A Friend of Sinners, Now.

The past 4 months, aka 1st Trimester, have been very hard. Frankly, my energy has been that of a completely used battery – and not an Energizer.

I have slept long hours, eaten weird foods, cried over nothing and everything, and felt like I needed to institutionalize myself. I have withdrawn from community in an effort to get some sort of grasp on myself; only the particular person has watched me flail up close, and even that vulnerability felt like peeling gauze from dried blood and puss on a very large wound.

Now, while I have experienced a lack of control in my life – especially in the realm of relationships (friends, male or otherwise), and a lack of control (more so now) over the aging body and its insatiable brokenness – I have yet to feel completely out of control in the realm of motivation.

Absolutely nothing, at this point, can motivate me to do anything I don’t actually feel like doing. The sting of social scorn, the frustrated sighs of myself knowing that I have failed – again – to get up at an hour that actually provides some time to read the word and journal – all are not enough. The body, in its formidable nature, has insisted that control belongs to one thing – and that “thing” is the Author and Perfecter of my faith.

It has struck me and rightly so that I actually don’t author my faith. When I look at the penmanship, the scribbles of goodness cropping up amidst the weeds, it is not my handwriting I find. Where the blotchy, incomplete sentences fade and turn into a white and crisp page on which to renew and create – I did not perfect the word; I could not erase or white out the truth of my sinfulness.

And the grace of this has, or is beginning to change me.

The reality, the Truer reality of life, is that the Lord – is the FRIEND of SINNERs. The friend. of Sinners.

Shocking. I am not the friend of sinners. I hate them, actually. I despise and throw my hands up at them. And while I do that, I also am not a friend of myself or my husband or my friends – I despise and throw my hands up at me and them.

I am annoyed at what the imperfection shows – that in fact, we cannot be righteous in and of ourselves. That, I, really cannot say or do anything that will rightfully impact a person without the Holy Spirit filling it with LIFE.

I have watched from afar, several people I knew begin to seek the Lord – people my words could not convince (that my life probably made God seem worse) – and yet, in my absence, God has moved toward them and begun to draw out their truest desire.

Anyway – I am meditating on this. The God, who had nothing to draw us to him – the nerd, was the friend of the people who stole his lunch money, beat him up, called him fat, cheated off his papers and threw a slushie in his face – and finally – killed him.

So – here’s the song. It is red mountain church – The Gadsby Project. You can get it on I-tunes.

Friend Of Sinners

Taken from the Gadsby Hymnal # 1052

Words – Augustus Montague Toplady, 1740-1778

Music – Jeff Koonce and Brian T. Murphy, 2004

Redeemer! Whither should I flee,
Or how escape the wrath to come?
The weary sinner flies to thee
For shelter from impending doom;

Smile on me, gracious Lord,

And show thyself the Friend sinners now

Smile on me, gracious Lord,

And show thyself the Friend sinners now.

 

Beneath the shadow of thy cross
The heavy laden soul finds rest;
I would esteem the world but dross,
So I might be of Christ possessed.
I’d seek my every joy in thee,
Be thou both life and light to me.

Close to the highly shameful tree,
Jesus, my humbled soul would cleave;
Despised and crucified with thee,
With thee resolved to die and live;
This prayer and this ambition mine,
Living and dying to be thine.

There fastened to the rugged wood
By holy love’s resistless chain,
And life deriving from thy blood,
Never to wander wide again,
There may I bow my suppliant knee,
And own no other Lord but thee.

Smile on me, Gracious Lord – and show thyself a friend of sinners, now.

© 2005 Red Mountain Music

www.redmountainmusic.com

Marriage: Month 11.

It’s crazy to say we’ve almost been married a year, and we’re expecting a baby in April.

Control/surrender has been the theme of this year – and the Lord has been faithful.

I’ve been thinking about relationships since I was – oh, in 5th grade. I had a good friend, a best friend really, I’d grown up with when I was little who reappeared in Elementary school, and I had a total crush on him – he completely ignored me. I was not “popular” or subtle, probably, and well – we were 10.

In the darkest hours of my life, when nothing seemed to be going the way I wanted it to go – everything was out of control, boys were a mess, and I was a mess pursuing them or being pursued by them or breaking up with them or being broken up with or whatever drama happens – I still knew, underneath all of the mess and confusion, what I wanted and that what I wanted – even though I couldn’t see it anywhere – did, in fact, exist.

Often, when I’d think of Eve, snatching the apple and the knowledge of Good and Evil before God had prepared her to have it, I would consider her sin to be so ridiculous. Why would she do that? God was/is a good God – he had promised to be with them; he had given them incredible gifts of power and stewardship – the gift of culture-making.

As I got older and began to understand more fully the many ways this “grasping” for what one wants manifests itself – I realized that I had already done it. In fact, I’d probably devoured the whole tree in search for the knowledge of Good and Evil – to be, not like God, but god… deciding truth for myself.

I never know what to tell people when they ask me when I became a Christian. If I use the stringent definition, I would say – well, Gosh, am I ever REALLY following Christ? I sort of switch back and forth moment-to-moment fighting between being a Worldian/Loraian/Erician or whatever and being a Christian.

Nothing about Jesus is really appealing – in the sense of the world. The promise for persecution is real. The command to give up oneself is true. The carving sanctification will be painful and beautiful – but when all I really want is to fit in, be physically attractive and look like I have everything anyone ever wanted – Christ really has nothing to say about that. He wants me to abandon myself to his will, and nothing about Him is worldly appealing – because he casts out all the idols of my heart that are most precious to me.

So – I could say this about being a Christian. Christ began a divine pursuit of me, planted the seed of desire for righteousness in my heart when I was probably 11. In the most trying times of my life, I regretted being baptized. How much easier would it have been to just live for what I wanted if I didn’t have this snagging sense that God had created and wanted better? But it is true – He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it; (despite you).

What about relationships then? I have reached for many, and they’ve all been wrong.  I knew it from the beginning of each of them, and most of them I stuck it out for a year or so just to make sure the “inkling” was right, and it always was. The Holy Spirit, I believe, is very clear.

I wanted control – to pick, in my own time, how my life would go. And yet, I would pray fervently (when I was praying) that God would be in control, that my life would follow His will and not my own – that I would live the life that fit exactly who I am and how I was created.

There are several different kinds of hard, but I’ll say two of them.

1. The first is the kind of hard where you’ve messed up terrible.

Your life is in shambles because you drank yourself into oblivion and slept with some random guy. You made out with your best friend who happens to be, well, your gender; and, actually you might be attracted to her, but you like boys, too. You are so depressed you stop eating.

You cut yourself. You mock every person you know because you are wittier and smarter than they are, but really you’re just lonely and terrified of being vulnerable.

You fail your tests because you don’t study or spend any time preparing. You get into a car accident because it all comes to a head and you fell asleep at the wheel because you were up late drinkin’ or making out with some guy.

You create a massive lie about who you are to your parents and to your teachers and people you respect or fear and a different face to your friends – and even within your friends you have many different faces. It depends on the friend, but you could be a Christian; lesbian chic; smart; crass; sexual; granola; intellectual; stupid. You move to fit the expectation.

This is HARD. This kind of hard, to me, is the most horrific – because it feels lost, without aid and completely skeptical about any renewal.

This kind of hard has “tried” “Christianity” and failed it. This kind of hard is self-righteous. This kind of hard is a body battered by the undertow, flailing, grasping, terrified.

This is the hard of an unbeliever or a believer caught sin.

2. The second kind of hard is God’s work in you.

This kind of hard is being faced with every dreadful reality of who you are as a sinner – and not rushing to self-pity, but rather clinging to the cross of Christ, to His righteousness. This hard is pressed with selfishness and constantly is trying to turn from it. This hard thrashes between idols and Jesus – trusting that Christ will win; sometimes not trusting, but still being shown grace. This kind of hard is always stunned when it fails to live up to anything.

This kind of hard is seeing how big your sin is and struggling to look at how big the cross is.

It sees selfishness, vanity, cruelty, anger, impatience, laziness, arrogance – and knows that those are the fruit it naturally bears.

This kind of hard knows that righteousness does not come from within but from without. The kind of hard has nothing to give within itself and struggles with being crushed by that realization, and yet – sees Christ who has everything to offer.

This kind of hard struggles with pride when it does well and pity/depression when it fails, and is thankful when Christ reminds it that it is HE who is righteous. This kind of hard battles constantly; this kind of hard tells reality as he/she sees it and lets God correct what is wrong with his/her perception.

This is the kind of hard produces character.

This is the most beautiful hard, because it is the race that throws of snares that entangle and keep a person from running strong. It is beautiful because it changes the nature of the fruit; it produces good fruit – tasty, delicious, ripe, mouth-watering, juicy and satisfying fruit. This hard asks you to surrender control to the Lord.

I think Christianity is this. Moving from the first hard to the second hard. I did that when I moved to Charlottesville. I gave up the first hard, which was just the beginning. I traded it for the second hard. The second hard – is a different kind of embarrassing, because it requires vulnerability and insists upon humility. This is where I am in Month 11 – coming out of a year of being show the reality of myself.

I have acne on my skin. But, I also have acne on my heart, and it’s gross. Eric sees all of it. This is the great metaphor of sexuality – the nakedness of one flesh reveals twofold – the vulnerability and reality of the body’s beauty and imperfection – and it points toward the beauty and imperfection of the soul.

It has been a HARD year. A second kind of HARD year.

The theme has been control/surrender – and God, is indeed, faithful.

Dads: Paper Dolls.

We had a chocolate, tan and white rug that lay in the middle of the floor right in between the TV and the couch. It was a cushy rug in which you could, if you were  a child, immerse almost 1/2 of your finger. I used to push all of my fingers into the rug and make several indentions, draw a smilie face, write my name – it was a malleable rug.

My dad is wonderful with small children. He has a perfect sense of how to capture, enlighten and draw out the essence of a child’s imagination.

Dolly Dingle came to visit my house when I was probably 6. I can say, pretty clearly, that I was 6 because I cut all of my hair off in Kindergarten and was accused of looking like a boy.

Dolly Dingle came in a 20-30 page book, and she had many friends, parents, some pets and about 15 outfits. She also had hats and shoes.

Dad and I had a day together, and I introduced him to Dolly Dingle. When Dad met her, she was just a little girl wearing what any paper doll wears – some odd looking 1920’s bloomers and a tank-top.

I sat there, on the rug, and asked Dad if he would help me cut out the paper dolls so I could play with them. My 6 yr old fingers weren’t precise, and I had a tendency to accidently snip the folds that were supposed to keep the hats and dresses on.

Dad sat there with me; he trimmed and snipped and chatted with me about Dolly Dingle and what she was up to.

When we finished – we had cut out the entire 20-30 page book – every outfit, every pet, neighbor, parents and hat. Dad cut out her name, and we picked out an outfit for Dolly (in all of her various positions). We dressed every one of them, and we stuffed them into the rug.

They all stood up – the entire Dolly Dingle community – ready for the festivities of play time with a dad and his daughter.

My dad didn’t have a son to play football with, but regardless – he cut out all of his daughter’s paper dolls and played make-believe with her until she was satisfied.

Lora