He Delights in You

The last couple days, I’ve been camped out in a single verse from Psalm 44: 

We didn’t fight for this land;

   we didn’t work for it — it was a gift!

You gave it, smiling as you gave it,

   delighting as you gave it.

— Psalm 44:3

I keep meditating on this verse in the context of my tree. I mentioned yesterday that I experience these images from Jesus as a gift, and this image of being a great oak tree planted on a jutting cliff, where birds come and find nest in its branches is certainly that. 

So in this psalm, I find resonance. I didn’t fight for this place I’ve been planted. I didn’t work for it at all. It was a gift! Jesus accorded me this identity as a tree, and he led me to the place of my planting. 

And then the psalm says that he gave it, smiling as he gave it, delighting as he gave it. 

Yes. 

I’ve learned that Jesus loves doing what he does in our lives. He loves being present. He loves spending time with us. He loves hearing what we have to say — he really listens. He smiles!

And he loves doing the work only he can do in us: the work of excavation, of restoration, of building up, of leading, and of planting. 

He delights in us and in the ever-new realities he is making of our lives. 

Do you feel connected to the delight of Jesus in you?

He Is Abundant Life

As I’ve been talking with Jesus about the tree that we are together, water has remained close by. I’ve been aware of it as an essential component to this new life Jesus has been preparing to give to me as a tree planted by him. I knew that wherever he planted me, the water of the Holy Spirit would be a necessary presence to nourish my roots and interior system continually.

And sure enough, it’s true.

Yesterday, Jesus planted the tree of me on the jutting edge of a cliff that overlooks the ocean. The beach where Jesus and I have walked together this past year in prayer is not far from view, and the huge, wide, blue ocean stretches out before me. All of that water encircles my cliff foundation, providing sustenance up through the elements and minerals to the grassy plain surrounding my tree, pushing all the way up through the fullness of its trunk and limbs and leaves. 

The water is necessary. 

It carries an abundance of life. 

The Godhead is many things, and one thing it definitely is, is the source and sustainer of abundant life. 

I feel aware that even as Jesus and I are the tree together, he is also the sunlight that nourishes it. He is the water that sustains it. He is its nourishing soil. He is the one who chose its location and planted it where it should be. He is the one who will prune and care for its leaves and bark and branches. 

In my awareness as this tree, Jesus has been and will continue to be the giver and sustainer of my life. And oh, it is such an abundant life he gives — life everywhere, surrounding and filling this tree of me.

How can you find God a source and giver of life in your own life today?

He Is a Haven

My favorite tree in Winter Park.

Jesus and I have been talking a lot about trees lately. (Which is great because I absolutely adore them. I am such a tree girl.)

A lot of this conversation about trees has been in the context of the kind of tree he has been making me to be. But this morning, as he has been showing me more and more of the tree that I am, I got to asking him about his part. 

If I am a tree, what is he?

As I exist as a type of tree in this world, where is he in that image?

He showed me that he’s also the tree. He’s the lifeblood of my existence as a tree. His Spirit is the water that sustains and nourishes my tree. It’s not that I am a tree and he is separate from me in that image in some way. 

We are together. One tree. 

In the context of this conversation, I keep going back to this passage in Matthew that says: 

“The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” 

— Matthew 13:31-32

I love this passage! It’s so beautiful.

But specifically, I keep being mindful of the safe space that the tree in this passage provides for all the birds of the air. It is a place all of them come to make nests in its branches. It provides support. Famliarity. Safety. Home. 

Jesus is that kind of tree for you. 

Do you know him to be a haven like that?

A Turn in the Suffering :: When It's Bigger Than We Understand

I have felt so aware throughout this suffering series that this subject is vaster than any bits and pieces of a blog series — even a whole lot of those bits and pieces strung together in a month-long series — can cover. 

I told Kirk that writing this series has felt like offering a tiny taste of perspective each day on one of those tiny pink plastic sample spoons you get at Baskin Robbins when you want to try an ice cream flavor before ordering your scoop. Each and every post of this series has felt like a tiny pink tasting spoon like that, and I feel like I could write whole book chapters on each post — each post that examined how suffering can affect us, and each post that has examined ways we might hold the suffering and learn what it can teach us. 

Not to mention all the perspectives that weren’t included in either side of that exploration yet.

This subject is just so big and vast. 

And this morning, as I was walking along the beach in prayer with Jesus and talking with him about all this, I felt so aware of the truth of this. It was like he looked out across the vast ocean stretching out for miles beside us and swept his arm out toward it, as if saying, “See this? This is its vastness. It’s true.” 

Sometimes our actual experience of suffering feels like that, too. 

There’s a vastness to it. An imperceptibility because it can be so all-consuming and great. An inability to pull back and see or even comprehend anything rational when it comes to what we’ve suffered or seen others experience. 

Sometimes it’s just too big to understand. 

And I think, in those places, we sometimes just keep walking — that that’s all we can do. Keep holding the tension of what is hard and what seems necessary. Keep living. Keep feeling. Keep knowing God and ourselves. Keep trusting that something in all of this matters, even if we may never know why. 

I think there is dignity in this way of holding our experiences. 

Because just because something doesn’t make sense or cannot be held in our minds doesn’t mean our experience of it is less valid or that there’s no meaning in it at all. Who are we as we live inside that inexplicable complexity? What will we choose to believe? What will it make of our faith? What will it make of our lives?

These are some of the questions suffering’s vastness invites us to hold, I think.

A Turn in the Suffering :: When It Creates a Reckoning

I’ve shared here previously that I walked through a marital separation and divorce in 2003-2004 and that it was an experience that created a heavy cloak of shame that I wore the length of my body every single day. 

I remember sojourning back to California from the Midwest, where I’d been living the previous year, with all that belonged to my name packed in the backseat and trunk of my little white Volkswagen Jetta. I arrived at my dad’s house, which would be my new home for the first part of that new season, and stepped into the tiny guest bedroom feeling all out of sorts and wondering what, exactly, my life had become. 

I was starting over. Starting from scratch. Re-entering the familiar context of my hometown, surrounded by people I’d known my whole life, but nothing was the same. 

Those first few months created a cocooning of sorts inside my soul. I would hole up in my room at the end of each day and play Sarah McLachlan’s new album over and over and over. I sat in that room with the door closed tight behind me. It was the safest place I knew.

And it was grief. Disorientation. A place where I pulled my shame cloak just a little tighter about my shoulders each day. 

But I’ve also shared that, eventually, I began to rethink all the beliefs that had been stamped into my soul through that experience. That was I worthless and thrown away … but no, I was beautiful to Jesus. That I was a single girl on her own for the first time … but no, I was now the bride of Christ. That I was less than desirable … but no, Jesus found me to be lovely. 

And then, in what was one of the most pivotal moments of turning around inside that season, there was the belief that my shame was merited because my new life as a divorced woman was counterfeit … but no, God sees me as Christianne, his daughter, not Christianne, his divorced daughter.

It became a season of reckoning. 

My suffering brought me face to face with what I truly believed about myself, others, and God. And by leaning into what those beliefs really were, God and I could look plainly at them together. In the context of that painful honesty, he could begin the work of reforming my crumbled foundation. 

A Turn in the Suffering :: No One Reason Fits All

As we begin our turn in the exploration of suffering, I want to share right from the outset that I don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all response to it. 

I’ve noticed this on even just a small scale in my own experience as I’ve been holding this exploration in my heart the last few weeks. I’ve gone back to key moments in my life history that created shock-waves of suffering, and here is what I noticed: 

• The way those situations impacted me often differed from one to another.
• The way God met me in the suffering of each often differed from one experience to another.

Each experience of suffering meets us in a unique way.

Each time, the effect of suffering has to do with an amalgamation of so many factors — our life history up to that point, what certain relationships meant to us, what we believed about the world at that point in time, what we believe about God, our specific hopes and dreams, and so many other factors, too.

How something affects me at 5 years old is different than how something else will affect me at 25 years old — even if both are real experiences of suffering.

Who I am, how I take in the world, and what I understand about myself and the world around me will be different in each instance because they happen at different points in time. My understanding of reality has changed in the space between them.

Therefore, the way each instance of suffering impacts me will differ in both.

And the same holds true when it comes to making meaning out of the suffering and finding healing in some way. 

Each case is unique — and this holds true inside the scope of our own suffering experiences as well as from another person’s experience compared to ours. 

In this series, wherever we range in the exploration of suffering and how to hold it, I want you to know this is my heart toward you and where I’m coming from. I will share some of my own meaning-making and healing experiences with you, but these will not be meant to be prescriptive — just descriptive. Descriptive of my own unique experience and what helped me understand or led to healing, and descriptive of just one of the many possibilities that exist in the realm of suffering and how we might hold it.

This is my heart toward you: making room for your own unique experiences and needs. 

xoxo,

Christianne 

A Turn in the Suffering :: What Does It All Mean?

When I was in Nashville last week, I attended a conference hosted by Donald Miller. During one of the conference sessions, we spent time talking about negative turns in our life stories, and specifically, in that context, the work of Viktor Frankl. 

Frankl was a psychotherapist with a background of success in helping individuals on suicide watch move away from their desire for self-harm. But he is most famous for his work Man’s Search for Meaning, which was based on his experiences and those of his fellow prisoners in the concentration camps of World War II. Specifically, the book shares his observations on the nature of suffering, how it affects our humanity, and the importance of meaning-making in the midst of it.

I’ve not yet read the book, but I’ve just placed a copy on hold at our local used bookstore and look forward to learning from it and sharing any insights gained from it here.

But what struck me most about what we learned of Frankl at the conference was his incredible conviction about all this — about man’s search for meaning — by believing it is meaning that fuels hope and life, even in the midst of horrific suffering and even death. 

Does this resonate with you? 

Is the search for meaning important in your own experience of suffering?

Taking the Suffering Seriously :: How It Exposes Injustice

I’ve been wondering if all suffering exposes injustice at its root. 

Would it be called suffering if the pain was merited? 

Like, if someone did something deserving of consequence, would the pain of their consequence still be called suffering?

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this. 

In any case, a great deal of suffering exposes us to the reality of injustice. 

I think often about the Holocaust these days, as I’ve shared elsewhere — a whole race of people persecuted and herded off to they-knew-not-where to encounter they-knew-not-what, simply because they were Jewish.

What sense is there in that? 

On Tuesday, while driving home from a conference in Nashville, we drove through Alabama — straight through Birmingham and Montgomery, where several pivotal events in the Civil Rights Movement took place. I couldn’t help but hold my breath at the holiness of those places as we drove through them, my heart continuing to be pierced by the suffering of our African-American brothers and sisters, simply for the color of their skin. 

It makes no sense to me.

And then there are the unjust sufferings closer to home.

Kirsten, for instance, shared in a comment last week these words about her response upon learning her son had a heart defect: “I knew people who had smoked and drank throughout their pregnancies and ended up with perfectly healthy babies. And here I was, having taken such good care of myself, and I was the one with a desperately sick child. It’s not fair. I did everything right.”

How has your own suffering exposed injustice?

Taking the Suffering Seriously: A New Exploration

Yesterday, I wrote a post that I’ve found difficult. It asked us to consider whether everything that happens — even the pain — is just as it should be. 

I struggle with this question. 

I’ve struggled with it on a personal level at specific times in my life, due to experiences that formed me not-for-the-better. And more recently, as I’ve shared here in glimpses, I’ve struggled with it on a more global level as I grieve the mass atrocities and events of evil in our world’s present and far-off past. (I recently began a series exploring this struggle on another blog dedicated to just such questions.)

But we know we aren’t alone in struggling with this question. So many souls for so many ages have wrestled with it, too. The idea that “everything’s as it should be” has even turned many a soul from God.

It’s hard for us to fathom a God that allows suffering. 

I’m not one for Sunday-school answers. They lack real heart and flesh. They’re impersonal, more interested in the answer itself than the struggle that provoked the question. And so I’m not going to give you any of those here. 

What I am going to do is explore the question. With you. Out loud. Over the course of several installments. 

I’ll seek to make this exploration as human as I can — to put real flesh and faces on it. My sense is that this exploration of suffering will include stories of my own and how my understanding of those stories has developed over time. My sense is that it will also include ways of thinking about pain and suffering that are not, in myself, fully formed yet. 

But since this is a space called Still Forming, that’s quite appropriate here, isn’t it? 

What questions or struggles related to pain and suffering do you have that we might explore as we go?

You Don't Have to Fix Yourself

I’ve been sharing with you this week about my personal health struggles (see here and here), and it’s been a bit of a surprising turn in the conversation for me. I didn’t really expect to lay out in the open with such gritty detail how much I’m personally growing as a wee babe in this area. (I usually leave extended revelations and stories about my own journey for my personal blog, rather than here.)

So I’ve been a bit perplexed before Jesus this morning about that, wondering if I shared too much or why he may have wanted me to share that much personal detail with you. 

And what I heard him saying to me this morning about all this is that he wants you to receive this truth: 

You don’t have to fix yourself. 

I’ve mentioned the principle of indirection here in these last few days. It’s something I’ve written about in the past a few times, as well. In a nutshell, I want to communicate that this the idea that says we can’t change ourselves by sheer will power or conditioning.

Only God can change the very fibers of our being.

This gets at the root of character. For instance, I cannot actually make myself into a patient person. I cannot make myself into a humble person. I cannot make myself into a generous person. I cannot make myself into a loving person. And right now, I cannot make myself into a person who cares about the way I treat my body. 

I cannot change my character. I may be able to direct my behavior, but behavior is different than character, than our nature, than our fundamental being.

And here is the beautiful news:

Jesus wants to make us into new people. 

He doesn’t want us to be people who just behave a certain way. He wants to make us into people who actually are patient, forgiving, grace-filled, generous, loving, respectful, and so on.

And that is work only Jesus can do. In fact, that is the work Jesus is all about doing.

And so this morning, as I sat with a bit of a vulnerability hangover at having shared such detailed pictures with you about my own growing edges in the area of physical healthiness right now, I had this image of coming to Jesus on the shoreline of that beach with a broken toy in my hands. 

In my own hands, the toy was a plastic, broken thing, sharp and useless and cracked into several broken pieces.

But when I handed the toy to Jesus, it became a soft, stuffed doll ripped down the back side, stuffing hanging out, an arm torn nearly right off.

I saw Jesus take that busted-up doll into his own two hands with such loving care and slowly start making it new. Stitch by stitch, with methodical, slow intentionality and mastery, he pushed the stuffing back into place and began closing up the backside with even, perfect rows of stitches. I saw the stitches begin to close up the ragged uselessness of the doll. 

He was making it new.

Jesus closes up our brokenness. He puts everything back in its place. He stitches us back together.

Our part is to let him do it — to bring him our brokenness, to put it into his hands, to stay beside him, watching him do the repair work, letting him put everything where he wants it to go.

We watch and wait with him, and we let him perform the operation. Our part is being with him, handing ourselves over, and complying with his movement. This is the heart of indirection.

How might he want to repair areas of brokenness in your own life right now?

It Requires Safety

Yesterday I wrote about one aspect of the good news of Jesus — that he is about the work of restoring our broken places. I so love that about him. 

But as a dear person recently reminded me, the thought of going back into those broken places is scary. Even turning around on the road to see them there behind us is hard. It can jab us with such sharp pain, just knowing those potholes and drop-offs and broken-up pieces of cement are there, can’t it? 

And the thought of going back into them, even to receive something as wondrous as healing? Terrifying. 

This is why getting to know — really know — the person of Jesus is so paramount first. 

I could not have allowed Jesus to visit those tender and difficult particulars of my life, much less excavate them and begin an in-depth reconstruction project, if I hadn’t first learned to trust him.

That’s just sanity, right? 

But the good news is that he is indeed trustworthy. It takes time to learn this for ourselves — to let the person of Jesus beecome known as real and concerned with us specifically. It takes time to learn what he is like, how he really sees us, how he converses with us, and how he holds us together.

Once that foundation of trust and safety is laid, perhaps we’ll be ready to let him heal us in the deepest of ways. I’ve come to know there is nothing better in all of life than this.

Do you want to get to know this trustworthy Jesus?

He Wants to Be Chosen by You

In the Look at Jesus course currently underway, we’ve been noticing Jesus as someone who continually puts himself out in front, vulnerable to acceptance and rejection. 

There’s a strength in Jesus — he knows who he is, he knows what he is here to do, he knows who his Father is. But even in that strength and confidence, he is choosing to make himself vulnerable. He offers himself again and again to a small group of friends who don’t fully grasp who he is. He offers himself again and again to crowds of people who ask him to touch them, heal them, restore their lives, and teach them about God — but then often leave him as quickly as they came to him.

He sees the need of people and, moved with compassion, keeps moving toward them. 

But it implies risk.

His friends misunderstand his intent. They want to get bigger, not become servants. They don’t want life with Jesus to include crosses and death. They don’t want to believe they will reject, deny, and leave him all alone. 

He keeps moving toward them anyway. 

Always with Jesus, there is his vulnerability to be received by you. He wants you to draw near. He wants you to know him — really know him — just as he knows and wants to keep knowing you. 

Do you want to draw near to Jesus?

Free and Made Alive

I have the incredible privilege of having been asked to proofread the entire biblical text of the New King James Version of the Bible for one of my freelance clients, a publisher, who is putting out a new study Bible this year. 

I know — pretty stinking incredible, right?

It’s a project I feel so humbled and excited to be part of. I am so loving it.

But one thing I’ve noticed as I’ve worked my way through the Old Testament is how heavy it makes my heart. Everywhere you turn in the pages of the Old Testament, all kinds of wickedness happens left and right. Brothers kill and betray and turn on each other. Daughters trick their fathers into sexual sin. Husbands lie about their wives. Not to mention the way nations war at the drop of a hat. 

The violence, deception, and general brokenness of humanity, written so plainly all over the pages of the Old Testament, hurts my heart. 

But something else about the Old Testament has been hurting my heart, too, and that’s the onerous burden of the law. Read through the Pentateuch — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — at a single, continuous stretch, and you’ll find law upon law, statute upon statute, written and repeated over and over, again and again. 

And these aren’t simple laws, either. The law of God as given to the people of Israel is rich and complex, with layer upon layer and contingency upon contingency. I can’t help wondering how Israel possibly remembered it all. It makes my head spin.

It also makes me feel like I’m sinking in a very thick lake of molasses. 

It’s just impossible. It’s so nuanced — it almost feels like you can barely lift your feet or turn from left to right without worrying whether you’re up the law correctly or breaking it.

And then the other night, as I was reading through those pages and sinking ever so slowly into that murky mire of despair with all its tentacles gripping me, my thoughts (thankfully) turned to Jesus. And it struck me for perhaps the very first time in a truly gutteral, known-in-the-depths-of-my-heart kind of way what the precepts of Christianity have been teaching me all along: 

We could not fulfill the law, and so Jesus fulfilled it for us. 

The coming of Jesus fundamentally changes everything. God hasn’t changed, nor was Jesus a different representation of who God really is. But our relationship with God has changed now because of Jesus. The way we relate to him and the way he relates to us has changed — all because of Jesus. 

And I am just so thankful. 

Along similar lines, this morning I was sitting by the pool outside our Captiva condo listening to a Phil Wickham album called “Singalong” and was struck by these words in the final song on the album:

The earth was shaking in the dark,

All creation felt the Father’s broken heart,

Tears were filling heaven’s eyes,

The day that true love died.

When blood and water hit the ground,

Walls we couldn’t move came crashing down,

And we were free and made alive,

The day that true love died.

The walls we couldn’t move came crashing down, and we were free and made alive. 

That’s what has happened because of Jesus. On this side of the Old Testament, where we now live, we have been given freedom and life.

I am so, so thankful for this. I’m thankful for the grace-filled, tender, always-full-of-growth relationship with God that is now possible for us to experience because of Jesus. 

What about you? What is it like to hold the gift of that fundamental shift in the way you can relate to God because of Jesus?

Discerning Our Way to Trust

I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I’m given an opportunity for discernment, my knee-jerk reaction is frustration and fear. I have an initial preference for how I want the situation to work out, and my gut tells me I won’t get my own way. So I feel defensive — and just a little bit mad. 

It occurs to me this is really an issue of trust. 

Do I trust that Jesus is attentive to me? That he knows what I want and also knows the best solution? That he has a greater scope in his viewfinder than I do in mine? That he knows what he is doing? 

Once I realize this is an issue of trust, I can slow down, breathe, and answer these questions. And that’s when I realize — thankfully — that my relationship with him has built a foundation of trust in me toward him. I do trust him, and I want to keep trusting him.

Sometimes it just takes slowing down, stepping back, and really evaluating my level of trust in Jesus. And that makes going into discernment quite a lot easier than it was before. 

How do you feel about your own level of trust in Jesus? What are the ways you’ve learned to trust him? What are the reasons you struggle to trust him still? 

Jesus Is the Beatitudes, Maybe

This morning I was sitting on the beach with Jesus, telling him about something unexpected that happened yesterday about which I’d been invited to make a decision. 

There were some pieces to weigh in the decision, but overall, my response to what had emerged was quite positive. I sat on the beach with Jesus and told him everything I was thinking and feeling about it.

As I spoke, I was quite animated, just letting myself be in the moment and the reality of my thoughts and feelings. And while I shared those things with him, he just kept looking at me, listening, with a smile on his face. It almost seemed like his eyes were sparkling.

I found myself quite captivated by him in that moment, so amazed and thankful that he has given me a chance to know him in this way. But I also found myself quite aware that this is the God of the universe here, sitting on the beach with me, listening and smiling. 

Isn’t this what they call meekness — strength and power brought under control? 

If so, Jesus is the full embodiment of meekness. All the power of the Godhead in himself and all the knowledge of the world and all existence, encased in an ordinary human body and present with us in the minutiae of our lives.

This got me thinking about the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, where Jesus says, “Blessed are the … , for they shall … ” Those who are meek are on that list. Those who are peacemakers are on that list, too. Those who show mercy are on that list, and so are those who mourn. 

Jesus is all these things, and more.

And it got me thinking: Jesus is all the Beatitudes, maybe? That is a new thought for me. I can’t say I’ve ever read the Beatitudes list in quite that way before, using Jesus as an example.

Have you ever thought about this? What do you think about Jesus being all the Beatitudes?

PS: If you enjoy learning about Jesus in this space and find yourself wanting to know him more, I invite you to consider joining us for the next offering of Look at Jesus. Registration will open on Monday — space is limited to 10 participants!

His Center Holds

I love when I’m reading through the scriptures and a certain word, phrase, or sentence grabs my attention. Yesterday, and then again this morning, it happened with this short passage in Isaiah: 

God is supremely esteemed. His center holds. 

   Zion brims over with all that is just and right.

God keeps your days stable and secure —

   salvation, wisdom, and knowledge in surplus,

   and best of all, Zion’s treasure, Fear-of-God.

— Isaiah 33:5-6

That little phrase “His center holds” just keeps getting my attention. I stared at it for quite some time yesterday, just being amazed and thankful for it. This morning, I let the words turn over and over again on my tongue. 

His center holds. His center holds. 

I marvel at this way of God, especially since I’m so aware of the struggle in my own life that it has taken to hold fast to my own center, not to mention how long it took to even know what my center was. It takes great strength of character and integrity — some would call it moral fiber — to hold to one’s center. 

God’s center is so strong it always holds. 

Not only do I marvel at the difference between me and God in this, but I also feel such rest in connecting to this God whose center always holds. 

He is sure. Secure. Strong. Stable. 

We don’t have to worry about him crumbling or second-guessing who he is to himself or to us. We don’t have to worry if he can handle what we bring to him or who we are.

His center holds. What great relief that provides to me. 

How can this truth about God be a companion to you today?

He Has All the Time in the World

I’ve shared with you that I’ve been walking through a season of difficult questions. I keep bringing those questions to Jesus — sometimes in anger, sometimes in grief. And I shared yesterday that I’m aware through all this struggle that Jesus values me and the struggle. 

I shared that he values you in the same way, too. 

This morning, I became aware of yet another aspect of Jesus in the mix of all this: his infinite patience. 

At this point, it feels like Jesus and I have been talking about this struggle for forever.

Really, it’s just been about a month.

But every time I join him on the beach in a time of personal prayer, this is the immediate place I go. Sometimes we’re walking into the sunset. Sometimes we’re sitting on the shoreline crest. Sometimes we’re stopped in the sand, facing each other, and I’m waving my hands wildly about, bumping up against the limits of my human understanding. 

He just keeps being with me in it. 

A lot of times in the struggle, I’m talking so much that I won’t let him get a word in edgewise. He’s fine with that. He keeps listening. 

Sometimes in the struggle, my heart is pained so much that I don’t want to listen to him, even if he did have something to say. I put a wall between us as I look out at the ocean and contemplate the waves and my struggle. He’s okay with that, too. He gives me my space. 

So far in this struggle, I have received his ongoing infinite patience.

He has all the time in the world with me on this.

When I did finally give up one day and surrender my stymied questioning, at least for the moment, he didn’t try to talk back to me about it. All he did was hold me and sing over me. 

This morning was perhaps the first time in all of this long struggle that I actually listened to him.

I made my case yet one more time, and then I listened. It was morning, perhaps around 8:30, and we were walking south on the beach. The sun was not yet warm. The sand was cold and wet beneath our bare feet. 

I had stopped talking, and we walked quietly for a few moments. He knew I was listening. 

And do you know what he did? 

He looked up at the sky for a minute. He looked over at me and smiled. And then he looked back up at the sky and started, slowly, talking to me about the creation story. 

He took me back to before the beginning of time. 

It was a long story. We are still, in fact, talking about it. And I became so aware during this morning’s walk that he will take as much time as is needed to do this conversation justice. 

There were several times in the conversation when I grew impatient. I had things to do and people to see today. I couldn’t take the fullness of time needed to cycle through the entire creation story, attendant with all my noticing and my questions along with it, all in the space of one morning walk. 

That was okay too. We’ll still be there tomorrow. He’ll still be there. Ready to pick things up right where we last left off. 

How might you receive the patience of God toward you right where you are today?

What Does It Mean for Him to Know You?

It’s such a valid question.

If God already knows everything, then what does it mean that he wants to know us? Doesn’t he already know us?

This actually has more to do with us — with the experience of being known that we receive by opening ourselves to him.

Here’s an example. 

Let’s say you are a thirteen-year-old girl trying out for a theatre production. You’ve practiced and practiced your audition for weeks, and the part is hard. You have to sing and put a little personality and even choreography — if you’re brave enough — into your performance of it. The scripted lines require you to take some bold steps out of your usual reserved self and to be a bit brash, even a bit comedic.

The day of the audition comes, and you nail it. You give the best audition you could possibly give. 

Your mom was in the audience while you gave the audition. She saw how well you did. She knows how hard you worked. She’s been with you through every practice and every fear. She’s been with you on this whole long journey to the stage that you’ve taken all these years. 

She knows what this audition meant to you.

But afterward, in the car, she wants to hear all of it again. She gladly lets you bubble over and replay every single moment out loud — several times, if you want to. She nods and smiles right along with you through every play by play. She celebrates. She joins in. 

In this moment with your mom, you feel deeply known and know that you really are.

That’s how it is with Jesus. 

He may already know everything about you. He may already know the highest heights and lowest lows of your life. He may know the mundane details of your daily life and the struggles and questions you are holding right now. He may know all of it. 

But his knowing it already isn’t the main thing. 

The main thing is his sharing in it with you.

His great joy is the conversations he shares with you about every single bit of it and the being in it with you. 

That’s your great joy too: Being known. Being loved. Being celebrated and enjoyed and comforted and held. Being given every single thing you need. 

This is Jesus knowing you. This is what he wants.

What Does He Say to Our Shame? The Benefits of a Reverse Perspective

God doesn’t like me right now. 

He doesn’t want to spend time with me. 

He’s telling me I better shape up.

I’ve heard these words fall from the lips of people I love in recent days, and my immediate response has been to call those words out like the lies from hell they are:

He always likes you.

His enjoyment of you never ends.

He always, always, always wants to spend time with you.

Those aren’t God’s words to you.

That isn’t his voice. 

Why is it so easy for me to see that truth so clearly when it comes to the people I love? It’s another story when it comes to me. 

Today is another day of discouragement for me, just like yesterday was. But it’s different from yesterday, in that yesterday’s heaviness had to do with feeling oppressed by the darkness of the world and the powers at work in it that make the light and love that I have inside me feel so small. 

Today’s discouragement has to do with me.

Barking, snarling voices in the back of my mind tell me everything I’m doing wrong. They yelp about all the ways I’m falling short and failing. They diminish me. They make everything and everyone else feel so big, almost monster-sized.

They make it hard for me to reach Jesus — to see him or hear his voice or even sit still enough to let him find me.

Thankfully, I have the experience of a really good friendship that has taught me a thing or two about how to receive love in moments when I’m feeling particularly unloveable.

This friend and I have been gifted with many moments of realization in the years of our friendship that the love and acceptance we feel toward the other person might — just might — be the same love and acceptance they feel toward us.

It’s always a healing aha moment when we can turn the tables on ourselves in a particularly heavy moment and offer ourselves this kind of reverse perspective:

Hmmm. If you told me that you feel about yourself the way I’m feeling about myself right now and that you feared I would feel that way toward you, too, I know without a doubt that I’d feel the exact opposite than what you fear.

So perhaps — just perhaps — you feel the opposite toward me right now than what I fear you feel. 

Reverse perspectives can be so helpful and such a gift. I think every time I’ve exercised a reverse perspective in a friendship, I have been set free from my heaviness and fears. I’ve been able, thankfully, to accept the possibility of love and open my heart to receive it. 

So today, just a little while ago, that is what I did with God. 

In the midst of all those snarling voices barking at me, I remembered those responses I’d shared the last few days with people I love who have voiced to me their dark beliefs about God’s perspective of them. 

He always enjoys spending time with you. 

He always wants to be near you. 

He never grows tired of you. 

He does not condemn you.

And I turned those words back on myself. 

It really helped. Those snarling voices faded away, seen for the lying dogs they are, and the light of God’s truth shined brighter and brighter still. 

Today, I’m going to keep moving toward that light. I’m going to keep advancing toward Jesus and the truth he speaks over me.

How might a reverse perspective help you in the midst of your own feelings of shame or discouragement today?

How Grace and Truth Relate

I mentioned in a previous post that the first thing I learned in my long journey of coming to understand grace and my need for Jesus was the reality of grace — that grace is the aspect of God that invites us closer to him wholeheartedly and without a single reservation. It’s about our full acceptance and welcome in the presence of God, no strings attached.

This was a pretty huge paradigm shift for me. 

I knew my whole life that God’s love was unconditional and that Jesus created a way for us to have full access to God — but really, that idea lived mostly in my head. I didn’t really understand unconditional love and acceptance because I’d lived most of my life inside rules and conditions.

So the journey into grace was about learning to breathe and receive my love and worth before God. And it took several long and searching years for me to find that path, let me tell you.

But I’ve come to believe it is this foundation of grace that prepares us for the truth of God. I’ve come to believe that no matter how long it takes or how hard-won the journey might be, it is the most essential reality God desires us to receive through our life with Christ.

When we look at Jesus, we are told that he is “the fullness of grace and truth” (John 1:14). What does that really mean? 

It means that somehow, in love, grace and truth peacefully coexist and belong together. 

But without a foundation of grace firmly rooted inside us first, without knowing in a visceral, very real way our full welcome and acceptance with God, then words of truth — and particularly words of correction — only strike us as harsh and shaming. All we hear in words of truth is that we’re going the wrong way and need to go the right way, as though going the right way is more important than who we are.

At least, that has been my experience. Has that been yours?

But once we are in a relationship of full acceptance and embrace, knowing that nothing we do wrong will remove that full embrace and that standing invitation of welcome, we can read these words that David wrote in the psalms …

Train me, God, to walk straight;

   then I’ll follow your truth path.

Put me together, one heart and mind;

   then, undivided, I’ll worship in joyful fear.

— Psalm 86:11 

… and give thanks and make them our prayer.

In a loving, grace-filled relationship, the truth that teaches us to walk straight becomes a gift. It becomes a gentle and loving guide intended for our good. It becomes an object of hope, rather than a ruler of judgment. It becomes something for which we give thanks.

What is your experience of grace and truth? Where in the journey into either do you find yourself today?