Tag Archives: life

May 2, 2012 · 3:11 pm

May{Be} — A Month of Discovering the Possibilities of May{Being}

I am personally, officially declaring the month of May the month of May{Be}.

As in May I Be. Just Be.

Our frenetic, task-oriented, full-scheduled, goal-driven society has made too many demands, and I am frustrated by the lack of being, by the tug-of-war tension in my spirit pulling me toward accomplishments and their shiny rewards.

My being is losing out. Is yours?

Remember in the schoolyard when we played the game “Mother May I?”? We raced our neighboring game players to  ”mother” by asking, politely, if we could take baby steps, giant steps, Cinderella steps toward the finish line. “Mother” had the final say, which led me to believe the game lacked strategy and “mother” could play favorites, always allowing her best friend to win.

 

Life feels a little like “Mother May I?”, doesn’t it?

“Mother” in our daily race could be whomever we place in that venerable position: God, our boss, our ideals, our lifelong dreams, our parents. But actually, I believe “mother” is more of an amalgam representing all those people we’ve tried (and failed) to please during our lifetimes.

And my fictitious “mother” never lets me win! When I ask, “Mother, may I take six giant steps forward?” she replies, “No, Alyssa, you may not. You may take three baby steps backward.” Or, “Mother, may I take two Cinderella steps forward?”, she replies, “No you may not. You make take just one.”

I look around and it seems that everyone else is passing me by, giant-stepping and jumping and leaping beyond me.

And, ironically, my playmates all feel the same way I do. Left behind and losing.

“Mother May I?” is a terrible paradigm in which to live out one’s life.

This invitation came to me recently, and I’m ditching “Mother May I?” for this:

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion?

Come to me.

Get away with me and you’ll recover your life.

I’ll show you how to take a real rest.

Walk with me and work with me — watch how I do it.

Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.

I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you.

Love,

Jesus

{Matthew 11: 28-30 the Message}

Life shouldn’t be a schoolyard game. Life should be embraced, the whole of it, for what it’s meant to be: a chance to experience God, our maker.

That doesn’t make it all cupcakes and tulle-skirts.

It’s the grit of pain and disappointment that rubs the shine into our souls, pearls of compassion produced by this organic existence.

It’s the slicing and searing of suffering that opens us to caring about the things God himself cares about: the widows, the orphans, the abandoned, the poor and lonely.

But the scheduling and running and false-starts and self-inflicted sense of perpetual failure that we’ve knit into our lives  serves as a chainmaille covering impeding grace, love, gratitude, compassion. We are armored against goodness by our pursuit of excellence. We are dulled and ingrown, myopically frozen in a pool of self.

And no wonder we’re tired, burn-out on religion, worn-thin from trying.

The irony of being is that it’s achieved by a certain amount of doing. We often picture a serene, enlightened, mountain-sitter in Tibet when we think of a person who is fully at ease with his “being”. But we forget about the climb.

Jesus’ offer here isn’t so much a “run away we me and wax poetic in a dandelion field” as much as a “learn how to be, with me, and experience life from my perspective. For I see things in the spirit that you are now blinded from seeing; I understand the soul of this life, the heaven-heartbeat, the joy of being. This is what I can teach you.“

The irony of being is that it’s kinetic, not static, it’s following and moving in order to be at rest. And like the old proverb says, that journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Jesus asks a question — Are you tired?

I see you sighing with me, a collective, shoulder-shrug of yeses. We are tired.

Sure, we have our moments when we’re resting on the lap of our savior, safe from the arrows of the enemy and for a few golden moments, content. But, abiding in that place of contentedness? Well, again, that requires a certain amount of effort. To catch the sea-breezes on a sailboard, a windsurfer must hold tight to the bar and lean into the wind, catch and harness it’s power. Otherwise, he’s dead in the water, sitting still in a gorgeous tide of blue, wind blowing through his hair, across his face, but not going anywhere.

Being is learning to lean, learning to hold on and turn into the wind of grace.

Are you with me?

Will you, too, declare May{Be} month?

May{Be} we’ll discover possibilities of rest, joy, forgetfulness (release), purpose. May{Be} we’ll respond to the invitation to learn the unforced rhythms of grace.

Come, May{Be} with me.

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April 13, 2012 · 3:49 pm

Battle Songs

Sometimes the lines are scary.

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The ones that draw creases near my eyes, that point out that I’m tired. Broken, exhausted.

Sometimes, you want to duck. You’re wary of where the next bomb might drop.

A broken-down car seems like a small thing, right? But it’s the car that takes you to work, takes your family to church, provides a way to the store for groceries and takes your kids to the park.

Job loss is a bit bigger of a deal. But in the big scheme of things, it’s just a job, right? But how does a man feed his family, pay his mortgage, offer any kind of security without work?

And then there’s sickness. When the broken-down state of this world invades your very cells and you are dependent on medication, bracing for a better prognosis, doing all you can but knowing it’s not really up to you.

As I lay here in bed, recovering from surgery and elevating my leg above my heart. I pray. I think of the facebook posts that reveal frustration, pain, loneliness and loss. Little cries for help called status updates.

I think of conversations I’ve had with those I love and the places where the talk settles: kids growing up and growing apart from Jesus, marriages that can’t flourish because trust easily erodes like sandcastle walls, job interviews and unmet expectations.

We’re all of us battle weary. Even when we praise, even when we look to heaven and really mean it (the praising and the singing to God) we praise from the trenches. Even lives that look shiny and clean and enviable are touched and smeared and marred by the sinfulness of this world.

We need a tidal wave of grace.

A total drenching of Jesus’ love.

A free-fall into the depths of true goodness.

We need to lie broken on the beach, even if to faintly sing back to God the song of his love.

He will pick us up. Even if in pieces.

He will hear the faint song and he will take us home.

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Come in, O strong and deep love of Jesus, like the sea at the flood in the spring tides,

cover all my powers, drown all my sins, wash out all my cares, lift up my earth-bound soul,

and float it right up to my Lord’s feet, and there let me lie, a poor broken shell, washed up by His love, having no virtue or value,

and only venturing to whisper to Him that if He will put his ear to me,

He will hear within my heart faint echoes of the vast waves of His own love which have brought me where it is my delight to lie, even at His feet forever. (Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, April 12)

My heart is like wax. It is melted…” {Psalm 22:14}

Broken shells still sing of the sea.

Does Jesus’ love sing from me?

Do parched lips, though weakly, declare

My joy in His faithful, loving care?

Does my voice, cracked but loyal, say,

“Jesus met me on the shore today?”

Am I content to be a broken shell, and motionless lie

Within the hand of Him that for me did die;

And sing to him songs of love and praise

Small echoes of the sacrifice he gave?

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March 20, 2012 · 10:51 am

Scars of My Salvation

I have a blister on my right hand.

It’s a round and angry scarlet wound. I hope it leaves a mark. I want to remember how it got there, remember the day, the very hour of the day, the slant of the sun and the brush of the spring wind across my hair.

I want to recall without the haze of time casting gauzy skirts across my memory like a careless dancer.

I need to hold fast to that moment that I was born again.

A pregnancy season rubs its memorial into skin stretched tight over full, round belly – the marks that remain, shiny and white-pink tell the story of life. Unsightly to some, they mark the birth of life, the beginning of something utterly profound and mysterious. They mark motherhood and tell a tale of hope and future.

Other scars–and I have them–mark the passage of different stories.

Tales of horror and healing, of late night wreckage scattered on black highway, of swirling lights flashing red and blue, of crying children and a mother who cannot hold them. Tales of thrumming helicopter blades and the glimmer of a precision blade held fast in a skilled hand, of thread and staples that hold life together when it seems to be coming apart like a fragile bit of lace.

But this blister, this place rubbed raw is a wound that must be kept with its sisters scarring this body of mine. This vessel of growing and birthing and suffering and surviving.

This small planet of pain I wear on my hand is proof that I made it this far.

It came from gardening without gloves.

Warmth popped into a March day like a dear old friend for tea and begged me out to the garden. I had a physical therapy appointment scheduled, but I cancelled and set up an altogether different therapy regimen for the day. Instead of the leg workout, I’d walk across the yard several times. Instead of the ab workout, I’d scrape rake tines over stubborn weeds and dry clumps of leaves and form piles.

I needed to see the familiar green spikes of the daffodil, the bare ruby-colored nubs of peonies pushing through.

I needed life in the version that only a Northwest spring could deliver.

So I raked and yanked and worked. I lived. I live.

And in the cooling air of late afternoon, when the sun began to look sleepy as it hung over the tops of the pines, my hand throbbed. It beat with the pulse of a heart that has yet to stop.

It pounded, sore and yelled in a silent voice: this is what it means to be born again.

To taste and know certain death but instead be gifted with life, with more, with pulse-pounding joy and interminable sorrow, with freedom and movement and prayer and the love of good people. To feel.

This is fellowship, this blistering wound of a life lived raw and real, full.

I want a scar from the day I was born again.

///

Do you have scars like this? Wounds from salvation’s touch? Do you embrace them or hide them? Do you tell their story?

Linked with Journey to Epiphany,  Shanda, Just Write

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March 8, 2012 · 11:33 pm

To Keep Hope Alive

Nothing said “home” to me about the disheveled collection of huts. 

They were lean-tos really and in my American mind, this pocket slum in Addis Ababa resembled a child’s treehouse or fort: crooked walls made of found materials, small square holes left empty of glass allowed in light and air.

Someone’s donkey was tied to a post just a few feet away from the cheap plastic bins, some empty, some partially filled with grain I didn’t recognize. The grain didn’t belong to the donkey but to the women who lived in the tiny hut structures just a few steps across a dirt path from one another. Read the rest of this post…

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February 16, 2012 · 7:14 am

Wanted: One Gatekeeper, No Experience Required

“So what would you do, Mom, if you found out I was having sex with my boyfriend, but it wasn’t me who told you?”

And the frogs sang their summer song in the marshy spring down the hill.

The swing creaked under our weight, her legs stretched across the seat and her head leaning on my arm.

The night air breezed about in it’s lazy way, like summer skirts, cottony and soft.

The grass, too long, tickled my ankle bones.

And my breath, held long, reminded me to exhale.

Yes, I’m a mom of teenagers.

It’s not as hard as some may say it is, but it’s full of these questions, these moments that surprise and strangle my breath and remind me there aren’t easy answers.

And I feel vulnerable.

And I feel unprepared, unequipped for this task.

I cull the memory of my motherhood up to this point, looking into my experience for the right answer to this question, but I come up empty.

I haven’t been here before.

“Well,” I begin and leave off.

A car drives by on the county road just south of us. We feel the bass in our stomachs, then he rounds the corner and the summer night-sounds resume, barely filling the empty air. It weighs on me.

So much matters in the answers to questions like these. There’s so much at stake.

Then I remember how we got to this place on the swing in the summer, eating chocolate and strawberries, and me, with a glass of wine.

I remember her season of formation. Those painful months that stretched past a year that hurt and punched and tested the foundation of who she was.

I remember the battle for her, against her, with her.

I remember the night we slugged out verses of Ephesians and learned the truth about ourselves, and when I saw the softening in her eyes and the truth, like a balm, begin to heal her hurting heart.

It wasn’t my healing I doled out in dollops of grace — it was Jesus’ alone. His grace, his wounds that took on her own. I only served to apply it’s salve and pray and trust.

I remember that she isn’t mine alone, but that I am the gatekeeper. It’s a terrible job, bad pay, no benefits, long hours, very little chance of it developing into something more important.

But, gatekeeper I am.

I let in and let out. I choose what stays and goes; I decide what’s permissible and what cannot touch her. At least, that’s what I try to do.

But I can’t use this job to issue my opinions about music lyrics and the morality of playing poker or how short is too-short when it comes to mini-skirts. I must use this job for questions like this. For nights like this. And moments like this when grace needs to run free like winter melting, rushing down the mountainside.

“Would you be mad? Would you make us break up?” She pressed, bruising.

And although the inquiries were hypothetical–she didn’t even have a boyfriend–they weren’t rhetorical.

She needed an answer.

And I was the guard on duty.

So I began again and shared my heart.

And she listened.

And we explored that unknown territory together because we had a shared battle and had walked a vulnerable path together. The grace that I let in that summer night was not mine, but Jesus’ alone, so that the security she felt with me might usher her right into the throne-room of Christ. So I spoke His truth, His love, through the gauzy gate of mother-words and backyard swings.

Because I am accustomed to this work; I am the gatekeeper.

I work for Grace; I work for the Giver.

 

Linking up with Bonnie and Jennifer

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