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.

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?

What Good Christians Do.

Source

Good Christians go to Africa.

Or, at the very least, to the soup kitchen.

They go to the bad neighborhoods and evangelize the homeless.  They risk their life in countries closed to the Gospel.  They give everything in order to serve.

And if I understood anything at all about Christianity, it was that my choice to follow Jesus was first and foremost a call to die. 

I knew that the only way to make God happy was to find those verses in the Bible about feeding the hungry and caring for the orphans and widows and live them wholly to the detriment of all else.  I knew that the only way to be a good Christian was to do something drastic in the name of the Lord… and that then, and only then, would I be enough in His eyes.

I didn't go to Africa.  I wasn't good enough to do that, after all, without a degree in Missions or International Ministry.  I didn't even have a passport, but I had a willing heart.

Instead, I went to Texas.  I cared for orphans.  I put on my Christian smile and my Christian uniform and I said the right catch phrases to be one of those women who give everything up for the calling to love the least of these.

Except that I wasn't.

I was drowning in my own effort, I was grasping for God in a dark, hopeless place inside myself – farther from Him than I'd ever been.  And I didn't know what to make of it.

I knew how it was supposed to work.  Good Christians go into full-time ministry, then God rewards them with warm fuzzy feelings and a gold star in the Book of Life.  That's how the equation was supposed to go – I'd been told that my entire Christian life – but no matter how I figured the numbers, my math just wouldn't line up right.  I couldn't get the right answer. 

I've never been good at math, so I puzzled over the integers.  Gave up belongings.  Check.  Left my family.  Check.  Cared for orphans.  Double check…carry the one…

But the pit continued to grow and the algebra of giving and serving continued to puzzle and I wondered if maybe Texas wasn't far enough but was afraid of what I already knew.  I wasn't a good enough Christian.  I wasn't satisfied with all this selflessness because I was a rotten, weak, selfish girl who probably hated all things holy and was doing more harm than good there, and Jesus probably couldn't love a girl like me anyway.

So I left.

In the leaving, I laid down my good Christian.  I left her in Texas where she belonged because I had no use for her anymore.  I scooted across the country with a moving truck of things I wasn't leaving behind this time in the interest of running… just getting away from the incredible expectation of the kind of life I knew I could never lead.  And I sort of whispered "I'm sorry" to the idea of serving Jesus with my whole life because I'd obviously failed at that whole thing, and I might as well just get back to my regular old failing life where I wasn't dragging anyone down with me.

But a funny thing happened.

Jesus met me.  Right there when I stepped foot out of the moving truck.  Right in the middle of my mess and though I'd looked for him all along, I found Him only when I looked beyond the expectation of the holiest kind of me.  Only when I had failed and admitted that I wasn’t holy at all and had no good at all in me – when I finally knew, once and for all, that my ugly, messy love just paled in comparison to the love of a Father that never had to try.

"Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God."                                  -2 Corinthians 3:5

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Linking up to:  http://www.mommadaybyday.blogspot.com/

We're reading through Emily P. Freeman's Grace for the Good Girl (affiliate link).  This week is chapters 2-3.  Join us... but even if you don't.... please, please read this fabulous book.  Truly life changing.