Come and hear, all who fear God,

And I will tell of what He has done for my soul...

But certainly God has heard;

He has given heed to the voice of my prayer.

Blessed be God,

Who has not turned away my prayer

Nor His lovingkindness from me.

Psalm 66:16, 21-22

This life is one of waiting, standing in the tension of the already-but-not-yet, but there are moments when God releases us from some forms of the waiting. For two years I have been waiting for God to give me some direction and give me some tangible target to pursue. I have not reached the target, but God has graciously given me a sphere to shoot at to start moving in the right direction. If you know me you know that I am painfully slow at making decisions, seeking to glimpse every possible angle and then some before I consider dipping my toe in the shallow end. But despite so much "new" being thrown in my direction the past few months, God has given me incredible clarity with my "yes"s and "no"s. Along with this has come a confidence of God's presence in the process--without that reassurance I would probably despair of any progress at all. 

I am thankful for these seasons where it becomes undeniable that His promises are true and His loving care and sovereignty are present. Clearly He loves me. Clearly He has heard my prayers. Clearly He loves me as the good Father and Shepherd that He is. I think these are seasons when God calls us to worship Him, write them down to remember them, and share them with others so that they may be encouraged. 

So much of life is full of fog. But Jesus is alive, my friend. And He has ears that hear and a hand full of power to tenderly and meticulously guide you along the path He's paved for you. You are not a forgotten sheep. He does not tell you to wait in vain. 

Being Led by the Shepherd

The Lord is my shepherd to feed, guide, and shield me,

I shall not want.

Your rod to protect and Your staff to guide, they comfort me.

Ever since graduation, I have convinced myself that because God's will is for my sanctification, and because that so often translates into suffering and dying to self, I must prepare myself for a career in something I don't like. It has been a battle to resist running to what is available and seen as least risky. And those options have a kind of holy sheen to them--after all, we want to be faithful servants, and being one does not always look romantic. But somewhere in the midst of this sorting through the will of God I have found myself believing that God intends to serve me a banquet of crumbs. He tells me it is good for me, so I subject myself to scooping up the dry morsels.

I believe I have missed something in this. Sometimes He tells us to drink a bitter cup, to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but there must be some good in the wanting and gifting He's placed in me. If the talents He's given to me are really from Him, then I must seek out where and how to use them. Some of the gifts He's given to me have been expressed here and there, but I'm coming under the impression that He wants me to be more generous with them. I have fearfully held them and kept them mostly to myself, self-protecting myself from any failures by only letting them air out when the stakes are low. But I have begun to sense Him prompting me out of this place that feels undangerous and a little less insane. This movement feels a lot more like faith than a naive God-is-my-genie kind of movement. It feels more like holding the hand of my Father so I can be who He has made me to be.

 I do not trust myself in this, and like everyone else, I do not know what I am doing. My story is not so different from every other Christian's story. I do not have anything new to say--I can only say everything that's been said before, because there is much that has been said that we need to hear again and again. Some is new to us. Some are made new by old words. I will gladly join the choir of the ages, singing the same old hymn being sung with millions of tongues in a million ways, centered around the One who we will never tire talking about. Those are the words worth speaking.

   
 When it comes to dating, I can be something of a fearful cynic. I feel I must cushion my heart in case I will be greatly disappointed. Somehow I have expected that it is very likely that however much I like a man at the outset, it may very well turn out to be a show--that somehow, underneath, I will find thin roots. Perhaps it is influenced by the man-shaming preached from some pulpits, or from that horrible cultural idea that dehumanizes men by saying they only ever want "one thing". I can only imagine the heavy load this places upon men. It surely places a different kind of a load upon single women.

Despite all of this, there is a part of me that sustains hope. Surely every man is just as much a sinner as I am. But surely, too, there is a man oozing with the fruit of grace. Surely there are men who bear some fruit that dangles within eye-sight, but bear a greater number hidden beneath. Men who believe Jesus when he said the Father who sees what is done in secret will reward them. Men who bear the girth of their character like an iceberg. They may not feel they have anything to show, but for those allowed to enter in, they find the fingerprints of Christ covered all over the place. 

I'm praying for an "iceberg man". But then, I also am praying to be an "iceberg woman". 

By God's grace, may it be so.

     I think it is only human to want to sign dotted lines and put rings on fingers. I think it is only human to want to join lives with others for something of a long haul. In a world that largely keeps friends for entertainment or a felt need's sake, the turnover rate is high. The voices of career, adventure, and wanderlust are nearly irresistible to my generation. Much--sometimes rightly--is sacrificed in following these voices. Some things must be left behind if others are to be picked up. Some things must be lost if others are to be gained. 

There is something in the twenty-something narrative that suggests recent graduates go on a kind of wild, responsibility-free romp across the earth. Or at least we are encouraged with words like "Go do that now...while you are young. Go there now...while you can. Experience new things and take risks...before you are tied down with a spouse and children." Are our remaining years of youth to be spent building castles in the sand? If we tie ourselves to nothing, will we sow anything worth reaping?

When you are a child, life feels like an eternity. Changes come and go, but you have not noticed the bitter aftertaste of the transient lingering in your mouth. With age you begin to see Death and the breaking down of things becomes more clear. Slowly, the myth of an unbreakable world shatters. At some point, after being a mere spectator, you become the one being broken down--and everything around you follows the pattern. Earth feels less and less like the Eden you expected it to be, and the Heaven you expected to find merely flickers through moments.

Things fall apart. Life is full of things that feel solid but melt beneath our touch. But there are some things that stand unchanged. 

There are some seeds that grow into oaks. 

While we live in this age, we cannot escape the decay. But we can throw our energy, our time, our love, and our lives into Things unfading. We spend ourselves in hope of a harvest. 

We must touch a place on earth with a name on it. We do live in tents, but we must stake them among neighbors. We must know the names of the lost, and we must share bread and wine with a family in Covenant. 

There is a kind of joy in having a land to tend. There is a kind of joy in setting aside the romance of alternatives and committing yourself to the few right down your street. 
To know your place and dwell in it. 
To look into faces, studying their griefs and joys, and casting your net for the Good of them. 

And we will love without interruption

fearless of thorn, serpent, and pain

for the One who loved us first

will help us love without end

He was still young enough to believe in his strength.

                                                                      --Wendell Berry

The theme of weakness has been on my mind for the past month. My knee jerk reaction has been to run--if I am weak, failure and disappointment are sure to follow, so areas of exposed weakness have been fearfully avoided. But the Lord has been prompting me with this:

"Don't resist weakness." 

 Don't resist the strain of shifting all of your weight upon Another. Don't flee when you don't know what to do. Don't pack up when a Sunday School answer won't suffice, or when you find shadows in every shaft of light. Where others find silver-linings, my senses have become tuned to the bitter dredges found inside every toasting cup. The Kingdom is yet to come. Every moment groans with the wait.

In the meantime, we stand by His grace, trusting that His strength will be perfected there. It will come in when we are desperate, devoid of both halo and cape. It will come when we need it. And when our felt weakness stems from noticing a limp hand of faith, we can direct our gaze upon the Object and Source of our faith. We do not put our faith in faith--we put our faith in Christ.

Drawn Out of Isolation

I have been reading Proverbs over and over, and there are some verses that strike me each time around. One of them is Proverbs 18:1 "He who separates himself seeks his own desire, he quarrels against all sound wisdom". The Spirit has been using this verse to illuminate that I do this. I am guilty of self-isolation. I am guilty of hiding away from others.

"Community" is something of a buzzword in Christian culture right now, but the tangible implications of what that looks like doing and what that looks like giving up are still being worked out in me. I'm still growing into it, watching my limbs fill in the crevices and pushing my arms through sleeves. I'm a strong idealist and I revel in what that looks like, but I'm still in the present process of translating what obedience means at the eye-level of life. 

I have come to realize that I face many temptations to "separate myself" as an introvert. There is both a selfish temptation to hoard the things I have been given to steward and a fearful temptation to self-protect by failing to make myself known. As a single, it is easy to settle with focusing on whether my own "needs" are being "met", looking no further than the demands of the daily grind. The hoarding is a bit of keeping my life "neat" for myself in an effort to minimize dissonance and discomfort. But this bothers me. It bothers me that I am content with keeping up with work, paying bills, and having some fun here and there. Joy breaks into a boil when I recognize that I can exchange fleeting things in for eternal things. 

The self-protection is a little bit more subtle. It is possible to be "around" your church and fail to be in community. It is possible to be with your church for every meeting and still live unknown. I think we all want others to pursue us, for others to find questions that get to our deepest core. But there is a prideful and fearful kind of isolation that refuses to come outside unless they are pursued with extraordinary persistence and uncanny intuition. It is prideful because I think that I am so "special" that someone should be willing to go to such great lengths to draw me out. It is fear driven because I fear rejection from anyone who didn't prove their acceptance by pursuing me. It bothers me that I use more effort to preserve myself instead of allowing my soul to be revealed. It's only in that place that I can receive counsel and instruction, enjoy fellowship, and comfort others with the Comfort I've received where I've needed it most. It's only there that I can serve others and be served, living as one who is not simply a redeemed individual, but one who is a part of a redeemed people.

It is not good for man to be alone. I am so grateful that being a part of the church means that I don't have to be.