It isn’t that I had no time for reading this weekend. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday tucked up close to a window, book in hand, enjoying the cool breeze. It’s only that I played Gungor’s just-released album as background music, but the story this album tells refuses to stay in the background. I kept lowering my book in order to pay better attention to Gungor’s stories.
Ghosts Upon the Earth is an album* to listen to from start to end, from God creating (“Let There Be”) to creation worshipping (“Every Breath”).
I’ve written quite a bit about waiting. This song, “The Fall,” puts it so much better than I ever could, especially when the line “turn your face to me,” becomes a duet.
I have sometimes wondered lately if I am waiting on God or if God is waiting on me. I think that the same can be said of our world. We look around at all the misery and wonder why God seems silent. Some pray, “God, turn your face to me.”
But how can we forget that God whispers the same words to us? God waits for his creation, he waits for us, and he cries, “Turn your face to me, turn your face to me.”
* When I introduce music on this blog, it’s because I’ve already purchased the song (or, more likely, the entire album) for myself, and I think you should too!
I’ve always had a tendency to let the mail pile up unopened (which means that we have realized, on more than one occasion, that we’re driving a car that may no longer be insured).
We put systems in place. For instance, a basket for recycling junk mail sits by the front door just beneath a tray for bills. I vow to do a better job, but I never quite keep up with the flurry of paper.
One particular unopened letter had been troubling me for weeks. The return address said Compassion, and “a message from your sponsored child!” was splashed across the envelope. I knew as soon as I pulled it from the mailbox that it was a note from our new Compassion child (I picked him from the lineup because he reminded me of my middle boy). He isn’t the only child we sponsor, so I knew the drill. I would need to write a letter introducing him to our family, and I remembered that it was customary to include a family photo.
It’s the photo’s fault. At least, that’s what I’d like to think.
As soon as I open this letter, I told myself, then I’ll have to add “take and print a family photo” to my to-do list. I felt tired just considering my to-do list, yet my perfectionism wouldn’t let me send a year-old photograph (because our baby boy has changed so much).
And so, I let the letter sit.
I kept spotting it. I noticed it every time I added a few more bills to the now-teetering pile in the tray. The guilt grew with the pile, but I couldn’t get past the need for a photo.
Until yesterday.
I shook my perfectionist, procrastinating self and opened the letter. Immediately, I noticed a small box with the prompt “Please pray for my family.” Within that square were these dictated words: “Please pray that my father finds a job and stops drinking.”
I was devastated. My chest hurt.
A heart-cry in a handful of words: how could I have let it sit unread?
Adding another Compassion child to our monthly giving was a financial stretch for us. However, I’ve found that opening my eyes just a little bit to the rest of the world makes it much harder to justify the ease with which I buy books. Or new boots for my daughter. Or another weekly dance class.
It’s about money. God has his eye on the poor, and I see them too. We both know that He’s given American Christians more than enough to wipe out mountains of misery, if only we would share what has never been ours to begin with.
Yet, believing it was just about money made it easier to leave that letter lying on the tray. Now I know: it’s about money (I say I care about the poor, so I better put my money where my mouth is), and it’s about so much more.
It’s about a small boy. One precious life. Only five years old, and yet he knows things that my own kids have never even imagined. I’m still trying to figure out how to share this prayer request with them. I don’t think that they have ever even heard the word drunk. Let alone seen it.
But this boy . . . oh how my heart aches when I consider what he has seen. What he is seeing even now as I type.
So, I’ll keep writing the checks. But now my checks go out dripping with prayer. Simple, nearly wordless prayers:
I slumped down at my writing desk one recent morning, and this phrase floated up to the top of my mind: “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
I was feeling a little depressed, a little overwhelmed, and Solomon’s words came unbidden to justify my dark mood.
For me, it was nothing more serious than hot weather, kids fighting (again), and dirt tracked all over my just-mopped floors. Some days it only takes that little bit and we are carrying the burdens of the world: in an instant my eyes roam from the dirt, sweat, and tears in my own house to the global orphan crisis, drought in Texas, famine in Africa (again!).
Why is my life such a mess? Why is the world such a mess?
Supposedly, we Christ-followers are the bearers of “Good News” (just search the Bible for the phrase “good news”: it comes up a lot). But what can we possibly have to say to those suffering amidst the ever-present darkness of this world?
As a child, growing up in the church, I heard a lot about good news. Maybe the message was simplistic or maybe I was only able to understand a simple message, but I believed then that the good news was all about heaven. The good news, then, was that Jesus made a way for us to go to heaven when we die. That seemed like pretty good news to me, which is strange because I was a lot farther from death than I am now. Today, thirty years closer to my own end, that news doesn’t seem nearly good enough.
You and I and our neighbors on this planet? We need good news now. We need good news for today.
Solomon’s words take me there. He writes, “Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’?” (Ecclesiastes 1:10). I’m not sure, I can’t really answer his question, but then I remember these words in Isaiah: “I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43: 19).
God is doing something new. In fact, He’s been working at it for thousands of years. The Old Testament whispers it, and Jesus embodies it. New life. New creation. New covenant. New heaven. New earth.
God is making all things new (Revelation 21: 5).
I don’t know exactly what that means. But I feel something good deep down in my bones when I hear the word new. New, new, new. All is being made new.
Was there ever a more hopeful, beautiful word than “new”?
In me, in you, and in this gorgeous, broken-down world, God is doing a new thing. Look closely. Do you not perceive it?
I stopped eating sugar three months ago. Well, to be perfectly honest, I still treat myself a bit on the weekends. And birthdays. I’ll never pass up birthday cake. But Monday through Friday, and even most of the time Saturday and Sunday, I sweeten my oatmeal with banana, I omit even the agave syrup from my smoothies, and I say no to every dessert, piece of candy, and slice of gum.
I’ve known for years that sugar wreaks havoc on my body. First, it was just my hormones. A direct link between dessert and my inability to get pregnant.
Highly motivated, I changed my diet. I had three miracle babies.
Then I went back to the cookies and ice cream.
I moved to Florida. I found a new doctor. He ordered a battery of tests. The news wasn’t good.
I don’t want to die of a heart attack or a stroke before I see my babies have babies. Once again, I am highly motivated.
I’ve had a fierce sweet tooth for as long as I can remember. If you had asked me when I was a child what my favorite food was, I promise you I would have said Cadbury Cream Eggs. Potato chips and popcorn, I can take or leave (though, of course, I take them frequently!). Chocolate chip cookies in the freezer will haunt me until every single one is gone.
When I first traded ice cream for mint tea after dinner, I felt sorry for myself. It seemed unfair. I imagined that everyone else could eat chocolate as often as they liked without fear of diabetes or heart disease.
My husband and children pour on the maple syrup while I frown and grumble over sprouted grain toast with none of my favorite blueberry jam.
But now . . . I’ve had an epiphany. I’ve realized something I might have noticed sooner if I hadn’t been preoccupied with feeling sorry for myself.
It was last Friday night. The week had been long, I was tired, and I decided to start the weekend off with a special treat. I would make chocolate chip cookies. And not just any chocolate chip cookies. The very best. The cookies from a cookbook called The Best Recipe. A cookbook that more than delivers on its title.
It was nearly nine o’clock when I sat down to taste those cookies, so sure that I was about to taste the goodness I’d denied myself all week.
After the first bite, I thought there was a mistake. I pictured my hand dumping in the cupful of brown sugar and wondered if I had miscounted.
My husband sat beside me at the table, and I asked, “Do these taste funny to you?” His look said, “What are you talking about?” and so I understood that the cookies only tasted strange to me. They were so, so sweet.
Unbearably sweet. I felt as if I were eating pure sugar, could almost feel the grains of it crunching sickeningly between my teeth.
This sweetness was no longer sweet. It was awful. One dimensional. Flavorless.
Here is the sweetness I’ve enjoyed all these months: the syrupy sweetness of a ripe peach, the crisp, tingly sweetness of ice-cold watermelon, the tart-sweet of blackberries, and the mellow, warm sweetness of a candy-colored sweet potato.
God has given me so many kinds of sweet: a whole spectrum of flavor and texture and color.
I never knew. Never truly tasted what was always right in front of me.
How often do we do this? Drag our feet and feel sorry for ourselves when all our father-God wants is to give us something good? Something better than the one-note flavor of whatever substitute we’ve provided for ourselves?
This thing I’ve been calling loss? Turns out, it was no loss at all.
I am blinking and shielding my eyes as I look toward another hot and humid Florida summer, and I am thinking about winter.
One of my favorite poets, Louise Gluck, invokes winter in “Snowdrops”: “You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you,” she writes.
I lived in Chicago for ten years, and winter has meaning for me. But I also know what despair is, so I think I would understand winter even if I had never felt the icy wind that blows off Lake Michigan.
Toward the end of a long winter, it is possible, even easy, to stop believing in spring. It is possible to doubt that you will ever again feel warm sunshine on your bare arm.
This kind of doubt seems ridiculous. Haven’t I witnessed the earth turning year after year for decades? Don’t I know that spring always returns?
I know this, that spring always comes, and I know something else: it is better after waiting. Waiting out a long winter, whether literal or metaphorical, is incredibly, sometimes unbelievably, difficult. Even when I hold tight to my belief in spring’s return, I can tip over into despair, like a teeter-totter shifting between faith and fear.
Having walked through a decade of winters, winters that were often seasons of my soul as much as seasons on the calendar, I know that the sunshine and warm air feel better, richer, more precious after waiting. Even now, knowing what I know, I can still waste too much effort wishing away the waiting, trying to speed up time.
Today, looking toward several months of heat and humidity (though the near-constant coastal breezes do offer some relief), I want to wish it away, as if I could push some sort of cosmic fast-forward button. It’s the weather, yes, (I may have grown up in Texas, but I have never been a hot-weather person), but it’s also a whole season of waiting.
Here, in Florida, we are in-between. Our careers and the long miles between us and family suggest that we will not stay here long, but we don’t know where we’ll go next or when that might happen. We are waiting, yet trying to find within the temporary some sense of at-home-ness. At times, I despair. I begin to believe that I’ll always be frozen in this place, with this weather.
“Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion.
For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!”
