Starshine
Dusty, broken bits of glass
Falling from heaven earthward
Reflected in crystal muddy rain puddles
How absurd.
Eventually, they wither away and become earth. Like our bodies. Dust to dust.
I was watching the girls jump on the trampoline today and couldn’t help but notice how they vie for the attention of the nearby adult. “Watch me, watch me! What I can do is better than what she can do!” Maybe they don’t always say it exactly like that, but it’s the gist.
I get like that. Donald Miller calls it the lifeboat theory. Our value is in our competition. I need to be worthy of not being the one thrown off the lifeboat.
Damn.
The thing is, I’m so selfish. I’ve got no reason to even be on that lifeboat, but I want in so bad. I want things my way, I want to prove that it’s the best way. It makes me argumentative and irritable.
I told a friend today that I was getting annoyed with another friend for no reason. He told me that it’s my own fault. Okay, I knew that. I did. And it made me more upset. I was letting my friend get under my skin. She didn’t even know it.
I don’t even know what my way is. It’s hilarious. I think I know what I want, but as soon as I get it, I’m left unsatisfied. My way isn’t really so great.
Watch me, watch me! Whatever I do is a waste.
I’ve been reading Galatians, and to be honest, it’s pissing me off. I never would have admitted that I get angry when I read Scripture, but sometimes I do. I get really hacked off at things like, “Why didn’t Jesus heal everybody? Why didn’t he just make everything right when he could have?”
Well, that’s my way again, and I’m not so sure I would be so satisfied if Jesus did do it that way. It sounds great and all, but I think maybe then I’d feel like “For pity’s sakes, why couldn’t you let us fumble around some more? Now I don’t love you for your mercy. I love you because I freaking have to!”
We’re not robots or puppets or whatever. We’re people. Messed up, hurting people. We live in a messed up, hurting world. Christ didn’t come to snap and fix it all in one fell swoop. He isn’t Mary Poppins. No, he allows us to sin and to suffer. He didn’t make us love him…he’s not what one apologist refers to as a “divine rapist.”
Apparently the Galatians thought that performance could save them. But they’d already been saved. Paul got pretty hacked off when he heard about it. “Circumcision can’t save you, people! Only faith in and through Christ can! Why can’t you get it through your thick skulls? God loves you so much, so much that he died, for crying out loud! And we died with him…no more of this law!!! GRACE!”
Truthfully, if I was a Galatian, it would have taken me awhile to listen to Paul again. What makes him so smart anyway? Where does he get off telling me that all the rules I have are so bad?
Okay, so here’s the deal…so much in our formulas is good. Like feeding the poor. It’s great work. But it’s nothing apart from love. If we do it without love, then it’s pointless. It’s just another performance done by a loveless fool.
The real lover will do good things as an expression of the love. And only someone not caught in “my way” knows love. Faith in Christ, and not the law, frees us to accept his amazing grace. The freer we are, the more we receive our value in him and love him. The more we love him, the more we love our neighbor. The more we love those people the more we see injustice and go about working for righteousness. It’s the out-flowing of love.
In the first book of Corinthians (which happens to be another book that vexes me a lot) Paul tells us that doing great things without love is meaningless. He then describes love.
Truth be told, I’m a whole lot more comfortable reading that beautiful passage about what love is than reading about how without love every good thing I do is a waste.
Why?
I think because I fall back into law. Loveless law. And reading that stuff convicts me…leaves me with the knowledge that once again, I’ve let my heart be deceived into thinking if I do enough good things, I’m saved. God will love me.
My ideas are backward. God loves me. I embrace that. Then I do the good things he tells me to do in him and through him and for him. And others know that he is God.
The thing about love—about being loved and loving—is that it hurts.
I mean, it hurt Christ till he died:
Real love is going to cost something. Life. But without real love, your life is gone anyway. Jesus was a real lover, a great lover. It cost him everything. But it bought redemption. Love like that is worth tossing the laws, the formulas, the lifeboats, the dead leaves, my way, all of it. Love like that is worth striving for.
I’m still thinking this through. Still figuring it all out. But I don’t want to figure it so much that it becomes another messed up formula, some distorted version of truth for the sake of “my way.” I want to be broken to love. I want to not think so much about the cost, about the risks. I want to blossom in grace. I want to be a lover.
The craggy rocks
The perfect hiding place
From there to rest
Wearied and bruised soul
But from these mountain shadows
Hear vultures call
See flowers bloom on hillside
Watch the goats, wildly dancing
Smell the heat
Of zero atmosphere
Glory unrefined
from an old journal entry:
Sam is messing around on the guitar.
I love how the strings vibrating makes sweet melodies…how they quietly mutter sounds even when fingers have stopped touching them…their voices linger, soft notes in the air, vibrating into my ears…walking past into my brain so that even when the temporal sound is gone, even the memory of the music remains vibrating in my mind’s ear.
I love how music reflects the vibrations of the heartstrings…how my insides, the real invisible one who is me is always reaching out to God cries like the notes from the guitar…how often I wonder if God hears…but just as the strings’ motions are deep within me, I must believe that God hears my soul’s movements…that he is listening intently to the harmony of the notes created by the vibrations of all his children, of all his creation…that even when we lie silent, the motion travels up to heaven’s throne…and he remembers us…and responds with his own notes…if only we were silent long enough to hear him…the intimacy we are seeking is in the love cries that float, vibrating from heaven’s heart to ours and back again…
If we dare to breathe in spite of the sharp pains we will find God and all his grace and beauty. Awaken, soul, and breathe, sing out. Light shines on you.
When do we stop delighting at looking at our faces in a mirror?
When do we stop pretending and making up new games?
When do we stop coloring fuzzy images of loved ones? Coloring outside the lines?
When do we stop thinking that the world is so many shades of gray that there isn’t anything to rejoice in?
The children bring me outside of me. Even when we are smiling at our own reflections, the delight is in the way light and glass make backwards pictures of ourselves. The delight is in God’s creativity.
The children are forever creating new games. They are tiny geniuses. “Why is it made like this?” I give a black and white answer and they reply with a way around it that I never in a million years saw coming. They reply in color.
I stopped drawing because I can’t make a straight line to save my life. They don’t care about straight, crooked or anything of that. They care about coloring out what they know and see and feel and perceive their world as. They are not afraid to expose themselves through their art.
They dance freely and laugh and always find something new to celebrate. Or something old to be excited about. I get bored. They are not afraid to say silly things and look foolish. They delight in foolishness.
I want the heart of a little girl. I want the freedom, the celebration of life. They see God in things I merely glance at. I want to be like the children. This is how we enter the kingdom.
*post title taken from a quote from one of the kiddos.
Jealousy is a waste. The envy that I feel inside is bitter, destructive. Like anger, it has nowhere to go in all its futility.
All these negative emotions are like blackened clouds. They will grow and grow and then rain down their wrath and the drops of bleeding water and frozen angry chunks of hail will return to the vast ocean and the sun will return.
I’m pissed off, in spite of all the goodness around me and so, of course, I want to run, as though that would somehow change things.
But Truth remains stored away, locked in the deep places.
I don’t just take my own crazy, mixed-up self everywhere I go, but Truth also.
It is hard, this Truth. It demands to be reckoned with. Even when I just want to pound my fists at it, punching its chest over and over and over again.
It looks at my tenderly, even when I tell it to f off. It’s not pretty. Truth has been there for me, with me in the darkest nights, it’s what broke off my chains. But it got bruised and banged in the process.
Truth isn’t sexy and neither am I. We make quite a pair as we go together. But for all my anger, rage, and jealousy, I’m not giving up Truth.
It is costly, it is dear. And it remains. All else fades away.
Truth meets me when everyone else has gone home to sleep in light of morning.
Truth says, “Hey, baby, let’s go take a walk and watch the sunrise.”
Hand in hand we go...
which again just reminded me how wondrous YHWH is.
