In Which I Go Ahead and Admit It...I'd Rather Be Agnostic

I’ve tried a thousand times to bring words to this place over the last few months, and inevitably I give up, dissatisfied with attempts at authoritative writing in what is proving to be a wide and hazy place of quiet but intense spiritual growth for me.

But here’s the thing.

I spent some time on the mountaintop, in solitude, last week. I sought silence and the presence of God and had my fill of both in more abundance than I ever knew was possible. I heard in the rustle of leaves and footsteps of speckled fawn on wet grass an enormous, wild dream that is so outside of myself, so contrary to anything I could conjure or even imagine, that it bound me to the heart of God in absolute surrender.

It was life changing, and it’s hard to know how to return to regular life after an experience like that—a closeness with God I would do anything or go anywhere or give everything to sustain. I understand the oaths of monks and saints now, how one’s entire life could possibly be full with only the infinite fullness of God, to a devotion to Him that leaves little room for temporal distraction.

What I don’t yet know, what I am only now learning with each passing hour, is how to live a life infused, how to make spaghetti or answer email when I am bursting wide with all I am learning how to see and hear and experience.  

I have more clarity than I’ve ever had in all my life, more faith and footing in solid places, but it’s time for me to say three words out loud, in surrender, from the heart of this state of growth and depth and transparency.

I. Don't. Know.

There are just so many things I don’t know, things I’m not willing to pretend I do know because a denomination or pastor or theory or tradition or text tells me it’s true. There is so much of God I don’t understand—so much He has not made clear in this world. There is so much more to Scripture than taking its life-infused words without the aid of context or serious, open-hearted, prayer-infused contemplation.

I don’t know how to reconcile the angry, destructive God of the Old Testament with the absolute consuming warmth and love I have experienced of Him. I don’t know how to balance the stories of Scripture with the science that claims to counter their truth. I don’t know the answer for every question under the sun, and I’m aware, more than ever before, that I am not meant to, that we are not meant to.

Scripture does not tell us that He came to answer our questions, that He came to make us puppets, or that He came to give us the tools for effective evangelism. He did not come to make us healthy or smart or strong or wise. He did not come to give us logical satisfaction of His ways.

He came that we might have life and have it abundantly. (John 10:10)

Abundant life is so much deeper than whether or not we read the Bible in a year or how many church-approved best-sellers sit on our bookshelves. Abundant life is not the absolute knowledge and understanding of God; rather, it’s the abandonment of yourself into His abundance, forsaking everything else with the potential to captivate your heart. 

My study of spirituality and the sacred truth of Scripture is for the purpose of drawing my heart nearer to His, not to memorize canned and shallow apologetic responses to complex matters of life and faith. Nothing on earth or in the heavens is as easy as it seems. No verse in the Word of Life stands on its own or means a thing without the breath of holy wisdom within it. So why, friends, are we so afraid of embracing His mystery?  

I know just enough to know that I know God’s heart deeply and intimately only because He knows mine, because He actually, actively dwells there. Yet I do not know His mind or His purposes for everything under heaven because I am not Him. Everything I know about God confirms only one thing: I know Him and I need to know nothing more under heaven but that which drives me further into seeking more of Him. This includes a surrender to the deep unknowing, a sobering awareness of the orchestrated Divine that is far too large to be condensed into either a single mind or an entire galaxy.

The only thing big enough to contain the mystery of God is the heart of the human spirit which has stopped seeking to solve an equation of God in order to make way for all of Him—even, no, especially the parts of Him that challenge our finite minds.

Knowing Him means letting go of my attempts to shape the universe to my understanding, to answer all my questions and linger instead in the holy mystery that is bigger than me and bigger than humanity and bigger than all the forces of nature together.

I have enough faith to tell you I don’t know, and to tell God right to His face that I just don’t know. And I’m grateful for that.

I don’t know if I’m a mystic or a Lutheran or a Methodist or a Baptist or if I will touch earthly dirt during the Tribulation or if all dogs go to heaven or why God made mosquitoes. I don’t know if any particular thing is right given the circumstances or if any particular wrong is wrong without any regard to the heart of the person engaging in it. I don’t know what happens in the hearts and souls of those who have not yet seen God as He really is and not merely the biased and blurry portrait we paint of Him as a Church. And mostly, I don’t know why we’re all so afraid of all we do not yet know about God, why it is shameful not to know something which has not been revealed clearly to us directly by Him.

I read earlier today that the word agnostic means “not knowing.” And friends, even if you have the Bible memorized, even if you’ve graduated seminary, even if you prayed a sinner’s prayer at the age of four…you are…all of us are…not knowing. We are all agnostic when it comes to the Divine.

I am a Christian with all my heart and soul—more now than I’ve ever been. I claim the life and teachings of Christ and the all-consuming power of God in Father, Son, and Spirit. And I feel no shame in telling you that I am agnostic with all my heart, too. I hold loosely to my earthly understanding of all things eternal with the certainty that there is much I cannot yet know, things that man cannot teach me, with the knowledge that I am not privy to the Secret Things of God.

I don’t know what will happen with this online space as I consider all the directions it could go, as I consider even whether to altogether let it go.

Right now, I just don’t know. 

To borrow the words of Ian Morgan Cron in Chasing Francis, when one of his characters is asked about the differences in beliefs between evangelicalism and Catholicism... "I'd rather be a reverent agnostic. [...] There are countless mysteries that I have to stand before reverently and humbly while saying, 'I don't know.'" 

But my prayer, in this space of my life and all the others, is this:

Let God alone be the source of all I know or claim to know or need to know. Let my mind be clear and discerning of Truth, let my humanity not reject anything the Lord would show or teach me, either temporally or eternally. Let my not-knowing be an honest seeking after the heart of God, and let me never allow any religious teaching, logical response, or crafted defense corrupt my awareness of the scope of God’s hugeness and holiness. Let me never choose the wisdom of humanity over the wonder of God. Let me never be satisfied with the boxes of logic and reason which seek to contain the Great and Holy Lord into matchboxes fit for modern human pockets, flints with which to strike religious fires that keep our egos warm. Keep me not knowing the things which will always keep me seeking the face of Him alone. Keep me captivated and consumed by the God I don't understand, and collectively consumed in unity with His whole Church, and all the people in need of His love, which is to say, every person on this planet. 

And let me never be afraid of I don’t know, perhaps the only space where I am truly teachable, where only in emptiness can I be made whole. 

Rise From the Battlefield, My Friend

It’s our first spring here and the tree outside our bedroom window started blooming this week. I’ve strained long for those shoots of green, narrowing my vision to examine brown bark, longing for a breakthrough.

The last few springs have been dark ones for me, humid and hot ones and icy cold ones too. They’ve been cast in the shadow of all the wrong places, darkened in the depth and ache so familiar to those landscapes which became spiritual battlegrounds, bloody and muddy, gray like the dented armor of my walled-up heart in those years.

Endless were the midnight games of holy hide-and-seek and I was running in place, peering for God inside heart holes and behind graffiti’d buildings.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

But this spring is different.

This spring there are fat yellow flowers and white petals that trickle from trees and stick to my hair, and there are tulips and strawberries right in my very own front yard, damp with the paint of God’s fresh brushstroke. This spring there are cloudy days too but the low wisps and gusts tickle colorful branches, scattering light about us like a thousand tiny mirrors tumbling from the sun.

This blistering battlefield threatened to evaporate me in those years. I thought I might dissolve into nothing but a puddle of melted-down armor from the weight of it and the intensity of its temperature. Straining hard for grace or maybe deliverance, still searching frantic for my hide-and-seek God, I stumbled hard into patches of white, suspended in tangles of sweet honeysuckle, fragrant and tangy with the taste of grace.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

In the stumbling, I learned to see. To look through eyes that linger long on a dusky pink sky, to twist a child’s hair between my fingers and take in a breath like a whisper, to taste a taste of love Divine.

 It is not midnight hide-and-seek after all but a secret scavenger hunt, our moments and years on this earth. There are millions of tiny treasures tucked away for you. Have you noticed?

Love notes, written straight to you out there tucked inside acorn shells and flittering from tree branches, scrawled on the footprints of a child. They are bound majestically in a single grain of pink sugar, splashed across the foamy coastline, dancing in the filtered lace-light of sunrays through spring leaves and reflect the creative brilliance of our Father.

Rise from the battlefield along with me and smell the honeysuckle, my friend. There is so much to see.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.  

On Hoarding Manna

You can get your ketchup bottles made custom these days. Did you know? Anyone with a couple extra bucks can just have their own name designed right into the label on a Heinz ketchup bottle. This is a thing. Because we deserve it, right? Don’t we hard-working North Americans deserve to have our ketchup personalized?

I read this morning about a new beauty technique that involves a $2,000 procedure for removing blood from your body and injecting it into your face. Apparently, it’s a rage with the Kardashians and, no doubt, young women everywhere will follow suit since it allegedly makes you look younger. Hide your age. Save your pennies.

At the superstore this morning, I picked up an assortment of color-coded insulated faux-mason jar drinking glasses for my kids. At $5 a piece, they weren’t exactly an extravagant splurge but I find myself wondering if there was a better universal use for that $20. Could it have bought a meal for someone? Diapers for a struggling single parent? Added to the funds from other unnecessary purchases to contribute to bringing clean drinking water or medical help to the masses of people on this planet dying daily from contaminated water and malnutrition-related illness?

Yes. Of course it could have. But I liked those cups and the money was mine and no matter what I do in this life, I will probably always have a warm-enough home with a cupboard full of more drinking glasses than people to drink from them. What’s wrong with that?

I glance around and my heart calculates the sum total of all the excess I can see from where I’m sitting. A man rides by on an $800 bike, passed by a $30,000 car. I take a swig from my $4 bottle of vitamin-infused fancy juice in its plastic bottle and make notes with my $3 pen in the university library my $10,000 a year tuition helps fund. If it rains, I will open my $22 umbrella and try not to get my $18 flats wet, which would be a real tragedy since I only have about sixteen pairs of shoes in my closet.  

Somewhere it all gets dizzying and I become nauseated.

It’s easy to think that what I have or don't have, what I do or don’t do doesn’t matter that much. But it matters.

It matters because the sad truth is that there are more than enough resources to go around in this world. More than enough dollars and farmland to feed the hungry. More than enough words for everyone to be encouraged and more than enough of us calling ourselves disciples to overcome the poverty of love that exists all around us. We hoard the manna and it spoils in our homes, in our bellies, in our pantries and bank accounts and vacation homes. We are afflicted by the disease that comes from overabundance but to cure it, we hoard some more and thank Him for His blessing.

It overwhelms me, the abundance of God’s manna and the way it can still feel daily like we never have enough to go around. I never know how much is too much, whether giving up air conditioning matters while my family still pays $200 a month for cell phone access, and if having a hundred bucks in the bank is responsible stewardship or if it’s hoarding riches so I avoid the question altogether and buy a Blu-Ray player because, well c’mon, we need one, right?

As my heart cries for ministry again, I try to imagine how it is we justify this lifestyle when we’ve all been told to abandon it. Yes, Jesus, we whisper in our stone-walled churches with the patterned carpet and the cappuccino ministry. I give it all to you.

There are days I think seven articles of clothing ought to be enough to live on, that a room with a bed and a loaf of bread is all I should strive to keep ahold of in this life. There are days I think, “sell all you have and give it to the poor” actually means sell all you have and give it to the poor and isn’t just a metaphor for discipleship, that “go into all the world and make disciples of all nations” isn’t an invitation for a posh holy land tour but a command to get our knees bloody, to fill our mouths with the taste of the poverty which can only be quenched by mercy.

I went back to college so I could someday teach at a university and have a retirement account and health benefits but lately, its feeling an awful lot like the pursuit of comfort above all things and I’m pretty confident that the kind of comfort I need is not the kind that gathers zeroes in an IRA. I’m not sure if “get wisdom” means the kind I can memorize out of textbooks or the kind that can only be learned in the hard doing of following His footsteps.

The truth is, I’d like to balance the life I want, the life I secretly believe somewhere deep down that I deserve with the commands of giving and serving. I’d like to do what makes me happy and believe that things like sex trafficking and gendercide are God’s business, that there’s nothing I can do about them but maybe cut a check every once in a while because God has been good to me. But I feel myself believing the lie… it’s okay to be comfortable while other people suffer. It’s okay to worship in fancy churches and learn at fancy schools and talk about how people suffer while I wrinkle my forehead and purse my lips because how sad. It's okay to buy a latte and another new candle and do the kind of work that people do when they’re pursuing their own comfort because that's what this country is all about. That's what this life is all about.

I’ve believed the lie that my happiness, my comfort, is more important than obedience. I’ve believed that I can have a foot in both worlds—that I can sponsor a child or two and hand the homeless guy a burrito and I’ve done my duty. But I hold my wallet close. My children and my cell phone and my apartment with a thermostat that works, because I don’t really want to give it all to Jesus. I don’t really want to lay down and die, even if that’s precisely what I signed up for when I asked Him to make me His.

The honest truth is that I know all of it. I know it and I believe I’m off track. I make small changes and buy fair trade coffee and sponsor a kid and think I’m doing something good in the world but all the while I’m smothered by the abundance we’re all neck deep in around here. I don’t know how to live in this world but not be of it.

I don’t know but I’m willing to learn and I’m going to continue asking for brokenness until I abandon the idea that I can balance the American dream with the commands of Christ, because I suspect that there really is no balance. There are only personalized ketchup bottles and luxury cars and children in Africa being suffocated by their own tumors for lack of medical care. There are only cheeseburgers and sale racks and girl babies buried alive because they should have been born as males. There are only plastic bottles filled with designer water that I can swig and gulp from all I want but not without the image of the thousands dying every day without clean water access, of the bottles that linger in the earth longer than the bones of the babies who died without it.

And I pray the prayer I’ve been afraid to pray all along. The prayer that I would mean it. The prayer that trades work for water bottles and just enough for far too much.

Amen.

When I Was Held Hostage: On Gunmetal and Grace

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.
~ Frederick Buechner

Source

Yesterday was heavy with hopelessness for humanity.

I feared for the life of my boys last night inside a fast food joint where an agitated, mentally unstable man paced the floor and rallied angry, held his fist in his pocket grasping what might have been a weapon...and everything I thought I believed about nonresistance challenged me the instant my faith came up against my fear.

Our french fries sat steaming but untouched. We were, in a sense, held hostage. The man's writhing angry body draped across the dirty floor, blocking that swinging door with its golden arches cursing and forbidding any of us to leave, his guttural groans bouncing off walls and tables. My heart beat for the Lord's touch of grace upon this man, for God's will in this scary thing, but when the man pointed and laughed maniacally directly at me, singling me out with a terrifying glare, first I wished my husband was there—a military-trained expert marksman—with the concealed weapon he used to carry. 

With careful hands I texted Ryan, telling him I loved him and that I was scared, and avoided the foreboding words I wanted to say:

If I shouldn't come home, take care of our babies. Make sure they know I love them.

“I want you to get a pistol again...soon,” I texted instead, knowing the words would surprise and sober him as much as they did me. I was afraid for our lives, and I wished both for peace and for pistol. He has rallied for having one again, a pistol I know he would never use to harm unless an innocent person's life was at stake.

Unless.

It breaks my heart all the same.

We are none of us innocent people.

I do not like guns in general and I do not believe they are the answer to an epidemic of hate and hurt. I don't honestly know how you can turn the other cheek toward Jesus, toward peace, with a pistol in your pocket. I grieve today that my heart reached for violence in the gripping midst of last night's fear, that it leapt for safety and not first for salvation. 

This is not about politics; it is about peace. Peace that transcends all understanding.

So I muddied the waters of what once was crystal clear because when the fire got hot, I valued my life and the lives of my family more than I trusted in the name of Jesus. I trusted the assurance of my husband's expertise, trusted that a bullet in a crazy man's thigh might really save our lives...every one of them already saved.

Yesterday, I saw humanity at its bleakest, a gray haze over the world I'm tempted to call home.

But it isn't.

It isn't home, this earthen-house, so broken and blood-soaked. It's so tempting to forget its temporal nature when the days run long and the body aches hard and I forget the joys of this life are only notes in an orchestra of heavenly preview. I forget that I am in this broken world only on official business...my passport stamped with redeeming blood, my permanent address given at Calvary.

In fear, I forget.

The police took twenty minutes to arrive, minutes I spent texting my husband, praying beggy prayers of safety and desperation, eyeing the crazy man's pocket and planning our escape at the first glint of gunmetal. By the time the lone officer pulled slowly into the restaurant, armed and heroic, the crazy man had been swallowed by night. Only then did I pray for this man's healing, for his safety, for his soul if it needs it, and his hurt and his life worth much as mine.

He was gone and life went on. No fanfare. No media. The police took interviews. The fry machine sizzled and sparked into business as usual. Hamburgers were chewed by teeth still fear-chattering while we strangers all looked around at each other's goosebumps and stunned faces and wondered what we were supposed to do now, our frail makeshift family, united in an instant over terror and iced tea. 

The boys and I got to the car and headed back southward, silent and shaken on the highway. The scene recurred through my conscious on a loop, restarting every mile until my husband's call broke through. 

He announced that the two kids at home needed an immediate treatment for head lice, which we later learn were passed on by my daughter's cherub-faced friend, curls always adorably tangled, whose home is filled with filth and animal feces but is starkly empty of a mother. Hers is just another kind of broken home, I know, reminiscent of this earth which stinks and crawls with the infestation of destruction. I groaned with the inconvenient timing of this minor plague, so desperately needing something of beauty to redeem.

I stopped at a store and scanned grocery shelves for the three-step RID kit in the white box, the one that makes me nauseous to purchase, but a woman, worn with wrinkles and raspy cigarette-stale breath, began yelling at her husband and the pharmacist behind the counter beside me.

“CANCER?! When did I have cancer? I DIDN'T have cancer, you lying sack of shit! I'm perfectly healthy! I'm FINE, damn it! I WILL NOT DIE!” 

She thrashed tearful at her husband's shirtsleeves; misty-eyed man hushing and pulling her close, the woman swinging and spitting on them both. 

So much hurt, here. So much darkness. 

Have mercy.

Forty seconds later, a different woman passed by, crying into a cell phone that her husband had started making meth again, that she didn't want to live anymore, and the whole black night reeked hard and heavy of Hell on Earth. I wanted to give up my citizenship right then and there in the Beauty department, to cash in the earthly heartbeat I'd been so scared to lose hours earlier just to make the madness stop. 

I tried to muster hope, to bring a holy thought to mind that could bring me back from this nightmare, but I could land on nothing but the question of where gunmetal fits into grace. 

...where gunmetal fits into grace.

Recoiling again at the darkness that flooded these desperate lives, I feared despite truth that evil could triumph on a night like this, and I wept.

Just a few blocks from home the radio sang loud, “Though darkness fills the night, it cannot hide the light. Whom shall I fear?” but the song ended before the darkness did, so the music faded into a radio interview. A meek and whisper-thin voice gathered strength in narrating her own horrific survival story through the car speakers, and our scathed spirits sat seatbelted stiff in our bodies, wincing at the endless grief of the night.

“I love Jesus,” the woman declared in shaky whispers, “because I know He forgives me for being a battered woman.”

The airwaves went silent; the interviewer, wordless.

Did you catch that?

She loves the Lord who forgives her for being battered...beaten and stabbed by a man whose heroin addiction split her lips and broke her legs, whose violence killed their unborn child. 

Forgiven. For being battered.

After hearing the story, I only know what I don't know at all. 

I don't know what forgiveness even is for a God like that, for a person like me. I don't know what it looks like to act justly and to love mercy anymore, when evil breathes near enough to tickle my neck hair.

I don't know what faith looks like so full there is no fear. I don't know how to long for the heart of Jesus more than I do, how to gather trust up around my neck and settle into its warmth and assurance when it's all I can do but to whisper, "My God," at the madness. "Have mercy." 

I don't know how to pray or what to pray for when the world seems eclipsed with suffering. I only know that no bullet can take me. No bullet will save me because a nail already has.

What I know—all I I know—is that there is no genesis in wickedness. Evil cannot create. It can only destroy. Darkness disintegrates and deteriorates the sound of that angel orchestra, the familiar melody of home still faint in the weariness of my heart.

Demolition does not stop demolition. In response to creation, we create. In response to destruction, we create even more. We can cover gray haze with orange paint, redeem hopelessness with the redemption and beauty of words made gospel, songs and movement and laughter and wonder that shines pinholes of grace-light through cloaks of fear, singing the joy-song of home.

In creation alone, I stop wishing for safety and start seeking my Savior. I call Him in with words in graphite, words of sacrifice, of love, of the home my heart sings for. Evil destroys but holy creates. Holy redeems and holy survives. Holy glimmers bright with glory, brighter than bullets and gunmetal, brighter than anger, brighter than fear. 

Have mercy.


Linking to:

Abide. Proclaim. Bestow.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, says Isaiah*, and later Christ in the Gospels*.

The words unravel and re-weave this anointing of my flesh, the very calling of my spirit. I know deep and hard this work and this purpose.

I write to proclaim release to the captives.

I write, as Christ lives, to provide for those who grieve in Zion—to bestow on them a crown of beauty* by pointing to freedom, proclaiming release.

It is my longing to tell you, with all of my breath every day and forever, to take heart dear friend and receive the crown of beauty. Throw open your arms and soar a while in your own sweet release, because I have known it, because it is magnificent.

But I forget, daily, to breathe in and receive. I forget to slow the thundering hooves and linger in my freedom long enough to proclaim it. I wash laundry and file papers and shepherd babies and my fingers don't find the keyboard. I make phone calls and wonder where the days go and when I will find the time to proclaim release when I'm jailing my very self with too much of the wrong kind of work and sit behind the bars of self-doubt to mold a casing around my tender heart with the liar's black clay.

I am mentally and spiritually aware that to abide is not merely to obey or to exist. This awareness, though, comes up shy of internal some days and days turn into weeks as days are wont to do.

And so I make the paper remember for the words to instruct when the brain forgets. I make the schedule to cradle a cushion to abide, a daily space for the fingers to find the keyboard: first, time to read and sit and pray and receive, then 4 hours a day of like-it-or-not writing time, beginning tomorrow. No excuses. No escape.

Because,

I am a writer before I am a housekeeper.

I am a writer before I am a chef.

I am a writer before I am an interior designer, a patio sweeper, a phone app dawdler, a grocery shopper, an iced-tea guzzler.

I am a writer before I am a Facebook junkee, a Twitter checker, a Pinterest surfer.

And? I am a mother before I am a writer. A wife, a daughter, a friend. So I puzzle the things together and remember them all as gifts. 

I must first breathe in my freedom and break through with release. First, I dance, radiant, with my flowering crown of beauty.

First?

Abide.

Then?

Proclaim.

Bestow.

And Write.

Will you join me, too, in this?

Abide, dear friend. Live in creativity. Live in amazement. Live in love. And let the rest all fall away.

And I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you'll be able to take in with all Christians the extravagant dimensions of Christ's love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.

                                                                                                -Ephesians 3:14-19

  

*Isaiah 61:1-3, Luke 4:16-21

Olly, Olly, Oxen Free

A couple of times a day, The Little One peeks around corners and under things and wonders aloud,

"Where's God?"

She plays a cosmic hide-and-seek game all alone, turning over Matchbox cars and lifting rug corners. "God?" she says, eyebrows furled, "God?"

She glances around the room and below the dining table, between chair cushions and chair bases, under couch pillows, in clothing drawers. She traces peasant faces with her fingers on the toile tablecloth.

"Is this God, Mama?"

"God is in your heart, honey girl," I say, but her eyes droop at the answer. She wants something tangible. She believes He's here somewhere, an ant below a Matchbox car, a pale-faced shepherd in a fabric pattern on the dining table. She wants to touch, to find… to lock eyes with Him.

Me too.

I let her play the game over and over and I don't step in until she directs the question at me. I don't intervene with her hide-and-seek game because I might be surprised at what she finds. Because I'm playing my own grown-up version in my own grown-up heart.

"Where's God?"

And I look high and low, deep and hard. I look for God, for grace incarnate. I look in the dishes, in the laundry, in the tangled bedsheets and peanut butter sandwiches.

Where's God when my husband is away, when I'm overwhelmed, when the kids need more than I can give? Is He looking back at me from the toile tablecloth that I wipe down a dozen times a day? In the medicine bottles? The dirty barbeque?

I look in the pile of bills, the cat dish, the sunset. I look in the eyes of my babies and the bookshelf in the hall.

I play my own hide and seek game with God, and it is daily.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," I murmur. "Olly, olly, oxen free!"

It's a cry of gratitude, a cry of trust. A cry of faith and truth and a bare naked heart.

And there He is.

Under a Matchbox car, in the laundry bin, beneath the toile tablecloth. In the eyes of all these babies and inside my own crumpled heart. He's right there, in plain sight, for those willing to look.

I have looked and I have seen. There He is, and He grips my heart again. I'm caught. 

I'm tagged. 

I'm it now, I suppose.

And if I'm it, in this hide-and-seek game where God peeks around corners of His world, will He find me? Will I be there? Will I be about my Father's business or will I be consumed by my own? Will I be found in the eyes of these babies, in my work in this world, or will He have to search below and between for me, calling my name to find me hiding from it?

Olly, olly, oxen free. 

On Excavating Earwax, Panty Raids, and Joy With Dish Gloves On

Friends, this post is long... like making-up-for-lost-time long...like more-of-a-chapter-than-a-blog-post long, and I apologize (kind of) for the length. I really feel desperately that I need to post it anyway and I ask if you'll give me the grace of getting through it because I think this message is a good one for us all this week. There are some things around here knocking my socks off... things I believe truly will rock your world, too, if you soak it in. So go get a coffee refill and stay with me in this, if you can...come back to it if you have to. Thanks for trusting me, for getting through my wordiness and letting me unravel the beautiful, terrible mysteries I'm drifting through these days.  

----------------------------------------------------------------

I haven't been writing much lately—not here anyway, and I'm sorry for that. 

It's not for lack of trying. I've sat down at my keyboard dozens of times this week and the last one and the one before that to keep this space current and relevant and real. What happens, though, is that no matter what I set out to write, it all ends up coming out something like this:

"This is hard. This is hard. This is hard. Joy is here. God is good. He is teaching me so much. And oh, yeah… did I mention? This is hard. "

It's true of course. This is hard. God is good. And He is teaching me measure upon measure more than I ever dreamed this season would be about. I am learning dependence and how gratitude can overcome attitude. I am learning about love in action when the feeling of love is elusive. 

I am learning about what importance and success look like in the Kingdom, and how wrong I've had it all this time. I am learning about need, about nourishment, about food and laughter and organization and the power of a smile or a scowl, about volume and voices, love languages, trust, fear, home, and the wild and wonderful human spirit.

- I am learning that love is joy with its dish gloves on.

- I am learning that the words I grumble or yell or whisper or pray are longer lasting than the words I type, that tying up life lessons nice and pretty in a package works well on paper but doesn't serve me at all when there is poop in the sandbox or when I see my own forked-tongue wagging back at me from the mouth of my flesh-and-blood boy. I am learning that hot, silent tears into my pillowcase are a hallowed kind of prayer, and that I would be wise to utter less the phrase "Lord, give me strength" and utter more the phrase "Thank you, Lord. Give me joy." Also, that He always responds swiftly to "Help me, Help me, Help me," even if I whisper a curse word in the middle of that prayer somewhere.

- I am learning much, much, much about grace.

Overcoming my critical, complaining spirit in this means not running to my blog just to purge out the grime of the day every time I'm tempted to, even though you all take it so graciously and mold it into a golden gift through your comments and outreach and prayer. You all are my heroes and you are how I do most anything—all this inspiration I get from the people out there walking around on Jesus-feet, kissing with Jesus-lips, giving with Jesus-hands.

Having foster kids in our home these past few months has rocked us, not in a flip-our-world-upside-down sort of way, but in a gnaw-away-daily-at-our-false-ideals one. The temptation is to say that with each challenge, I am growing and loving them deeper and deeper because that's what the neat and pretty answer might look like, but that just isn't always true. 

What's true is this. I still don't have a maternal instinct for these babies, not completely, and though I love them as much as I can make myself love anything, this is a hard love. It's a love that acts and does, a love that wipes and kisses, a love that moves and rocks and holds and bites its tongue, but not so much a love that feels. It's different, and I am learning, too, to be okay with different, all the while praying for a bigger heart to overflow with Jesus-love when these little faces still seem so exoteric, so marvelously foreign here. 

The intimacy with which I am caring for these sort-of strangers who are also long-neglected little children means this work is mostly gross and bloody and sweaty and stinky, covered in waste that emerges from bodies I have not carried and have not watched carved by formative years of nursing and growing and living. The truth is, it often makes me wearier than I wish it did. 

And though I am immune, mind and body and spirit, to whatever is produced by my own children's bodies, there is no such lack of repugnance with these children, yet. I shouldn't admit it but that's the hard work of motherhood, what biology affords us the capacity to endure out of instinct. When biology is the missing link between these strangers and myself, the already-hard stuff gets harder, if only because it is not nature but effort that drives me.

I am shamed further by the shame I feel, by the way I cringe and curl inwardly at the hazards of motherhood, the green and brown and foul-smelling things, the yucky stuff that from my own children leaves me unscathed. Per doctor's orders, I had to go out and buy a tool last week designed to excavate impacted earwax, a tool I never knew existed and have lived peacefully without for 32 years. Then, draping wriggling half-dressed children over my lap one by one, I dug deep into their oozing orifices and hummed loud to make them still and safe but also to suppress my gag reflex, to transform repulsion into grace, to remind me to find the joy here, in earwax, somewhere…in puddles of drool and vomit, in overflowed toilets, in asthma and tantrums and middle-of-the-night toddler pantry raids (not to be confused, of course, with panty raids, but with the same sort of commotion and cunning thievery involved).

I am struck by how unnatural this love can be, how the actions of what love does can sometimes be so instinctual but other times requires intense suppression of human instinct. And yet, even this unnatural and irregular love is complete and perfect love all the same, for such a time as this. 

Foster parenting is, by nature, the role of coaxing a square peg into a round hole and making it as comfortable there as possible. It is oddly unnatural. Intentionally unnatural. And, challengingly unnatural for me.     

- It is an unnatural love that chisels impacted sludge out of a half-naked stranger's head with a miniature plastic melon-baller and sings her quiet all the while. 

- It is an unnatural love that peeks beneath peculiar habits and whispered statements to the dark underbelly of human existence and reveals the despicable truth of the trauma and turmoil which raises babies in badly broken homes.

- It is an unnatural love that attempts to explain foreskin to a puzzled preschooler who accidentally discovers anatomical differences in his same-age counterpart (a delicate and highly charged conversation to have with a boy still wearing Spiderman underpants, just a baby but already corrupted and confused by sexual abuse and body shame).

- It is an unnatural love that whispers lies to a baby for a holy purpose. Their mama won't be visiting today; she's in jail again, but their hearts can't receive the truth of this. Not yet. And sometimes, a lie can be an act of love, too. 

Love so often is the tough work of exposing joy when there doesn't seem to be any.

Love can be natural or unnatural, and the tough kinds are pulled and stretched from all corners of our body and soul and spirit.    

- It is hard physical work to excavate joy like I excavate earwax, digging and prying and scooping for it to make things better, to enhance my ability to listen more clearly. I round my posture and strain hard for the delicate sound of joy amidst the clamor, the wailing racket in the world all around. There is a din of falling ashes and abundant hopelessness, but I tune in careful and with clarity hone my senses to simply hearing. In doing this, I decipher a soft symphony of intricate miracles, joy's peaceable volume growing over the clatter with each passing second. 

This love? This hard love... this careful, deliberate, focused, slimy and grimy, exhausting love? 

It amplifies the sound of joy. 

Love always amplifies joy because love teaches the lover to listen. 

- It is hard mental work to locate joy when a food-obsessed toddler leaves a midnight trail of empty soda cans and potato chip bags strewn about in her wake like rubble after she cleans the cupboards bare and we are all oblivious, snoozing in spent slumber. But as tight fists unclench, I look closely and there it is...joy, giggling about the silliness of it all under a pile of granola bar wrappers. 

Joy finds a pathway to humor when humor is a lifeline to grace.

(Or a pathway to chocolate. Chocolate is always a lifeline, in my book.)  

- It is hard emotional work to find joy in rising anger when three sets of tiny, mighty hands demolish weeks of careful bedroom decorating in mere seconds of raucous fun. They tear curtains off walls, thrash the personalized name signs I meticulously painted for each one of them, bust closet doors, and crush the paper lanterns that once hung from the ceiling—cheerful orbs now ripped and ruined by careless, overactive play. I almost cry but I yell instead and lose my cool completely. Later, we talk about destruction and forgiveness and how wrong we each were in all of this, me especially. And we forgive.  

Joy flees when anger roars but gathers at the feet of a humble lover. 

- It is hard spiritual work for me to remember, minute by minute, that they are children and not just to find joy in that but to create and nourish it also with room for imagination, creation, amusement, and wonder in the bustle of passing days. I'm so often tempted to wish them into mature beings fully capable of order and reason, but joy knows better and sees clearly.

Joy in you begets joy in others, and where there is much joy, peacefulness abounds. 

Though it doesn't make it any easier, I am grateful in small ways for this fissure between me and my foster children, for what is lacking here. These are not my forever babies, and my soul has not given birth to them the way it has to my others, the ones I could not bear losing like I will lose these ones, someday. 

So I go about the work of stitching my heart to theirs word by word and action by action, bathtime by bedtime, meal by hug by juice cup by storybook by smile, each action another stitch in the fabric of our stories. I baste love like scar tissue over fresh wounds with wide, loose stitches. I sew loops of thread like care and clockwork with lots of open space in this tapestry of grace that covers over them, space for the tight stitches of redemption that will someday not only cover the scars but heal them also. I am leaving room for those who will come after me, the new strong embroidery of an adoptive family perhaps, or the delicate healing sutures of reformed (or, rather, reforming) biological parents.

Theirs is not a forever love within me, not a soul-birthed love like I have for my biological kids and also for our boy in Texas whose adoption is underway. His stitches are sewn short and tight and strong like my others, and with the sweaty, painful work of bearing and birthing a grown-up boy from my heart's womb with all the fight and fire and breath of bringing forth new life—new life right out of existing blood and bones, thoughts and scars and needs and dreams and fears…a partnership between redemption and creation, a partnership between an average family and a Divine and Holy God. I don't know why it was different for him than the others, why his love gets to be natural and permanent, except that it was designed to be. The story was already written. 

And just like there are different sorts of stitches—wide and long and loose, short and tight and strong—there are different sorts of mother love, too—fierce and physical and permanent, nurturing and healing and temporary, bold and beautiful, quiet, clumsy, complicated, selfless, distant, biased, graceful… And I might exhibit a different love dynamic with each little body, each big life that passes through my care. 

I see now that my work in this world, in everything, is not merely about action but first about vision, to see joy and Jesus everywhere, and then to act accordingly. 

So, I seek joy...deliberately, intentionally, increasingly, I seek joy in every. little. thing.

I don't always find it. My heart gets hard and my voice gets loud and the laundry pile grows and I give way to weariness.

But I squint hard through the goggles of grace and try to be mindful if nothing else because the thing about joy is that it's really the awareness of its presence that's elusive, not joy itself. It is sometimes just a vapor, a supernatural and hazy transformation from empty to full, heavy to light, beastly to beautiful.

Sometimes it's wide right there in the open like a spring tulip, beaming bright in a child's happy smile or whispered thanks. Often though, at least for mothers, it is buried as treasure, settled hard under dirt and germy filth or else obscured and camouflaged—an optical illusion that requires a spiritual squint to recognize it hidden from sight right there in the open. Grace goggles, like paper spy glass prizes in sugary-cereal boxes, reveal the secret message in blue beneath a blur of red squiggles, beneath the ugly and exhausting work of mothering, of sustaining life every single day, all day long, again and again and again. 

The secret revealed is always this:

This is hard. This is hard. This is hard.

Joy is here. 

And God is good. 

Inglorious Things

I feel the need to apologize for my last post. The one where I ranted a bit and complained a lot about what is really a privilege – the daily drudge of life with so many little people, the rundown of love when it gets hard…

And it does get hard.

There are days like those.

There are also other kinds of days, like ones with giggles and 2-hour naps. There are beautiful treasures like the number of times a day they all hug each other and say, "I love you," and pray in unison with miniature whisper voices. There are enough peanut butter sandwiches to go around and when he thinks I can't hear him, my boy tells Little M that she looks beautiful today. There are days like today where my broken car gets fixed by someone willing to give up their evening to help us out, where a phone conference brings our adoption one big step closer, where we hear the quiet voice of our boy in Texas on the other line and have hope that we may hold him close within 60 short days. 

If this practice has shown me anything about myself, it's the depth of selfishness I'm still learning to let go of. It's that I sometimes think I have a right to complain about the hard things just because it makes me feel better when I do. I want to tell the truth and tell it whole, and the rest of the story is that there is always, always redemption at the other side of those tearful moments. He is always only working out the kinks in my selfish heart the way a baker kneads air bubbles out of the dough.  

I can gripe and wax poetic about inglorious things, but then I am brought back to earth, where God humbles me in a visit center lobby, where a mixed-up mama with a Tattoo Jesus wraps her arm around me and tells me thank you for loving her babies, for caring for them so well, when I'd thought judgy thoughts about her moments before. A woman I'd withheld forgiveness from reaches across the divide and reminds me what love looks like and I recall what it is I'm trying to do here… just. love. And that means loving her, too, and the Texas caseworkers I've been so angry at for making the adoption harder, and my husband when he doesn't respond the way I'd like him to.

Because Love loves anyway, and not just in words.

This week, I've been stressed. I've been busy and sore and broken down on the side of the road in 102 degree weather with four babies that had to pee. I've been short with my husband and annoyed by life, and I've chosen sin out loud and over and over, knowing full well what I was doing. I appreciate your words and kindnesses, but I am not a saint. I am impatient and often irresponsible and I secretly believe I should have control over my world. He knew I would do this Christ-like-loving thing poorly some days, and He gives me an extra measure again and again so I will see how.

If the woman with the Tattoo Jesus can love like He does, maybe there's hope for me. These babies are a right step in learning, I know. And our boy in Texas, too. And the freckle-faced children of my womb, my very beating heart in three little blonde bodies. And you. And her. And them.

This is the fruit of these days that pass slow and too quickly all at once. Seeing the bruises and worms I carry and peeling them away, dissecting my heart like the carving away of soft spots on a peach to make it sweet and  imperfect…nourishing…delicious…and redeemed.

Trials and Tattoo Jesus

They fight all the time.

ALL. The. Time.

He took this! She hit me! He said no! She broke that!

They are forever not each other's best friends, anymore.

The big one lies and talks constantly about prison and drug references. My own little guy shrieks and gasps in hypersensitive freak-out mode over everything they touch or say or do. The little one, at two, outweighs my 4-year-old and then some and my back screams from sloughing her around in my arms. She eats everything.

Everything.

Paper. Books. Photographs. Pine cones. Food wrappers. Styrofoam. Batteries. Napkins. Dirt. Rocks.

Everything.

My husband is gone again, 10 more days this time. I am cranky and tired and I miss him, and my head pounds while I struggle to admit that today, I don't want to do this. I don't want to wrestle with three car seats when it's 102 degrees and the car has no air conditioner. I don't want to jostle children between time-out and a too-hot backyard, give three baths while the other two wait for showers, slather on another round of Band-Aids and hair gel and toothpaste, wash another load of miniature underwear, sort train tracks from toy cars again.

I don't want to hear the ABC's out of tune again today, or explain for the hundredth time why it's not okay to talk about prison in front of the baby. I don't want to imagine the pre-placement life of a child who doesn't know his last name but likes to pretend-arrest the other children and recites the Miranda rights with sickening accuracy.

I will load up the whole crew in my overheating rig again this afternoon and take these babies to see their mother, praying they won't ask to call me Mom (again) in front of the lady who birthed them both. She will fill them with junk food between meal times and give them things I won't let them have when we get back home. While they're at the visit center, I will hold my own babies longer than they'd like to let me, since my time for this is scarcer now than it used to be, and we will eat ice cream in a restaurant and pretend like life is normal.

After an hour, I will go back to the visit center and the babies will run to me, and Birth Mom will cry and tell me to be careful again and again and I will fight the urge to roll my eyes, since careful hasn't really been on her agenda before now, because I'm the one treating her babies with tender hands and doing the things she ought to be doing. Because I know she has a big screen TV and wears designer jeans when I'm buying thrift store duds so I can afford to feed her babies. I will feel a mix of anger and compassion at the mixed-up woman whose kids are in my care, and she will whisper things to them in Spanish so I won't understand her.

As she passes little M back to my arms, whose bottom lip is stuck out into a pout because she doesn't understand the Mom who hands her over every time, I will see the enormous Tattoo Jesus looking back at me from her arm, shoulder to elbow, in sandaled feet with faded background glory, like the one on the candle jars at the grocery store.

I will carry the sniffling baby back to the stifling car and ask Tattoo Jesus if he ever didn't want to love, if the smell of sickness or the filth of life annoyed him as bad as it all annoys me, today. I will wonder how to be like him when my house smells like another family now, that my own babies now know about cocaine and prison and their bedrooms are inspected by ladies with clipboards and they can't have a kiddie pool in the yard anymore because the clipboard says so, because we're all just trying to love when we sometimes don't want to.

He will tell me, as he always does, that love doesn't have anything to do with wanting to, and that love doesn't come from me anyway so I'd better make more room in this equation for him to do the work. He will kiss the baby on the cheek with a breeze and wrap himself all back up across the arm of the mixed-up woman who needs him, too, to cling to her in tattoo ink on the days she can't cling to him for the power of addiction and poverty.

I will roll down the windows and we will drive away in the overheating rig and sweat off Band-Aids and hair gel, and sing our ABCs all out-of-tune, again. 

Making Room - Where Love Fits In

The week started with a bang… a publisher meeting, a book acceptance, a tearful hug, a bottle of champagne…long chilled for the day this excitement came, popped and poured and savored. I didn't know that wouldn't be the most exciting thing that happened this week.

Tuesday we were notified our foster care certification was official, that our home was opened to provide care, and less than 24 hours later, our phone was ringing… would we take a 4- and 5-year-old sibling set in an hour? We had said we had no room for boys, what with three already in one bedroom, and could only accept girls for placement, and with my writing and work commitments, only school-aged children fit into our current life.

But when the call came, it was so much clearer than it had been before… we don't fit love into the rest of our life. We just walk in love, first, and let the rest fall all over and around it, soaked up and stained by the color that bleeds from what love does.

With shuffling feet they came, feet but no shoes for them to fill, only the smoky, stained clothing on their bodies, and the funds normally set aside to clothe wards of the state previously squandered by those who came before us. They both wore diapers (and it turned out, they were 2 and 4 in actuality which made three babies under age 4 in our three-bedroom rental, plus our 8 and 12 year old, plus the 15-year-old whose adoption is underway).  They came with no clean diapers to change into… no car seats, no clothing, no belongings but the dime-store teddy bears that they had selected at the child services office.  

They peeked cautiously around corners, suspiciously tiptoed into their new home with trepidation and I watched my biological kiddos, the ones who didn't really choose this arrangement and told me, before the others arrived, that they weren't excited about it. I prayed, I asked you all for prayer, and we were covered, abundantly.

I know because despite my own bout of insomnia, three preschoolers snooze in mismatched sets of my son's pajamas, divvied up across the crowd until we can make it out shopping for right-sized ones. I know because there were way more laughs than tears today and because my children took the lead on loving them, taking hands and leading prayers, sharing toys and whispering sweetness, breaking my heart wide open with the simple practice of love that they grasp so much easier than I do, loving wide and well even when they didn't want to.  

Little J took deep whiffs of the ill-fitting pajamas after his bath and proclaimed, "They smell so good," and I remembered how simple delight could be. Then, kissing his sweaty forehead at bedtime, he asked, since the others called me Mama, if he could call me Mama too and if he could stay forever, and my heart swelled with the ease with which he felt at home here, despite his world being ripped wide open just a few hours ago even while I fought to remember that I was not charged with forever for these children, just for now.

They said Little M wouldn't sleep without her big brother in her bed, that they'd shared a twin mattress their whole lives and I probably shouldn't try to sleep her solo, but we read about Jesus and I stroked silky hair and her eyes drifted away and I knew this tiny girl needed a bed to grow into, a spot in the world that was only hers.

Mr. Smitten had to be away this evening, so I juggled a little more than usual and uttered a holy thank-you for the frozen flautas on hand for dinner in a pinch. There were tears and fibs, spilled milk and popsicle juice in the carpet, messy pants, bumped heads, cranky moments, and for Mama, excruciating back pain that leveled me to bed before the laundry was sorted (and yet, insomnia gets up me again and to my keyboard for the telling).

But there was love… much, much love. The kind that comes raining down like invisible pearls and echoes of the whispered prayers of friends and strangers. The kind that has me choking back tears at not just the disgrace of a world where foster care is needed, but the beauty in it, too.

There is love.

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Linking up at Emily's for the summer's last Imperfect Prose and with Jennifer at Getting Down With Jesus. Join us?

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. 

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? 

 

Pimples, Ulcers, and Gin in the Cat Dish

A friend of mine is currently struggling through the early phases of a season of parenting known as oh-God-help-me-I-have-a-teenager-who-hates-me syndrome (AKA: adolescence).

The symptoms of OGHMIHATWHM syndrome are mostly exhibited by the child in question and encompass a great deal of eye rolling, moodiness, heavy sighs, general apathy, and extreme embarrassment at the very existence of her mother.

In her case, it is also accompanied by an equally as horrendous case of oh-dear-God-my-teenage-daughter-has-a-boyfriend syndrome (ODGMTHAB) and this particular affliction causes symptoms mostly exhibited in the parent in question such as hyperventilation, paranoia, headaches, ulcers, anxious prayers, irrational thinking, heavy drinking, and general desperation. Concurrent symptoms exist with the child in question and include declining grades, hours in front of the mirror, hair flipping, thumb strain (from texting), and starry eyes.

I've spent a lot of time with my friend lately and have observed the whole thing unfold before her horrified eyes. Just a few minutes ago, she held this wiggly infant girl in a swaddled bundle and looked adoringly at her, never dreaming this moment would come. Now, off she rockets into the world, leaving her fretting mother in her wake. Just listen, child… I have so much to tell you. There is so much you have to learn for what's ahead of you.

I look at my oldest son, who will himself cross over that coveted 13th birthday this summer, breaking the rite-of-passage marathon tape and probably hurdling me headlong into my own case of OGHMIHATWHM. These two babies used to play together, watched cartoons and toddled around in diapered butts together, but now they're walking time-bombs… pimpled monsters of their own making. And I'm about to join the ranks of shell-shocked parents everywhere, looking longingly at their infant children dangling car keys and squealing out of sight.

So, there's that. (Cheers.)

Being the still cool and collected outsider in the whole debacle has given me a bit of perspective and unfortunately, a clear view into the mirror. I'm a few decades past my own eye-rolling, pimple-popping, boy-swooning days but I imagine, in God's eyes, I haven't grown up all that much.

Here's my loving parent, walking me through life with compassion and grace, teaching me, guiding me, giving me wisdom for every situation, and here I am, rolling my eyes at His ways, smacking my gum and trying desperately to go my own way.

I know He's immune to the paranoid delusion that accompanies parenting teenagers, but I wonder still if I wound His heart with my rebellion… if my desperate attempts at being liked by others, at seeking after my own happiness whether it's good for me or not causes Him grief… or as Anne Lamott says, "makes Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish."

When He longs for me to turn my heart to His, I flip my hair and roll my eyes and pick up my cell phone to text a friend. When His book of wisdom sits collecting dust, I whine to my friends about my troubles, simple unable to imagine a way out of the mess I've made of things. He stands waiting in the wings and I turn my back in rebellion to find my independence, to make my own way.

My friend's daughter will grow out of it. They'll find their footing in the awkward stage of adolescence and eventually, she'll be grateful for her mom's tireless presence in the midst of her toughest years. Or at least, she'll need a ride to the mall.

But I wonder if I'll ever grow out of it. Will I ever draw close enough to my Father's heart that my own ways don't glitter with intrigue? Will I ever grow out of the awkward dance of being young enough to still need Him but not always wanting Him in charge?

Father, forgive me for my spiritual adolescence, for needing you and wanting your gifts, but chasing after my own ways. Help me to have faith like a child but the wisdom of maturity to hold tight to your hand when my desires lead me astray.