Get Naked for Jesus

“Abram believed the Lord, and he credited to him as righteousness.” – Genesis 15:16

I know the verse. I’ve heard about grace, about faith versus works and the whole nine. I get the big deal about righteousness.

It means to be good, to do what’s right on God’s behalf. To be obedient and do what He has commanded. It means to be right, to be ever-striving toward perfection.

Doesn’t it? 

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Come visit me over at BibleDude.net to read the rest. The true path to righteousness might surprise you, when you get down to the nitty gritty. Come get naked with me over there, today. 

Blessed Are Those Who Don't Do It All

In past seasons of my life, I filled notebooks with goals, to-do's, strategies and techniques for getting things together. From a fundamental place inside of me came the constant, relentless message: Be Better.

I wanted to be better at everything and somewhere inside I believed that every other woman out there was accomplishing all the things I couldn't manage, an entire lifestyle of doing it all with grace and effortlessness. I saw myself as failing in some level at just about everything, not only everything in my life but everything in the world if you counted all the things I wasn't doing. (And I counted.)

If I spent five hours cleaning the kitchen, I felt bad about the state of the pantry. If the house was neatly picked up, the carpet stains screamed loudly at me every time I walked into the room. If I'd baked a fabulous dessert for my family, I berated myself for the mediocre dinner they were served just prior.

But somewhere along the line, something within me broke and I saw that part of myself from outside eyes, like an out-of-body experience. I learned to be kinder to my heart and treat her like a friend of mine and not just an abused little girl who couldn't live up to anything. This was all unfolded, I'm sure, as my depth of understanding unfolded about grace, about the God who loves so purely and completely that His heart for me cannot be changed by any amount of my goodness or lack thereof.

At some point, I stumbled on peace and self-forgiveness.

I started a Things I Don't Do list in my head and began to check off, one by one, the things that would creep up on me and tell me lies. I thought hard about the things that tormented me and decided whether I really needed to make space for them in my life, whether I really did believe my call was to be better in that area. Sometimes the answer was yes. Sometimes, I added them to the TIDD list, and breathed a little easier.

The Things I Don't Do are mostly good things. They are things that may be sacred and creative and might beautifully enhance another person's life. But for me, they are things that would take the space I have to give the other things in my life, the ones that give me life and joy and serve a higher purpose than to simply be better. As I have let things go, I have learned that with less effort to be everything and more effort to be the uniquely created me, I am a little bit better by proxy, and that is the ironic-flavored icing on the cake.

Here is a portion of my list:

I don't go to the gym. My body is not perfect or even necessarily pretty but it is the body that has bore three children and held tightly to a dozen more. It sags in areas it shouldn't and bulges in places I wish it didn't and has erupted in a terrible case of adult acne, but its scars and stretch marks reflect its purpose. I love to see old Bibles, worn from years of use and tears, notes scribbled in the margins and pages bent back. I'm beginning to see my body in this way too, an open book, a love story, in which my life is written slowly into laugh lines and chipped nails, tan lines and chronic illness and chapped lips and birthmarks, calluses and tattoos and scabbed-over wounds that I am beginning to love. My exercise comes in the form of wrestling t-shirts over squirmy kid heads and games of hide-and-seek, hiking to waterfalls and the thousand leg-lunges I do every single day while picking up Matchbox cars. I don't count calories and I eat more chocolate than is good for me but I've decided I'm basically okay in my size 11 jeans because this body has been awfully good to live in despite its many flaws. 

I don't garden. I grow children well, pets poorly, and I kill most other living things. I admire and respect those who find gardening to be a spiritual experience, but for me it is dirt and thorns and grub worms, and it takes all the beauty and mystery out of nature. If I manage to keep alive a rose bush, I resent it for the creative time lost in its cultivation and therefore, gardening makes the TIDD list.

I'm not on the PTA. I'm not the room mother or the field trip chaperone or the teacher's aide. I care deeply about my children's educational experiences but this is not the outlet for that, for me. I admire that there are others who are so much more patient, more talented, more gifted with teaching children and I give them space to be positive influences in my kids' lives, too.

I don't pair socks. Laundry is serious business around here and I spend way more of my life than I care to in the act of cleaning and putting away clothing. We have a Sexton Sock Basket, and when I fold laundry, all socks go in the bin. When someone needs a pair, they Scuba dive for two that pass for matching, and we all live happily ever after, the end. Most people are seriously horrified by this. What kind of mother doesn't even match their kids' socks? Let me tell you. This kind of mother. The kind that has living room campouts with them for the heck of it and throws unbirthday parties every once in awhile and decorates a living room birthday tree for the special kid of honor. The kind who has decided to make other things a bigger deal than socks and does so without apology.

There are scores of other things I don't do. I don't eat organic or change my refrigerator filter as often as it needs it. I don't do play-dates or mom's group or homeschool (anymore). I don't cloth diaper. I don't vacuum every day or run marathons or cook from scratch or iron or dry clean. I am not against any of these things. They're good. They're great, even. They're just not great for me, right now.

I am not totally guiltless over all of these things yet, but I'm getting there. The Things I Do list (I have one of those too) is getting shorter and shorter in quantity, but fuller and fuller in quality and I'm learning to see that as the better thing.  

You're blessed when you're content with just who you are – no more, no less. That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought.

(Matthew 5:5 MSG)

What's on your TIDD list?

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Linking to Unwrapping His Promises and Imperfect Prose. Click on links below to join us.

Virtual Reality -or- How to Make a Life

I tend to live too long sometimes in this world in my head, fueled by online friends and brilliant blog wisdom, where hours are marked by hashtags and Facebook becomes a lifeline, where I register a comment count or today's subscriber numbers like a self-worth bathroom scale forever showing a number that leaves me feeling bloated and unsatisfied.

In this neighborhood and since it's my fantasy, my quaint old chippy farmhouse with miraculously leak-less faucets is nestled right in there with awesome neighbors like Emily and Sarah and Lindsey. I lunch with Anne and Ann and Annie and Anna and we break bread and talk about life and God and gratitude. My kids hang on the neighborhood monkey bars next to Shannan's and Lisa-Jo's. 

I camp in the woods in invisible tents with Emily and Suzannah and their beautiful families. Tamára, Preston, Nish, and I debate microbrews at the backyard barbeque. My pretend writer's group meets at the corner bakery where Jeff and Mary and Dan and Shauna, over bites of something buttery, offer brilliant insight on this tricky manuscript, which I can't wait to share with my make-believe agent, Rachelle.

Because this is sorta what it really feels like for me to live here in this online space. To wander from house to house and blog to blog, to eat my lunch beside you folks and nestle myself into your reality, make you part of mine, let your words make mine somehow come out a little better next time. Like a fantasy. Like one of those dream sequences on TV marked by foggy edges and a twinkly soundtrack.

It's not merely virtual, though. The real-life encouragement, support, prayer, and tangible love that floats across keyboards and computer screens is not make-believe. It is substance and it is depth and most days, it gives me strength I haven't had before.

But I have a real life too. I carry spare pairs of cartoon underwear and emergency fruit snacks in my purse. I have foreheads to kiss more often than I do, and toilets to clean and filters to change and sunscreen to apply and more book ideas floating around in my head than time to write them all down. I have dirty carpet and friends I need to visit (the kind who knew me when I wore leg warmers and slap bracelets and crimped my hair). I have movies to watch, stories to tell, a husband who keeps me one step ahead of psychosis every day. Somewhere, there is probably chocolate I should be eating too, regardless of what my protesting belly pooch has to say. There are real books with real pages to read and holy moments to be had.

There is life to be lived, and you have one too.

Is virtual reality overshadowing actual reality, in your life?

This is a struggle for me. I'm a writer at heart, and at times, I think I need to set up camp in this virtual space to "make it" and make sleazy flashing billboards to get my voice heard. Everyone is trying to make a name for themselves out there, and the Internet never sleeps.

But flesh and blood does.

It sleeps and cries and laughs long over good wine with good friends. It turns the laptop off sometimes to paint toenails with pigtailed daughters, to play in the rain with fuzzy-haired sons and attempt daring new recipes. It kisses your husband long and sweet, and dips its toes in river water. It leaves the bedroom window open and listens late to crickets and rhythmic breath and cars driving past. It star-gazes and goes out dancing. It eats the moments of life like bites of a sweet summer peach.

Be careful not to miss it.

Don't trade your life for eye-strain and carpal tunnel syndrome. Don't sell your soul for another Twitter follower if you aren't bringing your whole heart into the world beyond the computer screen. Virtual reality has a funny way of reflecting actual reality. If your life is empty, your work will be empty. Live.

As much as I love my fantasy neighbors in my make-believe neighborhood, I have real neighbors I've never met, ones with pet roosters who wave enthusiastically every time I drive by. I have a lonely grandma who could use a lunch date. I have avocados to savor and dandelion heads awaiting the breath of a small boy who doesn't yet know about making wishes.

So, if you'll excuse me, I'm off go make a living… and make a life. 

What Lightning Has to Say

{written yesterday} 

Source

I have lived a lifetime this week and it is still only Monday.

Baby Girl (who is 9 these days) was baptized in beauty and love and living water, surrounded by family on Sunday as she said yes to Jesus. My open-aired barefoot church split at the seams with family old and young, and even the nonbelievers among us lifted hands to Him and it was the kind of beauty that is still making me weep 28 hours later.

I was asked to be a part of somethingso incredibly close to my heart, so vital to this blog community, so honest and real and out of my league that it, too, made me weep for good things.

But I am weeping today for things that don't feel good or right at all, things I don't know how to justify or make sense of, things that shouldn't be and searching to find God in it all.

A phone call with our adoption caseworker left me sobbing into the phone, as muffled by red tape as the pleas of our boy caught in the system have been, and equally as unheard, then later, louder, into the nape of my husband's neck with pounding fists at the injustice of a child whose future is reduced to manila and copy paper and black ink while his heart swells with anger and nobody hears.

She heard, though. She heard me when I said I will fight for him, lady, and keep fighting and sucked breath sharp and mean and bit my lip to keep the rest of it inside.

Brokenhearted people have to clean their floors too, it turns out, so I mop the floors with tears and soap and scrub like I can lift the dirt off the world with elbow grease, taking out anger on the tile while polishing it with apple-scented solution and somewhere in here is a Garden of Eden metaphor but I'm too tired to find it.

I nauseate and the sky tumbles dark and green too and bolts of lightning flash in the distance, sky all sad and angry and it's Him to my heart saying, "Yes, I know, dear One. Me too."

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Linking to Imperfect Prose, a sacred space where our souls can breathe... so, so blessed to be a part of this. Join us over there, will you, and be blessed?

Over and Over...Still. {Part 2: On Depression and Anxiety}

Source

My last post may have given the impression that I'm in the Anne Shirley condition these days, in the "depths of despair"…"a perfect graveyard of buried hopes."

It's not really the case, and I'm okay, for the record.

I can write vulnerably about depression and anxiety because I have some distance from the valley these days, and I'm blessed that I've never had to sit in that valley too very long without Hope and Light and Truth.

Sometimes, though, I need to drive through the old neighborhood with the windows rolled up, lock eyes with the brothers and the dealers, the pushers and the hustlers, and keep on driving.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face (the hymn goes) and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.

It all sounds too easy, I know. Jesus with the cape and the white horse, who swoops in and rescues and the earth goes dim and the credits roll.

Except he rode a donkey and not a white horse, and the whole rescuing business is a lot muddier and bloodier than maybe we're wont to recount. We come back to the rescue day by day and sometimes, minute by minute, and we learn and we heal. Because the beauty is so consuming that it's all we might be tempted to say, the rescue is so very worth it.

But there is still an old neighborhood. There are broken hearts and people who don't know and are just tired of all the mud and the battle. For them, and for us when we forget to cling tight, the things of earth are raw and real and not strangely dim at all. So we tell our truths, go back into the valley when we can, when we're secured tightly to the harness of Grace, and extend healed hands but not clean ones and do what we can to help them turn their eyes.

Over and over and over and over

It is odd and unseasonably chilly, rain shooting sideways and trees pummeled, assaulted by wind and rain and it's exactly how I feel today, assaulted by too many voices, too many hands and needs, pummeled by the daily drudgery of bills and water leaks and bad news and work and emails. I am sleeping too long and my patience too short and there is guilt.

So much guilt.

The bookshelf boasts a worn copy of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and I see it and nod to no one in the room because it feels like company. It is the twin brothers that suffocate, Depression and Anxiety, and they intertwine around me, strangle with bony fingers like they did Sylvia with her head in the oven.

I know what Sylvia did not know. I know how to loosen their grip, but the busyness and responsibility of mothering widens the gap and in the midst of suffocation, I am playing Matchbox cars and pouring apple juice and my soul screams silently all the while.

It all makes me a little bit crazier: Metal wheels on coffee table, boys sniffing snot over and over until my own tongue tastes salty, and the sound of humming, water running, cartoon laughter, unending questions. The click-clack of plastic building blocks fitting together while I simultaneously come undone.

"Jesus."

My heart calls to Him, guttural, like a battle cry and a curse word… a whispery, groaning plea.

This? This is how I battle the brothers, laid bare before the One.

I tear open lace curtains with grubby fingers for a glimpse of foggy vapor and drenched treetops, gasping for beauty like air and through panes I am flooded by green, poured over with Love.

And healed.

It is momentary and to be healed, we are always returning, over and over and over and over to the cross.

So I fold it over and over and over in my hands, the olive wood crucifix my in-laws brought me from Jerusalem, until it splinters my fingers and makes them bleed.  

This is healing… turning the cross over and over in the heart, in the mind, like I do in the hand, letting it splinter straight through and draw blood and breath and bring me back to life.

{Read part 2 of this post, here: Over and over... still. Why go back to the old neighborhood?} 

Linking to: Imperfect Prose on Thursdays at Emily's place.




Might you also consider pre-ordering Emily's book for those with loved ones struggling through an eating disorder, and spread love for the broken and hurting? Consider it for your church or school library, perhaps? 

 

Not One but FOUR Book Reviews!

Heaven in Her Arms by Catherine Hickem

The tagline on the cover reads, "Why God Chose Mary to Raise His Son and What It Means for You." It is never a bad idea to get parenting advice from the mother who had it better than all other mothers and the mother who had it harder than all other mothers, Mary. Mary is the mother from whom we can learn about selfless love, fostering independence, managing joy and grief. The book unfolds all the appearances of Mary in Scripture, the circumstances surrounding them, and what we can learn. Written by a licensed psychotherapist (Catherine Hickem), the book deals with many of our greatest fears and failures as mothers, and how we can learn to overcome them by Mary's example.

The book was overall very helpful and informative. As an advocate for foster care and adoption, though, I found a real damper on the wisdom here to be the author's approach/attitude toward adoption. The author is an adoptive parent and admires God's faithfulness in providing her with an adoptive child that "met all the criteria on her requirement list" (must be born from older, married, Christian parents, medium-high level of intelligence, and no drug history in the family, pg. 30-31) and her suggestion that God wishes adoptive children to resemble their adoptive families (pg. 38).

To be frank, that spoiled the book for me. What about all the other children out there? What about the kids who don't fit on the list of "desirable" qualities? What about the abundance of minority children in foster care needing families with a prevalence of Caucasian adoptive parents? I don't personally believe that God creates each child to physically "favor the very family that will raise him or her as their own" (pg. 38). I think it's a narrow-minded approach that suggests we can pick and choose our preferences regarding our responsibility to care for these children, and it sours my stomach to think of this presented as a holy perspective. I do believe God hand-picks each family for each child, but not that we can put superficial parameters like hair color or IQ score on our willingness to help kids in need.   

Disclaimer: The publisher provided me a free copy of this book through BookSneeze.com in exchange for a review. All opinions are my own.

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God Gave Us You by Lisa Tawn Bergren, art by Laura J. Bryant

This is an 18-page kids book for children ages 0-3 by WaterBrook Press. It tells and illustrates the story of Mama Bear and Little Cub, a fuzzy little girl bear, tucked in her bed, asking, "Mama, where did I come from?" Mama Bear recounts the story of many little bears and babies everywhere, two praying parents, growing tummies, doctor's visits and the birth of a healthy, whole baby Little Cub, a gift from God.

My 4-year-old son nuzzled down and enjoyed the story, particularly the playful illustrations. I felt it was a good book to help answer young children's questions about pregnancy/birth, but I would recommend that you skip this one for any child who isn't born under the parameters above. The way it's written could cause some discomfort for the child not born to two praying parents, in a healthy pregnancy with a doctor-assisted delivery, and a healthy, normal birth. It's a cute, heart-warming book but doesn't make exceptions or leave room for other family circumstances such as adoption, foster, disabilities, home births, NICU, non-traditional families, etc., unless perhaps you'd like to use it as a catalyst to engage in discussion about what's different in your family than in Little Cub's.  

Find more info about the book here.

Disclaimer:  I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review. All opinions are my own.