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Looking for Jesus When I Don’t Understand

April 21, 2019 by michelle 7 Comments

On Ash Wednesday, I awoke in the dark, and clumsily made my way toward coffee. While I’d slept, a vulnerable post had been released into a bigger sphere than my normal audience, and there was no taking it back. Strangers, loved ones, or acquaintances were reading the delicate story my mind had kept in sounds, feelings, and colors. It’d taken a long time to find the language, but somehow, 700 words made it to paper and the sensory story I hadn’t known was there had finally been told. It was healing to honor it and let it go, and as a gift, the Lord saw fit to have it open my Lenten season.

I didn’t yet have a practice for Lent, but I was chaperoning the 6^th grade zoo field trip and I figured the zoo gardens were the perfect setting for a soul retreat and the revelation of a meaningful practice for the next forty days. But before we boarded the busses, it was announced my daughter would be a soloist in the upcoming spring concert, and in the few seconds it took to say her name, my soul took a long sip of disappointment.

My daughter had tried out for countless solos and it was happy news she’d finally been chosen, but without knowing the date of the concert, I’d already said ‘yes’ to attending a conference that would fall on the same day. In twenty-two years I’d attended at least 2 million games, concerts, assemblies, science fairs, leadership days, rehearsals, speeches, awards ceremonies, presentations, dance performances, and parades. I’d spent my life being there, even when it didn’t seem to matter, and now that it was the big solo that mattered a lot, I’d be absent.

I was confused, maybe even indignant. I was annoyed that the God of all time and goodness couldn’t work things out a little better. I was afraid my daughter would need therapy for the rest of her life because of my absence. And I was uncomfortable with these unpleasant feelings. More than that, I was discontent with forty years’ worth of other confusion, disappointment, hurt, indignation, annoyances, and fears. I didn’t want them anymore.

So I wandered into the forty day season with a promise rather than a practice, the same promise throughout Scripture: if I look for God – even in the midst of things I don’t understand – He says I will find Him.

Forty is the number of years former slaves wandered in the desert; the number of days rain fell and swelled around one boat holding all the world’s remaining life; the number of fasting days for prophets, and for Jesus Himself. Forty is the number of days I stewed and worried and overate to avoid the hard work of letting go of old grievances (and of watching a solo on Duo rather than from the front row).

When counted as a number, forty is the timeline of hardship and nearly losing your senses. But when viewed as a process, forty is a number of healing.

Newly freed slaves wander, and in the process, learn to trust the provision of a new Master. Water covers everything, and in the process, the earth is made clean. Prophets and the Messiah go without, and in the process, they draw closer to God and find He is enough – He is everything.

I unbury the hard stuff I don’t understand, and in the process of confronting and forgiving, I see what I hadn’t before – healing. In the Holy practice of looking for Him, I find Him, as He promised. But the Easter story I’ve never seen until last week – Holy Week – is that in the process of looking for Him, He’s healing my heart, healing my mind, and healing my senses, so that when I find Him, I’ll see, hear, feel, and know it’s Him. And I’ll recognize He’s the Savior He says He is.

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The Grace of Choice and Empty Space

March 6, 2019 by michelle Leave a Comment

A few weeks before my senior year, I called a clinic from a payphone and found out I was pregnant. I processed the news alone, July’s humidity running down my back and laying thick on my skin like beads of guilt. The Florida sun spread yellow over everything, all bright sky and silence, and the asphalt steamed thick like the coals of a firewalk. There was much to think about, but I didn’t want to think. I just wanted to breathe.

Room to breathe had been the quest of my junior year. I’d gone looking for it in some pretty dark places and found it, but the freedom I’d found wasn’t as comfortable as I’d expected. It was the kind that quickly sours, the kind that requires hiding the truth and hiding from it. Hiding magnified the darkness and further complicated my sadness. A pregnancy, though – well, that complicated everything.

An unplanned pregnancy is typically complicated, especially for a 17 year old who had planned to go to college, but there were other complexities, too. My boyfriend was an addict, something I should have considered long before, but ignored instead. I worried the Christian bookstore where I worked would cut me loose rather than keep an unwed mother on the payroll. But most worrisome of all was my dad’s job – he was a pastor. Our whole lives had been ministry, and small, unplanned lives popping from the bellies of pastor’s daughters had been known to ruin ministries. Or so I’d heard…

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The Pleasure of Burning, and Plot Twists

March 1, 2019 by michelle 6 Comments

I’ve loved reading since before I could read. In elementary school, I was the girl reading the dictionary at recess. In junior high, I was the girl reading every Nancy Drew the library had available. In young motherhood, I was the mom reading stacks of books before nap time, and as long as my voice didn’t give out or I didn’t fall asleep before the person to whom I was reading, I’d read through whole stack, plus a few extra. Now that I’m in a later season of motherhood, I’m the mom on the go listening to audiobooks – the silver lining on the dark cloud of driving. Not my preference, but it squeezes books into my busy life.

But every once in a while, the ol’ book nerd shows her face, especially when one of my children is assigned a book. So when my son’s teacher sent an email requesting all students order a copy of Fahrenheit 451 – a book I never read in high school – I placed the order within approximately 7 seconds, and when it arrived (used, of course), I practically Hulk ripped the package open and did what all book nerds do: I inhaled it while flipping the pages.

While huffing the book in my kitchen like some kind of book junkie, geeking out over a book I wouldn’t be reading, I thought of my son who doesn’t geek out over books, because he hates books and hates reading. In fact, the last time he shared his enlightened opinion it went something like, ‘Books are dumb, reading is dumb, honors English is dumb and mom never should have signed me up because I’m going to a college where they never make you read, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah.’

I was holding a book with ’60^th Anniversary Edition’ printed boldly above the title and I knew, sadly, my son would make it through one paragraph of decades old language, and then he’d threaten to poke both his eyes out.

I thought of my ninth grade English teacher reading Romeo and Juliet aloud to a classroom of fifteen year olds, defining ancient vocabulary, pausing to explain context, going only as far as the next sentence before pausing again to answer questions. Weeks or months later, she finished reading us the entire play, and all of us understood every section of the Shakespearian tragedy.

If there was any chance the concepts and imagery of a sixty-five year old piece of literature were going to sink into my fourteen year old’s head rather than fly over it, and if there was any hope my son would one day appreciate books rather than loathe them for all time, someone would have to read his book with him, explaining every difficult piece of text. I decided I would be that someone. I would become my ninth grade English teacher.

So my son and I camped out in the front room together and I read the first line, “It was a pleasure to burn.” My son was scowling; I was salivating. We were off to a great start.

Over many hours and weeks we followed the character as he encountered questions and people and ideas that challenged everything he thought he knew about pleasure and burning, about life, about himself, about the truth. Eventually the character must choose: Does he want the answers he’s always been given or does he want to find answers for the questions he’s burning to ask?

Life is in the questions – truth is in the answers. That’s why God, as Father and as Son, asks so many questions throughout the Bible, and that’s why when I’m in a quandary over answers and ideas, I let His Spirit ask me questions. Because in answering Him, the truth is revealed about whether I’m pulling closer to Him or pushing further into myself – am I pulling toward truth or pushing into delusion?

I’d once heard an author say there are seven basic plots for any story written or told, and each of those seven can be boiled into one question – will the character choose the truth or a lie? In the story of my life and in the story of your life, we each must make the same choice. There’s the soul saving choice made to accept Jesus as Savior, to accept the truth we need saving. There are moment by moment soul sustaining choices that are equally important, when everything we hear and see must be checked by the question, ‘Is this God’s truth?’ (If it’s a lie, don’t keep it – especially the lies about who God is and who you are.) And there are soul bearing choices, too, the choices of thought, word, and action that prove the truth of what you believe and who you are.

The character of Fahrenheit 451 chooses to leave the flash, dazzle, and floating ash life to follow the burning in his soul, sensing it will lead him to truth. I paused multiple times in those final pages to make sure my son was listening, and to promise him his mind was about to be blown. (He was half-listening and fully resistant toward having his mind blown.) I clapped with enthusiasm after reading the last sentence, and my son peeled himself from the floor saying, “Cool. We’re done.”

He still claims it’s the worst book he’s ever read (Ok, son, for real?! You’re going to claim you read it?), but after watching the movie version in class, he’s decided the movie is worse. He says the movie didn’t stick to the true story, and I find it interesting he even cares about the true story of the worst book ever. I find it interesting he remembers the true story enough to recognize a false one. Seems my son may have learned something.

And I find that to be a true pleasure.

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Slowing My Roll

February 13, 2019 by michelle 6 Comments

Last week, I’m talking to a friend and we’re talking about faith, because that’s what I do with my friends. (We also happened to be eating, because I like doing that with friends, too.) I commented we often assume love is the focus of faith and we neglect our focus on grace, peace, humility, mercy, and patience – the virtues that made Jesus’ love so astonishing. I called them the ‘slow virtues’, because all of them require a person slows down in order to properly execute them, and she chuckled. Laughing is another thing I like doing with friends.

The next evening, my husband and I took our younger two kids roller skating. It’s something we like doing and used to do more often, and although it’d been quite some time since we’d hit the rink, we were still pretty smooth on those wheels. I’m not sure why I couldn’t have been that smooth in jr. high, when roller skating skill would have benefited me greatly, but agility wasn’t in the cards dealt my thirteen year old self, and I’ve made peace with that.

Now it happened we had a coupon for admission – a good one – and it didn’t take long to figure out we weren’t the only ones. The rink wasn’t overly crowded, but every parent with young kids must have seen that same coupon and said to themselves, “You know, my child is a disaster on wheels. Really quite terrible, actually, and it’s painful to watch, but heck, if it’s only $3 to get this kid off the Ipad and into harm’s way, then I’m all in. In fact, I’ll invite the whole neighborhood.” Mmmmmm…I’m so glad they did.

So I’m zipping around the rink the way I wished I could at thirteen, and the most clumsy children are weaving in front of me with walkers made of PVC – the roller skating version of training wheels on bikes or gutter guards at the bowling alley – and I’m guessing they probably know a lot about how to get around in virtual worlds on Ipads, but they are completely oblivious as to how to navigate the real world. They’re skating the wrong direction, either coming straight at me or attempting to dart across the rink rather than around, and I’m having to touch more stranger’s bodies than I’m used to, and even though the exercise was getting my heart pumping, there was another heat rising.

I did myself a favor and took a little time out – a few times.

And sitting there, it occurred to me – the slow virtues aren’t just the subtle disciplines that have a calm presence about them, they’re also the virtues I’m slowest in applying. They’re not my natural instinct in tight situations, when my rough edges appear. They’re the virtues I exercise sometimes but haven’t practiced enough to keep me from tripping over someone else’s cumbersome flaw or errant contraption.

When obstacles and hurdles blindside me and the heat starts rising, it’s peace and mercy that help me navigate better. When grace, humility, and patience are my consistent disciplines, I’m more agile and more likely to respond with gentle dignity and sincerity. Love is just how I roll. I think this is what Jesus was saying (and showing) all along, I’ve just been a little slow in catching the mission. Or maybe I need more practice. It’s a little of both, I think.

Truth is for all, OMT is for all. If it’s helpful, feel free to share.

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