like a homeless child in a strange city

When I was 15, I gave myself a tattoo. I scorched a needle with a lighter and dipped it into my brother's "borrowed" bottle of India ink and marked myself with my first love's initials. Recklessly and with full abandon, I made a poor choice. Isn't that usually the way? These days I find myself contemplating a new one, something suitable to cover my mistake. I'd rather not have made it, like so many others, so many worse. 

Sometimes I wonder how we can look at people in the midst of their mistakes and judge them for it. Somehow their poor life choices or attitudes suddenly become the basis by which we decide just how much sympathy they are worth and how much kindness we will offer.  Sadly, we withhold the very love that God offers so freely to us all in our brokenness. He aches over them and mourns for their return to safety, return to Him. He grieves their loss while we condemn them. How long ago was it that we ourselves perfected our own behavior? For whom has Christ come, the righteous or the sinners?

Underneath the blinding brightness that covers our sins is a righteousness of filthy rags yet we would pretend to be more than our brothers lost yet in their suffering. Why would we not extend the hand of mercy when we know how similar we are and realize that we walk with our best friend while they stumble alone? 

God alone knows how many more failures it will take before they choose to walk with Him. It may be tomorrow. It may be the end of their life. Perhaps, I shudder to think, it may not come at all and the frivolous pleasures of this life are all the joy they will ever know. How devastating! Does that not feed our compassion and assuage our fire for judgement?

In all our church attendance, all our serving, all our pleas for our own guidance, knowledge, healing, growth, in all our sacrifice how can we harden our hearts to the very ones God has called us to love? How many times should we forgive our brother? Often the ones we judge most harshly sit right beside us in the pews. If someone hits us in the face, the Bible says to let them have another go. So how can we who call ourselves His, look with such disdain on those who are only hurting themselves far worse than anything they could possibly do to us?

Matthew 9:12-13 “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Just because our sins without Christ were committed years ago and now we sin with the knowledge that He makes us clean, does that permit us to abuse those who are currently sinful and alone? I have done so much wrong I could NEVER atone for my own mistakes so why would I expect anyone else to be able to do that for themselves? I am so thankful to be a new person and my heart is so broken for those who haven't made it yet that I feel no anger at their position but pity, instead.

I imagine I can grow closer to God, more favored, by sacrificing my life and deeds to Him. I used to think that because I was His and chose His ways, wore myself out doing good deeds in His name, He would love me more but now I see I was wrong. Just as a mother, whose son is in jail, has lost no love for her child but is full of anger and pain and longing for his future, so too is the Father for His lost children and so too should we be for our wayward brothers and sisters. 

I have decided to cover my past ink laden mistake with one simple word: Mercy. Then I will always be reminded to offer that above my sacrifice, to everyone. I cannot atone for my own sins with my actions, however changed, improved they may be. Neither can the currently lost find redemption by cleaning up and playing church. It is God given and we are all as worthy, the currently saved, as those who do not yet walk with Him or those who are falling away. The only difference is, we have found our true love, our best friend, our home, while they flounder alone like a homeless child in a strange city and we throw rocks.......

End the Bout and Retire

I lost myself. Somewhere in the giving of my body to pregnancy, every dream to the desires of my husband, every second to the needs of my children, and the stray moments of cultivating a life of philanthropy, I feel I've nearly ceased to exist.

I've read one book in 3 years. One book for sheer pleasure, not spiritual devotion, not education, not children's tales. I miss reading. 

I miss quiet, thoughtless moments. Even in the few hours after the kids have gone to sleep my head is full of this barrage of planning, criticizing, questioning, agonizing, processing, frustrating. Even letting it go, whatever the IT may be, is like diving into a dog fight and wresting one animal from another.

I have FOUGHT a momentous battle in myself. I KNOW "we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." (2 Cor 10:3-5) I fight against my OWN mind. 

I KNOW "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it" (Matthew 16:24-25) But I have not done it willingly and, at times, have even been bitter over such a calling. "Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver." (2 Cor 9:7)

The Bible tells me He will give me peace, that His burden is light. Mine is VERY heavy, but I don't know how to put it down. It seems a great mental effort to let a thing go and even then it is truly not released for it springs again to my mind, later, and later, and again. I want to hold on to my books, my crafts, my dreams, my plans, my desires but the time for those things is consumed by the needs of those around me. 

The world would advise "me" time. I know it's NEVER enough. I have taken such time and am even more loath to return to my duties then I was before I lavished an hour or two on my own indulgences. Nowhere, that I have found, is this encouraged in the Bible. To be honest I find no respite in it either, there's a constant pulling toward duty that keeps me from enjoying it.

I feel I give almost my all to everyone. I have a few expectations. I have recently been emotionally shattered and, I feel, financially cheated. I am told, it seems, by people that expectations deserve such demise, as though I am at fault for believing people should be more thoughtful. In any case, I am advised to "pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back." (Luke 6:28-30)

I have carried, drug, wrestled, and been defeated by a gaping hole called UNFULFILLED my whole life, not without warrant, mind you, but even the most easy, stable, and perfectly functional life has its pitfalls. Though it be a large thing that trip me and a small slight that trip you, we are both on our face in the dirt. The point is, I want to detach myself from my emotions and lose myself to others with no regard how they treat me. I want to do what I should DESPITE them all and devoid of bitterness. I want to call the constant boxing match between my duties and desires in favor of obligations, end the bout, and retire. 

Somehow I think when Jesus said, "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." (John 15:13) he wasn't only foreshadowing His death and speaking of diving in front of a bullet. He was telling us to forgo ourselves, our personality, desires, longings, loves, sometimes even dreams, for the sake of everyone else and especially God. How do I get THERE?

Beat the human out....

As usual, I have been struggling a LOT. When the Bible describes us travailing in birth pains until our son ship is manifest (Romans 8:22). I know EXACTLY what that means. It seems the fruit of the spirit does not come easily to me at all. I am rebellious, sadly. I buck everything and when I KNOW I should think, feel, act differently than I do, the wrestling match begins. I have to beat the, well, human, out of myself. It doesn't go peaceably.

Raising children is an insurmountable task for me.  I need to be more than I am so that I can teach them the proper things. I don't want them to struggle with the same issues spiritually. Believing, as I do, that God is true and He deserves praise, worship, loyalty, and love from every living thing, it is then my duty to help them along this path so they achieve more in it than I ever could. It is my goal to be their ladder, or really to let Christ work through me so that He is their ladder. This means that I cannot do what I want. I am in doubt. I do not know how to be more than I am. I do not have a childhood bank of object lessons from which to pull. So I pray because God must show me how to be the right parent, how to attain and exude His glory, not my own.

I struggle with contentment, envy, and, as I mentioned, authority. Knowing God and that His will is the same as my own in conquering these foes for Him I trust my prayers will be answered and my enemies put under my feet, not without diligence and sacrifice on my part. I have been asking how to be content for quite a while. I want to be a Godly wife, not just a good one. That's hard. It's self-sacrificing. It means I come last.

So while the kids were down for a nap and I wanted to watch tv, I found myself griping about wasting those precious and limited minutes loading the washer and the wood stove and putting on dinner instead. And suddenly as well as finally, He spoke to me. I was carrying a armload of wood to the fire stoking my own flames of neglected desire in the process and suddenly the thought was whispered, "Be thankful for this wood." 

That rough, heavy, daily chore became a blessing. I am warm. I am able bodied. The loading and starting of the washer, no longer a chore. I am not huddled in a doorway with too few clothes shivering my life away with no hope of help or love or kindness. But some are.

I know we know this. At odd times in driving or praying or eating or teaching our kids we say, "Kids in Africa would be glad for this." Truth be told there are people in your very town that would, too. But then we forget. We get mad about lines at school, about policies at work, about the dishes, the laundry, the never-ending honey-do list. These chores MUST be accomplished, most daily. God, help me, help us all, always see them as the blessing they are and forget instead to be frustrated.

As I was heading up from the basement where the wood stove and washer are to put on supper, Mathew 13:12 came to me: "Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him." I don't think I really ever understood this verse before now. In a spiritual light my peace and joy stand to be taken and my gifts in life will become a burden. If I can be thankful for my duties and in them find blessing, I will have joy added to my action but if I hold on to the frustration, the task becomes arduous and all goodness is then taken from it.

one poorly handled tantrum at a time

Today as I was losing my cool with the kids I started all that poisonous mental talk. You know the kind: Why am I always stuck here with all these responsibilities?  Why can’t they just do what I say? Why so many messes. Oh poor pitiful me.

I realized suddenly that I have been calling my blessings a curse and utterly shirking my responsibilities.  I fancy myself a warrior, built for battle, standing up for the side of right.  But honestly when it comes to the actual battles in life I cowardly run away, refuse to deal with the issue, or throw a tantrum in my mind that would rival the ones for which my children are sent to their rooms.

Instead of dealing with the dishes, I check Facebook. Instead of folding the laundry, I clean the relatively clean bathroom. All the while this bickering is running tickertape fashion through my mind.  It’s no wonder there is so much harshness escaping my mouth, so much yelling.  It’s no wonder I feel so angry.

I have been called to fill the most beautiful heads with Truth, with example, with love and in explicit selfishness I choose my coffee, my television shows, my time.  My time I deem better spent entertained and self served rather than an example of patience, honesty, diligence, sacrifice and forethought.  It is often discussed in circles of wizened empty nest mothers how they long for the youth of their children whose hands are no longer the size we inexplicably feel the need to replicate in every medium possible.  Here I am wishing my babies’ childhood away one poorly handled tantrum at a time.  And really many of their tantrums are my fault.  It’s their last resort after my attention and negative is better than none.

I am a fixer. Every scraped knee, lost job, or passing sorrow sparks an immediate flood of solutions on righting the tilted ship. I do not wallow in seeking out the how-did-this-happen except to remember what future pothole to avoid.  I want to know how to make it right.  In my most vulnerable of moments, after the screaming stops and everyone settles back into themselves, like birds suddenly startled ruffle each feather back in place on the safest branch they can find, I am shamed and I ask my husband to fix me.  Give me that one piece of advice that will change how I think, change who I am, because in my head I know I don’t want to be this furious and malcontent person.  I don’t want to be the tyrannical dictator ruthlessly exacting my demands on all my lowly subjects – or family, rather.

As ineffectual and perhaps insane as it may sound I need to learn to be my own contender.  I have to stand up to me.  For every negative viewpoint I must counter myself with the positive until good thoughts beat the poor ones out of my head enough times they just stop coming around.  For every self debasing lie I must remind myself who I am, who God says I am. I must meet the challenges He sets before me and fill the role for which I’ve been created with warrior-like stoicism.  

Everything takes practice and this mind renewal is no exception.  My kids deserve better. My husband deserves better. I deserve better but what’s more God deserves everything I have to give.  This race, like any other, must be run for the right reason and the finish line should be reached panting and spent with every selfish desire pushed aside and pain ignored until my goal has been achieved.  First though, my goal must change.  Instead of coffee or rest or computer time, instead of friendships or crafting or gardening, instead of ME, my goal must be HIM and showing them who He is and how to house Him because that’s what we were made to be: temples, brides, and friends – of God.

Beyond this mortality

I've lately been struggling with a loneliness that steeps everyone in my life in poor taste.  Somehow my friends aren't really friends. My family doesn't really care.  No one sees me for who I am but only for what I can give or do for them. Suddenly, I found myself going down the list of people in my life and checking off the ways in which they've failed me.  I was making my emotional weakness their fault instead of taking responsibility for my own selfish cravings.


Obviously none of these perceptions about others are true but the emptiness and longing they create feels real. Now, before any of you truly awesome and supportive friends read this and start offering up your lovely words of encouragement and ego-stroking kindness, I want you to know that I don't want any of that. My purpose in writing this isn't for my own encouragement but for that of others out there that I know need to see that they are not alone.


Then suddenly (as He often does) God shook my conscience a bit and said, "Now you know how I feel." What?! How could the King of Kings, Creator of the universe relate to my petty misgivings? And it dawned on me that the whole point in the creation of man was for a companion.  Evidently there was a loneliness that existed before we were made.

God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong ( 1 Cor 1:27). We feel stupid talking out loud to the air or believing that a love from someone who has no arms to hug you or lips to kiss you can be more satisfying than the faulty and often selfish love from another person. But we aren't talking to the air, not if we truly believe in God and His methods are higher than ours. I asked God to increase our relationship more by being more physically tangible and He refuted that I need to make our relationship stronger by learning to be more spiritual because He is spirit. We want God to operate more in the manner of touch and sound because with that we are more familiar but He is ever calling us for higher purposes, for a life in, but much further beyond this mortality.  He offers a real healing, a true cure, while we often seek only an aspirin to mask the symptoms.

I truly believe that in ALL things (even the most horrid) God works for the good of those who love him and seek His purpose (Romans 8:28). So I found that He was using one of my most despondent moments to teach me to lean on Him.  You see He knows you the way you want some human in life to know you. He loves you more than your spouse, your friends, your parents love you. He will not fail you like people can. God uses all of our pains to beckon us toward His outstretched arms. Our longing for earthly recognition, for human acclaim, comes from a dark place but our deep and tender desire for companionship is not only mirrored by but also only truly fulfilled by the Almighty.

My happy is ecstatic

I am full of passion. My happy is ecstatic. My sad is heartbroken. My anger is flammable. I am painted brilliant colors with the sun reflecting blindingly off of them.

I often feel like a bull in a china shop, as if everything I say and do runs someone over. I feel forceful. I feel strong. I feel like a gust of wind when most everyone else is a dandelion seed.  I get the impression people as a whole would rather we all be subdued, tranquilized, if you will. They seem to say quite often, "Calm down." So I hear, "Lie down, wild horse. Lie down among the teacups and Fabergé eggs.  This is OUR home now and you must be - complacent. Have a pill. It'll help you..... conform."

I feel that in their wide stares and silence at my exclamations of elation or outrage or fervent disappointment.  I feel it most when I am dead wrong and no one will stand  up and point out that my whirlwind is headed in the wrong direction. I know it in the fact that I have often been diagnosed as bipolar, ADHD, and depressed by sidewalk psychiatrists. Any child who jumps and runs and climbs and sings while some adult is explaining for the fifty thousandth time the importance of constant sssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh and sit still is force fed sedation.

I want to run headlong into the outdoors and yell with my head turned back to where everyone is mindlessly milling, "Look, look! Do you see this green grass? Do you feel this wind and the sun on your skin? Do you feel ALIVE?!!? I want to smash their stupid smartphones down and say, "Hey! Did you notice the trash in the gutter, the old lady struggling with her grocery bags, the people with their bruises? Don't you want to DO something?!"  How can we spend hours fighting gameboy zombies and screaming encouragement at teams that can't hear us while all the while deeming it too tedious to fight life's REAL atrocities like champions? I am AGHAST. I am shaking with incredulity.  Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhh. (I seriously did say that Argh just now but quietly because the kids are sleeping.)

I feel like life MATTERS. People MATTER. Ideas and behaviors and how we treat each other makes astounding difference. We paint our world and the lives of others with the words that come out of our mouths and the motions we make with these God-given, flappable, flailable, wrappable, squeezable, jumpable, flingable, loveable limbs. I feel like I DO have something to prove and I get the overwhelming urge to run up and shake people and yell, "LIVE! There is only one of these lives and it MATTERS what you do with it! Don't you know that?" Don't you?

into the trenches of wars that aren't ours

I wanted to give you all something lovely and encouraging for Thanksgiving but time and again, the words were not there.  In their place swirled a thousand thoughts, a relentless barrage of melancholy. I could not shake it so I will share it.

Countless times I've heard people say, "It looks like you have it all together." "It looks like you can handle it by yourself." "It looks like you don't need any help." "You are where I want to be." You need to know that it looks that way because my smile is set when you peer through the window of my life for a brief moment.  You don't see the suffering because I carry it inside.  I have all the patience in the world with my flailing, sprinting, climbing children because I have lost it enough times to feel guilty and had to reason out the appropriate punishment and the times when I have to concede to their youthful vigor.

I am reminded that I have seen worse, but I am not without my breakdowns. I have cried for so long that there were only tearless, breathless sobs left, that my eyes were all but swollen shut and had a vicious headache from the racking emotional trauma.  I have watched the people I love most whither away.  You do not see the inner toil of every day because I do not broadcast it on social networks or rush to tell when people ask how I am. Mostly, people don't care anyway and even if they do, a brief hug and a little chat doesn't fill the emotional pantry when you've been starving all your life.  My biggest turmoils now are for those who are where I was or those whose souls are so far lost I don't know how to begin to speak to them about God.

Most people don't actually want to "touch" the problems of others. They want to offer an encouraging word, some scripture, and get on with their day feeling thankful that they don't have those problems or superior that they don't make such stupid choices.  This reality is my nemesis.  We are supposed to cover one another, to stand between them and their attacker, whatever that may be. To do so means to put yourself in harm's way. It means you willingly give up your comfort for theirs, even if they don't deserve it.  Your heart is broken because theirs is.  All too often we smile and hug and say, "If there's anything I can do...." and then wait for the person in need to ask for something tangible. 

If you really know what it is to need, you know that isn't how it goes.  We have to get to know people and then surprise them.  Discover their troubles like Shurlock Holmes (because they won't tell you) and then toss off our warm blankets, give up our full bellies, miss the events we wanted to go to, and dive into the trenches of wars that aren't ours.  We have to suffer our secure hearts to hurt with those that hurt and guess what, it bloody well hurts - a lot. 

Mostly, it hurts because even in your suffering with them, you can't fix it.  You can't take their addiction or make them feel worth something. You can't promise them health or financial ease.  You can't piece together a broken marriage, a broken person, a shattered hope.  You can't guarantee the people will ever change. You can't throw material things at what most often turns out to be an emotional hole and hope to fill it in. All the hugs in the world won't bring back someones baby or rewrite someones horrid childhood or amend the scars of someones misdeeds.

A meal, a smile, a friendly talk, clothes, cars, toys, a ride to the store won't fix the major problems but we need to give all that and, most importantly, we need to give it consistently.  Ultimately, the problem is loneliness.  Our consistency tells someone we really do care, every time, not just when it's convenient for us. We are willing to wrestle internally with our own opinions and offer love and encouragement instead of stern advice and self-righteousness. The reality is only God can heal their suffering, and we need to be there to remind people, even when we doubt that sometimes. 

We wonder why such a powerful, loving Creator allows things to happen.  We cry, we scream, we rant, we feel depressed and then we must remind ourselves that our emotions are lying to us.  The truth of the Bible says that He is always with us, always loves us.  He is the only one who knows our beauty the way we want the world to appreciate us, after all we are wonderfully and fearfully made, each of us, by His hands. He hurts as much, even more, than we hurt when we are falling to pieces.  He knows us and our needs even better than we do and he doesn't give us more than we can handle, even when we are eye-swollen, chest-crushed downtrodden.

So why doesn't He just fix it?  I don't know. I wail out the same question time and again.  I rant and rave at Him when I am mad at being broken because He knows I am and there's no use hiding it. I know full well that the deficiency is in me and not my perfect Creator. All I know is He knows what we need to accomplish His purposes in our lives. The rub comes when we'd rather our purposes prevail. 

We'd rather stuff our face with popcorn and sit at home watching a movie as soon as we get off work than take the risk of letting the girl who just missed the bus into our car, near our purse, with our kids. We refuse to forgo the few moments of peace we planned for ourselves that day to take her to her drug dealer's house (because that's where she was going anyway) and impart a few words of hope, of truth, a lack of judgement and scorn along the way.  She may have clothing on, a healthy physique, and a pocket full of money (intended to provide the only escape for a tortuous internal struggle that is her only reliable companion rather than her electric bill) but her need is greater than ours and we can take a few minutes to offer, without pressure or disdain, a greater hope.  We can offer her our heart broken for her trouble.

In the end, I still have problems. I still feel lost, alone, burned alive in anger, and have breakdowns but in retrospect they are nothing compared to what I've known, which is why I seem to have it all together.  Besides, I have a true companion, though I need to be reminded sometimes.  My true struggle is how to know where to help, how to offer someone the stability I have, how to ensure my life is not pointless, how to make them see the one true God has given them a comforter, a counselor, a hope that can succeed even when everything else falls apart, a hope that returns when you've lost it all and this is a problem that never goes away and never stops hurting.