A Roman's Road to Grace

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.

A Caterpillar's Question

"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.

Under Grace

It is hard to live under grace.  It is hard to accept love without condition, without deserving any part of this favor shown me.  To be loved not because I'm beautiful, or joyful, or good at washing dishes.  To be loved not because I clean without being asked, or that I cook well, or that I am ever patient and kind.  Loved because I am loved is hard to let be.

As I drive to visit my brother, I think hard on Galatians 2, freeing my head from my selfish desires for the first time in far too long.  I try to reason out what it means, these life feeding verses, and how it is no longer I who live.  Sun above me sharply glints against crisply reddened leaves.  The sky spreads its arms wide to embrace my adventure.  How is it no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me?  My sins weigh heavily on me, even as I turn my glad face to the day.

Some people seem born to a holiness beyond what I will ever know this side of eternity.  I have to slaughter myself daily in order to live in any semblance of holy.  Would that I had cut off both hands and feet and ears and eyes and tongue...my mind would still corrupt and boil within me.  Yet I have been crucified with Christ.

I want to deserve the immensity given to me.  To pay back somehow for some small portion of this blessedness.  I try harder, always trying harder, always more prone to fall harder.  I refuse to meet God's eye, angry with myself for falling?  Or is it anger with Him for letting me fall?  I demand my own perfection sullenly, thinking that surely this time I have done enough wrong for many lives.  No more, please.  Take this dish back to the kitchen.  It is underdone and wicked.  The plate refuses to hold it.  My testimony is already padded thickly.  I have been given much, and surely God will require much, but I have nothing to show.  Paul claims that he is chief among sinners, but he and I will fight for the title, and I am confident in my own success.

I live by faith because I have nothing else to offer.  My belief must be counted as righteousness, for I am small.  By law shall no flesh be justified.  Dare I say that Christ's death was in vain?  I must live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.  This is the life I now live in the flesh.

Hills of rock and purple fringed bushes fly past me.  I am still as worlds pass by, this trip by daylight, splashed across a brief word in my history.  My smallness is surrounded.

Some people seem born into holiness, but I know my flesh, born into depravity.  How much has been forgiven me.  Joy rises out of this smallness.  God made flesh.  Immensity cloistered in human womb (Donne).  My life drops from the faucet onto an ocean of saints who whisper softly from pages breathed of Sovereignty.  "Endure for the joy set before you."  In the presence of God alone is fullness of joy.  Sin pushes me to my knees, to His presence, to His joy.

Oh, and doesn't joy fill my cup, my broken vessel, my humble clay.

It is raining now.  It will not stop until I reach my destination, but Christ is in it.  He is here in the rain.  Every drop fallen onto my windshield is a new wave of Grace.

Cry Glory and Fight

It is easy to live in fear of this present time.  This present evil age, as Paul said it, nearly two thousand years ago.  I remember reading Animal Farm years ago with crawling flesh and a sick stomach, recognizing vaguely similarities not only to other countries, but more importantly to my own.  I was unable to put into words my young but very real fear.  I could only say with clarity that it was the creepiest book I ever read.  

There is a conniving, deceptive attitude about things going on right now in our nation that scares me just as it angers me.  Animal Farm fear of something unknown.  The fear multiplies as we live, as we exchange stories with others, as we feel an invisible net being pulled tighter.  Everything in our eyes is always reaching its worst.  I think at such times perhaps we tend to go defensive, protecting our rights and liberties with jagged nail and canine tooth.  There may be a desperation even about our actions and thoughts, as if already being trampled underfoot.  But what need we fear man?  There is nothing new under the sun. 

Is our time really so much more evil than it was in Paul's day? Perhaps this period of complacency is giving way to a period of early church tribulation once again.  Is this a thing to fear?  There may not be another country for Separatists to flee to this time (except maybe Texas), but in the right perspective, won't the future be exciting?  Who knows what God will do in this glorying of His Name to come!  Shoot, our country may go legit communist and be thrown to the wolves.  All the wolves.  We may be threshed like wheat and burned like chaff, but won't God's name be glorified by the proud actions of His humble servants?

Oh friends.  How petty our grievances against these weak created ones.  Shall we stand confidently, and attack with assurance the deceptions borne to us?  We may be driven like snow from the homes we once owned and the possessions we once worked for, but what an adventure future generations will then read in our pages.  For pages we will always have, stories somehow passed on in the face of persecution.  There will always be a remnant.  Won't our heroic deeds be told in all their weakness and celebrated as God's own victories?  Hallelujah.

We, our human selves, may not live to see this time we foresee gloomily, but We, the Church universal, may and I think will see it in no uncertain terms.  Why then lurk in fear of what may already be coming?  Let the light of battle sparkle in our eyes!  A time is coming and is now at hand when we must stand for Truth in a world run over by the squelching half-truths and slim chances.  Let's live it!  Let's live this time of uncertainty in fierce delight.  Our victory is sure.  

God will be glorified.  All praise His name!

Much Sin, Much Grace

It is surely wrong to wish sin on anyone, but the temptation is there, when I know how sin brought me to realization of grace.  While I tremble in fear to wish the deep and obvious sin of my own heart, I think that surely a more accurate view of self-depravity may be desired.  Still, strange as it sounds, I have had occasion to pity people for not having the power hungry struggle that I have with obvious, degrading, disheartening evil in my heart.  Deception comes easily for me.

I wish people would be able to grasp reality without the pain and fear I have put myself through, but there is part of me that knows: The worst thing in my life was the best thing for my life.  From much sin, I found much grace.

Sometimes people suffer from a righteousness that exceeds their own abilities--a crushing legalism of superiority.  I wish they could be free.  I wish they could have that one shattering moment of confession to dramatic failure of years past and present, and experience the stark otherworldly emptiness of a vessel cracked after a lifetime of stagnation.  I want that moment for them, when they walk under a night sky and look at the stars with the new and numbing knowledge that nothing stands between them and their Creator.  

I want these people to see the world as if for the first time~the world they've taken for granted all these years, because, you know, they're just children of the King and this is their home.  This palace of earth is where we grew up, so maybe the novelty is lost on us until we have that moment of Grace Come Down.  I guess I wish people would know firsthand the absence of honesty, just so they could experience its liberation and health with its sweeping fullness of gratitude.

Dear me.  I want people, these people, us people, you people, to have at least one moment where joy is so overwhelming that there is no response sufficient.  That your face might shine with God's own presence, because, for the first time, God gives you a glimpse of how little you deserve and how overpowering is His love for you.  For you, His child.  How I wish for this to happen for each one of us.

Redemption of an entire life's worth of unconfessed, unacknowledged, fearful lowness...there are no words to express it.  I can only continue to hope for these many others to experience it.  For you, many others.  I can only continue to hope that the worst thing in many lives be turned into the greatest gift~as mine was~the discovering of grace become embodied.  And may we all be stripped of our restrictive false righteousness to find fullness of joy in His presence.

All is grace.

Placing the Counted

I can usually tell when I'm getting a migraine.  Some of them come quickly, but usually mine are slow in advancing.  A morning of sleepy daze slowly wakes up to an ache in my neck and behind my eyes by afternoon, and evening brings worsening aversion to light and sound.  A smell may also bring a migraine faster.  By an early bedtime my eyes hide from the lit lamps and I flee (very slowly and stiffly) to my bedroom in a vain attempt to shut out the world.

It was on such a night not long ago that I mused silently about the hypersensitivity of a migraine.  Curious, how lifelike it is.

Bitterness works the same way, doesn't it?  The same way, in fact, as gratitude.  They both count moments.  As I lay in bed that night I heard clearly each whisper, cough, sneeze, cleared throat, creaking door, kitten's thump.  I could list each grievance with poetic accuracy while holding my dully throbbing temples in an attempt to still the pulsing annoyance, to no avail.  Life was whirling dizzily around me as I lay in the dark, but all I could feel was the nausea of light and sound.  My moments of grace escaping without thanks~because my eyes couldn't see them?  No.  Because my soul refused them.  

It's not just food that you refuse when you're in pain~it's the every moment.  The treasure is no less valuable when I refuse to give thanks for it.  When, in fact, I prefer refusing it altogether.  The complaints can be counted as minutely as blessings, and always more naturally, because my heart is always deceptive.  The Old Sin in me hides my eyes as effectively as a headache.  I shield myself from grace, because who can handle its blinding light with such a throbbing behind their eyes?  

Then here is Jesus to gently open my eyes and take the disappointed bitterness from me.  Isn't that the beauty from ashes redemption of a broken world, that He promised so long ago?  Always new mercies, even when I refuse to open my eyes.

Oh, to have numbered my complaints that night with my blessings.  To have given thanks in all things and grasped the every moment grace with both hands, freely taking and giving of the blessing surrounding me, for such is Christ.  To let go of the acrid soul and reach for the better things. 

718. brother fighting sickness hard

719. closeness of bedrooms

720. sound of yawns across hallways

721. show tunes whispered nearby

722. dog asleep noisily at foot of bed

I can usually tell when I'm growing bitter.  Sometimes it comes quickly, but usually it is slow in advancing.  I guess the difference comes in where I put my counted moments.

The Sometimes Hardness

What do you say to the sometimes biting hardness of God's always love?  Blessings are given, blessings are taken, blessings are withheld, and it is all Grace.  Every moment.

How do I comfort with the trite and the condescending when all my heart wants to do is break?  How do I tell friends about stately sovereignty when all they feel is the lack of their darling child?  How do I speak of abundance when I watch years roll by within a few short days?

I don't know.  I do not speak well in the first place.  I stumble over the pronouncing of my vast ideas.  I write my love out of the fear of being unloved.  Yet oftener, words must be spoken to be heard and I can't hide behind the covers of my journal forever.  Loving must be verbal even if I do not know what to say.

II Corinthians 1 speaks of a God who comforts us in all our afflictions so that we might be able to comfort those in any affliction with the comfort with which He Himself also comforts us.  As we share abundantly in Christ's suffering, so we share abundantly in His comfort.  Abundantly.

The word haunts me.  Always abundance.  We share this abundance of suffering, of comfort, of Christ.  Our cup overflows.  Goodness and mercy follow us all of our lives, not as passive onlookers but as interested habits clinging to our paths with the diligence of God-sent dignitaries.  Grace is not disinterested.  

I know these things.  I write them out to myself.  I hang them on my walls.  Chesterton and Donne speak to me out of illustrated passages, hung where I am reminded of their truths.  And yet I cannot speak them.  My mind sails upon thought and swirls new ideas into its current but the words will not be right and I am afraid to speak lest I hurt where I most wished to heal.

Oh for the grace to speak what must be said, and to show the love that I feel.  

Blessings are given, blessings are taken, blessings are withheld, and it is all Grace.

And forever and forever,

   As long as the river flows,

As long as the heart has passions,

   As long as life has woes;   

The moon and its broken reflection

   And its shadows shall appear,

As the symbol of love in heaven,

   And its wavering image here.

~Longfellow, from The Bridge