The moment I walked into my parents’ sleepy farmhouse, I rattled off a long list of promises to my niece – about forts and decorated cookies and potato stamps and monkey games. I wanted to do everything wonderful and I wanted to do it all at once. Between the two of us, I’m not sure who was more like a 3 three year old, but at one point my mom said, “Honey, why don’t you just choose one thing and do it all the way.”
That was yesterday.
This morning, in the Sunday rush and rumble to get ready for church, Natalie crawled on my lap and said, “I just need to snuggle for a little bit.” There she goes again, stepping into the moments standing right in front of me without making lists about the moments that follow. Maybe my niece and my mom are in cahoots to get some slow motion in my life.
I’m breathing deeper now, breathing advent in slowly and letting the anticipation sink in deep. Because longing does not mean impatience and excitement does not mean busy plans. Looking for my Savior is something I can savor slowly, like Sunday morning snuggles and Saturday night fort building.
Slow seems to be a theme these days, especially as I reflect on advent.
This gift of a Savior baby – a miracle sent to meet all our messes – was not a rush job. God didn’t wait until things got real bad, until Gotham was nearly a graveyard, before sending his superhero. No, He didn’t send the Messiah out of fear that the world was caving in and evil was winning.
God conducted the world and everything in it like the perfect notes in an orchestra. He knew redemption was necessary the moment He set creation in motion. He knew how far we would fall from his plans and how busy we would make ourselves in making our own. He knew all this and still stayed with His salvation plan from the beginning.
This week, I’ve been thinking about Father, Son and Holy Spirit knowing what redemption would look like. Thousands of years of knowing that salvation would involve serious sacrifice. An eternity past of knowing that the Son would be sent to be the Savior of the world.
What a very long time.
Yet, the Lord was never anxious about His plans. He did not crowd or cram the calendar. Because He is sovereign, His plans are never foiled. He did not need to move fast.
There was enough time for celestial choirs and enough time for repeating the sounding joy. Repeat the sounding joy. Slowly.
joy to the world! the Savior reigns
let men their songs employ!
while fields and floods
and hills and plains
repeat the sounding joy!
I’m spending this holiday in slow motion – savoring fully the invitation to come and adore Christ the Lord.
I love the melodies of this season. You might even catch me singing out of church calendar order. “O Come, Let us Adore Thee” always feels appropriate probably because adoration is always appropriate. We are welcome to approach the throne of grace in every season and adoration seems the proper thing to sing.
But, today there is a different melody … one that isn’t getting lost between The Christmas Song and Mariah Carey. The melody is not like the hallelujah chorus. It doesn’t feel like the candlelight service. This melody is different.
I am singing sadness into this beautiful season and I don’t know if that’s altogether okay. I don’t know if that emotion jives with the church calendar and with the anticipation of my Savior and when others are singing “repeat the sounding joy”?
Can I sing sadness at Christmas?
I think I am, regardless. This song is not all sad, but it is not all “tidings of comfort and joy,” either.
Christ came down because we are wretched and wayward. He left glory and snuggled into a humble straw bed because we worship other gods. But, mostly He came down because in His great love He is exalted.
He came quietly, like a whisper in the winter.
And His life shook the universe while He held the universe together. He rubbed shoulders with brokenness, broke bread with sinners, and invited the lowly to dinner. He loved without exception, but He never apologized for the message of redemption – the message that creation is in desperate need of saving.
And if you give a good honest look at our desperate need, it might make you sad, too. Sad that He had to come the way He did, sad that we are so hardheaded and sad that we couldn’t learn a different way. Sad that after a miracle birth and miracle resurrection we are still learning and still desperate.
There are a lot of people stuffed on to subway trains, with trees and shopping bags and too many tired faces. Christmas is work here, like a second or third job. It gets spelled out in wrinkles and reprimands and cumbersome boxes and Christmas is work.
Limbs start to feel like lead and the “Christmas spirit” is sly like a fox.
And maybe that’s why I am sad. Because the world is still dark. Even though the light came as a miracle in a stable, but the world is still rushing in blind darkness – collecting toys and keeping up appearances and wishing happy holidays.
Sadness is an okay way to feel at Christmas, but it is never the end of the story. In my heart I know that Christ conquered the grave and with that death and darkness fell, too. I know that there is a standing invitation to dance in marvelous light – an invitation that I can extend to every Christmas-weary soul.
Christ came to give life, and life abundant. He came to walk out perfect obedience, to demonstrate perfect love. He came because He was the only One able to perfectly satisfy the payment a world of sin required. And in His coming and living, He showed us the way.
Sadness is an okay emotion, maybe, if it is a prayer. And that is what I am singing today – a prayer to be an instrument, to be a little bit like the miracle who came to redeem me out of a life of darkness.
Slow hangs like an abstract painting between more palatable pieces – between fast and lazy. This season is sick with fast and lazy, with running around shopping malls and with hiding under thick covers. Too much spending and too much rushing, too much pampering and too much justifying selfish pursuits. Too much. And the hustle is exhausting.
Somewhere along the way, we equated slow with “unproductive” and savor with “inefficient.” We let ourselves slide into routines of excess that glorify our gluttony. We are either obsessing about productivity or obsessing about recuperating from productivity.
We forget to experience good things slowly.
Last week was an exception. Last week, twelve new and old friends gave beautiful meaning to the phrase, “reclining at table” when we lingered for hours over our Thanksgiving meal. Our hodgepodge living room was candlelit and crowded. The laughter reached all the empty corners where bare walls still meet bare floor. We passed our potluck food around three stretched tables and no one was rushing. We lingered. From appetizers to desserts, we lingered.
A week later, I am learning these lessons of slowly. I am learning to be selfless with a “list of things to do on my day off” when what I think I want is fast and lazy. No, everyday cannot be a day I host a thanksgiving feast in my apartment. But everyday can be about intentionally experiencing good things slowly, like conversations and thoughtful gift making.
Rush, buy, build, pamper, play. I can’t keep up with the Joneses and I don’t know who can. I’m going to be honest: are the Joneses even happy, whoever they are?
It isn’t about doing less in life. Well, maybe it is. Maybe it is about choosing wisely so the good things we choose can be done slowly. I am tackling a “to do list” today, just like anyone would on a day free of 9-5 schedule. But, I want to tackle it slowly. I want my checkbook and my dayplanner to reflect a slow, savored, unselfish day.
And then, I guess I want that to be every day. It’s an upstream swim here in NYC, but it is everywhere.
This song by Sara Watkins is on repeat, literally. The rhythm reminds me to breathe deeply and walk slowly when more important people are rushing around my shoulders. The words remind me that slow living is not less important, not less accomplished. Living slowly and savoring good things is still hard work with sweet reward.
Living slowly is about breaking ground for good things.
There is a reward inside our slow, hard work when it is done unselfishly. We are free to be unselfish because Christ gave Himself for us. We are not confident in our efficiency and neither do we trust our cleverness to complete what we’ve started in breaking ground. We do not revel in past accomplishments or dwell on past failures. As we build on broken ground, we are not hasty in construction or worried about completion because that has already been promised.
We savor good things when we work slowly for others, trusting God to complete and perfect the work. He will take our hodgepodge to-do lists and our hodgepodge gatherings and our hodgepodge 9-5 work days – He will take them all and make them productive. We are left to savor slowly the miracle of working and serving and loving at all.
It happened yesterday in Prospect Park – when I was rounding the bend down the slope, right after I stopped to take a picture of the lake. The Saturday children’s soccer games were in the middle of playful competition on the fields, various groups clustered around pastel balloons for birthday parties, and there was a small gathering who had followed hand-painted wooden signs down a slight slope to celebrate a wedding.
The colors were turning, but soft like a whisper. The sun was making warm paths of light to reach the turning leaves on the opposite side of the lake.
I got emotional.
I suppose that isn’t surprising, given my emotional history and over-dramatization of most events, at least for story’s sake. But it did surprise me and I had to close my eyes for a few paces to collect myself.
Have you ever stretched out your fingers into rays of sunlight? All the mystery of those rays reaching us, dancing on our fingertips, evading our capture – it normally makes me marvel. How is it that the light that warms our faces comes from a gigantic spherical furnace? How is it that it gets as far as earth and remains at the perfect distance to sustain life? How is it?
Normally, rays of light and soccer games and birthday parties and wedding celebrations make me marvel, but yesterday they made me emotional. I guess because I couldn’t hold the light or be in the soccer game or sit with the ladies in lawn chairs or wave a flag at the wedding.
I felt very small and very disconnected – like knowing and being known here is too distant a thing to reach.
The faces I met – on bikes and in strollers and in road weary running shoes – I did not know, not a single one. Commotion is not hard to come by in this city and with it the potential that I am missing out on something beautiful. Festivals, neighborhood parties, service events, art openings – commotion and opportunity and all this potential for beautiful make me acutely aware when I am outside and unattached.
This is not my city, yet. And it took me a while to shake the feelings last night or to do more than resolve the feelings away. Sometimes it is good to feel what you feel – to step into it fully and make peace with the way it got tangled inside.
This morning, I have different eyes to see the shortness in my chest for what it was: fear.
Today I’ll reach out and let the same sun dance on my fingertips, but I will choose to marvel because I have a God who keeps His promises. I know a God who is my Savior and who has promised to provide and protect and preserve these bones.
I’ll confess the things I’m afraid of, even if it takes a little convincing and arm-twisting out of a host of self-sufficient habits.
I can’t help myself, and that’s the honest truth.
This is week two of a new job and day five in a new apartment and week three of a new life in the city where my love lives. I can be pretty confident about my inability to help myself – decidedly confident in that one, unsettling thing.
My roommate and I are kind-of, officially “moved in” to our beautiful, spacious, street-facing 3rd floor apartment, but we’re still trying to cure it of the empty echo. We’ve moved furniture in and out (thanks to a lot of Patrick’s sweat and muscle), raced to the houses of strangers with listings on Craigslist, and scavenged for gems on the sidewalk. We’ve navigated (and failed) the subways and the streets and the sidewalks in our neighborhood and beyond. We’ve made friends with the hardware store, the flower store, the fruit stand, and our very nice neighbors across the street who (we suspect) have a car dealership that fronts for a drug operation.
This is not the easiest thing I’ve ever done, which is probably why I’m so aware that I can do absolutely nothing to help myself. This is not the easiest thing I’ve ever done, but I am overwhelmed with the way God makes hard things beautiful and rough things lovely.
And this is so beautiful and so lovely – even so much so that I forget I’m inside a whirlwind of transition. Somehow, in the madness of moving across the country, God orchestrated events so that I would live two avenues from Patrick. Somehow, in the hazy hurricane of details, God arranged for Tamara and I to be the kind of roommates who hope to make our NYC apartment a home. Somehow, in the slew of job applications I electronically threw toward the East months ago, God remembered my love for laughter and passion for service.
The only reasonable “somehow” of all this beautiful mess, is that the Lord is sovereign. He is not surprised by anything and He loves to give good gifts to His children. Not easy gifts (not all the time anyway), but it is good gifts He loves to give.
This move is a good gift in the superlative sense.
His provision of peace always surpasses my fear, always. This move is a good gift, but not because it is easy. It is good because God is good and He never changes.
I am believing more today than yesterday in God’s mercy and grace and peace. I think this might be part of His good gift – that I am pressing in to who He is and needing Him (desperately) to be who He claims to be. And even though He continues to prove Himself faithful, my hope does not come from history. My hope comes from His promises that today and tomorrow and this weekend, He will continue to be faithful to give grace.
I can’t help myself and this is my hope: He is my help. I lift my eyes to the hills and my empty hands to the sky, because nothing I can do or see or say can help myself.
I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. (Psalm 121, ESV)
Sometimes, He provides less than what we ask because He wants to give more than what we think.
That’s what happened tonight, anyway. My new roommate and I plodded our way to the 5 pm service, weary of apartment hunting and feeling like the persistent widow at the Lord’s door. “Please, Lord, provide!” We thought we were asking for His provision of an apartment today. We thought that was the only way His provision would happen.
And He did provide, but we’re still without an apartment. Instead He gave us Himself. We sat and drank in the words of the sermon from Psalm 77 and then we broke bread and drank the wine of communion.
He provided Himself and we got filled up.
He provides always, because He is a Provider. It is not in His nature to do anything else. Today His provision was Himself – which is not technically an apartment – but is more than abundant to meet our needs.
This is the firm foundation I can sing upon when there is an earthquake underfoot.
This Friday is passing without much ado about anything. I’m not sure if I’d prefer much ado about nothing. I think I’d prefer much ado, period.
But, Fridays and Tuesdays and Sundays are not about preference as much as they are about presence. So, I’m streaming the new Civil Wars album while I write reports and smiling about the next three weeks that are about to unfold in front of my face. I’m just jamming to this beauty and loving the Lord who gave us song.
It feels like I just said yes to a hot air balloon ride without a destination – and now I will just enjoy the surprises with the scenery. Nothing makes sense and I am so glad I can laugh at that.
Well, I take that back.
One thing makes sense and that’s all the sense I need.
My monthly reports are breathing down my neck, I’ve got suitcases and plastic bins stuffed to the gills around my feet, and I’m waiting with bated breath to hear back from my job interview in Brooklyn.
Sounds like madness, but it feels like the right kind.
I know as little as I did yesterday about when I’m moving to NYC, what I’ll be doing, where I’ll be living, and how I’ll be making ends meet.
And it’s okay. I am trusting in the Lord’s provision and leaning on His grace. There is no one more worthy to trust with my future than the One who knows it already. I can’t find a better love than His.
Fear is always lurking in dark corners, but joy is like sunshine starving it out.
I have a song to sing and this one by Green River Ordinance is beating like a drum in my soul today.
Things “begin” on Monday morning – the week, the work, the schedule – but we all know nothing ended on Friday. We just pushed pause so we could smile and forget for two days. At least that seems to be what everyone hopes our weekly system is set up to do: work for five days, forget about work for two days, and then start work again.
I have never had a job where that cycle is successful. Because working with people means working inside relationships and I would do very poor work if I severed relationships on a weekly basis.
So, this morning I woke out of a dream thinking about the court hearing at 8 am and about the meetings in the afternoon because they had been on my mind all weekend. These aren’t appointments, they are people and that feels heavy.
The antidote for anxiety is not reason, though many well-meaning people have lectured me on boundaries and work/life balance.
The antidote for anxiety is the promises of God. It is a medicine that doesn’t take away the illness, but overcomes it. The promises of God are trustworthy and they follow us. I cannot go to a place where God’s promises cannot reach. He is here, inside this Monday and He knows about the foxes. He knows about all the evil plans to steal my joy.
He knows about my anxiety and He knows His promises can overcome it. He is good to me. In His sovereign will, He is good and can only be good to me.
Today is about believing God is good when the foxes are in the vineyard.
This song by Audrey Assad sings the overflow of goodness and it will be my reminder all day long.
I put all my hope in the truth of Your promise
and I steady my heart on the ground of Your goodness
When I’m bowed down with sorrow I will lift up Your name
and the foxes in the vineyard will not steal my joy
because You are good to me, good to me
I lift my eyes to the hills where my help is found
Your voice fills the night–raise my head up and hear the sound
Though fires burn all around me I will praise You, my God
and the foxes in the vineyard will not steal my joy
Last night, Brandi Carlileinvited The Lone Bellow back up on stage in the middle of her set, backlit by a lazy summer sun at the Simon Estes Amphitheater in Des Moines. They were the opening act, these brilliant three, but they were the reason my sister and I paid the big bucks to sprawl out on a blanket by the river with expensive drinks (the kind they make you buy inside after making you dump your waters at the door).
Something clicked when they sang this song. It’ll get unhinged soon enough. I’ll forget and I’ll fret and I’ll fury. But something about those few minutes was bound to break my blog silence.
Vacation was too good to me. It swallowed up my bones in bliss and I was happy there, really happy. Every clockless morning and every unplanned afternoon, every impromptu tennis match and every adventurous trip down to the beach, every late night campfire-lit conversation, every slice through the water in the kayak, every forest run, every conversation – everything.
Vacation swallowed up my bones in bliss.
I didn’t really know how to shake myself out of it – how does bliss make sense with clocks and schedules and plans and expectations? How do you get un-swallowed? How do you not wish yourself back in those blissful moments when you’re in moments that feel so regular?
Then The Lone Bellow started to sing and I started to sway with all my hippy hair, belting out this brilliant tune.
Yes, I lost myself a little bit and I’m not worried about your judgment.
I was probably 1 of 10 concert-goers who had heard of The Lone Bellow, so I was definitely one of few singing along. But, I belted it anyway – like the ba-ba-da was something inside me fighting to find air.
There is a reason life isn’t endless vacation.
And that reason made sense as I swayed to this tune,
“Breathing in, breathing out, the salt in my mouth
gives me hope that I’ll bleed something worth bleeding out”
It might not shake vacation dust off your feet, but it did mine. This is an anthem that says our hands should get dirty and calloused and worn, an anthem that reminds us that respite gives fuel for our daily fight against the lies we can sometimes escape on vacation.
“All the buildings, they lean and they smile down on us
And they shout from their rooftops words we can’t trust
Like you’re dead, you are tired, you’re ruined, you’re dust
Oh, you won’t ‘mount to nothing, like thanks full of rust”
These are the lies of life, the weary and rugged and cumbersome kind that sneak into kitchens and coffeeshops and haunt our closet space. These are the lies that try to make our lives less redeemed. But, in Christ, there is no more or less saved. There is no scale to our redemption.
Our sin entangles with all kinds of cruel efficiency and the dull hum-drum of everyday life is its favorite booby trap. But a sliding scale salvation would strip God of the power to make it complete, and we are not capable of making Him any less glorious than He is.
Thank God. Thank God He did not leave us as exiles from the kingdom of God, banished from forever beauty and bliss.
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:9-11, ESV)
Thank God, in His grace, the blood coursing through our veins is more than mostly water. In Christ, this blood we carry around is something worth bleeding out. It is not nothing. It’s this blood, keeping us alive to proclaim that we’ve been redeemed and redemption is free by the grace of God and the cost of Christ. It is the blood by which we can sing the next lines,
But we scream back at them from below on the street
All in unison we sing, our time’s been redeemed
We are all of the beauty that has not been seen
We are full of the color that’s never been dreamed
Because nothing we need ever dies. Isn’t that so? Our needs – physical and otherwise are slippery things, but we get parched and desperate for them. We beg and plead for them, our needs. And those needs never die.
But there is one need that trumps all other needs and it’s what started beating like hope in my chest when I heard this song. There is a reason life isn’t endless vacation and it is because there is work to do. There is toil and sweat and there is work to do. My blood is worth something because Christ’s blood was shed on my behalf.
O, precious HOPE that redeems us in the bliss of vacation and in the dull hum-drum of Monday-afters. I’m still swaying to this precious hope that my life in the regulars and the weekday sways and sweats for a greater story.
Even if I was lonely, even if I was broke
Even if all the dogs in the pound left me notes
Sayin’ it’s never over, it never ends
Grab my heart and the fire, let us descend
To the darkest of prisons, break their defense
We will rattle the cages, rules will be bent
Oh, remind us our days are all numbered, not spent
And peace it comes easy like mist on a ridge
Chorus
Breathing in, breathing out, the salt in my mouth
Gives me hope that I’ll bleed something worth bleeding out
All the horoscopes tell us to break all our ties
To our families and loved ones we leave when we fly
To the cities we think we need in our lives
Oh, you Manhattan jungle, you tangle our pride
Chorus
All the buildings, they lean and they smile down on us
And they shout from their rooftops words we can’t trust
Like you’re dead, you are tired, you’re ruined, you’re dust
Oh, you won’t ‘mount to nothing, like thanks full of rust
But we scream back at them from below on the street
All in unison we sing, our time’s been redeemed
We are all of the beauty that has not been seen
We are full of the color that’s never been dreamed
Where nothing we need ever dies
Where nothing we need ever dies
MUSINGS IN THE MIDST 