Possibilities

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”  This is the first and greatest command...

Mark 12:30

What if we just loved God?

What if, just for a week, just for a day, just for an hour, we let go of the ‘coulds’ and ‘shoulds’ and ‘ought tos’, we resigned from the all-consuming business of image-maintenance and expectation management - we sent our religion packing?  What if our focus slid from self to Savior – not out of guilt, or pretentious, pious habit, but because we like it?  We like Him.  We like how it feels to lift our weary busy eyes from this loud and fickle world, resting them instead on the starkly simple beauty of His holiness.    

What if we softened in the Presence of our Maker?  What if we allowed the stress and the tension of daily life to drip out of our shoulders and down our backs, over our shoes and down the sidewalk?  What if we breathed every breath as though oxygen was laced with the potent goodness of God, lifting our chests with life, filling our souls and our lungs with the raw and utter sweetness of living?  (What if we knew the sweetness of living could be so easily tasted?)

What if we enjoyed God?  Not pretended to, as you do with people you chat to politely while waiting for your real friends.  What if we enjoyed Him – genuinely - as though He were the friend we’d been waiting for?  What if we liked to be with Him?  Not to ask, not to question, not to request, not to blame, not to wrestle, not to learn, but, maybe, just to walk.  To settle in to a comfortable rhythm of affection, His steps matching our own, awash in the fondness we share.  To ask His opinion or laugh at a joke. To remark on the loveliness of sunset.

What if loving God was the driving force behind the whole of our existence?  What if we allowed the Creative Genius behind quarks and nebulas and tiny infant noses, the Writer of every mathematical equation and the Author of every good story to tether Himself to our hearts and souls and minds and strengths?  What if we became so enamored with Him, so lost in His love that the line separating our selves from His wavered and blurred, slipping into extinction with each passing day?  What if our time with Him was so easy and common and frequent that we picked up His habits?  Would we find His words spilling from our lips, His hands and our fingerprints reaching out to every creature around us with compassion and kindness?  Would love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control flow not from us but through us, as light from a bulb or heat from a flame?

What if He was the first thought every morning and the last thought before sleep?  What if we let go of our trying and fussing, our fretting and struggling with our admittedly imperfect selves and let the anxiety we bear over pleasing Him melt into simply being pleased by Him?  What if we let perfect love drive out fear?  What if we discovered His yoke was easy and His burden was light?  What if we knew, down deep in the very darkened depths of our souls that He would never, never, never, never, never leave us or forsake us?  What if we believed what God said?

Would loving Him be enough?  Could we live on the sumptuous riches of God’s love, if it meant poverty in every other area of our lives?  Could we have nothing and yet posses Everything?  Would the knowledge of His relentless affection be worth every trial, every pain - the loss of every limb, every lover, every other pseudo-life-giving substitute we hold dear?  In the light of all possible occurrences, good or bad, hedging the road from this life to the next, instead of asking, “Why?” could we simply nod, “Yes – and can I be with You?” 

What if we loved God with ALL our heart and ALL our soul and ALL our mind and ALL our strength?  Could the world resist Him, then?  Could we?

What if we just loved God?

“If you continue to love Jesus, nothing much can go wrong with you, and I hope you may always do so.”

-C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children

Yoga Babies...

I’ve been breathing through Warrior Two. 

I can feel it in my pinkie toes and thighs; there’s a tiny trembling cramp at the base of my shoulder blade.  Elegance has settled in my wrists, but my chin tends to wander - my neck is tight and a little awkward from pressing it back into position.  Now, we arch back to Reverse Warrior, pulling taut the strings of muscle running from ribcage to hip. Warrior Two, again, then straightening and reaching, reaching, reaching out and down.  Triangle pose.  Today, it feels good.

Some days, it doesn’t.  Some days I make excuses and pretend it’s not Yoga Tuesday.  I go running instead or put it off until it’s too late to bother.  Yoga feels unnecessary or tiresome.  Sometimes, I think it’s boring.  It’s just stretching, after all.

But stretching is good for me.  It conditions the muscle fibers I use for everything else in life, from eating to running to shopping.  The gentle strain of stretching brings grace, a flexibility and fluidity to everyday movements that decreases the risk of injury and increases my ability to react to stressful situations with less stressful responses.  It creates space in places where space hasn’t been, space I can enjoy and fill, if I like.  Space I can love leaving empty. 

Yoga isn’t just about stretching.  It’s about strength and balance, too.  Patiently holding poses quietly strengthens muscles that make balance possible.  Remaining still can be as beneficial to a healthy body as running fast.  The race is won just as much in moments of mighty motionlessness as in leg-pumping, lung-tearing, sweaty-eyed sprints.      

Life is often a string of one breathless sprint after another and I’m only learning now that my spirit needs to stretch as much as my limbs.  Maybe more.  Not an outer Upward Dog or Child’s Pose, but an inner steady arching of my heart up to God.

Isaiah knew it.  Looking through prophetic eyes to future days of famine and ruin, he found the secret to surviving such painful days: the patient holding of worship postures before the Lord:

“You will keep in perfect peace

Him whose mind is steadfast,

Because he trusts in You.”

Isaiah 26:3

 “This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says:

‘In repentance and rest is your salvation,

In quietness and trust is your strength.’”

Isaiah 30:15

Repentance and rest. Quietness and trust.  A steadfast mind.  Yoga of the soul.

Stretching is not easy.  When I am out of practice, too busy for intentional movement of any kind, my attempts to lengthen tight muscles meet resistance.  It hurts.  I can’t follow through the way I wish I could.  My heart is the same.  Repentance is the lengthening of my soul.  If I don’t find time for it on a regular basis, it feels awkward and tight when I come back.  It hurts.  My desire to change meets resistance and I’m afraid that follow through won’t be what I wish it was - I’ve already failed so many times.

But, the gentle strain of repentance, the opening up of myself before God, is the only way I know to find grace.  Grace that brings flexibility and fluidity to my everyday movements.  Grace that decreases the risk of injury – my injury to others, my perception of their injuries to me. It creates space for forgiveness and restoration, space that hasn’t been.  Space that needs to be.  It’s in that space I find rest.  In that rest I can finally understand the depth of my salvation.

Trust is the strength posture that brings balance.  I find it through a steadfast mind, focused on the words spoken to me through God’s Word.  They tell me who God is.  What He said.  How He behaves.  How He expects me to behave.  Who I am.  I cannot trust my own inclinations or ideas about such things – they knock me off balance every time.  It is the mighty quiet stillness of relentless belief in the character of God - trust - despite whatever winds may blow that is the source of my strength.  No storm can knock me down, no tempest throw me off course.  He will hold me in perfect peace.

Family and friends all around have been recently sprinkled with the magic of tiny fingers and toes, little noses and soft spots under super-fine baby hair.  The stork, it seems, has been working overtime.   I held a delivery today, a brand new person clothed in flawless skin and sweetly scented potential.  He’s been breathing our air for only one day – so many more still spread out before him.  He spent his time in my arms sleeping and squirming, yawning and stretching.  Stretching is instinctive to him – he hasn’t forgotten to be intentional about it.  When I had believed in God only a day or two, with so many others spread out before me, stretching was instinctive to me, too.  Repentance and trust, prayer and Bible reading were as natural as breathing.

But I am grown now.  Years can have a stiffening effect on body and soul and sometimes I forget to bend.  Life feels like one sprint after another and I am often tempted to believe that the race is won by simply running.  Perhaps if I run from one need to the next, I’ll have a fighting chance of fixing a broken world.  

Running in my own strength, however, may get me from place to place, but not without awkwardness or pain, injuries that prevent me from being effective when I get where I’m going.  God made me for balance.  I can run, but not without rest; I can speak, but not without pauses for silence, serve but not without grace born of repentance.  Through it all, I’ve got to breathe, inhaling His steadfast strength into every space He opens, releasing stress and injury with every exhalation.  He bends my soul ‘til it’s supple, and my faith is once again brimming with sweetly scented potential.  When I am limber enough to fall on my knees in worship, truly taking a child’s pose, He lifts me up.  Then, I’m a warrior, too.  

Cinderella in Wonderland (or Down the Rabbit Hole in Muddy Glass Slippers...)

“Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken, nor my covenant of peace be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you” Isaiah 54:10

So….. I may have fallen down a manhole last night.  Sadly, I’m not kidding. 

It was late, and I was parked in an unfamiliar neighborhood.  Nervous about getting a parking ticket, I had almost moved my car about five times over the course of the evening, but each time had gotten distracted and forgotten.  Eventually, it was too late to bother. 

Now it was after midnight, and the neighborhood was quiet, save for the distant occasional whoosh of late-night drivers on the main road.  I walked quickly but gingerly to prevent my heels from clacking loudly on the sleepy pavement, keys interlocked and jutting from my fingers until my car was in sight.  To my relief, no tickets mocked me from my windshield and no muggers stole my purse.  All potential dangers had passed.

Or so I thought.  Approaching the car, I briefly considered the acrobatic trick where you enter through the drivers’ side door arms first, shoving purse, bags, etc. onto the passenger seat before making the quick twist to sit, hopefully landing squarely behind the steering wheel, having avoided a head butt to the rear-view mirror or a game of Twister with said bags and the gear shift.  But, it was late and I was tired.  Acrobatics were for busy afternoons and speedy get-aways.  I had time. 

I stepped onto the curb by the passenger door, inserted my key into the lock and BAM!  The ground collapsed.  Suddenly, I was looking up at the key in the door, one leg dangling free into recesses beyond the iron ring I straddled, the other awkwardly shoving my knee into the space between the corner of my jaw and my right ear.  A gnarled tree root pressed mud into my palm.  I felt a bit like Alice, halfway on her way to Wonderland, one leg down the rabbit hole, the other awkwardly stuck in the reality of this world, caught between the unlikely and the mundane.   Alice at least got biscuits and tea with the Mad Hatter for her trouble.  My unwelcome adventure left me muddied and bruised.

As I drove home, having extricated myself from the manhole and trying to soothe my throbbing dignity with hopes that no one saw, I wanted to be angry.  But, who to blame?  The city of Washington for placing a manhole on a quiet neighborhood curb?  My colleagues for not showing me where to park?  God, for somehow not alerting me that danger lurked near the passenger side door?

It occurred to me then how often we expect God to keep us from every potential harm.  We praise Him loudly when we, or our loved ones, are kept safe in the face of physical danger, are healed from painful diseases, or are financially rescued in a crisis.  We base our perception of His love for us on our circumstances: God kept me safe – He must really love me.  More than that, we measure our love for Him on the same scale: How could I love a God who would allow me to be ill, injured, or heartbroken?  Can I trust a God who would let me fall (down a manhole)? It seems that sometimes our entire spiritual lives are reduced to asking for God’s favor (read: a comfortable, stress/pain-free life) and judging His character on whether we receive it or not. If life is good, God is good – if life is hard, God doesn’t care.

The problem is, God is not my fairy-godmother.  His role in my life is not to wave His magic wand over the rags of my circumstances so that they disappear in a cloud of sparkles, replaced by ball gowns and glass slippers, morphing my everyday self into the belle of the ball.  For too long we’ve been convinced that if our mice were only stallions and our plain old ordinary garden gourds sweet rides instead, our dreams could come true.  We expect happily after to be just around the next corner.  And we get mildly irritated when it isn’t. 

The truth is, life is hard sometimes.  We get unexpected news, unexpected frustrations, unexpected holes lurking along the curbs of our otherwise well-ordered lives.  We prepare for all contingencies (parking tickets, muggers), trying to guarantee safety, never once thinking a manhole may lay under our next step.  Then suddenly, we’re down on the ground and dazed, gazing up at the world from an all-together awkward angle and wondering what happened.

What happened is that God, while legitimately concerned about my health, wealth and happiness, is actually more concerned about who I am than what I have.  I'm going to fall down sometimes, whether by my own doing or by circumstances I can't control.  God is still God if I do.  Whether my life is a fairy tale or whether it resembles a dark and twisty rabbit trail, I don't run to God simply for Him to wave a magic wand.  He's not a fairy godmother.  He’s the Prince. 

He’s got a Kingdom to run, a long-term vision for me and for those around me that far exceeds my understanding.  He makes His love known to me the way lovers do, in the little things.  Tiny heartfelt gifts – a breathless kiss of sunset, a diamond flash of light dancing on leaves in the afternoon - timely words whispered from His Word to my heart just when I need them.  If I look for Him in the realms outside of circumstances, knowing that He meets me there, I need never doubt His presence inside the hurts that come, whether He exercises His authority over them the way I expect Him to or not. 

There are days He pours His blessings over me and I stand breathless and dripping beneath the torrent, worship rising and bursting in response.  There are days when life collapses beneath me; worship is still the appropriate response.  Hard times come – it’s the way of life.  The point is, God is good either way.  His reputation does not rest on my circumstances.  He is good when I fall down a hole and He is good when I sidestep it neatly.  Mud and bruises do not challenge His character - they challenge mine.      

My life is spent seeking Him, Himself, not simply His blessings, because the sacred tender knowing of His heart is what gives me the ability to rejoice when life is good and to mourn with hope when life is not.  I am confident God knows what He’s doing.  He has His Kingdom in hand, and I cannot possibly understand all the intricacies involved.   My everyday me is being transformed into the belle of the ball, but My Prince does so from the inside out, and He’ll use whatever it takes to uncover the beauty He knows is there. Sometimes He uses ball gowns and glass slippers, and sometimes, just a manhole will do.    

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,  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

Showing Up

It’s January 2, and I’m showing up.  

For years I’ve told people that 90% of the Christian life is just “showing up”, and it’s true.  We often think that the power to change the world with ideas and intentions is ours; we assume full responsibility for transforming ourselves and others.  On good days, we humbly swat away praise (we secretly know is ours) for a harsh world now gentler because of our interaction with it - on bad ones, we lie crushed under the guilt of our impotence to fix it.  Either way, the burden of change presses hard on us.

The truth is, I don’t know how to change someone’s life.  I don’t have a five-year sustainable plan for changing the world.  I barely have a grasp on how to change myself.  This burden of change is one I cannot even slip my fingers under or my soul around.  But, I do know how to show up.

I know how to show up with soup for a family undergoing a crisis.  I know how to show up with arms empty and available for hugging or carrying boxes, with hands for cooking or washing dishes, the same hands that hold other hands or wipe tears away.  I know how to show up with kleenex and banana bread, coffee, tea and me - my ears for listening, my shoulders for leaning on, my heart for loving.  I’ve learned to show up in God’s presence with no agenda but to love Him and listen, to read what He says and do it as best I can.  I have no doubt that He is the One changing lives, the world - me.  I just show up, and He lets me come along for the ride.   

Many of us are now recovering from and beginning to put away remnants of the season that celebrates a time when God showed up.  Jesus’ good friend John told the Christmas story from a unique perspective:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made... The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:1-3, 14)

I like John’s version because it reminds me that Jesus is not simply confined to a Christmas manger or an Easter cross.  He is the Son of God and He is God, a concept that is mind-bending at least, especially when He adds that He and the Father are one, though somehow the Father remains greater (John 14).  Seeing Christ as the Word of God, being clearly spoken from before the beginning of time until this very minute, smoothes out some of those wrinkles.

Words are the embodiment of our thoughts.  They are bridges carrying our passions, fears and ideas from the bony prison of our brains to the bony prisons of others.  They stand independently but rely on us for their existence - our words are extensions of ourselves, minute manifestations of our minds, communicating the mysteries within us to a world incapable of fully understanding us from the outside.  

When God showed up, He came as the physical manifestation of His own mind.  For centuries, He had used prophets to play the bridges for His passions and ideas.  His Word flowed through lesser lips: 

“Comfort, comfort my people, 

   says your God. 

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, 

   and proclaim to her 

that her hard service has been completed, 

   that her sin has been paid for...”

(Isaiah 40:1-2)

Then, in a stroke of genius, the Word once spoken leapt off the page, becoming flesh and dwelling among us.  The God who spoke comfort became comfort.  The God who set the price of our sin became the payment.  The tenderness in His tone became arms empty and available for hugging or carrying burdens, hands that held other hands and wiped the tears away.  The Word was heard, showing up as ears attuned to cries trapped and echoing within our bony prisons, shoulders of sinew and strength upon which the whole universe could lean.  He spoke Himself into a heart beating with red blood cells and plasma and love.

This is the God who has asked me to show up.  He still speaks, His words flowing again through lesser lips, now typed out by faltering fingers dependent on spellcheck and the delete button for clarity.  He is the Speaker, I am the secretary.  He has asked me to write what He speaks to my heart and although I am afraid (of getting it wrong - of getting it right and humbly swatting away praise I secretly think is mine), He reminds me that the responsibility to change the world with ideas and intentions is not mine.  It is His.  My responsibility is to show up.

So, here I am.  And here you are.  God said that where two or three of us are gathered in His name, He will join us (Matthew 18:20).  This year I am resolved to remain there, in His presence and yours, with no agenda but to listen and to love, to read what He says and do it as best I can, to write what I hear Him speak, no matter how daunting the task.  I will leave the burden of change on His strong and sinewy shoulders, for I am powerless to transform anyone.  I am capable only of listening for words that I pray will leap off the page transforming us who hear into the embodiment of His mind.  

I’ll be here. 

I hope you show up, too.   

Christmas in the Sand (December 23, 2010)

It still gets me.  I’m still overwhelmed.  I cannot remember the days before I knew the story, and even now the details seem as though they ought to be mundane, they are so familiar.  And yet they are not.  They’re ridiculous.  Amazing.  Brilliant.  Unbelievable. Breath-taking.

Forgive me for my incredulity.  Perhaps the Christmas story sits in its usual December place with you.  Perhaps shepherds and angels and the star waft through the cracks in your hurried soul like the comforting scent of spiced apple cider or gingerbread.  They are the shadows of home that rise up this time of year, the “Christmas Spirit” one is generally expected to feel and share.  It’s a well-worn story, one that has perhaps grown soft and a little threadbare in your mind, like your favorite pair of slippers or long lost childhood teddy.

Perhaps it would gently lap around the edges of my mind, too, summoned by white lights and French horns, fresh-falling snow and children’s choirs, if not for the fact that lately I’ve been reading through the book of Deuteronomy.  For those unfamiliar with Scripture, it’s about as far away from the Christmas story as you can get.  Where Matthew and Luke offer cold crisp nights filled with angelic choruses and green pastures of shepherds and their sheep, Deuteronomy practically has sand spilling from the pages, every word dry and nuanced in thirsty shades of brown and yellow.  It re-caps the story of Moses and the Israelites after the great Red Sea parting and dramatic escape from Egypt.  

What should have been an equally dramatic and subsequent conquering of the Promised Land instead turned into forty years of frustration.  A lack of faith on the Israelites’ part resulted in an opportunity for them to re-think their allegiance: would they depend on themselves, or depend on God? He gave them forty years in a desert to figure it out.

In the meantime, He took care of them.  He gave them food and water and guidelines for behavior.  He spent a lot of time with Moses, discussing matters of state and matters of faith.  He laid out the blueprints for both, avoiding generalizations (“be good”) and dealing in specifics (“Do not take advantage of a hired man who is poor and needy, whether he is a brother Israelite or an alien living in one of your towns.  Pay him his wages each day before sunset” Deut. 24:14-15).  God’s laws were firm, but fair - no one could be sentenced to death for accidental manslaughter,  all debts were forgiven every 50 years, a cloak taken as collateral on a loan must be returned each night to its owner so the cold night air didn’t prevent a good night’s sleep.

It amazes me, the depth of insight He had into human behavior.  He drew the boundary lines for each tribe so that there would be no civil wars.  Those in positions of religious leadership were placed, financially, at the mercy of their congregants so they could not lord religious power over them (amounts allotted them were set, making it impossible to use guilt or charm for extorting more).  If a couple bore no male heir, their daughters had the right to inherit land and flocks in a time when most people groups disregarded women all-together.  New grooms were released from military duty during their first year of marriage so that they might stay home and please their brides.  The social and political genius of it all staggers me each time I read it.  Every need (physical, financial, spiritual and emotional) was accounted for, every human tendency was taken into consideration.  It seems God knew His children very well.

Which is what makes Christmas all the more incredible to me.  We tend to think of Christmas as the beginning of Jesus’ life on earth.  A baby was born, angels sang, shepherds bowed down and everything under the Star shone with a hope the world had not yet known.  God’s presence on earth actually began long before.  It began in the Garden of Eden when the infinite essence of God first walked among men.  He walked among them again in Deuteronomy, speaking with Moses and wandering through the desert camp.  

It was there, I imagine, He faced the human condition.  I’m sure He was aware of it long before, encountered during the shrouded years before Noah’s flood or along Abraham’s trek from Ur to Canaan, but it is in the windswept, temporary dwellings of a fickle nation somewhere amid the sands of the Sinai Desert that it really hits me.  God knew what He was getting Himself into.  

The Creator of protons, neutrons, electrons and distant nebulae witnessed first hand all the best and worst of humanity.  He didn’t just know what we were like in theory - He KNEW us: the sweat and the smells and the cursing and the laughing and the weariness and the joy and the snoring and the arrogance and the utter rawness of grief.  He came face to face with humanity, He was acutely aware of who we are when we are ordinary and who we are when we are bored and angry and irritated, and He still chose to come back at Christmas.  As one of us.

That’s insane!  That’s a level of goodness and perfection and patience I cannot even begin to fathom.  That’s a love deeper and purer than I even know how to know.  That’s a wisdom greater than my feeble soul can even breathe vapors of.  That God should know our reality so intimately and still find us worth the effort of leaving all that is comfortable and defined by perfection to step into time, passing through a birth canal, taking a first breath laced with the stench of manure, bearing rumors of illegitimacy, growing up as a refugee, always ostracized, always different, always misunderstood - that He would know what was coming and come anyway absolutely leaves me speechless.

There’s a line in “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, buried somewhere in the second or third verse that has broken me this Christmas: “Mild He lays His glory by, born that man no more may die”.  Born and lived and loved and cried and died clothed with the blessings and cursings of humanity, so that man no more may die.  So that I am not limited to a scant number of years on an earth that is sometimes breath-taking and sometimes heart-breaking. So that I can someday shed the blessings and cursings of humanity myself to step out of time and into His home, defined by perfection.  With eyes fully open, The King of All that Is laid His glory by, willingly born so that we no more might die.

Keep your mistletoe and Santa hats.  Sing carols out of habit, give gifts out of expectation, feel warm and fuzzy until December 26.  If you can.  Or, fall on your knees before the God in whose palm all the oceans of the earth are no more than a drop, who left His rightful and respected place of honor (when He had every right not to) to get rained on and laughed at, to catch the sniffles and go to parties and hang out with men who smelled like fish, so that you and I could dare to believe that such a God exists and that He loves us.

It still gets me.

“Long lay the world in sin and error pining, ‘till He appeared, and the soul felt its worth.  A thrill of hope!  A weary world rejoices! For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!

Oh, fall on your knees.....”

The Beauty of Dying (November 25, 2011)

His eyes crinkled in the corners as he gazed across her face and looked up. The shadow of a wink passed with a twinkle, belying an ageless soul though he spoke of days more than sixty years back.

“We used to park out in the orchard,” he started, one gray bushy eyebrow barely raised with the saucy implication, “Back when we were dating”.  Her swat on his arm was fully expected but he continued, the softness of memory filling the aged cracks in his voice.

“She didn’t know, but I always turned the car so that the moonlight fell on her face”.  He looked at her, and she at him, the memory so vivid for them both that we who watched nearly saw the moon ourselves, beaming flashes of silver betwixt the golden rays of that late afternoon.  His weathered fingers reached for her arthritic ones, the years in between melting with that touch.  He sighed at the memory.  “It was a little slice of heaven.”

Nearly a year and a half ago she left him, bound for the heaven he saw slivers of in her face.  Last week, he joined her.   Tonight I look up at the silvery moon that kissed them both, hoping for a glimpse of the magic that bound them in their orchard and under every moonlit sky since.

Pop’s passing comes during the season that has long astonished me.  Autumn, for all intents and purposes, is the season of dying.  Trees, flowers, grass - every green and colored thing that once bloomed with freshness and promise in the rites of spring now struggles for breath, leaning into the brittleness of death.  The glorious sweeping boughs of summer now bend barren and bald in chilly November winds.

And yet, there is a loveliness to autumn that no other season possesses.  Showers of golden rain fall beneath those windswept branches, tawny leaves drip like honey down a sweet blue sky.   Other leaves blaze red and rust, carrot and tangerine; a thousand subtle shades span the gap between red and yellow, and the trees of autumn boast them all.  Their fire is quelled now and again by splashes of pine and evergreen, a contrast that only fills the graceful swan song of flaming foliage with greater poignancy.       

I admit that my eyes get hungry this time of year.  Whether the sun slants bold through fiery vistas or the gray of overcast drizzle forces browning leaves to loosen their ever more fragile grasp on trembling branches, I (too aware the coming white of winter), thirst for the sight of it.  It is a crisp elegance, an aching beauty, one that overtakes the senses, toasting the soul though cheeks and nose are reddened by frosty winds.  I am drawn to all manner of windows with a rabid sense of wonder.

Every gilded leaf yielding to its inevitable delicate dive, every breath laced with the scent of scuffled forest paths, the evolution of painted fields from green to blistered gold to earthy shades of emptiness hums the repeated refrain of autumn I cannot escape: even death is beautiful.

The admission of it grates at first on our understanding of life’s mechanisms.  We instinctively fight for life, grasping for even feeble breaths, venerating those who are robust and strong.  Though the doldrums of daily existence may dominate our hours, there beats beneath them a hunger to thrive, a desperate longing for the tangible taste of life, verdant and green, blooming with possibility and hope.  We are jealous of those who posses it and pity those who we suspect never will.  Life, after all, is LIFE and better than the alternative.

Yet, the God who drips gold on dying trees and covers the corpse of last season’s earth with blankets of startling white gives us no indication that any stage of our existence is wasted.  In fact, He speaks of death as a necessary path to life, a loosening of our fragile grasp on meaningless things, forcing the inevitable delicate dive from our trembling sense of self-sufficiency into His all too capable waiting arms.

“We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?  Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?  We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

If we have been united with Him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with Him in His resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with Him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.

Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, He cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over Him. The death He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life He lives, He lives to God.  In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”Romans 6:2-11

It seems, then, that death is a gift.  How fitting that the Author of autumn should hide beauty even in the most feared of experiences.  Truly living is a voluntary dying, a continual turning from myself to Him, a steady replacing of my wandering feet into His footsteps.  Surrendered souls savor the flavor of tangible life and when I strike out on my own, I discover (again) that nothing else can taste as sweet.    

There are days I feel cords of selfishness and foolishness reaching around to bind me, thick strands of pride pulling me down and away from the verdant possibility of hope I know resides in the presence of my God.   Struggling against them is useless; I am weak and feeble on my own.  Although my ears are deafened and I grapple with a sense of being utterly alone, my mind holds tight to God's promises and I know what I cannot always hear - He calls me to Himself.  The challenge at that point is to reorient my soul, to point my heart resolutely in His direction, no matter how loudly the rest of me protests.  It is then I must remember that even death is beautiful – dying to my desires is a fiery process sometimes, but one that proves golden when I find myself breathless and alive again on the other side.

The rhythm of earth echoes the rhythm of life which, in truth, is simply the echo of our souls: the spring of new birth gives way to a summer of growth, culminating in the glorious dying harvest of autumn; the grave of winter melts again into a spring of rebirth.  My life is the continual incarnation of this rhythm, living, growing, reaping, dying, being resurrected from each struggle with temptation.  It is a crisp elegance, an aching beauty, the overtaking of my soul.    

God is the goodness and the strength calling me to Himself.  He reaches out as I strain against the cords of my sin, shattering the brittleness of death when I ask Him to bring me back to life.  It is His to be the life within me, continually making me new.  It is mine to not fear the most feared demise, to let go the trembling branches and die to self, turning with every ounce of spiritual might my soul back to Him.  When I do, His light shines on my face and I am bathed with a beauty not my own.  It’s a little slice of heaven.      

Tickled... (November 1, 2010)

I’ve been told I laugh too loud.  I can’t help it - if something strikes me funny, a bubbling flow of hot laughter lava starts boiling in my gut.  Shoulders and ribcage tremble as mounting mirth nears the surface and eruption spills peals of delight over anyone within earshot.  Am I offended that my all-too-obvious pleasure annoys a percentage of those who get splashed?  No.  I’m not going to change.  The truth is, I don’t know if I can.

My laugh is a part of who I am.  It is sewn into the hem of my being.   I can make attempts at stifling it, I can swallow it down so that only a shoulder tremor gives me away, but in my truest and most honest moments, it rises up and bursts out as involuntarily as breathing.

When I was in high school, a good friend and I discovered that laughter was touted as the best “ab workout” possible.  We would lie under her dining room table (usually at about four in the morning) and fake laugh, trying to whittle down our obliques and tone our midsections.  As one might expect, fake laughter - especially under such silly conditions - lasted for about thirty seconds before surrendering to real laughter.  Her mother would often get up to go to work in the morning and find us laying on the dining room carpet, giggling like fools.

Fake laughter doesn’t always lead to real laughter, however.  It tends to sputter and spit, stale in the absence of authentic delight.  We laugh when we’re nervous.  We laugh when we’re being polite.  We laugh when we’re trying not to cry.  Laughter is captured and looped on tracks then played during sit-coms and game shows to cue an audience when they ought to be amused.  

It’s been occurring to me lately that obedience is a lot like laughter.  That may sound strange, given that most people suspect laughter and obedience don’t run in the same circles.  One is considered a measured expression of self-control, the other a playful celebration of being out of control.  One has a reputation as banner of the righteous, the other as mascot of the rebellious.  Rarely the twain shall meet.

The truth is, both are less about themselves than they are about the thing which causes them.  I laugh with my friends not because I am expected to, but because they delight me.  When I focus on them, on their presence and their wit, joy hops expectantly along my eyelids, amusement dances on my lips.  Any moment, any word, any glance could send the two leaping into one another, leaving me gasping for breath, silenced by a laugh that is too loud.

If I were forced to laugh - guilted into giggles or bullied into chuckles - it would be nothing more than an empty sound, sucked dry of the very thing that gives it purpose.  Laughter is enjoyable because it is secondary; the person, the joke, the circumstance which causes it is the primary object of affection.  Laughter is evidence of that affection.  

Obedience, however, is also secondary, although it often gets pushed onto center stage.  We are told to obey because we ought to obey those we are expected to obey: our parents, our bosses, our government, God.  We are guilted into being good, bullied into right behavior - obedience becomes a chore, sucked dry of the life it actually promises to give us.  When obedience, for its own sake, is the object of our attention, we swing wildly between poles of pride and guilt.  If we have obeyed, we are good.  If we have disobeyed, we are bad.  We place ourselves at the center of a vicious cycle and wonder why we feel dizzy.

Although God is often accused of being a rule-crazed dictator, the Bible sheds a little light on what He actually thinks about obedience: 

“If you love Me, you will obey what I command” (John 14:15) 

“I am the Vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in Me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

“As the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you. Now remain in My love.

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. 

You are My friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last...”  (John 15:9-16)

“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23)

Obedience doesn’t seem to be much about gritting one’s teeth and miserably submitting to a holy lifestyle.  Instead, it appears to be requested by a friend and prompted by love.  Not only is it prompted by love, it is fed and fueled by God, Himself.  It’s as if He commands us to buy Him an ice cream cone every day, but proceeds to drive us to Dairy Queen, slip us five dollars, and treat us to a chocolate-dipped cone (with sprinkles), as well.  The point is not that we’ve offered God something He demanded but that we’ve enjoyed an ice cream together.

When I focus on God, on His presence and His love, joy hops expectantly through my veins, thankfulness spills from my lips.   His goodness washes over me and I cannot hold it back from splashing onto those around me.  He is the Vine, I am the branch - His love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control flowthrough me (not from me) and blossom into petals of obedience.  This obedience becomes enjoyable because it is secondary: God is the object of my affection and the source of my delight.  Worship leaves me gasping for breath, I am silenced by a righteousness I cannot produce.  I can only let it rise up in me and flow out, as natural as laughter. 

Holiness doesn’t always come easy, though.  There are days when I obey only through sheer will.  I have a soft spot for temptation that sweet-talks my heart and often threatens to cripple my resolve.  On those days, I cannot rely on a “laugh track” obedience, one that I maintain purely to be "the example", cueing others on how they should behave.  It’s the fake laugh - the one I force because it’s good for me - I must fall back on, instead.  The more determined I am to exercise muscles of obedience, the sooner I find myself surrendered to real righteousness.  The secret is that I’m not alone; it’s God and I on the carpet under the dining room table.  

My laugh is loud, I pray my actions to glorify God are louder still.  I do not rely on my own strength to produce those actions, just as I do not rely on my own humor to make me laugh. The objects of my affection birth both mirth and holiness in me.  I am grateful for the God who awes me into obedience, and I am grateful for the friends who tickle the joyful places in me, peals of delight raining down on us all.  

Change the way I react to whatever strikes me funny?  Please.  Don’t make me laugh.