FORGIVENESS - Part II

I struggle with forgiveness sometimes. It’s strange to me – how I can pour it out lavishly, as Jesus taught me, over the big things but in the scratches and the bumps I am so prone to keep accounts. I hold onto words – I get spiteful over the silent treatment. I listen to my children say, Now you know how it feels, and I know they are sampling revenge. They don’t see me modeling forgiveness.

I think about Jesus’ debtor’s story of The Unforgiving Servant in Matthew 18, and I ask myself why did that man have such a hard time forgiving another, after he himself had been unburdened of so very, very much? The one who is forgiven much loves much – but it does not always stand to reason that the one who is forgiven much forgives much.  

Life has been teaching me over and over again that being forgiven of a debt does not necessarily leave you without need. Forgiveness isn’t money in the bank – it is only a release from what is owed. The King did not say to his servant, I forgive you of your debt – and here’s a little something extra to get you back on your feet again, and a budget so this doesn’t happen again. In Jesus’ story, the servant left the King in virtually the same condition he went in to him – with empty pockets.  

Free indeed but with nothing stored up, empty of currency, and not yet any wiser. Fear can stick its foot in. And the surprising thing – the thing you would never expect – is that mercy can sit sour in your belly when you have had too much of it to drink. You can resent to your core the pain of ever having needed it at all.

When you have known burden, when you’ve felt it lifted, you don’t ever want to feel it again. I can imagine the liberated servant dancing out of the King’s presence singing freedom songs – As God is my witness, I’ll never need mercy again. But I know how pride and fear can tempt to self-preserve. You never forget the taste of dust. You can begin to take notice of people who bump you and stir up feelings of heavy. You can become accutely aware of people who took from you when were already barely holding on. You can start making mental notes of those to whom you once gave out of your excess. You can shovel out a pile of blame – why you ended up on your knees, in the hole.

Jesus’ story is really, really not about an imaginary thing like money. It is about real taken things like trust, childhood, reputation, dignity, pride, self-worth, a sense of personal safety, faith in humanity, boundaries, family, innocence, and sleep – things that we sometimes lose to one another in the normal course of life, which we need and to which we are sincerely attached. It can be hard to release those kinds of debts, though we know even as we write them down that there is seldom any way that they can ever, ever be repaid to us.

The Greek word for forgive is aphiemi – to send forth, to lay aside, to let go. It is not apokathistemi – to restore. It is not epilanthanomai – to lose out of mind, to forget. It is not a lot of other words that mean things like, it didn’t happen, it doesn’t hurt, it wasn’t wrong, one more chance, don’t call the police, don’t talk about it, just be grateful it wasn’t something worse, God is gonna get ‘em in the end. There are other words for those things, but none of them mean forgive.

Forgiveness means you choose not to count your debtor as a resource to draw from. Forgiveness means, I don’t need back from you what you took from me.

Forgiveness can be painfully costly – but I have learned a very great secret. Forgiving a debt is a whole lot easier when you’ve still got lots.

Sometimes I think we don’t want to say it – but we believe that God gives mercy because God can afford to forgive. We believe that God gives and forgives without partiality because of the generosity that comes from abundance, not because of God commandments like grace or compassion or love. We think, but don’t say out loud, It’s not like God is losing anything. God has more where that came from. Of course God forgives – God is good. It’s expected. Because when God asks us to do the same, we believe that God has not fully considered the nature of poverty – what it means to be way beyond empty. We feel that sometimes we simply cannot afford to forgive what is owed, because we still happen to need it.

I believe in love your neighbour as yourself. I really, really believe in love always forgives. But I have triggers. When I feel the unforgiving spirit well up in me, I know what it is because I start to feel mean. I start to feel spiteful. I start to want people to know. But I am starting to learn to say to myself – what is it that is making you so greedy? What is it that you are so very attached to, or that you think you don’t have enough of?  

I pray to remember that God has lots – more than I could hope, think or imagine – and to never forget the words, All I have is yours.  

For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man; so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:14-19

FORGIVENESS - Part I

I remember the first time God said to me, Do you want to be well? I was in church and the pastor was preaching from John 5 – Jesus at the pool of Bethesda. God doesn’t reach out and touch me a lot but I felt the hand of God on me then, like a slap upside the head. Jesus spoke, do you want to be well, and I felt it. I was nineteen years old and feet first, nose deep in a quagmire of losses and pain – my brother’s sudden death, my first broken heart, my parents’ crumbled marriage, the giving up of my virginity for the wrong reasons at the wrong time to the wrong person, and a drunken without malice rape – small words for giant things that tore my soul and bled me. I made a lot of very wrong choices, and I made them completely without style. I caused wounds and racked up debts that I cannot repay. But God started talking to me out loud in bathroom stalls saying words like, I love you. I’m not leaving you. I’m still here. Then one day Jesus came really close up and said right into my ear, I can make you whole. I can. If that is what you want. Right then, in the unlikeliest of places – a church pew – God said to me, Decide.

Whole is very different than healed – whole doesn’t say anything about what came before. Whole doesn’t have a story.

Decide. Decide to hold on to comfort thoughts like not my fault, not my choice, I was a victim, it was out of my control – passive words that justified, framing all my own choices around a picture of hurt, circumstance and other peoples decisions – or decide to accept a new truth. Whole. Intact. Fully functional. Healthy. Decide to refuse to let my life be determined by anything but my own choices, and to begin the difficult, painful, often embarrassing work of taking personal responsibility at every turn for where I was, what I did and who I was going to be. Learning to trust again, learning to move, learning new words, new reactions, new thought patterns – to choose to stop begging life for mercy, and to start standing and carrying and tripping and dropping and bumping and falling head first into coffee tables while I learned how to walk in well.

I chose whole, and began a loud journey into forgiveness.

THANKSGIVING

I have a good husband who takes me dancing, and says things to me like, I don’t love you for what you do. He says, We notice when you clean, we don’t notice when you don’t. He kisses me deep, buys the groceries and irons his own shirts.

I have healthy, alive children who don’t stay in their beds, who draw on mirrors and have fights and laugh, and wrap their arms around me every day. They make me coffee, remind me to buy dish soap and say things to me like, You are more special than Minecraft.

I have a room all my own, just for writing. It has a window to the sky and a door that locks. It has a closet filled with good memories and with things I like to hide. It is a serious luxury, and I am all the appropriate amounts of grateful.

I am blessed – bountifully blessed.

I think of friends who squeeze all their family into two rooms, and who don’t have a yard. I think of friends who can’t choose what they want because they are one, not two – so they choose juggle and provide and not sleep. I think of friends whose husbands push them into walls, and of friends who have kissed their babies and tasted gone.

I am blessed – bountifully blessed.

Why is gratitude so hard to remember? It is so easy to stop and list blessings – to think of things like soap and water, light and heat, pen and paper, kindness and acceptance, space, time – and to know that these things are wealth beyond measure. A fly lands on my child’s face and nobody ever thinks, Take a picture. This is blessing. This is abundance. There is never ingratitude for this. But blessings carry weight of their own and, when your hands are full, sometimes you long to just take some things for granted.

I don’t think it is any kind of accident that the Hebrew word for Spirit is the same word that is used for wind and for the exhaling of breath. The invisible, moving force that surrounds us, that fills us, that sustains our lives, that breathes into us and blows out of us without thought, while we are asleep, without ever once asking for grateful – this is the way of God. God is everywhere – in all things, around all things. In God we live and move and have our being. God does not have ego, that we are required to see or know or say, Thank you.

I remind myself that a grateful heart is not for God’s benefit, but for mine. I give thanks to God so that I do not ever lose sight of what matters – what I have, not what I have not. I give thanks to God so that I can drink from the wellspring of peace and contentment – because nothing in the world poisons like ungrateful. I give thanks to God because it reminds me that precious things have been entrusted to me, that they are not mine, and that I must remember to share them and to treat them with care. I give thanks to Spirit so that I can remember to hold joy and pain loosely, with open hands, knowing that for life to sustain there must be breath – that the force of all things that live requires both ebb and flow.

TRAINING UP A CHILD

I know a lot about sin – where the seeds are, how they root and grow into underground webbings, making beanstalks overnight. I have Master’s Class experience. Since I became a mother, I don’t let myself get quite so buried under rocks about it. I haven’t scratched the surface on holy, but I sure understand mistakes better.

I have an alphabet and a label maker for spelling out soul struggles like separation anxiety, obsessive compulsive, attention deficit and inadequate impulse control. I have a lot of people – some professional, some not so much – advising me all the time what and what not to do. In the midst of that I try to laugh and be wise, and not exhibit signs of oppositional defiance disorder. I monitor the level of my outside voice, and I try not to let aggression turn passive. I try not to quench the spirit. I dodge prescriptions. I study DaVinci and Martha Stewart and Simon foot-in-mouth Peter. I look for precious gifts to polish – for anything true, excellent, worthy of praise. I see, clear as a glass house, how frustration can wear a spirit down. Try this, maybe that, persistent, consistent, don’t blink, don’t sweat, don’t ever drop the ball. I give thanks to God that I already know how to sweep to the corners of error. I give deep thanks to God for swimming in grace.

I do not want my children to hurt.

But sometimes they will hurt. Sometimes they will hurt other people. From my side of it, some days I’m not sure which of those is harder. I put tape over the mouths of old-time voices in my head that lob guilt bombs. Didn’t your mother teach you NOT to – crumple your homework, colour on walls, kick off your shoes, leave the house without socks, gossip, yell, wipe your mouth on your sleeve, hammer nails in your dresser, say f**k, punch people? There are an awful lot of don’ts to remember, in between Family History forms and permission slips and reading and math and World Peace. Sometimes I just want a t-shirt that reads, Don’t tell me what to do.

Few people really like error. It is offensive. It is annoying. It is distracting. It is wounding. It is hurtful. It is messy. It is damaging to relationships. It is very, very time-consuming. It is better not to make mistakes – so you have life, time, money, energy, limbs and relationship for all the right choices you want to make. If I could take mistakes away, I would. Maybe.

The truth is, I believe Jesus when he says, The one who is forgiven much, loves much. And I so badly want my children to love much. I so badly want them to grasp and wield the unsurpassed power of forgiveness and to build their lives on a foundation of grace. I don’t want them to ever think to paint white.

But I still let them peek at what the paint looks like, and I show them how to hold the brush. I tell them all the rules. I speak the words, Be good, as they go out the door and I hear God say to me, sharp, urgent, with the outside voice. Stop, My child. Stop. That is not how I have taught you.   

 Just as I am. I have to get brave to tell my children what I know – all the priceless that God has shown me through the pining of my sin and error. Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God. Do not be afraid of pain. Do not fall into sin – do whatever you do on purpose. Own your choices, and learn from them. If it’s a mistake, then it’s a mistake. Tell the truth to yourself and to God – God will speak Truth to you. God is Grace. All is grace.

AT THE POOL

My grandfather had a work ethic. He would say, God helps those who help themselves. But he liked to be wise and at the dinner table, passing food around, he would puzzle out loud, Help yourself? What does that even mean, help yourself?  If you needed help in the first place, how could you be the one to give it to yourself? My grandpa never saw Jerry McGuire kicking the bathroom wall, pulling his hair, desperately pleading, Help Me. Help Me help you. I wonder what he would have thought of that.

One of my favorite Bible passages is in John 5, where John records the story of Jesus with the man at the pool of Bethesda:

Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie – the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?” “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked. (NIV)

Thirty-eight years – that’s a lot of years of hurting and waiting and trying. That’s longer than Tom Hanks was Castaway. That’s almost enough years for a mid-life crisis. You have to imagine that he would have, at some point in those thirty-eight years, spent a lot of time just teetering on the ledge of that stagnant pool, perched, listening for the sounds of rustling feathers, ready to roll – begging a stranger, When I say go, just give me a really hard push. How many times did his heart, pounding hot with adrenaline, pump false hope through his blood while his brain screamed at his legs to just move, dammit, move. But when Jesus came along, singled him out of the crowd and asked him if he wanted to be well, he never answered, Yes.

What does it matter anymore what I want? I can’t do it on my own. I have tried, but it’s impossible. And I want you to know that over and over and over again, I have had to lie here, helpless, and watch someone else receive what I need.

I know that in life you can sometimes lose the use of parts of yourself. You can take a hard, hard hit to the soul and survive, but part of you is left weakened to the point of withered. You can end up in a poverty of spirit, and be impoverished for so long that you forget what the currency is. You can grow so skilled at the art of survival that you are completely confused by words like live life to the fullest. You stop being desperate, and start to get sentimental about wholeness. It’s something for other people – people who have more strength, more will, more helpful friends. You can start to take a lot of pride in your ability to endure all things.

Sometimes I have to be really truthful with God when I’m asked and say, No, honestly, I think I’ve lost the will to be well. Maybe if you had asked me before – years ago, when I was really, really hungry for it – but I think I am comfortable here now. At least I have learned how to do this and, God, I just absolutely cannot survive any more disappointment.

And this is one of the things that make me more than a little in love with Jesus – he didn’t at all need that man to say, Yes. He wasn’t listening for a Lord, help me. He didn’t say, Man, I want to help you. I need you to help me. Help me help you. He did not say that. What he did say was, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

MIDLIFE CRISIS - Part I

I was once the prodigal, a long time ago. I used to pull off my dress and splash neck deep in grace. I was really wasteful with it. I used to know ocean. I understood boundless. I used to believe it will never run out. But I, like a great many prodigals, have long since become the Father’s prudent daughter. I have learned to sit respectfully at the table and drink God’s sufficient for all my needs grace from a cup. Life is filled with should and, unless I am having a really bad day or I didn’t sleep very well, I usually do. I have grown responsible. I have gained strength. I have become mature. I rarely make mistakes on purpose, tallying risk and reward before jumping brazenly into wrong. I have the beginnings of wisdom. I have faith more than enough to please God. I think, sometimes, maybe I might hear, Well done.

Except lately, that’s not been entirely true. I’m not really that crazy to hear, Well done. Honestly, I’m just not. Lately, it feels like too little, too late, and I don’t feel like it fits. I’ve been licking the skin of my teeth and thinking, Well – in is still in, is still in. Lately, I’ve been making mistakes on purpose.

The truth is that I’m just plain old weary of well-doing. I am exhausted from bearing all things and from overcoming evil with good. I have post-traumatic stress disorder from all the error I’ve had to put in the ground. I have all the symptoms of someone who’s been in the trenches. I’m thinking a lot about how evil you will have with you always – and how life just plain hurts no matter what you do.

I’ve been listening to Jesus, how he wants me to notice that the same sweet rain falls on the just and the unjust, and I’m answering him with anti-Christ words like, I don’t think that’s really fair. I don’t remember anymore what it means when the Father says, All I have is yours already. I want to say, Oh really? Well, what exactly do You have? Because if there’s something I’ve missed, I’ll write it down. I’m taking inventory.

Lately I’ve been taking bigger and bigger swigs of that cup of grace at the table, and looking God Father square in the eyes. Irreverent. He keeps full the cup in front of me – a bottomless, spilling out, running over measure – but it’s still measured. My daily portion. Sufficient for all my needs. I am expected to be mature. And lately He’s been eyeballing me. He knows I’m getting itchy feet.

I say, God, You know all things. I’m still here – I’m not going to run from You, even though I want to. Even though I’m crawling to get out of my own skin. Even though I’m sick in my belly from drinking that cup. But I’m so broken and so bored and I don’t remember what it feels like to choose.

His eyes blink ocean water, and His words to me are raw and warm like blood – All I have is yours. He loves me. Oh, how He loves me. He pushes away from the table – slips out of His shoes and pulls His shirt up over His head. He looks at that spilling over cup of grace and says, Ok, so We’ll be wanting more than that.

SWEET BABY JAMES: Mary's Song II

My soul is magnified within me. I see what has been veiled – a secret thing untold by angels – how love can grow and stretch you after you thought you had been filled to overflowing.

I see you – swaddled in the smells of home and innocence, wrapped up in my mother’s shawl, enfolded by her arms, all voices low, whispering a son is given.

I see you – fully man, fierce like a lion tracking the truth, pacing slow in shadows cast by the light.

I see you – how hard it is for you to wear your name after he has gone before you, and all that you have yet to bear because of him.

I see you – how you have mimicked holy ghosts, not knowing who you might have been if not for him – not knowing if, broken and spilled out, your offering will ever equal his.

You are the image of your father.

I am telling you the truth. Only God is good. Do not let the fear of being less than him stop you from being who you were made to be.

I am the lap where God knit you together. You are one of the blessed.

No – maybe angels did not sing when you were born. But I did.