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

Don't Get Any Ideas.

There is an unavoidable dilemma at 22, in which every young man to whom I speak is seen through others' eyes as a "prospect."  I do not blame people for this.  I fully realize that matchmaking, even if passive, is the most entertaining thing people can do with women like me.  However, this does create a mental obstacle towards speaking to my brothers in Christ as I ought.

Firmly forgetting that someone will be speculating gently as to any future possibilities, I am at last able to speak normally to Obadiah and draw him out of his shell as I would any well deserving person.  [Don't get excited, my dear matchmakers.  I don't know an Obadiah.]  However, fearing opinions and shying from harmless speculations, I find myself refusing to speak to men at all, should they be remotely young and unattached.  

Such was my unvoiced strategy for many years, and certainly through high school.  In a college environment where everyone was the same age anyway, speaking to men became natural and easy for me.  In college ministry, I tried to make people comfortable.  Men, as well as women, like to feel welcome in new situations.  Unfortunately, when I would return to various multi-generational environments, I found myself reverting to old habits.

I became newly aware of this fault in myself when I entered into conversation with a young man who had been visiting the church for several weeks.  Why had I not introduced myself to him before?  I had noticed him before, in a rather scientifically offhand manner, as if his life had nothing to do with mine.  The problem is, it does have something to do with mine.  He belongs to the same God that I do.  We are inextricably linked by the same Holy Spirit who breathed life into both of us, and by the same Christ who took our sins in equal and extravagant measure so that we might die to sin and live to His righteousness.

Yet here I am, fearing other people's opinions, and therefore doing nothing to welcome, to invite, to encourage.  I believe very strongly in protecting reputations and not giving people reason to gossip, but the extremity to which I take these cautions is frequently overdone.  Shame on myself for inattention based on fear, or worse, pride, for isn't it pride that wants onlookers sure of my indifference?  An indifference, in fact, that is unloving, ungracious, and devoid of real humility.

People will always speculate when there are matches to be made.  I find it rather funny.  Meanwhile, people ought to feel welcome.  We are the Church after all.  

Chocolate Chip Expectations

I bit into a chocolate chip cookie today that had no chocolate chips.  I did not realize it at first.  I thought there would be at least one, somewhere, if I kept looking.  But no, no chocolate to be found.  Just cookie.  The cookie tasted good, of course, and had it been called a "Chipless Cookie," or "Vanilla Bread Cookie," or...something, I would doubtless have enjoyed it.  However, I put it on my plate with the expectation of chocolate chips, and was therefore disappointed.

Sometimes life is like that.  I was given the impression that my life would be different now--that I would be confident in my direction, or have an entirely different purpose.  Life is still good, but not what I expected.  It was sold me under a false idea.  Certain relationships were supposed to be wonderful, but ended up being forced and unnatural.  Classes that I looked forward to ended up being ugly. People I expect to like are disagreeable.  Life at home may not be as sweet as I hope.  All the time the world sets up expectations for us without following through, and all the time we let ourselves put hope on things that may not come true.

As a child, I was given some very profound insight: "When you give a mouse a cookie," explained the author, helpfully, "he's going to want some milk to go with it."  How odd to realize, all these years later, that the author was actually being satirical!  Mice.  We are mice, my friends, who have been given cookies.  Never really satisfied with what we have, always expecting a little more than we have been given, always returning, in the end, to the cookie.

For some reason, we like to think God owes us things.  As if we earned something better than He gives us.  As if Grace is only what we want, not the every moment He gives us.  As if grace upon grace is only figurative for the times we have everything we want.  God has given me life, and I complain that He hasn't given me my chocolate chips.

God hasn't promised us the chocolate chips.  But He did give us cookies.  And more often than not, out of His abundant lovingkindness, He even gives us milk to go with it.

I munch the next cookie, contentedly.  I have found chocolate once again, and this coffee is delicious.