To the God
of Hagar—
God of wandering
people
in wilderness
places—
We know
that you see—
but we are having a hard time
believing
what we are seeing
and seeing it—
still believing
that you see.
God who has seen
all violence done
upon the earth—
who sees the mothers
and fathers fleeing—
their babies in their arms
only to arrive at safer shores
that do not want them.
God who has seen
every innocence stolen
by the hands of wicked men
some who claim
your name
while inflicting
unspeakable pain.
God who has seen
every victim silenced
by lies and deceit
and the idolatry
of the comfort
of lies so much
easier to swallow
than the bitter
draught of truth.
God who has seen
every genocide,
every leader drunk
on power and prejudice,
who values not
what you called holy
—the imago dei—
of all of human kind.
God who has seen
the ruthless grip of
natural disasters
tearing houses
and lands
and peoples
apart.
God who has seen
the ravages of every kind
of sickness and disease;
we know this is not the first
pandemic you have seen.
God who himself
has felt the sting
of sickness that leads
to death—
the tears of grief
for your beloved,
Lazarus in the tomb
and for the moment
out of reach.
These times are not
“unprecedented”
to you. But
we are still
afraid.
We need
to know—
do you see us
here?
Do you see
every lonely heart
turned lonelier
by pandemic
isolation?
I had days
where I was scared
to make contact—
to smile, to wave
even to those
a street away.
The distance
has felt more
than social.
But God,
these are
small things
I know.
What about
the family members
saying goodbye
with nothing but
a lousy internet connection
connecting them
to a parent
a child
a loved one—
dying in the ICU?
Do you see
how the fingertips
ache to be squeezed?
to be held
one last
earthly time?
Do you see
the fear
in our eyes—
that we
(or one we love)
could be next
to die alone?
Or what about the cries
for justice God?
You’ve been hearing
some version of the these
for millenia—
the oppressor always
has his boot pressed
against the neck
of someone unable
to fight back.
Some of us
are just now beginning
to understand this is
not the promised land.
This is the valley of shadows.
I’ve known it
since I was seven.
And despite
all you’ve done
to heal and redeem—
some days
all I can say is:
“I hate it here.”
Like Hagar
running
through the night
her heart beat
slamming
her short breaths
burning
her shaking lungs.
forced into service
forced into her master’s bed
forced to carry the burden
of the patriarch’s lack of faith
and her mistresses’ abuse—
she fled.
But where
could she go?
Where can we find shelter
in a world that seems
to be tearing always
at some new seam
we didn’t know
was there?
Do
you
see
her
God?
See the tears
track down her
dirty cheeks?
See her face, pale
with fears her heart
cannot hold?
What more
can she take
God?
(What I mean to say is
what more
can we take?)
Is there a spring
after all?
A spring rising up
in this wilderness—
water bubbling
like the sound of joy
from the ground?
Would you speak
as you once did
to Hagar—
to ask us
where have you been
and where are you going?
Will you give
to the wounded,
outcast,
abandoned,
lonely,
bleeding heart—
promise of a blessing?
Can we name our sons
Ishmael—knowing
you have heard
our affliction?
Knowing you have
your eye upon us
even still?
The chickadees
in the barren lilac
out my window
always have enough
to eat—
will you feed us
even here Jesus?
Will it taste
like bread
and water
to know
you
see
us
still?
1. Ash Wednesday
Leaves burned last fall
just when yellows and reds
should have swept us away
with the colors of flame—
Instead aspen leaves dropped charred
from the sky dark at noon.
They crumbled to dust in our hands
while smoke made it hard to breathe.
Thoughts of our own mortality
have never been nearer
than these masks that hide
our faces but not our fears.
Ashes to ashes
and dust to dust—
fears coming nearer like the lines
the fire fighters drew to protect the houses
the roads, the school campus
in the mountains burning down.
Like the lines marked
every six feet with signs
reminding us to keep
our distance.
But it’s the loneliness
that weighs me
down the most
Most days I stare out the window
and wonder—
who are the faithful friends?
the one’s who’ll weather
this storm too and stand
by my side again—
when spring finally comes
when fresh leaves
emerge from aspens
scarred by flames
of last year’s destruction?
It’s Ash Wednesday now
a time to think about
all that perishes—
and what remains.
what Beauty
is already standing sentry
when the pine seeds
are sprouting
in glorious resurrection?
I know the answer
like I know the sound
of his voice—
In this life so full of loss
and lack that burns
like smoke in my lungs
there is only One True
and Lasting Beauty:
One God who put on
fragile flesh to kneel
in the dirt,
to plant himself
like a seed sown in tears
in a borrowed tomb.
Like a pine seed,
awakened by
the flames
just waiting—
to burst forth.
This poem is the first in a series I will be doing, one poem for every Wednesday of Lent. I hope you follow along and that these poems of lack and longing meet you where you are this Lent. To receive updates in your email, click here to sign up for my email list and you’ll be sure not to miss a thing, even if you take a step back from social media for awhile. 🙂
Blessings on you Dear Reader, wherever this Lenten season finds you. And may the only True and Lasting Beauty—meet you there.
I have this fond affection for abandoned places. It’s weird, and feels misplaced every time it pops up, but there it is with the run down old house in need of love (and a roof) on the busy interstate. I feel it again at the sight of a leaning old tree; dead and grey wood worn down by weather and life. I remember the day that old tree finally fell, and that place on the highway felt lost without it.
There’s an old cinderblock house on Highway 287 north that I wrote a poem about. It needs a roof I think, but my engineer husband thinks it needs a bulldozer. He’s probably right.
There’s an old brick victorian house on three neglected acres just north west of the I25 entrance. It has painted green shutters, the window on the upper level is cracked, and sometime down the road someone seems to have built on a ply-wood addition to the side and spray painted it black. The NO TRESPASSING signs don’t intimidate me. I see the place as perhaps it once was; built with love and attention, facing a southern sky, the land around it filled with growing things nurtured and tended by loving and wise hands. There would have been a barn there for the horses. A carriage house perhaps. It would have been on the edge of the town-turned-city; our ever-expanding home. And no one would have dreamed of throwing a rock through the window, or building on a ply-wood addition and spray painting it black.
Last year I went to see my Grandaddy’s farm for what will probably be the last time. One portion is under-contract for sale; another holds a few head of cattle and the fishing pond my great-grandaddy built when he bought the land in the 1930’s. There’s a small shelter nearby where we park that was probably used for hogs I’m told; but now it’s covered in ivy and only holds the click-click-click of the generator for the electric fence. My father points out the field where they used to plant sweet potatoes. I can still remember in my mind’s eye the sight of the old farm house where my Grandaddy was born and raised, which has since been demolished after it became a danger. He shows me the acre where they planted the family garden, and tells me how they shucked corn every 4th of July for as long as he can remember, to put it up for the cool North Carolina winter months.
This all brings with it such wisps of my own childhood memories; like the time when I was young and my Daddy took my brothers and I fishing at this pond. He left the boys with their lines in the water at one place, and took me around to a different corner of the pond. I’ll never forget how he leaned down in my ear and whispered, “This is the best spot. Don’t tell your brothers.”
I remember how when I got older my Dad told me how he used to pull up old wine bottles from the bottom of the pond; relics of my alcoholic Paw-Paw’s day. I remember how my Dad told me Paw-Paw would say, “I’m going fishing,” in the evenings, and how everyone knew what that meant even if they pretended not to. When I asked him if he drank it, he said it had all turned to vinegar by then.
Places left unattended seem to become wild; they go to entropy without some greater force sculpting them towards order and harmony. Like Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden—I am drawn in by the abandonment of these places. All the memories they hold, both good and bad, past and possible future flash before my eyes as I catch sight of a house nearly drowned in ivy on the side of a North Carolina highway. I can’t help but wonder; Who lives here? Who owns this? When did they leave and why? Is there hope for its restoration? What would it cost?
The neediness of a place draws me in. Perhaps it’s partly the solitude these places seem to afford; like the ghost town of Independence, Colorado—a small abandoned mining town at the top of a mountain pass where once gold was found, and then just as quickly, it wasn’t. I read on the internet that the town was mostly abandoned by 1890, and all but one remaining person left after a massive blizzard in 1899 left the town cut off from supplies. I wonder about the last person who stayed for thirteen years alone at the top of a mountain pass, almost 11,00 feet above sea level. I wonder how he felt, as he watched his neighbors and friends flee to Aspen on homemade skis that February 1899. How did he (or she) survive? By 1912 the town was completely deserted, and I wonder if it was as a result of the death of the last remaining resident, or if he too eventually realized that there was nothing left for him there.
Maybe the reason these places pull me in is because I’m so hesitant to ever believe that there’s nothing left worth saving. Maybe it’s because I don’t want anyone to think that about me. Perhaps I feel a kinship to these lonesome and broken down places; perhaps its the Imago Dei in me longing to bring order and dominion to every lost and abandoned place. Perhaps it’s because I know my heart can’t take any more abandonment myself.
When I was seven years old I lost my church and all my friends in one fell swoop. As a homeschool kid those were the most significant connections I had apart from family; and it’s an ache I still carry around with me more days than I would like.
I don’t like telling you this; for fear you’ll see the broken porch step, the dirt pile under the welcome mat, the loose wiring in the living room, the broken tile on the kitchen floor. The truth is, that I was sexually abused by the son of an elder at my childhood church; and when instead of offering some measurable assurance of space to heal and comfort and justice we were told to simply “forgive and forget”, we left. Sadder still—no one followed us.
Abandonment feels like the sharp sting of acrid smoke in my nostrils; and it has haunted me so thoroughly for most of my life that sometimes I imagine I can smell it when it isn’t even there.
I have been guilty of looking at my friends with a sideways glance—wondering if they are about to dart out the door. I look at my husband this way too; this wonderful man who promised to love me forever ten plus years ago, and hasn’t ever done a single thing to make me doubt his commitment to me since. I play out the scenarios in my mind of how it will happen; how I’ll share too much, be too much, take too much—and then it will be too late.
The fear of being left alone haunts me; I worry about who I’ll disappoint when I don’t have things as together as they think I should. I have seen the looks of fear on faces when I express feelings of doubt in the face of my lifelong faith. I think they think that if I express doubt that maybe I’m lose my faith in God; but the Truth is that I have my eyes and heart so wide open on my best days, that I must continually wrestle the darkness that I witness into the hands of the loving God who is himself everything light and lovely. But it’s a fight. I wrestle constantly it feels like sometimes; and there are dark days when I just don’t even know how to believe in a good and loving God anymore. But he always brings me back—and I’m learning that that is the more important piece.
I know he’s going to mend that porch step in time. He’s already got the broom out to clean under the welcom mat. He’s planning a kitchen remodel and the new tile is going to be so much more beautiful than what has been cracked and broken and left to rot in me. And I believe he longs to do the same in you.
But if you’re like me, perhaps you find it hard to see that God really loves you; that he really wants to make all the broken down and bleeding in you whole and healed and new. Perhaps it feels impossible—because if you weren’t valued when you were young and innocent, how could you be valued now that you’ve grown up and screwed up more times than you could count?
I still wrestle with these doubt too, friend. I get it. But I want you to know something—no matter how abandoned you have felt, you have never walked alone. These broken parts are pieces of your story? They are making way for an eternal weight of glory.
I’ve seen it. I believe it. I know that it’s true. And my prayer for you Dear Reader, is that you would begin to know it too.
A Prayer for our Abandoned Places
Jesus—
You see all that is broken and abandoned in me.
You see where I have placed a pot to gather rain from the leaky roof—
the rugs I use to cover the holes in the floor—
the peeling paint beneath the stack of books on the window sill.
Thank you for making your home with me, even still.
Teach me to trust the shuffle of your soft footsteps on my squeaky floor boards.
Thank you that you love me as I am, yet you love me too much to leave me this way.
Do your work in me O LORD—
Amen
The Anvil
I.
Loss is like
an anvil
sitting silent on my chest.
The only noise comes
when I try
to breathe.
The creaking of my lungs
fighting to expand in this
weighted world
sounds like the rattling
of chains softened
by padded walls.
Words pad the cell:
“She lived a good life.”
“It was her time.”
“She was ready.”
AND IF I COULD ONLY STAND
I’D RIP THAT PADDING OFF THE WALLS
AND DASH MYSELF AGAINST THE COLD AND SOLID REALITY
THAT DEATH IS ALWAYS AN UNINVITED AND GREEDY HAND
AT THE TABLE AND THERE IS NO EXCUSING HIM.
I have tried to move
the anvil
by ignoring it.
Pretending that I believe
padded words
are enough to quench
embers burning
a hole in my chest
where my heart used to be.
But
surprise, surprise!
It didn’t work.
After sitting in the numbed silence
for 100 more years I took another
rattling breath—my lungs like a bellows
on the embers of a heart gone
almost cold as I whispered—
“I didn’t get to say goodbye.”
And the anger lifts the anvil—
throws it broken to the ground.
And I do as I said I would;
tearing padding, dashing
every part of me against the cold
hard stone until
either my bones
or the wall
must break.
II.
Blind and wounded
is this how we come?
Crashing through that solid
wall of reality
my bones turned to powder
my eyes gritty
my nostrils full of dust
& funeral ashes.
Lying under a bright
& open sky—
the beauty sharp
like grief—
at first felt worse
than the anvil
that sat on my chest
1000 years—a weight
where my heart
used to be.
And now this!?
As I crashed through the walls
to the truth that death
was always just a door—
out of the tower
out of the nightmare
out of the Shadowlands
to Here—
where air is breathed
just for
laughing.
(This poem is an excerpt from my poetry chapbook As the Sparrow Flies, a collection of poems about the various forms of grief that come with love.)
Header photo by Yang Shuo on Unsplash
I am shedding my skin—
the old broken down shell
is cracked and sloughing off
my shining shoulders.
I am letting go of the girl
I thought I was last year
two years ago, definitely ten.
Would she recognize me?
Would we be friends?
I’m letting go of those questions
too. They have no place in this pool
where I wash the soot from my body
and watch the way the moon gleams
on my brand new skin.
This coal mine cave turned tomb
For minerals, miners, and me.
Presented to the heat, the flame
as a sacrificial offering.
For what god—I wasn’t sure.
I felt the flames lick my heels
and I screamed until the air gave
out—I couldn’t breathe
and I collapsed as the cave
collapsed and crushed me.
But now I am stepping out
of my skin cracked and scared
like the granite of the mountain side,
and I see the new underneath—
shining hard facets sparkling
in the light of a young moon.
I realize it then: it takes defiance
to believe in joy—to hold both
happiness and sorrow
in your hands at once—
to believe in hope
when the dark is caving in.
I didn’t know it till
the sorrow buried me alive.
I didn’t know till I heard
the canary sing—
reminding me that somehow
there’s still air down here.
Still air in my broken down lungs
crushed beneath worlds of weight
beneath bodies of gods existent
in the image temples of my heart
where I worshipped perfection,
performance and outward shows
of grand love to be praised by man—
Where I bowed to the love of a god
who only loved what I had done
lately and not who I always was beneath
this skin I am shedding. Not who I
was when the cave roof collapsed.
And Oh what Wonder!
the dust clears and I can see
now these were no gods at all,
only toppling stones crashing
before the refiners fire licked
my heels and made me clean.
Now upon the banks of a pool
on the mountainside,
I shed my sodden, sooty skin—
I wipe the dirt from my neck,
and my chest thrums with a new
more solid beat.
Now, beneath the light
of the young moon, beneath
my shed skin, I can see clearly
what I was always meant
to become.
Photo C/O KT on Unsplash
“When the old way is dying, we can cling to normal or we can let sorrow lead our search for something better. This is the summer of imagination… Today I pray that instead of grasping for what you used to have, you let your empty hands clasp in prayer. Optimistic clutching for normalcy only can give you temporary relief, but you were made for more than the normal you had. Only grief can grow your imagination for the goodness of the kingdom you belong to.”
—K.J. Ramsey
I’ve been to two funerals in the past month. The first was a memorial for my Grandmother who passed away in March, the week that everything in our state shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic. The second was for my Grandaddy who passed away at the beginning of August, and because of slightly fewer restrictions, we were able to have a small, mask-wearing-service at his home church in Fuquay-Varina North Carolina.
Aside from the season of fear and anxieties and generally vague grief that this pandemic has brought us through, some of you, like me, are also experiencing the sharp grief that comes with deep loss. Loss of a loved one. Loss of a job. Loss of money you had been saving in a 401k—we are all grappling with so much, but some of us more than others.
But it’s in this season that I am remembering and re-learning, that allowing ourselves to grieve over these losses, makes way for more peace. The kind of peace that is independent of circumstances, but that is rooted in something realer than what our eyes can see. The kind of peace that allows us to see our lives with greater clarity and imagination, showing us that our hunger for rightness in not foolish, but a good hunger that will lead us to our greatest satisfaction.
God’s Kingdom is here, and it is also coming. Every broken thing will be restored. The dead in Christ are only the seeds waiting for the proper time to grow into a new and fuller life. Our King is here; and He is coming.
The tension of the already-and-the-not-yet can be a difficult place to live. In the months following my Grandmother’s passing, before her memorial service, I found myself trapped in a grief I didn’t feel like I was allowing myself to process. The pandemic pushed pause on so many things, and I found myself being forced to grieve in different ways. In May my Grandfather gave me a box of my Grandmother’s hair things; brushes, clips, hair ties, combs—because he didn’t want to just throw it away—and I found myself staring at the grey hairs in the hairbrush she had probably been using for 20 years or more, wondering: Is this all I have left?
The question haunted me right into the grief I had been avoiding. I penned an angry poem or two, and that’s when it began to happen. Quite by accident, or quite by the Holy Spirit, my eyes began to clear and I saw what I had been missing. In my attempts to push aside my grief I had said things to myself like, “She lived a good life. She was ready. She’s with Jesus now,” all of which are TRUE and GOOD things to say and believe. But I was using them like a tourniquet and not a bandage. I was circumventing the grief, trying to cut it off at the source, by saying things that I knew to be true, but didn’t really feel or believe in my heart.
The reality is that death is always an unwanted and greedy hand at the table. My loss is great. My mother’s loss is greater. The grief I felt at waking up the morning that I heard the news, knowing I would never see my Grandmother again in this life, was crushing. And why wouldn’t it be? When I finally penned the angry poems and let out all my feelings of pent up rage and frustration, it was then that the clarity came. Crashing against the cold hard reality of death, I broke through into the realer-reality; her glorious eternal life. Grief was the path that brought me there.
Two funerals in a row is a lot, but it has given me time to practice. After my Grandmother’s memorial, I felt the peace that comes with a little bit of closure, and many tears shed with loved ones who also loved the one we lost. When I visited my Grandaddy for the last time a week later, I knew that though sorrow would come with the night, joy would come in the morning. The memory of the peace that would come through grief was recent enough for me to have not forgotten everything I learned for once; and for that I am so very thankful.
Dearest Readers; I know the burdens you carry are heavy. There are so many of you walking around with griefs much heavier even than the loss of a Grandparent or other loved one. The anxiety threatens to crush you some days. The little sorrows pile up and feel heavier than a wheelbarrow full of lead. The weight of uncertainty in this season, and whatever season will come after, adds its weight too.
But I want you to know; there is peace on the other side of this thing you are grieving, when you grieve it in the presence of God. Circumventing your grief with platitudes and comforting phrases (even when those phrases are TRUE), is not the way forward to a lasting peace and a clarity which sees the Kingdom of God at work even in our most deeply devastated and broken places.
This is your written invitation: Let yourself grieve. It’s okay. You are not alone. Your losses are not insignificant, nor do they go unnoticed by our heavenly Father. He is not looking down on you. He is not waiting for you to be stronger. He knows your frame; that you are dust, and He cares for you as His beloved child. The way to the joy of the morning is the sorrow of the night. The grief that needs to come, the tears that must be shed to wash your eyes clean so that you may rightly see what you cannot see right now.
The day my Grandaddy died, I told my husband I needed the beauty of the lake. We packed a picnic dinner and went out kayaking and paddle boarding at sunset. But I got sunscreen in my eyes and they kept stinging my whole way across the lake. I kept wiping them with the corner of my shirt until finally a wave of grief hit me and I began to cry. Later I realized that it was the tears that cleared my eyes from the sunscreen that had been stinging and clouding my vision.
May it be the same for you.
Go in peace friends. The way isn’t easy, but it’s the way we’ve been given—and it is good.
*If you need someone to pray for you, leave a comment below. You can tell us what you need prayer for, or keep it between you and God, the choice is yours. And if you feel led to pray for someone, would you reply to their comment and let them know that you are lifting them up? Grief is done best in the body of believers.*
Now you are the Seedfor my Grandaddy Roy
Now the soil is carved
to make way for hands
that handled seeds with care
all their earthly days.
Now you are the seed—
Once you made space
for what looked like death.
For dried soy beans &
shriveled corn—
dusty field peas & string beans
turnips, collards & more.
(even tobacco seeds—for better
or worse)
Now you are the seed—
Once, you sowed faith
small as grains of mustard
in three small children’s hearts‚
and by grace like rain
they grew.
Once, you held grands & great-grands
in your weathered hands—
and by grace like rain,
we will grow to sow faith
like you.
Now you are the seed—
Now, I need the faith
of a farmer like you
to nestle you gently
in borrowed earth
like Paw-Paw’s sweet potatoes
so carefully arranged—
to plant the seed of you
beside the one for whom you tended
gardens & roses & feeders full of hope
like birdseed.
Now, I need the faith
of a farmer like you
to disbelieve what my eyes
have seen & believe instead
in fields of glorious green & songs
of eternal spring—the land
from which no sparrow
falls.
Now you are the seed
in the hands of a Farmer
even older & wiser than you—
and he knows
the time to plant
and he knows
the harvest
is coming.
Now you are the seed
we sow in tears—
but we will reap
with shouts of joy.
We have all been either in the headlines or the sidelines these past two weeks—observing and participating in what will certainly become a historic moment in our countries’ history. The blood of George Floyd, Breona Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless others joining the groans of Emmet Till in the injustice and rampant racism surrounding their deaths.
If your peace is defined by your stable walls of a home, and stores being open when you need them, and no one chanting of holding signs or crying out for justice from the streets—perhaps these weeks have been peace shattering for you. Perhaps in your heart of hearts you wish you could go back to the way things were a few weeks ago when *all* you had to worry about was a pandemic.
Perhaps you think this has nothing to do with you. But it does.
It has everything to do with us. Because sin destroys everyone involved—Satan doesn’t want to only steal, kill and destroy our black neighbors; he wants to destroy you.
When lives are stolen in the name of hatred and prejudice—Fathers ripped from the arms of little girls, and you look away in complicity, it is your humanity that is being stolen.
Your compassion went up in flames long before you saw your neighborhood Target burning to the ground.
If you see a black man killed brutality and shamelessly, but you insist you need to know “the full story”; it is your God given sense of justice that has already been put to death in your heart.
If the destruction of property bothers you more than the destruction of black lives and livelihoods; a story that I’m told is sad, but far from new—it is your heart that is bound to an unjust scale. Don’t think for a moment that this weighing of the lives of our brothers and sister of color as less than things you hold dear hasn’t destroyed you.
Do you really think that you can see someone made in the Image of God as less than—and it not affect you on the very level of the soul?
Of this and so much more, I repent.
If you think you can check your social justice box because you are “pro-life,” think again. Because God cares about ALL life womb to tomb, and your witness is defiled if you think you can care for the unborn and not care for the poor, the immigrant, the refugee, the tribe forgotten on the reservation, or your black neighbor.
Our unity is not for uniformity. Our unity is for the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood to stretch deep and wide beneath our varying perspectives and experiences; the Gospel big enough to hold us all in our deepest brokenness both white and black—
O CHURCH REPENT, the Kingdom is at hand!
Not a kingdom built on an uneasy peace won by silencing the voices screaming from injustice. Not a kingdom built on selective care of those made in the Imago Dei to those who only look like us, talk like us, or don’t directly inconvenience us. But a Kingdom in which we all can turn and be healed—healed by the scars of a brown skinned man living under authoritarian oppression, unjustly and torturously executed for crimes he did not commit.
The Pharisees were afraid of the stir he would cause; and we are to be like him. Not sacrificing “one for the many,” to keep the uneasy power and the uneasy peace. But laying down our lives, our rights; our privilege, all of it—for one another; that the bonds of unity would run deep and wide like the river of baptism washing all of us clean in the Gospel of grace.
O Church repent!
Repent of your White American Gospel; and hear the cries of the slaves in the fields singing from the depths of the suffering our ancestors put them through. Hear the stories of their suffering. Listen to their grief. See how the Lord has carried them, and love him for it even as you repent of your complicity in it.
I didn’t want to learn the truth last year when I learned that my ancestors owned slaves. I wish I could spit the taste of the shame from my mouth—of these sins I have inherited—Lord make me clean!
LORD HEAL OUR LAND! May we not wish this moment away. May we not stand idly by waiting for it to pass. May we see that we are here for such a time as this.
The church is being sifted; the differences between the sheep and the goats is becoming more and more clear. Do not listen to the voices that lull you back into your comfortable sleep. The world needs you awake.
Repent O Church!
Awake with new care and compassion! Do not be threatened by the past, only turn from it, knowing that grace is big enough for you too. You don’t have to justify the sins of the past to be set free from them. Only look them in the face, and do just the opposite: acknowledge the part that you have played in all of this, and let the grace of the Lord Jesus who has already lived perfectly for you heal your wounded soul. The Gospel is still the good news you need to hear.
O HOW WE LOVE YOU KING JESUS!
In his house there are many rooms. And in his Kingdom neither moth nor rust will destroy; nor thieves break in and steal (Matthew 6:19), they shall not hurt or destroy on his Holy Mountain for the Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9). And there every tribe and every tongue and every nation will worship him as the LORD.(Revelation 7:9)
Until that day, we bring his Kingdom here—asking God for his grace and forgiveness, repenting of the ways we have stumbled into a prejudice that blinds us from seeing our brothers and sisters for who they really are: beings made fearfully and wonderfully in the very image of a Holy God.
May our hearts be changed by God’s grace, and for his glory, amen.
There is a certain kind of evil that stares you in the face when an image bearers is destroyed by another image bearer. There is an exceptional evil at work when other images bearers try to justify it—or when they ignore the larger evil which acts like this clearly point to. Racism is alive and well in the country which claims to be the home of equality and freedom.
The biggest problem with our twisted and broken age is our inability to see what is right in front of us; our inability to see that the life in the womb and the life snuffed out by the cruel knee of a soul drunk on power, are of the same intrinsic value to the Creator of them both. That white evangelicals could be so passionate about the former, and ignorant, if neot willfully negligent on the later, is the kind of hypocrisy that allows for terrible evils to continue right before our eyes as if they were unnoticed.
Some say that we are misunderstanding the gospel to say that God would have justice come to his inaugurated Kingdom here and now, but I reject this. We are to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with [our] God,” (Micah 6:8) and how can we do this if we shut our eyes to what is happening all around us? We have been given the ministry of reconcilliation; reconciling us to God through Jesus’ work on the cross, this same work which also removes from us any distinction that would shatter our unity.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.
Galatians 3:28-29
To my black brothers and sisters; co-heirs of the promise of Christ—I don’t have much that I can say to comfort you, except to say, that I am sorry. And I love you.
I am sorry for the blindness that has led us to this place; this place where you feel so many in the church disbelieve you and/or willfully abandon you when you speak about what you have experienced. I believe you.
It’s not the same as what you have experienced in such a horrifically systematized way, but I know a little of what it is like when the church turns its back on the abused to protect the abuser. And so, I weep with you.
None of this is new to you; but it is new to so many of us. Saturday I found myself weeping in the garden realizing that the America I thought I knew was always an illusion for the privileged half—the America I thought I knew isn’t dead…she never existed.
This America which we took in the name of Manifest Destiny. Which we peopled with my ancestors and your ancestors forced to come from across the sea; this country which we built on your backs and the remnants of these unjust and evil institutions remain all the more painfully through our denial.
I still have so much to learn. I know we all do. But I’m here weeping with you. And I’m listening. And I’m speaking saying #blacklivesmatter because I know that when the wound goes deep, what should be obvious needs to be said. BLACK LIVES MATTER.
May those words begin to make a way for the healing that hundreds of years of injustice have inflicted.
I pray we will not stop there.
May we in the Church repent of our indifference, and may we bring the world along as we show what it looks like to truly love one another—without defensiveness. Without a thought of self-preservation. Without a fear of losing power; because what we have to gain in you is so much more.
To my black brothers and sisters; I’m sorry and I love you.
Thank you for your love for us that speaks words of truth even when we don’t want to hear them.
My twenty month old is my most timid of my children. Though a relatively peaceful and happy-go-lucky guy, he is easily startled and is the most likely of my kids to become frightened in a situation that feels out of control or uncertain. I’ve learned to warn his siblings that he’s going to need someone to hold him when I use the blender.
“It’s going to be loud, okay buddy?” I say in my most cheerful voice, smiling with my eyes to reassure him; but even still, he is afraid. There is little I can do aside from making sure he is held.
Last week it was the same thing when my husband was using a power saw in the backyard. The second the machine roared to life, he came running, terror in his face. I tell him: “It’s okay buddy. Daddy’s just using a tool. Daddy’s in control of it, he won’t let it hurt you.”
It dawned on me that this is how God parents us; he uses his tools to make good and beautiful things, but the tools are often loud and scary sounding. But he never chides us for being afraid—he understands that we are, one of the reasons that the encouragement “do not be afraid” is one of the most common in scripture. He tells us that there is nothing to fear, that he is in control, yet he also holds us securely until we actually believe that it’s true.
Someday my son will no longer fear the buzz of the saw, or the hum of the blender, or the thrum of the lawnmower. Someday he will go to my leg for comfort for a moment, and then turn right back around to appreciate the beautiful thing that his father is making from the pile of wood, from an overgrown lawn, or the smoothie that he will shortly be sipping courtesy of the loud appliance on the counter.
We hadn’t left the house all together since the day my grandma died in mid March: the week the pandemic really set in. It had been six weeks since my 20 month old had ridden in the car, but even with his fears of loud machines and unpredictable things, I didn’t see this fear coming. No sooner did I begin backing out of the driveway, then my son began screaming in terror at the top of his lungs. I pulled over to see if anything was wrong: a seatbelt pinching him somewhere? A toy lost over the edge of the carseat? Nothing.
I began driving again and he began screaming again. It had been a long day, and in my fragile, frenzied and finite mind I only felt the inconvenience of it. I had been looking forward to this drive as my first “outing” in almost a month, and now it was being ruined. I couldn’t comprehend why—why was he screaming? We pulled up to a stop light and the screaming slowed, but it began again the moment we resumed our trek. It finally dawned on me; perhaps he was afraid of the unpredictable movement of the car.
I reached my hand back to rest on his cheek, stroking his soft skin with my thumb until the crying stopped. That was how we pulled up to the office a few minutes later, and that was how I would drive in the relative peace I had been craving the 20 minutes back home.
Pulling into our neighborhood half an hour later it dawned on me how sharp the difference between my parenting and the parenting of God are. I was so frustrated at the child who would not stop screaming. I was angry at his irrational fear. I didn’t understand and I wanted it to stop. But what a grace that God never deals with my fears that way! He always and forever simply drives the car, craning his arm back so that he can cup my chin in his hand and tell me that everything will be okay. He tells me this on the days I believe him, and on the days that I do not.
I need that now just as much as my son did. I need that touch of comfort; that assurance that even when my circumstances are constantly shifting, uncomfortable, and totally outside of my control—that I am okay. God is still in control. He is still working for my good. All shall be well.
The One who knows all things; who knows where this car is heading, is also a God of infinite and kind compassion. He does not chide you for being afraid, though he invites your loving trust. He does not yell at you from the front seat to hush and be quiet, he meets you in the rearview mirror with his tender gaze. He cares for your fears, even as he does not promise to remove the scary situations from you. He will take you where you need to go, even if the way is frightening and you would just rather not go that way at all.
Trusting God, like my son in the car finally trusted me with my hand secure beneath his quivering chin, may just be the bravest and most beautiful thing you ever do. By this child-like trust, the world will know that there is something different about us; we are a people who despite every chaos and calamity, can still rest secure. We are a people who remember who they are in the context of whose they are. We are a people who will one day see this fearful journey for what it was all along; the sweetest most intimate journey of faith.
“And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body.”
