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.

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!

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

The Search for Profundity

Thinking all the more about what to write next, I have been struck with something akin to stage fright, and have found myself therefore incapable of writing anything.  Apparently I can't discover marvelous things on command.

"Elise! Learn something profound! Gain some particular insight into your own human nature!"

It just doesn't work like that.  I guess when you're looking too hard, you can miss what's right in front of you.  Edgar Allan Poe--no, I must be honest--the dog Wishbone's version of The Purloined Letter taught me long ago that the best place to hide something is in plain sight.  At the time I wasn't greatly impressed, and continued to hide things in carved out books and bed springs, but the significance has since resonated.

The dishes need done.  My room needs organized for the fall.  My two youngest brothers just disappeared around the edge of a barn with a machete, an arrow, and old vegetables from the garden--I wonder why?

Sometimes righteousness isn't a big whiz-bang discovery or dolled up bad day.  Sometimes things just need to be done, like reading that chapter for Bible study, or rearranging my bookshelves for maximum efficiency.  Sometimes we think that if we're not learning something phenomenal and world-shaking, we aren't really close to God.  We don't feel God speaking to us, so we must be doing something wrong.

Before I become worked up, I think I shall just mildly declare these to be cumbersome lies that we need not embrace.  Righteousness isn't a collection of profound thoughts or feelings.  That's called philosophy.  Nietzsche and Freud were philosophers.

When I'm looking too hard for profundity, it escapes my attention.  The written word is surely the most marvelous creation I have ever been incapable of fully realizing, yet I didn't find myself incapable of realizing it because I was looking for something to realize.  Instead I was reading Acts, and the momentousness suddenly broke upon me like an overripe cucumber thrown by my youngest brother at a barn wall.

Life is too profound to give up in a futile search for significance.  I think I shall cease trying to define profundity, and instead, do the dishes.  Lunch will need to be made soon.

Breaking up the Fallow Ground

I keep Bible verses, poetry, the Nicene Creed, and the occasional hymn taped up on the walls and furniture close to my bed.  I like words that mean something.  A few days ago, as I meditated on what would be closely linked to my last post--namely, the futility of my existence--my eyes fell on a particular index card rendition of Hosea 10:12.

Sow with a view to righteousness, reap in accordance with kindness; break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord, until He comes to rain righteousness on you.  

At a time when every career seems bent only on my betterment and I question the purpose of such a life, I find this verse a beautiful and challenging reminder.  Sow with a view to righteousness, not survival.  Reap in accordance with kindness, not professional courtesy.  By this time in the verse, I begin to be convicted.  But I read on.

The Google dictionary, which allows me to look up a definition without getting off the couch, defines fallow as, in part, "Plowed and harrowed but left unsown for a period in order to restore its fertility..."  Break up your fallow ground.  Loosen the rested soil once again enriched with the minerals essential to strong production.  My sinful heart resounds with fallow.  It is time.

It is time to seek the Lord until, as the judge gave protection to the persistent widow, He comes to rain righteousness upon me.  Jesus asks after his parable, "Now shall not God bring about justice for His elect, who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them?" (Luke 18:7)  A friend lovingly reminds me that weeping endures for a night, but joy comes in the morning, and Ecclesiastes proclaims the time for weeping, as well as for laughing.  Do not be afraid of the times for mourning, for there is also a time for dancing.  There is in fact an appointed time for everything.  And there is a time for every event under heaven.

But a time to seek the Lord?  That is every time.  That is now.  For it is time to seek the Lord, until He comes to rain righteousness on you.  "That is your purpose now," I say to a freckly face, which frowns at my reproof.  Righteousness is the purpose.

But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man shall be blessed in what he does.   ~James 1:25

As I turn from the mirror, it is far too easy to forget what kind of person I am.  

What Does Man Gain by Toil?

Three weeks before I graduated from college, I looked into the future and saw the emptiness of Ecclesiastes stretch before me.  Three months later, the vanity of existence still looms before me on an ever darkening horizon.  I once hoped that by 22, I would have found my purpose in someone else's.  But my plans continue to be solely self-promoting.  One thousand options, and not one appeals to me without coaxing.  I find little wonder that C.S. Lewis warned of thinking too much of the future and too little of the sparkling present.

“The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.”    ~Screwtape Letters

As I look ahead now, I find it easy to question the purpose of my existence.  Once I foresaw a life of meaning, of living for others.  Now I find that I must act for myself, and the idea is unattractive and useless to me.  When my life stretches before me, and all I can see is work to keep myself alive, to further my weak ambition, to stretch myself academically, I think I would not mind dying young.  Then, at least, I could make a difference.  When you have no goals, no ambitions, no drive to accomplish for the sake of accomplishing, every step in your career seems made to pay your own bills, to move up your own ladders, and to fight for your own survival in a Darwinian society.  

When I was younger, I used to lose myself in fiction so completely that I forgot the beauty of my own reality.  Now I lose myself in reality so completely that I forget the beauty of life.  I'm a good reformed girl.  I know that my purpose is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.  But I am also human, and frail, and there comes a point when I wonder how meaningless my existence really is and will be when I am only ever fighting for myself.

When brothers come into the room to hug me goodnight, I catch a glimpse of why I continue to exist.  But what happens when they leave to start their own lives?  To pursue their own dreams?  I won't always be able to do their dishes a hundred times a day, and vacuum their rooms, and sweep their floors, and play their games.  What happens when loneliness finally catches up to me, and I am forced to admit that I am not needed?

The Prophet says that all is vanity.  I know that hopelessness.  I know the lack of meaning in a life that should be full of meaning.  I know what it is like to plan, but to see your plans only with apathy.  "What else would I do?" is my question as I shrug my shoulders, and nothing comes to mind.  At least here at home I can help others, before I leave and help myself.

I pray for a purpose.  I need one.  

"The end of the matter; all has been heard.  Fear God, and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man."    ~Ecclesiastes 12:13

The Other Side of the Mountain

It's easy to get complacent.  We pull ourselves out of one hole, push off in the right direction, drive for a time, and suddenly find ourselves in another hole.  How did my good intentions and positive speeches put me into a place just as murky and hopeless as before?  And then I remember the one day I was too tired to read my Bible, and how one day stretched into a week, and before I knew it reading my Bible was the exception, not the rule.  I recall, ashamed, how I stopped looking God in the eye when my sins became too obvious even to my so deceptive heart.  And the chapter of Romans that was infiltrating every portion of my mind?  It began to be blurry and forgotten when speaking it took more concentration than I wanted to use.

Going up a mountain seems like it would be easy, once you get a good start.  That's when you realize you're sliding backwards.

I'm at war with myself, all the time, every day.  People say it should get easier, over time, to be righteous, but I do not see that yet.  If that is true, then I must certainly be the worst of sinners, without hope of holiness and virtue in this life, and I wish people would stop thinking to comfort me with words that actually chill me.  I know what it is like to feel the sin crouching at the door of my heart, and I can feel helpless, sympathetic to sin that perhaps Cain also felt unable to avoid.  "Who will free me from this body of death?" I cry, hopeless in my state of degradation, every minute fighting a more often lost battle for control over my own mind.  Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ His Son, is what I should say next, but the words choke me, for I do not seem free at all.  Not yet.  My sinning heart aches for righteousness that would be pleasing to God, forcing me to remember Whose righteousness covers my own inadequacy, forcing me to remember Whose humility covers my own pride.  "Hope that is seen is not hope," I remind myself, but meanwhile I clench my teeth in frustration at my own weakness and despair at ever living what I want to live.

I prayed for humility, but I never thought it would come even in my fiercer struggles with sin than ever before.  Silly as it sounds, I envy the people who seem to get by in life with easy, though consistent, trotting toward the prize.  My efforts are ever in need of being redoubled, not relaxed.  As if any moment may see me falling prey once again to that roaring lion, and if I stop my watch for the briefest of seconds my heart will betray me.

I must always be fighting for every step.  So be it.  If my whole life is to be a series of hard battles and fearsome ends, only pushing forward through shamed tears and aching pride?  So be it.  I will keep fighting.  If every step up this mountain is as hard as the last, though it may kill me, I will move on.  Because some day, some glorious day, I will get to the other side of the mountain, and none of the glory I see will be for me.  I will reach the top truly humbled, Lord willing, and it will be all for Him.  I won't have to fight ever again.

I will reach, once for all, level ground, that only ever goes higher.

Fighting for Security

Ever since I was very young, and believed with my whole heart that I had to make up for the decrepit sin in me by being holier than other little girls, I have been a terrifically insecure human.  

Ever since I made plans to be a spinsterly aunt to my brothers' children, because I had no reason to believe a man would ever want me, I have been a terrifically insecure human.

Ever since I was seven years old and formed in my mind the theory, confirmed again and again, that people were only around me to be nice, and not out of any real interest in me as a friend, I have been a terrifically insecure person. 

Once I was taught that you battle lies with truth.  But I was taught to fight with squishy truth and a lowercase "t."  Combat, "I will never be married," with, "Someday my prince will come."  Fight, "people are only around you to be nice, and not out of any wish to be your friend," with the nicer and more pleasing, "People love you and want to be around you."  When I wondered whether a certain person was tired of me and no longer wished to be part of my life, I tried to fight the "lies" by making excuses for the other person and justifying their decisions.  It only took my entire life, but in the past few months, I have finally learned the better way to fight insecurities.  

Thanks be to God, my body seems to reject lies.  Last fall I found myself so beset by insecurity and trying so hard with these cheap bandage words to fix my heart, that I lost close to ten pounds and spent a great deal of my time nauseous, or in bed with debilitating migraines.

To heck with that.  Sometimes people don't love you, and sometimes what you wish for is not what God wishes for you.  Who is the Lord?  Maybe that Disney prince will never come.  The Lord is good.  Maybe those children you love so much in your mind will only ever be in your mind.  His mercy endures forever.  Maybe the family you love so much will fall apart.  His will be done.  Maybe that person really is tired of you and finds you lacking.  The Lord is near.

Who is the Lord?  There is my hope and my security.  When I look every day to Who the Lord is, my insecurities and fear of others mean less.  I felt inferior to an entire church body, until the Truth of Who God is meant more than human thoughts of my worth.  I saw people in January whom I feared, and in May, looking at Who God is, I see my joy full because of His presence, and people-judgment doesn't scare me anymore.  
Jesus knows me intimately.  He loves me intimately.  Who fears human judgment when the Lord declares Truth and you hear it?  He reigns forever, and I am but a breath, to pass away in the next moment.  

Whom do I serve?  "One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible...."  (The Nicene Creed)

The fight goes on in my heart, and some days I am not victorious.  But I still serve the Victor, and that Truth must be enough for every day.  

Prayer for the Imagined

Lately, I have been trying to pray for my future husband.  I have run into only one small problem:  I don't think he exists.  However, I reason that I shouldn't let my own disbelief prevent my genuine prayer for a man who may exist despite my disbelief in him.

Why would it hurt me to pray for a man that I don't believe exists?  Perhaps because it forces me to see what I really believe--or don't believe.  Perhaps because it brings me face to face with ideas that may be insecurities, that may be lies, that may be truth.  I've heard that I should pray for those who hurt you, and perhaps this man who does not exist has hurt me with his nonexistence.  Rather a silly idea.  But I pray anyway.

I pray for grace in this imaginary man's life~for an understanding of love not based on works.  For strength and perseverance in God's work.  For hope and conviction of God's presence in this imaginary life.  For always increasing wisdom beyond his years, and the healing of sin scars.  I pray that he would be down to earth but able to see dreams of God glory.  I pray for this imaginary man to have a passion for the least of these and a bold spirit for justice and truth.

And finally, I pray that God would make me a ready helper for this imaginary man.  That I would have grace for his mortality beyond what I know how to have.  That I would always be an encouragement in his life~a life that will be full of discouragements and trials that we will only overcome out of God's abundant grace for the imaginary us.  I pray that I will learn now the things I will need to know, that I may be a strong support, having hope that perseveres.  I pray that we would be faithful parents of our imaginary children, raising them in an imaginary home that is filled with grace for all of our falterings and failures.

The only thing that seems real in my prayers, is my prayer.  
Grace and God's glory?  These are things that are never imagined.

Thinking of Doing

Some people know how much I have been thinking lately about everything offered to me.  Some people know how my life has lately had occasion to change, flip upside down, and do rapid back handstands.  I don’t even know how to do back handstands, so imagine my bewilderment! 

Some of these thoughts have concerned doing.  I see people who do, simply because it needs to be done.  I see them move to Africa, and adopt children, and write books, and begin organizations, and live out loud for the whole world to hear.  I see them mocked and scorned by the world, and don’t I wish I was so brave!  I see great things being done by Christ’s servants, and don’t I wish I knew how to do them as well, but I tell myself that I can just keep loving God and seeking righteousness, and that is what I am called to do and it will be enough.  

But the Truth that I keep seeking is making me question, and continues upsetting my peaceful world.  She suggests that perhaps I am called to great things, because I am called.  And whom He called, these He also justified, and whom he justified, these He also glorified.  And am I loving God as I could, and what do I call great, and am I seeking the approval of God or man?  So I wonder, and do as I am prone to do when I wonder: I read.  I read many things, but always more questions arise and I have to give up things that I used to love, because Truth is hurting me and I need to think.

I seek God’s presence, because I know that there I will have fullness of joy.  But His presence is holy, and I am a sinner, and He has to prepare me for His face.  So as I seek Him, He keeps breaking my heart and my dreams and my dependence on all else, and there is so much pain, the further into Him that I go.  Everything, joy and pain alike, is more.  I read Chesterton about extremes, and I see it in Truth, this Lion laying down with the Lamb without one becoming more like the other.  I see the rightness in living, doing, all unto Christ.  And I want to live, fearsomely and boldly, with the freedom I have been granted.  I want great things to be accomplished, and I don’t care whether I lead them or serve them quietly, because quietness in Christ is the loudest in the Kingdom of heaven, is it not?

I read Martyn Lloyd Jones and realize the power of Christ in me accomplishing the "greater things," that Jesus foresaw.  I memorize Romans 8 and see everything through its lens, because the verses become so deeply rooted in my mind that everything relates to them and clears my mind often when I don't understand.  I count blessings in a craft-project composition book and reach 464 when I feel the need to write out what I am thinking, because there is so much I seem able to think that I absorb Chesterton and Lloyd-Jones and Voskamp and Metaxas as if I have nothing else to think of anymore, but still I know that there is more and I want to do it, to live this Gospel that I read.

But I look around me and I don’t know where to begin.  How do I live out God’s commands in such a way as to impact and not to yield?  I ask the always asked question, “What can I do?”

There are people walking down the street every Friday, looking to fill themselves at the broken cisterns of alcohol and parties.  There are girls crying alone in their bathroom stalls, hopeless on the floor, sick with what they have done.  And nineteen year old me walks by, wishing I had the words to say, but letting fear control my actions because I am weak and broken myself, and what will they think if I do what I so wish to do?  What would happen if I stopped and asked what was wrong, and took them in my arms and loved them, because the mother-girl in me wants to give them comfort, but I never know what would happen because I let fear speak louder, and I walk by and hurt inside, but not enough to do. 

There are broken families in nearby complexes, very much alive, and we don’t look because our minds speak what our mouths can’t form for shame.  “White trash,” we don’t say, loud and frightening to our middle class sensibilities.  Better to ignore their existence, and say patronizing things about their music and their vulgarity, when their lives interrupt our own parties.  And I writhe a little at myself and the others, because something is wrong and we just don’t see the Gospel, trying to make itself heard above the noise of our sin and willful ignorance. 

Nearby there are always bitter women, growing away from young, disillusioned by their broken hearts and dreams, carrying on out of disinterested habit and seeking satisfaction in men, or work, or causes that they think good.  And there are church girls, afraid of their shame and never becoming what Jesus promises that they could become in Him, lying to themselves and each other to satisfy their desire to be accepted and loved, because if people knew what they really were, surely no one would love them truly.  

And how I wish I could blast those Hellish lies to forever damnation and throw myself around all of these broken women and broken lives and broken families, and protect them with my own life.  Everything around me is broken and hurting and I gnash my teeth at that Fall that killed us all and sent Creation itself to Hell.  Romans 8 once again speaks to me, and I know that Creation itself will be set free one day from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God, and that is a promise and a hope that I can surely hope for with perseverance, all the more because I do not see it, for hope that is seen is not hope.

And still the homeless and destitute track down the street, buying each other $1 burgers for their birthdays and hobbling by on feet that hurt on cold days.  And still I smell cigarettes and worse things on my musicians, hopeless and searching for what they think will bring them fulfillment and I wish I could tell them what it is they really need, but would they listen?  Lies always win me, and fear always controls my lips from speaking Truth. I see the boys hold hands and trying to find love and don’t I wish I could voice my fears for them!  And I see girls walking back to dorm rooms after nights away, and I avoid their eyes because I feel their shame as they do, but don’t know the words to make it better.  And always, always, why would anyone listen to me and wouldn’t I hurt His cause when I most wish to serve it?  And wretched woman that I am, am I not the worst sinner of them all?

And still, friends need me to be a friend, and to love them and encourage them as the church is called to do for one another, and where can I possibly start, and how do I prioritize people like just so many tasks in my planner?

Not twenty miles away, Toledo is the fourth leading center in the United States for sex-trafficking, and girls—just children yet—are forced every day into work that turns the stomachs of grown men, but we shield our clean cultured eyes from the horror and can’t even remember to pray the evil away, let alone face it ourselves.  Across the globe, Egyptian Christians face more and more persecution and horror of their own, and I read their stories and I weep for the hurting, but forget in the next moment as life drags me away to the next appointment.

What is the use of a broken heart for others, when no one benefits from my pain?  Is this Great Commission to be spoken of lightly and dismissed when it calls us to do the uncomfortable?  How do we carry the light into the darkest places that surround us, and name the Gospel to those who desperately need a Savior?  Don’t we all need Him?  How do I love my neighbor when I don't even know who he is?  Where do I start?  So many hurting ones!  

I pray one night that God may break my heart for His children, and I walk through a yard marked by crosses, and I am broken inside by their deaths in a country we claim to be so free.  I weep for the lives that killed them, who yet live in such misery of sin and hopelessness that they themselves are dead even while they live.  God grants my prayer to feel, but oh, don’t I regret the prayer when I hurt deep inside at all the pain around me, and sometimes I stop my ears because the crying of His children is too loud.

And after all this time, when I begin to be most overwhelmed by a world of fallenness, my question begins to change.  Not in essentials, but in emphasis.  No longer do I ask “What can I do?” but “What can I do?”

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength,” says our Lord, “and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love, He says.  Just as in any service or labor or relationship.  “Love,” He says, “is my commandment to you.  Do not be troubled, but believe in God and believe in Me.”  

Am I letting fear rule my actions?  Am I acting out of obligation to these my neighbors and friends, or responding out of that most powerful God gift?  Does God call us to action beyond love, or does He know that when we really start loving, we will really start acting?  

Sometimes I wonder if God smiles at our feeble protests and distrusting hearts, or if He raises His eyebrows as at Job and asks us where we were when He laid the foundation of the earth.  Do I believe my own heart to be more broken by sin than His own is?  Do I imagine that sin will become less, that I can make His kingdom on earth, before Jesus returns?  Dr. Lloyd-Jones asks me where I can find that to be true, and I am freed by the sudden remembering.  It isn't. "If we hope for what we do not see," says Paul, "with perseverance we wait eagerly for it."  

Love God and obey His commandments, says the Prophet, and I feel the burden lifted.  What can I do?  I will start there.

I will love.