Like Him

I went to see my niece this past week. Just for a little while, and I brought along a pink chair for her. Giving is becoming one of my favorite things. I think it is a quality that became more prevalent + apparent in me when I became an aunt. I love it.

We had some hard discussions and lively debates while I visited my family and friends and held that little baby I adore. I was teary-eyed for an entire night, and I promise you, you would have been afraid of the way I sobbed and prayed in the car on the drive back. I was a mess. I even had to stop and buy red gladiolus because I knew I wouldn't make it home so heartbroken without flowers.
I never really loved people. I was never really compassionate.
But these days God has been ever so subtly + tenderly showing me that I am becoming more so. I am learning to love people. It was so evident to me as I wept over the depravity of the human mind and how inconsequential we make such heart-wrenching things to be.
We are such wretched creatures.

Can I confess to you now? Please let me.

My greatest fear at the moment, is that someone—anyone—I know will die without Jesus. And they will do it on purpose. They will slap His hand away.

I am terrified of that.
Because this is the sweetest + most gorgeous thing that ever happened to me. This is bliss. This is a silver lining. This is joy. This is true redemption. This is forgiveness.
Knowing Jesus is heaven on earth, and quite literally.
I cannot imagine how the brief things of this life can compare to the eternal promises that my carpenter has made to me. And I don't understand. I really don't. I tried so very hard as I prayed for hours about it yesterday. But the truth of the matter is, I will never 'get it.' I will never see it any other way. Because I've tasted Him + His promises. I've seen His work and His blessings. I've felt His presence. And nothing even comes close.
Everything else is dirt.

I just want to give everyone what I have. I whispered that in a choked voice as I drove yesterday. And I really do. I really do want to give people what I have. What I have is beautiful. What I have is eternity in a handful. What I have is light and light and light. What I have is never-ending + ever-present.
What I have is a Savior.
That is perhaps the most beautiful thing about Christianity. You are saved. Rescued. Cherished. Loved. Freed. Liberated. You had a gun to your head, pressed cold and hard and with steady hands, deserving of it too, and then He was there. He stepped forward and knelt down in front of you and placed the barrel against his own temple and then he pulled the trigger. He saved you. He spared you. He forgave you.

He already took the bullet for you.

The greatest giver is the Christ. Let me be more like Him.

I am working on some small things, letters actually, and I hope to share them with you soon. But it is because of how God is delicately and persistently capturing my heart daily that I feel the need to share with you some of my thoughts before I can put them in the form I really wish them to be in.  In other words, I'm impatient, so please be longsuffering if my posts these days are erratic + incoherent. My mind is a mess. And you will have something that flows and is beautiful and substantial soon. Cross my heart.

Ce n'est pas facile

There's this part in Micah, chapter four + right at the beginning, that honestly struck me so hard this morning I was breathless. It says:

1But in the last days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and people shall flow unto it.

And maybe it's figurative language, or maybe it's just prophecy, but that picture it puts in my head is something else. A mountain on top of the mountains. There are hills outside my window. They're blue because it's still morning, and they are so tall. So looming. So overshadowing. When I look out at those hills and imagine God's mountain of a house on top of the mountains, I just have to stop. I have a good imagination, but not that good.
Can you see it?
Because after I stopped + my breath caught in my throat and tickled the back of it there, I did. I saw it. In my own way.
And it was like nothing I ever could have come up with.

...

These days God has been so gracious to me. They are full of a new + blossoming friendship, peach colored carnations, plums, and tea every morning. But they are also full of change + decisions.
I am changing. I am realizing that a little more each day. I have always had a very judgmental spirit inside of me; I'm not too big of a person to admit that. In fact, when it comes down to it, I'm quite a little person. And so I have judged, and I judge, and I will judge. Sometimes that is alright, but I think I do it in a harsher manner than most. I have such very high expectations, of myself + everyone else on the planet, that sometimes I forget grace and compassion and mercy and love.

When I left my old church, it took me two years to change who I was. To strip off the old self + die, and to become the new one. The new me. The ever-changing, incessantly growing me. And with her came new ideals and revelations and expectations.
I see now that I've let bitterness take root in my bones and grow as one with the marrow. I've let it bloom in the sinews of my muscles. The worst part is though, I think I planted it there myself.
I have had this never-ending nagging in the back of my head for more than six months over something my Pastor said, and I can't shake it. I really can't brush it off my shoulders. And it is so very heavy. It is one of the heaviest weights I've ever carried.
It was only one sentence, one thing he said.

I promise that I am trying really, very hard to live like I agree with him. Because he was right. What he said was right.

I want to be able to look at people and say, I know this can work. I know you can do it right. I know you can make it happen. But I can't yet. And it's because of that bitterness. It's because I haven't seen it done right. It's because I have battle scars that I still try to hide.
There are so many wrong ways to worship God. 
There are so many right ways too though.
I don't have it all figured out. I don't know everything. I just know what the Bible says and what God has shown me. So I just want you to know, I am trying very hard not to judge you. But I am weighing the consequences of the choices you + I make as well, and if I ever feel that what you do will injure your's or my relationship with the carpenter, with the sweet Savior, then I will tell you so.
I promise you that.

He will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.

That phrase from Deuteronomy is on the palm of my hand this morning. I love it most right now. Because I am so uncompassionate + confused at times, and it is only because He stays with me that I can continue on.

...

No one ever said Christianity was easy.
And if they did, they're lying.

Diving.

On Sunday, an elder prayed for me and my family. We stood in the hot grass in front of the lake and wrapped our arms around each other and he prayed. He prayed something about waking up with eternity written on our eyelids, but what struck me the hardest was when he prayed for me.
That I would go deeper.
I stood there for a second when he said it, my breath caught in my throat as I barely mouthed the word after he said it. Deeper, I whispered. And then I said it again, just to reassure me.

Deeper.

There was a time when that word meant nothing to me. I had no experience with it. It was useless. I was as deep as I could go. At least I thought I was. Depth was a foreign concept to me. Little did I know then, I had only scraped the surface of my carpenter + His grace. There would come a time later in my life when I would suddenly pry my fingers from my face and look and see and then actually dive. Because all that time I had been treading water, and I thought I was standing.
Sometimes the earth we feel underneath our feet isn't really there.

On Sunday, I loved hearing someone pray those words over me, but better yet, I loved more that they meant something to me. I got excited, tears creeping out of the corners of my eyes and sweat making my hair stick to the back of my neck and the sun, the ever insistent sun beating down. The beauty in that prayer was not that someone else prayed for me to go deeper. The beauty was that I knew I could, that I wanted to, that I was capable.
I can go deeper, I said to myself as I went back after he had finished and I sat on a hardwood picnic table that poked splinters into my thighs.

I can go deeper, I said it this morning too.
Because I believe it. I know it.

U P

Yesterday I laid in my yard and looked up. I should have been painting, but I couldn't help myself.
My favorite thing about waking up at five in the morning to go to school when I did, was the sky. I don't know if you've ever seen peach and rose pink clouds rimmed with the tiniest morning blue possible and settled along a lavender sky, but I have.
For a few days out of my childhood, I wanted to be an explorer. I didn't tell anyone because I didn't know what I wanted to discover, and you can't just be an explorer without knowing what you're trying to find while you explore. At least I thought you couldn't when I was twelve. Nevertheless, I secretly determined that I would spend some time in the Amazon, searching for something, and then I would go to Nepal and climb Mount Everest. I had always wanted to climb that mountain just so I could sit at the top and touch a cloud. It was my biggest dream.
Yesterday I laid in my yard and looked up. I realized after a few minutes of gazing at that blue expanse stretching from every corner of my eyes that the sky has always been a banner to me. A declaration. Even when I was little, it sold me on the belief that there has to be a great creator.
When I was on the cusp of my childhood blossoming into youth, in that state of being that confuses every growing young woman, I tried not to believe in God. I shed my explorer dream quite easily. I couldn't hold my breath long enough to climb Mount Everest, and no one climbs Mount Everest if they have poor lung capacity. But shrugging Jesus off was harder. I distinctly remember sitting on my white sheets in my bedroom, and light was spilling everywhere because it was the early morning, and I told myself out loud, you are fooling yourself. This whole Christianity thing is a lie. God isn't real. I was actually so scared I couldn't say the last part. I mumbled it. Something like, God is ennnn-t-rer. But I stuck my chest out anyway because I was going to prove that. I thought through it for quite some time. I weighed the choices I'd made and the people in my life and the things they said or didn't say. I went through the churches I'd gone to and the ones I hadn't and I tried to imagine what it would be like to not go to church. Ever. In my life. I tried really hard.
In the end I just made myself mad and my heart hurt just a little because I couldn't prove anything and I believed anyway.
In the end I just looked up at the sunrise and surrendered.
I don't know how not to believe in God. Sometimes I have very little faith, sometimes I doubt, but never His existence. I can't figure out how to do that. I tried when I was twelve, and let me tell you, it's not an easy task when the clouds are long ropes wrapped around a buttery yellow sun and all in a golden sky at an early hour.

I was once asked how I knew God was real. How I knew He exists. I'm not one of those people who has had a miraculous conversion and turned her entire life around from some tragic existence before. I was saved when I was five years old. I can't look at someone and say, because I'm different. I know He's real, because I'm not the same person I was. That's not my testimony. But that's not a bad thing. It's okay to have a "boring" testimony. It's okay to live one of those boring Christian lives where you never did anything worldly or tragic and had to overcome it. I had to learn that, because I felt guilty for the longest time about it. I used to want to make up problems for myself, because it's so hard to convince someone that you needed saving when they think your life was and is perfect. The truth is, evangelical Christianity is so much easier when you have a story that says you didn't know that you are fearfully and wonderfully made.
So I pointed up.
I always point up when someone asks me how I know, how I know that He's real. Because the truth is, I can't look at the heavens and think there is no God. I just can't do it. And I think that's a very human thing, it's very of the earth and dust. Because really, we can't explain all that much about this place. We don't even understand the dirt we were born of and go back to.

The sky is a testimony unlike all others. I'm ever so grateful for it.
It convinced me.
What convinced you?
And if you haven't been yet, convinced I mean, I dare you. Look up.

The will of God.

I was going to tell you all about the false alarms that there have been for my soon to be niece who will now be a June baby. And I was going to tell you all about the dream I had last night in which I saved Spiderman as Peter Parker something like a dozen times. But then I went to church this morning.
Church was incredible.