a song for the weary traveler

Many of us are in a place these days where we walk a dark, mysterious road. We know God brought us there, we know He's with us there. But we don't want to be there because it's dark and we're not the ones directing our own paths.

God is raising things to the surface in me that I really don't want to confront. It's going to hurt, it's going to require releasing some things I've wrapped myself around tightly for the last several years.

It's easy to want to shake my fist at Him, to envy Him in His heaven, fancying Him far removed from this all-too-real and painful path.

And then I remember ... He gets it. He's been there too. He's shared in our earthly existence, He's felt what it feels like to be us. He's felt what it's like to want another, less painful way only to find that the path of obedience is a painful and sacrificing one.

This song is one of the last ever recorded by Rich Mullins; Rich was killed in a car accident in September 1997 shortly after this crummy cassette-tape recording was made. But I prefer this version over the studio version by his band; there's something so raw and imperfect about it; unpolished and real. Kind of like me; kind of like all of us.

Something that reminds me ... He gets it.

See the lyrics to "Hard to Get" here.

penetrating layers of memory

Perhaps I shouldn't be, but I'm continually surprised at how God is leading me down this new path: the things He points out, the places at which He has me pause and look and take in the landscape before me, the detail He points out, the stones He turns over. I'm closely examining places I've become accustomed to overlooking, finding myself drawn to examine memories of myself that were on dusty shelves of forgetting: memories that at first glance, have no apparent connection to what drove me to this path in the first place.

I'm studying memories of myself that I haven't thought of since I passed through them. I find myself curious in my remembering: not quite afraid, often tenatively comprehending the view. Making notes of what I observe there.

I'm surprised at what reveals itself when pen passes over paper, at the truth once buried so deeply in my consciousness coming so easily to the surface now. One memory leads to another, and to one before that. And so the layers of memory peel back like an onion, revealing the truth beneath. I hand each layer to God, sometimes tentatively, sometimes with eyes squeezed tight and face turned away. But each time His hand comes to my face, and I open my eyes. He gaze locks with mine and peers deeply into to the heart I am still coming to know. There is no reason to be afraid. There is no shame. Just grace and understanding. Love. And so I open my hands and hand these things over to His care.

Really? You want this? You can redeem even this?

I can trust Him with these things.

I can trust Him to lead to the next layer and the next, knowing that only He understands what needs to be uncovered and recovered, acknowledged and surrendered.

As I'm drawn deeper, I wonder what I'll find when the next layer peels away, and where all of this might lead: this journey deeper into knowing myself, this pulling off the white sheets that have been covering and hiding these spaces in my heart.

One day, it will be important for me to share what these things are with you; I know this. I can trust you with these things, too. But for now this path is sacred, the time for revelations still in the realm of not yet.

journal photo by kirsten.michelle

kingdom math

God and I have been at work in those heartspaces I mentioned in my previous post. he is good to me: gentle and precise, just like the Master Surgeon He is.

as i've braved the journey into my heart's inner recesses, to those dark and hidden places, i've called them out as precisely as i'm able: here is the lie i've held onto so tightly, that has held on to me. offer me your truth. rip out the lie by the roots without removing chunks of my heart if You can, allow your truth to take root in that place. bind up the wound.

to be sure, it is a gasping, choking, sobbing business and there is more work ahead of me. but He has met and continues to meet me in those places. he meets me with tender grace, and i can already see evidences of His truth taking root there.

i was talking to christianne tonight, trying to tell her about these things. trying to put words around the movements of God in my heart. i was telling her how it seemed to me that the heights of joy seem higher, the freedom of our hearts more unbounded when we are willing to go into the darkness and the depths of ourselves, letting God meet us in those places. when we do this, we come out on the other side and see that it is good and new and better than anything we've had before. the heights are higher, the joy more joyful, the freedom even freer.

i mentioned once how i dance at church now. how i can't help it. how those are the most unselfconscious moments of my week. my dancing, my arms raised and extended, my singing at the top of my lungs, are the most natural and uncontained outpourings my heart has to offer. how i dance because my heart does. how i dance because my shackles are gone.

and so when i went to church today, it was much the same: having known God was meeting me in my dark and hurting places this week, i danced wildly for joy when the music started. i really couldn't contain it. i sang, i raise my hands, i moved in union with the music. and He met me there too: in this dancing, joyful place.

with the music was over and the sermon about to start, we were invited to turn around and shake hands with people. turning around, i noticed a man behind me. he was sobbing, his hair shaggy and unkempt. he cried into his hands uncontrollably; i could not see his face. a woman in the row behind him kept her hand on his shoulder, comforting him.

we all sat into our seats and i could hear one of the ushers speaking to the man behind me. he said yes, i'm okay. it's been so many years since i've been in church. many years. the usher handed him a box of tissue, asked if he wanted to speak to someone. the man replied, i will talk to you after the service, i just need to sit here and be here now.

when the sermon was over, we sang a closing song, one that had lyrics about heart singing to God, a heart that cannot help but sing. i thought about how appropriate and fitting the lyrics were, how well it expressed where my heart was at not only that day, but where it was at over the last few months as well. i thought of the man behind me and wondered at his story: why he had left church and why he was back today, what it was that moved him to such deep tears. what had him so broken and hurting so deeply.

when i turned around, the man was looking up. he wasn't sobbing anymore, but obviously transfixed and moved. eyes and cheeks still wet. he stayed in his seat as everyone else cleared the aisles.

compelled, i turned to him and reached for his hand, grabbing his with both of my own, meeting his gaze intently. bless you for being here, i said. bless you.

he began to choke again, and the tears began to flow. you're so beautiful, he told me [said in a way that i knew it had nothing to do with my appearance]. your worship ... the way you worshipped ... so, so beautiful. and he began to weep freely again.

i have been set free of so many things, i replied.

i tightened my grip around his hands and let him be in that space, still and transfixed and in awe of the God who met him there: exactly as he was, in whatever brokenness he carried in his heart.

i wondered of all the places a hurting man could have seated himself that day in that great big church building, the most likely place would be in the corner at the back. but today he sat in a row toward the front and at the center, right behind where i was sitting. and part of how God met him and moved in him that day had something to do with the crazy dancing arm-waving girl in front of him, singing at the top of her lungs [and probably off-key half the time].

i thought back to the sermon i heard. how it struck me about what our pastor said about giving: giving back to God in an act of trust a portion of what He's given us. how God multiplies what we offer him, however small, oftentimes in ways we never see: loaves and fishes, and all that.

i thought of the worship i offered up this day, how i really didn't understand what had transpired in the heart of the man in the row behind me. but how i knew that God took what i gave him this morning and multiplied it. somehow it was offered as food to a soul hungry and starving.

kingdom math at work, multiplication that doesn't make sense on any human scale.

how blessed i was to see God meet him there. and it hit me: the worship he witnessed would not have been possible unless God had walked with me through the darkness of many prior months, met me in the thick of mystery, carried me through the fire, and met me on the other side in a place that was boundless, joyful, and completely free. how it would not have happened at all unless i invited Him, unless i let myself learn to trust Him in the dark.

it struck me that as blessed as i am to know the joy of being set free, none of it is for me. none of it. which i've always known, but the knowledge today came in the way of a human soul, real and raw in his need, tears and sobs and wet crumpled tissues.

beyond our journeys and our pain and our trials and the times where darkness presses in around us is God's intent that those things will serve a greater purpose. our lives are meant to bear testimony to the truth of God's faithfulness, of His crazy deep reckless raging love for us, of how that love can heal a broken soul, set a prisoner free, and give us unimaginable, uncontained joy.

i told christianne that having so fresh a memory of God meeting me in the darkness has given me the faith that He would do the same here, meet me in the dark and mysterious place that i walk through now. and today was added inspiration, fuel to invite Him to continue the work He's about in me, knowing that if my pain remains my own, if i don't allow God to redeem it, it is pointless.

but when i ask Him to come along, when i allow Him to meet me there, God will show up. brilliantly and unexpectedly. in the dark in hurting places within me and in the row behind me, in the dark and hurting places of another.

that thursday

I've been sitting here quietly, staring down those words she said, holding them at arm's length. I circle them suspiciously. I simultaneously dread them and long for them. I put them in my mouth, wanting both to spit them out and to ingest them. In truth, they scare me.

So here I am. Sitting across from the truth, holding the raw shredded heart tissue that found its way out of me that day. It had been in hiding so long, protected behind thick steel doors, secured with locks that had long been rusted over.

But now it is here in the light of day, demanding a reckoning. I hold it in my hands, and it's a terrible mess. It's pulpy and tattered and dripping. I can't put it back together. I can't bring any sense or semblance of meaning out of it. There's a reason it remained hidden for so long.

By now most of you have a sense of something happening for both Christianne and I on a day we've both come to call "that Thursday". On that Thursday we were together, we were both startled to the core. For completely different reasons, we saw separate truths emerge that had been hidden and stuffed within us, crammed into dusty corners of forgetting without any conscious knowledge on our parts that they were about to make themselves known.

Christianne has written about beginning the journey deeper into what God revealed to her that day; and now I am doing the same.

I don't want to go there.

Going there means revisiting old wounds, splitting open old scar tissue and permitting God to poke about my insides.

It means resurrecting the memories of relationships long past, bringing to the surface that which I had gagged, bound, weighted with lead, and made to drown. It means not merely being present for the autopsy, but wielding the knife that will open these dead things.

It means looking at the past fifteen years of my life and relationships through a microscope. It means identifying where and how the seedlings of lies were planted, watered, and permitted to grow.

It means putting my finger on sore oozing places and letting God do the same.

It means identifying the lies that have tangled their long, sinewy roots around and throughout my insides, roots that have firmly embedded themselves in my flesh. It means acknowledging that I have held on to them as much as they have held on to me. It means asking God to pull these out by the roots.

It will mean learning to believe the truth.

The truth: the truth of those words that she prayed over me. The words that I keep at a distance, staring them down and eyeing surreptitiously. The words that I walk circles around to examine from every angle, looking for leaks, cracks, flaws, exceptions. Words that are foreign to my heart, that feel like rocks in my mouth. These words I must learn to believe.

And so I fear what is being asked of me: of being called again to walk a path that is dark, where my feet are the only ones that can do the walking.

loving god is like ...

Tidal

I grew up on the ocean,
so the ocean did not hold the same romance
for me as it did for, say

a farmer's daughter in Iowa who grew up
playing hide and seek in rows of corn,
or someone who had always lived in

and never left the big city
skyscraperssmogandtrafficjams.
At age nine, I knew the ocean

as what tossed me
in a little boat in forty knot winds
like a beach ball; I sweated

and my tiny white body trembled
as I clutched the handles of a soup pot
for just in case I should vomit.

I know that a wind coming off the ocean
can blow right through you,
move clean through the pores of your skin

on one side, go through your body
and exit through the pores on the other side,
that there is not always

sandy beaches good for hand-holding, that sometimes
there is just the black ogre rocks
barnacles and limpets cling to,

good for scraping knees and elbow on.
I know the ocean smell and feel--
the sticky-salty damp and cleanness,

the sand underneath your feet evaporating
as waves crowd in ripples around your ankles
and pull it away. The breaths you breathe are deeper

when you're there. This same ocean
has turned us over in boats and swallowed us
ever since there have been boats and people to swallow.

I remember first hearing about
my Scandinavian heritage and taking pride
in the fact that my ancestry

was made up of explorers:
people of wanderlust and restlessness
who would spend months at a time

out of the sight of land,
no longer in love with what was tame.
The people I came from lived

on the ocean, and I still like to think about
how their bodies produced children
and their children had children

who made more children, and so on
until me, who would not have been made
unless men and women who lived

on the ocean (and in between times
on land) had continued in the making
that also made them. I like to think

that had they not slept on the swells and tides,
their bodies not learned to roll with a sometimes savage motion--
had they not allowed the wind to cut through them

I would not be me: I could not say this
and I would be docile as a nun, content
with what had already been leashed and tamed.

I would not lust for the ocean
which I know can swallow me whole.

kirsten, 1999