Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

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Where Do You Draw the Line?

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Where do you draw the line?

A couple weekends ago my family and I spent some time with our Yazidi friend Azzat, and his wife and four kids at the Lincoln Children’s Museum. While we were there, Azzat spotted a large wall map, and he called us over so he could show us where he was from.

As he pointed to a tiny region in the northern part of Iraq, Azzat described what happened the morning ISIS invaded his village. He traced his finger along his family’s escape route, away from the mountain where hundreds of Yazidi people, trapped by ISIS, would later die of starvation and dehydration.

Azzat also explained that the Yazidi people have been persecuted by ISIS because they are not “people of the book,” as he put it. Unlike Christians, who have the Bible (which isn’t to say Christians have not been persecuted by ISIS); Jews, who have the Torah; and Muslims, who have the Koran, the Yazidi people do not have a sacred text. Their lack of a sacred book is unacceptable to radical extremist groups like ISIS.

It’s where ISIS draws the line and how they justify their persecution of the Yazidi people.

God used Azzat’s story to remind me that I, too, have a line I’ve drawn. Obviously I’m not going to execute anyone on the other side of my line. But what I realized, in reflecting on Azzat’s story, is that there are people on one side of my line I accept, and on the other side, people I am against.

I did not vote for Donald Trump, and in the months following his election, I have publicly denounced what I consider his moral and ethical flaws and his hostile views of marginalized people. Privately, in my heart and among my closest confidants, I have also denounced those who elected Donald Trump president.

It’s been easy for me to keep Trump supporters “over there,” on the other side of my line, in the “unacceptable” camp. Easy, that is, until I opened my Bible and read this verse in Paul’s letter to the Philippians:

“Make it as clear as you can to all you meet that you’re on their side, working with them and not against them.” (4:5-8)

Note Paul’s word choice: “to all you meet.” He isn’t referring only to the people we consider “on our side.” According to Paul, we are to be on the side of everyone we meet, not just the people who think, act, look, worship, or vote like we do.

My friend Helen did not vote for Donald Trump. However, in the days following the election, instead of railing publicly or privately against those “on the other side,” Helen made a different choice: she invited a small group of Trump supporters to her home to share a meal and conversation.

In extending that invitation, Helen made it clear that she was interested in working with, rather than against, the people who thought and voted differently from her.

As she later explained, “We would do well by each other to share a meal with those whose perspectives differ from our own in an effort to understand the complexity of their humanness. We mature and grow when we spend time with those who challenge us.”

I don’t know who is on the other side of your line. But I do know this: even when we don’t stand with their beliefs, we can and should stand with all our brothers and sisters, each of whom has been created in the image of God.

This post was originally published in the Lincoln Journal Star. 

Traveling the Broken Way

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The Broken Way

Faith has never come easily for me. I’ve often described my spiritual journey and faith itself as a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of process, with doubt rearing its ugly head from time to time, and me clamoring to smack it down like I’m playing whack-a-mole at the local carnival.

This past summer I traveled to Tuscany on a spiritual writers’ retreat expecting to uncover clarity and direction in my vocation. Instead I ended up spiraling into a dark night of the soul I never saw coming. Sitting cross-legged under a grove of trees overlooking the golden Tuscan hills, I got real with God real fast. It was the quintessential “I believe, help my unbelief!” moment, and it left me wrung out and reeling. God and I wrestled it out like never before.

Two days later, hands trembling, voice shaking, I told my traveling companions about my dark night. It was a confession of sorts, and that community of brothers and sisters — most of whom I’d met for the first time only days before — gathered around and held me close. They lamented with me. They consoled me. And most of all, they gave me hope.

When, following my sputtering confession, one of my new friends declared, “God delights in you,” I tucked that word of encouragement into my heart. Since then I’ve taken it out and reexamined it again and again.

My dark-night-of-the-soul experience in Italy and how I’ve come to understand it was a game-changer for me, a life-changer. As Ann Voskamp writes in her new book, The Broken Way, “Our God wants the most unwanted parts of us the most…Nothing pleases God more than letting Him touch the places you think don’t please Him. God is drawn to broken things — so he can draw the most beautiful things.”

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The Broken Way

The Broken Way

Cracking open wide in Tuscany allowed me to receive the understanding that just as I delight in my own children, God delights in me. He loves me like I love them, sweetly, tenderly, fiercely, but infinitely, unfathomably more. I never really understood that. I never really believed it.

Truth be told, three months later I’m still leaning hard into what it really means that God delights in me – what it looks like and feels like. I’m leaning hard into believing it. I’m allowing God to teach me, to show me what he is doing for me, to show me what I need to enter into. God is already loving, he is already delighting in, and he desires that we enter into that space. As Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “God does not respond to what we do; we respond to what God does.” (3:28, Msg.)

Ann Voskamp’s book The Broken Way has helped me move farther along in this journey. She’s put words around the unexplainable and indescribable. She has given language to the mysterious, inexplicable yet sometimes palpable presence of God.

“Belovedness is the center of being, the only real identity, God’s only name for you, the only identity he gives you,” she writes. “And you won’t ever feel like you belong anywhere until you choose to listen to your heart beating out that you do — unconditionally, irrevocably. Until you let yourself feel the truth of that – the truth your heart has always known because He who made it wrote your name right there.”

A long time ago I looked up the origin of my name, Michelle. It is derived from the Hebrew name Michael, which means, in some interpretations, “He who is closest to God,” as well as, interestingly, the question, “Who is like God?” The online site I visited noted that in Hebrew that’s a rhetorical question, because no person is like God.

I laughed when I read that bit about the rhetorical question, because honestly, it’s so like me to question my identity as one who is “like God.” Who me? Flawed, questioning, always-seemingly-on-the-cusp-of-unbelief me?  But the answer is, inexplicably and unfathomably, yes, an emphatic yes. For me and for you, too. For all of us. We are like God because we are created in his image– imago dei.  Each of us is wholly his, loved by him, beloved, called into oneness with him.

God calls us to walk toward that which we despise most about ourselves, because he knows that when we face that hard, ugly place head-on, we will finally be fully surrendered. And finally fully surrendered, we will finally fully find him.

God is in our most broken places, the parts of ourselves we least want to admit or expose to the world and perhaps especially to our own selves. For me, that’s my wrestle with doubt and unbelief. God ironically calls me to step into that very place, to acknowledge its existence, not to run and hide from it, but strangely, to offer it, my most broken place, to him. I know, it hardly makes sense. But yet it does. Because he is there, even there. Because there is no place God is not.

The Broken Way, by Ann Voskamp

I want to add, for the record, that Ann Voskamp doesn’t need me to write a review of her book. As I write this, The Broken Way, which releases today, is probably already number 1 on Amazon, and it will likely go on to become a New York Times bestseller, just like One Thousand Gifts. But here’s the deal: I wrote this blog post because I couldn’t not write this blog post. Like its predecessor, One Thousand Gifts, The Broken Way has had a lasting impact on me. Beautifully written and full of profound wisdom, this book is a life-changer, if you allow Ann’s words — God’s message, really, spoken through her — to sink in deep and change you. Powerful, prophetic, vulnerable and deeply authentic, The Broken Way is not an easy or a quick read, but it’s absolutely a must-read.

The Song is Wrong: They Don’t Know Us by Our Love

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Bleeding Hearts

I recently saw a “New Yorker” cartoon that depicted God speaking to a frowning angel as they gazed down at planet Earth. The caption read: “I’m starting to prefer the ones who don’t believe in me.” I laughed when I read that, but it also hit a nerve.

Last summer I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged woman on a flight from Denver to San Francisco. We engaged in the kind of small talk two strangers sitting side-by-side on a three-hour flight do. She told me she was headed out to visit her son and his partner. I volunteered that my family and I were spending ten days traveling up the coast from San Francisco to Portland.

Our conversation rolled along amicably. I asked what she did for a living – she was a physician – and she asked what I did. When I told her I was a writer, she asked what I wrote. “Non-fiction and memoir,” I answered. “I mainly write about faith from a Christian perspective.”

My seatmate didn’t respond. Instead, she opened the book she’d been holding in her lap and began to read.

At first I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me. But then I realized the awful truth. By identifying myself as a Christian writer I had shut down the conversation. She didn’t say another word to me for the rest of the flight.

…I’m at Huffington Post, writing about a terribly uncomfortable experience … one that taught me about the importance of radical hospitality and love…

[A much shorter version of this post first ran last month in the Lincoln Journal Star]

What the Infamous “Lamp Day” Taught Me about God’s Love and Grace

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My younger son Rowan once asked me if he could ever do anything that would make me stop loving him.

“No, absolutely nothing,” I assured him. “Even if you did the worst thing you could think of, even if you were in jail for your whole life, I would still love you. I will love you and your brother every minute of my life, no matter what.”

Rowan paused, considering my answer.

“Even on the lamp day, when you got super mad…did you love me the same amount that day, too?” Rowan pressed. “Or did you maybe love me a little bit less?”

Ah yes, the infamous Lamp Day — the day Rowan hurled a pillow across the living room (in spite of the no-throwing-pillows rule) and broke a lamp, mere hours after my mom had bought me a new lamp to replace the other lamp Rowan had broken eight months before, also by hurling a pillow across the room.

I cringe even now as I recall the scene, me gripping the lamp base white-knuckled, shaking it over my head and raving incoherently. My mother, who was visiting for the week, stood speechless next to me, paralyzed by my bellowing outburst. I ordered the boys to their rooms while I swept up the fragments, ranting about how they’d spend the entire day behind closed doors. My mother retreated to the basement guest room as I crashed around the kitchen, slamming the box of fresh donuts into the trashcan and fuming aloud to myself while the boys howled in their bedrooms.

All in all, the Lamp Day was not my most stellar moment in parenting.

… I’m over at Good Life Moms today, writing about what the infamous Lamp Day taught me about love and grace. Join me over there for the rest of this post…

For When You Fail to Love Well {or, More Accurately, When You Fail to Love At All}

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As a kid I was always a little afraid of the Ten Commandments. They seemed so grave, so foreboding, so be-all-and-end-all. In my mind I imagined the Ten Commandments to look a bit like tombstones, carved into great slabs of granite, hanging ominously over my head and haunting me with the threat of eternal damnation if I dared cross the line.

I understood the Ten Commandments as a form of punishment: You will do THIS and THIS and THIS…or else. I missed the point entirely. I didn’t see the laws as God intended – as a means to guide and teach me; as a ten-step program, so to speak, intended to help me live in the most kind and loving way possible.

Many years later Jesus finally set me straight when he succinctly summed up all Ten Commandments into two concise statements. “Love God with all your heart, soul and mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love, Jesus said. The aim of all Ten Commandments is to help us to love.

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I like that, don’t you? It sounds so simple, so easy: Love God, love your neighbor, the end. We don’t have to follow a whole long list of rules and laws. Those rules and laws take care of themselves if we do one thing right: if we love well.

All we have to do is love. How easy is that?

Turns out, not so easy.

If you’re anything like me, you end up loving a whole lot of other things in your life more than you love God and more than you love your neighbor.

We love our jobs. Our salaries. Our houses. Our cars. Our bodies. We love feeling important, successful, smart, pretty, witty.

And as for loving our neighbors? Yeah, we know how that goes in real-life.

We know how well we love our neighbor when he gets the promotion we desired for ourselves. We know how well we love our neighbor when we gossip behind her back. We know how well we love our neighbor when he doesn’t look like us, or think like us, or share the same political/religious/social beliefs we do.

The truth is, it’s not the law that’s flawed. It’s us. We don’t always love well. And sometimes? Sometimes we fail to love at all.

Which is why we need Jesus. Jesus came to love us and to love well for us. He didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it – to fulfill it where we fall far short.

Jesus came to fill the gap with his love, a gap left wide and gaping by us. His love completes the law utterly and completely, because Jesus himself is love.

“Don’t misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose.” (Matthew 5:17)

And don’t forget: I’d love to hear your story of the woman who has most influenced your faith journey. Would you consider blogging about her and entering your story into the #MyFaithHeroine contest? Entries must be submitted by October 22, one week from today – details here.