The last few years of my life have been quite an adventure. I’ve seen a good deal more of the world than I’ve ever seen before and worn the soles … Continue reading Big Wheel, Keep on Turnin’
Category: Bible and Life
My Acorn
Repatriation sounds like a dirty word. And it is. A lot of emotional and mental mess comes with moving from a foreign place you called home back to the place you originally called home. A lot of that mess comes from expecting to be able to fall right back in with how things were before you left—the same friendships, the same habits, the same communities, the same you. But those things aren’t the same as when you left, and the most different of them all is you.
In the year and a half I was away, my siblings grew up. My church family is made up almost entirely of a new group of people. People got married, had kids, moved away. And in my own year and a half, I learned a new language, made new friends, changed my habits, and learned more or less how to be at home in a completely different culture.
Bringing all of those experiences back with me wasn’t as simple as just packing up my suitcases for the plane ride, which I’ll assure was no easy task in and of itself. And sharing those experiences wasn’t as easy as unpacking my suitcase and showing off my Bulgarian pottery or books or tablecloths.
Even though I’ve been back over four months, I still have no context for many of my overseas experiences and stories. Many people don’t have a clue what I’m talking about when I explain my favorite Bulgarian foods. Most people don’t understand when I explain my yearning for at least one chance to walk to the grocery store, or chat up the lady at the fruit stand before I buy half a kilo of cherries she picked that morning.
In my head I know that this is the same experience in reverse of when I would try to explain living by the river to my Bulgarian friends, or fireflies and starry skies to kids who had only ever lived in the confines of a Bulgarian city. But my heart doesn’t understand the similarities of the two experiences. It only feels yearning—for both places.
And that’s where the mess of repatriation comes in. Is it wrong to miss my new country when I have the blessing to be back in my native one? Is it wrong to take my native country for granted and forget the foreign country that showed me hospitality and kindness and grace? Sometimes I feel guilt that I can enjoy bluebell ice cream or a quick drive to the grocery store when I know my Bulgarian friends never will. And sometimes I’m confused when I have to make a schedule to meet a friend, or when I take for granted that I can hop in my car and drive anywhere I need to.
But those feelings are comparable to times in Bulgaria when I would feel guilty about the far places of the world I got to see that none of my American friends had experienced, or when I would feel confusion at the beautiful parks full of snow, or the fresh produce markets I took for granted because they filled my every day.
The guilt and confusion come in deciding, what should I like more? I love my native country. But I also love the country that became home to me in the past two years. They have both nurtured and grown me in ways the other couldn’t. Now that I’m back in my ‘home’ country, my native country, I realize that BOTH Bulgaria AND the United States are my homes now, in different ways. It’s not wrong to miss and love both of them. My experience as an expat grew me and shaped me, and the most gracious and grateful thing I can do with that experience is to acknowledge its place in my life.
I can love both Bulgaria’s yellow sunflower fields as far as the eye can see and the lazy mayfly haze that hovers above the tall grasses shimmering in the Oklahoma sunset. I can appreciate the chilling beauty of Bulgaria’s snowy mountain vistas just as much as Oklahoma’s mile-long sunset shadows across the flat fields and the golden sunlight that seeps in through your skin. I can remember the grey ghetto dirt just as fondly as the Oklahoma red that sifts through my socks. I can long for the taste of fresh strawberries and yoghurt just as much as I enjoy homemade ice cream sweetened by good company. And it’s alright for my heart to race through the peaks at memories of rushing mountain streams just as quickly as it races when the lazy Oklahoma rivers trip along their banks and stir my childhood awake in me.
Repatriation, I’m learning, is largely a personal thing. I am the one most changed by it. I carry the change with me, and if I let it, it will continue to grow in me and stretch my heart wide enough to carry two loves for two very different countries.
You all know by now that Tolkien’s deep, earthy Middle Earth stories are some of my favorites. And it should come as no surprise to you that the picture I think best encompasses my repatriation comes from them. In the film version of The Hobbit, the main character Bilbo was just an ordinary, armchair variety person until he was called off into the wide world for an adventure. Near the end of his adventure as he sits musing on it, he pulls an acorn from his pocket—one he picked up along the journey.
The leader of his traveling companions asks him, “You’ve carried it all this way?”
Bilbo answers, “I’m going to plant it in my garden, in Bag End.”
The leader of the amazing adventure, a king himself, surrounded by a royal hall filled with treasures, remarks, “It’s a poor prize to take back to the Shire.”
But Bilbo answers thoughtfully, “One day it’ll grow. And every time I look at it, I’ll remember. Remember everything that happened: the good, the bad … and how lucky I am that I made it home.”
My experience overseas feels in many ways like a small acorn I carry with me, unsure of what to do with it. As I’ve continued to examine and sort through my last two years of adventures overseas, I’ve noticed it growing. Planted in my native soil, my kernel of experience has already sprouted and become a sapling. As I remember my experiences, good and bad, I remember what they’ve taught me. And that tiny tree has already stretched my heart big enough to love my two countries as my two homes.
Foolishness Roads
I told a dear friend in an email recently that lately I’ve noticed I keep pulling into myself—becoming more private, seeking more alone-time, avoiding connection over phone or internet, and trying to keep to the smallest circles of people possible. I recently observed to my mom that I seem to have regressed three years backwards into the painful introversion and social awkwardness I had hoped I’d outgrown. Those self-assessments germinated and grew into what, unfortunately, may be my first contact with you, dear readers, in over three months. So with a squirming in my stomach that feels an awful lot like guilt at avoiding you, I’m writing my jumbled thoughts for the first time in a while.
Coming back to the States has been an adventure to say the least. There have been healing days and beautiful moments and times when I’ve almost noticed some of the personal growth I’ve experienced. There’ve also been heart-sore days and frustrating moments and times when I’ve wondered about the worth of my time in Bulgaria.
All of the mental and emotional see-sawing has led me to retreat as far back as possible into a safe space. I avoid Wal-mart like the plague. I’m hesitant to connect with people I know I can trust—people who are walking the same roads or have been down them before. I spend what time I can surrounded by family and relishing in daily tasks that give my life a rhythm, like baking, cleaning, reading, or manual labor on our small farm.
The one thing I’ve enjoyed that keeps me connected to my time in Bulgaria (even though it’s made me feel like a nervous wreck sometimes) has been speaking at churches. Speaking and sharing stories feels comfortable and useful and important on a deeply personal level I can’t quite describe. They’re things I can do that give me a sense of continuity and constancy in who I am and what the Lord has called me to do. And they feel like one of the few lifelines that help me connect the fractured pieces of life here, life there, and life here again.
So it was that I found myself last week spending time in Texas with family there, sharing at their churches and telling the stories that help me stitch back together my fractured sense of self. I began the trip withdrawn. I unknowingly carried a burden of isolation I had packed and slung across my shoulders myself. I guess I assumed that because my own tangled thought life was burdensome to me, I would be a broken, burdensome houseguest. Better just to do what I came to do, keep quiet, and smile when the occasion called for it. None of this thought process was intentional, of course. I would never consciously expect family to feel that burdened by me, let alone treat me like a stranger who just happened to be staying at their house before speaking at their churches. I only realized my mindset when things began happening to expose it.
They unquestioningly embraced me as family in everything: from feeding me, to letting me help with chores, to hammering out who takes the longest showers and what our morning shower schedule should be. I got to be a part of my cousins’ weekend activities and watch with pride as they performed, quizzed, and coached. But I wasn’t just someone along for the ride. I was the lap chosen to sit in. I was the coveted companion for dog-walking and roller-blading. I was the resident dessert cook, confidant, and errand runner.
And when talk in Sunday school turned toward persecution, and my mind and heart were stretched so far towards foreign friends and foreign countries that they began to break, my cousin unquestioningly held my shaking hand until it stilled. When I couldn’t navigate the Dallas streets I should have known from experience, my cousins gave me directions from the front seat without so much as a judgmental glance or a word of question. When we had time alone together, it was the most natural thing in the world for my Aunt to probe gently into my tangled mess of repatriation thoughts and feelings and half-conceived understandings.
They cared about me. Deeply. I was not a burden for them to bear, like I so often feel myself to be in these days of limbo. I was not even a wounded missionary they felt compassion for out of the goodness of their hearts. Because of their hospitality and loving-kindness, I didn’t feel myself to be a burden, but a blessing. They enjoyed my company just as I enjoyed theirs.
As I began to process these thoughts, my fractured sense of self seemed to be on the mend and I was joyful to be a blessing again to someone. I was beginning to understand that my idea of needing to be ‘whole’ to be able to truly bless and benefit other people was hogwash. It’s in my weakness that Christ is strong. And I was forced to think about grace more deeply than I had in a while because family gave me precious gifts of time and comfort and laughter that I didn’t deserve. And those weren’t the only undeserved gifts of grace that week.
These ideas of grace and wholeness and blessing hadn’t yet coalesced into words in my mind by the time I left Texas to return home. In the driveway my aunt quoted words I had said just minutes before to her class about missionaries traveling without a money bag or an extra cloak, and nothing much besides the dust on their clothes, expecting others to provide for them—expecting God to provide. She slipped money into my hand as I tried to deny her, and then to find the right words to express thanks. And when I failed to back my manual transmission car up the steep slope of the driveway without first rolling into my aunt’s car, they laughed unconcernedly and the whole family pushed my car back up into the street.
I fought back tears for the next hour and a half’s worth of driving. They weren’t tears of embarrassment or shame or self-pity. They sprang from confusion and grief at leaving, and the same unresolved paradox of blessing through brokenness. I couldn’t understand it. And I struggled to accept the grace I had been extended by my heavenly father and my earthly family. By the time I stopped for supper I felt numb. And when the cashier only charged me for half of my order with a knowing wink, I knew I had to pull over for some time to reflect and pray.
Sitting in a deserted parking lot, I asked God through brimming tears, “Why won’t people quit being so nice to me?!” I felt broken and unworthy of the grace. I felt confused about my brokenness and wondered for the umpteenth time whether my time in Bulgaria had been worth it. I wondered why reentry into the States was so hard. I wondered why I kept ending up in situations as bizarre as being parked in a strange parking lot crying over why my mac-n-cheese was too cheap, fighting the urge to vomit brought on my medicine and hormones and overflowing emotions.
And then it all just stopped. I was enveloped in the embrace of my heavenly Father’s presence that I so desperately craved. I felt His words as clearly as if he’d whispered them into my heart, “Child, I bless you out of my lavish, extravagant love because I can. I can show you grace whenever I want. And when you don’t understand, know that I feel your pain, and you cannot fathom the love with which I respond.”
I felt prompted to turn on a song from an album I had recently bought and not really listened to yet. And as I listed to the words, a smile, and then a giggle broke through my tears:
…The dawn, it shot out through the night
And day is coming soon
The kingdom of the morning star
Can pierce a cold and stony heart
Its grace went through me like a sword
And came out like a song
Now I’m just waiting for the day
In the shadows of the dawn
But I won’t wait, resting my bones
I’ll take these foolishness roads of grace
And run toward the dawn
And when I rise and dawn turns to day
I’ll shine as bright as the sun
And these roads that I’ve run, will be wise
(Shadows of the Dawn, by The Gray Havens—do yourself a favor and check out their music!)
These beautiful words were a reminder that sometimes grace takes us down winding roads to which we can’t see the end. And the journey may look like foolishness until we reach the goal. It certainly looked foolish to plenty of people for me to move overseas for 2 years. And it felt foolish enough moving back when the time came. But all that matters is that I follow in obedience because my Guide knows the way and He knows the wisdom in the path.
Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians chapters 1 and 3 promises that God’s wisdom looks like foolishness at times, but that what looks like wisdom may not be as it seems. And the gleaming promise of vindication from Psalm 37 says that if we commit our way to the Lord, he will make our righteousness shine like the dawn, and the justice of our cause like the noonday sun. We’ll see it all clearly in the end, and sometimes for now we have to keep trudging along even though we aren’t shining very brightly, and even though we can only see dimly.
The reason I’ve used to justify these extended ramblings is that maybe some of you readers are in a season of life that doesn’t make much sense either. Or maybe you know me or others like me returning from the field in a jumbled confusion. Show them what grace you can, and encourage them to accept grace themselves. Remind them that if this season of life looks foolish, it’s not necessarily wrong. And if you’re the one in my shoes, I encourage you to accept your portion of grace, even when it’s uncomfortable, and keep walking your foolishness roads. Know that one day, the roads that we’ve run will be wise.
Coming back: This does not compute
I landed back on American soil exactly 16 days ago: a little over two weeks. I expected the disorientation normal for a return back ‘home’ after two years away, reverse culture shock, but I didn’t realize it would still be an ever-present part of my life two weeks after I was back. I expected to be well on my way to mentally processing through the change, journaling things I had learned little by little, writing blog posts about Frodo picking up the threads of his old life after he returned from his quest through Middle earth. But I haven’t done any of that.
I haven’t journaled or blogged one word. To be honest, the connectivity of our digital age has kind of overwhelmed me. There are so many people to talk to and catch up with, but I don’t even know what I would say. And if I use Tolkien’s analogy of the tapestry, picking up the threads of an old life to begin weaving them again, it would be more accurate to say I feel like someone picked up my life-tapestry, ran it through an airplane propeller, and handed it back to me to try to stop the threads from unravelling. Everything feels tangled, knotted, confused, and maybe a little broken.
Since I’ve been back, the range of my emotions and thoughts has been astounding. I race through the gamut quicker than I can even identify what I’m feeling or thinking. These emotions come from separation from a place and people I was constantly with for the last two years. They come from the fact that all the cultural habits I developed over the past two years have no context where I am now. They come from a changed schedule, home, way-of-life, and language. And they’re from being reunited with family and friends and places I’ve missed for 2 years.
In just a normal day here, I feel and think all sorts of things that my brain and my heart just can’t handle all at once. And living by myself for the past year with limited opportunity to speak English means I’ve gotten out of the habit of expressing thoughts or emotions like I used to, even IF I could remember the English words I need all the time, and even IF I knew well enough what I was thinking to express it. The overabundance of emotions just won’t compute, so they feel more like flashes in peripheral vision—too fleeting and too undefined to have meaning or form.
I am getting better at slowing things down and trying to experience emotions and think thought one at a time. But in a normal day, all of these emotions are frequent visitors:
grief
joy
pain
elation
confusion
frustration
guilt
belonging
strangeness
remembering
forgetting
apathy
empathy
overwhelmingness
inarticulateness
anxiety
distraction
comfort
meaninglessness
meaningfulness
separation
connectivity
longing
contentedness
sadness
happiness
differentness
sameness
changeful
unchanged
helpful
burdensome
accepted
loved
broken
unravelling
healing
And the list goes on.
It’s a lot, and sometimes I do feel like I’m going to explode, but I’ve been surrounded by loving friends and family who have helped and encouraged me enormously. And there’s been lots of prayer. LOTS of prayer. 😉 It also helps that I’m in the South. People in the grocery store are kind enough to offer me help when I’m standing dumbstruck in the middle of the aisle for minutes at a time. The lady at the post office pretends there’s nothing wrong to save my pride when I get so confused at paying for a package that I almost cry. I take nighttime walks with my Dad, and he never gets impatient when I break off mid-sentence because I’m staring in wonder at the stars I’ve missed. My mom helps me pick deodorant and shampoo when I’m overwhelmed at all the options. And my whole family is helping me with encouragement, prayers, extra hugs, and noticing when I get that look in my eyes that tells them I’m not there at the moment.
So I guess my purpose for this post is to explain to you why I may not be as communicative as when I left, or why I act different, or trail off mid-sentence. And also, I want you to know what others are likely going through as they return home as well. If you know someone coming home from the mission field—if they’ve been there for one year or 50—this is a little glimpse of what’s more than likely going on inside their heads. So give them extra hugs. Sit with them in silence while they think extra hard to come up with words to say. Hold their hand or help them make choices when they get that faraway look in their eyes. Believe them when they say they don’t know why they’re crying. Distract them when they need to be distracted, and listen to them when things need to tumble out of their hearts all jumbled and in pieces. It’ll do their heart good, and they’ll never forget the gift you’re giving them.
This Body
This body, it was made just perfect.
These arms and this heart,
they were strengthened to carry heavy burdens.
This middle, it’s the perfect size
to be squeezed between two small arms.
These hips, they’ve been shaped
to make a seat for smaller ones.
And they easily find the perfect bend
to bring these eyes on level
with other pairs, set in beautiful, small faces.
These hands, they are small, but toughened
by cooking, carrying, patting, and playing.
They hold suffering
like a familiar thing.
These ears, they have heard
many voices in many languages.
But this mouth, it was made to say in all of them:
He loves you.
Because
His Body, it was made just perfect.
His mouth, it taught me
how to live.
His ears, they listened
to pleas, misery, joy, long before mine did.
His hands, they healed
and broke bread in example for me.
They too held suffering
And bade me do the same.
His eyes, they see the depth of my sin
But still flash Love enough to cover all.
His middle, it took the lashes
mine deserved.
And His arms, they carried
a burden I could not:
the weight of my sin and the world’s.
This body, it was made perfect
Because His Body, it was made perfect.
And its death
gives life
to mine.
Face-planting into Grace
At training, all of us read through Acts in our daily time with Father to plunge ourselves deep into an understanding of what it looks like to spread the Truth to people who’ve never heard. That was a beautiful time of refreshing, redefining, and learning what our task truly is as we go overseas.
After we finished Acts, we read Luke. That got us excited all over again about the Son we are bringing to a people who have never heard of him. We fell in love again with his compassion, were challenged by his teachings, awed by his healings, and rallied by his refrain that the Kingdom had come to earth.
As I came home, settling in for what I knew to be at least a month’s wait for my visa, I debated what book to plunge deep into next. I could read another gospel, but I had just finished one. I could work on Paul’s letters, but they were often written to places where a group of believers was already established. I’m going to a city with no believers among my people group (that we know of), besides the other two women I’ll work with. I didn’t want a letter written to a group of new believers. I wanted something more… universal. Basic. Applicable to the mindset I’ll step into as I disembark my plane. I wanted something to prime my heart, soul, and mind to relate to a people who hadn’t quite made it to the New Testament in their belief. The Old Testament seemed a good place. And I was so intrigued by the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed to be here, that Joshua seemed a good choice.
That may sound a little strange, but in many cases, the physical realities of the Old Testament are the spiritual realities of the New. Paul says in Eph 6 that out struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual realities. The spiritual warfare in the New Testament and in our lives today finds a physical expression in the book of Joshua. The physical Kingdom of God’s people advances in Joshua in similar ways to how the spiritual Kingdom advances today. So I can learn a lot about how God moves, how the Enemy moves, how battles are won, and how battles are lost.
Here’s an example of what I mean: Achan’s sin prevents God from being glorified in the first battle against Ai (Jos 7), so the Israelites lose. People die, the entire nation loses morale, and God’s people are humiliated and defeated. In today’s spiritual battles, we understand that our sin keeps God from getting the praise, and sometimes it even keeps us from succeeding, even when whatever we’re trying to do is a good thing for the Kingdom. There are spiritual casualties due to our sin, and we often walk away from a spiritual battle humiliated and defeated if we haven’t first dealt with sin in our own lives.
It didn’t take long for me to start applying what I’ve been learning in Joshua. And I saw something in the book I’d never noticed before. Let me tell you the story.
About a week and a half ago, the majority of my friends from training headed out to their new countries. I knew it would be a rough day, so I was ready. I took so many requests to the Father to strengthen me and encourage me. I was genuinely excited for everyone leaving, but I felt kind of separated—with my head turned toward overseas, but not getting to go yet. My morning started out well. I got a call from my contact at the Embassy saying he’d received all my paperwork and would begin processing my visa. There was a slight problem though. My money order had been lost and they couldn’t begin without the processing fee. After I hung up from the call, I began praying for them to find it among the paperwork. I opened up my computer a few minutes later to find an email saying they’d found the money! But they needed the originals of my paperwork from Bulgaria, not just copies. I started writing a response email and praying, and as soon as I sent the email, I had received another, saying a courier had come in the door with the originals from Bulgaria! They would send everything off and I’d have my visa within the next 3-4 weeks! It was an incredible chain of events that could only have been put together by my heavenly Father. I stopped and sent up a prayer of thanks. I had an incredible gift—a token of my Father’s provision and faithfulness—to carry me throughout the day.
Just a few hours later, that afternoon late, I performed a quick self-check and realized I was utterly failing to cope well with everyone leaving. I’ll let you guess at my mental state. I was lost in Oklahoma City and pulled over in a parking lot to plug something into my gps. A couple of people had already honked at me because I was distracted and not driving well. A couple more people had honked at me for no other discernible reason than their panties were in a wad. I had very recently realized I hadn’t made myself eat anything since the half-bowl of cereal that morning. Somewhere in the middle I decided Burger King was a good idea (and I really do hate fast food). So as I was going over my life choices for the day, lost in a parking lot, with a half-eaten cheeseburger in my hand, lard coating my throat, and Les Miserables blaring dramatically over my car speakers, I was torn between crying and laughing at how ridiculously melodramatic I was being. I realized I had spiritually faceplanted. (You know… when you trip or fall. And you literally plant your face in the ground?)
After I got un-lost, got rid of the stale french fries in my passenger seat, called a couple people, and teared-up a bit, I pulled over in a different parking lot and had some Jesus time. The biggest emotion I felt then was shame. I was so frustrated that I had been reminded of Father’s faithfulness just that morning, and in the afternoon I had deliberately let myself have a pity party. I knew the day would be hard, and had asked Father in advance to help me through it. But when I needed him most, I ‘turned him off’ and quit listening. I was more content to fall apart and feel sorry for myself.
As I read my chapter in Joshua for that day, I found something I didn’t expect. In the pages of Joshua—a book about conquest, brutal battle, and instructions to follow the Law to the letter—I found grace. What a blessing that was. The Israelites themselves had gone through a very similar situation, except they had quail burgers and were lost in a desert, not a parking lot. God has parted the Red Sea for them, saved their lives, and made a covenant to be their God. They wandered around in the desert for a while and a disobedient generation passed. And when Joshua ushered the new generation into the promised land, God gave them a grace I had never recognized before. As they crossed the Jordan, God’s presence again went before them (in the Ark of the Covenant) and the water once again ‘split.’ It piled up upstream and would have looked much like the waters of the Red Sea, piled up on each side of the Israelites, who walked across on dry land.
Father didn’t owe them a reminder of who he was. They must have heard the story of the Red Sea more times than they could count. But he did remind them. He gave them a smaller, reprise miracle to remind them of his intentions and his power, and of his provision and faithfulness to the covenant. And even Joshua, the man who trained under Moses, needed extra reminding. It was grace that prompted the Lord to tell Joshua so many times to be strong and courageous; he knew Joshua would struggle. And it was grace that led the Lord to again prove himself to the Israelites.
It was grace that caught me that day when I faceplanted. Through the stories in the Book we are reminded over and over and over again of Father’s faithfulness to provide and care for his children. And Father has reminded me many times of his faithfulness to me through stories from my own past. He doesn’t owe me that reminder, but he gives it anyway, just like that morning when he worked out my visa application.
As soon as the Israelites crossed the river, they set up a memorial to remind the generations to come of the Lord’s provision and faithfulness. That was a physical reality that remained in the promised land for years upon end. In our lives today, our memorials look a little different. They are our stories. They are those times when the Lord does something incredible in our lives. They are the times when we witness healing, miracles, conversion, faithfulness, or provision. And one of my new memorials is the story of when I faceplanted right into my Father’s grace. He picked me up and reminded me once again of his past faithfulness. My prayer for you, reader, is that you are collecting memorial stories for yourself. Call them to mind when you are challenged to forget or doubt your Father’s faithfulness, and let them remind you of who he is.
God looked down…
This week I’ve learned some more about spiritual warfare. All of us in training have thought, prayed, and read about how the Father fights his battles, and what to do when we look around and find ourselves in the place of a foot soldier. God is, right now as I type, at war with the Enemy. Because of these battles, persecution pushes back on the growth of new believers around the world. Many hearts are hardened to Father’s stories of repentance, grace, and salvation. Strong believers fall daily into sins they knew to flee and avoid. But also because of these battles, the lost are freed from the Enemy’s traps. Father triumphs over people who would oppose the spread of the Truth. Strong believers are daily freed from sins which would eat them alive, given the chance. Satan is already bound and has no power except that which God gives him. And we who believe have victory in Christ.
We’ve studied this week about how Father wins his battles on our behalf through our weakness. Think back to stories of actual battles in the Old Testament. Whenever Father shows himself to be the Lord of Hosts, the Lord Almighty, it is when his people are vulnerable. Father won for Gideon when his men had all deserted but a few, and those left were either in the band or banging together pots and pans. Not the most effective battle strategy, last time I checked. Father won for Joshua when the people marched around the city more times than they cared to count and then shouted like maniacs. The Israelites escaped the Egyptians by waiting like sitting ducks on the shores of the Red Sea while chariots and horses charged at then. Hezekiah’s troops won by never even leaving the city of siege. All they did was quake in their leather sandals as men hurled insults over their walls. In all of these stories, the people Father fights and wins for look… utterly ridiculous. They have no room to claim a piece of the victory. God clearly did ALL the work. His people only had to stand up, vulnerable but trusting, waiting for God to act to win their battles. That’s how spiritual battles are won. That’s what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12. God’s power is perfected in our weakness. If we go into spiritual warfare knowing the God who we represent, and knowing we don’t stand a chance against the enemy in our own power, God fights for us, to show off his power. We just have to be ready and trusting for him to work.
As a story example (I do love stories), let’s look at David. David the boy stood up to a giant who defied the armies of the Lord. He refused armor. He refused good weapons. He refused sly tactics or anything that would help him win against the giant in his own power. He stood, a little boy with no shred of armor, and boldly opposed the enemy. He knew he had no power of his own, but that the Lord would fight and win for him. But David the king became a little more trusting in his own might. When war threatened, David did not always turn to his God to fight for him. One time he took a census of all the young men who could be warriors. The Lord punished David for taking stock of his resources and relying on his own power to save him from enemies. One of our teachers told us always to seek to be David the boy in the midst of spiritual warfare. Realize your failures and faults and call on the Lord of Hosts to fight for you. When we are like David the king and try in our own might to win, it’s then that we fail. If we leave no room for God to show off, he simply won’t do it. It isn’t in his nature to force himself upon us.
I have been overwhelmed the past few weeks by all of the mission work I don’t know how to do, all the things I can do wrong, all the ways I could get in the way of the Father doing mighty things. I haven’t as much been focused on myself, as I have been widening my focus and seeing how little I am and how much work there is to be done. But I have also seen how great our Father is, that he would use someone like me, with issues of fear, pride, doubt, self-absorption, not enough experience, and social skills leaving something to be desired. He doesn’t need me. In fact, I will most certainly cause more problems that he has to solve. But he chooses to use me. Incredible. Absolutely incredible. He shows himself powerful, the victor of the spiritual wars raging around us, when he uses someone as foolish and naïve as I am.
One of my favorite missioanries I’ve read about is Gladys Aylward. The woman was a firecracker. When she shot sparks the world around her lit up. She grew up in London, a little slip of a woman, not an inch over five feet tall. She took what schooling she could, read everything she could get her hands on, and didn’t stop trying to make it to China when mission boards declined her for her ‘inability to learn language.’
She scrimped and saved her earnings as a housemaid, sold her hope chest, and bought a one-way ticket to take her to China. She traveled just as she was, single, unprotected, and unsure of what lay at the other end, over war-torn train tracks and through frozen wastelands. When she finally did make it to China, the woman had an incredible ministry. She adopted orphans, stopped prison riots, marched a hundred children out of a warring country, and made friends and disciples of criminals and government officials alike. She lived an incredible life, and the Kingdom was grown immensely for it.
Father didn’t ask of Gladys a seminary education, a linguist’s background, an anthropology degree, or a hundred converts before he used her. He asked only her obedience. And in her weakness, God showed himself mighty in power. He provided Gladys with the skills she needed. He took her background and what training she did have and he used her mightily. I don’t mean to belittle her abilities, or mine, by comparison, but I do mean to point out that any effectiveness she had, Father gave her for the sake of His Name. He supplied her with people skills and language learning, and discernment and faith. HE made her into something special. And everyone knew that the God who stood behind this little 5-foot foreigner was powerful indeed.
God has begun to equip me with skills to use for his glory. I don’t mean to smother you in false modesty, though. I truly have so much to learn and so many places to fall before even this two-year assignment is through. Let me always be David the boy, standing naked of armor, small and unprotected, with only a leather strap and a stone before a fortress of a man. Let me continue to look absurdly comical as I face the Enemy and bring the Light into his darkness. For it is then that God’s power is unmistakable. Let me be weak, for His power is made perfect in weakness. When I am weak, the God who used a tiny single woman from London, triumphed over Goliath, won for Gideon’s men, and toppled the walls of Jericho stands behind me to win the battle for His sake.
Gladys Aylward said, near the end of her life: I wasn’t God’s first choice for what I’ve done for China. There was somebody else…I don’t know who it was—God’s first choice. It must have been a man—a wonderful man. A well-educated man. I don’t know what happened. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he wasn’t willing…And God looked down…and saw Gladys Aylward…And God said — “Well, she’s willing.” There are other people far more equipped than me to carry out the work I am going to do. Maybe they have seminary degrees, winning personalities, or already know the language I will butcher for the next two years. But God looked down… and he saw Caroline. And he said, “Well, she’s willing.” I know God will triumph in my smallness and inadequacies. And I know he asks of me nothing less than tireless obedience. The Lord has many better options—people more suited to his work—but I’m it. I’m the one he’s sending.
Pray for me, brothers and sisters, as I pray the same for you, that I would always see myself as little boy David standing before a giant. Pray that I would neverforget that battles are won only through the power of the God who stands behind me—the God who fights for me.
In His Embrace
Names are important in the Bible. They don’t just denote a person; they describe the person before he or she even gets a story explaining who they are or how they act. Just think of all the naming stories in the Bible. Jesus and John the Baptist’s names are given straight from the mouths of angels. Mothers frequently name their children in reference to their situations or the Lord’s action on their behalf (Hannah, Rachel, Leah, Eve and Sarah, for example). Think even of the creation story and how the Lord names the things he creates and they come into being because the name uttered from his mouth is so powerful. Or remember when Adam named the animals, in that action both knowing their natures and exercising humanity’s dominion over them. Point is, names matter.
And the prophets are no exception. Isaiah means The Lord Saves. Ezekiel means God Strengthens. These guys’ names encapsulate the message they bring and the nature of the messenger. So I was reading Habakkuk… and I read in a commentary that his name was probably a Babylonian word that meant ‘potted plant.’ I don’t know if you’ve read that book lately, but there’s nothing about potted plants in there. Absolutely nothing. If you wanted to really stretch it (we’re talking contortionist-like stretching), you could say that the end of the book, when Habakkuk talks about flourishing no matter the circumstances, is about living well away from your homeland—flourishing like a potted plant. But… I don’t really buy that. And anyway, I found another explanation of Habakkuk’s name recently that I like better. Who knows, maybe after you hear my theory you’ll think it’s just as much of a stretch as potted plants, but I’ll give you the goods and let you decide.
I’m no Hebrew scholar, so I use websites (like Biblehub.com) to help me when I want to know a word. Habakkuk’s name, directly transliterated from Hebrew looks something like Chabaquq (put a little phlegm in your throat for that first consonant sound). There’s another Hebrew word quite similar to Habakkuk’s name. In fact, the actual construction of the name intensifies the meaning of the word it seems to be built on. The Hebrew word chabaq (don’t forget the phlegm) means to embrace, or to hug. If you know me, you know that when I found that out, it felt like Christmas. Haha 🙂
I really struggled a few years back when I returned from a month-long trip to Romania. I had grown very attached to people I didn’t know if I’d ever see again, and I had fallen in with a culture which expressed everyday affection through lots of hugs and kisses. When greeting a new person—stranger, relative, friend, foster-parent, believer, communist insurgent, it didn’t matter who—you gave them two real kisses, one for each cheek, and a big warm bear-hug. And it was a completely normal thing to hold someone’s hand, no matter how well you knew them. I was a touchy person before that trip, but when I returned, I felt starved for human contact. I came home from immersion in a body of believers who expressed their connectedness through physical affirmation. And no one did that here. In the States people look at you weird if you hold a friend’s hand and you aren’t dating them. They tend to back off when you go in for a hug unless you’re a very close friend. And kisses are reserved only for the most intimate relationships: family or significant others.
So when I returned from Romania I worked hard to fall back into this distanced way of life. And many of my friends and family worked hard to give me extra hugs or extra meaningful ones. As I grieved for a people I felt like I had lost and for the physical connection to loved-ones around me, I decided to do a word study in scripture for words like hug, kiss, and embrace. My search came up pretty dry. I barely found anything in the Old Testament, and in the New most references were to the prodigal son story or to holy kisses among the believers. And some of the OT references were talking about kisses from prostitutes or from Solomon’s personified Folly. Not too encouraging. I wanted to find instances of God personified, physically caring for his people and showing his love to them tangibly. I couldn’t find it. I guess that goes to show what happens when you come up with your own idea and dig through scripture trying to find things to prove your own point.
I will say this, though. As the Body, we are connected, and we should care enough about each other to hug our brothers and sisters and welcome them in close to us. I have noticed since my return from Romania that we, as the American church, often don’t like to let people in. It’s a fairly universal thing that no one likes to reveal themselves at their ugliest, but we’re extra good at hiding those parts of us in America. We don’t like accountability, confession, or vulnerability with each other. So we don’t comfort each other like we should because we don’t know each other’s struggles. We’re all hesitant to share our difficulties for fear that people will see us broken and judge us for not quite having this Christian thing worked out. But I’ll let you in on a secret: we are all of us broken, every one, and the Body is supposed to care for its members by sharing burdens and joys alike. Scripture does back me up on this point. Maybe we should take a cue from those holy kisses in the NT and, if not physically enacting that culture’s expression of the Body’s intimate bond, we should at least welcome each other deep into our lives.
Now, with some distance on the situation, I realize that the NT rarely speaks of God personified, because he came in the person of Jesus. There was no need to personify Him anymore. We had the Incarnation. And the OT was just the beginning of the revelation. God wanted to show himself to his people as a Mighty commander of armies, a fierce judge, a creator of cosmic scale. He wanted his people to know him for his holiness and his power, not his desire for a personal relationship with Him. That option died at the Fall, and was not available again until Jesus came. So, of course I wasn’t going to find passages going on about a loving father who embraces his children or kisses their heads as they sit in his lap. In the Old Covenant mind, God is holy, awe-inspiring, terrible, and unapproachable. Sin is gruesome and not allowed in his presence. He was a gracious God, but instead of tender scenes with the Father, the OT depicts scenes like those of Is. 6, where the last thing anyone wanted to do was get anywhere near YHWH.
So, now back to my point, after what was perhaps too protracted of a back-story. Habakkuk’s name uses as its root the Hebrew word for ‘embrace.’ If prophets’ names describe what God does to or for his people and his prophets, what is a book on judgment doing coming out of the mouth of a man named Huggy (not to be confused with the diapers)? I think Habakkuk is one of the most brilliant names for a prophet given in the OT for not a few reasons.
First of all, think of what a hug is. When you hug someone you welcome them into your private, personal, intimate space. It’s a defenseless gesture, too; neither you nor the other person can protect yourself. And in real embraces, not those silly Christian side-hugs, you learn a lot about the person. You can tell if someone’s muscles are tensed because they’re angry, stressed, defensive, or shocked. You can tell how fast they’re breathing and how fast their heart is beating. You know immediately after a hug if a person is agitated or calmed. Often, you can feel a person relax into a hug as they let themselves be comforted by someone who cares about them. In embracing someone, you come intentionally and fully into their presence.
That still doesn’t explain Habakkuk though. He was a watchman on a wall, not an over-zealous Walmart greeter. But I think it does explain him. In Habakkuk’s book, he asks God a question about justice among his people. He sees the poor among them mistreated and neglected. He asks God why and how he can allow such injustice to go on. Habakkuk got a little more than he asked for. God tells Habakkuk that He’ll do an amazing thing among his people (1:5). But then God goes on to explain that his definition of amazing means suffering and exile and war and even more injustice. God will bring a nation against the Israelites to conquer them and exile them from their homeland in judgment against the injustice Habakkuk remarked on. Habakkuk responds, not questioning God’s right to do as he pleases, but questioning why God would use a nation even more wicked than the Israelites, and why he would dole out punishment indiscriminately to the righteous and unrighteous. He ends his question with a beautiful statement (2:1) of his trust in God’s judgment and humble acceptance of whatever answer God will give him. In time God responds, affirming his holiness and power, and reminding Habakkuk that he has an ordered plan in all of this; that in the end He will punish the wicked for their deeds. If the Lord’s answer wasn’t breathtaking, Habakkuk’s response certainly is.
He offers a prayer to God in chapter 3. His humility is striking. He conjures up awe and communicates the Lord’s terrific power as he explains that he and his people will accept whatever comes from the Lord’s hand. His closure in verses 16-19 is the kind of beautiful that makes a grown man cry. The whole book is wonderful, and I encourage you to read it when you have a few minutes. But these four verses are well worth committing to memory. Habakkuk says that no matter what happens—even when the food runs out and calamity comes—he will rejoice in the Lord. He’ll take joy in the One who saves him. He won’t just accept it. He’ll be happy it about it, the deep-down kind of happy. I’ve often wondered before what wells of trust and understanding of God’s character he pulls this confession from. How can he be broken over the suffering he sees, know that the Lord will bring even more, and commit to be full of joy over it?
Because of his name. Because, even though Habakkuk spent his time in a watchtower instead of a temple, he spent his time in the Lord’s presence. His whole book is a book of prayer—of speaking with the Lord, watching the Lord, waiting on the Lord, listening to the Lord, understanding the Lord. He spent his time fully and intentionally engaged in the Lord’s presence.
In His embrace.
His name is perfect. Habakkuk spent time with the Lord in prayer and understood His character, will, and plan all the better because of it. And Habakkuk knows that he will rejoice in the future, no matter what comes, because he will still be in the Lord’s embrace. He says so. In 3:19, after his wonderful confession, he says that the Lord is his strength. He’s spent so much time in the Lord’s embrace he knows that’s where true strength and comfort come from. And in the end, he trusts the Father who wraps him in an embrace, because He knows the character and the heartbeat of his God. He breathes the Father’s breath after him. He understands why. And he trusts the One who protects him in His arms.
I pray for you, brothers and sisters, as I hope you will pray for me, that you will learn to live fully and intentionally engaged in the Father’s presence through prayer. That you will, like Habakkuk, live wrapped in your Father’s embrace, breathing his breath after him and fully contented in his character.
On Suffering
Before I came to training, I was reading through Job. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to it, but I just felt one of those undeniable urges to read one of the more obscure Old Testament books of wisdom on suffering. Maybe it doesn’t bode well for my time on the field. If I needed preparation for suffering that early before my deployment, maybe there’s some insurmountable obstacle awaiting me. I don’t know. And, frankly, I’d prefer to worry about it later, when it’s actually here.
It occurred to me in one of my less-self-centered moments to think that maybe my suffering preparation and study was not for me, but for people I’ll work with. That’s probably true, considering they’ll be kids and girls who endure suffering beyond what I could even imagine: slavery, abandonment, physical abuse, abject poverty, and sexual abuse. They, of all people, understand the depths of suffering. They, of all people, wonder why a God who is supposed to love them let these terrible things happen. And they, of all people, deserve an answer from us. But oftentimes, instead of an answer, we come preaching past them, patting their heads, and telling them “go in peace; keep warm and well fed” (James 2:15-17). I am just as guilty as the next person, and do not hear me saying there are none who care for the least of these. Many do, and do it well. But all the same, many of us, myself included, are much more comfortable to look past suffering rather than engage the sufferer and share with them a God who bears their burdens.
As I read Job, I recalled the story and began to empathize with a man who experienced a pain disproportionate to his righteous walk of life. His well-educated friends, who assumed they understood the prestigious theologies and doctrines of their day, sat with him in stunned silence for a while. Perhaps they were stunned that a man so great had incurred the wrath of God. Perhaps they found their theologies inadequate and had to concoct some new answer to this unexpected situation. Perhaps they genuinely grieved with their friend. But when they opened their mouths, everything hit the fan. Your suffering is God’s punishment for wrongdoers, they said. God will hear prayers of repentance, they said. God will listen to the voice of a man humbled in heart and broken in spirit, they said. Repent and your life will be easy. A lot of what they said is actually a truth in itself, just misapplied in Job’s situation. Not everything though. Not everything by a long shot. But they brewed up their solutions and delivered them to a man who would have genuinely preferred for someone to instead scrape the sores on his skin with a broken clay pot.
They paid no heed to the suffering body in front of them and spoke instead to a soul they considered trapped in it. They misapplied theology and doctrines to corroborate their poor understanding of God. Perhaps they meant well. So do we. So did Machiaveli. So did Hitler. So did lots of people. But meaning well isn’t enough.
If our theology prompts us to talk at sufferers instead of getting down in the dirt and scraping their sores for them, it is severely broken.
Job’s friends didn’t comfort their friend. They didn’t tell him of the God who binds up the broken-hearted. They didn’t speak of a God who fills the empty with good things. They didn’t share with Job about a God who makes the blind see, the deaf hear, and the lame walk. But we should. We should share with the suffering people around us about just who exactly our God is and what he is capable of. But we can’t stop there. Yes, God filled Job again with blessings. And he taught Job that he delights in righteousness—that he is blessed by it. But he never told Job the reason for his suffering. And yes, God didn’t leave Hannah barren. Elijah saw the Lord bring rain after drought. Paul did arrive in Rome with the message of the gospel. But Moses didn’t get to enter the Promised Land. Abraham was over a hundred years old when he had a son, and he didn’t see the nation that came from his boy. Not a one of David’s sons was the promised messiah, the king of kings. If we teach that God heals, but he instead chooses to delay the keeping of his promise, what then? Have we lied to those we taught about a healer God?
It took me until this week to see the New Testament’s answer to Job’s questions.
A dear friend encouraged me before I left for training with Hebrews 13:5b. I started rooting around and discovered a nugget of truth I had never seen before. I hope you’ve hung on with me this long and can read the punchline. I read through and pondered Hebrews 12:4-17. It’s always been a hard book for me, and I feel like I rarely understand the connections the author makes. But this time I got it. I saw the answer to Job’s question. I saw the answers to my own. And I saw the answers we should offer to those suffering all around us.
The Hebrews author first speaks of all suffering as a punishment, or discipline from God (12:7). This confused me, because Job’s suffering was definitely not punishment. That was the point of the whole book. You take that away and you lose not only Job’s integrity, but the whole reason God invited Satan to test Job. If you call Job’s suffering punishment, his friends were right and you call God’s judgment of Job a mistake. So, naturally, I kept fishing around in the text. I realize that the difficulty hinged on my definition of punishment. See, I thought punishment was intentional infliction of harm by the punisher on the punishee for the purpose of discouraging further instances of the offence. I looked up the Greek word for ‘punish’ there, expecting it to be softer. Nope. The Greek word translated ‘punishes’ in verse 6 means ‘to whip.’ So all of our suffering, we are to consider a whipping from God. That’s what those verses literally mean.
It took me some prayer to realize the meaning isn’t in the literal details. ‘Punish’ and ‘discipline’ are the correct translations. Why? Because when a loving father punishes his son, he gives a gift. He takes a moment of pain, shame, or inconvenience—a moment when the son is visited by the consequences of his actions—and brings about a good thing. He seizes a teaching moment in the midst of suffering so that the son can learn something important. Something redeeming. Something healing and guiding. That definition isn’t one you can learn from a Greek dictionary. It comes from experience, and people, like my dad, who’s always been good at taking any opportunity to teach us about everything from retaining walls to fossils to the circulatory system to God-honoring people skills.
And God’s discipline, at least the kind delivered to righteous sufferers (the believers, the young children, etc.) is all aimed at teaching one thing. Here’s the point—the main idea it took me this long to make. The purpose of Job’s suffering, of our suffering, of the suffering of precious little children and girls enslaved before they’re old enough to get rid of their teddy bears? The purpose of that suffering is to teach us that only God can satisfy. In our pain, we look for a cure. In our emptiness, we look for the one who fills us with good things. C. S. Lewis says, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world” (Mere Christianity). Our ever-hungering desires teach us that something perfect exists to completely satisfy them. No friend, significant other, or spouse can fulfill our needs for unconditional love, companionship, or being valued. No medicine can ever fully heal our bodies, cure our pain, and stop us from slowly dying. No amount of hopping between cultures, reading about them, or drooling over then can satisfy our craving for perfect, multifaceted culture of Heaven. No dream job will ever make us feel completely useful, talented, valued, and capable.
No. Our hunger, desires, grief, and loss point us to the One thing who can satisfy them. We realize our body is broken, and only One can make it whole. We realize that even if our yearnings for people lost to us are satisfied, only One person can satisfy all our needs for relationship. God’s discipline shakes us up, turns our desires on their heads, and makes a difficult situation into a gift of teaching, endurance, and faith. Through our grief we realize that we are offered a gift much greater than that which we lost. Through our suffering we realize that we are offered a satisfaction much better than that which we are deprived of.
Our God offers us a satisfaction of greater magnitude than the loss of our suffering.
I’ve always loved Hebrews 12:12-13: “Therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. Make level paths for your feet, so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.” But with this new understanding of the previous verses, it has an even richer meaning. It harks back to verses like Isaiah 35:3 and Proverbs 4:26, both of which speak of a healing and redemption much more holistic than physical cure. Verse 13 says to make level paths—to be careful and make sure your way is a righteous one—so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed. A man may be lame yet spiritually healed. A man may also be lame and spiritually disabled. But if he follows the straight path with his life, or the narrow way, as Jesus calls it, his lameness does not disable him. In his soul he is healed and whole, and he merely waits for Christ’s return for his body to follow. But a lame man who walks the uneven way, or the wide road leading to destruction, he disables himself. He spends his days in bitterness and when Christ returns, he faces eternal destruction. He will be forever lame. So verses 12 and 13 present two choices in the face of suffering: letting suffering disable us, or letting suffering heal us.
I think it is also our duty to respond correctly to our suffering. Verses 14-17 explain this in-depth. We can either respond to the gift of suffering by looking to the God who satisfies our desires, or we can turn away from him and try to satisfy ourselves in other ways. This is the practical application of the message we must take to the suffering. Our suffering is wasted and useless if we do not let it point us to our Savior. But if we allow God to have his way in his discipline, we choose to cultivate holiness (v. 14a). And if we choose holiness—to be healed and look to the one who satisfies our desires better than any of his creation ever could—God truly does turn our suffering into a gift. It is a gift not only to us, but also to those around us. As believers, our suffering is often incarnational ministry. Jesus sent us out and promised we would suffer just as he had (Jn 20:20-21). That kind of holy suffering, the kind which plays out in the life of someone who chooses to be teachable, glorifies the Lord. It lets others see God in our lives (v.14b).
If we choose to wallow in our suffering, or if we simply do not know who to look to for our needs and fulfillment, we miss God’s grace in suffering, which is a terrible thing. We choose the wrong response, and we do not benefit from the gift God offers us out of our suffering. Not only that, but we become bitter (v. 15). People ask why they suffer and turn on a God whom they see as impassive and uncaring only because, in their suffering, they look for healing and regrowth and redemption in the wrong places. They look to the wrong things, people, and relationships to put them back together again. They feel cheated by God because they do not realize the gift he gives and think that he has taken away only to let them fill the gaping hole with something less than fitting. When instead, if they could only see his grace, he would fill them to overflowing with abundant life. See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and define many (v. 15).
The next comment the author of Hebrews makes has always thrown me for a loop. I never had the slightest idea how Esau came into this topic, or how his story even applied. I knew sale of his birthright for a bowl of stew was a great lapse in judgment, but an act of godlessness? That’s a stretch. But when we understand the passage in light of context and in light of the understanding of suffering as God’s discipline, as God’s gift, Esau makes perfect sense. I just told you about the two choices we have in suffering: to become bitter by searching for lesser things to fill us, or to cultivate holyiness by allowing God to use our suffering for his glory and to let others see Him in us. Using Esau’s story here to elaborate on the point is brilliant. You can see the hand of a great storyteller. You see, Esau, too, had those options.
In the small suffering of his hunger, he could choose to change out the gift of his father (his birthright) for some paltry, momentary satisfaction, or he could hold out and accept his father’s gift and receive all that his father intended to give him: land he did not amass, fields he did not plant, blessings he did not deserve; the place of Jacob, the honored son who went on to become the father of the Israelite nation; eternal membership in the kingdom of God’s people. Esau had two options laid before him. He chose in his suffering to take the easier, wider, unlevel road. It led him only to pain, sin, ignominy, and, ultimately, the place of an obscure, hated nation of Edomites. He exchanged his glory for shame (Hos 4:7). He let his suffering rule him and instead chose the route of lesser satisfaction and fulfillment. He became a bitter root that poisoned a whole nation of people. He turned against God because he thought God had disappointed him, rather than looking to his own impatience, self-reliance, and greed as the source of the problem. And his bitterness, as it says in verse 15, grew up as a root to trouble and defile many.
So what do we do with all of this? How should it change how we live, teach, and care? God turns our suffering into discipline. He takes a difficult situation and turns it into a gift by teaching us, and by revealing that only He can perfectly satisfy our longings. We can choose to accept his gift of discipline and thereby cultivate holiness and glorify God to others. Or, we can choose to ignore his discipline and our suffering becomes only a device to grow bitterness in us. Like a root. Picture what roots do to concrete, asphalt, and ancient cities. They slowly crush and destroy, strangling out all life. Who would choose to receive that out of their suffering?
People who know of no other option.
The only answer to “what do we do with this?” is clear. We let our suffering glorify God. And we tenderly approach the other sufferers around us with a better option. God created them to be his sons and daughters, and he calls them to him. It is their birthright—their promised privilege—to become a member of God’s people. If. If they only choose to know the One who opens his hand and satisfies the desires of every living thing (Ps. 145:16). It’s a beautiful promise. And it is our blessing and honor, brothers and sisters, to carry it to the suffering around us.
“Jesus Tastes like Cardboard”
I have always been fascinated with the Lord’s Supper. I was such a literally-thinking child that I used to understand it more as a sort of Eucharist—like I was actually eating Christ’s body and blood. Once my parents ironed that one out, I still thought it was an interesting thing. I’ve always been a bit imaginative, and a romantic. So when we, at our Baptist church, had a sort of ritual—where everyone had to be so quiet they could barely breathe and perform certain actions at prescribed times—I liked the feel of it, and the differentiation from the usual routine of three hymns, offering, a special, and a sermon. As a little girl, the Lord’s Supper reminded me of big words and dust, of mysticism and ‘the ancients.’ And I always got a warm feeling I couldn’t quite describe. I felt connected… to generations of Christians in Roman catacombs and European crypts and New England Churchyards.
And though I may not have understood the entire purpose of the procedure, I wasn’t too far off. I know today that the Lord’s Supper, or Communion, binds us together as a community. We share in and remember the sacrifice that Jesus gave for us. We remind ourselves that we are connected to each other by the same grace and the same savior. We feel intensely the bond between the future and the present. The young and the old. The saints, the apostles, the poets, the priests, the kings, the peasants, the natives, and the immigrants. In the words of C. S. Lewis, we remember our affinity with the Church as she truly is: “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners” (Screwtape Letters).
I have never lost my fascination with Communion. I wrote a couple of papers on its theology and practice in college, and I have experienced it in a handful of different ways with people from vastly different places in the world. I have come to see Communion, at least in my life, as a mile-marker, or a thermometer. It measures and records where I am with God, where I am physically, and what I am learning. There was a time when I experienced Communion as a solemn, solitary thing. I felt legalistically that I must confess every sin from my past and leave no stone unturned to be worthy to eat my wafer and swig my grape juice. I didn’t have the whole picture, but I was learning about the fear of the Lord, and about a holiness so pure and so complete as to be unapproachable. Later, I learned of our Father’s unfathomable forgiveness and grace, and of how he ate the Last Supper with his friends as brothers. I began to take Communion at more ease, understanding, while it is still a holy observance, my worthiness of it was never the point.
As I began to respond to God’s call to missions, I experienced Communion in different cultures. I served for a summer in inner-city Houston during high school, storying the Word, learning about people less fortunate than I, and discovering how to engage them as Jesus would. There I visited a church with friends I had closely bonded with. In Remembrance, we ate pinches off of a single loaf of real bread and took sips from a single cup. I was learning how people can be different from each other and worship in contrasting ways, yet be closely bonded and serve the same God wholeheartedly. Communion had its first savor of friendship for me. Jesus’ blood and body tasted… friendly. Like the communal parts of his message. It reminded me of the time long ago when 5,000 assorted and sundry people shared five loaves of bread as they listened to the Teacher.
I tell you these stories not to say that I have always had super-spiritual Communions and always prepared myself enough. I would be lying if I told you I had never gotten bored or failed to dig in down to my elbows and really remember the pain Jesus went through for my fellow believers and me. I went to a small, private, Christian college, and as a freshman, it was my Sunday ritual to grab a group of friends and go visit a new church. One time I took two friends to a yellowing, musty church downtown. We walked into the old, cavernous building and claimed a pew with a brilliant red velvet cushion, one of the vacant pews in the back third of the church that puffed with dust when we sat down. We sang the oldest hymns in the hymnal with words only a few could understand. Then we heard a brief sermon and accepted a pale, lifeless-looking wafer and a tiny plastic cup with half a swallow of grape juice. After we ate and drank, one of my friends, who didn’t grow up going to church, said in a carrying whisper, “Jesus tastes like cardboard!” I didn’t realize then the profound, if unintentional, wisdom of her words. The Jesus we often serve up in our dying, creaky, old churches tastes dry, boring, and stale. But the Jesus in the pages of my Bible is anything but cardboard. He has humor, and sarcasm, and severity, and intensity, and compassion, and irritation, and penetrating wisdom, and authoritative teachings. He is full of abundant life. The Jesus we share in our communion should be that Jesus. He should taste like life and love and repentance and wholeness. Not cardboard.
My favorite Communion to date occurred in Romania, wedged in-between members of the family that took me in for a month while I worked with the Roma people. I felt a tangible connectedness with people I could barely speak to as we sat rubbing shoulders and laughing with joy. I felt the warm, vibrant love of Christ pulsing between us like a circulatory system while we were squished together into the tiny building. To this day I don’t have words to describe the connectedness I felt. We cut up a loaf of bread just like those we used at each meal and all took a piece. We passed a bottle around and all drank from it. That day Jesus’ sacrifice tasted like family. And the mysterious bond of unity God gives his people across time and place. I was learning about the grace we share and the body broken for all of us. In Philippians 1:7, Paul says “… whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me.” No matter our location or situation, we as the Church are united by God’s grace—a single Body broken for the Church body. From that day on, Communion has never been a solitary thing for me.
Yesterday I had what will probably be my last communion with my home Church family for at least the next two years. And this time I took it with 9 people squeezed onto a 5-person pew. My family all sat to my left and I sat with a child on either side in my arms and one on my lap. I could smell their minty gum breath and the oils in the hair of the girl on my lap and the unwashed clothes they came to church in. They don’t have parents or a big sister or brother who’ll bring them to church. My family and I were happy to have them. I know that in time they’ll grow up and get to taste the Lord’s Supper for themselves and learn about what it means. I know that because of their inclusion in our church family, their lives have already changed and they have begun maturing. And as I ate Communion wedged between and under those beautiful blessings, Jesus tasted like the hope of a different life, the peace that can calm even a child from a broken home, and the unsurpassable love of our Savior. Jesus didn’t taste like cardboard. He tasted like let the little children come, and the joy of the kingdom of God. My prayer for you, reader, is that wherever you are, and whatever your communion looks like, that your Jesus wouldn’t taste like cardboard. Let him work in your life and shine through so that when the people you rub shoulders with partake of the Jesus in your life, he would taste like family, like love, like miracles and acceptance and salvation and joy and healing. And let us strive together toward this goal, in communion with each other and with our God.
— By Miss Cellanea 