Day 19 of Lent - in which Sheila runs out of words...

“My heart is composing a goodly matter; I speak of the verses which I have made concerning the King; my tongue is the pen of a ready writer.”

~Psalm 45:1

…this is me, in my think-tank…

It’s a crisp sunny Sunday, and I’ve overcome overwhelming odds to be here sipping coffee at the keyboard. You’ve overcome overwhelming odds, too, I want you to know. I don’t believe in chance. You’ve been brought here today, as have I.

On the way to church, I kept thinking about the fact that God has not been what has been against us.

He is for you.

He didn’t create humans reluctantly. God made because of who He is, and from who He is (a Being with unparalleled goodness, and overflowing creativity and insatiable desire to make). He was never a disinterested Maker. The Godhead were not without sheer bias towards us from the very beginning.

The generosity of Father, Son, and Spirit towards us did not flow out of some beige, tepid, half-hearted inclination. They weren’t sitting in heaven, amongst all that boring glory, and suddenly choosing to kick the cosmic can around, and so “here we are”.

No! There was an enemy, there was a Godhead, there was a story to be told, and the stakes were high. All the goodness of God made you and I, knowing we would need a costly redemption; and for that redemption to be real, there would have to be a designated Representative.

God knew that God Himself would become one of us. And His wholehearted goodness towards you was in it from before the beginning.

We do spend our life “as a tale that is told”. We’ve been included in the story God is telling, and that story is not one of a dying Christ “fixing” what an angry God hated about what He had made. Nor is the story one of an indistinct, all-inclusive “Fatherhood of God for a brotherhood of man”. Rather, the story is that of a dying Christ reclaiming our original design. He bought back the possibility of an affectionate relationship with us. It is the ongoing story of His creation, incomparably dear to Him from our first breath, all of nature as an object of delight, plunging itself into desperate ruin, and a relentless Living God who would not, and will not, allow His purpose for which He made us, to be denied.

His purpose (that we be with Him as beloved ones) caused Him to roar a lion-like “NO” to the very thought of our alienation from Him. Even though that alienation was by our own choosing. When we were faithless, He remained faithful.

And, can I tell you, there wasn’t a speck of hesitancy. The collective-yet-singular heart of God was never at odds with our original design. Far from it. He always knew that Genesis 1 would be a passionate rescue mission.

Let me tell you how that makes me feel. Let me tell you what it does for my heart to understand that any displeasure of the Godhead was aimed at all that would separate me from Him - that my original design, because of Christ, is still intact.

Well, I pretty much can’t. I start to run out of words.

But I keep trying. And you (hundreds of you!) keep reading.

Yay for blogs.

More coffee, please.

Day 5 of Lent {...growing in your practice of what already is...}

When I was in third grade, I painted a picture of a lighthouse. I clearly remember painting a blue sea with waves, the sky, the sun, and a lighthouse, with rays of light coming from it. My teacher entered that painting into a competition of sorts, and it was chosen to represent my county’s whole school system in an exhibit in Nashville.

Then, I never voluntarily painted again. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I didn’t even take art in high school. Again, I wanted to, but at my school in the ‘80’s, art was considered an elective for losers. (Looking back, this makes me really sad. I think things are very different today, thankfully). Because I cared far too much about what everyone else thought about me, I never took a single art class.

Yet all along, Spirit was nurturing that homely little 3rd grader inside me, the one who secretly was so proud that her picture got chosen - the one who secretly wanted to paint so many more.

After that, I tried viola lessons. Fail.

I tried dance lessons when I was 16, so that I could participate in the group dance number for a (of all things!) beauty pageant I was part of. I did great in the beauty pageant, but was an epic fail at dance.

Two years out of high school, I got married. We started our family 9 months and 20 minutes after our ceremony…honeymoon twins. It was then that I began writing in the margins of my time. I remember sending my first manuscript to a magazine.

After months of waiting, my words were returned to me, in that large, brown, self addressed stamped envelope that I had gone to all the extra trouble to load up two babies and drive to the post office to purchase only those supplies, with no money left over to purchase anything else.

Declined. The publishing industry didn’t care about my hard work, or my special trip to the post office, or the fact that I had withheld however many dollars from our grocery budget to buy a large brown envelope and special postage.

But other people in my life were asking me to write! I wrote church announcements, brochures for businesses, curricula for children’s ministry. Everything connected to writing became something that others sought me out for. I was asked to edit book manuscripts for several authors.

The whole time, my original design kept expressing itself in the way I lived my life. We had no money (I can’t begin to make you understand how we had no. money. ) but I still somehow managed to create an atmosphere and a home that I loved and others admired.

Beauty in all its varied forms pulled me like nothing else. I craved beauty. I wanted to create it any way that I could. My fundamentalist upbringing caused me to mis-name my desire for beauty. I called it “discontentment”.

I was so wrong.

But my original design was relentless, because God made me that way, and God never changed His mind about me. Even though I stuffed my creativity in a box, I mis-named it, I ignored it, I starved it, I thought I was too busy to indulge it, it was determined to come out of me, even if the expression was a bit side-ways.

Not one of us can suddenly become who we are not. I wish I could make you understand how hard I tried to be a woman who sang (before I knew better, I inflicted that “ability” so. many. times. on the hundreds of people in my large church). I tried to be a woman who played the autoharp (really!) and who ran a gift basket business. I tried to be a woman who could head up ministries in my then-quite-large church. (Looking back, I was in charge of a group of women in our church’s “Compassion Ministry” that added up to more people than who are in my whole entire church, today!)

I tried to be someone who cooked elaborately healthy meals, and who knew all there was to know about health and healthy food.

I could seriously bore you to tears with the list of all the women I tried to be.

When who I was, was a communicator who was seriously starved for beauty. Nothing more, nothing less.

Out of everything I tried, the writing stuck. The painting stuck, even though I had only expressed it one time, in third grade! And the gift to communicate with an audience stuck. And that is all that stuck - but that is enough, because that pretty much describes the sum total of who I was made to be.

Had I had the wisdom to simply ask trusted wise people, “How do you see me? How am I a blessing to you?”, perhaps I could have cut many years off of my process. Because I believe they would have told me, “When you have something to say, I somehow want to listen. And when you write something, I want to read it. And when I come to your house, I look around and I see beauty - even if there are few resources for it.”

We all bear the fruit of who we are. Apple trees do not strain to bear apples.

Friend. From now to Easter and until the Kingdom comes, I will be right here. Declaring to you the works of the Lord, and admonishing you to grow in your practice of what already is - because there is already something there, that has been there all along.

Serve your family, and then serve others with that very thing.