow him that they must die makes sense to me this winter. It has been a season of tears. I am faced with a task that is so opposed to my human nature that it feels like dying to confront it. It is, in fact, a death of sorts: a death of ego and a death (at least for a time) of some of my deepest desires. But it is a situation outside my control. As in all things, my approach to it is determined by my Christian identity, a reality that I believe supremely transcends all things.

I bring myself to worship each week because I am never immersed enough in this identity. Sunday after Sunday I mark myself with the baptismal water. Sunday after Sunday I hear the proclamation of forgiveness and the call of discipleship; I revel in the unity of all the saints near and far who gather to receive Christ’s body and blood; I open my hands to receive a divine blessing: to re-claim my identity: to remember that God dwells in me. When all has been said and done I am sent out. I enter into the Church’s mission again of living out of the treasury of God’s love, grace, and peace.

Today is observed as “The Baptism of Our Lord” for many Christian traditions. This morning our preacher asked us to catalog for ourselves all our different hats: the roles we fill from one day to another. The imagery was beautiful, made vivid for me as I had just shown my three-year-old son the picture on the cover of the bulletin of a dove descending on Jesus’ head at his baptism. The reality of the Christian gospel is this: that Dove is the hat over all hats. Unlike the roles I move in and out of, my baptism into Christ is an unalterable identity.

I came to worship this morning feeling the weight of my humanity. I came because I needed to hear the story again. Here and nowhere else I knew I would find the strength to approach my mission, which my grandpa articulated for me so many times when I was a kid: “Susan,” he would say, affection lighting up his eyes, “Always let God’s love flow through you to others.”

As we gathered around the Table the most familiar words struck me in a new way. “On the night when he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus took bread.” What could be a fiercer fire of humanity than the experience of betrayal? With what strength did Christ’s humanity wrestle in that moment against his mission to bring divine love to the world? And yet he stayed. I wonder if he thought of that Dove again – rehearsed for his human self his true identity. I wonder if he felt what I’ve been feeling: the relief of centering myself here.

This morning I don’t know how to better characterize the life I’m participating in than to say it is a relief. It is certainly hard, too. Hard because my human inclinations are in conflict with it. A relief because the gospel is just that: gospel. Good news! I am a beloved child of God. I am, and so are you. Nothing could be better. Nothing could be truer.

While I am wrestling through my human experience and even doing my best to honor it (It is I, after all, and not some ethereal abstraction, who am a beloved child of God), I am taking up my mission with courage and joy, charting my course according to the very nature of God, strengthened with the knowledge that it is not my love, but God’s love flowing through me, as my grandpa said; comforted with the recognition that what my baptism brings me, along with a share in Christ’s death, is a share in his Spirit of power, peace, freedom, wholeness, and joy.

Come, Holy Spirit, aid us to keep the vows we make;
this very day invade us, and every bondage break.
Come, give our lives direction, the gift we covet most:
to share the resurrection that leads to Pentecost.
–Fred Pratt Green, 1903-2000

Baptize us with your Spirit, Lord; your cross on us be signed,
that likewise in God’s service we may perfect freedom find.
–F. Bland Tucker, 1895-1984

“Go, my children, with my blessing, never alone.
Waking, sleeping, I am with you, you are my own.
In my love’s baptismal river I have made you mine forever.
Go, my children, with my blessing, you are my own.

Go, my children, sins forgiven, at peace and pure.
Here you learned how much I love you, what I can cure.
Here you heard my dear Son’s story, here you touched him, saw his glory.
Go, my children, sins forgiven, at peace and pure.

“Go, my children, fed and nourished, closer to me.
Grow in love and love by serving, joyful and free.
Here my Spirit’s power filled you, here my tender comfort stilled you.
Go, my children, fed and nourished, joyful and free.”
    –Jaroslav J. Vajda, b. 1919

 

A Lament and a Metaphor

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Here is a lament for the second morning of home schooling.

I meant to juggle two students during lesson time – a new milestone for us – but we came in for such a rough landing this summer that I wasn’t prepared yesterday, so neither of them “accomplished” much, and this morning my free time has to be allocated to lesson plans that should’ve happened in July.

I hoped my second grader would have time for piano practice in the morning, but he’s still struggling with buttons and I knew I shouldn’t help him so his shirt took him fifteen minutes.

I wanted to bask in our hour of Morning Time, but we sat on the brown couch (Rookie Mistake!) and they were all elbows and knees, and the three-year-old’s head makes a very poor window onto a page of text.

I planned us a calm afternoon routine, but I had to devote five hours to a doctor’s appointment 50 miles away, so my kids had to camp out at a friend’s house and I spent the entire day in a state of urgency.

I envisioned evenings being times of quiet togetherness, but I skated into town from that appointment just in time to eat the dinner my friend dropped off and run everyone out the door because baseball isn’t over yet.

I made my baby girl cry on her first day of kindergarten because she wouldn’t be straight with me about the Magical Disappearing Loom. She wouldn’t be straight with me about it because she was stressed. She was stressed because I was stressed. Multiple reports have it dangling from her backpack when she got home from her friend’s house. Three searches have yet to discover where it fell, somewhere within the tidy, five-foot-square mud room. We are all baffled by the mystery, like a twisted First Day of School Miracle.

I get Monday nights to myself for free time after my husband goes to bed early, but last night I had to spend it on cleaning the kitchen and then I went to bed and had a parade of stress dreams.

I mean to plant radishes today as our main school activity, but I haven’t had time to pull the first crops out yet so I’m going to sacrifice pace for getting work done that should’ve happened two weeks ago.

I’m serving tacos for dinner tonight, but that means attending to the four pounds of chicken that need to be prepped for the freezer.

Saturday as I triaged the remaining work to be done before our rough landing into this school year I recounted to my friend how I’d settled for Scotch Tape and Wite-Out on Friday night when my inclination, as always, was a freshly-typed revision with no trace of imperfection. Scotch Tape and Wite-Out may become my metaphor for this season. My friend wasn’t off the mark when she suggested perhaps Scotch Tape could be a spiritual discipline.

I’m just your average home educator, trying to gracefully walk somewhere between the lofty visions and the accompanying realities. Falling in love with baseball through library books sounds rather idyllic for a first week of school, until you factor in the dinosaur of a three-year-old sitting on your lap. He doesn’t understand how words get read.

So this morning I’m showing up for Day 2 with my metaphorical Scotch Tape in hand, ready to practice acceptance and presence, hoping to take more steps forward than back, wishing life could be as simple as I mean it to be. But it’s not: the reality behind that doctor’s appointment is that I’m scheduled for thyroid surgery next weekend, and your guess is as good as mine what that’s going to do my Teacher Voice. I’ve wrestled hard this summer with this lump in my throat, with this bump in the road, with all the implications of incapacity, both practical and spiritual.

I could’ve changed our school calendar to start after my surgery and recovery, but not only would it have sabotaged the gracious pace of No School Weeks I depend on, I think it might’ve missed the point. We’re not here to do a perfect dance, but to muddle through virtue practices while they slowly shape us. The math and French and baseball and weaving we learn along the way are incidentals by comparison, and any day is a good day to practice humility, honor, curiosity, attention, diligence.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s this simple line from my morning Psalm which jumped off the page at me just now:

“The Lord is my helper.”

OK, then.

My Life for Yours

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I worry to my priest friend occasionally that perhaps I’m letting myself off the hook too easily when it comes to the spiritual life. I can’t think now what makes this occur to me, but it’s happened more than once.

Always his answer has been the same, and when he gives it I swear behind his compassion and wisdom he’s almost laughing at me: “You are a mother. That will sanctify you. You don’t even have to try.”

I was glad to get to share this encouragement last week with a weary friend of mine who is adjusting to life with two kids, and yesterday it came back to me again. It’s comfort for a class of us who don’t get much of it.

Yesterday morning found me simultaneously studying Bach’s St. John Passion and nursing my daughter through an unrelenting stomach flu. I’d woken before dawn in a fog typical for me lately. My first thought was gladness that it was Sunday because I am particularly in need of the re-orientation of the Liturgy.

With the house still silent I took up my score and my colored pens again, tracing themes through the St. John Passion in preparation for a performance I’m involved in a week from now.

It was less than thirty minutes before I heard her begin to cry. I knew exactly what kind of cry it was. There wasn’t even room for questioning how the day would play out: My daughter was throwing up; I was not going to church.

This is motherhood, and this is what my priest friend meant.

I have another dear friend who remarked to me one day that he could never do what I do. He does precisely what he wants to do at every moment of his day, he observed. Sure, he’s a responsible adult and faithfully fulfills a whole realm of duties. But he does it in his own way, on his own time. Relatively speaking, he is autonomous. Then he comes over to my house and sees what I do around the clock. There are very few moments of my day that aren’t given to someone else. Even the sandwich I was eating yesterday got partially reallocated to the ravenous stomach of a child who’s finished throwing up.

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Yesterday motherhood meant sharing the sandwich I really didn’t want to share. It meant relinquishing my intention to be strengthened by the sacrament and cleaning up puke instead. It meant exchanging the sound of Bach chorales for Princess Sophia on Netflix. It meant pausing a dozen times in the midst of writing a letter to console a two-year-old who thinks he’s a kitty, to coach a six-year-old through big feelings regarding the laws of physics, to hold the sick one again whenever she threw up.

This is motherhood, and this is what my priest friend meant.

It’s not necessarily automatic, and this is where love comes in again. The same set of relinquished intentions can rot a heart as easily as sanctify it, and I’m familiar with this, too. Love is hard and it is costly.

But the gospel story was working on me yesterday, and the themes Bach drew from it in the St. John Passion were my sanctifying filter for the day.

The chorus of the Passion serves to connect the present to the past, not only as the voice of the people in the narrative but as the voice of the congregation now. Bach inserts familiar stanzas from his own tradition’s repertoire into the flow of the story.

The first of these follows Jesus’ courageous love expressed in his demand that, since he was the one the soldiers were seeking, they ought to let his friends go free. The chorus sings “O great love! O love beyond all measure! I lived with delight and joy and you had to suffer.”

Immediately following the betrayal and arrest in the garden, after Jesus heals the soldier whose ear met Peter’s sword, the chorus sings a stanza from Martin Luther’s paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer. “Your will be done, on earth as in heaven.”

The centerpiece of the whole work is another stanza from the incredible hymn literature of the early Lutheran tradition: “Through your prison, Son of God, must freedom come to us; your jail cell is our throne of grace: the freedom of the faithful.”

Perhaps for me the climactic moment comes once Jesus bows his head and dies. Bach weaves an aria and a chorale together. Arias are highly decorative, soloistic art songs). They are the sacred poetry that draws the audience even deeper and more personally into the narrative than the hymns sung by the chorus. The soloist sings this audacious question and then supplies the answer: “My precious Savior, let me ask (now that you have been nailed to the cross and have said yourself ‘It is finished’): Am I made free from death? Can I, through your pain and death, inherit the kingdom of heaven? Has the redemption of the whole world arrived? You cannot, from pain, say anything; yet you bow your head and say silently: Yes!'”

Finally, when the work is all but concluded, the chorus sings again: “The grave which is yours and encloses no more suffering, opens heaven for me and closes off hell.”

Laying aside for the present the whole subject of Christ’s crucifixion and redemption, Bach’s masterpiece is an exploration of “My life for yours.” If motherhood isn’t the most convenient way of being held to the practice of the image of Christ, I don’t know what is.

These were the resources I needed yesterday: submission to God’s will, self-giving love, and most of all a recognition of my participation in the way of the cross.

Fr. Raymond may be on to something…

Love and Loneliness

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This week I took an all-too-rare opportunity to slow to a halt and do nothing but be in my daughter’s space without distraction. In a moment of clarity I noticed her feeling lonely and knew my own culpability in that. It got me thinking.

Kids need connection. They need to be noticed, engaged, worshiped. While I won’t say they need this more than basic provisions, I will say they probably need it just as much–certainly more than they need the world given them on a silver platter.

Affluence can conjure a whole set of problems for us as parents. We can find ourselves awash in a sea of opportunities, layering guilt on ourselves even as we layer gifts on our children. I can provide her new toys and dance classes at the same time I’m chiding myself for being less generous with the paints than I meant to be.

My friend worried to me the other day about her unwillingness to let her kids get muddy. In the next breath she reported that her Lyme disease has flared up from stress this winter. Meanwhile I sat on her sofa and admired her as she connected with her kids. The last thing she needs right now is another load of laundry, and those kids are getting so much love that they’re going to be OK without the mud.

There is no substitute for love–no way around the essential gift of another person’s affection and attention. Our loving presence as parents is so much more important for our kids than mud or paints or even building good habits.

My sweet daughter has a sweet little five year old soul and body that needs a mommy to watch while it rides a bike in circles as fast as its legs can go. She needs me to watch and keep watching, not just so she’ll feel noticed. So she’ll be noticed. So that she is actually being loved. She is made for this.

And as her mom, I am made to be the person who loves her. It’s my job to make it true that she is loved. I’m fortunate that our family is whole and safe. We don’t struggle for basic survival, so there’s no reason that my children should have to experience loneliness. No reason, that is, outside of my own sin-broken nature.

At the very end of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Jean Valjean is dying, blissful to be finally in the presence of Marius & his beloved Cosette. His last words to them are “Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.”

The Apostle Paul says as much to the Corinthians: “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”

I will confess I am not good at real love. My heart is too much given to itself, bent in on itself. I need Christ to remake me, resurrect me, teach me, show me. I need to be formed in his image. I need love to be given to me as a divine gift.

John’s assertion “God is love” is bafflingly simple. Love is the whole point because it is the essence of the tri-unity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: the Community of Self-Giving; the Community of Mutual Delight. And as if that weren’t enough, love is the very project of Creation: More love!

The opposite of love, then? Self-absorption, self-interest, self-protection. Satan invites us to be like him in the hideous, agonizing, lonely comfort of ultimate lovelessness. That lovelessness is not just a failure to see the world outside yourself for all its beauty. It’s a failure to enjoy that world. A failure to be present in it. A failure to give yourself to it in self-forgetful worship. It’s isolation.

What do I become when I fail to see my daughter’s beauty and be present with her in love? I am choosing loneliness for myself. What becomes of her in the process? I am choosing loneliness for her, too. To be given someone to love is a sacred trust and a deep mystery. It is no small thing.

Could we say love and loneliness are opposites? Loneliness is such a painful experience because it is the opposite of our design in God’s image. We are made for love, and the absence of love is fatal. It dead-ends in misery. At its worst it becomes the rage, hatred, contempt, frustration of a young man who murders seventeen innocent people at a high school on Valentine’s Day.

My heart aches when I consider the epidemic proportions of acute loneliness in our society. I wonder why it’s so common until I look back into myself again and recognize the difficulty; the impossibility, really. Real love consumes the lover. It is not natural to expend yourself. It is not convenient or easy. It is costly.

There is a counterfeit love. But it is costly too. Counterfeit love has an agenda. It is self-oriented. It maximizes productivity, opportunity, and efficiency instead of connection and presence. It does not secure its object against loneliness.

I cannot love my daughter without investment and sacrifice. I cannot love her and spin all my plates in the same moment. I certainly can’t love her if I approach her as another plate to spin, because then I’m falling short of actually acknowledging her inherent worth as a creature.

I have a tendency toward this knock-off version of love. I turn my daughter into just another plate I’m spinning. Since I’m good at spinning plates, it’s easy to think she has all that she needs because she passes the hours of her days pleasantly and her life is full of good things. I often find myself looking at her as one of my Important Things To Invest In. Seeing her only as an aspect of my own life, I begin to prioritize efficiency. It’s easy to run out of energy and begin to resent the costliness of loving her.

My knock-off version of love is hard to sustain. Like any counterfeit, its source is different from the real thing. Not being divine, it has to be manufactured by my own energy, and this can be exhausting. Not being real, it leaves my daughter lonely.

Instead, if I look at my daughter as a creature made of love and entrusted to me in love, for love, investing in her isn’t exhausting. Yes, it is costly. Love lays aside itself for the good of the beloved. When I get caught up in her beauty–in how good it is to notice her; in how good it is for her to be noticed–then all the while it is costing me it is filling me up, too.

To lay aside self is unnatural. That is why love is so hard and loneliness so common. To lay aside self the heart must be turned toward the other, filled with the love which is the very essence of God. This is what Christ brought the world in his incarnation, bestowing himself on us in love; giving himself in order to be united with us. This is what Christ modeled for his disciples and what he commissioned them for. And this is what John wrote:

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us…. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. (1 John 4:7-12, 16)

Christ’s Companionship: Lenten Thoughts on Transfiguration Sunday

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I remember a professor in seminary impressing on us over and over again “Heaven is wherever Jesus is.”

Today we celebrate the Transfiguration. How desperately we need that story! Nor do we want to come down the mountain at the end. If only we could secure ourselves in Jesus’ divine presence permanently!

Here is a glad wonder, though: our access to Christ is not, in a way, as limited as Peter, James, and John’s. We have the whole story unfolded. And yet they were allowed his earthly body, a fellowship of human friendship not so easily conjured up from our vantage point. We would not be wrong to crave what they had.

As Lent approaches this year, the need for healing has been foremost in my mind. Every one of us needs healing of some kind. But more than that, isn’t our greatest need simply Christ’s companionship? In fact, is it possible Christ’s companionship is the essence of healing? We need to be in his company.

In this posture of desire and dependence we are ready for the journey of Lent. We call on Christ to come and take up his throne in our hearts; we seek for him to be our teacher so that we might learn how our hearts can be a place he may more easily belong; so that we may more steadily apprehend his presence; so that we may offer him true hospitality–the kind that makes its guest comfortable. This is the project of Lenten discipline.

We do not presume that Christ is in need of this hospitality. But we are, because in that comfort–in that apprehension–every Lenten day of this earthly journey may be its own Transfiguration. And I suspect Christ will not answer us as he answered Peter if, in this transfiguration, we were to say, like Peter did on that mountain, that it is good for us to be here.

It is in Christ’s companionship that we may make our pilgrimage without being overwhelmed by the things which grieve or shake us. Indeed, this companionship is the only thing we need. Christ’s company is enough. To have his presence is life and health and peace.

It is strength, too; we can in fact journey through anything if Christ is our companion, no less surely than Peter could walk on water. Perhaps this is what Paul was trying to convey by his claim: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

Rutherford in Paris

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I’m sitting in my favorite coffee shop. This morning’s flavor of music here is not my jam, so I’m glad I brought my headphones. I’m listening to jazz from Paris, dutifully caring for myself. Cliché, but here it is: when Louis Armstrong starts singing about chestnuts in blossom I smile. And I’m sitting beside the window on purpose so I can see the sky. I thought about not getting a latte, but this morning it was a wise choice.

Meanwhile, I’m reading Samuel Rutherford’s ebullient reflections on the loveliness of Christ and browsing essays by Marilynne Robinson, a decidedly Calvinist Christian, a dauntingly brilliant thinker, and a major literary figure of this generation. Rutherford says “Rest, with Christ, will say more than heart can think or tongue can utter,” and if that isn’t the truest thing I don’t know what is.

Lately when I get time to myself I spend it on maximum-strength rest. I need space in my head and my heart. Sometimes I can’t find it, and most of the time I can’t even look for it. I start to feel like I’m drowning. “Rest, with Christ” is oxygen. Yesterday I met my pastor at this same coffee shop and he reminded me of another Calvinist writer, John Newton, who wrote of the cordials Christ bestows on an infant heart hungering for the gospel. That’s why Rutherford went into my bag this morning.

On a morning when I wake up fighting my darkest sorts of feelings, which is it? Is it April in Paris, or is it the Loveliness of Christ? I’ve learned to listen to a lot of secular voices in my adulthood after a thoroughly Calvinist and Puritan childhood. I use these two descriptors rather unfairly, as anyone who lives within them will insist, but I use them in their stereotype-meanings. The poster I made in Sunday school, which my mom probably still has on her bedroom wall, reads “If heaven is our homeland, what else is this earth but our place of exile? –John Calvin.”

After I finish typing this I’ll drive across town to the behavioral health offices at the hospital in an ongoing, uphill attempt to be whole and happy. Christ, unmediated by common grace, simply could not effect this important aspect of wholeness no matter how much I were to devote myself to him. There, I said it: the Bible is not all you need.

But reading Rutherford reminds me that there are less secular methods of self care, and I know them too well to forget or reject them, even if they (like everything else) have potential pitfalls. Couldn’t I care for myself in no other way than “Christ’s cordials”? Rutherford’s sentences make me nod and wince in alternation. A poetic rejection of the world for the sake of love’s expression is good and even true. A life that doesn’t avail itself of April in Paris in this “place of exile” is foolish.

When I criticize myself via internal childhood voices for running to sources besides Christ for wholeness, joy, and rest, what I’m remembering this morning is that all those sources can be oriented within a Gerard Manley Hopkins-esque theology of creation that is as ebullient as are Rutherford’s love letters. Oriented this way, every little thing is valuable to my soul on a morning like this, from orange leather shoes and orange Italian latte cups to Newton, Rutherford, and Marilynne Robinson. It just isn’t either/or.

Ultimately, I can attest to the all-surpassing loveliness of Christ right along with Rutherford, because there is a place my heart goes that nothing else can cure, and Christ can cure it, oh! yes, he can. The best Christian spirituality is learning what it means to belong to him, and this is a school I try to attend, however distractable I may be.

The reality for Rutherford’s original audience was very different from my own. He was writing to friends in deep affliction and even persecution, sometimes writing from prison. Perhaps this is where his modern disciples risk mistranslating him: by reading him out of context. I could have all that I need if I had nothing but Christ, unmediated through Sacrament or sacrament, but that is not my context.

I, for one, will not entertain my own doubts about my faithfulness to Christ when I answer my hunger for creature comforts. This world is his and it is not evil or even unlovely. Everything is beautiful.

 

Holy Audacity: The Church as Christ’s Vice-Regents

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Last Saturday morning I jumped in my van and pulled out of my driveway. Lately I’ve been introducing my kids to the tunes-of-choice of my college days, so Steven Curtis Chapman was cued up in our CD player. Track 4 started playing when I got in the car.

It’s all yours, God! Yours, God! Everything is yours!

I was driving toward a local shelter where I was to meet a desperate mother and her four young girls. Through Safe Families for Children, I had agreed to host two of them for a night.

I have my doubts in these moments. I am keenly aware of my privilege and my naivety. I am comparatively young, comparatively wealthy, and comparatively whole. My story reads like a fairy tale compared to the brokenness and devastation survived by many of the parents I meet through Safe Families. I imagine they must find me irritating. Maybe they groan to themselves about yet another Well-Intentioned Well-To-Do who thinks she holds the keys to hope. “As if she has a clue. As if she’ll care enough to go the distance.”

As I drove I wondered out loud: “Who do I think I am, going to get these girls like it’s just a regular Saturday morning? How is this my business? What gives me the right to waltz in offering my remedy? My relief?”

But Steven Curtis Chapman was still singing, and his worship reminded me of another lyric I sing to my kids often: “This is my Father’s world.”

This is my Father’s world.

Suddenly my heart was flooded with confidence. It wouldn’t be putting it too strongly to say I felt a sense of entitlement in that moment. “Holy audacity,” I heard myself say to the empty passenger seat beside me.

So I parked my van just a mile from my own house and walked to meet these struggling strangers. On behalf of my Father in heaven, I had work to do. In some sense, these girls belonged to me. Their mom belonged to me.

I believe that my identity in Christ (and more to the point, my identity as part of the Church, His Body) includes a right to ownership of the whole world. If “everything is Yours,” as Chapman sings, then it must be true that everything is mine, too. God has called His people to love the world on His behalf. He has called us to practice His kingdom.

I’m not saying we can achieve world peace and end world hunger by our efforts. We believe the Kingdom of Heaven is coming. Someday. But today, while we wait with hope, we enact that vision. Today we are Christ’s vice-regents, commissioned for the flourishing of His world.

I stood waiting to meet the little girls I was to take home and Meghan (our local director) began to wonder where the second host family could be. When they still hadn’t shown up fifteen minutes later Meghan called them, only to discover there’d been a mix-up and they were out of town, thinking their hosting was to be the following weekend.

Suddenly we had a situation on our hands, and any minute this mom was going to be walking through her doors with four little girls to hand off.

Steven Curtis Chapman must have gotten into my bloodstream in college, because I buckled all four of those little girls into my van twenty minutes later. I turned the key in the ignition and Track 5 began on cue:

It’s crazy when love gets ahold of you
It’s crazy things that love will make you do

I laughed.

I knew I could do anything for 30 hours, and I knew I would have support.

My husband was in the middle of painting our bathroom so I was on my own for the first few minutes as he finished up. I don’t remember much from that mayhem, but I remember playdoh on the bottom of shoes, mass-production of snacks, and six little people coloring at my dining room table. Suddenly I had seven kids, and my 5yo son was the oldest.

The other thing I remember distinctly is the number of attempts I made to send a single text message. After an hour of sheer pandemonium, I finally got it typed and sent.

And so began the unfolding of a most amazing day. The text was to Brad & Caroline Tubbesing, the directors of Reformed University Fellowship at Indiana University. I knew when I agreed to take all four girls home that I’d need help, and by the time I heard from Caroline I had little more to say than “Send back up.” I asked her to connect me with college students, and I told her I didn’t want their phone numbers, I wanted them on my doorstep ASAP.

Mike finished painting and we started suiting up to walk everyone to the park. At one point the door to the garage got opened and kids started escaping. Mike picked up one tiny person after another and set them back inside until he realized that no sooner would he reach for the next escape artist than the one he’d just retrieved would head back out the door. He called for help. “Babe, we’re hemorrhaging babies over here!”

By the time we’d set out with two kids on bikes, three kids in strollers, and a baby strapped to each of us, I’d started to get text messages from our College Student Fairies.

Elizabeth was the first responder. She was at Kroger and decided to pick up groceries for lunch. Just as we returned from the park she showed up at our door with fried chicken, watermelon, juice, cookies, and even flowers.

Brad himself showed up with his preschool-aged son to lend a hand while I escaped with my own daughter for our long-awaited ballet matinee.

At 4:00 Xinzhu showed up and helped while I started giving everyone baths. At 5:00 Matthias walked in and found me up to my elbows in shampoo. Xinzhu made rice. Matthias read stories. Luke arrived in time to help set the table. We all sat down to lentils and rice at 6:00 with four kids bathed and jammied and only three to go.

The kitchen was in quite a state. After dinner Luke ran Xinzhu home and returned to read stories, color, and generally offset the average household age. Matthias rolled up his sleeves and attacked the kitchen. He didn’t quit till it was sparkling. There wasn’t even rice under the table, and that’s saying something.

Around 9:00 Matthias and Luke left, promising to return in the morning to help caravan us to church since we’d be short on seatbelts. It was 10:00 before I’d finished settling the four sisters into our guest room. The 3yo fell asleep on my arm. The 2yo went from whirling dirvish to snoring angel in mere seconds. The baby wiggled around quietly in her crib. I told kitty stories with the 4yo in the dark and then escaped to attend to the laundry and set out seven church outfits, raiding my stash of outgrown girl clothes.

By this time three of our closest friends had gathered in our living room. This is not unusual in our house and I don’t know what their excuses were for showing up on that particular evening. But at midnight – as Tyler, Nicole, and Fr. Raymond stood in our basement folding a mountain of laundry – it was obvious to me that God hadn’t been finished chasing me down with the love of His people.

Sundays are always an ordeal for my family. My husband works as the organist at a local church. My kids and I worship with a different congregation. Mike leaves by 7:00 a.m. most Sundays and it’s my job to get the family out the door on my own. This particular week was no exception.

I have it down to a science after several years of practice. Still, it isn’t easy. And Sunday mornings are excruciating when I’m sleep-deprived.

After about three good hours of sleep I was standing in my kitchen slicing a very large collection of strawberries when it occurred to me that I was neither anxious nor stressed. If I’d had to make those breakfasts and pack those bags and dress those babies in a filthy kitchen and a house full of chaos I would’ve been a basket case. Instead I was at peace and there was only one explanation: Matthias.

Matthias cleaned my kitchen like it belonged to him. He had the holy audacity to step into my world and enact his vision of the Kingdom. While I was giving myself for the flourishing of these girls and their mom, he gave himself for my flourishing.

And it worked. I flourished.

We say often that it takes a village; but I think it’s more accurate to say it takes a church – an audacious community of vice-regents, working on Christ’s behalf for the flourishing of our Father’s world.

I understand Safe Families more now than I did before last weekend. It’s common for people in Safe Families to tag social media posts with #bethechurch. My understanding of our mission deepened as I found myself surrounded by Jesus’ hands and feet, held up by an audacious church as I ventured into My Father’s World with my own audacity.

Hopefully that single mom felt as much of Jesus on that weekend as I did while slicing strawberries in my clean kitchen. Hopefully she felt the embrace of our Heavenly Father, a whisper of the reality that (as Steven Curtis Chapman sings) He’s the Maker and Keeper, Father and Ruler of everything.

It’s all Yours.

There Is No Crisis Here. Everything Is Fine.

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I’m here to reason all this stuff out.

In a pause of the vacuum cleaner just now I spoke my mind:

“Will you drink with me tonight?”

It didn’t need an answer, really.

Tonight we get to see each other, my husband and I, for the first time in over a week. I mean, we sleep in the same bed and we greet each other and we are present, but never alone together lately. There wasn’t a single night this week that we kissed the kids goodnight together. We spent date night working.

But before we get to sit down together we vacuum most of a large bottle of glitter out of our carpet.

I drove to the pharmacy for my daughter’s antibiotic (she has an ear infection) while he tucked them in, and I thought to myself “‘My life for yours’ is only fun until there’s glitter on the carpet.”

The pharmacy was closed.

As a highly sensitive person I find myself reciting this mantra to myself often these days:

“There is no crisis here.”

My body feels crisis in too many situations. My vision of the good life is clean, minimalist, tidy, calm. Things move slowly and in an orderly and sophisticated way.

What I’m learning – what “There is no crisis here” means – is that I can still allow myself to feel those slow feelings when there is glitter on the carpet and everyone is talking at once. When my house is still full of people over an hour after I thought my kids would have their jammies on. It means that even when I am busy and I know I haven’t paid those bills that were due on Monday I still have time to listen to what my kids are saying and say yes about the Dr. Seuss book. There is no crisis here.

There was crisis most of the time last year. But noise and glitter are not a crisis.

I also breathe “Everything is fine” a lot because often I feel like it’s not fine. But everything is going according to plan. Glitter on my carpet means everything is going according to plan.

We believe in “My life for yours.” We believe in a porous household (except for when it’s time to close up shop for a week or a month or a year) because we believe in the Kingdom of Heaven.

I’m part of a team supporting a single mom these days, so every other Saturday crazy things happen in my house while we women sit and share our hearts and our Jesus. On this particular day the craziness was glitter. We only discovered it as we walked down the stairs to tuck in the kids, ready for that “finally” moment when we’d see each other for the first time in a week.

There is no crisis here. We believe in vacuuming up glitter. We believe in welcoming a tiny newborn into our family for a week or two , especially when it’s Lent and we’re asking our children to recite Isaiah: “Is this not the fast that I choose? To take the homeless poor into your house.”

Back in our college dorm hallway conversation days we envisioned this. We didn’t realize that what we believed in looks like glitter and chaotic Saturday nights at the end of a brutal week, but we just weren’t there yet.

Redemption is found in the specifics, my friend said.

There is no crisis here. Everything is fine. I believe in all of this.

Apparently I believe in glitter.

Thoughts on Spring and Standing Still

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or Thoughts on Broken Bones and the Power of God

I’m not good at sitting still. I mean that. When I sit down, I get up again. It’s a compulsion, but more than that: It’s a desire and a delight. I like doing All The Things.

Sunday morning my pastor was talking about healed lepers as I was looking at the boot on my foot, aware that all I’ve been told to do is stay off it. Stay off it and it will heal.

This weekend was spring. It’s still February. But it was spring. The birds and I were euphoric for no reason but how the sky looked and how the air felt. There in my front yard, barely an inch tall, a bunch of purple crocuses opened. All I had to do to make that happen was nothing.

I’ve been thinking about life-force a lot these days. Paul writes to Timothy about “the power with which God raised Christ from the dead.” I’ve been thinking about how that power is in the warp and woof of our whole existence. Not only for the whole world: bones and bodies that heal, crocuses that didn’t need any help, and the first warm day of February when even the bare trees and brown grass magically look like Aslan has been here. But doubly for us, children of the resurrection: We belong to God. Spring is inevitable even for souls marked by death with more than annual ashes. Mine, my children’s, my husband’s. Yours.

The conjunction of spring and the X-ray that revealed that my foot has been broken for four months, not strained for two weeks as I’d assumed, was loudly incongruous for me. Every year when spring comes my eager spirit comes out of hibernation. My inability to sit still reaches fever pitch. I do more things, think more thoughts, and feel more feelings in the first weeks of spring than in an entire Minnesota winter.

But not this time. This time I watched my kids at the park from a picnic blanket and I read most of a book and dozed on the couch, because I know that the only way my foot will heal – the only hope I have for my next run – is stillness.

Sit still and let it happen. Sit still and it will heal.

Perhaps second to the story for which this blog is named, my favorite Old Testament story is in 2 Chronicles 20, when Jehoshaphat is king and the people of Judah are facing disaster at the hands of their enemies. The people cry out God: “We are powerless against this! We do not know what to do! But our eyes are on you.” And God’s answer comes, perfect:

Do not be afraid and do not be dismayed at this great horde, for the battle is not yours but God’s. Tomorrow go down against them….You will not need to fight in this battle. Stand firm, hold your position, and see the salvation of the Lord on your behalf, O Judah and Jerusalem.

I thought of this moment in history again yesterday as I sat listening to the story of healed lepers and looking at my broken foot. Sometimes we do not need to fight the battle. Sometimes our work is to stand still and hold our position and see: The world is hard-wired for life and for spring. For resurrection and for the victory of Christ the King.