Well, John Newton and I haven’t exactly met. I guess I should be clear: we haven’t met at all. But he couldn’t have started out a hymn with a more appropriate assessment of my heart. Sometimes, I excuse my pensive, doubting, fearful heart condition by calling it humility or wisdom or an attempt at being “gentle as a dove.”
Maybe sometimes it is true that I am those things, but I know for certain I make more excuses than my heart deserves. As I am being transformed from one little degree of glory to the next, my heart sometimes stumbles over thought and doubt and fear. I get anxious and make human calculations, which nearly always add up to paralyzing human fear.
The combination of vulnerable words (pensive, doubting, fearful) is tricky because each serves a purpose in making us more like Christ. Our best thoughts and greatest questions and deepest fears are all satisfied in Him, but the result is the opposite of paralysis. The result is freedom.
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
(2 Corinthians 3:17-18 ESV)
Today, my pensive, doubting, fearful heart is dancing from one degree of glory to the next, swaying to this song.
I’m not the kind of sick that needs a doctor. My stomach is flu-free and my nose breathes easy. It’s not an ear infection, so a prescription antibiotic won’t do. It’s not migraines or measles or malaria. It’s none of those things.
But it sunk into my soul last week, sitting across from my mentor in a local coffee shop downtown: I’m sick.
We were talking about being lonely in a crowded room and feeling distant when people are close. We were wrestling the word loneliness and trying to make it mean something else – something that we felt even when life is everything but lonely. And then she wondered aloud if we are longing for our forever home. And there sunk the sickness – all gathered up in my tired bones. I’m homesick.
Sometimes, the mess of sin that pales in comparison to future glory makes one long for that future. Sometimes, that longing can feel like loneliness. It can mean feeling out of place everywhere. That longing can be a tired but eager white flag stretching up to break the battle-weary skyline. Sometimes we get homesick.
Maybe when you are close to the battle, you have a more urgent desire for the other side of victory even as you are fighting. Weird thing is, sometimes stories from the frontline can have the same effect. There are never too few stories about sin – they monopolize the headlines and scatter themselves everywhere. We fail and others fail us. We hurt and others hurt us. It’s a big, black dreary hole that feels lonely from the inside and lonely from the outside. But it’s not loneliness, really. It is a homesickness for peace – for a place where relationship is rightly restored.
And that place of future glory set in my heart will also be the anchor for my gratitude today. The Lord has given me this breath for a purpose, but He’s let me breathe it with eternity in view.
Every fiber of our self-sustaining nature resists it, but there is sometimes no way around an emergency of the soul. We pray and read and fret and pray and end up a mess of distress as we dial up some urgent care. And that’s the call I got from a dear friend at midnight.
She knows Truth better than I do – she speaks out sin and claims it canceled on a daily basis. Her spiritual journey is proof that redemption means transformation and results in a life full of fruit. But, her soul has emergencies, too.
And as I listened, I praised God for His Word.
I have nothing to give – nothing to offer for the soul in need. My mind is a mix of my own soul’s issues and prone to selfish wandering. I have no advice to share when someone is desperate on the other end of the line.
So, I praise God for His Word that never returns void. I praise God for the way He fills our hearts with Truth when our hearts are empty of everything else. I praise God for the way He encourages in the emergency exchange – that shared Truth blesses both the speaker and the listener because the words are spoken by someone else entirely.
When your soul has an emergency, and it will, the Lord is ready to respond with Truth and it will bless more than just your soul.
let LOVE fly like cRaZy
So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
I mostly have full days and full thoughts and full plans. Mostly.
Over and underneath all this fullness, like a needle and thread, is sometimes woven a very strange loneliness. There is no reason for it, or at least no reason I will admit. The Lord has made my life full. The over-the-top, splashing-out-on-all-sides kind of full. I can find a hundred things to love every morning before I get out of bed – before coffee and before my heels click out the door. A hundred is a lot and it could probably be more if my mind worked better that early.
Maybe the weather makes me this way – thoughtfully theorizing with my cups full of tea and thinking about… well, me. Lonely is really a very selfish state of mind and that’s probably why I won’t admit to having one.
It usually works out because I am not lonely, mostly.
Then that little needle and thread starts to weaving and I end up with a patchwork quilt I can curl up inside.
When I left for college, I thought I was joining the ranks of “students” – a thoughtful army my parents had already been a part of and had since graduated from. I was going off to learn so I could approach “real life” with the right information, equipped with the tools for a career. I thought that being a student was a phase and not just in an academic sense.
My growing up years are replete with examples of spiritual mentors and faithful witnesses who crowded around to pour light and truth into my self-centered soul. In many ways, I looked up to these folks because they had been through the “student” phase and seemed to still have their wits about them on the other side. Not that they ever encouraged my thinking that they had “made it,” but in my ignorance I believed them to have arrived somewhere I hoped to soon be.
As it turns out, God never intended us to stop learning (please, no jokes about it taking me years to figure this out).
This is part of our sanctification – humbly adopting the title of student. When we stop pressing on to know the Lord in a deeper way, we have said “I know it all,” which is nothing less than a lie. God has designed the refining process to draw us into a greater knowledge of Him, a greater dependence on Him, and a greater satisfaction in Him. Being a lifelong student is the best kind of blessing there is when your subject is the Creator of the universe!
I remember having conversations with my parents while I was in college and many more since, where I shared inspiration about the light bulbs turning on in my head. Their responses were not, “Mmmhmm. Good, glad you’re learning that” but rather, “Now, that’s interesting. I wonder if that also applies…”
A giant light switched on when I realized I was learning WITH my parents and not to catch up to them.
I’ve never seen their pursuit look so different from the world then right now. When their peers look for worldly pleasures and social science studies reveal what they should be doing and desiring, they are venturing into wildly unknown territory.
Because they love their Lord and treasure Him, they are exchanging a mid-life crisis for a mid-life calling. Yesterday, they officially invited Sadie and Sierra into our family and into their home. Their bags had been packed for two weeks, before they even knew the destination. Yesterday they moved into the room above the kitchen I called my own for several years of high school. And now I’ll call them sisters.
Sadie and Sierra getting cozy in their new room (my old room)
As my parents are clinging to promises they have taught and studied for years, they are challenged to believe the promises hold power enough to be strong when they feel weak. And I’m sure they feel weak and ill-equipped and even awkward about the transition, but there they are in the midst of it.
I can’t tell you how much my love for them has grown as I watch them lean into the Lord. And as I see the Lord sustain and sanctify them, I can’t help but love Him more as well. What a beautiful Savior who looks after the lost and lonely and finds them refuge.
My heart is full for these two young ladies who will change our family forever. I can hardly wait for thanksgiving to come so I can count them as blessings around our family’s abundant table.
let LOVE fly like cRaZy
See the first in this mid-life series: the opposite of mid-life crisisas I look at what it means to always be in the life development stage called “sanctification.”
Tonight at the dream sessionswe asked the Lord to help us get generous with our gifts. Our bursts of inspiration and creativity are always borrowing from what He has already made and deemed incredibly good. There is a certain stewardship that feels heavy and overwhelming on Sundays – that we would invest well the gifts He’s given us and it can be a bit like carrying around a blank check.
We don’t know what we’re capable of or how to get to our maximum potential. We don’t know how to manipulate the logistics so our lives will matter and our art will bring glory to the One who let us make it in the first place. We don’t know if it’s okay to dream for things too big or too scary or too layered. We don’t know if it’s just foolish to think dreams come true.
But maybe it’s what we don’t know that sends us back to figuring out what we do know – and maybe the whole process reminds us that we will never know everything but we will always know enough to be useful for His kingdom. Because the dreaming life is a dependent life on One who can make them come true.
This, dear friends, is exciting indeed.
When we understand our calling, it is not only true, but beautiful—and it should be exciting. It is hard to understand how an orthodox, evangelical, Bible-believing Christian can fail to be excited. The answers in the realm of the intellect should make us overwhelmingly excited. But more than this, we are returned to a personal relationship with a God who is there. If we are unexcited Christians, we should go back and see what is wrong.– Francis Schaeffer
The ultra religious are sometimes just as clueless as the outright nonreligious – what God wants from those who love Him is become more like Christ. The journey is looking something like this:
“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?
Then shall your light break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up speedily;
your righteousness shall go before you;
the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
you shall cry, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’
If you take away the yoke from your midst,
the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness,
if you pour yourself out for the hungry
and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
then shall your light rise in the darkness
and your gloom be as the noonday.
And the LORD will guide you continually
and satisfy your desire in scorched places
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters do not fail.
And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to dwell in.
“If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath,
from doing your pleasure on my holy day,
and call the Sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the LORD honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly;
then you shall take delight in the LORD,
and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”
(Isaiah 58 ESV)
I remember looking disdainfully across the lunchroom table at my childhood friends – whose plates were covered with crusts from the cheese sandwich that accompanied chicken noodle soup day.
I knew the crusts were the part of bread that would make me strong and healthy and smart. Inside the crusts were magic ingredients that only fools would refuse. I ate my crusts every time I had the chance and looked with pity at my friends who didn’t know or believe what I knew and believed about bread crust. My disdain came from the repeat record playing in my head, put there by grandparents and parents and other old relatives luring me into the accomplishment of finishing my food:
“Eat your crusts – they are the best part. That’s where all the good stuff is!”
Literally years later, I realized the crust is no more nutritious than the soft and squishy inner loaf. It sounds trivial, I know, but it was kind of a big deal. Of course, I’d seen bread made and even made it myself, but one day I realized that my belief that the crust is better was absolutely false.
I don’t hold it against my family (I had two things working against me: my gullible nature and my very real hope that I could eat things that would make me grow taller) because they never actually said that the crust was more nutritious or that it would make me healthy and smart. I had somehow established that on my own, maybe to rationalize my eating it while my friends in the lunchroom made cartoons with theirs on the long brown tables.
What I’m trying to say is… we want to believe something. I want to believe that my actions are motivated by a purpose and that that purpose is true. The trouble is when we start with wrong information or gather wrong information to support what we believe.
I remember (I am embarrassed to say how old I was) looking at a piece of bread, trying to find reasons why nutrition would travel to the outside of the loaf during the baking process.
I know bread crust is a funny place to begin thinking about research, but a child is sometimes very similar to a scientist in the sense that she is curious and motivated to find answers. As I read social science research about child welfare and family structure and inner city crime, I wonder about the motive behind the research.
It’s humbling to be wrong and even more humbling to discover you have piled up evidence (or made up evidence) to support something you believe.
I’m making plans, friends. And why shouldn’t I get swept up in the wave of everyone making plans for the future (some full of hope and others full of dread)? I’m making plans, but they sometimes come out of an undignified and broken down place.
Have you ever been there?
It’s a place of exposure and pain, but it’s a place where desperation reaches for solid ground… and the reaching is revelry because the solid ground is so firm that it can be built upon.
The blueprints are looking like this and it’s feeling like beautiful.
Breaking Down by John Mark McMillan
I’m making plans to waste my life on You
I’m making plans to waste my life on You
Cause New York City and Hollywood combined
They ain’t got enough lights
To make me want change my mind about You
Cause I’m breaking down
I don’t even care if there’s anyone else around
Cause I’m breaking down
I always fall to pieces whenever You’re around
I’m Mary Magdalene and tonight is a bottle of perfume
I’m Mary Magdalene and tonight is a bottle of perfume
There’s not enough dignity to hold me now
When I know You’re going to meet me here
There’s not enough gravity
To keep me away from You
Cause I’m breaking down
I don’t even care if there’s anyone else around
Cause I’m breaking down
I always fall to pieces whenever You’re around
So, meet me here
Where we shine like gold
Like the light beneath the embers
Of the burning coals
And I will spill my bottle
Like in days of old
On the song that bleeds from the breaking down
As a 28-year-old, it feels childish to hide my face in a movie theatre during a bedroom scene. Sometimes, the devil on my shoulder says, “You are an adult – pull yourself together!” Shortly after, my mind jumps to an image of my mom (who could never find the remote) running in front of the ancient TV in our living room with arms flailing and singing, “Lalalalalalalala” to cover the sounds of a married couple walking towards the bedroom in “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”
You can imagine my horror when I went away to college and realized the extent to which I’d been “sheltered.” I bet my friends thought I had a skin condition that caused a permanent rose tint to my cheeks. It was a strange thing to struggle through – trying to understand if there would be a time to grow out of my childish ways and into a more “experienced” phase of my life where I was more comfortable with sensuality.
The struggle was complex because my innocence got entangled with pride. Innocence, of course, is a beautiful thing but pride is not. Pride is sin. When my face burned guilty red around brazen sexuality I wasn’t used to, my soul had to figure out how to feel about it all. The prick of conscience punctures deep and holding in a response is simply not an option.
I swallowed hard and covered my ears or pulled a blanket over my head. Sometimes I cried. But often my heart chose to be proud about my “innocence” – about my mom running in front of the TV and about my being excused from 8th grade Sex Education class at school and about not knowing anything when it came to third base. I chose to be proud because having cheeks that burned felt… well, right.
(Sigh)
I’ve lived a lot of life since then. Turns out, my ears still burn and my cheeks still flare up when I’m in a movie theatre and a sensual scene plays out. I fidget uncomfortably and turn away and shield my eyes and pray for it to not remain in my memory. But, now I have a more humble view of blushing. My tender conscience is not something I can take pride in, but it is something I must try to preserve. Though I don’t claim to know what causes others to stumble, my red cheeks are sometimes a sign that my heart is getting pulled away from “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.” (Philippians 4:8)
We’ve really done an unfortunate thing in making sensuality something that females grow into – we can watch certain things or hear certain things or do certain things when we are “mature enough” to handle it. This kind of thinking sets up a threshold that the world is constantly pushing to a younger and younger crowd. The real deciding line for “mature enough” is sometimes never.
God’s desire for our hearts and eyes and lips and minds is to experience the most satisfaction in this life and this will only ever come about as He protects us in our pursuit of holiness.
I am now not ashamed to blush, but I will not boast that I’ve created the conscience that reveals sin. As God humbles my heart and draws me into a pursuit of holiness, I know He is the cause of my conviction and must also be the goal of my turning from evil.
Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Some couples graduate into their 50s and revert back to their adolescence. Isn’t that what a mid-life crisis is? You know, extravagant spending and adventures because it’s “all about me” and I’ve got to a have a cultural norm to explain it?
I know, I know.
I can’t possibly empathize because I’m in my late 20s and I don’t understand how practical and mission-minded expensive motorcycles are. But, I have a reason to pick this middle life bone. My parents are having the opposite experience. They would never tell you that, so I’m going to.
My parents have hearts the size of Texas and they are constantly looking for ways to grow them even bigger. Recently, my mom sent me a text that said, “What would you think of us fostering two freshmen girls?”
She had to expect my response would be, “Yessssss! Of course!” I mean, as a sophomore in college I sent my parents pictures of children who were awaiting adoption in the state of Iowa. Clearly I would be in favor of the idea, but I’m always in favor of dramatic life changes if they are in the direction of ministering with the gifts you’ve been given.
Then I talked to my dad. He was counting the cost – thinking about how his house would change and family gatherings would be different. He was thinking about curfews and possibly inviting two people to be part of our family forever. He was considering his role as protector for my mom who has spent herself in giving to others. He was counting the cost and it made me consider the magnitude of the life-altering adjustment.
I heard my dad’s prayer requests for unselfishness. I heard my mom’s prayer requests for these girls to have a future. I heard both of them ask for hearts enlarged to fit God’s purpose for them at this stage in their lives and I’m humbled.
My parents will never tell you they’ve got it figured out, because they don’t. Their lives are evidence of their humble posture toward what God is calling them into next. I count it truly a privilege to learn how to love my Lord better alongside parents who are doing the same. This might be the best lesson they are teaching me.
The opposite of a mid-life crisis is getting intentional about serving others to the point where it hurts… it means adjusting your life in a way that’s painful so that others might benefit. There’s never a stage in life where you arrive and can say, “At last! Comfort and relaxation and vacation.” That is not a life stage in God’s development plan for your holiness. It just isn’t.
The beauty is that the pursuit of holiness – the forever life stage – is also the most rewarding and satisfying way you can choose to spend your days. That’s not my guarantee, either.
“In His presence is fullness of joy and pleasure forevermore.” Psalm 16:11
MUSINGS IN THE MIDST 