Summer Home

by JenL

The Cottage

The Cottage

Between Pittsburgh and Erie, off I-79, (or as my dad calls it, the Festival of Barrels given its constantly-under-construction status), through sleepy college towns and rural one-stop villages, around a million blind corners and just at a sweating hot dip of pavement, there’s a gravel drive that runs up a small hill. The grass really is greener here, but that might be thanks to runoff from the cow pasture at the top of the hill, and the faulty septic system that passes under the front yard. Still. It’s pretty.

The Cottage has been in my family for over a hundred years, and it looks like it. A sturdy if slightly slanting first floor is wrapped by a porch, half of it screened against the sun and bugs. The other half of the porch holds the swing. The swing is prime real estate over which not a few arguments have begun. Perfect for watching the sun rise over Sugar Lake, or for a satisfying apres-lunch snooze, the swing hangs in the shade, but not so much that we can’t feel the warmth of the sun while counting sheep.

Dinners around the ever expanding table on the covered porch were simple and glorious, the yellow gingham waxed tablecloth (are you seeing a pattern here) loaded with the riotous colors of the farmer’s market: yellow corn, red tomatoes, strawberries in a shameless, vixen hue. We smacked our lips while Grandpa told, again and again, about throwing firecrackers in the outhouse while Uncle Percival Bergen was, um, in situ.

After dinner, when the fireflies blipped in the darkness, we searched the ground for nightcrawlers, perfect for early morning trawling with Dad. Sticky, muddy, sweaty, happy and tired, we tumbled into the house, for the first time all day, to a fire perfect for marshmallow toasting. Grandma sat in an fat upholstered rocker, just under the pitched stairs, sewing clothes for our Barbies or reading Agatha Christie.

Up the stairs, through a hatch in the ceiling, a smaller second story, one big gable, really, is separated by an intricately rigged system of planks and canvas, so that there are two smaller bedding areas, and just a hint of privacy. But the house is not big, nor is it insulated, nor is the ceiling up the stairs finished. So when it rains, the sound of the drops on the shingled roof splash louder, and the trees whisper in theatrical tones, and the knots of the wooden beams become faces that we recognize over time.

The Cottage is our family museum. My father’s old sketches align the walls along with his sister’s equestrian ribbons.On the mantle around the fireplace, warnings about not being rude to the barmaid hung with fishing gear and photographs. A series of wierdly large fungi ran along one portion of the mantle, marked in my grandmother’s precise handwriting. She’d have found one on the side of the house, and with a nail she would carve our names and the date into the spongy thing. Magically, our names, her script, darkened in the flesh, like a tattoo, a permanent record:

Jenny, Chuckie, and Shanny were here with Grandma on July 4, 1981.

We escaped here. For a long time, there was no phone, and so when someone got sick or if someone died, my dad could not be called home at a moment’s notice. That changed when the phone line went in. Then the mailbox. Finally, my mother insisted on a shower. A proper shower, not some cooler full of hot water bleating on to her head from the back porch, with a sheet at the mercy of the wind her only protection from the prying eyes of the cows up the hill.

I know how I sound. I know I paint a picture of summer idylls and family harmony. And that is the way with memories, especially those gauzy recollections from a mostly happy childhood. The memories drape on me like the Oklahoma heat, where my home of nearly two decades is. I won’t get back to the cottage this summer; I won’t be able to get “home.”

I am homesick.

I am homesick for the green mountains that surround the lake and for the sound of boys dragging out of bed in the dark morning hours to fish. I am homesick for lazy summer laughter and books in the shade. I am homesick for this place, and knowing I won’t be there, knowing that siblings and cousins and nieces and nephews will fight over the swing drops on me; a stone of knowledge too heavy.

They say home is where the heart is. They say home is where mama is. They have a lot to say about home. What I know is that home seems very far away.

June 20, 2013 in Story with 0 Comments

when these are the days of awe

by Preston

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I want to tell you the story loudly, because I believe the louder I tell it, the more you will believe me.

“Out beyond the ideas of wrong doing and right doing there is a field. I will meet you there.”

Rumi whispered that once over our heads, over the gin martini with one olive. That’s where I shall take you, to that field, sit you down, and tell you the story of what it was like to kiss her, touch her, see her for the first time. I shall tell you how I can calculate the curve of her back, how I can sense when she is about to break ether with wisdom that slips off her skin like diamonds spilling off granite. I shall tell you the metered and rational things, the tables of financials and timelines, the way everything has its proper column, box, place.

I want to tell you the story loudly, because I believe the louder I tell it, the more you will believe me.

Because the alternative, the version in which I place between us the truth that to be next to her is to remember how to breathe again, that the way she smiles at me makes those tiny fears–the ones that creep in middle of midsummer and lie next to you in bed and tell you about the ways in which you have, once again, failed–how her smile scatters them back and further still, and how all of this leaves me talking in runon sentences because they are the only sentences that makes sense in this moment I want to tell you this version of the story, this way it has happened, but I am afraid that you will not hear me because the pattern won’t fit or the archetype or the conventional wisdom or the how you would have could have or should have done it yourself back when it was still yours to would could or should.

Love is a maddening sort of thing.

It becomes an unintentional hedge of protection that at times keeps out more of whom we thought we were to be than we ever were. We make our vows before we ever make them, make them in the day to day, in the distances, in the phone calls, in the pauses before we say the words again and remind ourselves of them over and over until we think there should be no breath in our lungs to give.

And I want you to understand this. I want you to see us as we are, but I am uncertain that you can.

You want a story for us that is perhaps not ours to tell. So I tell you the version that you find satisfying, the version that fits the narrative that you find safe, the version of events ordered in such a way that you look from your window and see all the neat and tidy, the box and column lives, arranged in efficacious decay and you call this the best and proper way to live.

You will not find us there. You will find a version of us, the version you find palpable, and we shall nod when you say you understand us and knowingly smile one to another, because you do in your way, but not The Way. Because Love is a maddening sort of thing, and sometimes He has more in mind than our box and column. And I wish it would be enough to tell you that I knew in the moment that she first looked at me, that a life was made at a kitchen table with two people side by side, that it was measured in coffee cups and wine glasses and late nights and laughter and wit, that all of that was the sum of the unspoken and that these are the days of awe, but that is a quieter story.

It’s a story that begins simply, This is it. These are the days of awe. And with that, as said the poet, this is love.

June 20, 2013 in Story with 1 Comment

How to Weather June

by Emily Maynard

Oceanside 1 EvinDC

When we arrived yesterday the sky was crisp and blue.

The trees out here on the Oregon coast are tall and strong. They grow fast in the rain and rich soil, but their roots go deep. Some are strangely shaped, with missing branches and limbs bent by the wind, but they are steady. There is one tree growing sideways on the side of the rock wall that stretches into the ocean. I can’t stop staring at it.

There’s another fresh loss in my life this year, but here we are in June, so I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve felt the storm building for weeks, like a slow hurricane that I see coming in, but cannot avoid.

June is my cruelest month.

Do you have days or months that are marked like this? Seasons weighted with grief or unease that show up each year?

I’ve tried all sorts of things to fight it. I’ve partied my way through Junes, slept through them, and hid away with my good friends Rational Detachment, Over-exercise, Over-eating and Alcohol.

But I’m learning that there are no ways around grief, so this June I am trying to reach down my roots.

This year I planned a retreat at the coast with three other writers. I found a house large enough for four creative introverts, where we could spread out to work in our own corners.

The house is tall and skinny and stands halfway up a hill overlooking the Pacific.

..

It was light until 10:30 last night. I ran down to the beach and stood on a rock as thousands of birds circled over the Three Arches. They joined in waves, the flock gathering together before settling down for the night. They swirled around and around against a pink sky, and I was reminded that even funnel clouds are beautiful.

The fade lasted for hours, gliding through countless colors while the gray chased it up from the east. It is almost the longest day of the year. We gathered on the porch and laughed and toasted the might of words with whiskey.

When I finally went up to bed, I could hear the ocean through the black out curtains as I stretched out on my hard mattress. I felt the rush of grief rising up in my bones; my joints telling me that the storm is very near.

..

This morning, the grief arrives along with the roofers working on the house next door. They show up at 9 a.m. and the banging beings. The sounds of shovel scraping off old shingles matches the sense of loss on my skin. I want to be out, to be away, to claw it all off and just be through with this already. They are tossing slabs of roofing down to the driveway below.

Today I have to face the reality that I had something good that I don’t anymore.

I ignore the pounding and crashing, and write out a careful list of all my present emotions, trying to identify and accept them in turn. I stare at the list.

I curl up and cry on the couch.

..

When the roofers stop for lunch, I grab two towels from the bathroom and spread a long white mat on the upstairs deck. I am angled towards the sea and the breeze blows wisps of my hair across my lips, but does not move the branches on the trees. I breathe through a short yoga routine, stretching into spaces my body does not want to be. Sitting at a desk all day does nothing for your hamstrings.

This is a way through grief: the willingness to stretch into a place you do not want to be, and to be fully there.

My hands press into the towel and it leaves a little collection of indentations in my palms. I notice them as I reach my arms up to the sky and then hold them together in front of me, balancing on one leg. The weight of our pain marks us, but we are not overcome. I stand in tree pose and focus on the rocks. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, and I pray for peace.

At the end, I am sitting cross-legged at the front of my makeshift mat with my palms facing up, my back as straight as I can make it. I am panting, because breathing through downward dog is harder than it looks. That always surprises me.

The Three Arch Rocks stand out in the waves, slowly being obscured by a cloud that settles down on them.

The ruckus resumes next door, with the pow pow pow of a nail gun echoing across the street as the roofers apply fresh shingles.

photo

June 19, 2013 in Story with 18 Comments

Everything Must Go

by Micah

Yard Sale

They say that money can’t buy happiness, but that doesn’t keep me from trying.

So I went to college and graduated and got a job where they give me dollars and then I exchanged all those dollars for stuff and now I’m sitting in my house surrounded by piles of stuff with no dollars.

But when I roll out of bed and stumble across piles of stuff strewn around my house, I don’t feel happy. When I watch my boys smear peanut butter on everything I own, I don’t feel happy. When I move boxes and bins from the garage to the closet trying to figure out where to stash it all, I don’t feel happy.

I’ve read those minimalism blogs, about simple living and anti-consumerism and de-cluttering, and that doesn’t make me happy either. Because I don’t want to be a minimalist. I don’t want to get rid of my stuff. My stuff is supposed to make me happy.

We’ve moved a few times since we were married and there are things that have never been unpacked, never used, and never missed. There are clothes in my closet that I never wear, but I keep them just in case. There’s a mountain of stuffed animals in our living room, because somehow cheap teddy bears reproduce and multiply faster than any living creature.

And now I’m beginning to realize that it’s all a lie. The blaring commercials, the glossy oh-so-airbrushed ads hanging larger than life, the whisper in my ear that I must buy more. Lies.

The truth is, the stuff weighs me down. It stresses me out. The truth is, I don’t even really want it. I just love buying stuff.

So everything must go.

The DVD’s that I bought because they were just $5 (but now they’re free on Netflix Instant). The books I thought I’d read a second time, but never have. The jeans that don’t fit right but I paid $10 for. The toys that cover our living room floor every night, the ones that the kids will never miss. The broken electronics stashed in a closet because I might fix them someday.

It’s an acquired taste, a learned freedom. But there’s a certain thrill to piling stuff into boxes and bags and throwing it away or giving it away. That voice still whispers strong in my ear when I walk into WalMart or pass a yard sale: “Buy something, anything. Don’t throw it away. You might need it someday!”

But someday has never come, and I never needed whatever it was I’ve been carrying around in boxes all these years.

You know what I need?

A quiet place to sit and write. Time with my wife and my boys. Good friends. Good food. A few adventures from time to time. Those are the things I don’t keep stashed on shelves in my garage. Those are the things I can’t buy for a handful of change at a yard sale.

Everything else is just stuff.

Everything must go.

[ image: Brett Davis ]

 

June 14, 2013 in Story with 14 Comments

Vocation: How Did I Get Here?

by Mihee Kim-Kort

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The twins are fighting over the latest coveted object. This time the earbuds for my Iphone.

I pause.

Watching them in this bizarre, passionate tug-of-war: Dezzo with his mouth a rectangle full of teeth, face tomato-red, and eyes full of the most forlorn tears I almost want to laugh at the absurdity and pick him up right away to comfort him while Anna is on her tippy toes caterwauling in an ungodly way, face also a hellish red, and every fiber in her body so tense she is vibrating while she pulls indignantly. I look around. There are remnants of raisins and Goldfish crackers, and Ellis, our poor Boxer dog, who has been relegated to the bottom of the totem pole for years now, is scrounging for those crumbs. Oz is in his bouncy seat cooing loudly, sweetly, but also, annoying in this moment.  All I want to do is to take a torch and burn up all the Legos and Little People cars, all the miniature farm animals and dinosaurs on the floor so I don’t have to clean them up, and then go into the kitchen to make a huge chocolate cake and eat it over the sink with my bare hands like a rat.

I ask myself again: How did I get here?

I didn’t sign up for this, whatever this is, pseudo-insane-asylum. I graduated from college. I went to graduate school. Twice. I was supposed to get a PhD. I am an ordained minister, for God’s sake. What the hell is my world right now? 

I wake up for a moment and run over to the twins and snatch up the earbuds before they go the way of Solomon’s sage advice to the women fighting over the baby and become two strands of useless, dead wire. And now they are screaming at me. I guess that’s a better alternative.

How did I get here???

||

Vocation is a funny word. It’s surprisingly not so far off from the word, “vacation.” But, I digress, pointlessly. Or not so pointlessly? In my mind, I keep on turning over and over the words of one of my mentors, “Vocation should be about flourishing and thriving in your passion.” Flourishing. Thriving. I am doing neither of those right now. Perhaps I would if I had some kind of a vacation. That is all-inclusive. With fruity, diluted alcoholic drinks with pretty umbrellas, and where I can swim up to the bar to refill my glass as many times as humanly possible. An opportunity to breathe and to break from it all. No doubt then, vocation and vacation seem to go hand-in-hand. To flourish requires some kind of fracture in the day to day routine, temporary but thorough and extreme.

But both vocation and vacation undergo a major transformation in marriage and family. Back in the day when it was just Andy and me, vacations were actually stressful before we could do them together. It took us a long time to realize that we both had very different ways of relaxing and enjoying a city. I longed to be a tourist first and to see everything, soak up museums, parks, and churches, while Andy prioritized reading a good book in coffee shops and bars. Granted, we both wanted the same thing but the order was off. We eventually got it.

Likewise, the first time we came up to my parents’ home for “vacation,” with just the twins who were 6 months old, we thought we could immediately hand them off and looked forward to going out for wings and beer. 10 minutes after we got our beers and started to get into the Cubs-Pirates game we got a call from my dad. Both babies were screaming in the background. We got our wings boxed up and left to go back. Now, we look forward to this time so we can go out to breakfast or lunch without the kids or sit in a Starbucks to read and write or take the kids to the zoo. That’s vacation.

I have my moments. When I really love this whatever. Love being at home with the kids. Love watching them do everything for the first time. Love experiencing everything with them. Love their laughter, their songs, their eyes when they wake up from a nap.

But, I have my other moments, too. And I can’t help but say, “WTH is this life?”

||

I got stuck. Writing this out. And someone posted Momastery’s latest blog by a lady named Lisa-Jo, I’ve never heard of her but feel like I should know her, and wish I could grab coffee or better yet, a hard, pre-prohibition drink and hear her talk more about these dog days:

Ain’t no shame in those days, friends.

Nope, I think those are the holy days. The scars-worn-bravely days.

So, on those days, dear ones, dish up an extra bowl of ice cream and repeat after me:

I am stretched and tired and fearful.
I am wild and brave and broken.
But this one life is on purpose and it’s not by accident where I woke up this morning.

…

These are the good days, the glory days, the slow-as-molasses days. These are the fast years, the wonder years, the how-do-I-find-words years.

But we do. They usually start with “help” and end with “thank you” and the middle?

The middle is a thick layer of reliable wonder sometimes whispered, often shouted, always answered.

The middle is me. The middle is you. The middle is just this one, sacred, take-off-your-shoes-worthy syllable,

“mom.”

I read this and I can’t think of a better way to describe this vocation. To make me stand a little taller because of this calling. To go to sleep for a few hours feeling satisfied and fulfilled in unexpected ways. To wake up looking forward to what is around the corner, and how these little ones will continue to call me forward. Sure, I vacillate constantly between being faithful to my feminist priorities by bucking against cultural pressures to be the perfect and willing stay-at-home mom…or embracing this as an opportunity to experience and live into a new kind of faithfulness trusting in God’s timing and gifts. Yes, I was judgy when I was pregnant and looked down on all sorts of stay-at-home moms, suburban moms, homeschooling moms, and now I see them as incredible expressions of survival and vocation…and calling. I was ordained in 2005 to ministry, but I was ordained to something bigger when the twins first laid hands on me and I never let go, and then Oswald surprised us, and it was like I was being baptized all over again.

June 13, 2013 in Story with 20 Comments

Stephen Colbert Is Ruining America

by Zack Hunt

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Do you remember the trays we all used to eat off of in our elementary school cafeterias?

I usually had to bring my lunch from home, ‘cause $1.80 was apparently too pricey, but when I did get to buy my lunch at school I loved the trays we got to use.

Why?

Because those nice, neat little sections they were divided up into kept my food from touching.

And as any elementary school kid will tell you, there’s nothing worse in life than having your food touch. Although, I have to admit. Even as an adult, I sometimes have to agree with them.

Look, if God wanted my corn to be in my mashed potatoes God would have made corn potatoes. But He didn’t. Because clearly God doesn’t like His food to touch either.

As adults we may not use those wonderful gifts of gastronomic separation anymore, but many of us live our lives like we’re still in the school cafeteria.

We love to keep our lives nice and neat. We separate and divide everyone and everything into clearly delineated categories that we don’t have to think about and which we treat however we like.

We need to have our good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other. No touching. No mingling. That way we can vilify anyone or anything at the drop of a hat without having to worry about messy things like nuance, complexity, or worst of all – diversity.

Which is why Stephen Colbert is ruining America.

He’s doing everything he can to destroy our cherished cafeteria tray way of life.

For some, he’s just a liberal blowhard.

For others, he’s one of the funniest guys on television.

And for the oblivious, he’s the champion of the Republican cause and the most patriotic American in history.

But what makes Stephen Colbert so frustrating is the quandary he presents, particularly to the church and her relationship to politics.

The modern myth of faith and politics in America tells us that all Christians are Republicans. Fortunately, the last election made some progress in dismantling this myth, but it still holds firm ground in the minds of many. The idea that a person could be a Christian and criticize the Republican Party, or worse, vote for a Democrat is nothing short of heresy for many good, faithful people in the church.

And yet there stands Stephen Colbert – a devoted Catholic, a family man, Sunday School teacher, and unabashed wearer of Lenten ashes who is not afraid to publicly call out his fellow brothers and sisters in Christ (in both parties) when the policies they are advocating stand in stark contrast with the God they claim to be following.

Like the time he called all of us out a few years ago in what, for me, is one of the most stinging (and accurate) critiques of American Christianity ever uttered in the English language,

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.

With his brazen public admissions of faith and steadfast refusal to shy away from his Christian faith, Stephen Colbert forces us to rethink our cafeteria tray approach to faith and politics.

Unless we are going to position ourselves (rather than God) as the judge of someone else’s faith, then we have to take Colbert at his word (and deeds) that he is, in fact, a Christian. And if that is true, we must abandon our “us” vs. “them” approach to faith and politics and begin to recognize that sometimes “they” are really “us.”

Now, I’m not saying we can’t disagree. We can. And we should. But the demonization of people in the opposing political party has to stop, particularly since some of those people we are demonizing are our own brothers and sisters in Christ.

On a basic level, the utter ineptitude of our current partisan political climate demonstrates just how impotent this attitude renders our ability to get anything accomplished. But on a deeper level, when we caricature and demonize our fellow Christians (or people in general) on the other side of the aisle, we are denying them their God given identity as people made in the image of God by painting them instead simply as political opponents to be destroyed. When this happens we rip apart the Body we claim to hold dear.

Again, I am by no means denouncing disagreement. We should debate and debate vigorously, but must not demonize.

Demonization requires simplicity. It requires a stripping down, or even contorting, of reality to “basic issues” which replace the people who believe in them, along with the nuance and complexity of life that led them to their beliefs. When people become simply idea, “them,” or worse, the enemy, they become targets we think nothing of destroying at will, and with a sense of righteousness to boot.

However, the issues we are so passionate about are almost never as simple as we make them out to be, nor are the people we debate with as uniform or malicious in their beliefs as we portray them as being.

Faith and politics, life in general is not like an elementary school cafeteria tray. It’s complicated and messy. Boundaries are crossed as people and issues get mixed together in the face of the nuances that shape the reality of our complicated and ever evolving everyday lives. Pretending otherwise, that life is simply about voting “yes” or “no” on certain issues or that faith and politics can be constructively reduced to “us” vs. “them” is not only utterly dishonest, it creates an antagonistic myopathy that keeps us from answering our call to bring the kingdom of God to earth as it is in heaven.

We need a new approach to faith and politics, one that is honest about the complexities of life and which honors the humanity of everyone.

Which is why I am so thankful for the witness of Stephen Colbert.

He is ruining the America (and church) of “us” vs. “them.”

And I, for one, am very grateful that he is.

 

Grace and peace,

Zack Hunt

 

June 12, 2013 in Story with 20 Comments

“Everything is an Act of Translation”

by Andrea Levendusky

Hey, where did May go? No seriously, where did it go? Because as I’m typing this, my calendar says June and I’m realizing that somehow May snuck out the back door when I wasn’t paying attention.

And because of that, we didn’t get to share this printable with you for the month of May. This quote struck me deep, and I’m happy to share this little bit of inspiration with you. Print it, pin it, share it, love it.

Click here to download a pdf of this 8.5 x 11 printable.

Read the original article by Preston Yancey here:

“There is a moment when it is off-handedly offered that someone read recently in an article that biblical translators, facing difficulty in communicating with inuit peoples in Alaska, were having to be creative in translating some of the Bible’s phrases for a people group with no context to otherwise receive them. What does Lamb of God mean to someone who has never seen or heard of a lamb, who has no concept of a lamb? The translators settled on seal…” Read more.

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“everything is an act of translation.” — Preston Yancey /// www.deeperstory.com

Also, because I feel bad about not posting this in May, here are some additional extras…

iPhone Lockscreen

iPhone Lockscreen

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Android Screen

 

 

 

 

 

 

Desktop wallpapers: 1280 x 800, 1280 x 1024, 1366 x 768, 1440 x 900, 1680 x 1050

See you next month with another printable (and maybe more!).

 

June 8, 2013 in Story with 2 Comments

Do Not Stumble on Account of Me

by Jen Hatmaker

One of the less appealing things Christ-followers have always done is divide into sects. We love doing that. I’m sure it starts with noble purposes, but inevitably, factions draw as much identity from “what they are against” as much as “what they are for,” setting themselves against differing tribes under the Christian banner.

Denominations, coalitions (i.e. groups who graduated from the looser “movement” status), networks, associations – usually with strong, charismatic (white) (male) leaders – generate copious amounts of followers, parroting theological positions and sweeping Biblical conclusions about what God definitively meant in His Word.

These have never set well with me, much to the chagrin of the various splinters. It’s probably the same reason I’m registered as an independent voter rather than siding with a party; once I sign my allegiance over, I feel like I lose the freedom to call my party to reform. I’m more likely to defend bad policy and bad practices, because as a partisan supporter, it’s too sticky to admit my group has a dark underbelly worthy of dissent. We live in an “all bad” and “all good” society, readily attaching those labels to the groups we like (ours) and the groups we’re against (everyone else’s).

Just like there is both great good and heinous abuses on each side of the political divide, factions of the church get some parts right and others wrong. This is because we are human people, attempting to reconcile the ways of Jesus with this broken life; the ways God said would be higher than our own, born from His thoughts which always exist in the stratosphere above our heads.

We do our best. We try to handle God’s Word with integrity and flesh out what the Christian life is supposed to look like. We do. I daresay we mean ever so well. But anytime a human decides he and his group have cornered the market on our mysterious God, including exactly how He is handling salvation, eternity, and redemption, my alarm bells start clanging. Especially when he is conveniently on the right side of favor. (Concerning the eternal damnation of her family members, a local church leader told my friend: “We will one day see them in hell and say AMEN.” Sweet merciful heavens.)

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Take God’s sovereignty, for instance, a polarizing, emotionally charged concept within the Bride. I am uncomfortable laying evil, perversion, and darkness at God’s feet, casting Him as a petrifying, arbitrary ruler. I haven’t the slightest idea how His sovereignty works in us, around us, through us, in spite of us. I don’t know where sin ends and God’s will begins. I can’t even suss out what “He allowed it” means. Is Satan a real force on this earth or isn’t he? Do our sinful choices belie the heart of God or do they simply execute His providence? If God is sovereign over injustice, what does that actually mean? The mysterious cocktail of ultimate good and evil, sin and self, Spirit and power somehow equal the truth of God I cannot comprehend.

Mind you, this is not for lack of reading or discussion. I’ve pressed and obsessed and grieved, worried that God was actually horrible and untrustworthy. I’ve gone cold, calculated, fatalistic: “What is the point? It is what it is no matter what anyone does.” I’ve been angry, then defensive, then arrogant, then hopeless. I dragged people off the cliff with me, leading the witness toward my current position, hoping someone could help reconcile the God I knew with such a broken, devastated world. Is God really in charge of this mess? Because if so, it seems like He might be terrible at being God.

Deep in the throes of confusion, thrashing and lashing out, God rescued me from my own despair with one simple word:

“Jen, I am love and I am just.”

And with that, all the wind left my manic sails. God could not possibly orchestrate injustice. That is incompatible with his character. He would never stoically endorse abuse, hatred, evil. How could He? God couldn’t possibly be unfair. He could never act unlovingly. In His heart, in His hand, He is love and justice and embarrassing mercy. God doesn’t simply act that way; it is the nature of His very being. However God moves, it is always just. It is always fair. It is always loving. It always moves toward redemption.

That is all I need to know.

How this fleshes out amid the complicated mix of humanity and decay and sovereignty, I haven’t the foggiest idea. Circumstantially, the entire concept can fold in on itself, for it all seems so subjective. But my soul rests in the security that my God is good. I needn’t feel compelled to lay evil at His feet, because dark forces exist on our earth as well, if you believe the Bible. As long as rebellion is still possible, then parts of life will unfold outside of God’s goodness. Somehow, He will set this all right one day.

If that isn’t as certain or positive or crystal clear as you’d like, I get it. There is comfort in following believers with iron-clad confidence. Sometimes I envy them. But I am unprepared to put too much confidence in my understanding of something as mysterious as God’s sovereignty. I’ve been wrong too many times before, and about lesser concepts. Rather, my confidence has finally found rest in God’s goodness, which somehow transcends theology and circumstances and doubt. I am comfortable loving Jesus with questions in play, because the one thing I am sure of is His nature.

The older I get, the less I know, the more mysterious salvation becomes. I no longer feel compelled to nail it all down to reproducible soundbytes, Twitter-worthy missives. I am comfortable letting my mind suffer, yet letting my spirit rest. My God is good and worthy of all praise, and that is enough.

“When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”

Jesus replied, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.”

Jesus, indeed, I will not stumble on account of you.

 

June 5, 2013 in Story with 43 Comments

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