"If you make happiness or joy or peace your one aim and object in life, it is certain you will never find it; but if you put righteousness as your main aim, and if you become so concerned about righteousness and true living that you can be said to be hungering and thirsting after it, well then, says our Lord, you will be filled with happiness. It will follow." ~Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
It is not an easy thing to be happy. I am less than capable of convincing myself that I am happy when, in fact, I am not. In the parable of the sower I am only too aware of the seed I would be, if not pursued so endlessly by a gracious and all-loving Hound of heaven. The cares of this world choke my fearful heart.
Joy is not a natural state of being for any, certainly not for me, but I have tasted its tang too often to give up my hope in its revival, when thorns prick me on all sides. Joy is too alive to be held back, wild, untamed life brimming with laughter and salt tears. I hate pain, but I welcome the life that is its sponsor. My worst of times is my best of times in the middle of my circus act. Apathy belongs behind the curtains, the shadows in which it thrives, but I am alive here on the stage and the acrobats throw me and the clowns spin me and I may even get shot out of a cannon, and life is the music playing overlapping strains above a multitudinous roar. We are life's players, we circus performers, we poor but rich servants of an Audience.
I do not achieve joy any more than I achieve a handspring (which I don't). I reached my particular brand of rock-bottom before discovering with the help of Dr. Lloyd-Jones, Chesterton, Dostoyevsky, and Romans that the fruit of the Spirit is not reached for from the ground, like an apple hanging above me. I am grafted into the very tree from which the fruit is borne, and the fruit is therefore not eaten nor collected. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness...these become my own as I become the tree's own. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.
"The business of the gospel of Jesus Christ, therefore, is not to reform the individual or the whole world; it is to take hold of us one by one and to bring us out of it, to give us a new birth, a new life, a new beginning. It makes men and women children of God." ~Dr. Lloyd-Jones
Pursuing by-products of Christ is the world's way of helping: pursuing peace, or health, or happiness. Meanwhile, thorns threaten to choke out that which is most dear, and I want to taste not just a fleeting savor of joy or peace or patience, but of life fully lived, life fully enjoyed under the Glory of God who lives.
Here is a seed that ought to have fallen among thorns. Grace threw me into rich soil.
Out I walk along the taut wire, touching the sky with my outstretched fingers. Next time, I will ride the unicycle.
Ever since that fateful day two years ago, when I opened my unwilling mouth to admit sins kept secret for fifteen years, I have loved the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans. I remember that my reading had brought me several chapters into the book before Grace shattered my carefully constructed world. When I picked my Bible up again, every verse glowed at me with a life I had never seen in color. I cried at the beauty overwhelming my tired soul, and laughed aloud through my tears at the sudden freedom.
"Oh, the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!" If my soul could have spoken its reaction to the world during this time, these would have been its words. Oh, the depths of the riches! Even as a believer, even as Christ is changing you over the years and opening your eyes to the new and the wonderful, you can still live in a shadow. It is all too easy to work towards righteousness on your own strength. With Paul I could boast of my pitiful standards, always deceiving myself into believing that my works pleased God. Never realizing my works were filth before His glory. Never realizing that He didn't want my burnt offerings. Never realizing that He wanted me.
One of the trees outside my window has refused, all this fall, to let her leaves turn color. She has been nearly as green as in the summer, even after the other trees lost their leaves and stood stark and gray against the November earth. But it snowed last night, the leaves froze on the branches, and now the ground is carpeted green, leaves fallen all at once. It was such a November for me two years ago. Refusing my humanity, denying my weakness, somehow keeping my green leaves long after they should have fallen. It was such a November for me, fifteen years too long, before the frozen storm thawed my proud heart in a single night. Die, to live. No condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.
No condemnation! I, who above all deserved condemnation! I, who had hidden even from myself the depth of my guilt over the confines of years. It all burst upon me with curious intensity now, and I was left gloriously shell shocked. Where sin increased, grace now abounded all the more. This harlot, who had been forgiven much, learned at last to love much. For who will bring a charge against God's elect?
Oh, the depth of the riches of wisdom and knowledge of God. This grace. This widening, ever expanding, always limitless grace, separating my clinging sin from me as far as the east is from the west. I did not understand. But for the first time I understood. In one gut wrenching, perfect frame of time and space, I knew both the magnitude of my own depravity and the all encompassing, death defying, astronomical strength of a freedom I had never realized.
I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. I am convinced of it, because I, wretched woman that I am, was unable to be separated from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus my Lord. The words soared on wings that shielded me. Abba! Father!
I read Romans with new eyes that November. I feasted on the Word that had once become flesh and died for my sin. I drank deeply the wine that flowed over my guilt, and every word was a gift, and every grace was a miracle, and all things were grace, for from Him and through Him and to Him were all things.
And such they are still. May I remember the eyes that saw so clearly, that November two years ago. May I remember the heart that held so tightly onto living words with the desperate joy of one long-starved for this one central truth. May I never forget the furious grace that destroyed deceptive chains. Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.
"Who are you?" said the Caterpillar.
Being told all your life to be yourself can be restricting. Who am I?
I am only too eager to be different, if what I think I am is my identity. I want to be smarter, wiser, more open, more gracious, always more of what I deem good and less of what I deem bad. Less private, less awkward, less uncomfortable. By some God-ordained miracle I escaped from the too common obsession with beauty of a physical and even sexual nature~what could I do about a flyaway shock of red hair and large hands anyway? Inner beauty is what I have been told to value~goodness, truth, intelligence~and value it I have, to the detriment of all else more grace-filled.
Because of course, constant reminders of inner beauty reminds a young heart that she is filled only with the ugly. Don't look. Too dark for holy eyes to see. "Confidence is the sign of a Godly woman," I heard sharp voices declare, ignorant of the shrinking girl at the edge of the circle. Already fearful of letting others see, that giveaway lack of confidence grew exponentially, a cloud of anxiety darkening above a young soul.
"You!" said the Caterpillar contemptuously. "Who are you?"
Who are you? Asked a wise, drugged up caterpillar of a confused girl. The same caterpillar, this time dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt and carrying books of systematic theology.
Who are you?
Not good enough.
Not smart enough.
Not wise enough.
We fight a battle, not against the innocent others who speak thoughtlessly, but against the merciless, grinning forces of evil who take careless words and spin tales of such worthlessness that battle after battle in this bloody war is lost at a single withering glance.
I seem doomed to failure. The flaming arrows have for so long pierced my thin faith that I know unmistakably my own wretched ignorance in all that I most wish to be most knowledgeable. Words continue to come slowly when I most wish for the articulation and clarity to communicate my own thoughts.
Who are you?
Not smart enough.
Not wise enough.
Not good enough.
I don't know how to step outside of my own viewed incompetency into a better understanding of my own skills. I try to show people what I see and am only frustrated by their dismissal of my sight as warped. But what is true. Who am I. Why do I not understand the truth from outside of myself that others claim to know?
Who are you?
Not wise enough.
Not good enough.
Not smart enough.
Wrestling with my inadequacy makes my shame ever more tangible. Where is the confident woman of inner beauty who I am supposed to represent? This fearful specter of some Victorian imagination haunts me with her gentle smile and perfect poise. She understands the philosophies of ages past, recites all the grandest poetry, argues ever graciously her perfect opinion with easy clarity, and I hate her. I hate this creature who stands by my elbow wherever I go and corrects my reality with her own falsehood.
Who am I? Flesh and blood, faulty, hilariously real. A sinner, bought with Son. Entirely bought. No longer slave to mortality and frail faith.
Who am I, asks Valjean in a far grander melody than my own. Who are you, asks the Caterpillar with obvious scorn.
Who am I?
Not good enough. Imperfect. Faulty, but covered in faultless blood. Once dead, but now alive by Grace alone (around which all other things orbit). I am holy who by her own power is only the chief among sinners. I stand before all my imagined juries of disapproval and judgment with the grace to be brought to me at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Keep smoking that hookah, Caterpillar. Keep reciting your classifications and sage advice, flannel shirted one. Keep pursuing that inner beauty, you sharp but womanly tongues.
I wear the righteousness of Christ.
