Smashed Alabaster: The Importance of Brokenness

Now one of the Pharisees was requesting [Jesus] to dine with him. And He entered the Pharisee’s house, and reclined at the table. And behold, there was a woman in the city who was an immoral woman; and when she learned that He was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume, and standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing His feet, and anointing them with perfume. Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet He would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching Him, that she is an immoral woman.”

And Jesus answered and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he replied, “Say it, Teacher.” “A certain moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. Which of them therefore will love him more?” Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have judged correctly.” And turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair. You gave Me no kiss; but she since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss My feet. You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed My feet with perfume. For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” And He said to her, “Your sins have been forgiven.” And those who were reclining at the table with Him began to say to themselves, “Who is this man who even forgives sins?” And He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”  (Luke 7:36-50)

God has been doing most of the talking in my life as of late. I have a billion things in my head, a billion things I want to try to say, but God said loud and clear to me - almost audible - "Chew with your mouth closed". So I've been thinking on some things. Chewing. Swallowing. Being nourished. Expelling some waste.

I've been thinking an awful lot about Smashed Alabaster. I've been thinking about how very attached I have been to the memory of that alabaster box that I broke years ago at Jesus' feet. Sentimental. I kept all the pieces of it - poured some cement, pressed them artfully into a nice round mold and made some stepping stones out of them.

I let go the fragrance.

Somewhere I started to have the idea that breaking the alabaster box was about the sacrifice, pouring out tears before my beloved Saviour God, spilling an offering precious and costly and impossible to retrieve. I thought it was about me, about dying to self, about how much I was willing to surrender, about How much do you really love Him?

God is not a narcissist.

So I am interrupting my blogging hiatus, because I really, really wanted to share a little of what I'm chewing on:

RETURN TO LIFE

Crows talk about you, you know. They have the unsettling ability to remember, and they have been known to hold a grudge. They remember your face. They chat to their neighbours about you, describing you in such vivid detail that crows who have never laid eyes on you will know you on sight. I'm not saying that they're petty - but don't ever throw stuff at them. 

 

I was very, very nice to them last year, and so far they don't seem interested in much more than stopping by. There has been no swooping, and I don't get the feeling that they're plotting against me. I did take this picture through the window from inside my house - just in case they're camera shy.

Crows are definitely eye-candy - like a big bag of horrible licorice gumdrops. When it comes to Spring fever, I really prefer the strong, silent type.

Enough said.

GRAFTED

For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please… Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarned you that those who practice such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. ~ Galatians 5:17-23

I am developing a tree obsession – a deep study of the beauty, the intricacies and the out workings of any one single tree could easily inspire a year’s worth of blog posts. I have two plum trees growing in my back yard that wrap around each other like lovers, side by side as though one tree. They were planted that way, for fruit bearing purposes – only when they are bare can you tell them apart.

 

I believe that everything God creates speaks something to us about the Ineffable – mysterious, unknowable, unspeakable things that are within the Divine heart. There are things that are too Spiritual to elevate us while harnessed by words.

Trees have sacred carved all over them – devoted to God for Divine purpose. Not carved totems of Theology, but living witnesses to the workings of the mysterious, unknowable Knower. Trees are preachers of Truth that is at once both wild and ordained – they make entry into our most pivotal stories, from the Garden of Eden to the crucifixion to the New Jerusalem.

Standing in a forest, we feel the importance of the created thing – our hearts instinctively grow quiet, swelling up with poems and songs and meditations that are all completely inadequate to express what is inside us. We want to breathe deeply, we feel pressed with the need for silence. The hush is a reaching out, a soul response to the Good News we hear preached to us, each in our own language – a response to their heavenly glossolalia, like the tongues of angels – words we hear and understand, but that we cannot repeat back.  

Sacred can’t be uttered – the best of words can diminish it making it appear trivial, exaggerated and ornamental. You have to climb a tree. You have to sit in its branches, wrap your arms around it, feel its strength and its bending, its roots and its reaching, and be one of the living things that nests in it. You have to smell its blossoms, get scraped by it, sit under it, pick its fruit, rake its dead leaves, be still and contemplate.

In contemplating the metaphor of the fruit bearing tree, and exploring whether or not a person might realistically be able to grow an apple tree from seed, I discovered something completely fascinating about the nature of apple trees. You can grow an apple tree from seed – but the fact is that if you want to grow a particular kind of apple, this is not how the tree is reproduced. You cannot plant the seeds from the fruit in your lunch, and expect to grow a tree bearing Golden Delicious apples.  

It has everything to do with the birds and the bees – Spring air, blossoms and pollination. The seeds an apple carries are not clones of it, but are rather a combined genetic coding of two separate trees – the parent tree that it grew on, and the random tree with no name that fertilized it. If you grew an apple tree from seed, it could take ten years of watering, pruning, fertilizing, de-bugging, watching the weather, before you had any idea what kind of apple you were even growing. Chances are good that it wouldn’t be tasty, and you’d love it for its profusion of blossoms. Chances are good that the baby daddy would be a crab apple.

A tree will always produce the same kind of apples, but the seeds its apples carry may be different with every harvest. If you want to grow a tree that will produce the same kind of apple as the one you hold in your hand, you can’t do it from seed – a chosen rootstalk must be grafted with a branch from a tree that bears the desired fruit.

Grafting is a simple process of making a split into the branch of a tree or into a rootstalk, into which a branch from another tree is inserted. The grafted branch is bound tightly and eventually fuses together with the rootstalk, becoming part of the tree as it grows. Amazingly, through grafting you can actually grow peaches, apricots, cherries and plums, or grow several different varieties of apples, all together on one single tree at the same time.

This, of course, makes me think about Romans 11, where Paul refers to the church in Rome as a grafted in branch – a wild olive branch grafted in to a cultivated tree. Apparently, like virtually all fruit trees, olive trees that have been grown directly from seed do not generally make for tasty fruit. Olive trees grown from the seed of cultivated trees backslide into wild olive trees – the fruit they produce is almost certain to be bitter and tiny, inedible though pretty to look at.

I am pondering the metaphor – wondering what exactly God desires me to see. I am wondering which I am – the seeded tree, or the grafted branch – or if I am somehow both.

I see how I am part of the great, blended family of undefined parent origins – one part of the Tree, one part of the world – Divine nurture and sin nature wrapped in rings through my growing. I bear fruit of peace filled with wild seeds, reproducing in my own sullied image, involuntarily spreading, prolific without intention – sometimes tasty, sometimes tart. I am part of an ever enlarging kingdom of trees growing Spirit fruit – created to sow seed, to expand, to branch off, to spread wastefully without trying, seeding new and differing apple trees with every season.

Some of what comes out of me is fit for human consumption, some feeds the birds, some feeds the earth – but the Spirit of God is somehow at work in it all. God alone is able to distinguish the good from the bad, the ornamental from the necessary, letting it all grow together, fully able to work all things together for good for those who love Him and are called to His purposes.

This truly is how we grow. We are each unique – whatever our doctrine, its outworking in our lives never looks the same. We don’t bear fruit or reproduce trees that bear fruit with the exact quality and flavour as any other of our type. We don’t bear fruit in every season. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control – these can seem somewhat subjective. One person’s love is another person’s hate. One person’s faithfulness tastes sweet while another’s is bitter and sours the stomach.

We are all intentioned to make an offering of the small, simple, honest thing that is in us, though it varies greatly in taste and appearance – to let joy ripen and drop freely from our branches, and to not concern ourselves with what lies dormant inside it, or with where and what it will grow. To explode wastefully, bountifully, lavishly, like God does, without thought for self-preservation or worry – to exponentially multiply the fruit of His Spirit within us for the nourishment of the world. We do not bring life to the dead seed, we do not cause the fruit to grow, and we do not control what influences its nature. We are not the Life, we are not the Arborist, we are not the Wind.

Still, I know that there is wildness in my flesh. Unless I am somehow saved from this inherent pomme sauvage savagery, there is a latent tendency both in my seed and in my very nature towards growing and exponentially reproducing fruit that is bitter, small and just for show. My goodness is so hard, so meager, it wouldn’t satisfy anybody. It is no kind of food source. Only God is good.

I am one who has been purposed by the Wise Arborist, a twig plucked out of the natural, the uncultivated, the neglected, and grafted in to the One Good Root Stalk. I have been tightly bound to the One Tree in order to be part of It, to have a share in It, to be sustained by It, nourished by It, sanctified by It – to be transformed to Its nature, in order to produce good fruit that is pleasing, satisfying, and nourishing to the world God loves. God intentioned us to carry the select fruit that His Spirit bears, choosing to supernaturally bypass the erratic, unruly nature of our seeds, going so far as to make them irrelevant. If I don’t bear good fruit, then for the health of the Tree, for the purposes of the Tree, I can be cut off to make room for a twig that will.

It is a big, beautiful metaphor – it’s bigger than me, branching off into a thousand directions. I’m not entirely sure what it all means, but I feel it diminished with every word. It makes me wish for all the world for Spring leaves to blanket the bare branches of the trees – that those two growing stark as lovers in my back yard would cover themselves and appear to me as one. I want to climb up into my best climbing tree and just sit there. I want to watch the wind moving through the green, listen to the birds, and study the bugs. I want to close my eyes and breathe deeply of God in all His mysterious splendour – feel in every cell of my body the silencing beauty of wildness. I want to be still and know that He is God.

I want to know everything within me humming in harmony to the melody of tree – Who is like Thee among the gods, O Lord? Who is like Thee, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, working wonders? ~ Exodus 15:11

By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. ~ Jesus

On Bearing Fruit

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
 A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
 A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
 A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
 Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
 Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

~ Joyce Kilmer

Living in the land of indomitable Winter, I am trying to be chill about the return of Spring. It will come. Truthfully, it’s already here – though perhaps a little climate challenged. But mid-April snowfall has me thinking about the fruit trees in my yard, and about how much I love when those first green buds appear – almost more than I love the blossoms, and certainly more than I love the apricots and the crabby apples they produce.

I love all things Spring – proof of life, and the signs of things to come. There is so very much that happens in the slow, slow metamorphosis from seed to tree, from tree to seed bearer, it’s easy to get dazzled by the process. I never enjoy breathing in more than when every tree in my yard is flowering. My small piece of Earth feels cathedral, arched pillars wrapped in green garlands, draped in white, monarchs dressed in velvets of orange and black, gathering by the dozens; everything alive, whispering of holiness, spreading itself open, drinking deeply of the Divine, giving, receiving, worshipping.  

When the trees are just there for show, for the blossoms and for what they attract, it’s easy to become intoxicated by the growing, to not have a mind to the harvest. It is easy to have contempt for what has been heralded – for the tiny, tart thing – when Safeway down the street is importing Golden Delicious. You can’t even give crab-apples away – they brown with rot, squash beneath bare feet, get shovelled off the grass by the barrel full.

If every seed in every crab-apple on every crab-apple tree died, was planted, resurrected and grew into a fruit bearing tree which in turn seeded, season after season, producing and reproducing in exactly the same way – one tree for every seed – heaven help us.

Maybe it’s because we live in the land of the grocery store, but I do sometimes forget the purpose of the fruit to the tree. I think of an apple as food – I do not think of an apple as a seed bearer. I do not hold the glossy red flesh in my hand and think orchard.

And so I think it is very easy for me to misunderstand what is fully meant by the fruit of the Spirit. I have a tendency to think, The Spirit is an energy source.  I have a tendency to think, Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control are wholesome behaviours that are accessible in the Spirit, waiting to be born in me, to be stocked up and kept cool in the crisper for when they are needed. If I am annoyed with my children or with the woman working the drive-thru at Tim Hortons, I can take a deep breath, pull out patience and munch a really big bite of it.

But I don’t think that is the full picture – I think it stops far short of the whole point. I think it makes the fruit of the Spirit sound a little bit like Comfort food – a little bit like bumbleberry pie.

I wonder if having joy, peace, or patience in your own self isn’t a lot like those first buds that shoot forth from the branch in Spring. They are proof of life – but they are not the fruit. Getting a fruit tree to actually bear fruit can be quite a complex process, with more than a few variables: the size and the age of the tree, its exposure to the sun, the fertility of its soil, which trees are growing near to it, how regularly and wisely it is pruned, how the temperature holds after the buds appear, and how well it is protected from disease and pests. A fruit tree is not reliant upon its ability to bear fruit to live, to grow, to be beautiful – one can grow tall, bud and explode with beautiful blossoms without ever once producing an apricot.

But God didn’t make us just to look pretty – we were purposed to be host for God’s Spirit, and Spirit is a tree that bears fruit. The fruit of the Spirit growing in our lives – the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control – these things are not tools to equip us to be better people. They are not things that we reach for, they are not ways that we behave – they are not things that we do. They are the inevitable, natural outcropping of a life that is led by the Spirit.

Fruit is a by-product – it is the seed-bearing flesh that is picked off, rolled into a box, wrapped, and carried across borders, able to be placed freely into the hungry hands of another. It is the solid food that ripens and drops off by the bucket full, that you give to your neighbours, and that you call your friends over to help you gather, hoisting the ladder, shaking the tree – marvelling at how much, more than a person could ever hope to have a use for alone.

God has not given Spirit merely as a force to sustain us today, manna in the wilderness, fresh on the ground every morning. God has seeded into us with a mind to the harvest – in planting the seed, God has planted a tree, has planted an orchard, has planted a kingdom. The kingdom of God is tree to seed to tree again – it is ripe, bountiful and ever multiplying love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Thy kingdom come.

LET'S TALK TURKEY

I made a sincere Facebook promise that if my blog ever was read in ten countries, I would post a picture of my dirty laundry. When my audience stats crept past that mark, I was kind of excited and kind of depressed. Depressed, because my mother-in-law had just washed all my laundry and I didn’t actually have the usual Rocky Mountain high pile I was so looking forward to showing off. Excited, because, well… except for a bus trip to Kansas on a choir tour, I’ve never really been outside of Canada.

I make myself very vulnerable in this space, and I try not to think about where the words are going to end up, or how they may be interpreted. I’ve always been somewhat of an emotional exhibitionist – but every once in a while someone will leave me a comment that affects me, makes me aware of the deeply intimate, makes me think about getting a bigger fig leaf. It reminds me what a small, small world it is that we live in, and how personal our struggles truly are.

Even so, I do believe voice is given to be shared, and I believe in the freedom that comes from acknowledging and honouring what can only be common human experience.

So in celebration of Earth Day, the shedding of fig leaves, Spring thaw, bare feet, muddy floors, and the murder of crows perched in the tree outside my window, and because I am sincerely grateful to all of you who have taken the time to read my blog, I thought I would use this opportunity to share a few of my very favourite comments from kind souls in an assortment of countries that I will almost certainly never visit in the flesh. Pardon the run-on sentence, I’m just so excited. I hope you find them as inspirational as I do. One love.

Anonymous wrote: Thanks for the good writeup. It actually used to be a amusement account it. Look complex to far brought agreeable from you! However, how could we keep in touch?

Visit my site: taco bell

Isn’t that just so true? I mean, how could we keep in touch? It’s kind of like that old saying: a bird may love a fish, but where will they make a home? The wisdom for that complex life mystery reads almost like a tagline – sometimes you just have to run for the border. Deep words, Anonymous. I hear you. Thank you.

Anonymous wrote: I all the time used to read paragraph in news papers but now as I am a user of net therefore from now I am using net for content, thanks to web.

My web-site: Mexican fast food 

This simple confession about being a user of nets and webs reminded me so much of Peter – you know, casting his nets on the wrong side of the boat. And really, aren’t we all ultimately fishing for something? Yet you never can presuppose what that net will pull up. Life is a perilous voyage in a vessel of wood, and we are prone to getting snagged, stuck and rolled up in even the simplest of temptations - Mexican food. Thanks, Anonymous.  

And then there’s this one, left on one of my more intimately personal posts, Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives and Women Preachers – which appears to be a fan favourite in Turkey. It reads so simply:

Anonymous wrote: I'm gone to convey my little brother, that he should also go to see this blog on regular basis to obtain updated from most recent news.

Look into my website: youtube

Sniff. See what I mean? Yes, precious one, you tell your little brother. You tell your brother and one hundred and fifteen of your closest friends. Spread the most recent news...

It's all simply smashing.

Je t’aime.

Dirty laundry soon to follow.

SOLA SCRIPTURA

I finally had The Talk with my daughter – the one in which I told her I didn’t actually believe in a literal six day Creation. It felt a little like handing her wings, kicking her out of the nest, saying, It’s safe for you to fly – it probably shouldn’t have been so terrifying. She took it the way I expected her to. She asked if I was even a Christian. She administered The Test. She's by nature a literal thinker.

Since I was a girl I have loved the Bible. I’ve been told that it makes my eyes light up. I feel it that way, like illumination – like wrestling with Holy, and being seared from within. I remember getting my first Bible – the whole thing, not just the condensed for kids picture version. I cracked open its hard cover and went right for the words lettered in red – all the stuff that Jesus actually said. He was there, written in red, In the Beginning, but I didn’t yet have sight to see Him.

I immediately discovered that Jesus only featured in five books out of the whole Bible, and that four of those books seemed the same story told four different ways. I remember being upset. I wondered why the Bible was so very long – why there were so many words in it that weren’t God’s.

I looked at the maps in the back. I tried to read the Principals of Translation and the Explanation of General Format at the front, and I began to think that this book was a little bit bigger than I was ready for. I spent three adult years learning its languages, its context, I’ve read through it cover to cover, and I still feel exactly that way. It’s always just a little bit bigger than I’m ready for.

Red letter reading, and scanning the titles, I somehow found my way to The New Heaven, The New Earth, The New Jerusalem. If you asked me at ten years old if I was reading my Bible, I could say absolutely, yes. Yes, I’m reading Revelation. Over and over, the same words:

And the material of the wall was jasper; and the city was pure gold, like clear glass. The foundation stones of the city wall were adorned with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was stone was jasper; the second sapphire; the third, chalcedony; the fourth, emerald; the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, topaz; the tenth, chrysoprase; the eleventh, jacinth; the twelfth, amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; each one of the gates was a single pearl. And the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass…. And in the daytime (for there shall be no night there) its gates shall never be closed.  Revelation 21:18-21, 25

My parents bought me a book about rocks. I thought a lot about how gold could look like clear glass, about how exactly a giant, round pearl could be formed into a gate, and about why God would bother building walls around the city at all, if the gates were always going to be open. I wondered what God was afraid of.

Children have a way of asking the most startlingly obvious questions, like – If God only came to earth one time as a man in baby Jesus, how is it that grown-up God was walking around having conversations and arguments and lunch with Abraham, and why does nobody ever talk about that in Sunday School?

Why, if Love is all-powerful, couldn’t God just forgive the Devil – love him so much that Satan would repent? Why couldn’t the Devil become one of the redeemed? God is omnipotent. Love is all-powerful. Why can’t I pray for him? God can do anything. God. Loves. Everybody.

Where exactly at the bottom of the ocean are our sins, and did God put a sign there that reads, NO DIGGING? Because telling somebody not to do something is just asking for trouble, which was kind of lesson number one of Genesis.

If God is good and loving, and if He was going to do it anyway, why didn’t He reconcile Himself with Adam and Eve right there in Eden? Why didn’t God just stop walking around in the garden in the cool of the day, cut down that tree of knowledge of good and evil, use it to build Himself a cross and hang Himself on it? Really. Why not?

To this day, I only have a good answer for one of those questions.

Despite my deep passion for the Bible, I have a hard time actually reading it to my children. Cain and Abel; Noah and the ark; Abraham and just about everyone he interacted with; Sodom and Gomorrah; Lot and his daughters; Jephthah’s daughter; David and Bathsheba – a lot of what I read as a child was simply inappropriate for children. A lot of it was spiritually traumatizing. I asked my father flat out, If God asked you to kill me, would you? I took an anticipated comfort in knowing that my father didn’t always obey God.

The Bible is ancient, sacred text – it is not a collection of bedtime stories. It isn’t God’s Chicken Soup for the Soul. It’s full of tear you up inside truth, and Truth is a sword – a razor sharp, double-edged blade. If it isn’t illumined by Spirit – if we ever try to wield it carelessly in the flesh – we could cut off our own toes and completely lose our balance. We really do need to be wise.

But then sometimes we might get to being too wise in our own eyes, and miss the point all together. We might get really hung up on the Greek. We might think scripture is a pointed weapon to stab people with, dead between the eyes, in their heart or their gut, to take them out at the knees, to sever their head from their body, to have the victory. We might claim pieces of it to make justified our own sin. Even the devil knows how to quote scripture.

It takes innocence to see the obvious – I  can get so mired in the words. I need my children’s ears, my children’s eyes, my children’s questions. Does Jesus get bored sitting around in our heart not even having a television? Does God get mad when I worry?

Going back to the Greek is really not the place to find answer – we are not People of the Book, but of the Living Word and of the Spirit.

I tell my daughter to punch the air really hard, and then I ask if she thinks that she hurt it. I ask if she thinks the air is offended. I tell her God is Spirit – like air, like wind, like breath. You are in God, and God is in you, and there is nowhere to go from His presence. God moves into everything that gives Him room, filling every bit of room that is given. Worry is like holding your breath, trying to conserve the air that’s inside you. That doesn’t make God mad – God just wants you to breathe. I don’t give her chapter and verse for that, but when she looks for it I believe she will find it.

Sometimes I have to chew solid food for my children, and drop it into their mouths – like God still does for me. I want them to feel how Truth feels in their bellies, to see how it strengthens their bones, how it lights up the eyes. I want them to taste and see that the Lord is good, so they won’t hide if Truth comes like a sword.

I still contemplate closely the words in red, the ones that Jesus spoke, but I see Jesus so much larger now. I find Him all over the Bible. I meditate on the Truth in His metaphors – what Jesus said about being the Door and the Vine and the Light, and about how we are sheep and salt and fragrance. I try to make sure my children don’t gag on the literal. Truth doesn’t have to be literal. Truth can grow loftier and clearer and more transformative in power when It’s not root bound and choked out by literal.

WIND TOSSED

I got it wrong. I got it so wrong, I wanted to vomit. Like Saul, after the Damascus Road, how he had to linger a little in his blindness, how he had to lie broken and dazed and weighted by the knowledge of good and evil, and how he simply could not tell them apart. How he had to chew on the words, Enemy of God, feel that soak into him like sulfur, like a hell, like the hot melting of steel, like the purging of dross. Like Saul, how he had to disappear for a while to weep and wrack and sever righteousness from his bones, peel skins of truth from his teeth, uproot the trees from his eyes, to see the Mercy in the dullness of his new sight. 

I wanted to plant my feet – put them down on something solid, on something hard and fixed and stone, so I could say to myself, Here I stand. This is my God. This is His Love. I wanted words of cold granite, carved soft as by finger, to lift over my head as a covering, an immovable, unchanged Law on my heart. I tried to write them myself. I took gold, precious things mined from the earth, chipped off from the Rock, and melted them into a god in my own confused image. Be it sleeping or speaking, I prayed for Him to be in my boat. 

I forgot how Jesus knew his disciples, how he knew that they sat in their wave battered boat, tossed by a contrary wind, and how their hearts were prone to fear. I forgot how he came alongside them like a ghost, walking on the water and how they didn’t know – they weren’t sure who he was, phantom – and how Peter tested the spirit, knowing, Whatever he calls me to do, I can. 

I forgot how he stepped out of his unbelief, saying, If it is you, command me to come to you on the water – and how Jesus answered him only what he asked. Come. And Peter did not know Who had called him until the moment he dared to set his feet on the liquid, the ocean of Grace, the ever fixed constantly changing, and felt how firm a foundation it is that washes the feet, how it floats even the one with the weakest of faith. 

I forgot that the Spirit does not dwell in temples, that the Word is not nailed to a cross made of paper – It does not sleep in a book or a box, waiting to be conjured with secret code. The Word is broken body, resurrected Life and blowing Spirit. That Word is infallible. That Word is the Word that is Life. It does not do what you expect. It moves where It will and It does not ever repeat. We do not know Its boundaries. We do not know It’s will. It does not have to answer our questions. It says, Follow, if you dare. 

And so I listen again, like a child, like a beloved disciple, like a tongue-tied betrayer in a wind tossed boat, and I wait for the Voice over the waves in my own soul – the Voice that says, Come. This is the Way. Walk in it. 

This is how you walk in the Spirit – you do not hold fast to what is under your feet. You do not put your faith in it. You do not wonder how it will hold you. It won’t hold you. You fix your eyes on the One Who is alive – the One Who is Rock, Who has Fathered you, Who has called you, Who has breathed into you, Who has poured His blood over you, Who indwells you with Spirit – you say, Lord, save me, when you feel yourself sink, you do not grab back for the sides of the boat.

 

But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all men generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith without any doubting, for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. ~James 1:5-6

 

LET IT BE

I’m going back to the in the beginning, back to that first day, back to the raven heavens where God cupped His hands and released into them an orb, a spinning chaos of confusion and emptiness – where Elohim set a void like a hazy gem, into the middle of His vast, unknowable universe. Where God said, Let us begin.

I’m going back to that crinkle in time where the face of the deep stared at darkness, and God’s Spirit was the only thing moving – not as breath, not as mist, but as mighty wind over water, brooding as a hen over her eggs.

I’m going back to the place of first Light where there was no eclipsing, nothing to bend the light as it moved through the black at the speed of His Voice, illuminating all that existed – to the place of clearness, where there was nothing that was not revealed. Where there was nothing that scurried, nothing that blinked, nothing that flinched when the flood of Light fell upon it.

I’m going back to first illumination – where no One but God knew that the Light was good.

BABEL

Isn’t that so like God, to burn into your heart that you are a preacher and then to promptly strip you bare of all your convictions. I might have predicted it.

That trying to build a tower up to God is a futile thing. If all of us together, in one accord, with one mind, could agree to work together on anything, we would not come even close to comprehending the ways of God – though we might be in grave danger of toppling. It’s no wonder that God confused us in our communicating with one another. God wants us to work together, but God has never wanted us to fall headlong. God never wanted us to forget that we are earthbound, that the things Divinely purposed for us are here.

I am considering removing the word sin from my vocabulary. That knowledge of good and evil – I don’t believe we were ever meant to have it. I surely don’t know what to do with it – I’m trying to get back to innocent. Innocent, like born again. Innocent, like baby. Though I try, though God speaks it with signs and in parables, I cannot rightly divide the Truth. I cannot scoop out the marrow without carving off one side of the bone. I cannot even harvest the good from my own heart – it is a field wild with wheat and tares, and God speaks ever clearer, Just leave that to Me. Let it all grow together. I do know how to rightly divide.

I know sin divides me from God – interferes with our relationship, keeps me from gazing on Holy. It’s the stuff that makes your face melt, makes your heart burn, makes your skin feel like it’s on fire – standing anywhere near Holy just makes it worse. God, how I believe in Grace. Yet I know that my errors have drawn my heart closer to God than any other force on earth – not to understanding God, not to being like God, not to pleasing God, but to knowing God and to loving God. In the Biblical sense.

Sometimes God moves so far back into the Universe when I err, that I think I can almost see Him in full – He gives me a completely different point of view. I gain new knowledge. I gain new insight. It’s from those depths that I gain new wisdom. The closer I feel to eternal separation, like maybe He’s never coming back, the deeper I hear His voice, the heavier I feel His hand, the more earnestly my heart desires Him, the truer I know God is real. I don’t understand it. It’s not very good theology.

 For we know in part, and we prophecy in part; but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. When I was a child, I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a woman, I did away with childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I also have been fully known. But now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. ~ 1 Corinthians 13:9-13

Reflections on Bill 18, by a reluctant Mennonite

But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches; but if you are arrogant, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root supports you. You will say then, ‘Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.’ Quite right, they were broken off for their unbelief, but you stand by your faith. Do not be conceited, but fear; for if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will He spare you.  Romans 11:17-21

I’ve never seen an olive tree, but I know the nature of vines. I had a gorgeous grape vine wrapping around the back of my house for a few years, before I decided that I was fed up and exhausted with managing wild and unruly things. We cut it down but left a long stump, just in case, because wild and unruly can be all kinds of awesome, and because it is just not a good reason to kill. That thing looks dead – deader than dead – but, wow, does it know how to grow.

When I look at that vine, I always think spiritual. I always think about how Jesus is the vine and of these verses from Romans, Paul’s words to the church in Rome about their place in the order of things. Do not be conceited, but fear – you are not the tree, you are not the root. You are a branch, and a branch can be broken off. I look at that church in Rome now, how it contrasts with my own, and I know Church has never stopped being a hodgepodge of long, twisting branches seeking the Light and Living Water in a thousand different directions.

I believe the Church has a gross addiction to religion. Sometimes I am afraid of being a part of a branch about to be lopped off. I wonder how you can tell whether or not you yourself have finally just been shut up in disobedience. I have a miserable penchant for disobedience.

We Christians can be more than a little arrogant – a little wild and unruly, a little we are the world, a little let’s take over. We have a long, documented history of devastating people in the name of God and righteousness. We also have a long history of saying, But those weren’t real Christians. I’m sure I don’t know how to draw lines around who constitutes a real Christian.

Jesus said it like this – You will know them by their fruits. Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 7:20-21).

The saving right arm of God, His Word in the form of flesh, said, Therefore, however you want people to treat you, so treat them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. (7:12)

The Prince of Peace and Son of Righteousness said, Do not judge lest you be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. (7:2)

I don’t think these verses are out of context for talking about our response as Christians to Bill 18. I know that we praise God that we live in a free country, that we are able to be our whole selves openly, to worship God fully and freely without any fear from our government, with the full support of our government when we are infringed upon. We are grateful to God that we have the legal right in every public school in our country to start up a prayer group, or a Bible study, or any kind of Christian Alliance. We embrace the law, we give thanks to God for its covering, because it really is our supporter.

I think we are like this with God’s Law, sometimes. We love to have it humble before us and washing our feet, but we really don’t like it to convict us. We really don’t like it to boss us around, or to bring us down to our knees before somebody else who is dirty.

Law is a servant to us, but it is not our Servant – it only ever kneels before us in order to teach us the way. God’s Law peers straight into the heart leaving no table unturned, no stone unrolled – and the heart can be a desperately wicked place. Cleansing that temple can get more than a little messy.

I have little doubt that Christians could crucify Jesus all over again, if given half the chance. What he asked people to do really offended their understanding of righteousness. Jesus really upset people’s ideas about how to please God. Jesus had contempt for religion.

Jesus did not come in any way to abolish His Law, he came to fulfill it. He came to demonstrate it. He came to satisfy it. In every interaction he had with people, he fulfilled the Spirit of the Law – he was the Law of God in action – and he said, This is how you do it. You love the Lord your God with all your heart, and you love your neighbour as you love yourself. It isn’t complicated – it’s just really hard sometimes. It doesn’t leave any room for self-righteous. You don’t get a gold star for doing what’s right. You don’t get a gold star for loving.

Years ago I came across a beautiful Star of David necklace and decided I wanted to wear it. People wear crosses all the time as jewelry – why should it be any different, I reasoned. It wasn’t meant to be a conversation piece. Jesus was a Jew, I loved Jesus, the necklace was beautiful – at the time, I couldn’t really see the problem. I hadn’t had a lesson in appropriating.

Sitting outside of a gymnastics class one evening, a blonde haired boy of not more than nine (with whom I happened to be playing a game of Go Fish, and who happened to be the gymnastics instructor’s son), looked at my necklace, recognized it and spoke words to me that I will never, ever forget – Are you a Jew? I hate Jews. I looked at him, shocked, as his face blushed a confused contempt even he did not understand. I scanned the faces of the other women seated on the floor, as I was, with their backs against the wall. They all looked stunned and embarrassed, but nobody said a thing.

In that moment, all that was running through my mind was, God. They all think I’m a Jew – and they are all totally watching me be hated on by a CHILD – and nobody is saying ANYTHING – and I don’t know what to DO. I had never, ever in my life experienced racism before. Judging by the epidemic of I don’t know what to do, I doubt anyone within hearing had ever felt or witnessed it in quite that way before, from such an innocent, with such an absence of shame. I think it was like watching somebody get hit by a bus, and suddenly not knowing what number to call for an ambulance.

I knew that I was feeling very, very mad, and when I am very, very mad I don’t generally control my tongue – but I knew in this moment that I had to. I had just been painted with a wide, ugly brush, and now I was representing a people. It’s a huge reality check when you discover that you have inadvertently taken it upon yourself to impersonate someone else, to a room full of people who don’t have your back. But I knew that whatever I was going to say, the only one thing I absolutely did not feel like saying was, No, I’m not a Jew.

So I said simply, That is called ‘racism’ – and he said, sincerely confused, What is? We had a brief but meaningful one-sided conversation, in which I explained to him what that word means and exactly why it is not ok. Then I had the conversation again with his mother. She was apologetic and horrified and said something harsh to her son in another language that made tears well in his eyes and made his face red with shame. Important things are missed when you can’t translate, but one thing that doesn’t need language for you to hear it is fear – whatever she said to him, it didn’t sound much like I am not raising you to be a racist, and did sound a whole lot like maybe, you’re going to get me fired.

Sometimes there are things that we just simply don’t see, unless we can actually step out of our own shoes and into another person’s for an hour. I saw racism like I had never seen racism before – because that child was talking about me. He hated me, and he didn’t even know me – and it could not have mattered less that I wasn’t even what he thought I was. That was the whole point – he didn’t know a single thing about me other than that I had played Go Fish with him while he waited in boredom for his mom, but he was prepared to hate me anyway. Whether intentionally, or inadvertently, he had been taught to hate me.

As worried as the Church tends to get sometimes about being persecuted, that has never once been part of my own life or faith experience – never once, until I was somebody else. I would not have been surprised to hear that that little blonde boy was a Christian.

Maybe it is time – maybe it is long past time for the Church to feel again what it means to truly be on the outside, what it feels like to suffer indignity and abuse from the mouths of children, and to learn what exactly it means that the servant is not above the Master. Maybe this is a really good time for us to weigh out carefully our neighbour’s need for respect, rights and freedoms, and to value it as more important than our own. We clearly don’t know what to do with ours.

I don’t think that Bill 18 is a shining example of the excellence of law and, honestly, I just don’t think it is going to work. It does little more than illustrate, on paper and in conversation, how completely insufficient Law is when it comes to transforming us into better people. Law cannot save us where we truly need saving – only Love can do that. You can make concerted efforts to expose and to educate, but you can’t legislate against fear and people are always going to be mean.

I know there are layers to the conversation, and that the split ground appears to fall between the sanctity of human dignity and the sanctity of the words of the One who made us. There are a lot of very meaningful and important conversations that need to take place around those issues, inside the Church.

There has been a lot of concern expressed over the wording of Bill 18, and there are rumblings in some places about how it is one in a series of steps towards full-on persecution of the Church. This really, really bugs me. While it may be an example of legal incompetence, I do believe it is a sincere attempt to do away with breeding grounds for hate, subtle and overt, and to set a standard of respect and support to a wide spectrum of people who are right now, today persecuted, disenfranchised, attacked and made to feel in a thousand ways, both subtle and overt, like they are somehow less than.

Nobody is asking anyone to understand or to approve – what is required of us all is simply respect as equal citizens under the law in a free country. As Christians, we could be at the forefront of that effort. If we were at all doing our job as Christians, Bill 18 would not even be necessary – because, supposedly, there are billions of us. We are not loving the way Jesus said to love – we are not always treating people the way we want to be treated. We say ‘Lord, Lord’, but we are not always doing the will of our Father.

Things we fear we will be subject to should we begin to lose pieces of our Religious Rights and Freedoms, other people already live with every day. In Synagogues in this country, police officers routinely roam the building during Passover services because of threats of violence against gathered God-worshippers. I’m not sure why we think we should be exempt from that as a life experience. I’m not sure why we aren’t joining forces and up in arms about that. Why do we only grow teeth when it’s about us and our values? Isn’t countering hate one of our values?

To my mind, there is just something so unbecoming about the Church in North America fighting for its rights. We’ve been indulged past the point of bloating with rights and freedoms. Perhaps it’s the pacifist in me, maybe I’m a little too much lay down and die, but it deeply offends my conscience. But of all things to get fretful about, why would the Church – any church – engage in a fight for Freedom of Religion?

We are not even supposed to have religion. We are always so quick to say how much God hates religion.

The question I have to ask myself, and the one I want to ask my brothers and sisters in Christ, is this: if your Religious Freedom is infringed upon, what necessary thing won’t you still be free to do? What power or principality can stop us from doing what is good and what God requires of us – to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God?

What if by some remarkable series of end-times events the Church did actually become the persecuted, and what if Christ-followers were reduced to this: They will know we are Christians by the love we have one for another. It’s the old question they used to ask us in Youth Group – would there even be enough evidence to convict you?

What if by some predestined series of events Christians began to suffer great violations, indignities, were treated unjustly, had threats made against their lives, were made fun of, beat up, refused service, feared and hated by children, marginalized, stripped down and reduced only to this: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Is that fruit actually growing in your life?

Because, the thing is – Against such things there is no law. 

Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. ~Philippians 2:3-8

THE SCARS THAT LOVE BUILT

There is a cross inside my body – a sliced T where my son was cut out and pulled from my womb. He was a little tangled – upside down and backwards – and it took a bit of doing to get him out. He is so beautiful.

I heard the word natural a lot after giving birth to my children. As in, Did you have a naaaatural childbirth? I know what was meant – the question was really, Did you take the drugs, or did you take the pain? And in what manner did that baby get out of your body? It felt like I was being asked, What kind of woman are you? It felt like a litmus test – an analysis of my character, my capacity for selflessness, my inner fortitude, the purity of my love. Sometimes it felt like they were asking about my wedding night – as in, Did you wear white?

I don’t like the way it sounds – natural – like there was something unnatural about being cut from my body. There was no other way for him to be born. It was the most natural thing in the world to say to the doctor, Just do what you have to do. My body, for his life – it wasn’t any kind of choice.

I thought about this when I heard my daughter use the words my fault to repeat the story of Jesus’ death on the cross. It kind of made me cringe. My fault. I had audio for the sermon that was playing on repeat in her head – I know it line for line. Jesus died for you – for your sin. If there was no other person on earth, and it was just you, Jesus still would have died – he loves you that much. If all you had ever done was to tell one little white lie, Jesus still would have had to die – your sin separates you from God. Even if by some miracle you had never even sinned, he would still have had to die for you – you can’t stand in His presence, He’s just that holy and you, in your very nature, are a hopeless sinner. But because he loves you, his body was broken for you. He was stripped and flogged for you. He bled, he was pierced, he was humiliated – he did that for you. He died because of you.

That can sound a whole big bunch like, It’s your fault.

But I think about the T-shaped scar inside me, and the straight one stitched across my abdomen where the doctor cut my child out of me Caesar style – and I look at my beautiful son – and I never think the words, You did this to me. I never, ever imagine, It was your fault.

That would just be ridiculous. What does blame have to do with any of it?

It wasn’t his fault that I conceived him, that I wanted him, that I loved him and had a name for him before he even existed in my mind. It wasn’t his fault that he grew in me upside down and backwards. It wasn’t his fault that I submitted to the will of the Physician to do the only thing possible, the one thing necessary, to give him life.

I chose him. I loved him. The entirety of my flesh was devoted to him. And so what, if my body was wounded to give him life? I would have died for him. My scars are my commitment to him carved in my flesh, and I wear those scars with joy. It was my honour. It was my responsibility. It was my job.

There’s no great mystery to it – it is not about fault.

It is simply the nature of Love.

And there is no real strangeness to it, though it is beyond all comprehension – because of overflowing joy and absolute Love, It is God Who is the singer of the Easter song, and God sings that song over me…

She lives!

 Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross. ~ Hebrews 12:2

 

CROSS ON, CROSS OFF

And he was saying to them all, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me”. ~ Luke 9:23

I’ll be honest – I still stumble over the cross. Not the Jesus bore the penalty for my sins part – that part, I adore though I still struggle to get a grasp on what it exactly means. Not the I’ve been reconciled with God, I’ve been redeemed, I’ve been bought with a price, I’ve been sealed by the blood of the Lamb – all of that abides smoothly like a balm on my soul. It’s that take up your cross and follow me part. That’s the stick that trips me – because that part is really hard. That part sucks rocks.

I can’t nail down what it means.

It’s what causes me to ask myself sometimes, Are you really sure that you’re even a Christian?

How can you call yourself a follower of Christ, if you actually don’t really want to follow him? Maybe ten steps behind waving palm branches, waiting for your portion of bread and fish, thirsty for water, hungry for righteousness – but carrying a cross? I don’t know. It’s not a parade – it’s not shiny jewelry on a chain around your neck. It is one slow, inglorious death march Jesus is asking us to take. Don’t carry a cross and expect not to be crucified on it.

So you have to ask yourself – Do I really believe that? Do I really believe that’s the way? Is this really what I want to teach my children?

It kind of came down to it this week – the rubber met the road and left a skid mark. I halted. I dropped my cross cold onto the ground, set my shoulders back straight and said, Seriously? Wtf. No.

Because it happened to my child. That’s how it is with convictions – they are stone solid, until it’s your child.

My child made a mistake. It wasn’t a big mistake – it was the kind of mistake a hundred other children could easily make in a day laughing, without conscience, without fear of reprisal. It was a mistake made in secret – nobody ever would have known. But she knew. And because she has a conscience that is tender, a heart that hungers for righteous and a stomach that spits sin out of it before it ever gets sour, she confessed it to me.

And because I never want her sin to go ingrown, into secret places, into hard to sweep spots, I took her by the hand and I said, This is the way. I said, The truth will only set you free. I said, You are so brave and I just love your heart and I am so very proud of you. I said, God will honour you for telling the truth.

But it didn’t really work out that way. The confession cost her. It cost her big.

Her mistake was not forgiven – in fact, it was held up and used against her. Not only that, but that little mistake drew old buried under the blood sins from years past to it like a magnet – things long ago repented of were pulled out and held against her. And a Jesus-loving adult pulled out an indelible marker and drew lines around her, and wrote words over her – all her sins. They called her a name.

And her tender conscience, her beautiful heart, her personal integrity, her unbelievable courage, her strength of character, her simple honesty, and her obedience to what’s right even when she’s done wrong – all of that was ignored, like it didn’t happen. Like she’d never been the one to confess it first, to shed tears over it, to seek to set it right.

And my soul felt Judas – like I had betrayed her with a kiss.

I thought long and hard about stones. I thought long and hard about picking one up and throwing it right back. I had a stack of them, equally sized, equally weighted.

But a Voice said, An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

I thought, It was such a stupid little mistake. What did I have to go and make it a big deal for? Why couldn’t I have taught her how to sweep under the rug? Nobody would ever have known.

But a Voice said, My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.

I thought, She did what was right, even though it was hard. Why, God, have you forsaken her?

But a Voice said, They do not know what they are doing.

And a Voice said, Forgive.

That cross is so hard – because it just is not fair. It is so unfair, it’s offensive.

My daughter got her first hard lesson in the painful part of the Gospel – that Truth does not spare you the cross. She paid the price for her sin old school. She got shunned, old school.

I am still going to teach my children the way. I am still going to teach them that God sees the heart, but that the only name He ever writes onto us is Mine.

But I’m not going to lie – the temptation is there. The next time somebody comes at my child with a log sticking out of their eye, I might decide to go old school. I might decide to think Yael. I might decide to think tent peg.