Amber Waves of Grace

I pack with anticipation. Dreams flood and fly and I reach for them, frantic and flailing. He has a dream for me, I know, but trying to capture it, narrow and clear, is trying to catch a river in a paper cup.

The conference sessions are circled and starred in pink ballpoint. I can’t wait to internalize the holy truth, the power and beauty of the words from the mouths of these women who look like Technicolor Jesus to me, these powerhouses with humble hearts, beautiful speakers and writers, friends and sisters that bring me hard to my knees.

I’ve come here to meet the Divine and it’s all right there in my grasp, right in the retreat center meeting room where I’m sure I’ll meet with Him, where I know He’ll whisper gently that one. next. step. toward His big, beautiful dreams for me.

It’s cost a thousand or so dollars for me to get here, a small price to taste what lies in store, a holy encounter for merely a song, a diamond necklace in a nickel machine container, and I am breathless for it.

We are giddy. Anticipation does that and so does the wine and the salted caramels, the high from our still-bleeding foot tattoos, identical, the forever reminder for our each and every step: Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. I am wrapped in the arms of my sister and the sun will be up soon but time does not exist here. This is not a hotel room in the middle of Nebraska but a sacred space where tears fall easy from eyes which have been dry too long, where the seemingly insignificant trivialities are consecrated gifts, revelations in disguise.

Amy plucks my eyebrows and speaks with the mouth of Jesus and inexplicably, the sky ignites with fireworks and orange-breasted spring robins dance across the icy parking lot and there is somehow nothing strange about it at all. This is a thin place, nothing but a gauzy lace curtain through which we stare right into the eyes of Abba Father, locked in the gaze of El Roi: the God of Seeing.

Sleep is short and morning is hard. Bottles with prescription labels decorate this space, bottles with white caps, impossible caps that taunt these swollen knuckles and frozen fingertips, aid for broken bodies. In the sacred space behind the veil there is no need for these bottles, but here in this broken world these capsules are the currency that buys a few moments of flexibility and function. Last night this was a thin place; today, it’s a thick one. Thick with sickness and pain where the clock hands tick off the rhythm of this temporal world: Eight, Nine, Ten a.m. has gone and now so has eleven, and twelve. The hours pass past the pink ink on our conference schedules and we lament a little because it wasn’t supposed to be this way. We were supposed to be in conference sessions, dancing with the Divine, filling our hearts with His dreams for our lives, jumping off mountaintops in tandem with our sisters, arms locked, hearts beating wild with our one collective yes.

The heart wants what the flesh will not allow. Today there are no fireworks, no dancing robins, no giddy laughter. Today there is vomit, there is throbbing, there is frustration and disappointment and pills that don't do their job. Today the veil is not a veil of lace. It is a brick wall and it is a hard strain to see through it. He holds us still, there is no doubt, but I cannot catch His gaze.

Practical attempts are all that can be done but let the hours pass, let the darkness lift organically through the passing of time and tiptoes through the dark. I fire up the car and veer it toward the conference center, towards the speakers we long to hear, and drive right past. I have not come for this just now. I have come for a cold coke and a chicken sandwich and a prayer vigil held quiet in the driver’s seat of a rented Dodge Avenger.

I have come here, to Nebraska, to be spiritual. I have come here to draw near to the heart of God and I cry out to Him. I ask Him to intercede, to form my words and my prayers to the needs of my sister in the moments that make her feel weak. I am a do-er and I pray for practical steps, for action on her behalf while my own knuckles throb with the rhythm of sickness. I have come here to be spiritual. I try and conjure beautiful prayers, powerful prayers. I try and invoke a healing spirit because I believe in His power, because I know she deserves it, because I still believe that we will meet God here, today.

What does she need, Father? Oh, Jesus, what can I do? How can I help her? How can my words, my empty spirit uplift and nurture, encourage and love in action?

I think of the conference speakers, of the beautiful words, the eloquence of holiness and the leaps I have yet to make to be so eloquent.

And all at once, the brick dissolves. Light spills and there is lace once more. Holiness is not always eloquent. Holiness is messy and holiness sometimes comes with a splitting headache and a runny nose.

What can I do, Jesus?

And there it is.

You can get her a chicken sandwich, Cara. You can stop searching merely for moments of fireworks and lace and start standing in the moments of imperfection and brokenness. You can stop praying and start driving. You can buy a chicken sandwich and sometimes, that’s all.

It’s been a while since the elements held this much significance for me. It’s been awhile since the taste of communion was more than dry bread and sweet wine, and I have forgotten the taste of His body, broken even for broken-up me, broken for my hurting but lovely sister sleeping in the hotel bed upstairs, and I do this in remembrance of Him.

Today there is more than bread and wine. Today there is coke and chicken sandwiches and a veil so thin it vaporizes into air. Today, I have met with the Divine and He has dreamed of me. My time in Nebraska didn’t look like I thought it would. I missed every one of the breakout sessions I’d so looked forward to enjoying. I hugged necks swift with quick smiles and polite words and too few stirred-heart conversations with the beautiful people gathered in this Midwestern God-spot.

And yet, we found Him in Nebraska all the same. Tangible holiness, sacred beauty in prescription bottles and breakfast menus, milk soap and nose rings and airport bathrooms. Thin places, all of them…thin spaces thick with grace and reverie.

I am grateful for the parts of the conference we were able to attend, blessed beyond measure by the words and dreams of Deidra, Jennifer, Emily, Dan, Shelly, Diana, Kelli, Holly and Holley, Sandra, the ViBella team, Amy (of course), and all the beautiful women and men who dreamed big and dreamed scared and slid hands across the table to one another this weekend. We all whispered yes with trembling voices in the middle of the corn fields of Nebraska, catching rivers in paper cups, scribbling on stones with abandon in the amber waves of grace where God-sized dreams unfold. 

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.

On Gays and God-Haters and Me - A Facebook Conversation, continued

{This post is actually a continuation of a personal Facebook thread in which I posted a link to this blog post. The responses I received were from varied perspectives and highly charged on all sides. This issue is important to me, so I appreciate your time in considering it prayerfully.}

I do not write this lightly, as I wept over the responses this Facebook post got. Actually fell to my knees in the middle of Barnes and Noble, phone in hand, and cried hot tears. I'll tell you why in a second. First, I need to clarify a couple of things, so as not to be misunderstood. I shared this link as exactly what it was – a powerful story about a family's experience with conversion therapy (a method of "curing" gayness that a lot of churches support). I disgree with this method since at its core is the teaching that homosexuality is caused by something lacking in the father-son relationship (something that research shows to be false and damaging, and in my opinion, is just plain hurtful). I strongly disagree with a church supporting/teaching conversion therapy. I made no indication, statement, judgment, or position on whether homosexuality was right or wrong. None. Nor did I represent anything anyone else said as a Christian perspective. However, I am Christian, and that was my perspective about conversion therapy, on a public forum in which we are free to share thoughts and opinions, Scripture verses, prayer requests, barbeque invitations, or whatever we fancy. It's the same hard-earned freedom which allows us to worship Jesus openly that also allows this man and others to share their words and hurts.

I shared one man's perspective and experience, a man whose perspective is no less important than yours or mine. I do not believe to do so calls into question my Christianity, rather I believe that to show active love, to learn how to love like Jesus, means to listen to and acknowledge the experiences of those who are feeling like outcasts, those who have been told they aren't welcome in church. Being listened to is a way to be loved, practically speaking, and I'd wager a guess that if more of the homosexual community felt like the church was willing to listen and support rather than condemn, we'd see many more gay individuals coming to Christ.

Since it was suggested that I may not be familiar with what Scripture has to say about homosexuality, please be assured that I do. I know well what both the Old Testament and the New Testament say, as well as Christ's silence on the particular topic. I do believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God, as I also believe that to study it is to also study the historical background of it, the original languages it was written in, the meaning of the traditions and such, and to not take it out of context. The Scriptures condemning homosexuality also condemn wearing mixed fibers and eating certain fish, but I don't know any Evangelical churches ostracizing polyester pantsuits. I'm very grateful personally that Jesus taught about the dangers of living under religious law instead of freedom, which helps me understand that keeping the Levitical laws holds no weight in regard to my salvation and access to unconditional love, grace, and forgiveness.

I know all the relevant Scripture and have studied the Greek and Hebrew in modern translations and ancient ones, with historical implications, and have studied a smattering of theology on the issue, from various viewpoints, in order to help my gay friends get to the bottom of the topic. I am more acquainted with the Bible's standpoint on homosexuality than most Christians you know… I promise, and to be fair, arguments can be made for several positions on the issue, all of which I understand. I won't debate theology with anyone here, mostly because this is the Internet and not seminary, but also because I doubt it will matter. We may have different ideas about this position. It does not mean we don't both love Jesus.  

But again, I did not take a stance in the above post on whether homosexuality was okay or sinful or anything else. I never will. I am not God and until I reach the day where my own eyes are plankless, I won't attempt to let my moral standards have authority over someone else's life. Scripture warns me of the consequences of doing so. It is only the Holy Spirit that can convict us of our failures, and I am so glad that I was shown agape love by Christian friends that caused me to first want to know and understand God's love as an outsider, and only after that could I care anything about His law. I have read the Bible cover to cover, in several translations, and studied it in depth. What I have found every. single. time. in every. single. translation is the same, and it is this:

I have been given a greater responsibility, along with all Christians, to show love than anybody else. I follow a man (God), who taught that love was the most important thing and that without it, we are nothing but "clanging cymbals". Sadly, a lot of my friends will never set foot in a church or whisper a prayer because they can't hear love over the clanging, because God has only ever been portrayed to them as hateful. Those of us who intimately know Christ know that in Him is freedom and grace. I want my gay friends to know my Jesus. I care more about their soul than their sex life, and I believe strongly that He does too. I believe that Jesus, friend of sinners, would build a bridge of love before attempting to deal with lifestyle. Jesus saw to the heart of a person and it is my prayer that I can do so, too.

A popular Christian catch phrase on the gay topic is "hate the sin but love the sinner." What I want to know…what many of my gay friends want to know…is what that means for you on a practical level. HOW is the church, how are you and I, as the body loving the sinner? What are we doing to make Christ attractive to our gay brothers and sisters? Are we hearing them? Are we listening? Are we wrapping arms around them, showing them the grace we've been given? Do we care about anything more than their sex life? I hope my answer will be yes. I believe to love like Christ means to open the dialogue, to not generalize gays or claim to know everything about them because of one aspect of their lives. I am a sinner saved by grace and I believe that is available for all people who choose it.

Here's what sent me to my knees in tears in the middle of the bookstore on a Monday afternoon. I have many gay friends, some of whom are seeking truth actively. What they will see on my Facebook wall, between the lines of all of this, is not that they are loved and welcomed, not that there is room for them in the Christian community. They will see that they are compared to murderers, drunks, and liars by the world's greatest lovers, and that several sides of the issue will bear their teeth over a stranger's personal life. They will see that people who don't know them at all are willing to speak out about their sex life, but not about any other aspect of their beings. They will be reminded that there are many churches they aren't welcomed in, that they can find hateful statements galore by people whose greatest assignment is to love.

To the Christian friends/family who spoke out, I know the position of many of you is that tough love is still love and it seems that you believe to acknowledge or discuss homosexuality in any open way is to water down Scripture or ignore the law of God. I understand the perspective and acknowledge it, but I simply can't bring myself to see it this way. I have learned far more about the love of Christ, about how to walk in love, by listening and exploring and acknowledging people who are different from me than I ever have by starting the conversation with a statement about their sin. Respectfully, I don't think it's how Jesus did it or would do it now, and though I fail at it every day in many ways, I am growing in my understanding of His love and making every effort to walk in it through the grace I've been given. I will continue to share the perspectives of people I believe need to be understood and I freely invite you not to read it if it offends your values. In the same breath, I also invite you to (respectfully) disagree with me. I want all my public spaces to be open doors for all people. It doesn't mean we will agree, but I promise to always consider your perspective prayerfully. I make the same promise to anyone who finds their way here. There are ways in which we will adamantly disagree and I don't think our faith has to come into question because we might approach it from a different perspective. To the contrary, you teach me more about Jesus, you draw me to the Word and to my knees for wisdom when we disagree. I appreciate given the freedom to speak my truth and therefore honor everyone else's right to do the same.  

It comes down to this for me. It breaks my heart that most of my gay friends think Christians are hateful, condemning, religious, and spiteful, when Jesus adamantly, passionately taught against all those things. It is not only "God haters" who are giving Christianity a bad name. Plenty of people, in Christ's name, are willing to loudly condemn and assign that designation to the rest of us without our permission. I am the body, too, so I am doing what I can to help bridge the gap between the church and the homosexual community, in the interest of love. I do not have to make a judgment call on someone's choices in order to love them. Listening to a gay person's story, understanding their heart, acknowledging their hurt is not watering down God's love (or His law) in any way. If I am willing to listen to them, show them grace and understanding, there is hope that they will care about what my heart holds too and prayerfully, that they'll eventually know the source of it intimately, that they'll receive the love and grace and freedom I'm blessed to know. I hope that makes things a bit clearer, and I invite my gay friends, my Christian friends, and anyone else that wants to respectfully add to the conversation to do so. 

Heartbreak, High School Style

"He has a girlfriend now and I really think he is changing his mind about wanting this adoption to happen."

She says it frantic through static on the line, and this is what I feared, too, but couldn't—wouldn't—admit to, not with the foster babies getting ready to move out, not with having to keep my heart intact while I watch them shuffle headlong into a painful future and can do nothing to stop it. He wouldn't bring us this far in the adoption of this boy we already love—a whole year gone by—if it could unravel this easily, would He?

Would He?

The woman on the line wants me to move quickly, take action… do something, anything, to keep this from going the way it could go. 

But I can't give her anything to go on. I can't stop the world from unraveling. I can't be his mother if he won't let me, even if mere weeks ago it was all he wanted in the world.

I am held captive by the ever-important and always fluid social life of the American teenager.

The rumors come by telephone now like they did when I was 15 and I'm back in my high school bedroom somehow with Rolling Stone magazine covers and vodka advertisements littering the walls, holding my breath and willing the pieces of my fragile heart to stay put until I know the truth for sure. I am holding back breath and holding back tears and wondering how love can melt away so easy.

I'm afraid I'm being dumped by a 15-year-old boy.

Traded in for another girl because having a girlfriend is safer for injured boy hearts than having a mother. 

Mothers drink. And mothers die.

And just like the first time, when I was all ribs and elbows, I start to dial his number and pause over the last digit, unable to complete the call. What would I say? How do I ask this burning question? And if the answer is what I fear… what then? What happens next?

Who else will fight for you like I will? Who else will love you every step of the way?

A lot of adoptions don't work out and I scold myself for being so hopeful, for already being his mother.

A lot of mama heartbeats echo beneath ribcages for what should have been, and I know there were never any guarantees in this. But I am reduced, nonetheless, for the fear of what we'll never give him. I am wounded by the fear of being replaced by something temporary and where that will leave him, and I am all ribs and elbows again, all captive-aching heart and whispers to my pillow of no, this can't be happening. But this time, the pillow is his. His pillow, on his bed, in his bedroom, in what was supposed to be his house.  

I have no magazine covers on the walls these days, no room to call my own. No boyfriend troubles or stepfathers or algebra homework or raucous youth retreats to heal tender wounds with laughter. Just a house full of babies from all sorts of bodies and a mama's heart left behind.

No matter what happens, child...

                 I will love you every step of the way. 

Linking up to Imperfect Prose, back from its summer hiatus. Join us here as we revel in grace and community?



* Update: Made that call and asked the hard question. And he admitted to having second thoughts, of how hard it is to imagine a life other than his past, but...gently...that he believes his future is still here and I am grateful and relieved and a little more grown-up in my own heart again. We will proceed with the adoption plans still and pray for a heart guarding and lots of approval stamps before the wind changes. 

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.  

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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. 

The Anatomy of a Fight

It's hard to be a good wife.

Especially when you don't always know what that means. When you practice selflessness and not being a nag and you try and remember to rub his feet more often than you'd like to, and you work on first and foremost being aware of his needs, and their needs, and the needs of what seems like the whole entire world so many days.

And then you have an argument about who should drive which car and you feel for a while like you've been had, like you're the only one on the whole planet looking out for you, for them, for what seems like the entire world, and it's. all. up. to. you. to do it all.

So you get fired up and it rises within you because somewhere inside you're afraid that what it really means to be a good wife is to always be pleasing and agreeable, even when he's wrong, even when he's dead wrong, because that concept makes your ears ring like they did another lifetime ago when your head was being smacked into walls by a different husband. And even though the memories are distant, the gripping anger rises up inside when you get afraid, because your value as a woman is attached somewhere in the folds of these words about gas mileage and seatbelts and who ought to make the decisions here, and you think, fists clenched, I just have to put my foot down. If no one else is going to look out for me, I'll have to look out for myself.

You're not afraid because he made you that way but because it's scary how fights can always seem like the end of things to a girl too used to getting left…how the brain can flesh out the disastrous destruction of this whole big life anytime the paint gets scratched, when the fading color starts to show.

And you stew and you steam and when it's time for bed, you stay awake awhile because you're still fuming mad, because nothing was resolved, because he's snoring with the Olympics on full volume and you hate the Olympics and you hate snoring and you aren't even sure how to verbalize what this is all really about, whenever you decide to speak to each other again.  

So you breathe a lot and you think about perspective and grace and the benefit of the doubt. You remember that you're on the same team, even when it doesn't feel like it. You do what it takes to stop having the same conversation over and over again in your head, the one where you tell him off, where you really let him have it, where your words are so enlightening that he suddenly just gets it and agrees with you and everything is happy and wonderful again.

Instead you study the state of your heart, you figure out where all this is coming from. You remember that he was up before the sun today to take a side job for extra money because the family needed it, and he's sleeping because he's dead tired from lifting bags of concrete all day, on his day off. You remember how your legs looked all tangled together while you chit-chatted only yesterday and recalled together all the wonderful things about life these days. You remember the babies you made together and how he kisses them on the forehead and nicknames them and sees straight into them the same way you do. You remember how happy your whole wide life is this season and how a few short hours ago, you were praising God for this marriage, for this man.

And you see from behind your fear that this really is just about gas mileage and surface semantics and not about control or power or upper hands. You remember that this is the man who has sat in hospitals and held your hand, not the one who put you in there. You realize that respect can sometimes just look like taking a different vantage point, stepping over the divide and into their court, even when his logic isn't clear to you.

So you sit in the dark for a few minutes and listen to the clock on the wall, how it reminds you of this fleeting life, of all that's not worth hanging on to. You graze all the sleeping babies' sweaty foreheads with your chapped lips and smell their hair and whisper goodnight. You tiptoe to the bedroom and wriggle the throw pillows out from under his arms, the ones he's all wrapped up on, the ones you made for your marriage bed that say "Mr." and "Mrs." on them.

And even though he won't hear you through his slumber, you whisper I'm Sorry and I Love You and you trace his wedding ring round and round because rings are so very fitting an icon for what marriage is really…round and round, swirl and roll and circle 'round each other. And sometimes it's a whirlpool of turmoil, but sometimes it's a band of strength or a halo of sacredness or a wreath of celebration or sometimes a belt, round and round, just holding this all together. 

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. 

The Secret Sound of Solitude

It's an odd thing, learning to be someone you haven't been before, like substitute mama to little folks with different customs and lifestyles than yours. It's a wave-like rhythm here. Laugh, hold, feed, yawn, grump, cry, smile, love, sleep.

I don't have enough hands, enough time. I don't have enough skills to know the answer to questions like, "When will my dad get out of prison?" or "How come you have a bathroom in your house and my grandma doesn't?" Then perplexed at little folks who don't know their own last names but without prompting, fold hands and squeeze eyes tight and pray in unison, an unintelligible sort of chanting to the rest of us, at the dinner table over what sounds like poo'd (food).

I don't have enough love either, and this is a new learning…drawing it straight from the Spirit around me, pulling love out of thin air, the love poured down all around and over me, and spilling it onto them. I'm a pipe of sorts these days, a filter. God love pouring through me and spraying all over these little folks, love I don't have within me any other way.

Still, I'm the sort of woman who tries in my own strength just about all the time, tries to be understanding and patient, tries to be compassionate and selfless, and the more I hit my knees before him and plead for strength, the more I realize how I've been doing it all wrong all this time, how the coming before him in desperation needs to be first and not last ditch.

I have escaped to the front deck for a breath and a quick go at my keyboard. There is an inflatable swimming pool beside me, the kind you get for ten bucks at the superstore that lasts a few uses before deflating, and the water inside is still and even, crystal clear and at peace. I breathe the image in for a bit and practice making myself calm and cool, still and unrippled, a refreshing drink for the thirsty babes collecting at my feet. It is a practice only of channeling Love, not the love we can create in gesture and batting eyelash, but the Love that saves us when we cannot save ourselves…the love that is, the love that does.  

Soon the pool will be full of babies, splashing and pouring, smacking and drinking and the water will be an explosion of sound and movement, clear liquid fireworks, and the stillness will be gone. Soon, too, my respite on the porch will be finished and I will jump back into the fray, the seven-ring circus that makes me laugh and cry and sometimes curse when they're out of earshot. 

I got up early this morning just to hear the sound of silence for a bit, to remember what the air is like when not interrupted by toddler voices. It sounded like bird song and eager Saturday lawn-mowers, the refrigerator drip-drip-dripping into the ice maker and the house settling upon itself, inch by inch… my heart settling upon itself too, inch by inch. I am not a morning person but I am a woman who needs her solitude and, as it turns out, there is much to be said about hanging out in the silence early in the morning, before the crunch of cereal and plunk-plunk-plunk of the coffee pot, before giggles and whines, before flushing toilets and crashing plastic toys.

For me, the voice of God comes most clearly in that sort of noisy silence, the quiet that allows you to hear the sounds that are always there, just normally muffled under the din of daily life. It always feels like a breeze upon my neck and earlobes, a whisper that says many things but always, always says, "I love you, child." 

When Does Love Come?

It's the kind of love that makes me say, "I don't want to get out of bed" when it's cold outside and we're all tucked like sardines into a jumbo tent, and the kids start wriggling, but I do it anyway. I wonder when I'll grow into a person whose first instinct isn't always the selfish one, when pulling covers tighter to my chin isn't what I'd rather do than dress a chilly child for a hike to the bathroom, when I won't silently wish I could eat a meal when I'm hungry before serving six other gaping mouths like baby birds.

When does love come naturally?

My fingers are so swollen I have to retype the words over and over. Camping and cold and hours of loading and unloading boxes and children and duffel bags has angered my friend Fibromyalgia, who lingered quietly in recent months until today, when she roars and thrashes and my whole self aches under her influence. There are bananas on the table but all I can really think about is coffee, even while reading Corinthians.

Even Scripture doesn't cure my selfishness today and I don't pray that He overcome it either because I know deep that this is the sort of prayer that is answered through opportunity to practice and that annoys me at the moment. I have enough opportunities to practice. They are all here snoozing in rhythmic breath on inflatable mattresses, tucked in tight and clean after bathing all five assembly line style in the cold camp shower and making our way back in the dark. They yawn and stretch and bed head prevails, and all today's quiet moments have already been spent, but all I want is coffee still.

I'd keep them asleep a day long if I could, to ponder the lake and whisper to God, counting ripples in the water like the way these moments matter, these daily choices to wrap up littles in love when I'd rather be alone, when I'm tired and sore and wishing for peace.

When does love come naturally?

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.

----

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

Five-Minute Friday: How to Trust When You're Ready for Battle

Trust

This boy… this boy who I've written about, the one you've prayed for, and how our hearts entangle and he is mine even though he isn't… he's lost in the world about now, in need of a set of arms to claim him, a name on a case load, a blond-haired kid in a sea of them.  And I am on the other side of a state line, arms opened and screaming to be heard, fighting for this child who everyone's forgotten to fight for.

I have left messages and scrawled out frantic e-mails, I have come farther by the grace of God in this man-hunt…this teenage-boy-hunt… than I thought I would.  I have names, I have phone numbers, I have laws and code numbers and certifications to back my fight, and I am ready for battle. 

But now, Friday afternoon and the sun going dark in his time zone, there is nothing to do but wait.

And trust.

Because it is not my battle.  It is His.

Because no one fights for the blond-haired boy like the one who he belongs to -- The Daddy that does not die and does not leave and does not kick him to the curb.   

And I wonder.

If this is a culmination of everything that hasn't made sense for all these years.  If God has been prepping me for such a time as this. 

I do not fight with swords, I fight with words and research and a love that's stronger than state lines. 

I fight for love with love.

And I see the swirl of this whole wide life and all the rusty weapons I've collected without even meaning to, the way He equips.  The way He is orchestrating this.  The way He makes me trust in the darkest middle of uncertainty, and the way I can, which surprises me.  The way having no control at all will make you trust in ways you never thought you could. 

I fight for love with love.

-- linking to Gypsy Mama's Five-Minute Friday, on the topicof trust.

Pray with me, please, for my boy, for the one whom I'm trusting God to provide for, for the one I'm fighting the system to reunite with, for the one I'm asking God for the privilege to care for again.  Pray that He is in the right hands, that this all unfolds the best way. 

In which I curse at God and call you a hopeless murderer.

Disclaimer:  This post is not for the faint of heart.  Not everyone will agree with me, here, and that's totally okay.  But the post below contains some raw and honest language, so don't say I didn't warn you. 

Source

Sometimes, my faith confuses me.

God only knows what the people around me think of my beliefs, at least those who know me well enough to know that I sing worship songs to Jesus with my hands lifted and also say 'shit' with some regularity.

And if we're being honest here, it feels a little strange sometimes to call myself that -- a Christian.  I mean, I am one, in the raw and realest way you can be.  My heart is wholely and solely in the arms of Jesus, but the word Christian can be so… icky… sometimes, and it makes me think of Jesus as a slimy Pat Robertson with a southern accent, banging His Holy Gavel on a condemning platform, calling out "sinner!," "sinner!" and glaring down his nose at gays and alcoholics and potty-mouthed soccer moms while he listens to Focus on the Family on K-LOVE and denounces public school children for their wayward education. 

But that really isn't Jesus at all… not even a little bit, and I still haven't figured out how to reconcile my faith with the weirdness of the body of believers and all our little idiosyncrasies and why we can't just get on with it and agree that we're all royally screwed up and in need of heaps and loads of grace and love on each other and cry together and sometimes look at one another and then up to the heavens and say, "Well shit, God, what am I supposed to do now?"  (Because we're all saying it, really, in one way or another, and if you aren't, then you might want to stop reading because I'm probably no one you want sitting at your lunch table, anyway).

It's harder, too, in ministry, because when you wear that badge, that label, you're supposed to be a representative of Jesus all of a sudden, like you weren't already just by acknowledging his deism in the first place.  But when you're in ministry, this weird little game happens in your head where these rules lay down upon you and, if you're me, you suddenly look around and realize that none of this really looks anything like the God you know, and the ministry lifestyle starts to look like a competition for some kind of consecrated brownie points and you wonder what you're really after anyway, and the whole thing starts feeling like a spiritual ride on the carnival ride The Scrambler, only with more prayer and (a little) less vomit.

It may have been why I had to leave Texas… because I couldn't bring myself to get over the layers and layers of extra crap that somehow gets added to faith when it begins to cross into religion, and I couldn't keep my big mouth shut when pointless religious rules overshadowed the ministry we were trying to accomplish (which was supposed to be love, pure and simple, but started to become a war over proper church clothes and acceptable reading material and who got the award for memorizing more Bible verses).

And while we're on the subject, let me just bow right out of that competition now.  I'm not a better Christian than anyone.  I might just be the worst, even -- the most wretched and helpless and confused of us all.  And wrong or right, I can sleep better at night when I'm just keeping it real here.  I connect with the real nitty-gritty of my faith only when I'm honest about that, when I sit in my mess and say I'm a mess, and opt out of the game of having arrived in the faith and think I've got any right to tell anyone else how they're supposed do it.  My feet are dirty, too, and the only way Christ can redeem me is if I haven't already achieved holiness for myself (but I try... ohhhh, do I try like a damn fool). 

I am learning that being a bad Christian is better than being a good one.  Because if you think you're a good Christian… well, that's a problem already.

And I'm not saying we all should throw up our whiskey bottles in the air while we rip up the Ten Commandments and crank up our gangsta rap, but I just wish us, as a church, would get off it already with the big act we're putting on -- the one where we think representing Jesus means pretending we know how to be Him on this fallen earth and we see each other's petty efforts at goodness and give one another a hand, because love might be the only good thing we really can do in this world, but none of us will really ever understand the depth or height or breadth of love as long as we're breathing. 

I'll take a mud-streaked, tear-stained Bible full of parts I don't understand over the leather-bonded edition that says only what I want it to any day of the week.  The real Christian life, the one Christ led, is full of prostitutes and cuss words and dirt and shame and poverty, and the only way I know how to connect to any of it is to see my shiny white Sketchers for the dirt that's on their soles… to wrestle with the disgusting reality  I don't want to believe but I can't make go away -- that I am as wretched and sinful as a murderous pedophile, that he is as good as me, that our feet are equally dirty, and that grace… extravagant grace… covers this whole hot mess, and that until we've really grasped that and let it change everything about us, we don't really understand faith at all, and no amount of holy water can clean our dirty soles and dirty souls.  It's all grace, friends, and the day I get to be a good Christian... the day I'm holy enough to bow down and wash my own feet, is the day I'm really in trouble on this journey of faith.  

So, you wash my feet and I'll wash yours and we'll ruminate on this love thing together while we try and fail and laugh at ourselves and finally admit that we can never save the world... we can't even save ourselves.

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Linking to:

The Practice of Love

We look at each other and we know, wordless, that we have come to an end, toes edged right up against all that we can take in this moment.  There is a terrible reality hanging in the air, the kind of moment when all you can think is this can’t be happening.  But it is.  And we keep on breathing through it.

But there we stand, the mix of fear and worry and exhaustion painted plainly on our faces, suddenly aged beyond our years, silent before the Lord that only knows how the rest of this story will go.  And I am struck by the sight of us there and more than the weight of the horror is the weight of what stands out to me in this heightened moment – our togetherness.  Lovely though they were, the rings and vows and wedding guests dabbing at their tears that marriage-day seem so futile now, in this, in the face of real. ugly. painful. scary. life. 

This is commitment.  This is love.

Standing soul-bare, side-by-side and I have never been so empty.

And I have never been so full.

It occurs to me only here, only just now and in the hollow quiet of this barren moment that at the bottom of fear and loss and emptiness is only awareness of what remains when there is nothing else.

In this moment I see that the strong love is the quiet love.  The love that fears together and wonders together and laughs together and sits quietly together when there are no more words to be said.  Love is the practice of love’s presence.

This broken girl is two kinds of bride all at once and imperfectly running toward renewal at both altars -- altars of faith and of matrimony, covered over by the love that is action and the love that is left over in emptiness, running over in abundance.

Linking to:

Religion Kills.

“Boring religious people killed Jesus.”

We took the kids to a concert last night, a collection of Christian hard rock bands, organized in an effort to show these kids a different side of the faith they thought they knew backwards and forwards.  One of the singers threw out the tidbit about religion that got us cheering and thinking and vowing to see beyond pews and neckties to the dirty feet and extreme love of the Christ we follow.

The music was admittedly a bit, um, intense for my listening tastes, but I’ve thought about those words a hundred times in the last 24 hours.  They’re true, after all.

Religion killed Jesus.

I knew that, of course… I know that.  But I know I often forget.  I’m a pretty verbal advocate for faith over religion, and love over law.  I have a handful of deep troubles with the church in general, and religion is at the top of that list.

But I wonder if I look at myself, right straight to the heart… how often I’ve done it, without the church’s help.

How many times have I killed the work of Christ within me, within this world, for the sake of looking religious or sounding holy?  How many nails have I driven into all that is lovely and consecrated and sanctified with self-righteous words or judgmental thoughts?

And while I cheer along with the crowd for the thought, I look back on that truth and I groan because I see how easily I’ve betrayed Him, over and over in my selfish sin and missed the point entirely.  How many times have I wanted to be right instead of righteous, justified instead of loving?  How many times have I killed Jesus, killed love, killed righteousness, killed the witness of love with religion?   

““He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.”” - 1 Peter 2:24

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It’s so easy to have the heart of a Pharisee, to look at others with judgment instead of love.  Free me, Lord, of hypocrisy and arrogance; strip me of everything within me that isn’t motivated by your kind of love.  Help me see all people through your eyes and to abandon religious motivation in favor of extravagant love. 

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Thankful, with Ann, today for:

313.  A small treasure:  Clearance-rack cookbook full of mouth-watering recipes.

314.  Progress.

315.  Seeing kids, out of their comfort zones, embracing a new side of Jesus-love.

316.  Wildflowers, delivered by the neighbor girl... 

317.  ...then, passing it on and blessing another with wildflowers from afar.  Ah, technology.

318.  The needed quiet that Monday brings. 

319.  Warm sidewalks on bare feet.

320.  Sprouting veggies, in the garden. 

321.  Anticipation.  In general and in particular. 

322.  Pictures of baby pigs, daughter squealing with delight.

323.  Peace-feeling over next year's homeschool plans.

324.  Abundance.  Of everything.

325.  The joy of sweet release.

326.  Prayer and worship, from a new perspective.

327.  Husband's delicious cooking.