Tag: Faith

Foolishness Roads

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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 I began the trip withdrawn.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.

“Jesus Tastes like Cardboard”

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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.