Help My Unbelief

A very short musing, as it's getting late & I am once again trying to force myself back into the swing of writing. (One of these days, I'll be consistent. Promise.)

He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?” -Mark 4:39-40.

No faith. Do I still have no faith.

Do I, Lord? Not just little faith, but do I actually have none at all? Has the storm taken up so much of my range of vision that my faith is actually gone? Has my everyday life & my anger at the Church & my gross misunderstanding of You gotten so out of control that I could possibly be one of those disciples? Do I have no faith left?

I want to believe, Lord. Help my unbelief.

I want to believe that I have nothing to prove. I want to believe that Your love for me knows no bounds, that Your grace over me is deeper than deep and wider than wide. I want to believe that You are here in the middle of my chaos and that You uphold me with Your right hand. I want to believe that I am Your beloved and I want to believe that nothing I could do, nothing I could say, nothing I could think could ever take that away. I want to believe that I can still believe that Your promises are for me, too.

I want to stop making my relationship with You contingent on my politics, because I know that I am saved by grace through faith, and I know that Your promises to me are yea and amen.

But when I said that I love You and I love Your people and I didn't think they were any more wrong than I was, I was cut off from You. I was told that I couldn't use my gifts, that I needed to choose or change my mind.

We weren't the same anymore, You and I. I couldn't raise my hands or fall to my knees in unbridled praise. I didn't know who You were anymore. Were you the Abba I'd been told I could count on, or were You the Judge I should fear and obey without question?

Sometimes I find myself coming back to You and asking who, what, why. Most of the time I don't hear Your answer over my cries. I'll catch a glimpse of You sometimes, calling out from down the shoreline, asking me to follow You and be a fisher of men. No dogma, no institution, just me walking in Your holy footsteps.

I want to believe that You are here and Your arms are holding me and You are the balm over my wounds.

I want to believe these things, but maybe I really have no faith. If it only takes faith the size of a mustard seed to move a mountain, then what is mine? Dust swimming in a certain slant of sunlight? A molecule of oxygen? Help my unbelief.

Three Cups of Tea

"The first time you take tea with someone, you are a stranger. The second time, you are an honored guest. The third time, you are family." (Balti proverb)
My downtown apartment is dark tonight - the light above the stove and the amber glow of the streetlight in the living room window are plenty. It's rather bizarre to be out of work right now, to be home before midnight, to make myself anything resembling a "real" supper at a "reasonable" hour, & it's nights like these that I find myself wandering aimlessly between chores, between rooms, between Facebook pages, attempting to slow my brain down sometime before the clock strikes three & sleep becomes more pointless.
Tonight, like every other night, is a struggle to keep from opening one more Chrome tab & wasting time somewhere that's not my kitchen. But tonight, the rain outside my window smells of longing & change & peace. Tonight, when that rain started coming down in a drip followed by a drizzle followed by a downpour that had even the most devout walker searching for a ride home from work, I could feel tea & bathwater & a book calling my name.
Tonight, I am taking three cups of tea with Jesus.
I make myself comfortable for our meeting. Work uniform shed, replaced with a men's button-down shirt. Hymns playing. Hunger assuaged. The tea kettle on my stove looks like it belongs in a kitchen far more rustic than my own, clashing horribly with dishwashers and microwaves and Keurig machines.
The first time you take tea with someone, you are a stranger. Even after walking with someone for seven years, sometimes they can feel like a complete stranger. I don't call or write as often as I should. We have some catching up to do, Jesus & I. I hope He is comfortable - I cleaned the apartment as thoroughly as I had time for this morning, but there are still a few undone dishes in the sink, bags strewn on the living room floor (not yet unpacked from my brief vacation last weekend), laundry in the corner of my bedroom not yet put away. I'm probably a little too casual for a date with a Savior right now, in an overlarge button-down & my underwear, my hair soaking wet from the bath, face crimson & drenched in sweat.
I pour my first cup - chai, milk & honey on my tongue with Indian spice, though perhaps black tea is a bad idea at 9pm - & sit down with Him, get to know Him, let Him get to know me. Me: workaholic overcaffeinated self-isolating mess with a heart for justice & nowhere to serve. Him: Son of God, Savior of the world, misunderstood cultural icon. We get past the awkwardness, past my uncertainty & discomfort. We smile & laugh. I lean forward, engaged, my legs still politely crossed under the table. I pour a second cup of tea.
The second, you are an honored guest. I am a friend of Christ. Sometimes I forget that, & sometimes it takes months or years of inconsistency & a rude awakening to remind me that I am still His. But that's the beauty of grace - when I fall & scrape my knees, He offers a hand to help me up & we resume our journey. I've wasted years on the ground, angry with Him for letting me fall, refusing to join Him again, afraid of being hurt again. As I pour my second cup of tea - appropriately named Tension Tamer - I confess this to Him. I'm still afraid to tell Him these things at first - could He stop loving me? could He walk out on me if I say the wrong thing? He, after all, is above me, His ways are higher than my own. How much of my wrongness can He tolerate? He only continues to listen, smiling at my habit of hiding behind my mug & averting my eyes when nerves overtake me. He reminds me that I was the one who let Him in - He won't judge me for the things I say or the way I feel, or ask me to stop talking. I smile, loosen my posture, & pour my third cup of tea.
The third, you are family. It's no use hiding from the One who already knows where & why. All I can do is to fall into the embrace of the One who is at once my Father and my brother and the Spirit guiding me, to ask forgiveness for leaving, to joyfully receive what I already know is mine - while the son was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him. My third cup of tea, chamomile that is beginning to lull me to sleep now as the stroke of one is not far off, relaxes my mind & my tongue. I do not need to vocalize the questions I have, the reservations - do You still love me if I'm a workaholic who sleeps in most Sundays? if I'm liberal? if I'm on birth control? if I'm anorexic & depressed & don't always love You back? - the answers are in His eyes. I've managed to curl up into a ball in my chair, my arms around my legs. He pushes His own chair back & comes to my side, running one hand through my hair to push it away from my face, the other around my own hand to remind me that He will not leave until I ask Him to. I curl further into His embrace, not sure why I ever left.
To think that all this took was three cups of tea.

On Giving Up

I'm a terribly inconsistent blogger, & this is yet another attempt to fix that. A dear friend of mine made a resolution for the New Year to blog twice a week, & she's kept up with it quite well so far. I unfortunately don't have the leisure time required to blog multiple times a week, but I'm at least going to do my best to post here on a weekly basis.


Earlier, I posted the following status on Facebook: "We'll never understand God's love until we stop defining it in terms of us & our sin. His pure & perfect love has nothing to do with what we've done (or not done). He just loves us." Far too often I've been guilty of that terrible - some portray it as entirely unpardonable - sin of doubt. I've forgotten my first love. I've wondered if Papa still loves me. I've been defining my Abba's love in terms of me, my sin, the things I've done. I was turning unconditional, eternal, selfless, sacrificial, Fatherly love into something that could fall short, something that would end or give up after I had hit some "quota". I was turning the God of the universe into someone who would say "sorry honey, you've sinned too much, no more love for you".

Who am I to put you in a box, Lord? Who am I to limit Your love, Your power, Your redemptive grace? You are limitless. To even suggest that You could ever stop loving me would go against everything You are.

I think I'm giving up on trying to wrap my head around my Father's love. I know I can't define it in terms of me, but I'm not going to try putting it in terms of Him, the God who gave everything to be with me. As soon as I try to comprehend that love, I'm limiting it. When I make it something I can understand, it ceases to be something I can worship. I was made to stand in awe of my Creator, not to control Him, not to keep Him working on my schedule or to make Him something I can wrap my feeble human brain around. There's a reason that He's God and I'm not.

"³⁸ For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future,nor any powers, ³⁹ neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." -Romans 8:38-39

On "Fruit"

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” -Galatians 5:22-23
When I first made Jesus' acquaintance, at the tender and impressionable age of sixteen, I quickly got into the habit of living out my weeks in preparation for Sunday mornings - and that was in large part due to this verse (or rather, the misinterpretation thereof).
My first church was a quaint little white building off Leeman Highway with a rugged cross nailed to the front wall, a few chips in the paint job, a creaky wooden porch out front that looked out onto a virtually unused railroad, the shipyard, and my small town's tiny stretch of highway. It was in this building that I first heard the full story of Christ, of His birth and life and death and resurrection. It was here that I learned of His love. It was in that third-floor Sunday school room that I first encountered this passage, and it was here that I first blatantly missed the meaning of Scripture.
Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. Self-control. 0 - 10.
After we read this passage in Galatians one Sunday morning, these words were copied on the board. (To this day, if I try to recall what the fruits of the Spirit are, I always forget one. I still count them on my fingers -- yes, counting on my fingers at twenty-two -- knowing there should be nine, but only ever getting to eight.) The pastor then launched into a mini-sermon on these "fruits", and this was the day that our community church met the "fruit meter". My class of 12- to 17-year-old Christians learned that day to measure ourselves by our works, by how good we were at expressing these nine "fruits" in our lives. We could never be a 10, we were told, until we were with Christ; as long as we are still inhabiting these fragile human forms, we are not entirely perfect -- but every Sunday morning for the next several weeks, 9am Sunday school began with a confession of where we had landed for the week, on a scale ranging from 0 - 9.9. Rarely did any of us confess to falling below a 6 or 7. We would live out every moment of the week in preparation for that moment in Sunday school when it would come time for us to speak a number indicating how "good" we had been that week.
This was when I first missed the big picture of Scripture. Now, if this "fruit meter" concept had been pitched to a group of adults or college students who knew how to read Scripture critically, who really knew what this verse meant, the message could probably have been a lot more effective. To myself and my adolescent comrades, however, the larger message was far too easy to miss.
The fruit of the Spirit. I don't remember deconstructing this verse in the context of other verses. There is certainly Scriptural support for the viewpoint that I had at the time. "Produce fruit in keeping with repentance." (Matt. 3:8) "By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them." (Matt. 7:16-20) The Gospels command us to bear these good fruits. But these same Gospels also remind us that it is not by our own efforts that we can produce these good fruits; that it is only when we are in Christ, in tune with His heart, that these things are going to be truly evident in our lives. "Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me, and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." (John 15:4-5) We are nothing more than branches, the extension of the living Vine. If we do not remain in Him, we have nothing in which to take root that will give us the life needed to produce good, pure fruit.
Okay, so this conclusion isn't that hard to draw, right? But as a sixteen-year-old who hadn't even read the New Testament in full yet, who was just getting to know this Jesus character, I needed these things spelled out for me. This scale that I now had to step on every Sunday morning only affirmed my previous mindset that it was all about how "good" I was, what I was doing, what I could do better. Six and a half years later, I'm still reminding myself that it's not about that -- that when I measure myself by the things I am doing in my own strength, they come to naught. I'm still reminding myself daily that these "fruits" should be the natural outcome of being rooted in Christ, that His grace is not an excuse for my imperfections, but a covering over them and a new life allowing this good fruit to come naturally from me. Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. Self-control. (Yes, I still needed to reference the verse that time. If I can't even remember on my own what the fruits are, how could I ever produce them on my own?)

Just taking a moment...

The one thing about God that never fails to bring me to my knees is His love.
Granted, His love is really everything there is. When we think of what God is supposed to be, that’s the first word that comes to mind, isn’t it? Even someone who doesn’t know Him knows that He is love.
But sometimes we forget just how big, and simultaneously how personal, that love is. The Creator of the universe holds us in the palm of His hand. The hands that cradle the stars are the hands that bled for us. I know this, but I can’t always wrap my head around it. & that’s the beauty of it. It’s so incomprehensible, the only right reaction is to stand in awe.
The God who sees all the ugliness in me calls me Hepzibah (“my delight is in her”). I am His lily among thorns, His beloved, His child. The God who could hold all my sin against me cradles me in His loving embrace & calls me His.
Lord I'm amazed by You, how You love me…

(I may write more on this later.)

On Worth, Or Lack Thereof.

I'm going to start this with something that you might not want to hear.
As a human being in & of yourself... you have no intrinsic value.Think about it for a minute. Compared to the entire universe, you are a speck. To your government, you are a number, a statistic, a few dollars in taxes, a Social Security check. Outside of the community in which you live & the social circles in which you spend your time, few people know your name. Unless you have a pen pal or distant relative in some other country, there's probably no one more than a few thousand miles away who knows of your existence. To most of the world, you're virtually invisible, & when you leave it, you'll leave few marks save for the children you may have born, the names you might have passed on, & the six feet of earth housing that shell that once carried you.
As far as theology is concerned, I've always struggled with the idea that humanity is worthless. Personally, I've certainly had a history of feeling worthless, but I can't tell another person that they're not worth something. Praise the Lord that the Gospel isn't about that. In fact, the Gospel is entirely the opposite.It's true that in & of ourselves, we have no intrinsic value. The world pins a value on us based on the things we do (or don't do) - the pricetag is attained over time, & can change with any action or inaction. Without these things, we have no value. In the larger scope of things, we are dust, & the work of our hands is for naught. "Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 2:11)
Now, here's the beauty of it. In this same existence in which we have no value, we have infinite value for one reason: we are a creation of the King of Kings, wholly and dearly loved. In this same moment in which we are worthless, we are priceless simply because He loves us.
Scripture speaks endlessly of the love lavished on us by our Father. In Song of Songs, the "beloved" or "bride" (also used very commonly throughout Scripture to refer to the Church) is described, just to name a few examples, as "like a lily among thorns" (2:2), "all beautiful... without flaw" (4:7), "my dove, my perfect one" (6:9). In Matthew, Jesus himself says, "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" (6:26) To the One who created us, we are worth the world. To Him we are worth life as a servant when He is King. To Him we are worth death when He lives forever. To Him we are worth everything that He does not deserve. Praise & glory & honor to His name.
I began this post by telling you that in & of yourself, you have no intrinsic value, & that the world places value on you according to what you do (or don't do). Even to God, your worth does not come from yourself. Your worth comes from Him. He places a pricetag on you, just like the world does, but His reads SOLD. "You are not your own; you were bought at a price." (1 Cor. 6:19-20) His life, His death, His resurrection, His salvation, His grace, His mercy, His love have paid the price for you. You are worth all these things & more to the King of glory, not because of anything you've done, not because of your job or your looks or the family or class or neighborhood you were born into, but because of Him. In Genesis He created us from the dust, & in Christ He has made us worth more than the most precious jewels regardless of our sin & our shame.
Far too many times, I've been told by friends that they feel worthless - for working dead-end jobs, for pursuing degrees that won't get them any further than more dead-end jobs, for self-image issues, for family issues, for not being the object of some earthly person's affections, & the list goes on. I've been in the same boat, & I always wished I knew what to say to them. Tonight I say to them, & to myself, more than anything in this entire world I want you to know how much He loves you. I want you to know just how priceless you are. Most days, I still can't wrap my head around the fact that the same God who holds the world in the palm of His hand WANTED to die for me just so I could have some faint inkling of how much He loves me. I know it's hard for you. No one ever said that belief was an easy thing. Trust me - no, trust Him. You are everything to Him, just let Him take you in.
This entire post sounded so much better in my head, there was so much more I wanted to say, but I can't even remember half of it now, I'm just so caught up in a Paul-esque doxology right now & I love it.
Blessings & peace & so much of His love to you all.

On Forgiveness.

Hey, blogoverse! How's life?
So I haven't written in here since my intro post, & I don't have anything in particular to ruminate on right now. But I figured that maybe if I started writing, I could just let the keyboard lead me where it may, & maybe something worth posting will emerge.
For those of you who don't know much about my life as of right now... well, it's pretty ridiculous, mostly in the best ways. I live with two pretty fabulous roommates, Angela and Sara. Sure, we don't get along swimmingly all the time (Sara and I will be the first to admit that, as we've had more than our share of spats in the five months we've spent here, & I'm sure we'll have more in the remaining seven), but I love them both dearly. Really.
Sara is about five years my senior, & is very much a mother hen, which is wonderful sometimes (I've filled that role in a lot of my living situations, & I'll admit it's kind of nice to get a bit of a break from it) but sometimes we just butt heads a little bit. We're both pretty aware that we're just very different kinds of people, & a lot of people wonder how we manage to live together without killing each other. I've been asked about it several times, & I'm sure she has as well. I ask myself the same thing. Again, it's not that we dislike each other by any means. My roommate is wonderful. We just need to give each other lots of patience & grace, which I think we both forget to exercise on occasion. Forgiving others, as God in Christ has forgiven us. Loving as He has loved us. How often do any of us consciously remember to apply this to our lives? Not just Sara & myself. How many times do I neglect to forgive the customer at work who has offended me? How many times do I try to justify holding a grudge against a friend who's wronged me? How many times do I hold onto the hurt from a boy who's broken my heart?
Then Peter came up to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?"
Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
"Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
"The servant fell on his knees before him. 'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.' The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
"But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. 'Pay back what you owe me!' he demanded.
"His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'
"But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.
"Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?' In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
"This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart." (Matthew 18:21-35, NIV)
This passage has always had a way of convicting me. It's not just the big picture of it, either. It's all the little things about it that get to me. I usually hate bullet-point lists, but right now it's the only way I can make my thoughts on this relatively organized.

• The debt that the servant had to the master was so great -- ten thousand talents would be equal to millions of dollars. No servant could possibly own enough property that selling off everything he had would pay off such a debt. 
• Similarly, our debt to God is a fairly large sum -- you know, the whole creation, breath-of-life thing. Oh, & there's that whole becoming-a-man-and-dying-for-our-sins bit... :) 
• Yet the master forgives it as soon as he is asked. No hesitation. & not just "hey, it's fine, pay me back when you can". He cancels it. Every last cent of a several-million-dollar debt, erased, done.
• On the other hand, the debt that this man is owed by another servant (& only just now did I really process this one -- fellow servant, a man on his own level, as opposed to his master) amounts to nothing more than a few dollars. A drop in the bucket.
• After the servant has been so greatly, so extensively, so undeservingly forgiven, he approaches someone on his own level for payment of a debt hardly consequential, & seeks repayment with such vengeance -- to the point of violence, & throwing his fellow servant in jail, though he has no right or reason to do this after the abundant mercy he's just been shown.
• The big picture, of course -- "Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had mercy on you?" God has forgiven all our debt, an entire lifetime's worth that we'll never be able to repay -- He doesn't ask us to. If we ask for that mercy, He cancels everything at the drop of a hat. Do we embrace the grace given us & pass it on? Why do we hold back forgiveness for so little when we have been forgiven for so much?

I'm certainly not going to claim that I'm perfect. I hold my share of grudges. I hold back a lot of forgiveness, & I try to justify myself in that. I've spent nights lying awake fighting with God, trying to tell Him that He doesn't understand, it's so much more than that -- but it's not. When it comes right down to it, He does understand -- He was there -- & it's nothing more than that. God has forgiven me a debt that I could never hope to repay, & I have no right to withhold that forgiveness from anyone else.