I was unprepared for Monday, but you know how it comes anyways.

I thought I’d be nervous.

I thought the bars and the razor wire and the concentrated mass of humanity would make my insides shake, and I thought my hands would show it and my voice would betray me.

But they didn’t, and I wasn’t.

I saw your little sisters there, all innocent and smooth-skinned with ponytails swinging and doe-eyes smiling. I saw them shocked when we cheered and greeted them with high-fives and hand shakes.

I saw them cry because they were the center of our attention.

I was shocked, too. And surprised when I saw your grandmas there in wheelchairs, or trudging slowly with toothless grin, gray hair all astray. With cloudy eyes squinting to see a familiar face or a fresh hope, they came last in line and headed for the bits of shade.

I may have cried.

Your moms were there, and your daughters and granddaughters. Your neighbors. I don’t know what age I expected them all to be, but it was the sheer range of years that affected me first.

Then I thought for a split second that there were men there, but there were not. Women with stolen identities and shaved heads, women with huge biceps and angry eyes, women trading beauty for power were there, everywhere, but I expected that.

We gathered in the yard (and I may never say go play in the yard again) and there was division, and light battled darkness because some ladies wanted to sit and listen, to follow the rules and be respectful regardless of their tattoos and girlfriends and stereotypes, and some stood out on the fringe and ignored the program. They ignored the requests from the front to please sit down, please enjoy the speakers and the music, and please listen because God has a message for you.

We wore purple as if we were royalty and they wore prison-blue, a blanket of bruised humanity all spread around in the bleaching sun.

By the end of our time there was nothing shocking anymore. A docile lady in her 60′s, with white hair and purple shirt, was surrounded by 5 or 6 girls with tattoos and shaved heads, and the smiles and conversation were as though they had just shared milk and cookies together.

Some sat in groups of 10 or 12, some were one-on-one, and God met every personality and every phobia. People with similar life experiences, similar interests, similar languages, all had a place to minister regardless of the color of their skin or hair or shirt.

Women in blue brought chairs to the tired and scorched visitors. They were concerned with our water and with the bugs in the grass and with our long trip home. They were thankful for listening ears and bolstered by messages of Hope, but this was real life to them.

“You’ll be gone tomorrow, Tresta, and I’ll still be here.”

I want to leave Hope in the places I can’t stay.

Of course the enemy was there. 

There were those who refused to listen , who crossed their arms and averted their eyes. There were those whose only purpose was to intimidate or separate or discourage, and they will always be there trying to mingle among the Hope-ful.

I saw you and I there, too. Because bars are real and man-made and all of us have chosen to be in or out of them, at one time or another.

And maybe still. Good girls and boys, all of us on the outside imprisoned by the bad girls and boys on the inside.

They live for justice or mercy or re-trial or letters to the governor or pardons or next week’s program or maybe a visitor.

Some live in truth and are free, walking the hardest walk.

Some live in denial and won’t cross the Nile where Egypt is purged, won’t face the Promised Land because they know about the 40 years of wandering, and their eternity started already and it ain’t pretty.

But you and I are there, believe me.

We want justice but need mercy and forget that He said there’d be trials and maybe someone will write the Govern-er for us, and we work for a pardon so we get ready for next week’s program and then we’ll visit an orphan or widow. Or prisoner.

And a run-on sentence followed by a fragment is such irony here. 

A death sentence made you free and it lasts forever. Let’s not live a fragmented life or even a fragment of death.

Linking up with Grace Laced Mondays, The Mom Initiative, Soli Deo Gloria,Titus 2sdays,MercyInk, The Wellspring, Imperfect Prose and #TellHisStory

I often wonder what all of eternity will be like.

No sorrow, no mourning, no lack of anything good and absolutely nothing marred by sin. I’m fairly certain eternity won’t involve clouds and harps.

I also wonder, though, about longing and satisfaction. The two must go together, for how do you know what satisfaction is if you don’t experience a longing, a need that must be filled? Will we hunger in heaven and have the satisfaction of being filled? Will we have desires and then see them met?

Maybe all of this life contains enough longing and unfulfilled desire to meet heaven with. All our perceived and actual needs, all the trials of life and mistakes and injustices, maybe they’re all righted in heaven and that leads to eternal satisfaction, without the need for any more longing.

Even in my dreams there is injustice I long to see righted.

So what will satisfy a soul for all eternity?

I heard Ken Wytsma speak earlier this month and he said that our folly is in trying to make God less mysterious. Trying to package Him all up tidy and make everything spiritual be logical and easily reasoned and explained, so that we don’t’ have to take any leaps of faith. 

He talked about Abraham, trying to explain to Sarah where he was taking their son Isaac on the morning of the sacrifice. He concluded that Abraham came to a place we all need to come to: a place where we throw ourselves out there simply with the belief that God is good, and that’s enough for us.

God is good, and that’s enough for me.

A good God would not make an eternally-boring eternity for His children, harps and clouds and dull sweetness ad nauseam. He made this life, for heaven’s sake, and there are boring people but nothing boring about living.

Jesus is speaking in John 17, red letters bleeding before the sacrifice, pouring out desire and longing before the Father Who was leading Him to the cross. Pouring out desire to a good God and completely satisfied with His goodness, even on the eve of intense struggle. He endured for the joy set before Him.

If any struggle on earth ever was enough to satisfy a soul for eternity, this was it.

While we seek to make God less mysterious here on earth, this sphere He created and we have yet to fully understand, He continues to allow those who will to search Him out.

And He’s given us all eternity to know Him more.

This is eternal life. Spend forever, because you’ll need that long, to know Me and My son and fellowship with us and search us out. Let Me be your desire and your satisfaction. Forever.

Go ahead and start now.

Linking up with Grace Laced Mondays, The Mom Initiative, Soli Deo Gloria,Titus 2sdays,MercyInk, The Wellspring and #TellHisStory

The best thing about my best friends is that we don’t talk much, and we’re okay with that

That sounds harsh or sarcastic but it’s not, it’s really what I appreciate at this stage in life. I appreciate that we are friends when we have time for coffee or time for praying together or time for a weekend away. And I appreciate that in all those in between times, the months where we don’t talk and lose track of each other’s lives, in those times we are still friends.

It can be months in between. There’s no hurt feelings and no pressure. No pouting or excuse making. Because Moms know this: that friendships change over the years and the ones that are meant to last are the ones that you don’t have to work hard at, the ones that step aside for your family, pray for your family, and pick up wherever they left off.

That’s the beauty of having friends in various seasons of life.

In high school there were unspoken rules about who you could really be friends with. Artificial friendships formed because you were all thrust into the same experiences and forced to endure them together – those aren’t typically enduring or endearing relationships.

But real life? Real friends who pray in the in-betweens and who’ve endured births and deaths and diapers and empty nests along side you – those friends are the real deal. 

Sharing five minutes on the writing prompt Friends (which is a ridiculously inadequate amount of time but I’m trying to follow the rules) and linking up with Lisa-Jo and others for Five Minute Friday.

If you’re still reading, let me just add that one thing I’ve learned over the years is that I don’t have to be just like my friends in order for our friendship to be true and lasting. Comparison kills, and I never loved a friend because they were just like me. Rather, I love them because they are different from me in ways that I can appreciate and grow from.

People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die. ~ Plato

It’s been on the counter in my laundry room for months because there’s no glue and no way to reattach the broken pieces.

It made it all the way from Kenya and it’s too precious to throw away, so we keep that broken lion figurine in hopes of someday remembering to pick up some super glue.

It wouldn’t be that hard to fix.

And people need brokenness to be fixed.

Everyday of this week leading up to Good Friday there’s been a breaking. It’s been Matthew 18 and Galatians 6 all week and these people, all of us, we’re too precious not to be broken. Too valuable.

Sometimes we’re held together too tightly though and it takes Mighty Blows to break us, but then. Then we have communion.

Community.

A week full of brokenness leads the weak to repentance and the beauty of wholeness, holiness.

I am terribly unjust and incredibly indignant at injustice, all at the same-conflicted-time.

But the Man on the cross was broken for unjust-me, and the veil was torn and now we all see his face, seek His face, and a broken people can be made whole that way.

First the breaking. Then the wholeness.

And I never thought so many good things could come from broken people but wow. Remember Sunday?

and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, “Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” – {1Cr 11:24 NKJV}

 

{Sharing this jumbled mix of words with the wonderful community at Lisa Jo’s, where we take five minutes to write whatever comes from the weekly prompt. Today, we write about BROKEN. Click here to read what other’s have to say or to link up your own five minutes.}

A memory can be a struggle to recall or a struggle to relive and those are the things I dislike.

Not that all the memories are bad. Just that there are so many I forget and ones I wish I could.

I want to remember every soft curl and eyelash and sweaty little forehead, nuzzled into my shoulder. I want to hold on to every tiny sock and toe and euphemism and funny word they said, and let go of the decibels that were hot and the crucibles that burned loud.

I don’t think our minds are meant to hold everything.

There is an arc over all my memories, the ones I forget and the ones He holds onto. Grace that covers and fills in gaps, love that unfolds like a curtain.

I remember that there were bad times but always a Protection, because I haven’t forgotten who I was or who He’s always been – always the Hand softening the fall and the Hammer refining the fallen.

I remember that in all my lineage, if my genealogy were written, there was never a perfect soul but only those made perfect by bleeding.

And I’m more attentive now. I see more because of pen and pixel and I record what is grace so I can remember better.

{Remembering today with a group of writers who set the timer for five minutes and go for it. You can join us or read what others have to say on remember over at  Lisa-Jo’s.}

On Tuesday I loved spring but then on Wednesday it actually came, and we almost broke up.

My morning run was pushed back in hopes of a break in the rain or even a tiny turning-down of the faucet.  By 8:45 I realized it was not happening, that this rain was the Oregon kind and I just needed to put on my flippers and new “water repellent” jacket and go.

I plugged my nose and jumped off the front porch, just for dramatic effect.

On Wednesday all the things I’d said Tuesday came back with teeth, as if to bite:

Do you really love this time of year?

You talk a lot of flowery nonsense but how do you feel about all this now?

And how’s that fancy new jacket working for you?

This is my normal modus operandi, to always question myself and accuse and check for hypocrisy, the ugliest of all character traits.

On Tuesday I waxed poetic about all I love about spring and how even the rain is a blessing. Tuesday it was beautiful and sunny and everything was right with the world and Wednesday, it was Oregon.

Big Time.

And I am realizing that not everything that looks and sounds like hypocrisy really is.

Sometimes, don’t we just say the things we want to be true, the things that we know are good and right but hard to work into real life?

Is it hypocrisy to say whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger?

Because in the middle of those things that feel like they’re killing me, what do I say?

In the middle of the torrential rain (which didn’t kill me, by the way) am I thankful for spring?

And who really cares about rain but in the middle of the argument when I quote scripture and encourage love and talk all motherly and authoritative…am I being a hypocrite?

Are all those platitudes bearing plastic fruit in my life?

When I lecture and pontificate about godly communication and then run to my bedroom for solitude, am I taking the chicken’s way out?

I think fruit comes through digging and toil and sun and rain, and the constant checking of myself can be just that. Cultivating.

It can also be condemnation, and to that I say enough. Enough introspection, enough preoccupation with self, enough heavy-burdened law keeping.

I conclude that saying what I know is true and then doing what I know is wrong is not always hypocrisy. 

And that’s kind of scary to say but those are the only words I have for it right now.

Sometimes I just do what I know I shouldn’t. I still know what is right to do, and I still can tell you and mostly my children what the right thing to do is, but I just don’t always do the right thing.

That’s not very profound.

It’s called struggle. Paul had it. I have it. You probably have it, too.

O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God–through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin. 

There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. {Rom 7:24 -8:1 NKJV} 

So yes, I still love spring. My fancy new jacket is not-so-water-repellent but rather more sponge-like and that’s ok, because it’s blue and it was on sale and I like it. And I like the irony of a jacket labeled “water-repellent” when it really isn’t, right after I said that I’m good with rain when I’m really not.

And yes, I will probably tell my kids to do things or not do things that I myself have not yet mastered, and I might spout some great advice here that is hard for me to take sometimes. That makes me human, not hypocritical. 

It also lends itself to grace, and that’s something I try to excel at.

Linking up with Imperfect Prose and #TellHisStory

This has always been my favorite time of year.

I remember that I read The Secret Garden when I was around eleven and it must have been spring, because I cleared out a little patch of ground and watched.

I waited for the green shoots. I cleared away the debris of winter and fluffed up the matted grass and soil and I watched the green heads poke through, just like Mary and Colin and Dickon.

I watched wildflowers and daffodils and tulips unfurl in the spring, beauty that I didn’t work for. Beauty that would poke through even had I not cleared away winter’s clutter, because that’s the nature of things.

There’s never been anything “green” about me. In fact, for most of my life I’ve shied from even the emerald color because of hair that I thought too red and if I’d had an accent it would have been fine, but I didn’t, so it wasn’t.

No green for me. Not my clothes, and certainly not my thumbs.

I have frequent sessions of what I call “Plant Rehab”, where I gather up my poor, neglected houseplants and try to revive any remnants of life. I fluff up the soil, cut off any irreparable damage, and give them a little change of scenery.

Oh, and water. Plants like water.

So I’ve never been famous for my lush greenery or bountiful garden, and that’s ok.

That’s ok because wildflowers and daffodils and tulips still come up in the spring.

This year, I’m watching them along the creek and around the old house site on our property because in the fall my mind was filled with other things, and the thought of planting bulbs was spent on something else.

I can’t remember what, but obviously not bulbs.

I walk the creek and remind the kids to bring me those flowers when they finally burst open. Let me enjoy the flowers I didn’t work for, and don’t let me forget to dig up some of the bulbs, to bring them closer for next year.

Spring is green without your toil and the sun (here in Oregon, when we see it) is just warm enough for a sweatered-walk. That’s perfect.

And spring is a few nice days in a row and then a break of rain and cloud, because the ground needs it and you might need it, too. It’s ebb and flow and not too much of anything.

It’s beauty I didn’t work for. 

After a season of beauty-in-hiding and all the frumpy days of winter and the blues, it’s high time for green. Time for some refreshing and a reminder of hope.

Christ in you, the hope of glory. The grace that you didn’t work for but Christ died to give you – the seed that gave life by dying.

 ”Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. – John 12:24 NKJV

And here’s the greatest thing: all the rain He sent you has watered something. The storms made weak things strong and blew away the un-anchored debris, puffed out idle passions, left you exhausted and gray at times. But now?

Now it’s spring. Now it’s time to blow a soft breeze and kindle something dormant. To clear away debris, take stock of your damage, and find that Hope of glory.

Remember that grace is beauty you didn’t work for.

Linking up with The Better Mom, Grace Laced Mondays, The Mom Initiative, Soli Deo Gloria,Titus 2sdays,MercyInk, The Wellspring and #TellHisStory