Migraine Rejoicing

A day of dizziness, of increasing pain, of eyes shut against light and ears aching against overwhelming noise, leaves me emotionally crippled by night.  Tears are quick even when I see the comedy in them.  When the pressure lifts and my head is no longer pinched, the feeling is indescribable.  I will try to describe it anyway.

Relief from a migraine opens floodgates of joy and thanksgiving.  Dizziness departs and my eyes can look once again painlessly towards windows.  I have noticed time and again how beautiful the world is right after a headache finally eases off of my brain.  Colors sparkle, light flashes, the world sings unbidden, and usually unnoticed, but for that day.  I try to hide my laughter as I walk alone down a bike path to reach my church on Sunday morning.  The bikers passing on my left and the joggers avoiding eye contact might think something's wrong with me, when in fact it has seldom been so right.  My appreciation for Mr. Magorium bubbles to the surface in an excess of minute delight.

"Now we wait," says the assistant.  "No," returns Mr. Magorium, "We breathe.  We pulse.  We regenerate.  Our hearts beat, our minds create, our souls ingest.  37 seconds well used is a lifetime."

I wonder, as I note the careful dispersion of glowing morning on sheltered leaves, why my attitude towards all of life lacks the sheen of post-migraine jubilation.  When God lifts the spiritual migraines from my soul, why do I not break into singing as King David?  Where is my daily zest for all things when the Cross, always fresh with Christ's blood shed for my daily guilt, hangs over my now white soul?  Salvation is every day.

"Depression is apt to turn us away from the ordinary commonplace things of God's creation, but whenever God comes, the inspiration is to do the most natural simple things--the things we would never have imagined God was in, and as we do them we find He is there."  ~Oswald Chambers

All of me becomes light when my physical body finds relief. My eternal soul is granted relief every day.  Ought I to take it any more for granted just because it is all the more common?  I hear cicadas hum, and feel cool wood beneath my feet, and my pen scratches across the page.  My head is dizzy again, but I still sing praises because my soul is set free.  Paul, in seven chapters of Romans, reaches a painfully acute dilemma.  "Wretched man that I am!  Who will set me free from the body of this death?"  His words scream.  I hear a pause before his next hushed sentence:  "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"  Chapter eight is victory.  It is relief from the migraine.  It is ice on the back of Paul's head, peppermint on the temples, Excedrin taking effect, eyes wide open toward the light.  It is life, and the life is the light of the world.

We breathe.  We pulse.  We regenerate.  

"Bring my soul out of prison, So that I may give thanks to Thy name; The righteous will surround me, For Thou wilt deal bountifully with me." ~Psalm 142 

Lost: Words.

"Bitterness is a paralytic," says the Cumberbatch Sherlock, and I wince a trifle self-consciously.  I can't move.  There is nothing to invite me into living.  I am waiting for something that I don't know, that doesn't come, and doesn't come, and doesn't come.  Waiting for a moment in which I say, "This is why I am here.  This is my reason."  Dragging my feet through a logical plan that ought to be exciting, pulling my sled behind me through mud and ice, weighted down by an unknown gravity.  I forge my chains like Marley, link by link and yard by yard, coiling them around and around me to move too slowly through a fleeting life.

I do what anyone might do in such a circumstance.  I memorize poetry.  I read it before sleep every night, and collect its gems carefully, as if storing away treasure for an unknown future.  It surrounds my desk.  Fawcett, Green, Donne, Southey, Frost, Herbert.  I seem driven to be engulfed in other people's words at the very time that I can't write or even speak my own.  All is a chaotic silence within me.

Sometimes you don't realize what you have, until you lose it.  Now that I can't even write my thoughts, I miss those words I didn't realize I had.  My pen hovers night after night above the page, eager to spill its ink out of my scattered mind and into rivulets of meaning, but nothing.  Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and nothing happens.

I read.  Frustrated, I play Bach faster than I ought, and I play Chopin with all the emotion I can't express in writing.  I look for my words in gratitude, in prayer, in conversations, in music, and I don't just feel that I have lost something precious, but that I myself am lost.  Lost without the words that have become all-important.  Lost without the freshly inked pages of my soul.  Lost without my one human medium of communication.

The solution is laughable, so I laugh at it unrestrictedly.  I am not lost without my one human medium of communication, because there isn't one human medium of communication.  "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders!" shrieks a funny little man from years ago, and I grin helplessly but happily as I sit at my little desk and realize my mistake.  I looked for my words in gratitude, in prayer, in conversations, in music, not because they would magically give my words back, but because these things are my words.  These things are my human communication, fragile and eternal.

Gratitude describes the blessing, prayer worships the Giver, conversation fills surprising dialogues, music speaks the very soul.  Words.  And in the middle of this entirely unsurprising yet wonderful discovery, The Word, not my own but of Another, sings.  The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.  His Glory.  As of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.  Always the abundance.  Always the fullness.

The words will come again.  They never really left me.  Freedom comes with the acceptance of freedom.  I move again, to find that the chains are only in my head.  Marley's ghost is nothing, after all, but a bit of undigested beef.

Seeds and Circus Acts

"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.

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.

Blessed, and Laughing

I laugh a lot. I worry sometimes that it's annoying, but somewhere along the way I decided that if something is actually laughable (and so many things are), I should be able to laugh at it unrestrictedly.  One of my brothers pointed out once that he could tell me outright that I laugh at everything, and that I would react by laughing.  I laughed before I could stop myself.  
Right now, you may start laughing about how you have read the word "laugh" so much in these opening sentences, that it doesn't even look right anymore.  You should definitely laugh at the way you have to google words like "laugh" sometimes, just to make sure they exist.  But back to my point.  I laughed a lot before last summer, but a year ago when I read about counting blessings, I began to laugh even more.  When I started to see how surrounded by blessings I was, my joy became fervent.

Blessed.

Ah, what a scrumptious word.  It is, in fact, a word that reminds me of the word "scrumptious."  Blessed is like...a cake.  A gooey cake with warm filling that melts deliciously over your tongue.  It's a different kind of word than "Grace," which is a delicate, beautiful, strong word, hard as iron and soft as a cloud--the meeting of all the Christian extremes that Chesterton has told me so much about in the past two years.  "Blessed" is a word you can bite into.  But they are often much the same kind of thing.

Blessings are like comfort foods, and toast with honey, and a cat sleeping on your lap, and sitting around a fire with friends, and watching both Sherlock Holmes movies with your mom when the boys are all away.

I was back at school last fall, and it had not been a good week.  As I trudged to class, I gave myself a talking to, and concluded by saying sternly to my newly repentant self, "You need to be grateful for what you have.  Look around you."  I looked up to the building I was passing, where funky architectural decisions had been made many years ago.  I pronounced my sentence upon the building firmly:

"Thank you Lord, for triangles in windows."

And, I kid you not, I couldn't help the smile that followed.  

Sometimes, we ask the Lord for good feelings, and joy, and peace, but we don't act like we really want them.  And sometimes, when we just put our feet down and refuse to be dragged into the piteous and miserable, but insist upon gratitude, the joy is certain.  

Blessings are like summer evenings on the front porch, and Red-Winged Blackbirds whistling, and a happy young brother looking like a lost boy in surely the worst clothing he could find in his closet, and a dog that always waits for you to come back home, and old reruns of Adventures in Odyssey while the flower beds get mulched.

The blessing is always there, waiting to be seen.  And I guess that's when you know what you really are.

Blessed.

One Year Ago

I walked out of the sanctuary and Wendy reached out for me.  I burst into tears, overcome by so many emotions at once, not knowing what to think or feel.  The woman who had spoken to us about freedom seemed to fly down the church length to fold me up and speak directly to my heart.
"That was one of the most beautiful, open, vulnerable, stirring testimonies I have ever been privileged to witness." Her hands cupped my tear stained face firmly and she looked boldly into my eyes, daring lies to try to take me now.
"You are a beautiful picture of redemption," she told me, into my years of aching heart, "you take one of my cards and stay in touch with me."  I had a ministry and a gift of communication that God was going to use, she said, as the tears would come and I didn't even try to stop the sobbing.  There was a freedom in not holding myself in.  This woman I respected held me close and prayed for me and spoke the dark away and I could not speak because my heart was too full and my voice could not be found after its loud confessed proclamation.

It has been a year since I stood in front of a church of women and told them the truth I had concealed so well all my life.  People knew before that I was a sinner, but I had to tell them just how much of a sinner stood in their midst, opening her heart and giving them a target for their arrows of judgment and hostility.  But grace always surprises me.  My smallness was made big and I heard chains breaking and felt lives shaking and not only was I blessed to witness the changes, but I was overwhelmingly blessed to be part of their freedom stories.

All those years of deep pain and inability to feel closeness--and fear, always fear, of people knowing me.  Suddenly all of it took on meaning I could never have dreamed.

And all this time later I ask God why the heartache and hurt of the now, and He reminds me of His past works and even my sin is sovereignly declared from the beginning.  So much changes, always changes, but He is the same.  Into His sameness of reality I will walk, ever closer to a Truth more true even than myself.  I take those deliberate steps through trembling, and He always knows what He has prepared for me.