Why I haven’t invited you to church yet

One horribly awkward Thursday evening in college, I was heading out of my dorm to Intervarsity Christian Fellowship’s worship service, which we called “Large Group.”  About five of us were walking there together, including one of the Bible study leaders.  Really nice guy.  Biggest heart of almost anyone I’ve met.  This might be the only less-than-stellar memory I have of him.

As we crossed the first street, he said, “Hey, let’s invite everyone we meet on the way to Large Group!”  We all responded with varying levels of fake enthusiasm.  No one would dare admit to not liking evangelism.  Partly because we didn’t know how to express emotions (“I feel embarassed and afraid!”), and partly because we already knew the response:

“you should really pray about that.”

So we headed onto campus and our fearless leader greeted everyone with, “Hey!  Do you want to go to the most awesome worship service on campus?”  After the second response of, “Uh, no thanks,” I think even he wished we could just walk the rest of the way in silence.  But instead we all pretended we were having a great time, we just conveniently forgot to make eye contact with anyone.

We had an unspoken taboo against honesty.  I hope that’s changed.

I genuinely did (and do) like having conversations about God… but inviting people to church has always been about as enjoyable as throwing up.  Mostly because it is very, very hard for me to be honest and authentic.  I start by asking someone if they’d like to come to church with me and suddenly I find myself quoting C.S. Lewis, then I force a laugh for no reason, then I tell them to just let me know if they want to come via email.  Or text message.  Or restraining order, if that’s more convenient.

But this week I had been talking with my sister-in-law about Christmas.  She said that she hoped to teach her little boy that Christmas is about more than Santa and presents… she wanted him to value the sense of community and generosity, the idea of peace and love and helping others.  And I had the strangest realization… she might actually want to come to my church’s Christmas eve service.

Normally I think, “if I invite Carine to church, we’ll probably sing ‘Grace like Rain’ for 17 minutes, then she’ll hate Jesus.”  But this time I thought…what if I invited her and didn’t feel responsible for what happens there?  What if I gave both of us the freedom to enjoy or not enjoy the service, without trying to fix or explain anything?

Joris, my not-quite-two nephew, came too.  I’ve always secretly wanted to bring him to church, because he’s so darn cute and I like bragging that I’m related to him.  He didn’t disappoint.  At the end of every song, he clapped and yelled, “YAAAYYY!”, which often overlapped with the Scripture readings:

[song ends.] “YAAAAYYY!”

“For unto us a child is b–”

“YAAAYYY!”

Halfway through the service he found his blue fishy sunglasses in the diaper bag.  He put them on and head-banged for the rest of the carols with his stuffed tiger, Coco.

The service ended with the song “Silent Night,” and a reading from the book of John:

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”

What mystery, I thought.

And then.

A young pastor stood up and said, “You may have asked yourself, ‘where is God?’, and that’s a good question.  Well, God has answered that question!”

I glanced over at Jack, who gave me this look:

Oh shit, I thought, the pastor is doing that Christmas-and-Easter thing.  His church is packed and he’s going to try to convert as many people as possible.  My sister-in-law is going to hate me.  She’s going to hate Jesus.  She’s going to think I manipulated her.

It was the ultimate test in emotional boundaries.  Mine are very poor.  I wish I could listen to that sermon and think, “I’m not sure that I like this homily, and it’s okay for me to disagree.”  Instead I thought, “Oh no!  How will I please both my sister and this pastor that I’ve never met?  Have I disappointed her by inviting her here?  Am I failing my church by being angry?  Will I be kicked out for sighing audibly?”

I felt like I was again walking with my Bible study leader from Intervarsity, watching him bravely invite strangers to an awesome worship service.  I didn’t know then how to speak honestly without abandoning him.  And I still don’t know how to sit in church without the fight-or-flight instinct.

Carine, of course, didn’t hate me for the pastor’s sermon.  She’d had a great time singing and was more than willing to wait out the 10 minute homily.  Besides, she was too busy keeping a toddler quiet to really pay attention.  Thank God.

For the Prospective Mars Hill Graduate School Student

Dear person who browsed here from the MHGS Blog Hub,

Last week we had an assignment that was nicknamed The Tragedy Paper.  We were to write the story of a “defining personal tragedy,” and reflect on how it affected our Faith, our Hope, and our Love.

I have not led a tragic life by most standards.  The story I ended up writing had never been called a “Tragedy” by anyone, including me.  When I first told this story to my Practicum Facilitator in September, I spoke of my adolescent self in third person.  I had very little love for her.  She had embarrassed herself.  Surely she deserved what she got.

My PF looked horrified.  “Do you hear the contempt in your words?” she asked.

I tried telling the story again, through a different lens.  I started to listen to that teenage girl.  She was scared, and trying so hard to do the right thing.  She asked for an advocate, because her world silenced and dismissed her.  I spoke for her, not with contempt, but with compassion.  In defending her, I grew more and more angry.

If all that sounds weird, but also intriguing and maybe a little bit wonderful, consider applying to Mars Hill.

I made the mistake of going to the coffee shop where I used to work to write my paper.  First I typed out the part that I remembered best: the horrible words that were spoken to me, the ones that have echoed in my head for years.  Then I went to the bathroom to weep.

For three hours I sat at Peet’s Coffee, reflecting on my tragedy as well as my Faith, Hope, and Love.  The customers I used to serve came over and asked if I was okay.  And I really didn’t know the answer.  No, I’m not okay, this hurts.  But then again, Yes, I’m wonderful!  Writing this paper feels right and good, and the dead part of me is beginning to stir.  And did I mention that I’m furious?  Yes, I’m very angry, and I think that’s part of the new alive-ness.  Thank you for asking, how are you?

I turned in that paper along with my 90 classmates.  We were exhausted.  All week we had wept, raged, and posted not-so-clever facebook status updates (“Christine is working on her tragedy paper…. FUCK EVERYTHING”).  Some had shared their tragedy papers with new friends.  None of us are the same since handing it in.

In the end, I was proud, so proud, of that paper.  I’ve rarely heard my own voice freed from the demand to please others.  It was unapologetic, furious, explosive.  It blew open a space in my soul for God’s words: I grieved that too.

I like this school.  Maybe you would too.  Drop me a comment or email if you want to talk.

Therapy

Mars Hill requires their counseling students to receive 40 hours of counseling outside the school with a Licensed Mental Health Therapist.  Licensed Therapists in Seattle charge at least $100 per hour.

$100 X 40 hours = ____

Yup.

Counseling students are going crazy with all this therapy.  We’re surrounded by therapists.  We pay $100 to talk about our parents.  We sit with our Practicum Facilitators (who are also therapists) twice a month and discuss why we were so anxious in Practicum last time, and why we panicked and said that one thing, and why we felt such shame for a whole week after we said it.  And then we talk for an hour about that shame, and our therapists teach us how to listen to it, be curious about it, wonder what other words connect to the word “shame.”  And then we find ourselves telling older stories, stories of really embarrassing times… times when we got it wrong, so wrong, again!  Can’t I do anything right?!?  Didn’t God promise me his Spirit of Love, so I could love others?  Then why do I just hurt people, over and over, why didn’t God change me like he promised?

Then you realize you’re talking about something different… not shame, but disappointment.  Disappointment with God.  How long have you felt that disappointment?  Oh I don’t know, since day 3?  What do you do with that disappointment?  Mostly I just ignore it and worship God with only part of me, a very small part, which really is no worship at all.  Then your therapist recommends that you journal about “What would a faithful God look like?”  And you think, that would be admitting in writing that I don’t think God is faithful.  And she says yes, that’s okay.  He likes that.  He likes to wrestle.  And through her kindness you see just the briefest glimpse of God, a terrifying and beautiful God that wants you to call him unfaithful so the wrestling match can begin.

But your 50 minutes are up!

So you head downstairs, to the student lounge.  Your mind is spinning and you feel that dammit, you’re losing it.  You’re losing that glimpse of God that was in the room during your therapy session.  By the time you hit the first floor you’ve already transitioned back to regular life.  Can I get to Taco del Mar before class? Then someone who knew you were in your 1-on-1 session sees you and asks, “How’d it go?”  And you say:

“Amazing.  We talked about shame.  And shame-cycles, and I realized that I just need to SIT in my shame, you know?  Just SIT in it!  And befriend it!  And love myself!  And we talked about how I hate God and need to wrestle.”

Which of course makes no sense.

Here’s what I’ve decided: describing therapy sessions is like describing dreams.  You just won’t be able to do it justice, ever. You can talk about the man who, in your dream, was your husband…but he wasn’t your real-life husband, and he made you go back to work at the coffee shop because he was mean and didn’t like how powerful you would become in graduate school, so you went back to the coffee shop and everyone made fun of you.  You can tell all that to your groggy husband when he wakes up but it won’t convey the horror and shame, the fury and dread that still linger even after the alarm went off.

Because only half of therapy is what you talk about in the session, the “aha!” and “oh, shit” moments of realization.  The other half is, as Buber would say, the I-Thou connection, the in-between, and the glimpses of the Eternal Thou.  Which Buber can describe only because he’s a late-romantic German philosopher, and most thankfully you are not.

So, many apologies to anyone who, in the next three years, will have to hear me describe my therapy (maybe even regularly).  I know how much it sucks.  And thank you.

Creation, Incarnation, and my 1-year-old Nephew

I’m watching my nephew for an afternoon this week.  The email I sent to my brother said something like, “Out of the generosity of my heart I am offering to babysit for you on Friday.”  But what I meant was, “Can I hang out with your kid?  I need that time with him, I really do.”  The deeper I go into my work at Mars Hill (3 weeks now), the more I miss Joris.

This week we read twenty pages of a 15-volume work by Karl Barth called Church Dogmatics.  The chapter was titled “The Spirit as Basis of Soul and Body.” And through this great work, I discovered what may be the cornerstone of every seminary education… I can now join in the chorus of Divinity students past and present.  May we all confess together that

German Theologians are fucking hard.

I underlined a lot of things in the Barth article.  One of his shorter sentences was “God is the living and active basis of man.”  God sustains our lives by giving us his spirit, not just once but constantly, every second of every minute. In him we live, and move, and have our being.

See, we’ve been reading different theologies of creation, and our professor has been offering us this new perspective: creation is incarnation.  God creates so that he can live within this world.  He re-creates it, day after day.  He is constantly sustaining and creating, and he calls us as co-creators and participants.

Our professor made the outlandish statement that God needs us.  Later he modified it and said, “Okay, need isn’t the right word, but the relationship is murky.  God created us to create with him.  What if, for example, we all just stopped having sex?”

Eighteen months ago I watched Joris take his first breath in this world; a shivering, screaming new co-creation of God and his parents.

Now, I see his delight in the world.  He shrieks when he sees a dog.  He studies faces, and memorizes the regular ones (he even came up with a sign for Obama).  He wants to know how everything feels to the touch— dirt, sand, Auntie Chris’ teeth… I don’t think “childhood curiosity” is an inaccurate term.  But I’m beginning to think it’s more than that.  God is calling Joris to co-creation.  Joris loves the world because of God’s creative spirit in him.

And as I’ve been reading these articles and obsessing over lofty ideas about Spirit and Matter, creation and incarnation, sin and Imago Dei, I have this sense that I will understand this more if I watch Joris play.

I’m looking forward to Friday.

Pho

I’m eating pho again.

Last year my body starting rejecting pho.  Probably because my blood was already half beef broth and critically oversalinated.  But then last week, I wanted pho, Oh how I wanted pho, and nothing else would do. So I ate it for 3 meals in a row.

Some of my most potent adult memories happened at pho restaurants, and not only because Sriracha gives me diarrhea.  My college boyfriend called me “stupid” over a bowl of pho.  He did it in another language, but unfortunately it was identical to the Russian word.  Not that it would have mattered.  If any college boys are reading, please note: your girlfriend will always recognize an insult.  It doesn’t matter if you hand her a dozen roses and flash that winning smile and lovingly coo “You Slimy Ho” in Berber.  She will know exactly what you said.

I used to meet my friend Amy for pho every week, before she left the country.  These lunches were Christian Fellowship on Crack.  We crammed confession, prayers, fears, frustration at God, and encouragement for each other into 22 minutes.  While Eating. I miss you, Amy.

Most recently, I ate pho at the same Than Brother’s Restaurant that I went to weekly in college.  My first ever bowls of pho splattered the pages of my first ever Bible (at least, the first one I bought myself), which I always read while I was on my own.  And while I was reading the Bible, I always felt like I was being read too.

This last bowl of Than Brother’s pho splattered the pages of Karl Barth and Martin Buber.  Instead of slurping up my rice noodles and asking, “What is Jesus saying to me?”, I am asking “What do I as a reader bring to this text?  What does it mean that God’s spirit gives life, even to those who reject him?  What hermeneutical tradition do I come from?”

I hope to visit the U-district Than Brother’s Restaurant in 10 years.  I’ll bring a book, the Bible or something else.  I’ll breathe in the steamy salty broth and as I read, I’ll ask myself,

“______________________________________?”

Disneyland and the Kingdom of God

He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

I’m sure a lot of parents have told their kids that heaven is like Disneyland, probably in a desperate attempt to get them to love God and go to church.  Because really, I would go through any number of years of bad Sunday school for an eternity in Disneyland.  Wouldn’t you?

I spent last week in Disneyland with my parents and two nieces.  We flew in Monday, went to the park for a few hours, then went back to the hotel room to sleep.  I lay awake, my mind buzzing with excitement.  Splash Mountain!  Peter Pan!  Indiana Jones! Then, with a rush of guilt, I thought, “I forgot to pray today.”

Realizing that you forgot to pray is like realizing you forgot to take your birth control pill.  Not only do you feel stupid for not doing it, you have to get up out of your warm bed and find the damn pills.  Then you have to remind yourself of the horrible things that will happen if you keep forgetting.

I liked thinking about Disneyland more than praying.  I didn’t want to quiet my mind, to ask God to speak, or confess the long list of unaddressed sins.  I’d much prefer some form of entertainment and fun.

Which is why I’ve spent much of the last year on facebook, or watching movies, or reading magazines.  Frenzied distraction has replaced joy and contentment.  I feel like Pinocchio arriving at Pleasure Island.  The candy and games—they’re still fun.  I don’t want to go back to the father yet.

On Wednesday we ate breakfast at Goofy’s Kitchen, which was flooded with Disney characters.  It was chaos, with little necks craning and little fingers pointing and little voices… oh the little voices… shrieking and laughing.

And that’s where I saw it, why Jesus probably loves Disneyland too.  Goofy was as excited to see my nieces as they were to see him.  Winnie the Pooh acted as though we were his long-lost daughters.  The princesses knelt down and listened to rambling stories, as if the kids too were beautiful, worthwhile, and had hearts of pure gold.  Everywhere in Disneyland, kids (and adults) were welcomed, celebrated, loved, and nurtured.

I’m guessing that when Jesus told people to become like little children, he was picturing the way kids react to Disneyland.  They love it.  In the words of my 5-year-old niece, “I wish I could live here!”

I’m not sure how much the guy in the Goofy suit likes his job, but I would say he spends his days loving his neighbor.  And you know, being hugged by Winnie the Pooh is probably the closest I’ve ever gotten to being hugged by Jesus.  Sorry, Jack.

Fear and Prayer, Part II: The Woods

Part I of this post is here.

Two years ago one of my customers and her grown daughter were murdered while on a popular hiking trail. It was all over the news, but they still haven’t solved the case. I worked the early shift that day and someone brought in the front-page story by 6am.

A lot of people in the community had known this woman, and many came in crying that week. I grieved her death too. But I also dwelt on the horror of it all. A mother and daughter, shot, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the summer, on a well-known hiking trail. That morning when I took my break, I called Jack in tears. I told him what happened, but he didn’t really get it.

He didn’t get it because I didn’t know how to explain it. What I told him was that I had known one of the women on the front page. I didn’t know how to tell him about the fear and terror that was settling in. I pictured myself hiking on a beautiful summer’s day and finding a gun at my head. In every way I imagined it, I couldn’t escape.

After a few months, these dark thoughts had formed their own dark place in my soul. I privately named this place “The Woods.” Soon, like all roads leading to Rome, all of my thoughts ended up in The Woods. If I started worrying about falling off my bike, five minutes later I was imagining my lifeless body lying in The Woods. When my mom invited me out for a walk, I refused, certain that the park would mean The Woods. If I couldn’t get a hold of Jack… well, Jack is confident he would not only get out of The Woods alive, but also whoop ass while in there. But in this horrible part of my imagination, no one was safe.

I didn’t know how to talk about any of this. I didn’t know how to say that it wasn’t about my customer and her daughter anymore, but about the terror of my own inability to control anything. The thought that maybe God really didn’t care… or else he just didn’t get that being murdered in the woods would be really fucking scary. Why else could it have happened to those women? Where was God then? If he let it happen to them, he might let it happen to me.  How could I trust him?

A year after the murders, Jack and I were driving North to visit relatives. We were driving through the town closest to the hiking trail where it had happened. I imagined two women driving and chatting through these roads, not knowing it was their last day. I felt nauseous. I started sweating, and my heart was racing. We weren’t in The Woods, but we were close, and it was too much. I started crying, then I started bawling. Jack pulled over and I cried and cried.

The next day at church I asked a couple to pray for me. Bill and Becky had a reputation for being “good at prayer,” which is kind of hilarious… but they were good at it. They would do things in prayer that I wouldn’t be caught dead doing, like speaking in tongues, and sighing, and saying “Oohhh yes. Ohhhh yes Lord, yes Jesus!” But I think the strangest thing that they did was listen. They didn’t start their prayers with “Dear Heavenly Father, please give us…” they started their prayers with long silences, believing that God knew what they needed and would speak.

I told them about the murders. I told them that I still saw the woman’s husband every day and I didn’t know how to reach him in his grief. I told them about the trip through the town the day before. I didn’t tell them about The Woods because still, I didn’t really know how.

So we all bowed our heads and no one said anything for a minute, except that Becky was murmuring in a whisper. I was crying because, well, I cry a lot. The worship band was playing an inappropriately upbeat song, and the rest of the church was clapping and singing in the streaming sunlight.  After a few minutes, Becky looked at me and said, “Christine, the word that comes to my mind is “images.” You don’t know what happened to those women, so your mind has been filling in the images of how they were killed, like thousands of movie clips. You see yourself in these scenarios too, and you can’t stop them. Is that true?”

And I couldn’t answer, because it was so true that I felt like my soul had just been read out loud. And maybe what I should have thought was, “Holy shit, this woman is psychic.” But instead, like a spring breeze blowing open a rusty window, this thought rushed in to my poor exhausted soul:

“God knows.”

God knew about The Woods. He was in the deepest darkest most alone place of my psyche. He had stood next to me for a whole year while I imagined his absence. He had held me in his enormous metaphorical hands while I tried fending for myself and planning my escape routes. Once again I had turned around and collided with Jesus.

I wish I could remember the rest of that prayer time. It was amazing. The thing I do remember is that in the weeks and months that followed, I didn’t imagine The Woods. The worn path (more like a slip’n’slide, actually) that led there had closed off. I felt like I could breathe deeper and love more generously than I had been able to in months; not because I would never be in a place like The Woods, but because I knew if I ever found myself there, I was pretty sure I could turn around and find Jesus behind me.

But in recent months, like an abused dog slinking back to her cruel master, I’ve gone back to The Woods. It’s a terrible place, but so familiar and in a way, comforting. It’s easier to trap myself in fear than to try to comprehend the freedom, love, and courage that I have with Jesus.

Paul (the Bible’s Paul… or as I think of him, “run-on sentence Paul”) wrote a lot about the old self and the new self. He insisted that the old self, the one that’s trapped in fear, or lust, or self-deceit, or all three and then some, died because Jesus’ death killed it. The new self is free from the old compulsions, and is a slave only to the deep-wide-far-and-high love of God.

I wonder if Paul noticed how often he was having to “remind” his flocks of this. Apparently, the Christians in Rome and Corinth and Ephesus also found The Woods easier than the grace of God, because every one of them got the “Old Self, New Self” lecture.  Being trapped is just so much easier than freedom.

Pray for me. Pray that I remember that my fear is in the old Christine. That the new Christine is free to breathe deep and love big, and to play and run a long way with her Jesus.

Fear and Prayer, Part I: Colliding with Jesus

I became a Christian when I was about 20, over a period of several months. And even though my wedding day was awesome, and I loved that one trip we took to the beach and spent a whole day making apple butter, and even today there’s a warm breeze and I have the whole day off… despite how happy my life has been at so many times, I think the months of becoming a Christian were my happiest.

(a side note: I agree with this guy that faith is a process and not a one-time event, but because I am lazy, I’m going to pretend I only had to do it once).

I had made a few friends who were Christians by then, and when I told them that I wanted to commit to following Jesus, they brought champagne over to my apartment and celebrated with me. And it was actually kind of awkward because my mouth was full of toothpaste when the doorbell rang, and my roommate had no idea what was going on, and I really just wanted to sleep. But the intention was so sweet.

I told a lot of people about Jesus then. I know it’s corny. I know you’ve been accosted on the street by fake smiles and fake enthusiasm and a tired old sales pitch like: “when you hear really good news, you don’t hide it, do you?” But I didn’t think I was like that (although I’m sure I was).

So I told all my friends that I had found Jesus, or he found me, or… well, more like on the walk of life I turned to look behind me and collided with him. And the shock of knowing he had always been there made me drop all my crap, but Jesus was a gentleman and was helping me pick it up. Some of my friends humored me and some retreated away from me. It got old for everyone pretty fast.

I started wishing I knew some grown-ups. I mean, grown-ups who would be excited for me. Christians over the age of 22, surely they must exist? Then I realized, hey, I know two. My parents had two Christian friends, and I had known them all my life.

Now, most of the blogs I read anonymize people’s names. It seems silly with a readership of, oh… like 4 now, I think. But I suppose we live in strange times. If my Dad can find my blog mere days after I set it up… anyway, let’s just call them Paul and Nan.

So I wrote to Paul and Nan, and told them that I had collided with Jesus and he was helping me pick up all my crap. I looked online for their address and sifted through pages on pages of their common last name until I found what I hoped was them.

And I swear, like a day and a half later I got a package in the mail. They had sent me books, great books on what to do after you and Jesus finish picking up the crap you dropped. And Nan wrote me a letter that was a thousand times better than the awkward champagne party. Hell, she might have been drinking champagne while she was writing, that woman was so happy. They celebrated with me in their letter. Of all the things I’ve ever lost, I think I’m most sad about having lost that letter. I don’t know what happened… in one of the moves since college it disappeared.

So that’s the back story. I promise this post really is about fear and prayer.

I got another letter from Nan yesterday, after she had read my post on Wrestling/Psalm 13. I read the first line of her email: “Your dad sent me your blog address today.” Then I had six heart attacks in a row.

Once I got over my dad finding my blog, I read the rest of Nan’s letter. It was about her experience with God and with prayer. If I try to summarize it I’ll ruin it… let’s just say that for every 99 people who can talk about the love of God, one person is stunned into silence because of it. Nan is in the 1%. She knows God loves her, and the rest of us just babble endlessly in hopes it will make him love us.

The point of her email, though, was to encourage me to pray about my fear and my godless thoughts. I’m not using that term ironically… they really are thoughts in which God is absent. And she said she was praying for me, which I cling to like a lifeboat, because I just don’t know how to pray anymore. I start praying then I use bad grammar in front of God, and how embarrassing is that?, so I stop.

And I started thinking about my fear, and what it’s meant in my life of faith. Grandpa John says “perfect love casts out fear” (“Grandpa John” is how I think of John in his letters in the New Testament. He reminds me of a toothless Grandpa that can’t throw you in the air anymore, but is hell-bent on making you know that you’re loved and should love others in return). And I think he’s right too, God’s love leaves no room for fear.

But I’m also pretty certain that this particular disease– fear and worry– will be much like doubt in my life. Never quite eradicated, but in good times, submitted to the will of God… and maybe for brief moments, invisible under all the awe and worship I have for him.

Nan talked about miracle healings, and I indulged my cynicism for a day. A family joke is that Jack’s Nana gets up so early because “there’s so much worrying to be done.” Like Jack’s Nana, I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t fret. If God healed me of fear, he’d have to heal me of boredom next.

But then I remembered The Woods. And the way God healed, or delivered, me from The Woods. And I’m so embarrassed to have forgotten what God’s presence feels like, to have gotten an email from Nan and responded, at least in my mind, with sarcasm. If I’m going to talk about fear and prayer, I need to talk about The Woods.

Stay tuned for Part II: The Woods tomorrow.

Wrestling

I found a little booklet while I was unpacking called “Prayers from the Bible.” The prayers are divided into four sections: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication…or ACTS.

OH BUT WAIT a minute! ACTS is a book of the Bible! And a handy acrostic! This is to help me remember that God doesn’t want me to launch directly into “Shit that I want,” or STIW. Notice that there is no book of STIW in the Bible.

So naturally I flipped straight to the “Supplication” section. Because what I want to know is, what shit do the Bible People ask for? Because if the Bible People ask for it, surely I can too.

Here’s a random sampling of what the Bible People ask for:

“Show your strength, as you have done before.”

“Correct me, Lord, but only with justice–not in your anger, lest you reduce me to nothing.”

(Are you feeling like your prayers suck? I sure am)

“Help my friends grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ”

Side note: I can’t help but notice that in the, ahem, editing process for this little booklet some Biblical prayers were left out, such as

“Strike all my enemies on the jaw;
break the teeth of the wicked.”

Apparently the International Bible Society doesn’t want me praying that. Even though David did.

OH HO HO HANG ON!!! I just thought of something way better than ACTS…

AMOS!

Asking for Shit You Want

Moaning about Shit you Don’t Have

Obsessing over Shit You Don’t Want God to Take Away

Supplication.

Now doesn’t that come just so much more… naturally?

Okay, but none of this is what I meant to write about. What I set out to post was this: as I was flipping through the Supplication section, looking for ways to ask God for Shit that I Want, I found this prayer from Psalm 13. A supplicating prayer. Ready?

“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?/ How long will you hide your face from me?…”

Do you hear the despair in those lines? David must have known such love and joy from the Lord, and an equal measure of sadness and fear at his absence.

The next line is absolutely shocking:

“How long must I wrestle with my thoughts/ and every day have sorrow in my heart?”

What happens when God hides his face? Think of the world without God’s presence.  Then listen to this again: How long must I wrestle with my thoughts?

I don’t know about you, but my thoughts are only about Shit that I Want. Then my prayers become about Shit that I Want. Not like a Wii or naturally hair-free legs… mostly I pray about not getting raped or murdered, not ever being unsafe or uncomfortable. Jack, I happen to know, prays that he will never ever appear inept at anything ever. Okay, maybe he doesn’t pray it. But I know he thinks it. He wrestles with the fear of failure just like I wrestle with fear for my safety.

And I don’t mean “wrestle” like “I’m trying to give it to God but it’s hard.” I mean that every day my imagination goes haywire. My nephew is kidnapped, I’m murdered in the woods, my mom is killed with me or else wails at my funeral. Even when I don’t do anything all day I’m exhausted from wrestling these horrible thoughts. When God hides his face (whatever that means), there is no joy or peace, just wrestling in my mind and sorrow in my heat.

Here is how the psalm ends:

“But I trust in your unfailing love;/ my heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me”

And my final question is: how long did it take David to write this? Years? Decades? Because I’ve been stuck in the “how long must I wrestle with my thoughts” bit since, oh, like a day after I became a Christian. When do I get to move on to verbs like trust, rejoice, and sing?

I’m not much for Acrostics or pneumonic devices or corny sermons or really anything in Christiandom outside of Jesus and maybe Paul (and now, possibly David)… but tonight, I might be browsing the other sections of this booklet.

Crisis of faith

“But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”

” ‘If you can’?” said Jesus. “Everything is possible for him who believes.”

Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”