America, America

I am afraid. 

A city is burning, and I am afraid. 

Earlier, my friend put it perfectly. If you didn’t know that those images streaming through our televisions and news-feeds were of American streets before you saw them, you might not know that they were at all. This doesn’t look like our country.  

And that just hurts. 

What are we doing to ourselves?

The earth under Nepal quaked and opened up, and cities tumbled and people DIED. Thousands of people are GONE. 

And yet, we are still here, and I can sit in the doctor’s office on a sunny, breezy afternoon and fill out a healthcare form and check “no” for every discernible disability, disease, condition and injury, because, thank you God, I can. 

We are still here and we HATE each other and we bat our eyes at the blessings that we have and we just don’t care. None of us do.

And we are destroying ourselves. 

Not just with our hands. With ours words. 

Our enemies need not raise their voices or their hands, we are sure to do it to ourselves. 

Because nobody has the right answer, only each of us thinks they have the right answer, and if only everybody would just listen to US then this world would be better, this mess would be undone. Right?

That’s the problem. Nobody ever claims to see this all coming, and they can sit in their homes, behind their walls in the days after and tell you that they know how to fix it all and pretend that they want to listen to what everyone else has to say.

But by the time people are spilling out into the streets and setting things on fire, and throwing bricks at other people and breaking glass, it’s too late. 

I went to bed last night when I could finally peel my eyes away from my phone and all of the images of things on fire and people looking angry, and I woke up this morning, I heard this voice ring out loud and clear with the rising sun,

“Dawn is here, now. Are you going to be a part of the problem, or a part of the solution.”

I know not all of you are into the whole, “christian, God thing.”

But I sat in my pew on Sunday and our pastor pounded it into us about how GOD IS NOT A BYSTANDAER WHEN WALLS FALL DOWN, AND BUILDINGS BURN AND THERE IS SUFFERING AND CHAOS. AND WE ARE NOT HELPLESS AND WE ARE NOT CALLED TO FEAR.

What followed could have been an entire sermon devoted to how we do this to ourselves and can only blame ourselves, and yet we were reminded that:

GOD IS NOT SURPRISED. 

He is active. He is ALIVE.

And we are CALLED. We are ordained. We are sent forth. 

We are not lights under a bushel, hidden from all prying eyes. We should not shield ourselves behind our walls and pretend that in the world we know, things like this don’t happen to people like us.

I might have been inclined to automatically believe that when the midwest was on fire last year, but now that it’s an hour away, it’s too real and too close to ignore any longer. 

We are to burn brightly in this world, and those are really going to be the fires that are brighter than a burning city. 

Fear and confusion and hate and anger make us wrap ourselves up into a tight, comfortable coil, where we can only see darkness. We are consumed with ourselves and BY ourselves. We are the thing that can destroy ourselves.

Hope is really the thing that breaks you and shatters you into a million pieces. Pieces that plant in the ground and grow and break through the earth into something NEW. 

We need something new.

We need hope. 

God almighty, we have hope. 

Earth has no sorrow

That heaven can’t heal. 

I know that some of you don’t do the “God thing,” and I get it. But now is assuredly the time to take our eyes off of ourselves and to place them on something greater. To look to heaven and realize that we are all together. That we are all one. 

It’s time to place our eyes on something greater, on The One who can heal all things and make beautiful things out of the dust. 

He can make beautiful things out of us. 

Martin Luther King: 

“Go out this morning. Love yourself, and that means rational and healthy self-interest. You are commanded to do that. That’s the length of life. Then follow that: Love your neighbor as you love yourself. You are commanded to do that. That’s the breadth of life. And I’m going to take my seat now by letting you know that there’s a first and even greater commandment: “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy strength.” I think the psychologist would just say with all thy personality. And when you do that, you’ve got the breadth of life.

And when you get all three of these together, you can walk and never get weary. You can look up and see the morning stars singing together, and the sons of God shouting for joy. When you get all of these working together in your very life, judgement will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

When you get all the three of these together, the lamb will lie down with the lion.

When you get all three of these together, you look up and every valley will be exalted, and every hill and mountain will be made low; the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh will see it together.

When you get all three of these working together, you will do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.

When you get all three of these together, you will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth.

Easter – The State of Things

The egg hunt was over in minutes. 

Literally. 

Nearly half an hour of egg hiding skills on the part of all of the parents, and the hunt was over in less than five minutes. 

My son beamed at me as he showed me his spoils and waited patiently to crack open the plastic eggs back in the classroom. The wind whipped across the wide open field because even though it’s a few days in to April, spring doesn’t really show up in these here parts until about May. 

It was on our way back to class that I saw it. The same plaque that I had seen before on the hallway wall; the same face in the same picture. The same words. But today it finally registered. 

A friendly face, or a seemingly friendly face. Gone for 14 years. 

14 years. 

And my mind tried to picture a world where time had trotted ahead 14 years past whatever day will one day be the day that I draw my very last breath in this life. And I can’t even fathom it. I wonder if the person in that picture could do so either. 

I wonder what we all think this world is going to look like 14 years beyond us, when we’re dead and gone and just bones and dust in the ground. A friend, gone 5 years this past week. My grandfather, gone nearly 7 years this summer. It really happens. We really do die. 

That face has haunted me. As I looked ahead to Good Friday, the words of pastors and authors and prophets and apostles ring in my head. 

And I realize the depravity of myself. 

I can’t fathom a world without me in it. I’m the center of my own world. And I live each day like I don’t think that last day is going to come. I live each day like all of these days aren’t going to amount to anything on that last day, and on the first day in the rest of my days in the Kingdom. 

That face on the plaque brought a bit of levity to the situation for me. 

As I stand here with empty hands. 

And I realize all of the things that I am wasting and it’s like I can’t breathe. 

“Your time spent pursuing love will not be wasted. The time spent embracing your moments, reading that extra bedtime book, sitting together to dinner, loving a child in their unkindness and weakness matter. Live each moment knowing even your unseen movement toward love and away from unkindness matters.”
— Kara Tippetts, Big Love

It might sound scary. It might sound like a confrontation with a midlife crisis or mortality. The truth is that this is a confrontation. It is a confrontation with myself, with the darkest parts of me. 

More than rabid hatred for the gospel and open opposition to God, our Heavenly Father hated apathy more. Woe to those who have seen and tasted and yet do not change. 

Their hearts turn over into stone and remain unchanged and unmoved by the power of a holy God. Unmoved by His miracles. And most importantly, unmoved by His love. 

How can you not be changed? 

He says that many had seen His miracles and yet they did not change. They still at times did not believe. They were led by a pillar of light out of slavery and oppression through the bedrock of a sea and yet, they were hard-hearted. They were healed and saw the blind see and the paralyzed walk, and yet, they were hard-hearted.  

I am guilty of seeing so many prayers answered, petitions granted. And yet, what makes me hard-hearted is that I am most unmoved by His love. 

I discount that love. I don’t believe in that love. I don’t believe that I could be loved up a hill, bloodied and bruised in those footsteps to Calvary. 

How foolish I am. That I could write off such shattering love. 

Or is it really apathy, so as much as it is fear?

Our fear is that we are loved. 

He loves us far more than we think He ever could. We think that there is no vastness or greatness in His love that enables Him to cover the things that we have done and still hold us precious.

For me? That leads me to apathy. Because it if isn’t possible to be loved as much as the word says that I am, then what’s the point? I will try and I will fail. And try again and fail again. The same circle, over and over again.

As I took communion this weekend, and I held that cup in my hands, I waited. Just for something. Before I had walked down front to get the elements, I just asked God, “where are you, Lord. Because I don’t feel it.”

I stared at the cup, waiting for something magical to happen. And the scripture was read. 

“By His stripes, we are healed.”

And He said, that is it. 

It was the cleanest I had ever felt. The weight of communion hit me like a ton of bricks. It is as great and significant, and yet as simple as that. 

By HIS wounds, I am healed. 

His wounds healed mine. 

He didn’t free us so to make us servants. He didn’t free us to make us subjects. He freed us so that we would love Him, and know that we are loved. So that we would be free from ever having to feel the pangs of a life lived unloved. 

By His love, I will be undone. His love completes me, His love will undo me. Until there is nothing left to hide. Nothing left to consider. Nothing else but He and I. 

She’s Here

I pulled into the visitor parking space. 

It was an unseasonably warm winter day; temps were hovering near sixty degrees. It was the first time that year the sun would splash across my face, actually warming it. 

Gently reminding me. 

Reminding me that spring was coming. A reminder this summer baby was thankful for and relished silently to herself as she brushed the bangs from her eyes. 

I traipsed across the hospital parking lot as an array of thoughts flooded my mind. 

My friend had just delivered a baby. Her first. A girl. A daughter. A winter babe. 

And as it does for most moms, the experience was a catalyst that ignited my own thoughts and sent them swirling. Memories. Of first touching my own babies. 

Of looking at them and gathering them to me, treasuring those first moments with them. Them just being here. Holding their tiny hands while pondering these things in my heart. Imprinting their smell into my mind, the feel of them into myself on a molecular level. Wanting to always remember them as they were.

Like riding a bike. 

There wasn’t time for fear in those first frantic yet surreal hours after they arrived. When they were birthed it stemmed the fear that I carried with me while I was delivering them, and washed it away. As fast as they were here, I forgot. 

But when the day came to go home, a new kind of fear reared its ugly head. 

The, “oh…they do actually trust me to do this parenting thing,” thoughts. “But I can’t even spin a hula hoop on my hips and I can count the number of nursery rhymes I remember on only one hand.”

My apprehension to the entire operation was crippling. 

It wasn’t until my first year of parenting that I truly realized the extent of my brokenness. Suffocated by fear, plagued by selfishness, I wondered how I would ever succeed at being a parent. 

How could I ever be trusted to parent a child? Was there ever a person less cut out to be a mother?

I walked through the hospital doors.

I leaned over the front desk and signed myself in on the visitor’s sheet. I was directed to the elevator. I pressed my floor number and waited for the doors to close. The elevator hummed, the beeps indicating each floor that was notched on my steady ascent. 

The doors opened.

I forget that God is a creator. A maker of all things. There is nothing new under the sun. He knows the ropes. He knows His stuff. 

“He makes beautiful things. He makes beautiful things out of the dust….”

He makes beautiful things out of our fear, our dismay. Out of our brokenness, He makes a new way. 

Out of the curls and pains and terror of labor, He makes the release and sweetness of delivery. A crushing, excruciating process is wrought and finally finished with joy and deliverance. Pain lines the very heart of hope that beats fast, even underneath of agony and despair.

It beats true.

We just have to find it, sometimes. 

Out of the people who are hurt and broken, He makes them love. And they love until the hurt goes away. I know, I’ve seen it.

And now my friend will have everything feel new for her, like the first time for all of it. Her dreams have new windows with light streaming in. Light filled with visions of the future. Of baking cookies at Christmas, tiny pink socks, becoming the best of confidants and picking out a prom dress. 

A new world open. It is both simultaneous and sudden while yet tedious and crafted. 

The parents who parent well are the ones who let go and let their fear turn into something better. Something greater. Who hope in tomorrow while passionate about today. Who let the fear turn into something beautiful. 

A fear of time running away turns into a greater need to cling to our babies and savor those moments that tick by. 

A fear of hurting them somehow leads to loving them until the hurt is blotted out within our own hearts. It leads to an appreciation for mercy and grace and forgiveness. 

A fear of not getting it right leads to a profound desire to try again on the days that you weep into your hands, exhausted. It leads to letting new mercies wash over us each morning.

Fear turns into something beautiful. Something new.

I scooped up that new baby into my arms and saw it. The delight on my friend’s ethereal, shining face as the sun streamed in to welcome the afternoon. Her husband beaming. And I thought that our hearts just might burst at the thought of so much hope. 

Hope is really the thing that breaks you. 

Once you grasp the fear, you find your way through to hope, praying to be held together. Pain lines the very heart of hope that beats fast even underneath of agony and pain. It beats true. It holds you together, yes.

But you find that hope is actually a thing that splits you. It breaks off into a thousand shards and scatters, taking root into the old and the broken and the rugged.

It takes shape and it grows. 

Into something new. 

“He makes beautiful things out of us…”

Dedicated to sweet, perfect Cecilia Ann.

Welcome to the world, little dear.

May you always have hope. You are ours.