Category: Grace

Illuminated moments

How Dieting Became Spiritual Awakening

“The nature of sin is not immorality and wrongdoing, but the nature of self-realization which leads us to say, ‘I am my own god.’ This nature may exhibit itself in proper morality or in improper immorality, but it always has a common basis— my claim to my right to myself. When our Lord faced either people with all the forces of evil in them, or people who were clean-living, moral, and upright, He paid no attention to the moral degradation of one, nor any attention to the moral attainment of the other. He looked at something we do not see, namely, the nature of man (see John 2:25).”  from the October 5th reading in My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers

I started an official diet last week (www.body4believer.com if you’re interested).  It’s fairly strict on what and when to eat, which is exactly the type of diet I usually avoid.  However, it is very simple to follow, and it’s very simple in its classification of how well you stick to the plan: you are either hot or cold.  There can be no middle ground, no mostly following it with a few changes, no close enough for horseshoes or hand grenades.  You either do it or you don’t.  So far, I have lost almost five pounds, which is more than I lost in two months of dieting my way.

My weight loss efforts always fail because I cheat.  I let myself off the hook if it’s a bad day: “I feel really stressed right now, so it’s okay to have an extra cookie (or five).”  I get busy and don’t make time for exercise.  I am an emotional eater, so I justify my bad eating by telling myself it’s just for this one day – just this time.  I realized last week that my body completely represents my spiritual condition.

I let myself cheat all the time.  I tell myself that acting in anger is justified in the situation.  I rationalize thoughts that I know are totally unacceptable to God because I cling to the right to own myself.  I have often put up walls with God.  I struggle with being a woman and being a Southern Baptist Christian because of the very literal interpretation of what women should be and do in the church.  This, however, is a rather theoretical argument for me, as I have never been prevented from serving in any church I’ve attended.  I use this as leverage to hold on to my identity as a woman in the church.  I want to hold on to my right to my own identity, when in reality, I have no right but to follow God if I profess to know him.  Here’s where the last week of dieting comes in.

When I have been tempted to eat chocolate cake or barbecue or cheat in any way, I’m finding that my reason for denying myself is the realization that I have no right to cheat.  I skipped the hard work for years, so now I have a lot more work to do.  There are no shortcuts.  To borrow from our pastor, I can’t pray my way out of something I behaved myself into.  I can no longer hold onto my right to eat chocolate cake because I will have to earn that freedom after I do the work to get back into shape (preferably, one that’s not round).  I am starting to see blind spots that I developed in my faith where I skipped the hard work, and I realize that Oswald is right again: proclaiming my right to myself is my sin.  My claim to myself leads to over-indulgence and obesity, physically and spiritually.  Denying my right to myself is hard work, but necessary if I want the freedom to be what God created me to be.

Icebreakers

The new school year means the beginning of a new year of children’s ministry and the chance to break out my giant book of ice breaker games.  I am a natural introvert, and, true to my contrarian ability to find some way to not quite fit the mold, I love ice breaker games.  Like most introverts, I prefer quality over quantity in my friends.  I have a really hard time with small talk, so I tend to dive in without the cursory, “How ’bout them Braves?” or, “Nice weather we’re having.”  If I want to ask someone a question, no matter what it is, that’s what I lead with as a conversation starter.  Apparently, some people find that to be off-putting; they like to warm up in a conversation before they jump into the deep end.  (I know, I’m as shocked as you are that everyone is not exactly like me.)  I can often tell you everything about a person’s emotional or mental status without ever knowing that they have a dog named Bob, they have blond hair, or that their favorite color is blue.  I’m often surprised that I could skip this level of detail since those are the “easy” things to learn about people.

Ice breaker games, however, force an introvert like me to interact on a more surface level.  I can learn that I have lots of little things in common with people along with knowing how and why they tick.  It may not seem important to know anyone’s shoe size or favorite ice cream flavor, but it provides me with another way to connect with someone I might not be able to talk to otherwise.  While I was leading English as a Second Language at church, I loved that our students embraced the ice breaker games because we learned that in spite of the obvious cultural differences in the American teachers, the Chinese students, the Hispanic students and the Iranian students, we often had a lot more in common than we would have imagined.  Everyone has a favorite color; everyone had a favorite subject in school; everyone has a favorite food, and apparently pizza is a universal favorite, regardless of country of origin.

Ice breaker games remind me of some important things in my relationship with God, too.  I tend to want everything to have meaning; my poor husband has been harassed on more than one occasion because I’m sure that when he sighed it meant something other than he needed to expel air.  I do the same with God – pushing to find an answer – even when there is no reason to push.  God made the sky blue and the grass green – it must mean something.  It means the grass is green, and the sky is blue.  While I’m tempted to always be looking for the deep end, it’s okay to spend time in the shallow end and remember the basics: God is good; God loves me; God has blessed me beyond measure.  I can stop and tread there for a while before I go back to pondering the mysteries of faith and life.

If you have attended church for a long time, you have probably heard the warning that we can’t stay on the mountain; like Moses, we have to come down and re-join the rank and file.  Life is what happens in the valley, and God wants us to experience abundant life.  We need the mountain-top time to keep us focused on what’s important, but we can’t set up permanent camp at that altitude.  If you have avoided church because you aren’t holy enough to even reach the mountain top, guess what?  Neither are church members.  That’s what God’s grace is for:

“23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” Romans 3:23-24

There’s an ice breaker – we all pretend to be assorted versions of perfect (perfect job, perfect mental health, perfect attitude, perfect marriage, perfect kids…) instead of being honest and admitting we need help climbing our assorted mountains.  The good news is that as deep and wide and long as our troubles are, God’s love and grace are deeper and wider and longer and waiting for us to wade through the shallow end and dive in.

Speak Life

We’ve all heard, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”  I think there are appropriate times to vent to appropriate people when we need to let go of some of the negative things we feel or think.  There will always be someone in your life whose very existence seems to anger you, unless you’re a much nicer person than I am.  I admit, there are a few people whose purpose in life appears to be to make me cranky, but I try to limit the number of people who know who those people are.  I don’t really do a bang-up job with that, and it’s an area I really need to work on.

I’ve been developing a habit to combat my cranky side.  I rarely say negative things directly to the person that sparked my ire, so I don’t have to work hard to avoid saying mean things directly to people.  I have focused more on making sure I say the positive things out loud.  A lot of times we think  that someone looks nice or did a good job with a project, but we don’t tell them.  A while ago, I decided that I would try to speak those thoughts in the moment instead of waiting or never saying anything at all.  It’s actually a really fun experiment.

If you have ever worked in retail or customer service, you know that the majority of customers will be unremarkable, a small faction will ruin your day, and an even smaller faction will make your day.  It seems to be part of the human condition to commit the mean things people say to memory while the compliments fade.  We should help each other to counteract the meanness; we should be the remarkable people who make other people’s days.  Think of how great you feel when someone offers you a sincere compliment.  I don’t know about you, but I get warm fuzzies and recall that comment through the day.  Many of you have made my day with small things you’ve said, and I treasure those warm fuzzies in my heart when I’m having a hard time.  Imagine if you could speak that kind of life into everyone around you.

We all can, and it’s very simple.  If you’re not ready to delve into emotions and deeper thoughts, start small.  Tell the lady next to you that you like her dress; tell the person at the drive-through window that they have a nice voice or were very polite; tell someone they have a great smile.  I don’t know anyone with a bad smile – do you?  The more I practice finding things I like about people, the less I find to dislike about them.  The more I speak those things out loud, the less I have time to complain.  The more I practice complimenting the small things, the more I am able to voice the real reasons that I love the people around me.  It is unbelievably healing in tough times to hear people say simply, “I love you.”  You will feel terribly awkward telling someone that you love them if you don’t build up to it, even if you do love them.  There are dozens of movie and television scenes where the guy fights to say, “I luh.  I luh ooh.  I luh…..v you.”  We have all had those moments – maybe not in romantic relationships – but we’ve all probably been through the awkward “I love you” with someone.

Maybe we’re awkward because we’re not very demonstrative emotionally.  I think everybody has a tell, though, and the more you speak love into the lives of the people around you, the more able you are to speak to individual hearts in ways they can appreciate.  Not everyone likes to be hugged; not everyone likes touchy-feely compliments.  But we all like to know that someone appreciates us, either for the work we’ve done or just for being us.  If you are a people person like me, people will talk to you more and in greater depth if you are positive (and if you listen – listening is still a required skill 😉 ).  Positive people are much more relatable than negative people.  Positive people tend to attract more positive people.  Maybe you don’t care if people don’t talk to you or see you as positive, but there is one great reason to have people who like to talk to you: you have people you can talk to when you need help.  It’s self-preservation.

The reason I said that it’s a fun experiment to try to speak out all of the compliments you may think but normally not say is that it’s great fun to watch someone’s face light up because you took a tiny moment to say something nice.  I bet that if you try it for a day, you’ll be hooked.  It is really lovely to know that you have the power to make people smile.  Conversely, you have the power to hurt if you use your words thoughtlessly or intentionally meanly.

Jesus tells us in Luke 6:45: “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.”  This is one of the hardest things for me to obey, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a day that I didn’t feel God telling me, “See – that’s what’s in your heart because you just said it.”  We’ve all had words we wanted to take back because of the damage they did, and they gave voice to something horrible we had stored up in our hearts, making that evil visible to us and the world at large.  I am appalled at myself on a regular basis based on what comes out of my mouth.  I really want my mouth to have nothing mean to say ever again.  I know my heart will never be pure enough this side of heaven for that to be reality, but God gives me grace so that I can try.

We can try together to speak life.  The body of Christ is called to encourage one another, so we really should be harbingers of life to each other.  Another, more radical, way to look at it is the choice between life or death.  A pretty good bit of Deuteronomy is dedicated to God spelling out that the Israelites had a simple choice every day: life or death.  Obedience to God meant life and unimaginable blessings; disobedience meant death and destruction and unimaginable curses.  I love the wording in Deuteronomy 30:11-20 because God tells them that the choice is very simple and well within the reach of their knowledge.  Our words and the choice we make in how to use them is equally simple: life or death.  Speak the good things in your heart and spread life and blessings; speak the evil things in your heart and spread death and curses.  Do you think death is too strong an image for our words?  Think of the power that bullies have and the destruction they leave in their wake.  Think of the existence of verbal abuse.  Choose to speak life instead.

The Discipline of Disillusionment

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of My Utmost for His Highest, and today’s devotion (July 30 – I know it’s after midnight, so I’m a day late), “The Discipline of Disillusionment” is a great example of why I love reading this every day to help me dig deeper into Christ.  If you’d like to read it, you can click on the link on the side bar, or click on this link (assuming I posted this correctly): http://utmost.org/  You’ll have to choose July 30 on the calendar on the right side of the screen to get to this particular message.

The heart of the message is that we must not illusion ourselves in our relationships with others; if we choose to believe the illusion, we will be disappointed and cynical in our relationships when we are disillusioned by the imperfect actions of the person we’ve elevated to godlike status.  Disillusionment that comes from God allows us to look at others as they really are and accept them anyway because our faith is in God and not man.

This message strikes particularly close to home for me because I put this kind of pressure on my husband for a long time, especially after the miscarriages started.  I was not basing our relationship solely in Christ for a while before my faith was shaky, and then I expected him to fill the voids I felt in my spiritual life after we started losing babies.  There was no way for him to live up to all of that expectation, and I was bitterly disillusioned every time he couldn’t live up to my crazy illusion.  I tried to make my husband responsible for giving me value and worth that could only come from God.  Obviously, it didn’t work, and it endangered our relationship.  It took some serious counseling and a lot of work to change my focus and understand the importance of building a foundation on Christ alone.  That foundation afforded me the freedom to love my husband exactly the way he is.

Sometimes relationships aren’t the only thing that can hold us captive to the illusion; sometimes it’s a dream or a goal, maybe even an admirable dream or goal.  But the second we lose sight of God’s purpose for us, that dream becomes the illusion we follow with all our hearts.  Losing that dream or failing to obtain our goal is a bitter disappointment if we lost the lens filter God would have disillusioned us with – think of it as a spiritual and emotional polarizer allowing images to become clearer and more vivid.  For example, I have ceased praying that God would let me carry a baby, and most of you probably think I’m a pessimist for doing so.  But I am not sure that my dream is God’s plan for me; I have heard no words from heaven saying, “Anne, you are going to have a succesful pregnancy.”  No angels have visited my home to tell my husband that I will give birth to a child by this time next year.  There is only God telling me to trust him, so the only thing I can pray when we have become pregnant is for God to work in the situation.

I do not love this instruction.  I do not love the pain it has caused me.  I do love God, I do want to obey him, so I am trusting him.  What I have heard him tell me is that he could give me exactly what I want right now, but I would have to accept that it may not be what he really wanted me to have.  As much as I would love to give birth to a healthy child, I cannot go back to the horrible disillusionment I struggled with before.  I can’t replace God with the dream because I would not survive another round of human disillusionment.  And if God tells you that he has something planned for your future, how can you ignore that and follow an illusion instead?  Talk about the ultimate dangling carrot…

I can attest to the power of Godly disillusionment in my life, starting with my marriage and working through every relationship I have.  I only expect perfection from God, so I am less judgmental; I can accept the motives and the heart of someone rather than critically dissect their every action.  I can love more freely because I don’t expect to be loved perfectly in return; I can love myself because I don’t have to be perfect (this one is HUGE for me).  I can accept that my dreams won’t always become reality, and I can accept that I can’t see the whole picture the way that God does.  If I think of all of the losses in human terms, I go crazy and bitter and cynical.  If I base my life and my thoughts on Christ, then my only purpose is to obey him and trust him.  That I can do – most of the time.  I would be dishonest to pretend that I follow through with that every moment of every day.  When Christ alone is my foundation, I have solid ground to stand on.  When I make my own foundation or accept the world’s foundation, I have no hope for my future because I can never be perfect, and I sink in the despair of my past because of the pain and the things I failed to accomplish.  I desperately need the discipline of disillusionment.

Worship

I started writing this post over a month ago, but it languished in the draft folder (a.k.a. Blog Purgatory) because I couldn’t really define what I wanted to say.  Yesterday, I experienced exactly what I knew I should write about.  I often feel that either the message or the music was chosen just for me.  This is not exactly true, as I doubt any pastor has ever written a sermon with me in mind, but it is true in the sense that God is using the lesson and/or music to speak to me or to teach me.

Yesterday, I was sure that I would be a weepy mess by the time I headed for the choir room to warm up for worship service, so I fully expected to hide in the back of the sanctuary instead of sing with the choir in the loft.  While I have been pretty numb, my walls were starting to crumble just a bit Sunday morning.  So, as I walked down the stairs from Sunday school, I prayed all the way into the choir room that I would be able to simply worship God without distracting anyone.  Maybe that’s an odd prayer, but I really take seriously the job of choir members to help lead in the worship service, which means you do not talk through the sermon in the choir loft, pick your nose, wear revealing clothing or rattle candy wrappers too loudly.  You also shouldn’t sob through sermons or songs, so I was fully prepared to just sit in the audience yesterday.  The other reason for my prayer was that I was afraid that the numbness I was feeling would keep me from being able to actually worship, and I really don’t want to continue in auto-pilot any more.  I needed to worship God yesterday morning with a body of believers.

Sitting in the choir loft gives you a bird’s eye view of the people in the pews.  I am often appalled to find that the adults who should know better are often the ones who are talking during the service or doing other distracting things, like making shopping lists or passing notes.  We can all find reasons that we couldn’t pay attention to the music or the sermon: somebody was sniffling, the music was too loud, the pastor was too quiet, somebody was wearing obnoxious perfume (maybe that caused the sniffling?), someone next to me is singing off-key, I don’t like the music, I don’t like what the pastor is saying, I have just experienced a personal tragedy… There is an endless list of things we can allow to distract us, but there is only one reason to focus. When we actively participate in worship and focus our energy on meeting God and hearing his message for us during the worship service, we will never be disappointed. It won’t matter that you don’t like every song or that it wasn’t our favorite sermon because the presence of God will wipe away all of the pettiness involved in even thinking those thoughts. Think of your favorite activity; now think of what distracts you from that while you’re actively pursuing that interest. Why is our list of things that distract us from hearing God AT CHURCH so much longer?

I think maybe the biggest component is active participation; if you’re just a spectator, you have time to sit back and complain like a backseat driver or Monday morning quarterback. If you are engaged in the worship service, you won’t be thinking about what color tie the preacher is wearing or how many notes the choir missed; you won’t care because you will be actively seeking God. Everyone can take an active part in worship: you can sing the songs and focus on their meaning, whether it’s your favorite song or not, whether you can sing well or not; you can take notes during the sermon so that you will stay focused on the topic; you can tithe at least a little bit even if you don’t have a lot of room in your budget to spare; you can decide that you won’t be a distraction to anyone else by talking or making your grocery list. You can do more than fill a seat.

If you are only filling a seat, or participating out of habit, think about why you are really there.  I did not attend Sunday school or church services regularly for over a year because I knew I didn’t mean it; I could not sing praises to God when I couldn’t even talk to him.  This was not the right thing to do, and I am not advocating for absence at all.  I am advocating for thoughtful worship.  I had to stop and think about what I really believed and decide that it is very important to me to love, serve, and worship God no matter what my personal circumstances are.  That was a long road for me, but being able to sincerely worship God yesterday in spite of knowing that my heart was breaking as it thawed was worth more than anything on earth. (And I’m pretty sure Bubba picked out all of the music just for me – again. 😉 )

New News!

Redundant and repetitive, I know, but indulge me.  We had a positive pregnancy test officially confirmed by blood work today.  My hcg level was a little low, but not unusually so for such an early pregnancy – we’re only 30 days, or four weeks.  I have to go back on Thursday to recheck the hcg level, so we’ll have a good idea what’s happening by Thursday afternoon.  I will start immediately on blood thinner injections, which is a step further than we’ve been before.  I would apologize for the mass announcement, but we really want your prayers.

We obviously need a LOT of prayer!  Obviously, I want for this baby to stick, so we should definitely pray for that, but mostly, pray with me for God’s will to be done here, even if it’s not keeping this baby.  Pray that I will be safe on the lovenox injections; the doctor is slightly suspicious that we might be having tubal pregnancies, which does not mix well with blood thinning medication.  Pray that I will be able to give myself shots without passing out (a very real danger for me :)).  Pray that I can be reasonably sane and reliant on God’s grace while we wait to see what happens in the next few days and (hopefully) weeks.  Pray that if this pregnancy continues that I will be confident and peaceful instead of worried and scared.  And, even if you don’t want to, pray that if this pregnancy does not continue that I will be able to handle the loss in a healthy way that will bring honor to God.

I know that I should remain positive, and I will, to the best of God’s ability through me.  I don’t have any hope left in me that doesn’t come from God – not after all we’ve lost.  But I do hope that this one is it and this time will be different.  I hope you all understand that I want to be giddy and innocently happy to be pregnant, but it’s not that simple for me anymore; it’s an obviously mixed bag now.  I will, however, happily use pregnancy as a handicapping excuse, such as telling my husband I can’t make an extra trip to the kitchen for ketchup because I’m pregnant or that he should rub my back without tickling me because I’m pregnant or that I should get to operate the remote controls because… you get the idea.  I have to enjoy the perks as long as they last, and it helps me stay positive. 😉

Joy in the Face of Grief

Our pastor has been preaching about grief for the last few weeks.  I still need to watch the first sermon, “Hope in the Face of Grief,” but after hearing last week (my title – “Joy in the Face of Grief”), I know I need to do that very soon.  If you’re interested in the sermons, you can find them on the Media page at www.gvbc.org.  For a bit of background and a base to jump from, the text for last week’s sermon is John 16:17-24 where Jesus is preparing the disciples for his imminent death, and the definition of grief Bobby uses is “a God-given emotional response to a significant loss in your life”.  You know what my significant loss is, but that loss could be anything: a job, the death of a loved one, a change in health – anything that significantly impacts and changes your life.

I won’t repeat the sermon (go watch it for yourself), but I will share a few things I gleaned from it.  My grief is a gift from God, and my joy is not earthly, fleeting happiness; it is the enduring joy of the presence of Christ in my life.  My grief is not abnormal or sinful; it is the normal and healthy expression of the pain of loss.  My questions and doubt are a natural byproduct of sorrow, and they have strengthened my faith insofar as I have made God the foundation on which I build.  No matter what, God has my best interests at heart, and he has planned good things for me, even when they aren’t the things I would have chosen for myself.

The last three years have been a loooooong journey through grief.  And doubt.  And fear.  And love.  And hope.  But no matter how much I have questioned, the base I jump from is always God.  I could share many Bible verses that have caused me no end of frustration and doubt; I have shared with you much of the experience that has caused great doubt and pain.  I hope I have done a good job of sharing why I haven’t jumped off a cliff yet.  Whenever I feel completely lost and sinking, I go back to basics.  What exactly do I believe and why?

Step one: do I believe there is a god?  I know there are dozens of scientific theories on creation, but I cannot look at the earth – the creek in my back yard, our bodies, the “natural law” we humans spend so much time trying to define with equations and numbers – and think this was a random cosmic hiccup.  I believe that there is a Creator God.  Step two: how do I know that I believe in the right god?  Rationally speaking I don’t.  By faith I believe that God sent his only son, Jesus, to die and live again to allow me and you to have a relationship with him.  I can’t scientifically prove to you that there is a god or that my God is the one true God.  I know in my heart that it’s true, and my life and my words should bear that out.  Step three: how could a god who loves me allow this to happen?  I still can’t really answer that except to say that God is always doing bigger things than we can see.  One example is this blog.  Mabbat wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t felt the need to share my losses and my experiences.  If a single person has been helped or comforted by something I’ve shared, then God has used my grief to do something good.  I can live with that.  It still sucks, but I can live with it.

I don’t know that I learned any new material last Sunday, but God used Bobby’s words to speak to my heart and tell me that I am on solid ground.  I have found joy in the face of my grief.  My sorrow will someday soon be turned into joy.  I am moving in the right direction.  There are times when I have been crippled by grief; there are still days when I have to stop and cry for no apparent reason; but I am able to see the good things in my life.  I have a deeper faith than I ever knew, I have a wonderful husband who has managed to stand by me even when I push him away, I have great and supportive people in my life, and I am learning to see how strong and beautiful I am as a child of God.  That is my joy.

To Have Faith and Never Doubt?

That title is a phrase I heard on the radio this weekend as joyously and peppily proclaimed by a Dixie gospel group.  The song lyrics posited that to have faith and never doubt are essential to walk with Christ (and just for good measure, they sampled “Victory in Jesus” as a bridge between the second and third verses).  The message was somewhat oversimplified, but I would venture to say that this thought is widely accepted as doctrine: doubt is not only counter to faith, but also sinful in nature and naturally excluded by the presence of faith.  I beg to differ.  Faith that has never been questioned or doubted is not a very strong or deep faith.  It is faith that has never walked.

Before semantics become an issue, I am using the words “doubt” and “question” as essentially the same.  According to www.dictionary.com, doubt is “to be uncertain about; consider questionable or unlikely; hesitate to believe” or “to be uncertain about something; be undecided in opinion or belief.”  Question is not only a sentence in interrogative form, but also “a matter of some uncertainty or difficulty” or “to make a question of; doubt.”  Doubt and question are synonyms with some obvious shades in meaning, but synonyms all the same.  I have heard people say that it’s okay to question your faith but not to doubt it.  I think that’s asking a bit much of syntax.

Where does questioning become doubt, and why are we so afraid of doubt?  The bottom line seems to be that we are afraid to find out we might be wrong and that our faith has been for naught.  We hope for irrevocable proof that our God is both real and right, and we are right to follow him.  Guess what, Thomas?  We won’t get that kind of tangible evidence this side of heaven.  We can hear echoes and glimpse flashes of Truth, but we will not know God the way that he knows us until we are standing in his presence.  Until that time, we are left here on earth to wrestle with faith and doubt.

The church tends to condition us not to express doubt.  When was the last time you heard anyone in a Sunday School class say there were days when they questioned the existence of God or the resurrection of Jesus?  Can you hear the collective gasp and cry of blasphemy?  But, if you are a Christian, haven’t you had moments where you wondered if you’d missed the boat?  What is gained by hiding those moments from each other?  After two years of constant doubt, I felt embarrassed to go to church.  It was pretty easy to slip in late for the morning service or only show up at night with the smaller crowd, but I dreaded being in a small group like Sunday School because I didn’t want to answer any direct questions about my faith.  For two years, I defaulted to answering questions with some variation of, “Well, Paul says fill in the blank in Romans.”  I didn’t speak of my own thoughts or beliefs to anyone but my very, very best friends (maybe only two of them, actually) for almost two years.

I was in fact terrified to talk to anyone except my best friend about matters of faith.  What if they discovered that I had no idea what I believed anymore?  What if I couldn’t figure out what I believed at all?  At that point in my life, I had been a Christian for twenty years.  It shattered my world to have no idea which end was up.  If you are an ocean swimmer, imagine the worst rip tide you have ever experienced; you are caught underwater, being swirled and pummeled and forcibly moved by water that you can’t see through or control, and you have no idea which way the surface is or when you will next breathe.  At some point, you will either drown in the current or you will find your way back to the top and open air.

My foundations were solid, and I knew I wouldn’t drown, but it made for a terrifying few years.  Every time I attended church or read the Bible, I was confronted with some doubt that had to be wrestled into submission.  It was exhausting to think of doing all of that work by myself.  I have no doubt that it was unnecessary for me to be or feel alone – now.  I have no doubt that there are saints capable of never doubting, but I doubt that I have ever met one.  I do feel comforted to find myself in good company as an occasional doubter: the disciple Thomas, John the Baptist, and Mother Theresa all doubted.  I still wonder, if we don’t see those examples as sinful, why do we condemn ourselves as such for expressing a question?

Sometimes setting may be the issue.  It isn’t always appropriate to express every doubt to everyone.  For instance, if my questions are more in line with a specific doctrine about women’s roles in the church, I really shouldn’t espouse those questions to someone who struggling with the very idea of God’s existence or his goodness.  But I shouldn’t dismiss the doubts of someone who is struggling with something I may already have come to grips with.  I guess I’m going back to the shoeless man example, but we’ve got to help each other with what really matters without condemning the doubter as a heretic.  If our faith is never questioned, it is never tested or proven.  Would you rather go diving into the ocean with scuba gear that has been quality tested, or would you rather try your luck with second-hand gear that hasn’t seen light or water in decades?  I think of doubt as the quality test or the annual inspection my air tanks have to pass.  Questions allow us to test for weak spots and fix them before they become life-threatening issues.  That singing group can proudly claim to never doubt, but I have faith, and sometimes I doubt.

Friendship

This is from an Oswald Chambers lesson in My Utmost for His Highest: “Friendship is rare on earth. It means identity in thought and heart and spirit.  The whole discipline of life is to enable us to enter into this closest relationship with Jesus Christ.  We receive His blessings and know His Word, but do we know Him?”

When I first read those sentences, I was immediately struck by their beauty and simplicity – so much that I read them several times. On first glance, I was considering that true friendship as described by Chambers is extremely rare, and I am blessed to experience its touches every day in a lot of often unexpected places.  I certainly have a few “go-to” friends with whom I share “identity in thought and heart and spirit”; they are my earthly anchors, and they are truly golden.  The silver bits come from the unexpected touches of shared identity: a word or a hug from a new friend; a message from someone you haven’t seen in years; a shared experience you wouldn’t have been able to imagine.  Essentially, these are the times that we stop everything else and take the time to actually communicate on the heart and soul level – the moments that seem to hang crystalized in our memories because of the insight we gained or the glimpse of depth we each contain but rarely share.

On the repeated readings of that quotation, I began to consider the last few sentences.  Chambers said the whole aim of our lives is to know Christ in this intimate manner.  “We receive His blessings and know His Word, but do we know Him?”  It isn’t enough for me to just read the Bible on a regular basis or pray on a regular basis if I am not taking time to search out the person of Christ through those disciplines.  Do I know him, or do I just know about him?  I can tell you my husband’s personal history, recite stories from his childhood, quote the details of his work truck specifications, and give you his clothing sizes.  But that is meaningless without the intimate knowledge that comes from almost a decade of marriage: I can read the micro expressions on his face and tell you what kind of mood he’s in; I know his likes and dislikes (although he still manges to pull off a lot of surprises on me there); I can anticipate his reactions to situations at work (and to my insane moments).  Those details are unknowable if you stop at the surface or spend little time with someone.

My husband and I will have been married ten years in May; I have been a professing Christian nearly three times longer.  I’m not sure that I could honestly tell you more intimate details about Christ than I can about my husband.  I can tell you innumerable details gleaned from a lifetime of church and Bible study, but intimate details are a horse of a different color.  In some respects, that is because it is easier to obtain intimate knowledge of a physical being you share a home with.  But mostly, it tells me I need to spend more time with Christ.  This does not mean I should cloister myself for hours or days, although I do find that a daily time for study and meditation and prayer keep me more focused on finding Christ in the intimate details of my life.  As Oswald Chambers said, “the whole discipline of life” should serve to draw us closer to Jesus.  I don’t know what your life holds, but my current discipline of life involves being a wife, keeping house, working, and writing, just to name a few.  I should have intimate knowledge of God through each and every pursuit; if not, I need to either find Christ in that pursuit or abandon it altogether.

I think some people struggle with Christianity over the rules and regulations.  We humans impose a lot of rules and laws on each other in an attempt to sanctify humanity by preventing some infraction of morality.  While morality as the result of a pure and honest heart is admirable, morality for the sake of morality quickly becomes self-righteousness and dictatorial.  It turns Christianity into a tool for condemnation and horrible acts of cruelty, like the Westboro Baptist Church folks who protest military funerals.  That is not the love of Christ; it is not love at all except possibly the love of self.  While I may not feel completely confident in my intimacy with Christ, I do know that the more we know him intimately – when we do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God (Micah 6:8) – then the more details and disciplines fall into place.

I think I need to add to my resolution list to search for a deeper intimacy with Christ than I have with anyone else.  How amazing would it be to be able to tell someone about God’s micro expressions?  Moses could have; the disciples could have.  I want to translate all of the knowledge I have acquired about God into close friendship and intimacy.  I can imagine nothing greater than to know God as he knows us.  While the full realization of that knowledge isn’t possible this side of heaven, we can begin here on earth.

To Forgive Is Divine, Which I Am Not

But I’ll try anyway.  I found myself in the foulest of moods today (actually for the last few days, but with our snow holiday yesterday, I was alone and had no need to feel or express said foulness).  I was talking back to the radio; I was angered by news articles (although several of them would have angered me anyway); I wanted to point out every stupid act or remark for its idiocy and therefore irrelevancy; I have the patience of one of my dogs when faced with invading squirrels in the backyard – except that I would be locked up were I to bark out my frustrations like they do.  I mapped out  multiple essays in my head over the last few hours rebutting the topics I heard or saw discussed in the news today.  So I finally stopped to breathe and try to figure out what sparked my rage, and I think I know.

I saw my step-grandmother-in-law (it’s a somewhat convoluted family history, but the short version is we both married into the family and often don’t recognize each other in public because we don’t meet very often) at church on Sunday morning.  While she can be a topic of frustration among my in-laws, she caught me completely off-guard.  We were a little late, so I sat down next to her and waved.  She looked confused until she finally saw my husband.  We didn’t talk to her until church was over, and my husband was talking to the friends we sat near that I really wanted to see.  I got stuck with the step-grandmother-in-law, which is always a little awkward since we really don’t know each other well enough to even discuss the weather.  She opened the conversation with, “Well, are you pregnant again?”  As all of the words that ran through my head were not polite, to say the least, suffice it to say that I was a total loss for a response of any kind.  So I stuttered and answered, “Nope, apparently I’m just fat and out of shape if you think I look pregnant.”  She paused and switched topics: “That little baby of your sister’s – I can’t remember her name, you know I’ve got so many grandkids of my own I just can’t remember everybody’s name – she’s just a beautiful baby.”  Of course, I agreed – my niece is indeed very beautiful – and then she moved on to the much safer topic of weather before I managed to just walk away.  Once she moved on, I told my husband that I never wanted to be stuck talking to her again.  And I will avoid her like the plague in the future.

Of course that is a somewhat outrageous reaction on my part: my step-grandmother-in-law is a polite but clueless old woman, and she rarely manages to even appear to care for my in-laws in any real way based on the few actual conversations we’ve had.  She tends to talk at all of us and generally only ever speaks about her own children.  So, why should I be special when she has so many other names to remember, and why should I even care what she thinks?  In reality, she’s just not worth the effort beyond just being nice to her.  Except she managed to hit a lot of raw nerves in one shot.  And what kind of jackanapes (look it up on www.dictionary.com – their definition made me smile a little, which is horrible and vindictive, but true) leads with that question if you know any tiny bit of our history, and she does?  And then what kind of jackanapes changes the subject to rave about another baby (even one that I love with my whole heart) immediately after that first blunderbuss of a topic?  I don’t care how many grandkids’ names you have to remember, common courtesy should have precluded her first question to begin with.  I’m not really shy about talking about our miscarriages, but that level of insensitivity hurt my feelings a lot.  She obviously didn’t care about me enough to even ask about the situation in a kind manner, which has nothing to do with our relationship, her age, or her memory – it was just rude.

I don’t know if she only heard a tidbit of family news several months ago, so maybe she got confused and thought we were still pregnant (even though I should be obviously showing by now if the last one had stuck).  Or maybe she thought I looked like I might be showing, which hit another sore spot: my weight.  I gained my freshman fifteen a few times in college, which was a difficult adjustment for my former dancer body and my psyche.  Then I gained more weight after I got married, some of which I managed to lose and keep off for a little while.  But, as it turns out, I am one of those comfort eater types, so I have done nothing but gain weight over the last three years.  I finally managed to lose about five pounds over the last month, but it wasn’t enough for the Jackanapes not to ask if I was pregnant again. (More unutterable phrases…)

Those are the situations nothing can prepare you for, since they come out of the blue, and this one happened at a place I consider very safe since everyone I know at church knows about our losses.  I don’t mind talking to anyone who is truly concerned for me or that may be going through the same situation.  I have learned to let most of the things that are said out of love (and a lack of knowledge of anything better to say) roll off if the actual words sting and just accept the sentiment instead.  Aside from this situation, I cannot recall a single phrase that may have hurt at the time it was spoken that I associate with the individual who said it; I may recall the phrase, but all I associate with the person who said it is that they were concerned and expressed some words of comfort in the best way they knew how.  I have not learned how to appropriately blow off moments like the one the Jackanapes provided: she’s not close enough to even realize that she hurt me, and I’m not close enough to tell her without having called her out in that very moment – it’s not like I could call her later and talk to her about it.  She was thoughtless and rude; I would have been more so to have addressed the issue with an elder in such a public foray, especially given that I was hurt and angry at the time and unlikely to have been rational or appropriate in expressing my feelings.  While I might have felt immediate relief had I told her off, it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do, nor would I have felt better for long if I thought I had embarrassed her or hurt her feelings.  I feel like it’s questionable to even write this blog post, given that she could be identified (and I have repeatedly called her a jackanapes, which proves I am also rude and thoughtless when hurt/angry), however unlikely it is that she or anyone close to her would learn of it.  But I also couldn’t keep biting people’s heads off for something someone else said days ago without thinking.

I suppose that this is one entry that may have been better left in my pink Chinese flower journal except for the fact that I know there other women who’ve experienced the same thing, maybe over pregnancy loss, or maybe over another fertility issue.  I was hurt and angry, and I was powerless to do anything about it, much as I am powerless to change my pregnancy loss experience.  I still have no idea how exactly to handle those situations except get away quickly and find a way to vent.  I got away Sunday, but I didn’t quite make it to the venting stage.  I didn’t realize it was that important until I started doing my snapping turtle act.  I know I did the best thing I could in the situation, although my mother-in-law was a little proud and somewhat astonished that I answered the pregnancy query with the fat and out of shape response.  I’m sure that I would do essentially the same thing if the situation were to arise again; the momentary instant gratification I might gain from turning the situation around on the jackanapes would pale when compared to knowing I am called to turn the other cheek and forgive the jackanapes.  Responding in kind would have done nothing to demonstrate the love of Christ.  I’ve got a long way to go before I can handle the jackanapes in a manner worthy of Christ; I let unforgiveness ruin three days of my life, and I very nearly let in hurt the people around me today.

Honestly, I’m not really sure how to forgive her, except by venting my anger in a way that probably won’t hurt her and then try to forget about it.  The temptation to indulge in revenge fantasies will only constantly remind me of the injury and push me further away from truly forgiving her, which would really only push me away from God.  So, now that I’ve gotten it off my chest, I will do my best to let it go.  And I promise to quit calling her a jackanapes as soon as I type this last period.