A brief story about a Purity Ball in my Sunday newspaper catches my attention. There is an image (a church altar decked in lace like a bridal veil) and there are words spoken by a twelve-year-old girl (“I’m saving my purity for my husband”), and I feel troubled, as if there is a small pebble in my shoe.
I don’t know why I am troubled. These are my people, after all. We speak the same church-y language, we love the same Lord. And goodness knows we need more fathers like this one, fathers who dance with their daughters and whisper prayers over their heads.
It would be easy to keep turning the pages, forget the nagging pebble, but I do have an eight-year-old daughter, after all. I hold the paper still and say to the sky, “Lord, do you have wisdom for a firstborn girl raising a firstborn girl? I’m troubled, and I don’t know why.”
And I can’t say if it’s an answer to my prayer but what comes to me is a story: the woman at the well. The woman with five husbands and one who wasn’t even that. Considering her, I decide that she wasn’t created for a husband (or five). She was created for Jesus.
In fact, she was so highly esteemed by him that Jesus chose her to be the first to hear his earth-shattering news: the Messiah you have longed for is here. I am He.
I want to take this lovely twelve-year-old girl by the hand, look her in the eyes, and try to explain (but how to explain?) that purity isn’t some thing wrapped up in a box. It isn’t a commodity exchanged for a price. It’s a fire, it’s a light, it’s a fountain, and, yes, it turns the values of this world upside down because it’s holy and it’s a sacrifice.
What I would try to say is something like this: purity is a renewable gift, not a thing to grow dingy and worn (though I’m not quite sure who is the giver and who it is that receives, is it me? Is it Jesus?).
But the best news of all? Husband or no, you are invited to live the kind of love story in which even a prostitute can be the belle of the ball.
So, dear little girl, may your light shine, may my light shine, may the light given my daughter and my sons shine and shine. For He is ours, and we are His.
Monday night witnessed our first visit from the Candy Fairy. For parents of highly allergic and/or cavity prone children (and I have one of each), she is a Very Good Thing. After the trick-or-treating, after the just-one-more-piece before bedtime binging, she empties the still-brimming candy buckets and drops a small toy into the plastic orange void.
For the firstborn: rosebud earrings and a Pippi Longstocking book. For the middle child: a Lego alien “blaster” (The language of a five-year-old boy is amazingly onomatopoeic). For the baby: a red Thomas the Train engine with an unpronounceable name stamped on his side.
This largesse came fast on the heels of another nighttime visitor: the Pacifier Fairy. When Jonathan noticed the baby’s teeth looking more than a little misshapen we took quick action (assuming, rightly I think, that delay would be deadly for our resolve). The baby was sweet-talked into stuffing the mailbox with much-loved pacis, and the Pacifier Fairy soon whisked them away, leaving a blue Thomas the Train engine behind.
Add in Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause, and Easter Bunny, and our home is a busy intersection in the fairy/magical creature highway.
Since she was first old enough to string words into sentences, my daughter has asked me, “Mom, do you believe in fairies?” And I always say the same thing, “Well, I’ve never seen one, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” (And for the rational-minded among you, shuddering at my deceit, all I can say is how often have scientists discovered bizarre new species in ocean trenches or volcano tops, creatures more surprising than any fairy?)
I tend to think that belief (in anything unseen) is a subtle orientation towards the world. It’s a just slightly off-kilter way of looking around oneself. A way of seeing that goes beyond the physical perception of your eyes. To believe, is to be always ready to say, “Perhaps, there’s more (rather than less) than meets the eye.”
And so, I’ve introduced my children to more. Fairy rings and tomtens. Santa Clause and mermaids.
I don’t share this under the category “advice for parents.” Perhaps, you’ve heard me mention before that I believe in the sharing of stories but not the sharing of advice?
I’m sure any number of you could put together a highly convincing, highly reasonable argument for why I am wrong. Honestly, I’m already half-convinced, and we will probably be telling the firstborn the truth about Santa Clause this year (the truth: Santa Clause is a magical story that you now get to help tell for your little brothers).
But here is what I cannot do: I cannot give my children lists of beings worthy of belief (Jesus, the angels) without demonstrating for them a capacity for belief. I want them to see in me a willingness to be surprised, to be proved wrong. I want them to know that the world God made is always more beautiful, more startling, more good than what we previously knew.
This world is full of magic. It’s evident in science textbooks and in fairytales.
I believe that the great magician behind it all has revealed himself to us in the figure of a man. This man walked the same solid ground that we do. In him, story and history intersect. Magic and flesh-and-blood-reality are joined.
I believe in stories more than advice. In other words, I believe that a light is shined on our way forward, not when we finally hear the exact, right piece of advice, but when someone shares their story with us.
True stories contain all of the messy, untranslateable details of a life. Somehow, they also point us toward the maker of life.
I wish I could tell you how to live without the kind of community I described earlier this week. I wish I could tell you how to get it back. I even wish I could tell you that developing that kind of community in your own setting is the most important use of your time. But I can’t tell you these things.
If this whole Jesus-following-way-of-life is truly a relationship (as I’ve been hearing all my life) then we need to stop comparing our circumstances with everyone else’s. My marriage to Jonathan is fifteen-years-old (or fifteen-years-good), and it makes no sense for me to look at those still-awkward newlyweds and wonder why our lives are so different. Other than the fruits of the spirit, I’m not sure there are many things we can point to in order to say “that is a good Christian life” and “that is not.” At times Jesus walks us through joy and other times he walks us through trouble, but we can be confident in both that he has not and will not abandon us.
I lived in community for ten years, and it was good and it was painful, and I hope I haven’t said goodbye to that way of life forever. I could beat my head against my Bible wondering why my life no longer looks like that and how to get it back, or I can accept that when God empties our lives he also fills them up again. Not with the things we are missing, necessarily, but with himself.
In this world, we are wanderers. And that is not always a bad thing, not always a sin thing. We can wander quite a distance pursuing the good things of God’s kingdom on earth. Still, there’s little rest in wandering, and God knows we need rest. But where to find it?
God’s people “wandered over mountain and hill and forgot their own resting place” (Jeremiah 50:6).
Sometimes we need silence and emptiness, loneliness and barrenness in order to remember. We need winter.
The four walls of my suburban existence can feel like a prison, but they have been just the thing for feeling the heavy, holy pressure of God’s hand on me.
“You hem me in – behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”
With three talkative children at the table, the ship of dinner-time conversation is rarely steered by the adults in our house. Which is surprising given that the youngest is working with a somewhat limited vocabulary. To make up for this handicap, he frequently resorts to loudly repeating a single word with varying intonations. His vocabularly may be small, but he certainly knows what talkative is supposed to sound like.
Recently, I yanked my mind from some daydream or other and recognized that the children were discussing Harry Potter. This, too, is strange, given that not one has finished reading a single book of the series, nor have they seen the films. I recognize, with a bit of sadness, that Harry Potter has joined the company of imaginative figures, untethered from any particular medium, which populate a child’s imagination. Harry Potter, Winnie the Pooh, a Jedi Knight … they’re all hanging out together in my five-year-old’s dreams.
As if trying to get a firmer grasp on all that she doesn’t yet know, the firstborn says, “But Harry Potter isn’t …”, and I gasp. I am suddenly sure that she’s about to say “true.” She doesn’t. Finishing her sentence over my raised eyebrows, she says, “Harry Potter isn’t real, is it Daddy?” He says easily, “No honey, it isn’t real.” And I sigh, grateful I don’t have to intervene.
But if she had said true? That would have been a very different story.
It isn’t simply that I love Harry Potter. I do. Much as I loved Narnia when I was my daughter’s age. But it isn’t love (or delusion, for that matter) that would have caused me such pain to hear my child say, “That story isn’t true.”
Despite what you may now be thinking, I don’t believe there are broom-flying wizards right around the corner. That’s our reality. No broom-flying wizards. I might wish it otherwise, but I accept this.
But true? Not true? To me, at least, those words suggest something very different from what we usually mean when we say “true-life.” No, Harry Potter’s world is not “true-life.” But true? Yes!
Ours is a fallen, not-quite-what-it-was-meant-to-be world, and our reality isn’t always true. At times, it lies. It says this world tends towards chaos, you are on your own, watch out for number one, pursuing goodness is a waste of time.
Stories – at least the excellent ones – give us a glimpse of the world as it was always meant to be. Through the lens of a story, we can see the world as it will be again one day.
Reality? Too often it is a cracked lookingglass. Stories? No matter how fantastical, this is often where we spy the truth.
When Jesus came walking in bare feet to rescue us, he was asked many questions. More often than not, he answered them with stories.
He told us himself that his name was Truth, and he told us stories.
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!
