What Next?

It was the glare of the sun off the icy surface of the pond that held my fancy. My eldest girl and little boy were pushing their toes against the edge to test the strength of the ice. Melting as it was, none of us had ever seen the pond out back of the house sit so frozen. It was new and delightful. Their giggles and awe were the soundtrack, with the glare of the sun freezing the moment too, like a dream. A hand reaching for mine. A question that remembers me, as if the Author of the story stepped in to tap a shoulder, show a smile, invite a heart like a dare - do you trust me? When so much in life feels bleak, that’s when my imagination can feel most eager to come alive , to catch the light and dream of what it’s saying. Lately, it’s a wondering question that keeps bringing itself back to my attention. Is this design on purpose? Maybe the imagination knows that it is a gift that was God-intended to help us hold onto hope for whatever it is that God is doing with the story? And when we’re most discouraged, is that where the imagination knows it has a role to play in helping us to imagine why we could still be hopeful? Perhaps imagination is most deeply intended as a beautiful gift meant to help a heart find hope. Maybe it’s a place longing to point to a God who is able to do more than all we could ask or think. For how would we think to ask for anything, if we could not first imagine the idea that God hears our asking and longs to meet us? And yet I know how much deceit likes to befriend my imagination, as if God’s own enemy wants to possess and distort his good creation. For my heart knows the path to be excruciating, when the story of life is imagined in a way that keeps one deceived about reality, not seeing what is really true inside of actual life. Imagining away the truth of what is real, has kept this heart stuck for seasons too long, exhausting itself for false kinds of hopes. And too, this heart has imagined away such good and real gifts, when its attention was most drawn to the gifts it didn’t have. It was a kind soul who first helped me see how I had imagined away the reality of so many different kinds of love in my life. How much beauty in the world can be imagined away for the sake of what we’re afraid to lose. Arresting is the lure to imagine the worst inside another if it can keep us in the comfort of the self-protections we know. In all the ways deceit longs to befriend our creative minds, perhaps all along what it’s most wanting is to interfere with the way we meet God. At its worst, my imagination would love for me to leave this present moment - the very place where God is waiting to meet me. And at its deepest root, deceit loves to tempt me to imagine God to be someone other than who He truly is… even if it’s in the most subtle of ways. For if I trust that God is as good a Shepherd as He promises to be, why would I need false hopes, false narratives, or preoccupation with what is missing? If I can trust God to be the God who provides, why would I need to imagine away the places in my heart that need care and support and healing for broken things? If I can trust that God is the same Love He says He is, who desires good for me, and is a safe place for all of me to come just as I am, why would I need to pretend away the worst in me, or imagine the worst inside my neighbor? Perhaps we are human with imaginations that are broken. Perhaps we all know this plight. We forget, and again we forget, how to imagine hope and beauty in light of our true God. And perhaps a shared humanity is the best gift we have to help imagine a tender world inside each other beyond what we can see. Maybe Love Himself knows each of us in the place where we are all children in need of the most tender Love. Perhaps a shared humanity is where He longs to meet us, a Love in flesh who lovingly wore this skin, grew into it, and cared for it as He cares for us. Imagine Him. See the truth of how He came for sinners (Luke 5:32), feel the truth of how He loved in flesh, and imagine how He looks at us. Maybe a broken imagination renews with healing hope every time it imagines the truth of Who He is. Maybe in the light of a loving Father who restores what things were made for, a broken imagination could rest so deep that it longs to hold rhythms of renewing in all of who He is. I’d dare believe it’s true, that imagination is a beautiful gift meant to help a heart find hope. So glare of Light, catch us up. A hand reaching out. A question that remembers us like a compassionate Author. Do you trust me? “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” Eph. 3:20-21. A prayer : Father, give us the grace to turn our imaginations into all of the Light of Who you are. Surprise us with the beauty of the glory of Christ and with it's imperfect, yet lovely reflection in Your beloved church. Practice : Read the stories of the Gospels and let yourself imagine that you are one who Jesus befriends and heals. Imagine how He looks at you, speaks to you, cares for you. Practice using your imagination to connect with your Savior. Consider ways deceit may be wanting to distort what is good and beautiful in your imagination recently. How does the truth of who your Jesus is, change the narrative?

The page of the calendar had freshly turned to November when I zipped up my boots on a cloudy light morning to wander through the evergreens behind the house so I could feel it as real. For it’s one thing to trace across words about your Evergreen God and it is another to step under the limbs of the cypress trees and touch them and take in their scent and remember the One who courts your soul faithfully holding out His branches through every season, like an Evergreen who relentlessly holds out His arms for a heart who forgets how deep she needs them alone. (Hos. 14:8, ESV) And there before the evergreen, a heart could still quiet, a heart that longs for evergreen peace. It was thirst for the quiet that brought me to sit, rest by the water, where the wind had already come to play gentle with the leaves. Almost still, yet moving. It brought them slow, one by one, from the trees to touch down on the water and follow its soft turning. All was still, yet stirring on, as if every last thing was held. As if a heart could trust that while it is resting still, all of the pieces are held, carried along, by a God who has already purposed to work every last thing for good, for those who love Him. The stillness of the water can bring springs up from the soul, to fall down a face and bring relief for everything that the heart has been holding. It can soothe a soul quiet in a world that is all so tenderly held in the mystery of a Love that is beyond our understanding. And when a mind lets go of its smarts enough to simply rest down into what is, a world and a life that is so terrible, so beautiful that it is far beyond the limits of your understanding or control is the most astounding gift to get to be part of after all. It was after the sun set that day that the words found me. “As [Jesus] approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, ‘If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes.” Luke 19:41-42, NIV If you had only known what would bring you peace… Sometimes it can feel as if peace keeps flying away, and maybe if you just fight hard enough, say enough words, hold your ground enough, it will bring peace back to you somehow. Sometimes it can feel as if life keeps asking you to step through a doorway that feels like the absolute opposite direction of peace or anything right and everything inside you wants to slam the door. And when Jesus looked over Jerusalem and spoke those words, He knew what was coming (Lk. 19:43-44), how Jerusalem was getting ready to slam a door as if it would bring them peace. Yet Jesus knew, with a heart that churned in ache for them, that this would be their destruction. For they were more concerned over what looked wrong out there, than they were concerned with considering their hearts. Jerusalem wanted peace. And Jesus longed for them to know peace too. The deepest core of what they desired - peace - was the very same thing that Jesus desired for them. Yet, as readily as it was available, Jerusalem wouldn’t have eyes to see the Way that would truly bring them peace. And the image of Jesus’ broken weeping remains in Scripture with longing invitation to all who want peace. Here is a friend, a brother, who is not at war with our desiring hearts, but rather is broken with anguish when our trust in Him fails and we allow our desires to become distorted and twisted by fear into something that could never bring us what we most deeply want. It was Jesus’ Love, broken in longing for our own confused hearts, that carried Him to step through a doorway that felt like the opposite direction of peace or anything right and involved painful separation from His own Father. For the joy set before Him, Jesus chose the way of peace and stretched out His arms in the pain. Those arms stretched out are branches always green with the promise of life and a place where you will never once be without a friend, closer than a brother, who perfectly understands you without fail. While there are many ways we could go in this life and everyone of them will come with pain, here is the gift of an evergreen pain that comes with a promise always alive. And these evergreen trees that we can still live and breathe in the presence of promise us that the gift is here today. Until life passes, it asks us, always, which hard path we’ll choose, and heaven waits for us, longs for us, to look up, reach for the fruit that feeds a heart, and whisper it from a heart unshrinking… Be my Evergreen God.

You can wander under the branches of trees and feel how they simply invite your heart to come just as it is in a place where you are safe to wonder about anything under the trees that are so quietly patient with the space a heart needs. I wander along the path beside the creek and I spot a turtle. I stop under the shade of the trees and step into the grass for a closer look. I spy what seems to be a much younger, smaller turtle sitting close by her. I consider them for a while, the way their heads tilt, the way they warm themselves in the sun. I slowly step a bit closer, but I am noticed and it’s the older turtle that splashes down, ducks under the water first. Within a few seconds the baby slowly follows, as if maybe he’s not sure why, but it’s what she’s doing. He’s not as cautious as her, but he follows along, and I imagine him bidding me goodbye. He’s a little more new and open to the beauty of the world while she is older and seemingly, a good bit more careful, guarded. Later at home my girl asks me if I’ve noticed the little white flowers in our yard, how they close up tight in the heat of the day, but how in the cool of these September mornings they open wide their petals to take it all in. I had walked by those flowers day after day and I had not once noticed that. I begin to turn my gaze that way a little more each day, waiting to see each time they open up again. How do they know? How do they know when to open and when to close? How does anyone know when to open and when to close? And what is it inside us all that would keep us hungry for places to open our hearts again after the times when we’ve opened and it all went terribly wrong? How in the world is it that something inside us keeps wanting to believe that there is goodness in our desire to open? What inside us is continually hungry for that? I feel the questions while old turtles go on splashing back into the water, while flowers go on closing in the heat of day. And I feel them while the new life of young turtles linger in the sun just a little longer, while little white petals go on opening to the freshness of the morning. While those flowers in the yard tell me that it is not always a time to open, what they speak most to my heart is there to be found in the cool of the day. Each day those white flowers in the yard testify with assurance to my heart in what it can feel must be true: that there is utter beauty in the desire to open. And even while the old turtle has seen more life than the baby and has much that she knows, it’s the baby turtle that gets to feel the beauty of lingering in the sun just a little longer. And it’s my own children that pointed out to me the white flowers that I kept simply passing by without noticing the beauty of the sermon that they were offering with their silence. The act of opening wide to goodness was made to be beautiful, a thing to be desired. It’s a desire that was embedded into life from the beginning of the world. We enter this world with heart’s made in the image of our Maker’s heart. And whether we continue in this life to open to seeking out the goodness of our heart’s deepest desire or not, these hearts, deep down inside, long to open wide and keep seeking after all of the goodness of Love as it was most truly made to be. And how does one open well? And how does a heart begin to know what the Love truly looks like that it longs to open to? For we are also embedded in this broken world with hearts broken by sin, easily deceived into things that hold a kind of form of Love without being at all what we’re truly looking for. How are we to live toward Love? And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Lk. 10:27. That’s how Jesus says it in Luke. He begins with the heart here. In Matthew, he says to love the Lord “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “your neighbor as yourself.” Mt. 22:37. In Mark, he says to love the Lord “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and “your neighbor as yourself.” Mk. 12:30. While the order of things isn’t the same in each instance, one thing that is the same is that Jesus leads with the heart when He gives the greatest command. And he calls for a Love where the parts of us join together to live into it as a whole. Why, when it comes to the greatest command of Love, does Jesus begin with the heart? It’s an important question to sit with. One thing we know about these hearts inside us is that they won’t be intellectualized into submission; they simply are not persuaded that way. And the heart within us is the very wellspring of life (Prov. 4:23) that God has placed inside us. Everything we do flows from it. The heart is the life of our being. While Jesus calls us to Love God with all of our mind, He also calls us to a life that does not concede to dutifully obeying Love with the mind alone, or even with the mind first, but to a Love that gives way to seeking and searching out how to Love with all of the heart. The heart must seek out and find the deepest reason why it longs from the depths of its being to submit to something, and the heart will not settle for anything less. Perhaps these hearts inside us know something that really is quite true: that to Love out of duty, while the heart is not in it, is not the kind of Love that we were created for at all. What we do know is that it’s not the kind of Love that Jesus calls for in us. Astoundingly, Jesus calls us to a Love where the parts of us form a whole that we can live with heart. As people called to such a glorious wholeness, what do we do with the aching tensions, longings and questions that these hearts inside us can feel? We can keep our hearts with all vigilance and refuse to treat them as useless things to be afraid of and set aside. Fear of our own hearts leaves us making fragmented decisions, afraid that the very thing we were made to love and seek God with is only trying to drag us to the ground. He made these hearts inside us for beauty and we can safely hold that. We can fully validate and honor what our heart is feeling, without agreeing with fearful or untrue thoughts that we have in that place or acting on the deceitful impulses we feel. As an example, feeling sad about mistakes we’ve made is a valid feeling inside us that we can fully honor and grieve, even while disagreeing with fearful thoughts that we are a failure. This is not how God sees us, for He delights in us, ready to greet us with His beaming smile whenever we come to Him just as we are, needy for the goodness of His redeeming Love. Lk 15:20-24. In the same way, and through the comfort of that same Love, feelings of anger about a situation can be fully validated even while letting go of a desire to control a situation as if we are God. There is no feeling of the heart that ever needs to be invalidated, and we can navigate our feelings best when we know and acknowledge their true existence while letting go of fears. We can determine to gather the true information that our feelings help us find about the needs of our hearts. When I am feeling afraid or unloved, my heart is telling me true information that I have a need for something that will help me more deeply know or remember that I am safe and Loved. To deeply honor and regard that need is an essential way to live into Love with the heart. We can take the true information our feelings have given us and feel our way closer to the God who satisfies our souls and loves to provide for our needs. Sometimes we can do this through prayer and the Word and healthy rhythms of life, and sometimes we have a very real need to feel our way closer to God by taking other steps with the needs of our hearts. Sometimes it may be a need to let people we trust know how we’re really doing, the questions we’re really feeling, and asking for people to sit with us there so that we can seek out the places where God can speak Love to us through His people when we’re having trouble hearing the truth of His Love by ourselves. Sometimes we may carry a question in prayer and companioned love until we see one next little step through our heart’s questions to step toward the wholeness of Love. As we continue to seek truest Love with our hearts, even when we don’t know just what we’re doing, we’ll keep learning and we’ll have more wholehearted Love to give, because we have received God’s care and compassion for us. We Love because He first Loved us. 1 Jn. 4:19. Our deep curiosity and longing can be used in wonderful ways to follow after Love with our hearts and live into the wholeness of Love as God made it to be. And just like those little white flowers in my yard, what we’ll find when we follow Love with the heart is that the desire to open to goodness always was, at its core, a truly beautiful desire after all. It’s a desire meant to lead us to the goodness of the One who is truest Love Himself, the very thing that the depths of our hearts have always been hungry to open to after all.

It’s a Monday morning and I wake slow, eventually roll forward as if to start to get up, then pause long in the weight of what I can feel inside. When life feels messy, when the voice of fear keeps wanting to taunt at your heels with old news of your failures, where do you find the courage to keep trusting in God’s work in your heart? It’s a trust the heart needs: a kind of trust that keeps you believing that He is able to do good work, even in you. It’s a faith that can keep the heart opening, turning again, to the movement of His Spirit in your life. Perhaps each of God’s children knows days, times, seasons, when we find ourselves in this place of need, struggling to keep trusting and believing that God can still do good work in us. I eventually get out of bed and kiss my Nano goodbye as he heads out the door for work. I brush my girl’s hair and dress my boy before we snuggle on the couch to read the next tale in our storybook, about the people who see what’s on the outside and about the God who sees what’s in the heart. We pile into the van to take them to school, humming to our favorite songs on the way, and on the drive back home after dropping them off, I think about these hearts inside us. How they matter. How they matter to God. I pull into the driveway and sit awhile in the parked car. I think about my own heart’s needs and begin to ruminate over the fears that begin rolling around like a threat to those needs and my heart is beating faster until it feels bursting-ready to dump on somebody. But the voice of Love speaks softly too and it is remembering me to a day a few years back when Love came to find me with invitation. And the memory plays in my mind when the three of my kids were all tiny and I got away from the house with them, having forgotten to bring my phone or the little bag that held all of my money and cards. And when the van was nearly dry on gas and I realized my lack of resources, I panicked. When I couldn’t reach Nano with a borrowed phone, I broke into tears in a gas station store, desperate. And it was a lady there who paid - fifteen dollars worth of gas for my van was what she decided to give me. We made it home that day, pulled into the driveway and I was still sitting in the driver’s seat when I reached my hand into the corner to look for something else, but what I felt in my hand was something papery, folded. I pulled it out to find that it was fifteen dollars. I had no recollection of how it had gotten there, but there it was. Somehow, there was exactly fifteen dollars in my van the whole time. And what Love spoke to my heart with that moment came with the sound of an unconditional Love. Whether I fell weak under the flooding fears or whether I could find heart to receive the hope to keep turning my eyes onto Him through the flood, looking assuredly for Him to provide for me there… God was already waiting to provide me with fifteen dollars of gas, either way. What I felt Him inviting me to that day was an invitation that He has found other ways to Love me with again when I’ve forgotten. He invites me to keep coming again after falling, to keep aiming to test how sweet it will be when the fears find their quiet in trust and I see Him meeting me there. I hold that memory in my heart and step out of the driver’s seat to call for my dog and we go on a long walk down the road. And while Saucer and I walk in the morning sun, it comes to my heart, meeting me with the still-rising sun… the Love that “always believes” (1 Cor. 13:7 ESV) the Love that “always trusts” (NIV). Can I Love? Can my heart trust? How can my heart trust? And Love whispers, “because He first Loved us.” (1 John 4:19) And with a rush I remember Him there on that cross, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” (Lk. 23:34) While an unbelieving world was rejecting Him, Jesus Loved with a Love that believed the best in us... believed in who God made us to be. When we had done absolutely nothing to deserve it, when we were fully guilty of rejecting and misusing His Love, Love looked on us and Love believed the best for us. While we were still sinners, He died for us with a Love that always believes. And a Love like that could make you feel free. I got home from my walk with a heart that felt lighter coming back through that front door. And as I pulled up my chair at the kitchen table, I checked my phone and found it there - the provision I had felt in need of that morning - what my God always had for me. It was a text from my Nano. “I’ve been thinking about your sweet face… I believe and trust that God is working on you and your walk just as much as he is working on mine.” And rain fell through my lashes, down my face as the cat came bounding up into my lap to curl into a heap and I felt the Love of God through my husband's words. The goodness of God had always been coming for me that morning and I felt Loved with a Love that always believes. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ For the seasons when your heart needs ways to help settle itself in remembering that God is still working in you, here’s a daily breath prayer to hold through the little pauses in your day. (Based on God’s promise below.) You are more than able To do good work in me. You are more than able To do good work with me. You are more than able To give me enough for this place. You are more than longing To spill over me with that grace. Hold the promise. “And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.” 2 Cor. 9:8. Believe that He is able. Pray for people to trust and believe it with you, for you. (Or seek with God and pray for whatever it is that your heart truly needs.) Trust Him for the miracle of providing just what you need in that each day, hope for it without fear, look for it without confined agendas, and open your heart wide to every little bit of trust and goodness you see and hear and remember that helps you feel His own believing Love that helps your unbelief. Then go open your heart wide to the world, for how will they feel it sure in their hearts that Jesus believes in them, without the members of His body who will go and open to the cry of His heart longing to pour through us with a Love that always believes. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ For another resource on the verse "Love always believes," see the link below for further study on it presented by the Gospel Coalition... https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/erik-raymond/love-believes-all-things/#:~:text=love%20believes%20all%20things%E2%80%A6%E2%80%9D%20These,translated%20simply%20as%20%E2%80%9Cfaith%E2%80%9D.

Once in the rush of a mighty river’s roar, my heart which I had long tried to push and shove away in compliancy into the very bottom of my soul felt a tug that it simply believed must hold the key to freedom from the place where it had stayed contained for years, held captive by the ever-dogged cautions of my mind that grew interlaced with fear. In a place of desperation, my heart which yearned for room to breathe and pulse and live, leaped out above all the rest and followed the rush of that mighty river, leaving my mind and soul be tugged along behind. In fits and bursts, my heart felt strangely, wonderfully, terribly messy moments of being alive and free from its prison of compliance. There had been one thing that my heart had begun to grip deeply and indeed, despite all that could never realistically be fully received as true, this part was true and needed. The heart is not made to live shoved into the bottom of the soul. It is not. My heart continues to find this a truth which she will not deny, nor will any other part of me. And oh, how she loves and has needed this truth. How she must sing it as part of a melody that she was made to know and share and love with any other hearts who also long to live. Yet the truth that hurts her to see in long years of those fits and starts is that a heart that jumps out up ahead on its own is a heart that exhausts itself and loses, in seasons, of what it was consecrated for if it is a heart in Him: a life where the yoke is easy and light. I’ve given away many seasons where I didn’t embrace what I was invited to: the easy yoke, where the heart may ache just as great while it waits, but the cares of life are lighter for the troubles the heart doesn’t stir. The heart is built to widen with longing and widen it can and so heartily may. Dear heart, widen with trust. Gently, lightly, your part will come. Do not put your God to the test (Luke 4:12. Hebrews 3). Despite what the deceiver would have you believe, God is not hiding any needed knowledge from you that cannot be found by seeking Him in sincerity and truth. Do not try Him for a chance to watch Him catch you. And when you feel any doubt that He longs with all of His heart to catch you up in His arms, then go and trace each and every last bit of the ways that His heart already has. Read every last bit of the Love that He has personally written to you in your story there, and praise Him for the remembrance of every little piece of it that you get to carry with you always. And in the sweet light of it all, test this. Come and rest, dear heart, rest away, repeated, from the sin which wants to drain and claim the life and passion in you and rest all of you into the Great Heart of He who is gentle and humble for you. Come and dwell and be known and expand among the hearts of His own where He resides. Let the longings and griefs and questions of the heart be heard and named and cared for in places where they can know life, even while desire comes along in gentle, steady stride that rests secure in delight of a Father who loves to bless you. Live with all of your heart out of all of that rest and just see how your part is already here. See, dear heart, come and see if He does not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows (Mal. 3:10). It is still the day where you are welcome to come as you are, from just the place where you are. Come alive, heart. Come gently alive. It is fully safe for you here in the life of His living Word that lives and breathes to set you free. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30.

and you also feel your flaws...

The frogs all splashed away when we walked up to the pond with the kids a few days ago and Daddy saw a chance to see their eyes widen. His melon-sized chunk of dirt ker-plunked down close to where the frogs had jumped, making the biggest splash of all. With exclamations of what a large frog to run into, he got one widened pair of eyes that weren’t quite sure and another pair that were pretty doubtful, while the oldest girl, in step with the dog, already had interests further around the pond. They’re getting older with an unsuspecting rawness that’s beginning to break down a bit as they grow more familiar with the reality of life. And I suppose, more familiar with the type of playfulness their Daddy shows. The cat showed up in tow behind us as the sunlight dawned more dim and more splashes were made by sticks and rocks thrown from their little hands… growing hands. And even as we dearly miss the child-eyes full of wonder that used to have no speck of doubt in sight, I am full with another kind of wonder, too. For if that unsuspecting part of the children in us did not go through the process of breaking down, surely none of us would ever grow up into people who can see and interact with reality as it truly is. Perhaps there are many times when it's that kind of breaking down that can most help us grow, yet I can imagine that there are other kinds of breaking down that are healing and needed at other times too. When it comes to seeing a situation as a gigantic frog splash or a chunk of dirt thrown by your Daddy, some children could easily find motivation for seeing past the frog story if they have a desire to believe that they’re growing up and getting too smart to be impressed so easily. Whereas some children, especially smaller children, could easily become quite defensive of the giant frog story if they are very attached to the unique experience of getting to witness such a large frog splash. Yet, on the other hand, if there ever truly is a giant frog splash, the first child would be likely to not believe it at all. I know I was eight years old and my brother, I think, was six when we heard the news from my dad that our family would soon be welcoming a new baby and we were far above falling for a joke like that. Our dad would have no pleasure of tricking us into any excitement over something so preposterous. We were too grown up to fall for stories. But of course, it wasn’t a story and mom really was a few months away from having a baby. I don’t remember exactly what it was that finally convinced us. Of course, we deeply wanted it to be true, so I know that helped. I just remember how determined we were to not fall for any stories because maybe we also deeply wanted to avoid the hurt of getting too attached to something that might not be true. Sometimes in order to see what is true, the part of us that needs to break down is the part of us that is afraid of getting too attached to a story that always does have the possibility of getting into our hearts in a way that could hurt. There are times when seeing the truth requires feeling like a little child again. I’d dare believe that these ways of relating with reality are common to humanity and that sometimes, even as adults, our desire to be intellectual, to take great care to not be deceived by our hearts, can interfere greatly with our ability to use our hearts in hearing and listening to the stories all around us, maybe sometimes especially, the stories of the hurting. Sometimes giving our ears and our hearts to the stories of the marginalized, the poor, the disadvantaged, the underprivileged and the hurting may cost us grief and discomfort. It can be painful to hear a problem that you have no fix for, and it can hurt to give your heart to something, when there will be no such thing as quick results where systems of trauma and systems of inequality run so deep. It can hurt to ponder the idea that what you were able to give did not turn a situation around in the way and the time that you hoped. And maybe what can hurt more is the realization when you remember what you forgot, that you, yourself, are not so much helped when someone simply wants to help you, but when someone is willing to listen and believe your pain and be changed by you along the way, ready to learn and be moved simply from seeing the beauty of the story and journey that God is writing into your life. I read the quote a few months ago in Osheta Moore’s book and it resounded as what I can often feel too when I am in need of the people around me: “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” (Quote often attributed to Lilla Watson.) I feel this deeply too in the realizations of love. For you can fall in love with someone from a segment of humanity that you have never known so well before, and your heart can widen in a thousand ways, tying your heart to the equality and dignity of this very part of humanity in a way you’ve never felt before. And you can wonder why you had never yet seen the significance of this. How simply, sometimes quietly attaching your heart in a way that could hurt, to people from so many kinds of walks of life can widen your heart in a thousand ways with the deepest truth that could never be put into any kind of spreadsheet or fact check or research report. The truth that the equality and dignity of every segment of humanity is deeply tied to my own, for if we as a people hold to any excuse for not assigning the most intrinsic depth of value to any part or person of humanity, we all lose out disastrously. Sometimes perhaps we must feel all of the tension of this and feel it long while we grieve the depths of what cannot be fixed within our timelines and tidy ideas and learn what we will do with all of the brokenness of this. Maybe hope lives in trust that Love is an army that fights the shame of trauma with every little voice of belief we give and every little prayer we voice that found its way out in Love through the hearts of souls we may never know in this life. Maybe hope knows that the beauty of Love is so strong that Love itself, never was distorted when I got it wrong. Still, Love invites me into all of her own beauty. Be the voice of belief because we all need believing. And come too, and jump headfirst into the celebration of the prodigal, the prodigal who did the unthinkable, yet takes shaky steps turned home, who has not one thing in his life together. Jump into the party all in because we are all the prodigals who’ve made a mess of it and need deep down inside to see the Father running. To know He saw us from a long way off and scrambled on toward us with the run that let loose all of his manners of dignity for the joy of welcoming us home with full kiss and embrace for His dearly beloved little child with robes and a fattened calf and all the stops to celebrate us. (Luke 15:11-32.) You belong. This is where you belong. And even when we feel more like we’ve been the older brother, standing on the side, despising the celebration of prodigals, the Father’s compassion is not short. The Father came to the son who stood outside, invited him with love into the celebration. And even when the brother still could not see the value of the prodigal, the Father’s Love ran on in his words to the older son… “And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.’” (Luke 15:31-32.) The home of the Father is ours to come to and this is where we all are so welcome to belong. And no matter who cannot yet see the value of any one, the Father will never be disheartened or any less enamored in the celebration of utter belonging for even one of His most misunderstood children. No matter who it could be who doesn’t understand, we can be firmly established with let-your-hair-down rejoicing in a Father whose heart is so tenderly tied to the most lost and hurting among us that He won’t stop looking. He will not ever be the slightest bit disheartened in the all-out celebration for even one who saw that he simply could not get it right, and started stepping home.

On embracing both the sameness and the diversity of humanity

It was the hump of the week when I had a sliver of time to myself and a flurry of things in my heart that felt a bit like anger. I just didn’t like it and wasn’t sure I knew how to explain it in words if I tried. I ventured my way between lines of orange and white cones and bumpety roads for the park with her clusters of trees. Trees that know without doubt where their place is to stand. I wandered a couple laps around the walk before sliding down onto the grass at the edge of the creek where the water was leaping in rhythm over the rocks. Where you can close your eyes and hear the song that helps you imagine that there is a place where no discord among persons could ever dampen the unified wonder at dancing waters in perfect roar. Its harmony is this song of the birds that lives free-belonging to the open skies that envelop each note with welcome abandon. And yet, with eyes wide open to see what is broken and feel the tugs inside, you can lean into the roar of those waters and hear another kind of roar. The roar of words you’ve heard that want to reverberate around and around your head, like a roar at your soul that wants to send your loaves and your fishes away. And staring at those waters it can feel as if you could simply plunge the diving weight of your hand down into the actual roar and feel it going right through, passing between your fingers while you feel the push and the movement, and are not swept away. A small act, a standing, that helps you find something to do with all that is swirling inside. To feel it on purpose and yet see how you are not destroyed. And the trees alongside the creek, they know. The wind may blow at your branches, and parts of you may bend and break, but the trees know where they stand. And what keeps them standing is a whole life that they have beneath the parts of them that we can see up here above the ground. And these underneath parts of us need places to dig into and be covered, given fertile home in our most mattering parts that secure us and keep us standing, firmly attached. Because up above the ground in our growing places, our prayer is to stretch our branches out in fruitful love, yet, when we look at the Jesus who is Love at His own very core, we see a Love that transcends our safe rulebooks and guidelines about any cut-out black and white view of what Love is supposed to look like. It can look impossible to grow into this. Jesus’ gave Love that showed itself just as it was needed in each situation beyond the bounds of our ideas of what Love must always look like. He always gave what Love most needed and He always knew what that was in its time… whether it needed table-flipping in defense of the sinners who just wanted to come to God in their need without being abused in the process, or whether it needed unhurried, gentle presence that silenced the accusations for a woman caught in adultery. Love stretched Himself out in ways that nobody saw coming, even giving His body at the proper time, to be mistreated and killed before He would finally rise. And Love cannot be dwindled down to something less than all of what His life showed, with the perfect timing of each part. My eyes follow the way down the creek to the tree trunks that grow sideways out of the bank of the creek as if they simply forgot which way is up. And then the trees that twist and bend in ways that you simply wouldn’t advise them to grow if they had asked your opinion. How do you let go of wanting your life to grow just so… according to your own idea of what growth in love is always supposed to be? And my eyes follow the trunk of the tree to her tangled web of roots that partial-protrude from the bank of the creek before they sink down into the earth there by the edge of the water’s roar. Yet still, I can hear the roar of those waters and even within, feel it as those words that want to shame the soul, accuse, condemn and shun, maybe like what they most truly are isn’t flesh or blood at all, but a prowling, seeking someone to devour. For I remember it, and find what the Word says, that the accuser of our souls can be “like a roaring lion.” (1 Peter 5:8) But that’s not what he is, for it’s not his place. There is this rising sense that wants to clench my fist at those waters, though I know that my own fist cannot stop their flow. And there is a part of me that wonders where… Where does my own clenched fist have a place in Love? I want to hold it to my chest and feel the stories, the ache, the things that I know had to go this way and it can hurt. Still you could close your eyes to the broken world and still in all that’s becoming new, feel the Healing Roar that is true. Because the stillness bids to know that there is an actual Roar that overpowers the broken roar of shame and it is alive. There is a true Lion-Destroyer of darkness, the Light of the world. He alone gives the genuine Roar. He is angry for the sake of hurting sinners. That morning, I had read the words… “His anger, unlike yours, has zero taint of sin in it… His anger can be trusted. For it is an anger that springs from his compassion.”* His anger judges justly for the sake of the nations and every people and tongue. It judges justly in defense of needy sinners and every lost and searching soul. When anger finds my heart, maybe Love invites me into this, this resting and rooting my heart down into the Roar of the Lion who has conquered (Rev. 5:5). “Be angry and do not sin.” Eph 4:26. One could take a clenched fist and fall on knees… and still. The Roar of the Lion of Judah is not dead. He is angry for the sake of sinners and His anger is there to cover us. Be angry for the sake of sinners who just want to come in their need, yet they find themselves shamed and abused. Be angry for the places where brokenness and death wants to claim that it’s winning the war. Be angry for the sake of sinners who feel stuck under the weight of their sin and the accuser of their souls. Be angry for all who are met with condemnation in their search for healing... for the Love of the Lion is the true healing balm, who perfectly knows how to Roar for He hates both the *sin and the *shaming of hurting sinners. These both that want to war for their claim on our souls. Be angry and pray where there is a war for the workings of your heart. For a clenched fist can always find a place in Love through prayer that trusts in the Roar of the Lion. No fist finds a better place to land than when it falls under covering with the Roar of the One who perfectly hates sin, shame and death. Until the time, rest in His Roar and use your heart for the ones He roars for. For you can still hear the echo of the undying kingdom of God that souls are yet rooting down into. Belonging for souls is here: rest our cause in the Lion. The water still flowed, leaping in rhythm over the rocks, where you can close your eyes and hear the song that helps you imagine, believe by faith. There is a place where no darkness could ever dampen our wonder together at dancing waters in perfect Roar. Let the Lion Roar. *Quote from Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers, p. 112.