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Do you ever have trouble praying? Is it ever a struggle to use a journal or a silent prayer to focus your mind on a conversation with God? Many times when I sit down alone and in silence to have a conversation with God, I feel like a failure. Plenty of times I’ll find myself wondering about my schedule for the day or planning dinner, or wandering around doing some task I don’t remember starting because my mind unintentionally went somewhere besides prayer.
Prayer is a spiritual discipline, so the more we do it the deeper our relationship with God becomes because we’re training our mind and heart to lean in to time with him. Spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, sabbath, and more should give us life.
So why are the spiritual disciplines so hard for some of us? Many of us want to grow in our relationship with God, so why can it feel so unnatural to stare at a blank prayer journal page or have a private “quiet time” to read God’s word, or to memorize Bible verses by ourselves?
I don’t think it’s only a handful of us who struggle this way. The spiritual disciplines do still require discipline, but God created us to love him and worship him in these ways, so they shouldn’t feel so unnatural to us. I think part of the problem may be that we think spiritual disciplines have to be tied to books and solitary silent meditation, because that’s what works for some people.
But other people, who are neurodivergent with ADHD or learning differences, or people who learn better from a person than from a book and from practice better than from a lecture—for us, the spiritual disciplines may need to look different. Maybe we need to do them in groups, or out loud, or use our bodies as much or more than we use our minds. That may seem incompatible with the spiritual disciplines to you, but hear me out. There is a rich tradition of spiritual practices for people like us to harness our wandering minds and prompt our memories with all five senses instead of just pages in a book.
God first gave the Israelites instructions for spiritual disciplines or practices through Moses, and what he said sounds a lot like the practices I crave. Right before they crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land for the first time, Moses gathers the Israelites and speaks most of Deuteronomy to them. Here are a few pieces of what he said:
So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul— then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and olive oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord’s anger will burn against you, and he will shut up the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you. Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land the Lord swore to give your ancestors…
Dt 11:13-21, NIV
These people waiting to enter their new home would have been both physically and spiritually transformed by their journey to get to this point. Their desert wanderings defined their calf muscles, softened their leather sandals that never wore out, tarnished their tools, stained their tents, and sanded down their heirlooms brought from Egypt. And Moses encourages them to continue these physical and sensory reminders of discipleship. The feel of rain and smell of harvest, grass thick in the field beneath their toes, the rich tastes of new wine and olive oil, symbols that caught their eyes on doorframes and gates, a brush against their skin from reminders they wore, and words echoing through bedrooms and main streets—all were to call them to remember God and his works. These could all be reminders to love and obey him so they could experience his blessing and abundant life.
These are the types of full-bodied spiritual practices that mark up our shoes, ring in our ears, make our muscles sore, blur our vision with tears, and leave sweet tastes in our mouths. They use the five senses God created in us to help us meditate on him with our whole being. Prayer like this wouldn’t just contemplate God’s omnipotence and sovereignty. It watches and hears roaring rapids in awe of their Creator who has unimaginably more power. Scripture meditation like this would feel like Jesus’ teachings that use drama and situation and relationships to brand God’s words into our memory.
These spiritual practices do exist, but if you’re like me, you didn’t necessarily grow up familiar with them. They can be church celebrations every year like Advent and Lent before Christmas and Easter. They can be Stations of the Cross, physical postures of prayer that involve our bodies, unison group prayers or liturgies, or a written calendar of prayers that we pray like generations before us. They can be bells or cell phone alarms to remind us to pray throughout the day or at meals. They can be prayer labyrinths, or memorials, or images of heroes of the faith or scripture passages. They can be ceremonies or relationships or habits—a ring we twist when we pray, a person who hears our confessed sin and keeps us accountable, an exercise routine paired with a habit of praying through our week or awe at God’s creation. Dance or baking or knitting or gardening can be just as reverent a way to enter into the Lord’s presence.
Two of my favorite of these new-to-me spiritual disciplines are lectio divina and visio divina. The first means “divine reading” or “sacred reading” and it’s a way to meditate on scripture in a group or alone. It guides your meditation like tree blazes on a hike or traffic signals so you don’t get lost in other thoughts. Visio divina is divine or sacred “seeing” and it uses God’s creation or art in the same way to guide a conversation with God, to give us space to admire him with awe.
Learning these new ways to practice spiritual disciplines sparked my own creativity too. Many people pray while washing dishes or changing diapers or taking walks because mundane activities can help our bodies go on autopilot and leave our minds free for things like prayer. But for me sometimes, creative activities can feel the most prayerful. I recently taught about lament, which is a special type of prayer you can find in Psalms and Lamentations. It brings our emotions of grief and loss to God and asks for his help or comfort. Often lament ends by clinging to our faith in God in the hard times, even when our emotions may not feel that faith very strongly.
I taught a group how to lament and gave them the option of writing or speaking a prayer, or creating a poem or song or artwork to express their lament to God. Later, I considered that baking is my favorite form of art and wondered if I could use some time baking to express a lament. The result was an incredibly moving prayer time that brought me to tears and helped me work out a lament with my hands when I hadn’t been able to with only my mind.
Visio divina and lectio divina both use components of observation, meditative listening, prayerful response, and silence to guide our thoughts in conversation with God. This “donut lament” wasn’t exactly either of them, but it did use a similar process to focus my mind in prayer. So perhaps I’ll call it creatio divina, or sacred making. May you all try out creative or new-to-you spiritual discipline practices and grow deeper in your relationship with God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
A Donut Lament
The sparse palmful of yeast released like tears into the waiting bowl. Quickly hidden in the flour, it became undetectable until it combined with the warm milk and butter and its tang suffused the kitchen. Like grief, the yeast multiplied unseen, its only evidence pungent byproducts and the ballooning space they occupied. A cascading reaction proved the potency of that first transformative ingredient: one traumatic event can reshape the course of a life. Prayerfully, meditatively, the yeast was mixed with the other ingredients until it incorporated into every part of the dough. Ingredients began to react and what once were separate components fused and changed on molecular and cellular levels as something new was created.
In the dark of early morning, the ragged dough was poured out and it collapsed against the countertop. Two hands tenderly scooped it back together and, with the insistence of lament, began to knead. Frustration and force went into the pushing and pulling motions, spinning the dough in circles by stops and starts with each repetition. A heavy heart and heavy hands imprinted sorrow and loss into the dough. Scattered proteins linked together under the influence of shaping repetition, and strands of gluten—like faith—began to grow. They lengthened and wrapped throughout the dough, slowly binding it together with their strength and resilient elasticity. And then, the shaping work done, the dough was left to rest, in the dark.
With time, the sun rose. Hands that had shaped the ball of dough in hope returned to find it grown and mature. It was ready to be shaped and cooked, then shared as a sweet gift to sustain others. The dough was a prayer, and the process a lament. The making was meditative, contemplative, and repetitive in ways that allowed the soul to rest in God and express sorrow seasoned in faith with hope.
Psalm 91 is all marked up in my Bible. It is a prayer song about God’s protection, and it was a particularly sweet reminder of God’s character in a season when I needed to remember God’s ‘feminine’ side—that God gathers us under wings to protect and shield us like a mother bird.
But I never really thought Ps 91 was a promise for me. After all, it was probably written by David, and we all know David was a man after God’s own heart. He sinned and made mistakes, sure, but I still don’t presume to walk as closely with God or have as much faith as David did. And for crying out loud, Satan quotes this psalm to JESUS when he’s being tempted in the wilderness. In Caroline paraphrase, he says “Jump off this roof and God will catch you, because the Psalm says God will command his angels to catch you and hold you up so you won’t even brush your foot on those rocks below.”
Read Psalm 91 for yourself. It makes these beautiful promises about God’s protection, about how he is our refuge from disease and terrors and violence and other dangers. But the promises are always for whoever lives in God’s shelter or whoever professes God to be their refuge: “Because he loves me, says the Lord, I will rescue him…” That’s all well and good, and of course I would say that God is the one who protects me, but do I really believe and live that with 100% of me? I don’t think I can claim to—I have doubts, and I trust in insurance or people or other things for protection more than I’d like to admit. So I didn’t think these promises would literally apply to my life.
Without putting it into these words, I believed, “If I trust and love God enough, then I earn the kind of loving loyalty he promises in that psalm. And there’s no way I love and trust God enough. So those promises can’t be for me.”
I didn’t think Psalm 91 was useless, I just thought it showed God’s character and the kind of love he shows to people who fully depend on him. I didn’t think I belonged in that category. I belong in the category with the disciples, “You of little faith,” or even, a little more kindly, with the man who comes asking Jesus for a miracle and says, “I do believe! Help me overcome my unbelief!”
But that’s just what I learned recently. Nowhere does Psalm 91 say we earn God’s kindness with our faith. In fact, that’s contrary to everything the New Testament teaches about how God saves us. I believe that God saved me out of his grace and kindness, but somehow along the line I lost the thread and believed that certain other blessings or kindnesses from the Lord had to be earned by my faith and obedience. And that’s simply not the equation the Bible uses. God is the Father of all good gifts, not all good merited-awards. And when Jesus teaches about prayer, to illustrate the point he asks, ‘if you earthly fathers know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more does your heavenly father?”
God’s protection from the dangers of this world is a gift we do not earn. Like Job says, we know that that sometimes he gives and sometimes he takes away (that protection), but it is not on the basis of how strong our faith in him is. In fact, God’s unearned protection in the midst of those dangers is the very thing that often grows our faith. And God chose to teach me that by way of a very memorable object lesson recently.
On the first Friday of September I was taking a recovery day at home after a week of all-day teaching. I was bouncing back and forth between work on the computer and work around the house and checking in on the repairmen who could finally come by now that I was home for the day. A little after 3:20 I decided to pop my head through the attic access to see if I could find any evidence of termites or some other pests causing the problems with my electrical wiring. I tugged on the ladder the electrician had been using to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere, and then started up. Just after I poked my head through the ceiling 11’ up, I felt the ladder twitch underneath me. I bent my head back down below the level of the ceiling and saw the ladder start slowly making skid marks down the wall, and that’s the last thing I remember.
The ladder fell all the way to the floor, taking me with it, and I must’ve lost consciousness on impact. I bruised several bones and sprained an ankle, and smashed my face diagonally on the ladder rail. I fractured my lower jaw and three teeth, and shattered my upper jaw and chipped, shattered, or dislodged 5 teeth on the top. I sustained a concussion, and may also have caused hairline fractures in my foot and below my left eye.
About 30 or 40 minutes after I climbed the ladder, my memory clicked back on, and I was sitting on my couch next to a friend, with a hand full of blood and some teeth or bone chips. Somehow in my daze after consciousness returned, I called a nurse friend to come and help me. I still have no memory of that call, or her arriving as quickly as she could. She got me to the hospital nearby, and scans confirmed no brain bleeds or skull or spinal fractures. I was transferred to a different hospital for more thorough scans where everything was confirmed a second time, and I had surgery to remove three teeth that were lost causes and stitch up my gums. I was hospitalized just shy of a week, and then came home to recover from a concussion that’s lingered for more than a month and the ongoing dental work that’ll take several months to complete, including time for my broken jaws to heal.
Sometime in Admitting at the hospital, while I was still spitting blood into a cup and we hadn’t done any imaging of my head or moved me to a room yet, it started to dawn on me how much worse the fall could’ve been. Yes, I had several goose-eggs and an impressive set of Gollum teeth, but I hadn’t directly hit my forehead or gashed open any part of my face. My alertness had quickly returned, and my relatively low pain level we knew even then meant it unlikely I had fractured my spine or skull or caused any brain bleeds, which could lead to more permanent neurological damage. And the next day after I transferred hospitals the doctor’s mouth literally dropped open after I was able to explain the fall and injuries in detail, and get up and walk around: “You shouldn’t be able to walk after a fall like that.”
It was then that God reminded me of Psalm 911, and I began to process God’s incredible protection. I remember silently weeping once in the hospital after the lights turned out and I knew I could rest peacefully for the night. “Those who live in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.” Surgery on my mouth took a few days longer to schedule than I had hoped, but my fear of infection or worse proved groundless. “Do not dread the disease that stalks in darkness…” And repeat scans of my brain showed nothing worse than a concussion, even though I had been at home alone with no one to anticipate or help immediately after the accident. “Nor the disaster that strikes at midday.” Eventually I connected the dots and realized that a fall like that could have killed me under different circumstances. “Though a thousand fall at your side, thought ten thousand are dying around you, these evils will not touch you.” And on the third day after the fall, with many of you praying for me, my sprained ankle that should have taken enough force to shatter it could suddenly and miraculously bear weight and I could walk without support. “If you make the LORD your refuge, if you make the Most High your shelter, no evil will conquer you; no plague will come near your home. For he will order his angels to protect you wherever you go. They will hold you up with their hands so you won’t even hurt your foot on a stone.”
Even now as I write I still tear up, overwhelmed by the Lord’s gracious protection that I did not deserve. God took care of me in the initial accident, with the healthcare I could access afterward, and through so many of you far and near. I have been surrounded by love and people checking in. I still smile with gratitude for all of you when I use the body soap someone brought me in the hospital. And I have been dependent on the kindness of strangers and friends who have given me medical care, visited me at home or in the hospital, helped me with errands, and borne with me as I dealt with the ongoing effects of the concussion.
Humor and humility have been the most gracious and necessary ways to accept my limitations as I’ve healed. I’ve joked many times about how I only damaged the breakaway portion of my face, or the dentures and cane I earned myself. I’ve matched my bruises to purple clothes and joked about being Gollum from Lord of the Rings or Toothless from How to Train your Dragon. I had to have patience with a brain that processed emotions like a toddler and couldn’t remember how to handle social interactions. I had to let being a single independent woman go more times than I wanted and ask for help with simple tasks like cleaning my house or preparing food or picking up groceries. I had to humbly accept the massive privilege I have to complain about oatmeal and soup when many of my friends would go hungry if they had to have a special diet, or the privilege I have to immediately access health care many of my friends cannot even consider, without worrying about the price tag. Many times the jokes come easily and the humility has taken more work.
But there again God has shown kindness I did not deserve, and answered my prayers with the humility and strength and endurance I needed. Not long after I returned home from the hospital, I found myself crying again over a minor inconvenience because my concussion hampered me from letting it roll off like I normally would. I sat down at the piano to see if music would come back easier than other things. Soon I found myself playing and singing, lisping praise through broken teeth, and weeping from blackened eyes. Moments like that have only grown my faith—moments when God met me in my brokenness and was sufficient to calm my mind or quiet my heart. God deserves praise in our brokenness because of his unsurpassed kindness, and that same posture of praise can grow our hearts along a trellis of gratitude instead of bitterness.
Say what you want about coincidence or spiritual forces we cannot see, but the teaching I finished just before I fell with the ladder was a Bible-story based mental trauma healing program with Sudanese church leaders here. They were reminded in fresh ways that God cares about their immense suffering and is with them in it. They learned how to support the many freshly traumatized refugees in their communities and their churches who have recently arrived fleeing the war in Sudan. And many of them tearfully praised God for the encouragement and healing they found in his Word. Our first story began with God’s perfect unspoiled creation in the Garden, and our last story finished with the hope that all will be perfected and healed once again in the heavenly garden after Jesus returns. I had been meditating on a beautiful lament song, Garden Hope,2 that reminds us of God’s good plan while we wait here in-between the gardens.
My fall reminded me afresh of those realities. And as long as my body and mind are still bruised, I carry with me physical reminders that though we suffer now, one day we will be healed. I was also reminded afresh to practice what I teach when my injuries forced me into a vulnerability that tied me closer to my community here. When my tribe of Sudanese sisters here finally worked out of me how badly I had been injured, they insisted on visiting me like a shut-in. I cried again because I couldn’t remember much Arabic and didn’t know how mentally stable I would be. But those women, who have been through persecution and famine and war and worse aren’t fazed by much, and they wept over me. They prayed and encouraged and looked me in the eyes to tell me they knew exactly why I fell—because our Enemy was not happy with the life-changing hope they had been reminded of and equipped to share that week. They reminded me that as refugees they know what it feels like to be far from family when you need or miss them most, and repeatedly told me that I am their sister and they are ready to help at a moment’s notice when I need anything. When I mentioned Psalm 91, they smiled and said, “That’s our psalm,” and quoted their favorite parts of it from memory. It sounded even sweeter in Sudanese Arabic from the mouths of friends who have personally known God as their refuge and protection in many hardships through the years.
I’ll be recovering from that kind of love for quite a while too. In the meantime, my concussion seems to be mostly cleared except for the lingering slowness with decisions, communication, and emotional processing. I still have a minor limp that will heal with time, along with the other broken bones in my face. I got some temporary teeth to last me until I can get permanent implants around the end of the year. And I’m still managing some minor pain and fatigue while God continues to heal my body. But God has tattooed Psalm 91 on my heart and I can’t help but praise him for his rescue and protection.
The LORD says, “I will rescue those who love me. I will protect those who trust in my name. When they call on me, I will answer; I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue and honor them. I will reward them with a long life and give them my salvation.”
Ps 91:14-16
All Psalm 91 quotations here are taken from the NLT. ↩︎
James was written in the Hebrew tradition of mashal, or wisdom literature. Mashal is a word for a parable, but it can mean much more than that: a proverb, ethical wisdom, a story that teaches wisdom, or poetry that works as a memory aid for bits of wisdom. You can read a mashal anywhere in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, or in lots of Jesus’ preaching and teaching.
Because Jesus taught with these ‘wisdom stories,’ they would have been a familiar teaching technique to his brother, James. James uses this teaching style in his short letter so well that many people who read it are reminded of one of Jesus’ most famous teachings—the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew 5-7.
The wisdom that James taught with the mashal in his letter was the practical and applied nature of our faith. I’ve been taught in the past that the letter deals with faith and works, answering questions about how true faith correlates to obedience in our daily lives. These works don’t save us, I’ve been taught, but they’re more of an ‘indicator light’ like you’d find on your car dashboard; if you have a good, solid faith, your works light up alongside it to mark it. Whatever the ‘works’ were was left as some fuzzy category of vague obedience, in my mind.
But James is anything but fuzzy. He tells us we can’t just listen to the Word, or Scripture, but that we have to obey it too, and that if we don’t we’re unwise and foolish. He caps off chapter 1 by saying that real faith produces works. The two don’t just accompany other, but grow from each other. His final words on that topic are familiar: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Real faith, or religion, IS works, and most specifically it’s the work of caring for people who need it most. James tells us our faith is caring for the marginalized, the oppressed, the poor, and the lonely, and doing so with a holy heart not swayed by the things of this world that would distract us.
What are those things that distract us from the poor and distressed? What keeps us from them? In my personal experience, it is pride, power, position, wealth, and privilege. When I love these things too much to look a beggar in the eyes or offer him some food, James says my religion is worthless. When I listen politely and nod along as someone grieves and laments, my religion is worthless. When I have the opportunity to listen to the voice of someone different than me, someone often neglected and unheard just like James’ widows and orphans, and I dismiss that opportunity, my religion is useless. It is dead, and deceptive.
That may seem harsh to us, or maybe overstated, but you don’t have to take my word for it.
James goes on in chapter 2 to say the very same thing. He tells the story of a rich man who comes to a gathering of believers and is treated with honor, while the poor man is welcomed to sit on the floor, or not even offered a seat. James warns us against favoritism towards those with privilege, power, or wealth. Partiality is a sin. It’s a work that shows our faith is not mature. It’s easy to hear Jesus’ words echoed here, from the end of Matthew 5, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?”
James goes on to remind us that God has chosen the poor to inherit the kingdom (which should remind us again of Jesus’ “blessed are the poor in spirit…” beatitudes), and he tells us that breaking the law about loving your neighbor as yourself is a sin just the same as adultery or murder.
Soak that in for a second. James compares favoritism with adultery and murder. This is serious.
What good is our faith if it has not action to go with it, James asks us in 2:14? Is it even real faith? Can it save? If one of our brothers and sisters has no clothes or food and we tell them, “I hope things get better,” or “my thoughts and prayers are with you,” or “Go in peace, I hope you’re warm and full,” our faith is dead. James points out here what is called a sin of omission. It’s a sin that you commit by not doing something you’re supposed to do. For example, Moses taught us to honor our mother and father. When we don’t do that, we sin. It’s the same here. When we don’t value our brothers and sisters equally in Christ, we sin. We sin just as deeply as if we’d murdered.
That is massive. If our churches don’t listen to the voice of the poor man, the one with shabby clothes, the one we tell to stand in the corner, the old, the young, the foreign, the minority, the women, the ethnically different, James says we sin and our faith is dead without these deeds. When I don’t actively show my brother or sister with a different skin tone or eye shape that I value them, maybe I have functionally murdered them by taking away their voice and their seat in the room with me. In James 2:17-19 he compares such inaction to the ‘faith’ of the demons, who also believe in God but refuse to follow him in obedience.
James rounds off chapter 2 by explaining that true faith isn’t just correlated with works, but that it compels us irresistibly toward works. Our faith should lead to radical sacrifice of what is dear to us, like Abraham giving up his only son Isaac. Is our comfort zone so dear to us that we can’t give it up to have awkward conversations with people who feel excluded or voiceless in our churches? James also says that that kind of Abrahamic faith-to-works should cut across stereotypes like the faith the prostitute Rahab showed through caring for people who had no claim on her. If you read James and don’t want to be like Rahab, you’re doing it wrong.
James preaches what many today would call a social gospel. And many who would call it that shudder and squirm. Faith is about saving our souls, they say. Faith is about redeeming our minds and our wills. Faith is about heaven and eternal salvation.
But James won’t accept that answer, at least not as a whole answer. Faith is about action, in our real world, to care for real people, who may not deserve our attention, but whom God declared deserve grace under the new covenant just as much as we do. Perhaps they deserve it even more, given God’s repeated emphasis on the poor in spirit and broken-hearted. James closes chapter 2 by saying our faith must be accompanied by social action or we aren’t really talking about real faith or the whole gospel. “As the body without the spirit is dead,” he says, “so faith without deeds is dead.” Just like you can’t have a body or soul without the other, our faith is dead if it’s just about our soul. It must care for the body too.
One of my favorite childhood songs was by Rich Mullins. It has the line, “faith without works is like a song you can’t sing—it’s about as useless as a screen door on a submarine.” This message from James is rough. It’s convicting. And it makes me consider many different aspects of my interactions and care for people. But it has beauty too. A song you can’t sing is depressing, a hollow promise. But when we get this right and evaluate and make changes to listen and include better, our faith can sing. It can be welcoming and warm, truly showing love to everyone. Is your faith the kind that falls silent in the throat, or is it the kind that sings?
How long ago was it that you last read a book written by a woman? How about one written by someone with a different skin tone than you? What about one written by someone whose native language is different from yours?
As widely-read as you may be, natural biases and supply and demand often combine to make your reading list an echo chamber—you only hear variations on your own voice. My seminary booklist for the semester of my writing is quite extensive, but every one of my books is written by a white man. I found two authors whose native languages differ from my own, but they were still educated under the same systems in the States.
Do we not miss a richness when we choose to learn only from those within our own culture, who already share our ideas?
I sometimes feel starved for the perspective of a female professor, or the lively teaching style of an African American brother. I can’t help but wonder if I would understand a Bible story better if it were taught by a Middle-Easterner, or if my concept of Christian suffering would have more staying power if it were informed by refugee.
Theology in particular is one discipline which suffers much at the hands of this diversity drought. Seven or eight years ago I sat in a college classroom learning about theology from a professor I still respect very much. He taught us about systematic theology—the study of all Christian doctrines and beliefs and how they harmonize into one unified, biblical system. For all his strengths, my professor did not teach me that culture and society radically shape each individual’s theology. He taught me that the theology I was learning was all there was—the creeds, the councils, the theologians like Augustine and Aquinas, all of them fed into one stream I shared, sitting in that college classroom with squeaky desks. And I did share in that stream, that culture of resources and thinking, but little did I know the other streams I could access.
My understanding of the uniformity of theology began to crack a little when I lived in Bulgaria and worked with the Roma people. All of the sudden, the Five Points of Calvinism were far less important than what the ‘baptism of the Spirit’ meant, and whether or not it was biblical. My friends were outside of the traditions of Western Christianity, and their spiritual landscape was vastly different than my own and the teaching I had encountered. They had questions I couldn’t even begin to answer. My white theology wasn’t good enough. And I slowly began to realize that what I had been taught was systematic theology was really just my white Christian heritage. There was nothing wrong with it as an individual perspective, but it certainly wasn’t the only perspective to be had.
Since that time, I have sought out teaching on cultural theology. All of us Christians come to the Word of God from a starting point. Whether we come as women or men, poor or rich, single or married, or whatever our color, we bring ourselves to the table just as we are. We can’t help but see the world of the Bible through our own eyes, because what other eyes do we have? If we’re wealthy and well-situated we identify with Abraham, Nicodemus, or Paul. Women are drawn to the stories of the Woman at the Well, Esther, and Ruth. Minorities see how God cares for the oppressed and demands social justice. And slowly but surely, the stories we are drawn to shape our understanding of who God is and how he interacts with us. Little nuances in culture, character, and past shape how we understand God.
Now, notice that I didn’t say my culture shapes who God is. Our differences do not give us license to fashion a God suitable for us, because God is exactly who the Bible says he is. Period. But our differences do explain how a black brother or sister might understand God’s zeal for freedom better, how a woman could understand God’s care for the voiceless better, or how a persecuted brother or sister may better understand what Jesus meant when said to count the cost. Our experiences mean that certain stories are more precious to us as individuals or because of our cultural identities. Certain Scriptures resonate with our emotions because our experiences help us see ourselves in stories someone else might struggle to identify with.
These cultural differences lead to differences in belief and practice that emphasize certain traits of God over others. These theologies even have labels, but they’re whispered in the corners or condemned from behind a lectern as ‘different’ or ‘distortions.’ Liberation theology. Black theology. And the F-word of good, Southern Baptists: feminist theology. All of these variations and more have some redeeming and praiseworthy qualities. They have valid perspectives on real biblical content. But any of these theologies alone, even white orthodox theology, can spin into disproportion when taken without balance from other cultural views. We need our brothers and sisters who are different than us to help us balance what we understand about God from the Scritpures.
We must dialogue between our theological perspectives. When we pad our rooms and our discussions with people like us, we miss the gift of diverse cultural perspectives God gives us. If our divisions of culture and sex are reflections the image of God, we each form an integral part of His Body here in the Church.
I asked before if we missed richness by cloistering together in like groups. I believe it’s more than that. We miss wholeness. When God created male and female, he created them both in his image, both as a unique representation of his qualities and character. When redeemed, our cultural differences are like that too. Our cultures and their resulting theologies uniquely reflect aspects of God’s character, and when we cut ourselves off from ideas outside the ‘mainstream’ we consign ourselves to a small corner of a masterpiece, never to see the whole painting by the Master.
So what do we do, brothers and sisters?
We have to mind the gap. Intentionally seek what you’re missing out on. Read a book by someone whose name you can’t pronounce. Listen to sermons, podcasts, or blogs from someone with a different skin tone or eye shape than yours. Learn from voices with richer and more colorful tones than your own. Make the most of opportunities to widen perspectives and voice the unsaid.
Try this sermon for starters, dear brothers and sisters. Don’t be defensive, but listen. Really listen. And try to put yourselves in the shoes of someone who has had to walk twice as far as you to be heard.
Ezekiel is no joke. It can be a difficult book to read and certainly is difficult to understand. It often gets skipped over in Bible studies and sermons, and there are quite a few reasons for that. The book is arguably the most graphic in the Bible in terms of sexual and violent content. As literature in the apocalyptic genre, it measures high on the bizarre-o-meter with symbols, prophecy, and motifs that have no tether in our modern experience.
I always forget how graphic the book is. I don’t know Hebrew, but I get the feeling our translations of “member” for penis and “issue” for semen and “bosom” for nipples and “whoring” for sex are sanitized—words the prophet meant to be raw and irritating to us we gloss over with a euphemism. So why did he use them? What was the point? Certainly sexuality has a good and holy place in the lives of believers, but if that was Ezekiel’s point we’d have another Song of Songs instead of the graphic descriptions of lust, an affair, and acts of prostitution that Ezekiel writes.
To say nothing of the graphic depictions of violence including evisceration, rape, and rivers of blood, the sexuality in Ezekiel chapters 16 and 23 goes far beyond acceptable dinner conversation. But the prophet might not have known much about table manners. He was the one, after all, who ate food cooked over a poop fire for more than a year. I find it most likely Ezekiel is avoided in polite church conversation for this reason—he spoke about and did shameful things that make our skin crawl, make us want to take a bath. The shock of his writings often provokes physical responses like sweating, blushing, racing heart, tears, or shaking. We avoid the book because it’s uncomfortable. It makes us cringe.
But that’s the point of the book. One of its themes is shame, and not just any shame, the particular shame we feel when exposed at our dirtiest, most disgusting moments of sin. It’s the quality of shame we would feel if our deepest and darkest sins were found out. Ezekiel wrote and acted with shock to wake God’s people up to their sin, to convict them, and to call them out of it.
Have you ever asked yourself why the Old Testament so often uses sex and adultery as a picture for sin and falling away from God? Why that metaphor, and why so often? What does it have to teach us? Maybe we should ask why we don’t describe our sin that way today. Why is it more common to hear “food, work, busyness, etc. is becoming an idol in my life” than “I’m cheating on God with my binge eating” or ‘I’m having an affair with my schedule”? Granted, those don’t roll off the tongue as well, but why do we describe our sin differently than God does?
We often describe things as idols in our lives without any real reference to what idolatry meant to the Israelite people, or to real idol worship today. We misinterpret and overuse the idea of idolatry, which was exchanging God for another and totally betraying him. To the Israelites, idolatry was leaving one covenant and seeking another, totally depending on another god to provide for needs God had already promised to provide. We sanitize that word, idolatry, make it metaphorical, and use it to refer to the way we let the score of the sports game control our emotions, or our overeating, or the fact that we find too much security in our bank account. We call it idolatry because we don’t have firsthand experience with idols. We don’t connect our cutesy, pre-packaged words for sin with slaughtering our children in total devotion to idols like Ezekiel talks about.
Through the Lord’s inspiration, Ezekiel knew that perverted sexual appetite was a much better analogy for our sin habits we won’t kick. I believe we leave out the topic of sex from or conversations far too much anyway, but I also think Ezekiel’s graphic depiction of nymphomania and lust-crazed infidelity is actually a better picture of what we so quaintly call idolatry. Do you worship that football game you watch on Sundays? Or would it be more accurate to say you lust over it, fantasize about it, spend all your spare moments imagining how it might play out? Do you sacrifice your children for your gluttony, or do you fantasize about that meal or dessert you want to eat, count the time until you can consume it, imagine what it will taste like, dwell on it? Is your bank account an idol, or is it the secretive little thought that comes to you in spare moments to soothe you or make you discontented? Is idol worship more your pace of sin habits, or is it lust—wild-eyed, insatiable, ever-present sinfulness, an appetite that consumes and controls you at the expense of whatever else deserves your attention more?
We all know what lust feels like, a burning thought or desire you can’t quite put away, that leaves you feeling dirty but aroused, alive. With lust, we mentally throw caution to the wind because it’s hidden, and no amount of conversation or probing lets it out unless we allow it. Are your sin habits more like that? I know mine are. So pick your poison. Idolatry, or lust? Idolatry replaces God in an act of finality and betrayal. An idolater has at least made up his mind. Someone consumed by lust though, thinks she can have the goodness she desires as well as the goodness she already has. If your sin is better described by lust, you want to fill your appetite with other things the world has to offer in secret, but still enjoy your ‘righteous fidelity’ to God. Sounds like a pretty good description of me.
But Ezekiel doesn’t stop there, at calling out our sin and shaming us for it. He wrote to Israelites who were already in exile, already experiencing the punishment for their sin and slowly learning to reform their ways. Ezekiel gives hope and promise to answer the shame. The gospel is so beautifully present in Ezekiel, and we can see through the bars in the narrative to God’s enormous care for the lost nations of the world. God didn’t just care about Ezekiel and the Israelites. He led the prophet to call out the sin of the surrounding nations, but also to weep and lament for them. He called them to repent, just like he has called us as believers to himself. There are whole chapters in the middle of Ezekiel remembering the good qualities of the nations, and praising the unique gifts and abilities the Lord gave them in his mercy. The laments are heartbreaking because they describe the self-destructive sin of these nations and the inevitable consequences of their unrighteousness that they now must face.
After fully expounding on the shame of a lustful people who turn away from God and fill their appetites elsewhere, Ezekiel mentions the idea one more time: “describe to the house of Israel the temple, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities… and if they are ashamed of all that they have done, make known to them the designs of the temple…” What follows is a blueprint for the temple in Jerusalem in surprising detail. What is even more surprising is that this temple didn’t exist. Never has been built and most likely never will be. Ezekiel closes his book with chapters about a non-existent temple—what might have seemed a hollow promise to the exiled people, away from their homeland with no place to properly worship God.
Why would God shame his people with descriptions of a perfect temple they would never see, even after they returned from exile? This temple description would have been the reason people wept at the end of Ezra 3 when the new temple was finished. It was nothing like Ezekiel’s description. God meant for the people to be ashamed of their sin. He meant them to know fully and finally that they could never be perfect, never build a temple and carry out its practices as a perfect, pure, holy people whose hearts were fully devoted to God.
Hearing Ezekiel’s words in exile they must have experienced the sobering proof daily that they could not escape their own sin. As a consequence to their sin they were scattered among the nations. Their language, culture, faith, and even national and genetic identity as Israelites were precariously close to annihilation. As a people, they could be lost forever, blended in among other exiles in a foreign kingdom. They had fallen far short of the perfection of Ezekiel’s temple. It would have seemed unobtainable. And it would have brought them great shame.
But the theme Ezekiel had introduced in snapshots earlier in the book—the theme of a new covenant of God’s mercy and full and final restoration as a people—is an answering hope here fully developed in the context of the temple description. Apocalyptic literature like Ezekiel is meant to alert people to the cosmic realities of sin and its consequences, but also to bring hope to a people devoted to God. The temple he describes isn’t just an object of shame, it is also a symbol of hope. Ezekiel describes a prince who rules justly and leads his people in honoring God. He describes a nation at home in their land, righteous in their ways and prospering in their obedience. Ezekiel describes a new and restored Israel that gathers in its reborn capital city to worship the Lord in spirit and in truth. Perhaps the woman at the well asked Jesus about this very passage.
What Ezekiel describes as a sustaining hope to those repentant of their lustful sin is a restored nation: a pure and rescued people whose language, celebrations, and culture flourish. After fully recognizing the extent of their sin and wickedness, God tells them that one day his presence would be among them again and a perfect reality beyond their wildest imaginings would come true.
Jesus heralded this coming kingdom reality, but it is John’s description of the heavenly temple in Revelation that matches up precisely with Ezekiel’s vision. Ezekiel describes twelve gates for the twelve tribes, and John describes the same twelve also representing the twelve apostles. Both describe a river flowing from the temple, healing the land. Ezekiel promises a day when the Israelites who truly follow the Lord will be with him in his perfect city, and he winks at a coming reality the rest of the world couldn’t even begin to imagine at the time of his writing. He mentions a place for sojourners among the people of Israel, foreigners who are to be treated as natural-born citizens and given a share in the inheritance of the land and the perfect city and temple. He mentions us. We, too, are God-followers invited into the kingdom through God’s gracious mercy exhibited in Jesus. Just as Ezekiel described God’s presence coming down to earth once more and filing the temple, Jesus came down to earth and lived and walked with us in our imperfection, inviting us to share in the hope of a world restored from the ravages of sin.
This harsh prophetic book to exiled people opens with terrifying images of God roaming the earth in giant wheels. This same God spoke through a prophet to convict his present and future people of their shameful, disgusting sins, but he ends his message to the prophet and his audience with a perfect picture of a city and a temple where his presence dwells. The Lord who roamed the earth could be found even by a broken people far away from his temple, but he also showed them that he would soon choose to heal and perfect them, and live among them. The book closes not with God roaming above a broken earth, but with the new name of his perfect city to come, “The Lord is There.”
I was raised by parents who taught me the Bible and took me to church. I could see the difference their faith made in their lives. When they were kind, it was because of their faith. When they cared for and helped other people, it was because of their faith. When they struggled in life or made hard decisions, their faith helped guide them.
Of course I wanted to be like them and have faith like them. But Christianity’s biggest draw for me was the stories I heard from the Bible. They felt real and alive and applicable to me. So one day I prayed to God and asked him to forgive me for my sins—the wrong things I did all them time when I was selfish or lied or disobeyed—and to live in me and help me to be a better person. I felt changed after that; not perfect, but changed for the better. Of course I learned more about what I believed as I grew older, but from that point on, faith wasn’t just ‘faith’ to me. It was trust in a living God I could interact with through prayer and his words in the Bible. My reliance on that God made me a kinder, better person because I had a model to pattern my life after. I became a Jesus-follower.
My faith became more my own as I grew. I read the Bible for myself. I prayed more myself. I learned lessons about my Christianity from books, sermons, teachers, and my parents. But the lessons that stuck with me most were the ones I gleaned myself from reading the Bible on my own time. I learned what real love is from the stories of Jesus’ life. I learned about kindness, justice, mercy, and forgiveness from colorful stories in the Old Testament part of the Bible. The stories of faith came alive to me as I learned about its great history and my forefathers and mothers who participated in its founding epic.
Those stories wouldn’t let me sit still in a church pew. They moved me. They moved me out into the world where people were hurting and living and laughing. They moved me to learn what I could about and from the people of the world; and just like any other favorite book or cause or passion, they set a fire in me. Those stories enriched my life and helped me to live well. I couldn’t keep them to myself.
I learned that I love hearing and telling stories. The stories people tell explain their lives, their passions, and their spirituality. I live my life gleaning as many stories as I can. You tell me your favorite stories, and I’ll tell you mine. Our stories shape us and connect us—and whether they’re about Jedi, WWII soldiers, Middle Earth, or superheroes, the narratives we tell spin the threads of our belief. I learned that I am a keeper and teller of stories. I listen. I observe. And I tell the stories I hear. As a Christian, I see that our stories fit into a vast narrative that gives them meaning and purpose.
I could write books about why I’m a Christian, if anyone would read them. But there’s a better book I’d prefer you to read. It’s the book Christ-followers have been reading for centuries. It connects me to poor paupers, social activists, benevolent kings, historical figures, and great movers and shakers of the world who have all read the same book. Intelligent and powerful men and women for 2000 years have been reading this book, and it has shaped their lives. If they’ve read it carefully, it’s shaped their lives for the better.
The Bible
The Bible has its rough edges. It can be hard to understand sometimes, just like any old literature. But it’s at once both gritty and real and soaringly beautiful and poetic. It tells about the building blocks of every day life, like families, governments, poverty, and celebration. It has elements of the fantastic, the mundane, the extraordinary, and eternal truth. It holds stories about rape, incest, coups, insanity, bravery, bribery, prostitutes, child kings, the rise and fall of nations, the cuss words, the graphic scenes, the victory songs, the nighttime weeping, crazy parties, and the simple contentment of dawn. In short, this ancient book relates to every aspect of life, both modern and ancient. It’s an anthology of music and poetry, philosophy, ethics, and epics and short stories. But it also traces the meta-narrative of history that gives our lives meaning beyond their narrow scope. Have you personally ever read the Bible’s engaging books? John, Genesis, or Acts? The Bible’s stories have real answers for real questions that have changed my life.
Lots of people today think the Bible is old or outdated. And in some sense, I suppose it is. We don’t ride around in chariots today, and our neighboring nations don’t sacrifice their children to statues of gods. The Roman Empire is long gone, as are the days when we raised our own livestock and grew our own produce. But family relationships aren’t all that different nowadays. People are oppressed today just like they were when it was written. And humans still ask themselves the same questions: why am I here; does this life matter; why would a good God let bad things happen; is it worth it to try to be a good person? In its own words, the Bible says, “What has been will be again, / What has been done will be done again; / There is nothing new under the sun.” In many ways, history repeats itself, so we have a lot to learn from the past. And if Shakespeare managed to tell stories that still move us 400 years later, perhaps a book that’s stood the test of time for 2000 years might be more relatable than we think.
Quite a few people think the Bible isn’t reliable, and that it has changed a lot since it was first put to paper. And those people have a valid point; can I base my entire belief system on some collection of stories that’s been warped from its original in the intervening years? First I’ll tell you that we never think about the reliability of our copies of Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey. We don’t care much how accurate our Aeneid is to Virgil’s first manuscript. Those books read as if they were whole stories. They move us, teach us, and intrigue us, so we give them credit for their worth. But the Bible is the most historically unchanged ancient book around. It has more fragments through history than any other book to attest to its integrity. Our copies today, in their various translations, are more accurate to the originals than our copies of the Iliad or the Odyssey.
Maybe we tend to judge the book by its cover. And maybe the cracked leather and fading gilt letters Holy Bible seem a little powerless or stuffy in an age of brightly colored news feeds, pixels, and immediate digital updates. But the Bible’s words pack just as much punch today as they did thousands of years ago when they were first spoken or written. Its harshest words are toward the prideful, the arrogant, and the self-righteous oppressors. Its kindest and most soothing words are to the poor, forgotten, repentant, and voiceless. It seems to me our world could use more of those words today. Just this morning I read in it that Jesus came to unite people near and far, to be our peace, and to destroy the barriers of hostility that divide us (that’s in the book of Ephesians, if you want to read more of it). As a citizen of a country ripped and bleeding by the divisions between race and gender and economics, those words are powerful to me. And when you come down to it, either they deliver on their promise or they don’t. That question lies with the most disputed, most intriguing figure of the entire Bible.
Jesus
Jesus is a character you can’t make up. He yelled and whipped people who charged others to come to the temple to worship. He stopped his busy schedule for children to listen to his stories. He wasn’t pompous or arrogant. He was kind and peaceful. He shared what he had and gave his time to everyone. He was a man who wept freely, but refused to speak a word in his defense when false accused of a crime. His love for his band of friends was self-sacrificial. He washed their dirty desert feet like a servant, spent every waking hour with them, and didn’t betray them when he was on trial. If anyone could unite people across nation, race, gender, and wage, it would be him.
He knew that the only way for generations to be able to personally know a God who hates sin but loves the people he created was to pay for their sin personally—to take our just punishment of death himself. Do you know anyone else who literally died for you? God came to earth himself as Jesus to deal with all the ugliness and limitations of our human existence so we could know him. And how could you not want to know him? He is so intriguing. He cared personally for women, children, sick, outcasts, thieves, educated, simple, shunned, oppressed, and foreigners no one liked. He himself was a refugee, most people assumed he was a bastard child, and he performed miracles you’d have to be crazy to believe.
I admire quite a few historical figures, but if you ask me which one I’d want to be like, hands down it’s Jesus. Many people admire Jesus as a historical figure, but they don’t believe everything he said. You may not have to believe everything a person says to admire them—I adore Tolkien, but I don’t agree with him on any and every topic—but if somebody claims to be God, and to be God’s savior for mankind, that colors everything else he says. You either believe him, you don’t, or you think he’s crazy. You can’t ride the fence with Jesus. You can’t say he was a good man and dismiss his claim of divinity as a little white lie or a moment of insanity. You have to take the whole package or leave it.
Jesus is the founder of my faith, and the founder of Christianity. He claimed to be the Christ, which means ‘the messiah,’ or God’s chosen deliverance for his people. Jesus came to deliver people from their bondage to sin. And if we think we can free ourselves from our own human nature, which prompts us to lie, to cheat, to be unfaithful, or to lack character, we’re wrong. It’s impossible to always do the right thing. Sin is a monumental slavery to break, and it requires a supernatural power who is unfailingly good. It required Jesus. That’s why Christians name themselves after him.
How Can Christians Bear the Name Today
So, to answer the questions I started with, how can I be a Christian when there’s so much hate today and in history connected to that name? When Trump, a man who spews hate the likes of which I’ve never seen in my life, calls himself the same name? When people who claim to be Christians value themselves and their fears too much to want refugees to find a safe haven in their county? When people claim the title who ignore the cries of the poor or oppressed?
Simple.
It’s a matter of definition. Being a Christian means you should look and act like Christ. I want to be like Jesus—to love like him, to speak truth like him, to tell life-giving stories like him. But if I never act like him, I’m not a Christian. If I tell you I’m an astronaut, or an oak tree, or a purple baboon that lives in a zoo, I’m lying. I don’t look or act like those things I claim to be, so I’m not. Anyone who doesn’t act like Christ, but claims to be a Christian, they’re pulling your leg. We all make mistakes and we aren’t perfect on our own. But real Christians will tell you that God’s Spirit lives in them. And if he does, they’ll act with that same inexplicable love and compassion Jesus showed, that same fury at the self-righteous and self-assured. I’m a Christian because I want to act like Christ. Not I, nor anyone else, have a right to bear that name we don’t live by it.
I hope that you all have the chance to read about Jesus in the Bible. And I hope he rocks the world you’re standing on like he did mine. I hope that, as a Jesus-follower, I look recognizably like him to you. And if I don’t, you have every right as my friends to say something to me. If I do look like him, and that intrigues you, let’s sit down and talk.
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’
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.
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 