You yourselves have seen what I did in Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself.~Exodus 19:4 (NIV)
Over this past year, I've had the privilege of connecting online with a fellow author and publisher, Ericka Clay. She created an ebook entitled Letters To Our Former Selves. She graciously accepted an essay from me to include in her publication. You can find the ebook and all her books, poems and essays here. Ericka Clay
My essay:
LETTER TO MY FORMER SELF
Dear Former Self,
There was so much pain thrust upon you. Primarily because you were born into a world that is familiar with turmoil and despair, shame and sorrow.
You survived. I commend your resilience, especially since your mother frequently scolded that you were "too thin skinned and needed to toughen up." You lived with a red-welted glyph across your tender heart.
You didn't know then what you've learned by now. You didn't know that profligate grace would be the conduit to overthrowing guilt and sin. Would stand nonplussed in welcoming your sensitive nature.
You had to experience the prodigal years, too, to learn that all your efforts to fix and perform would only deplete your faith in God, would only drive you further away. Would create a gleam in the enemy's eye, make him clap his hands in glee that you fashioned a beaten-down dusty pathway to the canyon of legalism.
You hadn't bargained on the fact that the Savior followed your trail and waited for you in that rocky basin--waited until you consented to be carried out. Placed you upon His shoulders (that one lost sheep) and took you from that arid, pristine environment. You believed the topography was perfect, but then felt ambivalent because you couldn't keep it tidy, couldn't keep it shiny with all your human solutions and well-rehearsed formulas that could never be proved.
It felt too easy to give consent to be carried--to merely relax and luxuriate in the warmth of the Savior's embrace. To inhale the scent of His goodness, to hear the joy in His voice when he said, "I'm so glad to have you near."
Now I know. Repentance is not about being bullied into reformation. Now I understand that resurrection life is granting permission to be rescued from the hostile gorge, to allow holy forgiveness for all the ways I fall short and miss the mark. I am seen and accepted by a good God who finished all the work so that I don't have to earn salvation. To perform. He doesn't scold like my mother. He runs His finger across that pinkened glyph on my heart and reassures me that all that sensitivity is His gift, because He created me that way. There is even a Kingdom awaiting me. That perfect geopgraphy I long for. Because of Him.
Grace and peace to you my dear self,
Priscilla
He is wooing you from the jaws of distress to a spacious place free from restriction, to the comfort of your table laden with choice food. ~Job 36:16 (NIV)
I happily read a book filled with beautiful metaphors, the prose rich, resonant, and providing me with pleasure. Then, abruptly, the author stated, "though I'm not spiritual..." I felt sadness that the writer was solely connected to the natural, not realizing the Creator's gift bestowed on him to write so eloquently, causing the English language to sing.
Yet I am no different than this author at times. It is as if I am not spiritual. I become tangled inside anxiety, enamored with my own ideas, my faith in God expressed in sloppy elisions. I am consumed with self-effort, forgetting the expansive love of the Father. Burned out and panting with fatigue. I typically experience the rescue of His relentless mercy while watching a sunrise. It happened just this way a few mornings ago.
I awakened at dawn and looked in the mirror, a pillow mark deeply embedded on the side of my cheek. I rubbed my hand over the indentation on my face and felt glad I had nowhere to be for a while. It would take some time for that mark to disappear. I walked downstairs and gasped. The sun, a mass of golden rays, glided in through the blinds. I sat down on a chair and absorbed all the light flooding in through the window. I didn't want to review my to-do list or ponder all the things I needed to accomplish. I no longer cared about the ugly dent in my cheek. I simply desired to be in His presence. Pandora played a song by Fernando Ortega, Give Me Jesus. I knew the lyrics and sang it aloud in the spacious place of my living room...In the morning when I rise, in the morning when I rise, in the morning when I rise, give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. You can have all this world, but give me Jesus.
His merciful wooing to bring me to a place free from restriction is the comfort I need to strengthen me. The love of the Father for a daughter.
God's grace and peace to you all. May the beauty and love of the Father strengthen and comfort you.
For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in.~W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
Over the weekend, I read a disturbingly beautiful book. Can the words disturbing and beautiful harmonize? The book, Where The Light Fell, by Philip Yancey, seems to fit this uncanny description. Yancy writes of his boyhood in Georgia during the fifties. He had an older brother, and the boys were raised by a single Christian fundalmentalist mother who offered them both a steady diet of religious rules and shame. Yancey defines his upbringing as "ungraced." While in college he had what he defines as "the first authentic religious experience of my life."
He says of his "vison" of the parable of the Good Samaritan: "A swarthy Middle Eastern man, dressed in robes and turban, bending over a dirty, blood-stained form in a ditch. Without warning, those two figures now morph on the internal screen of my mind. The Samaritan takes on the face of Jesus. The Jew, pitiable victim of a highway robbery, also takes on another face--one I recognize with a start as my own. In slow motion, I watch Jesus reach down with a moistened rag to clean my wounds and stanch the flow of blood. As he bends toward me, I see myself, the wounded victim of a crime, open my eyes and spit on him, full in the face. Just that. The image unnerves me--the apostate who doesn't believe in visions or in biblical parables. I am rendered speechless...all that evening i brood over what took place. It wasn't exactly a vision--more like a vivid daydream or an epiphany. Regardless, I can't put the scene out of mind...In my arrogance and mocking condescension, maybe I'm the neediest one of all."
Yancey's epiphany eventually moves him toward a relentless curiousity regarding the grace of God. Inside his strict and toxic upbringing and hundreds of church services and read-throughs of the Holy Bible, he missed the truth of the gospel. Yancey's story is like my own. At one point in my life, I was at that dangerous juncture of renouncing my faith in Christ. Yet when I faced the reality that I had broken most every rule that I prided myself in keeping, and saying aloud, "I'm done with this whole religion thing," that's when I owned the fact that God was still good to me--showed up in my life when I knew I didn't deserve it. He wooed me back to Himself with compassion and love, with His father's heart. I was that bedraggled soul in the ditch that spit in His face. Yet he wiped my brow and tended my wounds and carried me to a safe place. I was gutted by His grace, by His mercy, by His forgiveness. I understood that salvation was not "do good, get good/do bad, get bad." Salvation was receiving the tenderness, allowing His ministrations. That kind of unconditional love does not stir up a desire in me to sin more. That kind of rescue causes me to be grateful, humble. "Let me be faithful to you," I say now. Christ's love is otherworldly. His love is not disturbingly beautiful, but rather unfathomably beautiful.
There is a lot of pain in this world. Sometimes it is difficult to figure out our response to both the ache and simultaneous sweetness of life. There is, though, the reality of the light of Jesus. May His light fall on all your shadowy places and bring you salvation, consolation and hope.
Let us remember that the life in which we ought to be interested is "daily" life. We can, each of us, only call the present time our own...Our Lord tells us to pray for today, and so He prevents us from tormenting ourselves about tomorrow. It is as if God were to say to us: "It is I who gives you this day and will also give you what you need for this day. It is I who makes the sun to rise. It is I who scatters the darkness of night and reveals to you the rays of the sun."~Gregory of Nyssa, On The Lord's Prayer (From The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy And "Women's Work" by Kathleen Norris)
The black and white cup goes in the microwave. Hazelnut this morning, the strong brew that opens my nostrils. Inhaling the day. What will it look like? I could call up negativity and fear, dread or apathy. Glower at the hours ahead. I don't want to. Can't afford those feelings, don't want to luxuriate in shame and staleness.
I rewrite the script as I pour cream in the ceramic cup. Rehearse what I know, what's real. I'm thankful, so grateful, for the art on my wall. The abstract beauty of the orange and green and umber reminds me of Noah's Ark--perhaps how things might have looked as the waters receded, the lavender sunrise spread over everything.
Noah and his family were "shut in" and safe. You, Lord, prepared a new world for them.
Today I'm "shut in" with You. Safe. You've prepared a day for me, a lambent pathway through the hours. You whisper, "Call up joy and expectancy in my faithfulness, my constancy. Trust my voice, my breath on your life. Buongiorno. Good Morning."
The wideness of God's mercy, as the old hymn says (morning by morning new mercies I see); the sudden way that grace makes all things good.~Kathleen Norris (From Dakota, A Spiritual Geography)
Today I write my 400th blog entry. In some ways, this truth seems momentous. In another way, it is simply a milestone. I've needed to be here. Fleeing to the page, picking up the pen (my sister's term) feels as if it's saved my life over and over again. I started writing for real in 2002 when I'd almost forsworn Christianity--at least I thought I had. At first, I ventured to the white, empty space hesitantly. But soon, the blank lines began to fill with black ink as I poured out my feelings and questions about life with the remaining threadbare strands of faith in God I had left. Writing became a companion in that austere region, like a sturdy cane for an aching limp. I had no idea the profligate grace I needed then. I probably still don't. God has used the page as a catalyst to help me connect with Him, to understand that it is only by His mercy and faithfulness that I continue on the pilgrim road this side of His Kingdom. And I find it heartening that at consistent intervals you join me here in this spiritual geography. Thank you.
Number 400 has me looking back. Musing on the writing life. It takes bravery to keep moving forward inside this landscape, though I'd never turn back. The topography can be bleak at times. Yet there are realms of beauty that often cause me to suck in my breath. Wondrous sights. Vaulted blue ceilings of sky, the sight of an open road that inspires the lovliness of solitude. But when loneliness invades, there is birdsong, or a dark v-shape of geese flying overhead. A stand of trees or a wooden bench situated by a lake. Pinpricks of stars glowing on a chilled evening at dusk. A crescent moon. Sometimes a fellow traveler, a backpack filled with images and words and ideas we share over a campfire together, singing songs we know by heart. Then parting ways, we each take our separate paths. A bear hug, that sweet embrace of someone who sees what's hard and simultaneously understands it's worth all the time spent in pursuit of writing things down.
"Keep going. Take courage. I'll see you on the other side where all our books and words and images are stored and redeemed in the Kingdom Library. God's grace and peace to you."