Waiting for Beauty

I’ve started a strange, weekly tradition this spring – introducing an eccentric produce item one night during dinner.

My daughter is embracing this domestic adventure with unharnessed passion.  My husband is struggling to accept all of me, including my quirky love for change that would possess me to take on such a challenge.  My son, well, he is about to pack my bags and send me off on the next train.  Bless him.

We’ve tried some pretty strange things, as well as some more common, but new-to-our-kids items.  Mangoes.  Asparagus.  Asian Pear.  Acorn squash.  Bok choy. Prickly Pear (that was a total flop).

Last week my son - immersed in his third grade rain forest unit at school -  asked if he could suggest the crazy produce item of the week.  (Those of you who know my sweet Clayton can pick your jaws up off the floor now.)  Sure, sweetie.  Of course.  ABSOLUTELY.

How can something so strange…


…produce something so beautiful?

“The burden… He has made everything beautiful in its time. 

He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom

what God has done from beginning to end.” (Ecc. 3:10, 11)

No one can fathom.  But we all try.  We are Jacob, wrestling into the night to surrender – or not surrender - to His greatness.  Wrestling to find the beauty now.  Or maybe just wrestling to find answers, and yet the only answers found are the painful ones.

Restoration.  Redemption.  Transformation.  And I see, more and more, that the beauty promised really has nothing to do with the circumstances that cause me to wrestle.  No, the beauty has everything to do with my heart.  Its wrapped up, enveloped by the ugly, just waiting to be transformed.  Beauty among ashes.

Beauty and serenity and peace. Oh, and surrender.

A Child’s Writing

The scene is Heaven.  The witness, the scribe is John, the one who was living in exile – alone on an island – because of His love for His Rescuer.  The mystery was a deeply sealed scroll.

“Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?” (Revelation 5:2)  Or, as my pastor paraphrased, “Where is the person who is worthy to open up the destiny of mankind?  Who can stand and represent us before a holy God?”

And John is crying.  Weeping.  “No one in Heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it.” (5:3)  Can you imagine the utter emptiness? The deep hopelessness?  The fear and terror of having no shadow in which to stand as you are before God? 

But an angel stops John in his grief.  “Oh, there is someone.  And believe me, He’s standing.  He’s power and stability and a conqueror.”  And John, the witness, sees his own redemption, the Miracle before him. “I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain… And He went and took the scroll from the right hand of Him who was seated on the throne.” (5:6,7)

And their response was worship.  Life-changing relief and gratitude and connection with God. 

And last Sunday – Easter – I left the scene in my mind’s eye as my pastor was finishing His sermon to look at my children, only to find this…

Give her relief, God.  Foster her gratitude.  Draw her to Yourself over and over and over again.  Take her heart, oh take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above.

A Weary Sheep at Easter

I did it to myself. 

“May I make the lamb cake this year?” I asked.

Each year we celebrate Easter with our good friends and their children.  Neither of us have family in town, so unless one of our families is traveling or hosting relatives for Easter, we spend the day together.

Kara and I both grew up with mothers who celebrated Resurrection Sunday with lamb cakes.  Every year.  Little girls growing up miles apart in New Jersey and Iowa, we shared the same tradition before ever knowing each other.

And we both have our own lamb molds today. 

It’s really very simple.  You whip up a cake mix, pour it into the front half of the mold, snap the back half on, and pop it in the oven.  In less than an hour, you can have your own stand-up lamb cake.  (I clearly didn’t inherit the cake-decorating genes from my grandmother, a farmer’s wife with her own wedding cake business.)

Yes, it’s really very simple except ours reclined this year.

Even my husband noticed as I was carrying him out to the car. 

“Doesn’t he usually stand up?”

“He’s weary this year,” I replied.  “This year the lamb cake isn’t Jesus.  He’s us.  And he’s tired -- just like the two of us.”

“My people have been lost sheep.  Their shepherds have led them astray, turning them away on the mountains.  From mountain to hill they have gone.  They have forgotten their fold.  All who found them have devoured them… They have sinned against the Lord, their habitation of righteousness, the Lord, the hope of their fathers.” (Jeremiah 50:6-8)

You see, I snapped the mold apart this year and out came a broken lamb.
 

And with tears in my eyes, I pieced him back together with frosting and thought of my own wounds - sometimes inflicted by others but usually inflicted upon myself.  I thought of my inability to really stand, even though I try to give the appearance of wholeness.  I thought of the weariness that comes from my idols and empty choices.  And I reflected on the ultimate paradox – His wounds, His brokenness healing me.  For ever.

“In those days and in that time, declares the Lord, iniquity shall be sought in Israel, and there shall be none, and sin in Judah, and none shall be found, for I will pardon those whom I leave as a remnant.” (Jeremiah 50:20)

So like ancient Israel, this year we rejoiced in our Rescuer.  We worshiped the Risen Lamb while identifying with weary sheep desperately in need of a Shepherd.   Even on Easter.

Easter Eggs

Yesterday afternoon, my son came in from shooting baskets to fill up another basket with colored eggs.  With his little sister.  I don’t know how long boys do this sort of thing, but at the age of nine, he had no intention of giving up a low-key, annual tradition just yet.  I relished every minute with him.  He’s half-way out of our house, after all.

I was generous by hard-boiling 18 eggs instead of a dozen, but it quickly became clear that my generosity in eggs had been overshadowed by my stinginess in egg coloring kits.  I reached for the 99 cents package at Walgreens this year.  I think they were 99 cents when I was a little girl.  Enough said.

“Nothing’s really happening, mom.”

“Patience, guys.  Just keep working on it.” 

So much of life takes patience.  And so many times, instead of waiting, I try to “work on it”.  When, oh when, will the curse of the Garden leave me, and I will no longer reach for control?

I personally liked the muted, natural-looking egg.  I would have taken a whole basket of them.  But to a seven and nine year old, coloring Easter eggs is not about discovering amazingly light shades of sage green, lavender, and grey – or different shades of white.


And rather quickly, our character lesson in patience became a vocabulary lesson in the word “vibrant”.

I found a box of food coloring and suggested they deepen the water with drops of vivid color.  They deepened and stirred.  Deepened and stirred.  But then my daughter boldly dribbled the food coloring directly on an egg, and our the whole atmosphere changed.  Her mouth opened wide into a smile while her eyes seemed to get just as big.  We laughed and laughed and laughed.
 
 
My kids got bolder and bolder in their egg coloring techniques, and their unharnessed creativity resulted in a basket of vibrancy.  I love that word.


And while my kids laughed and experimented, I reflected on my present life.  How easy is it to settle.  How easy it is to be fine with safe shades of white and grey and not immerse myself in the vibrant.  How easy it is to not fully engage in community, to not fully engage with my Maker, to not fully engage in the story He is writing for me – for fear of hurt and disappointment and unanswered questions.  For fear of losing control. 

“In Christ you have been brought to fullness,” Paul wrote to the Christians in Colosse, to those living in a cultural center where new ideas and doctrines were topics of society’s discussion.  “You have been brought to fullness.  He is the head of every power and authority.”  (Colossians 2:10)

In His authority I find fullness.  Not in my control.  In His authority I find a vibrant life, for his power silences every word of shame, every misunderstanding, every question in my heart.


Fullness.  Vibrant fullness.  Unharnessed, vibrant fullness.   

Holy Week Thoughts – Sin and Betrayal

“Does the motive of a sin – its rationale, its reasons – make it any less a sin?  Isn’t the betrayal of the sovereignty of the Lord in our lives always a sin, regardless of the factors that drove us to betray him?  Yes!  Yet we habitually defend ourselves and diminish our fault by referring to reasons why we “had to” do it.  We sinners are so backward that we try to justify ourselves by some condition which preceded the sin.  Motives console us.  That’s why we want to so badly to have and to know them.

…We invert the true source of our justification… If by excuses I duck my responsibility, I’ll never truly repent, and then the forgiveness of Christ will seem incidental to me… But if I own my responsibility, own up to the sin and so repent, then that forgiveness will justify before God even the most horrendous betrayer of Jesus.  Even Judas Iscariot.  Even me.” (Wangerin, 45)

God, only by your grace can I live in a place of deep humility and confession, void of justifying the reasons I react.  Or the reasons I run back to idols.  Or the reasons I think more highly of myself than I ought. 

Your grace is enough. 

Holy Week Thoughts – Happiness, Joy, Sorrow

My friend, Beth, is like a walking library, suggesting book after book. Or rather, she is like a walking Borders or amazon.com, for every book she recommends is one I want to own, not just read.

You know the types of books to which I’m referring.  They’re the ones you want to grace your bookshelf with in hopes that someday – in your dark, low times – you will remember the life these pages breathed into your soul.  And you’ll reach for them again.  They’re the ones you hope to hand to your children when they find themselves in a valley.  Because we all know those days will come.  Even for our children.

I’m reading such a book, and would love to share excerpts with you as we enter into Holy Week.  Explore Walter Wangerin’s Reliving the Passion with me… take a peek.

ON HAPPINESS, JOY, SORROW

“The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow.  Happiness lives where sorrow is not.  When sorrow arrives, happiness dies.  It can’t stand pain.  Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief.  Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguration of suffering into endurance, and of endurance into character, and of character into hope – and the hope that has become our joy does not (as happiness must for those who depend upon it) disappoint us. 

In the sorrows of the Christ – as we ourselves experience them – we prepare for Easter, for joy.  There can be no resurrection from the dead except first there is a death!  But then, because we love him above all things, his rising is our joy.  And then the certain hope of our own resurrection warrants the joy both now and forever.” (p30)

Sorrow… that deep, deep sadness is so encompassing you find it hard to breath, as if the weight of the world is on your chest.

Might there come a time in my maturity – eventually – hopefully – when I no longer reach for happiness?  When I no longer expect it and am resentful when I can’t find it?

Might there come a time when my perspective and faith are so rooted in my Rescuer and not in my circumstances that the lines of sorrow and deep joy and wholeness and peace all become blurred?  In a good way?  When my life is such a story of surrender and redemption that joy – the deep kind one must sometimes uncover to find – is always present?

I embrace the sorrow as I prepare for joy.  I embrace the pain as I prepare for character, for hope.  I embrace the dying as I prepare for the resurrection.

Keep It Simple

Yesterday I was chatting with another mom as we waited for our little girls. The scene was a birthday party in which a dozen sweeties were absolutely delighted to be together and laugh and dance and soak up the celebration – together. When is it that we start putting up walls? I don’t see any in a seven year-old’s world.

This woman is one with whom I can go deep quickly.  We really  see each other at birthday parties and youth athletic events, but I imagine we’d be better friends if our paths crossed regularly. As usual, she shared truth that I am still pondering today. Keep it simple.

Why is it that we complicate things for our children? Why do we reach for the elaborate when they really just yearn to laugh and enjoy each other? Our conversation was in the context of our daughters’ book club that incorporates a craft (I’ll write more on that at a later time.) Oh, the pressure we put on ourselves when we are the mom in charge of a group activity. A school Valentine’s party. An Easter egg hunt. An ice cream social. Ultimately, the treasure at all those events are the people around us.

And once again, God is using His youngest children to minister His grace and truth as they delight in what matters most. Imagine if we could approach the activities we hold for our children as mere avenues toward healthy living. Toward community. Toward never building up the walls.