Uncategorized

“The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.” (Romans 12:3, Msg.)

Well that explains a lot. No, really, it does.

For most of my life, I’ve been using the absolute wrong criteria to figure out who I am and why I’m here. I’ve been looking for my identity in my work, my achievements, and my accomplishments. I’ve been looking for myself in the items crossed off my to-do list; in my long-range goals and my big plans; in my strategies, action items and milestones. I’ve been looking to define myself by what I’ve done and by what I’ve failed to do.

And I’ve come up short every single time, year after year after year.

You know why, right? Because this whole time, I’ve been looking in the wrong places. I’ve been looking to myself and to external criteria to figure out who I am, rather than to God, who knew me and identified me long before the beginning.

The only way we can know who we are at the very core of our being is to know and understand ourselves in God.

God is creator. God is love. God is everything and in everything. And therefore, God is in us. His love is in each one of us, and we are defined by that love. We are defined and identified by God in us.

This, friends, is how we understand ourselves: created by God, made in the image of God, loved by God, embodiment of God.

Believe that, know it deep in the very center of your being, and you will know who and what you are.

After I was home a week or so from Italy, my sister asked, “So, are you going to be one of those people who says, ‘Well, in Italy we did this…’ and ‘The Italians do it this way…’?” I laughed, and then I answered, “Yes, yes, I am going to be one of those people.” I was only half kidding.

Honestly, though, I know it can be really annoying to hear about “the best experience ever!” again and again, so I’m going to be cognizant of that in this space. And as fate would have it, I’m being forced to take a writing break for the next two weeks as I recover from elbow surgery, so not only will you not hear about Italy, you won’t hear from me at all.

I’d love to tell you I injured my elbow wingsuit flying, but the truth is, I tore a tendon pruning shrubs. It was vigorous pruning…but still. Pruning. This is 46.

As a result, I’ll have my left arm in a sling for two weeks, which will render typing virtually impossible (although one-handed typing might help me become a less verbose writer!).

Thanks for bearing with me as I take this forced hiatus. And let me know if you have any books to recommend – I’ll still be able to turn pages!

A few months after Noah was born I decided to make him a scrapbook.  I scoured the aisles at Michael’s for stickers and dye-cuts and special scissors with ruffled edges. Every night after Noah was finally settled into his crib, I sat at the dining room table, construction paper littering the floor at my feet, and I scrapped.

The problem was, I hated every minute of it.

Nothing turned out like I had envisioned. I didn’t have a creative eye for matching papers and pictures. Everything I cut with the fancy scissors turned out crooked and off-kilter. My handwriting was messy, the magic marker smudged and bled. I had envisioned Martha Stewart magnificence, and what I created looked like the work of a ten-year-old. As it turned out, scrapbooking was not my thing.

As I paged through that rag-tag scrapbook a couple of days ago I thought about the verses we read this week from Acts 6.

Because the twelve disciples were struggling to maintain order within the rapidly growing church, they called a meeting with the larger group of followers to decide what they could delegate and what they would continue to focus on themselves:

“We apostles should spend our time teaching the word of God, not running a food program,” they announced.  (Acts 6:2)

The disciples recognized their strengths and their mission – teaching and preaching the word of God. They focused on their God-given gifts and then delegated the responsibilities better-suited to the strengths of others in the group.

We, on the other hand, often feel obligated to do it all. And instead of focusing on the special abilities God has given us, we run ourselves ragged focusing our energies on areas in which we don’t especially excel.

Sometimes we say yes to something because we feel like that’s what’s expected of us.  Like me with the scrapbook. As a new mother, I thought that was what I was supposed to do: make a scrapbook of my baby’s first year. Regardless of whether I was good at it or not, and regardless of whether I even enjoyed it.

A few years ago our director of children’s ministries called to ask if I might be willing to teach Sunday school at my church. A wave of guilt washed through me before I took a deep breath and told her I didn’t think I would be well-suited for such a role. “Frankly I don’t even really like kids that much,” I blurted. Thankfully she laughed.

There are times we do need to try something new in order to grow or step out of our comfort zone. But there are other times in which we simply know in the bottom of our gut that saying yes will result in cataclysmic disaster.

Sometimes, as with my ill-fated foray into scrapbooking, a period of trial and error is necessary in order to discern our strengths. But sometimes, like the disciples, we simply know what we’re good at and where we need to focus our energy. And in those circumstances, we should say yes, or no, with confidence.

Thanks for bearing with me this week, friends, as I scramble to edit the Katharina and Luther book before my Monday deadline. This is a re-post from 2013, believe it or not, but since I’m thinking about buffer zones lately, it seemed like a good time to revisit it. 

Brightest Christmas wishes to you, friends!

May your holiday be filled with joy, light, love and peace, and may you feel the presence of Immanuel, God with us, as you celebrate and contemplate this week and all year long.

“She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means, ‘God with us.'” (Matthew 1:23)

With joy and gratitude, from our house to yours… {well, this isn’t exactly our house…but you know what I mean!}…

I heard him first before I saw him. Three chirps in a row, again and again, the same three chirps I’d heard the afternoon before, when I spotted the robin fledgling fluttering helter-skelter onto the branch of the honey locust tree. I’d sat on the front step and watched for mama bird to arrive with a fat worm, but despite his incessant chirping, three times in a row, again and again, I never saw her come.

The next morning, early, when the sun was still slanting golden through the branches of the white pine, I heard him through the open living room window, insistent, persistent, along with a rustling of dead leaves. I walked out the front door in my plaid robe and bare feet, across the dewy grass, bending to look beneath the spirea and the boxwood. Finally I spotted the fledgling deep in the window well, fluttering nervously among the dry oak leaves, chirping his three chirps. Brad donned a thick pair of utility gloves, reached in, cupped the speckled robin gently in two palms and set him on the flagstone in the front yard.

We watched the robin for two hours from the living room window, our faces peering over the back of the couch, peeking around the fuchsia bougainvillea in the window box, careful to stay hidden in case mama bird was watching. He didn’t move but an inch or two from the flagstone, still chirping while the dew dried on the grass and the sun rose over the tops of the trees. We Googled and then Googled some more, keeping an eye out for mother robin. There were several candidates, all with oozing worms glistening from their beaks, but none belonged to our baby bird. Or if they did, they did not acknowledge him.

Brad dug up worms from the garden. We arranged them, first on a Frisbee, and then later moved them onto the lid of a plastic cottage cheese container, sliding it onto the grass a few feet from the bird. Our baby took three frantic hops in the opposite direction when he saw us coming. When the first round of worms dried up, untouched, we replaced them with a fresh supply, but the bird never got within a few feet of the lid.

Around mid-day I ran up to my neighbor Karna’s house, the concrete hot under my bare feet. She’s into birds. She would know what to do, I was sure of it. “Leave him be,” she advised, shaking her head. “It’s best to let nature take its course.”

I wasn’t satisfied with that answer. Brad and I prepared a nest in a large Rubbermaid container, filling it with fountain grass and leaves, a twig on which to perch. But I went back to Google, unsure, and was dissuaded by what I read.

“It might take weeks before he’s ready, and it says we’ll have to feed him every hour, from sun-up to sun-down,” I told Brad as we stood side-by-side in the backyard, the hot afternoon air still. “We’ll have to keep him in the house, and what about the dog, and what if he doesn’t eat, and how will we get him to learn to fend for himself?”

We left the leaves and grass in it, but slid the Rubbermaid container back into the garage.

The fledgling grew quiet around three or four that afternoon. He’d made it over to the bee balm and stood beneath the spiky, scarlet blooms in the partial shade. I crept out every twenty minutes or so to look at him, bending over the garden, my palms on my knees. I watched as his one eye closed. He stood still now. He didn’t chirp.

Around five, Brad and I watched from our perch on the couch as a mother robin, a worm in her beak, balanced on the white picket just above the bee balm. It looked as if she were watching him, and Brad and I held our breath and spoke in whispers, watching, waiting. After ten minutes, she flew away toward the neighbor’s eave across the street, plump worm dangling.

At six I stopped short as I walked through the living room, past the glass front door where the sun beamed hot onto the wood floor. Our baby was in the street, round and plump, still standing, covered in flies. He tried to shake them loose, but, too weak to manage even that, tipped forward, his tiny beak tapping the asphalt. He righted himself, took half a faltering step, tipped forward again.

Brad donned the thick utility gloves, shooed the flies away, cupped the bird gentle between his palms and placed him in the Rubbermaid container in the garage. We slid the lid on partway. I crouched on my knees, elbows in the sharp grit, and watched through the opaque plastic as the tiny body shuddered up and down, up and down.

I wish I had a happy ending for you. Truth be told, I expected a happy ending. Maybe I’ve watched too many Meg Ryan movies, but I expected everything to work out somehow. I assumed the mother bird would show, or the baby would learn to eat our worms from the cottage cheese lid, or that God would swoop in on that hot June afternoon and make it all better. Until that bird was tucked face down, wings splayed, in the Rubbermaid container with the lid pull over it half-way, I had hope, hope that everything would somehow work out.

But it didn’t.The fledgling died in the Rubbermaid container in our garage while I was out at a speaking event. When I pulled the mini-van into the driveway that night, my headlights lit upon the container, sitting empty next to the trash bin. The bird had died not long after I’d left, Brad said. He’d felt relieved, he admitted, and I realized, in that moment when my headlights had flashed onto the empty container, I had felt relief too.

Later though, I felt angry. For days afterward I referred to the fledgling as “that stupid bird.” “Why didn’t that stupid bird just eat the worms we put out for him?” I lamented to Brad. “Why didn’t he do something?” I blamed the bird; Rowan blamed me. “You were lazy,” my son accused me. “You didn’t want to take care of him because you were lazy.” He was right, in a way. Laziness had been part of it. But like a lot of stories, it was more complicated than that.

Sometimes I feel obligated as a “Christian writer” to make this space a place of hope and joy and peace. I want to offer stories of redemption and beauty, stories that illuminate God among us, stories with happy endings. I don’t want to be the big downer, serving up tales of depression and lament. I don’t want to be the one who welcomes you here, and then offers you a story filled with the dismal and the grotesque.

But nature doesn’t work that way. And neither does life or faith or even God, at least while we spend our time here on this green earth. People suffer. Bad things happen. Mothers abandon their young. Babies die. Humans make the wrong decisions and then regret them later.

“Abundance and destitution are two facets of the one face of God,” writes Christian Wiman in My Bright Abyss, “and to be spiritually alive in the fullest sense is to recall one when we are standing squarely in the midst of the other.”

I suppose he’s right. We don’t get Jesus’s grace and love without his brutal sacrifice. We don’t get the resurrection, eternal life, without Good Friday, without his writhing and crying out “My God, my God” on the cross.

“Christ is a shard of glass in the gut,” Wiman continues. “Christ is God crying I am here, and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends and degrades you, here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God.”

I would call the day the baby bird died a not-God day. But in that I would be wrong. It was ugly, macabre and revolting. It was depressing and hopeless. But God was still there, even in the offensive, the appalling. He was beneath the bee balm, next to those fluffy, fly-infested feathers. He was in the stifling Rubbermaid container on the gritty, cement floor of a garage. He was next to me as I crouched on bent knees, peering through the opaque, crying over a stupid bird.