Category: Bible and Life

“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.

Higher Ways

·

Isaiah 55:8-9

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

My littlest brother has a processing disorder. In the main, that means that it takes his brain a little more effort to make logical jumps the rest of us make with ease. He has quite a bit of trouble with the ideas of time and sequence. Sometimes he simply can’t process a new piece of information and he has to grasp it later, when he learns it in smaller pieces over a longer stretch of time. I love him to death, and I’ve learned a lot from him. He doesn’t always see the world the way we do, and often it’s refreshing or revealing to hear him talk on a subject—it teaches me many times about childlike faith.

The newest information my brother has been trying to process has been a bit out of his reach: my big sister is going overseas for two years. I’ve recently come back from a 4-day trip to Virginia to spend time looking at overseas ministry jobs, and for the first time I feel confident enough to tell people that the Father is finally taking me to live and love among a foreign people for an extended period of time. My brother can’t quite wrap his mind around a two-year length of time. So, when I was helping him with his homeschooling the other day, he kept asking me small questions—in the middle of his math, his reading, his history. “So, will you miss Christmas?” “What about holidays?” “Will you be gone for my birthday?” Yes, I’d tell him. Plane tickets are expensive, so once I leave I won’t be able to come back for a while. But I’ll Skype you! And we’ll write letters and look at each others’ pictures. And it will only be two years for now. Once he asked, “Caroline, why do you have to go? Why can’t you stay here, or just go for a few weeks?” I tried to explain, but I could tell from his furrowed eyebrows that he didn’t understand. He is a believer, and he likes telling people what he believes. He’s even been on a short trip to South Asia, where he made fast friends with other little kids and loved helping with crafts and storytelling. But he didn’t know why anyone would need to spend more time than a few days away from their home, like I am planning to do.

Later, when we did my brother’s history, we read about the Aztecs and briefly touched on their penchant for human sacrifice. I looked up from the book I was reading to him, and his eyes were wide with shock. “Why did they do that?” he asked. Lots of reasons: they were scared, bad things were happening, they thought the spirits would treat them better. “But… people died! Why…?” They… they didn’t know God. They didn’t know—couldn’t know—that He could forgive them, help them, heal them. That’s why I’m going somewhere else for 2 years, I told him. Lots of people don’t even know about God and how good He is. And they do terrible things sometimes because they don’t know how to live with God. Sometimes it takes years for them to learn otherwise. My brother thought about that for a while. I let him think, and we kept doing his schoolwork. I knew I had his approval a couple of hours later when he stopped writing, looked up at me, and said, “I guess this New Year’s we’ll just have to celebrate with you for three years at once.”

As I told a friend this story over the phone, I realized that we understand God just about as well as my brother understood me. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts; His ways are higher than ours. What God sees as time-all-at-once eternity, we can only see in little snatches and glimpses. What God sees as three-dimensional, we can only see from one point on a line. Sometimes it takes us hours, days, years even, to process a small piece of information He’s shown us. Our failure or success to understand Him doesn’t change His plan, but many times He graciously waits on us to catch up to involve us.

I’ve written before that I’ve known God’s call on my life to overseas ministry since I was a child. I’ve written that things up to a certain point were very easy. But then I started hitting snags in the path, and roadblocks, and detours. My application for two-year service was denied about a year ago for health reasons. After a difficult journey in which I learned about God’s enduring faithfulness, my application was approved—in His time. But because of the delay, I ended up spending a summer and a semester at home: unemployed; living with my parents while my little sister went off to college; and taking care of goats, chickens, brothers, and dirty dishes and laundry. I would not have readily picked this time of in-between for myself. But God has taught me things. He has taught me things that will be useful overseas and that continue to prepare me for a life of service wherever I live. Beyond the practical lessons of how to butcher and cook a chicken, how to not be gored by an angry goat, I’ve learned about patience. And waiting.

Those slow and silent times in the woods cutting limbs for goats, those early-morning trips outside to squawking chickens and screaming goats, and the repetitive liturgy of folding the same pairs of underwear and jeans and mating socks for the people I love have built up in me to teach something I couldn’t have learned if God had told me all at once. God’s ways are Higher Ways. And there is a certain holiness in daily faithfulness. The way that God teaches and trains me is His prerogative. And if it involves screaming goats and dirty dishes, let it be so. In mid-November I will receive a call detailing my two-year assignment. In January I will begin training. In late March I will get on a plane. I’ll take language lessons and stumble through cultural mistakes and tell my favorite stories til I’m blue in the face. And I couldn’t have picked a better road to get here. His ways are higher than mine.

Waiting in the Wings

·

Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun.

David wrote those words in the midst of a cry to God about how the wicked succeeded all around him. He was agonizingly frustrated because, even though he had the desire to do good, he seemed to fail more often than those who worked wicked deeds. His godly desires did not match up with reality—yet. This passage comes from Psalm 37, which is one of my favorites because I can identify with David. I have prayed that scripture many times before, because the more time I spend with the Lord, the more I grow closer to him, and my desires conform to his. As my desires have changed, my heart has grown to seek God’s glory among the nations. Yet I am continually frustrated in my works of righteousness. As much as I desire to be overseas, God has planted me here, in the States. David wrote these words after learning from experience that, in time, godly desires will prosper. The thing is, God fulfills those promises because they glorify him, not because they are my desires. He cares about me, yes, but he wants me to be content in him and with his timing. In the end he will let my righteousness shine like the dawn, and the justice of my cause will be undeniable to all those who care to look because of his Name’s sake.

I know analogies from the theater are often overused and abused, but sometimes they are the clearest way to communicate a point, so here goes. Most of my theater experience came from musical theater productions in grade school. I know it’s difficult to imagine, but I was a very dramatic child. 😉 I always loved the part of the play when I was on stage. I got to perform and play my part to help tell a story. I was always anxious when my cue was near because I had to wait in the wings, paying close attention and waiting for my moment to shine. If I did the waiting and listening part right, I would walk in on cue and everything went off smoothly. I am beginning to realize that there are times in my life when it’s my lot to wait in the wings. I am called to pay attention to what’s going on around me and to be prepared for the action after my cue. I am learning that, in fact, without the waiting in the wings, I might usher myself on too early and mess things up. I might come onstage ill-prepared.

In my times in the wings as a child I sometimes got frustrated with the long wait. I remember wondering if I would have time to leave and come back or to begin a conversation with a friend waiting alongside me. I think I do this in my walk too. As strong as my desire to serve and love overseas is, sometimes I get frustrated with the in between times when I feel unused and not a part of God’s global work. And instead of waiting on the Lord to see what he has planned for my waiting periods, I try to leave and forget about my calling. Instead of following the lamp for my feet and the light for my path that is God’s Word, I try to stumble around in the dark, bumping into things in my blind rush to find something else to do.

In times like these I find myself identifying with Jeremiah, my favorite prophet. After continual frustration about his reception, Jeremiah tries to shut up God’s Words inside of him and not let them out. He tries to move on from what he perceived as a lost cause:

But if I say, “I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. 

Jeremiah simply could not leave his calling. He couldn’t forget about it. He couldn’t hold it in. He couldn’t refuse his life’s calling without feeling the pain of his unfinished mission. Like Jeremiah, I too have tried to keep it in and go on with my life. But by God’s mercy, I was chivvied onstage for a minor scene again before I exited once more to await my next cue in the wings.

Like Jeremiah, too, I have also tried ignoring my calling. After being deeply wounded by the sins of his people and feeling unbearable pain because he knew of their judgment and coming destruction, he could not keep quiet. He knew of the disaster coming, and he spoke of it in spite of the agony it caused him. Just as Jeremiah, I cannot escape the reality of my calling because I am sometimes crushed with the weight of God’s grief for the condemnation of his people.

Oh, my anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain. Oh, the agony of my heart! My heart pounds within me, I cannot keep silent. For I have heard the sound of the trumpet; I have heard the battle cry. 

I’m coming to realize that I am part of the story even while I’m waiting in the wings—a part God is using and preparing. He wrote the play, and he knows every little thing that will happen before he draws the curtain. He knows when each actor comes and goes, and he know just how long it should be before each character walks onstage to shine like the noonday sun to play their part in telling HIS story. So for now, I am content to wait in the wings. I can watch the story close by and prepare myself to fully understand the part I will play when I hear my cue.

My Old Attic

·

I have something like an attic in my soul. It’s full of dusty old memories, and sometimes I well up when I take them out and look through them. I find worn out regrets and neglected dreams and a few warm, fuzzy sentimentalities I’d forgotten about. Experiences in real life—life outside my private attic—recall those ghostly wished-fors that hover around up there. Those can be the most painful. When I venture back up the rickety attic ladder to pick them up to turn them slowly over in my hands, they poke at me in all the old sores. The painfully stiff scar tissue covers up things I’ve been told I’m good at; things I actually believe I’m good at; things I can do well; things I enjoy doing; things I love; and things I miss doing. They remind me of aching could’ve-beens like still playing the French horn, or singing in a choir, or pursing acting. Things that might have happened… but didn’t. After a while of reminiscing and thinking about the what-ifs, I usually muster the strength to leave my attic to itself and pensively inch back down the ladder.

The reality of the matter is that the things in my attic are meant to be there. My life only has so much room, and I can’t pull down everything from the attic to decorate it with. If I were to do that, I would run the risk of clutter. I’d obscure, cover, or even possibly completely hide the things that I currently keep downstairs—the important things. The pieces of furniture from the life I’ve chosen downstairs remind me that I have made choices. I chose what to keep and what to toss. I chose a way of life. And life paths have ways of being mutually exclusive. But, it’s not so bad. As I look around, I realize that the things around me—the ones not in my attic—are not too shabby. I’ve gotten to keep out more than I ever thought I would, and passions and dreams I once thought to be irreconcilable have become magically reconciled. They complement each other quite nicely as they sit together in my living room, in fact.

On occasion I chance to look at my ceiling and imagine the attic with its lonely wishes. They have a sense of necessity about them. I can’t have the life that I have downstairs without expecting to have an attic. The very inevitability of the thing eases the wistfulness into a pensive, smiling peace.

Friendly Poems, Sparkles, and C. S. Lewis

·

I enjoy the feeling of being small. I don’t mean forced humiliation, when someone squashes me to feel better themselves, and I don’t mean humbling myself when I’d rather just have a big head, though those do have their places. I mean that I enjoy that tiptoeing, wholesome humility that shows up in my life at no effort of my own, but is welcomed in wholeheartedly. It’s that comforting sensation that I’m not in charge, that I’m only a small cog in the mechanism: that I am just a small insignificance surrounded by the beauty and majesty of a thing much bigger than I am. I am only an ‘ephemeral coruscation that pipes my short song and vanishes’ (C. S. Lewis’ great dance description in Perelandra). I am only a small thing, but I have my place. I have a sparkle.

These ruminations don’t happen often, and when they do, they catch me by surprise. I find them hidden away like a small, secreted stash in various spheres of God’s truth. Each one is precious, but dissolves at a touch. I learned a word for that once… I guess it is fitting that I cannot remember that perfect word for such a slippery connotation. It meant something like “perfect knowledge of the workings of the universe, esp. in a philosophical sense: ephemeral and vanishing.” These awarenesses come nearest to opaque substance when set down by great poets and authors, or captured in a painting, or caught in an air of music. So, I feel like I can best express them by alluding and quoting and referencing. One of the allusions that comes to mind is the last two stanzas of “A Lost Chord” by Adelaide Anne Procter:

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,

That one lost chord divine,

Which came from the soul of the Organ,

And entered into mine.

It may be that Death’s bright angel

Will speak in that chord again,

It may be that only in Heaven

I shall hear that grand Amen.

Today I had one of these moments; I felt my small place in the universe most intensely. It came through a poem and a connection with a dead man. I was reading some of George Herbert’s poetry and I felt the rise to his climax so intensely that it began to grow in my soul until it burst and filled my body. I predicted and expected the conclusion before he came to it and gradually gave whisper to the lines I was reading as they built to the glorious finale. Herbert and I met at that last line. We rested at the same, beautiful point of grace, and my breathing came quick and shallow as I felt the meeting of our souls for one sparkle of a moment before they slipped apart. We had become friends. Regardless of time, regardless of geography, regardless of culture. Regardless of any continuity whatsoever. C. S. Lewis once said:

Friendship arises… when two or more… discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste… which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I though I was the only one” (from The Four Loves).

Herbert and I came to the same, deeply personal conclusion, and the cores of Christianity in our hearts touched for a brief moment. I suppose all good poetry works that way, that it connects the author to the reader at some point. So, I know I am not special or unique in my friendship with Herbert, but maybe my experience was. Ultimately, we are both a small flicker in the span of time and the great dance, but we met each other in passing in this great, wide universe of ours. And I felt my sparkle.