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life{in}grace

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My poverty (and yours)

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This week we are swimming in  abundance.

I spent the weekend making all manner of preparations.   While Stevie smoked back ribs all day yesterday, the rest of us flew into a frenzy of buying and storing and cleaning and prepping and sewing and ciphering.   All this to make sure 28 people know how thankful we are to have them in our lives.

Everywhere I turn in my house, there’s excess.  I have bowls and stemware and linens and food and candles and silver, galore.

There is wealth and bounty aplenty.

Everywhere, that is, except in me.

It’s the poverty of my own heart that scares me to death.

It’s my inability to be who I was created to be.

It’s my impatience and unkindness to my children—-the lack of grace and love and joy.

It’s the tally of hurts done against me that I keep record of and file away for later use.

It’s the wretched cycle of my own  sin that makes me sick.

And when I stood at the end of this week, looking at the  trail of brokenness, that’s when I saw the beautiful paradox of want.

This poverty of spirit that plagues me is the beginning of repentance.   This is where I find Him.

When I have come to the end of my resources, to the last shred of hope in myself, that’s where He waits.

And the truth is, the sooner we discover this poverty—that we all happen to share—-the sooner we can learn to live from His wealth.

Because everything is His.

And if our hands weren’t so full of our own decaying riches, He’d show us what abundance really looks like.

It looks something like peace, joy, love, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance, forgiveness.

We may be the richest (most in debt) country on earth but we live in sheer destitution.

Our lives look more like  strife, sadness, cruelty, harshness, wickedness, faithlessness, stubbornness, excess, blame.

At least mine does, if I’m honest.

And I hate my inadequacy.   I want, for all the world, to be capable and industrious—to have it all figured out, to have the perfectly coiffed life.

And you probably do too.

We don’t want to feel our need, our desperation.

So we hide, we medicate, we pretend, we run, we seek cheap relief wherever it may be found.

But at the end of the that long, scary road of our stubborn self-sufficiency and our rusty heap of riches and our swirling addictions,  He waits.

Because He is gentle and kind and faithful and full of peace and forgiveness.

He is love, incarnate.

And He became flesh to know this very pain.  He took on this desperate poverty in which we live to give us wealth untold. He is our Father.  And our inheritance cannot be measured.

And if we are wise, we will learn to thank Him for those things that remind us of our true condition:  the very circumstances that break our hearts and cause us to despair.

Those are His gift to us, to help us see clearly.

By nature, we hate the heartache which drives us to Him and keeps us begging for relief, begging for answers, begging for the scraps from His table.

But from that lack, he will give us heaven.

Let us not forget that it was in desperation that David wrote Psalm 51 and from prison that Paul wrote Ephesians and Colossians.

It’s in our poverty, not our abundance,  that He will give us His kingdom.

We don’t have to try to be poor in spirit to receive His kingdom.  We are poor in spirit and we must beg Him to show us our emptiness in order that He may fill us with the bounty from His table.

Everything is His.  And so everything is yours.

“Taste and see that the Lord is good.  Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.”

ourpoverty

 

31 Days of Hospitality:: Day 2 Every life is sacred

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This is day 2 in a series on hospitality.  You can find the others days of the series here!

We take a radical position when we insist that it all does matter.  Life is holy ground.

Every Sunday at my church, we start our service by confessing that  ‘we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves’.   Every single Sunday I can think of specific instances in my own life where this confession nails me to the wall.  And my worst grievances  are  against  the very ones I love the most.

Perhaps part of the reason we so mistreat our neighbor is our failure to recognize who he is.

We keep our hearts and our doors locked up tight because we have failed to see the image of God in the eyes of the stranger or even in the eyes of our own children, for that matter.

We march through life using people for gain, trampling on their hearts, or worse yet, ignoring them altogether.

We have forgotten that this is life and death.

These relationships where we live our lives are holy ground.  And it matters immensely how I tread on this soil.

When we are in the presence of others,  we are in the presence of Christ himself.

True hospitality sees the neighbor without all the distinctions.  He is not white or black, gay or straight, rich or poor.   He is the image bearer of God  and  we must honor him with all the love and respect with which we would honor the very presence of Christ in our midst.

He is holy ground and if we will open ourselves to him, we will never be the same—–because true hospitality is transforming.

It is not political correctness.

It is not social grace.

And it is most certainly  not tolerance.

It is an openness to know and love our neighbor that can only come from Love incarnate—-from the One who so wanted to know us that He crawled into our skin and became a man.

The one who so loved us that He drug Himself, half-dead to a cross to die for us.

His hospitality toward us wasn’t an afterthought or a means to impress others.

His hospitality was dangerous.  Holy ground always is.

But He came right into our Hell and broke down every barrier to get to us.

He gave no thought to what it would cost Him.

Yet, we spend our entire lives building those walls back in a desperate effort to protect ourselves, to hide our secret sins, and to guard ourselves from heartache.

May He tear it all down and expose us and make us vulnerable.

May He jar us awake from our selfish slumber so that we learn to see His children through His eyes and may He forgive us for every time we fail.

And tomorrow, when we meet our neighbor, may we see him with the  fresh eyes of wonder and treat Him with honor—not for who he is but for whose he is.

“We catch a glimpse of each other, we sense the smell of God, and although we rush away from the holiest of moments, we are utterly changed.  Life slams us into God…..and we realize that behind all the ordinary stuff there is something more dazzling and real than we can understand.  Life is holy ground.”
 

quotes from Radical Hospitality.

Why I’m Not Reading Fifty Shades of Grey

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Why I'm not reading Fifty Shades of Grey

I’ve been thinking about it lately because the references are everywhere and then someone ask me if I was going to read it.  I hadn’t taken the time to process my thoughts correctly about the book.  I had heard the premise and then read a bunch of reviews.

I knew right away that it wasn’t for me.

Now, to formulate a coherent, well-informed reason why not and then effectively communicate it to someone else—–that’s not exactly as easy as it sounds.

This weekend, at the Circe Conference, as I was frantically jotting down quotes from the church fathers and from the brightest minds of the past two millennia, it dawned on me that the main reason I won’t be reading the book is because there are too many wonderful things to read that I already know I’ll never get to in my life. Despite the fact that I have full-to-the-brim bookshelves already, I came away from the conference with a list of twenty-five books that I MUST read and I’d like to read ten of them before school starts in 3 weeks. I’m considering putting myself on a rigorous reading schedule that involves waking up in the wee hours of the morning so that I can take in as much of the classical tradition and wisdom as is possible for a mom who still needs to cook and do laundry and sleep.

So, why would I waste some of those precious few reading hours on what many reviewers have described as horrific writing in a genre that is barely passable as literature?

There are so many wonderful works of art, music, literature, and film with which to fill our minds.  We’ll never exhaust the wealth of what is available to us from brilliant, capable artists and writers.

The beauty of living in a free society is that you’re free to choose what works of art you will engage.  But how we use our freedoms is another thing all together.

And I’m not moralizing here.  I’m not a prude or a legalist.   I don’t think it’s an accident that even in scripture, we’re not given a how-to book.  We are instead given stories and poetry and parables, all of which contain truth that God gives to us through stories.   And the Creator himself writes some racy and violent things.   But we have, in our porn/erotica addicted society, exchanged the truth for a lie.   We have stripped away the mysteries of love and reduced them to violence and objectification and dominance.    And why?   I can only surmise that it’s because we’re so desperate for the real thing and we just don’t believe that we can have it without the sensationalized, scandalous forms of sexuality that dominate our culture.

Here’s my idea of sexy…….

A man whose strong arms cradle a tender newborn.

A grandfather who painstakingly takes the time to teach his grandson to fish.

A husband who works two jobs to put food on the table.

And of course, the beautiful, even wild, consummation of young lovers who vow to live together forever within the bonds of marriage.

It surprises me, really, that this kind of literature is what woman want, or at least what they think they want.

I fear we’ve lost our center point.  All of us.

And, ironically,  it’s often art that draws us back.   Beauty woos us and invites us to something better, a nobler love, a higher calling.    I’m thankful for artists whose works are the very incarnation of truth.

Contrast the debased world of BDSM to this commentary of David Hicks in his book, Norms and Nobility, on the beautiful description the lover makes toward his beloved in Song of Solomon.  He’s commenting on the passage where Song of Solomon describes his lover in detail—her cheeks, her neck, her belly, her navel, her breasts.

“The poet’s admiration for his beloved is without perversion or sentimentality, and his imagery suggests an ennobling and self-transcending sexuality—nothing tawdry, nothing vain.   For the love the poet expresses, although intensely personal, is also universal and divine.  His myth raises human sexuality out of the technical mire of the modern sex manual and imbues it with the significance and loveliness characterizing Dante’s ‘Love that moves the sun and the other stars.’ ”

Love and sex are beautiful gifts from God.  Gifts that we will always be prone to pervert, like we pervert all His gifts.  I don’t really need any help—in the form of perverted sex acts— to make a mess of love or of life.

To summarize Andrew Kern’s talk, in its truest form,  art is the medium by which the artist embodies a truth.

From what I can tell, the premise of Fifty Shades of Grey is built on lies.   Lies told in an effort to sell books and undermine the wonderful mysteries of love thats exist between a man and a woman.

At best, it seems a waste of precious time and at worst, it tears at the fabric of what has always made societies great—lovers whose passions are finally tamed  and whose selfish desires are put aside to leave a legacy of fidelity and love for their children and grandchildren.

Life is too short for bad books, especially given all the good ones I’ve yet to read.

Here’s a sample of what I’ve added to my reading list instead:

Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers

The Last Gentleman: A Novel by Walker Percy

Standing by Words: Essays by Wendell Berry

The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth by David Bentley Hart

The Divine Comedy by Dante

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose  by Flannery O’Connor

 

Post-Edit::

I was on my very hot and difficult run this morning when Intervention by Arcade Fire began playing on my iPod.  There is a truth in that song that pierces my self-righteousness.  It nails me right between my hypocritical eyes.  Listen to it and ponder your own tendency to look for the problem ‘out there’ somewhere—in a culture gone wrong.  Perhaps the culture has gone wrong because I have gone wrong—-we have gone wrong. We have failed to love truth and beauty and we hear the echoes of this generation as they cry, “We’ll go it alone.” In the end, it is my own need to repent that rings loudest in my ears.

“working for the church, while you’re family dies.
you take what they give you, and keep it inside.
every spark of friendship and love will die without a home.
hear the soldier groan, ‘we’ll go it alone.’ ”

Visit our workroom/schoolroom/artroom.  It’s a pretty fantastic multifunctional room!

baptized into His death……

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Reposted from April 2010.

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Something is  happening to her.   I’m not altogether sure that she fully grasps it.      It started when she quit work.     And it further heightened when she brought her children home to educate them.   Maybe you’d call it an epiphany.   Or an awakening.   Sometimes it feels more like a death or at the very least a drowning of an old fantasy.

But something very peculiar happens when you face the truth about yourself and about your life in one area;  it eventually creeps into all areas of your life, invading your presuppositions and putting to death the lies under which you’ve operated for so long, drowning them in a sea of life-giving water.

It took her by surprise and she must learn to swim again.   Or  so she thinks.    She reaches out for something familiar but even her virtues seem to have washed away.    There is no sure footing.   There has to be another way.   Or surely she will drown.

When you allow layers upon layers to be peeled back so that all you’re left with is the nakedness of your own depravity……

When the words of Christ sink in and take hold and gnaw at you and undo you…….

He is taking you into His death.     “Deep calls to deep at the roar of Your waterfalls;  all Your breakers have gone over me.”

She finds it hard to breathe.  She fights Him.     She finds it impossible to surrender…….

And then He comes.   He has made another way.

He will be the one to surrender.

And His surrender will be perfect, even to death.

His words play a melody in her heart.

He has come to give her life abundant.

how long have i been in this storm
so overwhelmed by the ocean’s shapeless form
waters getting harder to tread
with these waves crashing over my head

if i could just see you
everything would be alright
if i had to see you
this darkness would turn into light

and i will walk on water
and you will catch me if i fall
and i will get lost into your eyes
and everything will be alright
and everything will be alright

i know u didn’t bring me out here to drown
so why am i ten feet under and upside down
barely surviving has become my purpose
cause i’m so used to living underneath the surface

if i could just see you
everything would be alright
if i could see you
this darkness would turn into light

and i will walk on water
and you will catch me if i fall
and i will get lost into your eyes
and everything will be alright

and i will walk on water
and you will catch me if i fall
and i will get lost into your eyes
and everything will be alright
and now everything is alright
everythings alright

 

Blessed Holy Week to you!

Grace Upon Grace::The Mystery of Prayer

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This is week 5 of a Lenten book study of Grace upon Grace  by Dr. John Kleinig.  For reasons not all that clear to me, I’m a week behind.   I don’t know if it’s the fact that we’ve had so many perfect spring days that I can’t bring myself to do anything but enjoy it all or because I’m so far behind in everything in my life, I’ve given up on catching up.  Oh well.  Life is a beautiful mess!  So really, this is week 4 and I haven’t even finished week 3’s post.   You might enjoy catching upon by reading week 1 on Receptive Spirituality,  week 2 on The Mystery of Christ and week 3 on The Mystery of Meditation.

This chapter on prayer is unlike anything I’ve ever read before on the subject.   John Kleinig is a brilliant Lutheran pastor and seminary professor in Australia who has written and spoken extensively on the subject of prayer and here’s how he begins the chapter:

“More than anything else, I would like to be good at praying.  That’s what I’ve been called to do as a disciple of Christ;  that ‘s my basic task as a member of God’s holy priesthood.  I truly believe that much more is accomplished by prayer than by anything else I do.  Yet I must admit that I have been anything but a man of prayer.   A sense of spiritual frustration, coupled with the longing for spiritual fulfillment, is common among devout Christians all over the world.  Our disappointment is precipitated by the difficulties we experience in prayer and in our personal devotional life.  Here we experience the biggest gap between the way things should be and the way they actually are. “

This opening statement hit me right between the eyes.  I have been a complete failure at prayer.  I don’t pray enough.  I don’t know how to pray.  It has never felt natural to me.   It has never come easy and has always felt forced.   I have made extensive prayer journals and have often pressed on in prayer despite my fumblings but I’ve always been sure that everybody else must be good at praying except me.  In my daily life, I never meet a stranger and can talk til the cows come home on almost any subject but when I start to pray, I’m tongue-tied, hamstrung.    The only thing I’ve had even a moderate amount of ‘success’ at in praying is praying before meals and with my girls in the morning and evening as we say the Lord’s prayer together.  But the more systems I set up to turn me into a prayer warrior, the more failure I see.   Turns out, Dr. Kleinig would diagnose my utter failure in prayer as precisely the way it was meant to be.  Imagine the comfort when I read these words,

“Prayer should come as easily and naturally to us as breathing or eating.  Yet, we all know how hard it is to pray.  Prayer, mostly, seems to go against the grain.  Unless we are quite desperate and have reached the end of our rope, we would rather not ask God for help.   We know that we should pray.  We would like to pray more regularly, ardently, and spontaneously.  The harder we try, the more we seem to fail.  But that’s how it’s meant to be.  Christ lets us fail when we pray by ourselves so that we rely on His intercession for us.  Oddly, our success in prayer comes from our personal failure and our willingness to carry on as He works for us and with us.   Unlike us, Jesus is an expert at prayer…..He is its best practitioner…..He takes over for us when we fail, and intercedes FOR us.  He fulfills God’s call to us to be praying people and get us to join Him in His praying.

Jesus does not leave us by ourselves in prayer.  He helps us at every step.   Long before we ever began to pray, He was praying for us and for our salvation.  Whether we pray or don’t pray, whether we are awake or asleep, He prays for us….and he prays with us so that we can join Him in His praying.   Jesus teaches us how to pray by giving us the Lord’s prayer.  This is His prayer, the prayer that He prays.  By giving us His prayer, He includes us in His relationship with His Father and allows us to act as if we were Him, dressed up in Him.  He therefore identifies Himself with us and our needs, necessities, sins and temptations.  He joins Himself to us so that we can join Him in prayer and borrow everything from Him.  He swaps places with us so that we can be where He is before God the Father.

We need not be anxious about whether God is pleased with us or whether He will give us a favorable hearing.  We need not worry about what to pray for, or how, because Jesus covers us with His righteousness and perfects our prayers.  Our performance does not matter;  what matters is Jesus and our faith in Him as our intercessor.

The Lord’s prayer makes praying simple and easy for us because, as we use it, we pray together with Jesus.  It is much more important that we pray it regularly than that we wait until we have enough time to pray at length and in great detail with deep ardor and heartfelt devotion.  Satan,quite commonly, uses our spiritual enthusiasm against us.  He gets us to go on a prayer binge because he knows we will not be able to sustain it.  Then, when we fail, he uses our failure against to argue that praying is not for us.

 

And just as has been my experience,  Dr. Kleinig talks about how we learn to pray through suffering.  It wasn’t hard for me to pray in the days and weeks following the fire.  It was all I could do—cry out to God in helplessness. We learn to pray ‘in the belly of the whale’ so to speak.   He emphasizes that prayer is not our work but God’s work in us.  Prayer is a gift from God TO us, not an obligation He expects from us.  He wants to give us Himself, His peace, His gifts, His life.  We pray to receive from God what He alone can give us.

This chapter is so revolutionary.   It’s not self-help.  It’s Jesus;  His life, His forgiveness, His obedience,  HIS prayers——for YOU!

And the portion of this chapter devoted to praying for others is full of such wonderful wisdom.

So, now it’s your turn.  Wasn’t there so much comfort to be found in how Christ prays for us?

Share your thoughts:)

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My blog friend Tricia has been such a source of encouragement to me and she has a great blog called The Domestic Fringe.Com.  She’s sharing her homemade vanilla today at lifeingracegirls!