They say that money can’t buy happiness, but that doesn’t keep me from trying.

So I went to college and graduated and got a job where they give me dollars and then I exchanged all those dollars for stuff and now I’m sitting in my house surrounded by piles of stuff with no dollars.

But when I roll out of bed and stumble across piles of stuff strewn around my house, I don’t feel happy. When I watch my boys smear peanut butter on everything I own, I don’t feel happy. When I move boxes and bins from the garage to the closet trying to figure out where to stash it all, I don’t feel happy.

I’ve read those minimalism blogs, about simple living and anti-consumerism and de-cluttering, and that doesn’t make me happy either. Because I don’t want to be a minimalist. I don’t want to get rid of my stuff. My stuff is supposed to make me happy.

We’ve moved a few times since we were married and there are things that have never been unpacked, never used, and never missed. There are clothes in my closet that I never wear, but I keep them just in case. There’s a mountain of stuffed animals in our living room, because somehow cheap teddy bears reproduce and multiply faster than any living creature.

And now I’m beginning to realize that it’s all a lie. The blaring commercials, the glossy oh-so-airbrushed ads hanging larger than life, the whisper in my ear that I must buy more. Lies.

The truth is, the stuff weighs me down. It stresses me out. The truth is, I don’t even really want it. I just love buying stuff.

So everything must go.

The DVD’s that I bought because they were just $5 (but now they’re free on Netflix Instant). The books I thought I’d read a second time, but never have. The jeans that don’t fit right but I paid $10 for. The toys that cover our living room floor every night, the ones that the kids will never miss. The broken electronics stashed in a closet because I might fix them someday.

It’s an acquired taste, a learned freedom. But there’s a certain thrill to piling stuff into boxes and bags and throwing it away or giving it away. That voice still whispers strong in my ear when I walk into WalMart or pass a yard sale: “Buy something, anything. Don’t throw it away. You might need it someday!”

But someday has never come, and I never needed whatever it was I’ve been carrying around in boxes all these years.

You know what I need?

A quiet place to sit and write. Time with my wife and my boys. Good friends. Good food. A few adventures from time to time. Those are the things I don’t keep stashed on shelves in my garage. Those are the things I can’t buy for a handful of change at a yard sale.

Everything else is just stuff.

Everything must go.

[ image: Brett Davis ]

The twins are fighting over the latest coveted object. This time the earbuds for my Iphone.

I pause.

Watching them in this bizarre, passionate tug-of-war: Dezzo with his mouth a rectangle full of teeth, face tomato-red, and eyes full of the most forlorn tears I almost want to laugh at the absurdity and pick him up right away to comfort him while Anna is on her tippy toes caterwauling in an ungodly way, face also a hellish red, and every fiber in her body so tense she is vibrating while she pulls indignantly. I look around. There are remnants of raisins and Goldfish crackers, and Ellis, our poor Boxer dog, who has been relegated to the bottom of the totem pole for years now, is scrounging for those crumbs. Oz is in his bouncy seat cooing loudly, sweetly, but also, annoying in this moment.  All I want to do is to take a torch and burn up all the Legos and Little People cars, all the miniature farm animals and dinosaurs on the floor so I don’t have to clean them up, and then go into the kitchen to make a huge chocolate cake and eat it over the sink with my bare hands like a rat.

I ask myself again: How did I get here?

I didn’t sign up for this, whatever this is, pseudo-insane-asylum. I graduated from college. I went to graduate school. Twice. I was supposed to get a PhD. I am an ordained minister, for God’s sake. What the hell is my world right now? 

I wake up for a moment and run over to the twins and snatch up the earbuds before they go the way of Solomon’s sage advice to the women fighting over the baby and become two strands of useless, dead wire. And now they are screaming at me. I guess that’s a better alternative.

How did I get here???

||

Vocation is a funny word. It’s surprisingly not so far off from the word, “vacation.” But, I digress, pointlessly. Or not so pointlessly? In my mind, I keep on turning over and over the words of one of my mentors, “Vocation should be about flourishing and thriving in your passion.” Flourishing. Thriving. I am doing neither of those right now. Perhaps I would if I had some kind of a vacation. That is all-inclusive. With fruity, diluted alcoholic drinks with pretty umbrellas, and where I can swim up to the bar to refill my glass as many times as humanly possible. An opportunity to breathe and to break from it all. No doubt then, vocation and vacation seem to go hand-in-hand. To flourish requires some kind of fracture in the day to day routine, temporary but thorough and extreme.

But both vocation and vacation undergo a major transformation in marriage and family. Back in the day when it was just Andy and me, vacations were actually stressful before we could do them together. It took us a long time to realize that we both had very different ways of relaxing and enjoying a city. I longed to be a tourist first and to see everything, soak up museums, parks, and churches, while Andy prioritized reading a good book in coffee shops and bars. Granted, we both wanted the same thing but the order was off. We eventually got it.

Likewise, the first time we came up to my parents’ home for “vacation,” with just the twins who were 6 months old, we thought we could immediately hand them off and looked forward to going out for wings and beer. 10 minutes after we got our beers and started to get into the Cubs-Pirates game we got a call from my dad. Both babies were screaming in the background. We got our wings boxed up and left to go back. Now, we look forward to this time so we can go out to breakfast or lunch without the kids or sit in a Starbucks to read and write or take the kids to the zoo. That’s vacation.

I have my moments. When I really love this whatever. Love being at home with the kids. Love watching them do everything for the first time. Love experiencing everything with them. Love their laughter, their songs, their eyes when they wake up from a nap.

But, I have my other moments, too. And I can’t help but say, “WTH is this life?”

||

I got stuck. Writing this out. And someone posted Momastery’s latest blog by a lady named Lisa-Jo, I’ve never heard of her but feel like I should know her, and wish I could grab coffee or better yet, a hard, pre-prohibition drink and hear her talk more about these dog days:

Ain’t no shame in those days, friends.

Nope, I think those are the holy days. The scars-worn-bravely days.

So, on those days, dear ones, dish up an extra bowl of ice cream and repeat after me:

I am stretched and tired and fearful.
I am wild and brave and broken.
But this one life is on purpose and it’s not by accident where I woke up this morning.

…

These are the good days, the glory days, the slow-as-molasses days. These are the fast years, the wonder years, the how-do-I-find-words years.

But we do. They usually start with “help” and end with “thank you” and the middle?

The middle is a thick layer of reliable wonder sometimes whispered, often shouted, always answered.

The middle is me. The middle is you. The middle is just this one, sacred, take-off-your-shoes-worthy syllable,

“mom.”

I read this and I can’t think of a better way to describe this vocation. To make me stand a little taller because of this calling. To go to sleep for a few hours feeling satisfied and fulfilled in unexpected ways. To wake up looking forward to what is around the corner, and how these little ones will continue to call me forward. Sure, I vacillate constantly between being faithful to my feminist priorities by bucking against cultural pressures to be the perfect and willing stay-at-home mom…or embracing this as an opportunity to experience and live into a new kind of faithfulness trusting in God’s timing and gifts. Yes, I was judgy when I was pregnant and looked down on all sorts of stay-at-home moms, suburban moms, homeschooling moms, and now I see them as incredible expressions of survival and vocation…and calling. I was ordained in 2005 to ministry, but I was ordained to something bigger when the twins first laid hands on me and I never let go, and then Oswald surprised us, and it was like I was being baptized all over again.

Do you remember the trays we all used to eat off of in our elementary school cafeterias?

I usually had to bring my lunch from home, ‘cause $1.80 was apparently too pricey, but when I did get to buy my lunch at school I loved the trays we got to use.

Why?

Because those nice, neat little sections they were divided up into kept my food from touching.

And as any elementary school kid will tell you, there’s nothing worse in life than having your food touch. Although, I have to admit. Even as an adult, I sometimes have to agree with them.

Look, if God wanted my corn to be in my mashed potatoes God would have made corn potatoes. But He didn’t. Because clearly God doesn’t like His food to touch either.

As adults we may not use those wonderful gifts of gastronomic separation anymore, but many of us live our lives like we’re still in the school cafeteria.

We love to keep our lives nice and neat. We separate and divide everyone and everything into clearly delineated categories that we don’t have to think about and which we treat however we like.

We need to have our good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other. No touching. No mingling. That way we can vilify anyone or anything at the drop of a hat without having to worry about messy things like nuance, complexity, or worst of all – diversity.

Which is why Stephen Colbert is ruining America.

He’s doing everything he can to destroy our cherished cafeteria tray way of life.

For some, he’s just a liberal blowhard.

For others, he’s one of the funniest guys on television.

And for the oblivious, he’s the champion of the Republican cause and the most patriotic American in history.

But what makes Stephen Colbert so frustrating is the quandary he presents, particularly to the church and her relationship to politics.

The modern myth of faith and politics in America tells us that all Christians are Republicans. Fortunately, the last election made some progress in dismantling this myth, but it still holds firm ground in the minds of many. The idea that a person could be a Christian and criticize the Republican Party, or worse, vote for a Democrat is nothing short of heresy for many good, faithful people in the church.

And yet there stands Stephen Colbert – a devoted Catholic, a family man, Sunday School teacher, and unabashed wearer of Lenten ashes who is not afraid to publicly call out his fellow brothers and sisters in Christ (in both parties) when the policies they are advocating stand in stark contrast with the God they claim to be following.

Like the time he called all of us out a few years ago in what, for me, is one of the most stinging (and accurate) critiques of American Christianity ever uttered in the English language,

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.

With his brazen public admissions of faith and steadfast refusal to shy away from his Christian faith, Stephen Colbert forces us to rethink our cafeteria tray approach to faith and politics.

Unless we are going to position ourselves (rather than God) as the judge of someone else’s faith, then we have to take Colbert at his word (and deeds) that he is, in fact, a Christian. And if that is true, we must abandon our “us” vs. “them” approach to faith and politics and begin to recognize that sometimes “they” are really “us.”

Now, I’m not saying we can’t disagree. We can. And we should. But the demonization of people in the opposing political party has to stop, particularly since some of those people we are demonizing are our own brothers and sisters in Christ.

On a basic level, the utter ineptitude of our current partisan political climate demonstrates just how impotent this attitude renders our ability to get anything accomplished. But on a deeper level, when we caricature and demonize our fellow Christians (or people in general) on the other side of the aisle, we are denying them their God given identity as people made in the image of God by painting them instead simply as political opponents to be destroyed. When this happens we rip apart the Body we claim to hold dear.

Again, I am by no means denouncing disagreement. We should debate and debate vigorously, but must not demonize.

Demonization requires simplicity. It requires a stripping down, or even contorting, of reality to “basic issues” which replace the people who believe in them, along with the nuance and complexity of life that led them to their beliefs. When people become simply idea, “them,” or worse, the enemy, they become targets we think nothing of destroying at will, and with a sense of righteousness to boot.

However, the issues we are so passionate about are almost never as simple as we make them out to be, nor are the people we debate with as uniform or malicious in their beliefs as we portray them as being.

Faith and politics, life in general is not like an elementary school cafeteria tray. It’s complicated and messy. Boundaries are crossed as people and issues get mixed together in the face of the nuances that shape the reality of our complicated and ever evolving everyday lives. Pretending otherwise, that life is simply about voting “yes” or “no” on certain issues or that faith and politics can be constructively reduced to “us” vs. “them” is not only utterly dishonest, it creates an antagonistic myopathy that keeps us from answering our call to bring the kingdom of God to earth as it is in heaven.

We need a new approach to faith and politics, one that is honest about the complexities of life and which honors the humanity of everyone.

Which is why I am so thankful for the witness of Stephen Colbert.

He is ruining the America (and church) of “us” vs. “them.”

And I, for one, am very grateful that he is.

Grace and peace,

Zack Hunt

And because of that, we didn’t get to share this printable with you for the month of May. This quote struck me deep, and I’m happy to share this little bit of inspiration with you. Print it, pin it, share it, love it.

Click here to download a pdf of this 8.5 x 11 printable.

Read the original article by Preston Yancey here:

“There is a moment when it is off-handedly offered that someone read recently in an article that biblical translators, facing difficulty in communicating with inuit peoples in Alaska, were having to be creative in translating some of the Bible’s phrases for a people group with no context to otherwise receive them. What does Lamb of God mean to someone who has never seen or heard of a lamb, who has no concept of a lamb? The translators settled on seal…” Read more.

“everything is an act of translation.” — Preston Yancey /// www.deeperstory.com

Also, because I feel bad about not posting this in May, here are some additional extras…

iPhone Lockscreen

Android Screen

Desktop wallpapers: 1280 x 800, 1280 x 1024, 1366 x 768, 1440 x 900, 1680 x 1050

See you next month with another printable (and maybe more!).

One of the less appealing things Christ-followers have always done is divide into sects. We love doing that. I’m sure it starts with noble purposes, but inevitably, factions draw as much identity from “what they are against” as much as “what they are for,” setting themselves against differing tribes under the Christian banner.

Denominations, coalitions (i.e. groups who graduated from the looser “movement” status), networks, associations – usually with strong, charismatic (white) (male) leaders – generate copious amounts of followers, parroting theological positions and sweeping Biblical conclusions about what God definitively meant in His Word.

These have never set well with me, much to the chagrin of the various splinters. It’s probably the same reason I’m registered as an independent voter rather than siding with a party; once I sign my allegiance over, I feel like I lose the freedom to call my party to reform. I’m more likely to defend bad policy and bad practices, because as a partisan supporter, it’s too sticky to admit my group has a dark underbelly worthy of dissent. We live in an “all bad” and “all good” society, readily attaching those labels to the groups we like (ours) and the groups we’re against (everyone else’s).

Just like there is both great good and heinous abuses on each side of the political divide, factions of the church get some parts right and others wrong. This is because we are human people, attempting to reconcile the ways of Jesus with this broken life; the ways God said would be higher than our own, born from His thoughts which always exist in the stratosphere above our heads.

We do our best. We try to handle God’s Word with integrity and flesh out what the Christian life is supposed to look like. We do. I daresay we mean ever so well. But anytime a human decides he and his group have cornered the market on our mysterious God, including exactly how He is handling salvation, eternity, and redemption, my alarm bells start clanging. Especially when he is conveniently on the right side of favor. (Concerning the eternal damnation of her family members, a local church leader told my friend: “We will one day see them in hell and say AMEN.” Sweet merciful heavens.)

Take God’s sovereignty, for instance, a polarizing, emotionally charged concept within the Bride. I am uncomfortable laying evil, perversion, and darkness at God’s feet, casting Him as a petrifying, arbitrary ruler. I haven’t the slightest idea how His sovereignty works in us, around us, through us, in spite of us. I don’t know where sin ends and God’s will begins. I can’t even suss out what “He allowed it” means. Is Satan a real force on this earth or isn’t he? Do our sinful choices belie the heart of God or do they simply execute His providence? If God is sovereign over injustice, what does that actually mean? The mysterious cocktail of ultimate good and evil, sin and self, Spirit and power somehow equal the truth of God I cannot comprehend.

Mind you, this is not for lack of reading or discussion. I’ve pressed and obsessed and grieved, worried that God was actually horrible and untrustworthy. I’ve gone cold, calculated, fatalistic: “What is the point? It is what it is no matter what anyone does.” I’ve been angry, then defensive, then arrogant, then hopeless. I dragged people off the cliff with me, leading the witness toward my current position, hoping someone could help reconcile the God I knew with such a broken, devastated world. Is God really in charge of this mess? Because if so, it seems like He might be terrible at being God.

Deep in the throes of confusion, thrashing and lashing out, God rescued me from my own despair with one simple word:

“Jen, I am love and I am just.”

And with that, all the wind left my manic sails. God could not possibly orchestrate injustice. That is incompatible with his character. He would never stoically endorse abuse, hatred, evil. How could He? God couldn’t possibly be unfair. He could never act unlovingly. In His heart, in His hand, He is love and justice and embarrassing mercy. God doesn’t simply act that way; it is the nature of His very being. However God moves, it is always just. It is always fair. It is always loving. It always moves toward redemption.

That is all I need to know.

How this fleshes out amid the complicated mix of humanity and decay and sovereignty, I haven’t the foggiest idea. Circumstantially, the entire concept can fold in on itself, for it all seems so subjective. But my soul rests in the security that my God is good. I needn’t feel compelled to lay evil at His feet, because dark forces exist on our earth as well, if you believe the Bible. As long as rebellion is still possible, then parts of life will unfold outside of God’s goodness. Somehow, He will set this all right one day.

If that isn’t as certain or positive or crystal clear as you’d like, I get it. There is comfort in following believers with iron-clad confidence. Sometimes I envy them. But I am unprepared to put too much confidence in my understanding of something as mysterious as God’s sovereignty. I’ve been wrong too many times before, and about lesser concepts. Rather, my confidence has finally found rest in God’s goodness, which somehow transcends theology and circumstances and doubt. I am comfortable loving Jesus with questions in play, because the one thing I am sure of is His nature.

The older I get, the less I know, the more mysterious salvation becomes. I no longer feel compelled to nail it all down to reproducible soundbytes, Twitter-worthy missives. I am comfortable letting my mind suffer, yet letting my spirit rest. My God is good and worthy of all praise, and that is enough.

“When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”

Jesus replied, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.”

Jesus, indeed, I will not stumble on account of you.

“You don’t say much, but you have an unquiet mind.”

The words are spoken by a serial killer to sheriff Walt Longmire to start the second season of Longmire. They’re absolutely true. This A&E crime drama, set in the fictional Absaroka County, Wyoming, and based on Craig Johnson’s series of mystery novels, is unlike any other on television.

Why? Because it’s slow. It’s quiet.

The title character, played by Robert Taylor, rarely speaks. When he does open his mouth, it’s in efficient, ineloquent bursts. He doesn’t carry a cell phone. He drives a beat-up truck. He wears boots and a hat and admits he’s out of step with modern crime-fighting or, well, anything else using “modern” as a descriptor.

At a crime scene in last summer’s pilot episode, a new deputy (played by the feisty Katee Sackhoff of Battlestar Galactica fame) asks Longmire what he’s doing as her boss pokes around a crime scene. “Thinkin’,” Longmire replies. “I do that sometimes before I talk.”

The “unquietness” of his mind has to do with his wife’s death, with dark secrets in his past, and with the remarkable number of murders that require his attention in rural Wyoming (seriously, people: stay away from the Wyoming badlands, where someone dies every week). Longmire’s stoic nature isn’t because he has nothing to say, but because he chooses not to add to the noise. The show’s pace follows his lead. It’s as lingering, methodical, and hushed as a western landscape.

I think of Longmire a lot when too many things are happening.

+ + +

In late April, my wife and I attended a Lumineers concert in the Dallas area. It was an amazing show—simple, stripped-down, and a prime example of the new-folk renaissance taking place in the music world. Here were passionate musicians playing retro instruments (cello, accordion, mandolin, upright piano, glockenspiel) and having an amazing time without Auto-Tune or fog machines.

About four songs into their set, they hit the first hos and heys and acoustic strums of their big hit, “Ho Hey.” Predictably, a deluge of blue-lit cell phone screens popped up to tweet and photograph and record the moment.

The Lumineers stopped the song. Like, totally, stopped playing.

“Do me a favor and put away your cellphones and recording devices,” lead singer Wesley Schultz said. “We want you to just be present with us and experience this moment.”

And then most of the phones went black, and The Lumineers started the song over:

I’ve been trying to do it right / I’ve been living a lonely life

According to other reviews of this tour, they’ve made the same request—at the same point in the concert—at multiple venues. So maybe it’s kind of a shtick. But it’s an effective one.

I think of The Lumineers a lot when too many things are happening.

+ + +

Another folksy Americana musician, the singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, has also been known to interrupt his concert set (typically in the middle of his young-love song “Kathleen”) to ask something from his audience members. In a brief intermission, he stops the show to invite his fans to slow dance with each other while his Royal City Band plays “sexy music.”

“Put your arms out Frankensteinishly towards someone—anyone,” he says in this clip from a 2012 Nashville show at the Mercy Lounge.

“It strikes me…that we could have the largest, sort of amoeba-like slow dance,” he says in a 2011 St. Louis performance. “This is not optional.”

“Just grab someone. You know how this works,” he tells a New York City audience in February 2011.

During these moments, it never fails that the audience members find each other—strangers partner up—and slow-dance together like awkward middle-schoolers in a sweet interlude of humanity and intimacy.

No cell phones. No conversation. No lyrics.

I think of Josh Ritter a lot when too many things are happening.

+ + +

It’s been a disheartening couple of weeks. On May 20, five hours away from where we live in the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma City was hit with a series of tornadoes, killing 23 people in and around Moore, Oklahoma. A week later, another powerful storm hit Amarillo with tornado warnings and golf ball-sized hail. Despite damage to our house and my car, we were fine, having spent the evening huddled in my brother’s basement.

A few days after that, on May 31, another tornado outbreak hit central Oklahoma, killing ten. The death toll included Tim Samaras and Carl Young—scientists and field researchers who had prominent roles on the Discovery Channel series “Storm Chasers,” a show I was passionate about during its 2007-2012 run.

Meanwhile, an online friend had a much-anticipated adoption fall through at the last minute. Other close friends ended up in a social media scrape with another member of our online family, and relationships got messed up. A campus minister I enjoy on Twitter, @prodigalsam, has been accused of plagiarism and joke-stealing, and the evidence is damning. Combine that with all the other stuff that typically happens in the religious blog world—Bible fights, theology disputes, people who are supposed to be kind calling each other names—and it becomes too much. There have been times when I relished this back-and-forth exchange of ideas. I got involved. I spouted my opinion. I took sides and linked up and stepped into the sound and fury.

But more than ever, when it feels like too many things are happening, I find myself just wanting to step away, to do myself a favor.

To unplug.

To ease my unquiet mind.

To do something slow.

To think before I add to the noise.

To put away my phone and be present.

To put my arms out Frankensteinishly and hold someone close.

Sometimes, for me—in the wise words of Josh Ritter—this is not optional.

Some time later, [Samson] fell in love with a woman in the Valley of Sorek whose name was Delilah. The rulers of the Philistines went to her and said, “See if you can lure him into showing you the secret of his great strength and how we can overpower him so we may tie him up and subdue him. Each one of us will give you eleven hundred shekels of silver.” Judges 16:4-5

Your kind of pretty is the loneliest kind, the cracked-under-the-surface kind.

It’s not altogether your fault. You learned it at eleven, when you read Seventeen Magazine secretly at your best friend’s house because your mom wouldn’t let you buy it. You learned that beauty was never really about you in the first place – it was about the boys.

It was about who noticed you and who didn’t and about whether you applied the right makeup or combed your hair the right way or wore the right clothes from the right stores. It was about the way you held your body when you sat on a bench, about what you did with your eyes. Flutter up. Flutter down. Flutter up. Catch his eye and then look away, and wait to see if you are magnetic enough to pull him in.

You are not so different than any of us.

The truth is that very few of us know how to truly believe in our own beauty without the second glance from a car window every now and then, the smile from the stranger at the end of the bar.

They offer you eleven hundred shekels of silver – each – to overcome Samson with your beauty and learn the secret of his strength, but I know you. You might have done it for free – just to find out if you could. To find out if you were enough. If, of all the women in the room, he would see you most of all.

If the boy doesn’t see you, do you even exist?

Somewhere along the line, you’ve forgotten who you are without the context of these boys. Their approval, their appraising eyes, their inappropriate whistles. You pretend to hate it, but I know you. You keep these things in an invisible ledger near your heart where you are all the time recalculating your worth.

And who can say where the lines blur? A game becomes something else and then, in the pitch-dark of the earliest morning, you find yourself holding scissors, cutting his hair, and it’s not so much to rid him of his strength but because you’re so unsure of your own.

Listen, love: You were always strong. Our minds are plastered over by so many advertisements and images. You know so many lies, and this will be one of the hardest truths for you to believe: that you are enough. That you are entirely beautiful and entirely seen, just you are.

Your beauty – the true version of it — exists deep in your soul, and you can’t lose it when you gain weight or when you add years to your age. You can’t augment it with your lipstick and you can’t earn it with their glances. It is already whole. You are already known and loved all the way through.

You are already enough.

I see you, Delilah. You are holding the money in your hands, and it is more than you’ve ever had, but you will never really feel eleven-hundred-shekels beautiful. You will either feel empty, or you will feel precious. There is no in between — only brief reprieves in the striving. Only brief moments of victory – then, hollowness.

I see you writing it down in that ledger near your heart – eleven hundred shekels, and you know it still doesn’t add up to enough.

Rip up that little book, Delilah.

Throw it page by deceitful page into the deep water and then watch it crumble, sink, disappear. Feel your soul swell with the truth that  God is looking at you with his heart full to the brim.

That he’s never seen anyone as beautiful as you are right now.

Image credit: Matt Gruber, CreationSwap.com

Her heart cried for him to assume the mantle of

Spiritual Head of the Household, her faith as strong

as her desires were specific. Although speaking the things of God

was her first language, he was a private man of careful words.

If he wouldn’t initiate the family devotions she craved,

they could have none.

Of quiet faith, he led off-stage, dish towel or mower in hand.

Humble, hard work was his hallmark, and she led by example, too,

in disciplines spiritual and faith like a child. She thought there no leaders between them,

but I saw two, alone.

The Christ-way is not gendered; aren’t all called to follow first?

To lead we bow low, without spotlight or script. There are different

kinds of service but the same God is at work. Gifted and graced by a Spirit

of freedom, teaching and learning, we practice as one.

Can we pray, she asked, initiating. And we did, and he did, together,

like she’d wanted all along. Some prayers bear fruit in decades’ time, and

we are the answer we’ve searched for all the while.

Image: almarrte II

But on Memorial Day (and any patriotic holiday, I presume), they had draped all that beauty with bunting. Front and center, someone had arrayed six flags representing the US military branches. At stage left hung an enormous US flag from an eagle-topped flagpole, while on stage right, an equally enormous Christian flag hung from a cross-topped flagpole – the only cross in sight. Every flower arrangement in the church was red, white, and blue.

In the back, they’d set up a museum-quality display of war memorabilia: photos, uniforms, helmets, boots, guns, posters, newspapers, and more. A life-size cut-out of a Marine stood next to an old organ across the room, and I stifled a giggle as I watched women pose for pictures with him (is there a rule that all Marines must be handsome?). Everything in the display was a memento from a loved one; each had meaning. White twinkle lights and bunting framed the display.

It was beautiful. But it was in church.

In a place where we should be focusing on the God who chose to lay aside the power of divinity to become human, who did not come as a military hero but a quietly subversive teacher and healer, I see no place for overblown patriotism. Did Paul not write that God’s strength is made perfect in weakness? Did he not teach that God uses the weak things of the world to shame the strong, the foolish to shame the wise? And do we not sing that Jesus loves red, yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight? We dare not glorify military might in God’s upside-down kingdom (to borrow a phrase from Ann Voskamp). We dare not revise history to define every American conflict as a defense of the Bible and Christianity.

But despite the bile in my throat at such blasphemy, I go. I go because I love my extended family. I go because relationships are important, and when I’ve chosen not to go, those relationships have been strained. (And, to be honest, I also go because I like to see how they respond to turquoise hair.)

This particular Sunday was everything I expected. At first, I mentally argued with everything taught that morning. I wrote copious notes complaining about the revisionism and about the simplistic analysis of both the world’s problems and the solutions (e.g. “the world is so wicked because we don’t read the bible anymore and we don’t tell others about it.”). I tweeted angrily when a Sunday School teacher flatly stated that our military is in Afghanistan to defend God’s Word.

But my phone died, and I quieted as I listened to the pastor, bedecked in red, white, and blue, pray that the congregation would not get caught up in trends and be God’s people. And even though I didn’t play the “every head bowed every eye closed no looking around raise your hand if you love Jesus” game, I heard it. A haunting question: Why do you think you’re better than they?

This pastor was clearly unaware that his words were contradicted by everything else, from his outfit to the décor to the choir’s special music to his request for everyone who “served the Lord in the Army” (and each other branch, by turn) to please stand.

I set aside my righteous anger and asked myself, “Where am I saying one thing while completely oblivious of the fact that everything else about my life contradicts my words?”

I don’t know the answer. How can I? I’m as oblivious as he is.

I can’t know without other people, people I trust to love me even in my hypocrisy, speaking into my life, asking me questions, and pointing things out that might possibly piss me off because to admit that I’m a hypocrite is embarrassing. It takes me being willing to listen to those people and consider whether they might be right.

It also takes me being willing to learn from someone I would rather look down on.

On our drive home that afternoon, my husband and I talked about the sermon and where I thought the pastor completely misinterpreted the passage. He used only the parts of the passage that fit the point he wanted to make. And while I stand by my critique, I must turn the tables on myself.

How many times have I gotten things wrong? How many times have I wanted to make one point and used things to make those points, whether the context allowed it or not? Listening carefully to discern the truth is important for this very reason – none of us gets it all right.

In picking at the errors I see, I miss the bigger point. I miss the unmistakable love the people in this church have for each other. I miss the way they manage to smile and welcome me in spite of my turquoise hair and my modern translation of the Bible. I devalue the respect they have for their family members who experienced the horrors of war. I discount their commitment to Jesus because I don’t like the way they demonstrate it.

I dare not do this.

I believe that each of us who loves Jesus looks at him through a different window. We see different things, and our experiences cause us to value different things more. Disagreement does not mean that we lack common ground. It does not make this one better and that one worse. It does not give me permission to mock or look down my nose.

So this week, I echo that fundamental Baptist pastor’s prayer: God help me be the person you want me to be.

My mom learned about the storms of life early on. Growing up in a loving, yet broken and blended Christian family, she weathered many seasons including some marred with alcoholism.  She had to teach herself how to rise above the waves of her childhood, and she gleaned from the positives in her upbringing. THAT was the legacy she would later pass on to her children.

I always loved looking at pictures of a younger Cindy.  She was a striking blonde.  She was captain of her cheerleading squad, star of her school plays and a part of GA’s at her church.  She carried a grace with her that was recognizable even in photos.  She married her high school sweetheart and they quickly had 2 girls, Tiffany and me. We benefited from a loving, affectionate and supportive mother, and never questioned how she learned her ways. We assumed as most do, that she grew up in a similar situation as us.

Many years later, for reasons not needed here, my parents divorced.  Mom, Tiffany and I moved south to Tampa.  She quickly re-married and new titles were given.  Life and love were stirred once again.  She rose above the storm that divorce always carries with it. She, and her life kept moving forward.

My mom worked full time for most of her life.  Her faith was strong and she believed in the local church, so she toted us there at least twice a week.  As we got older, she began to find ways to support and cultivate our talents.  For 14 years, she took us to dance 3 days a week with 1 to 3 hours of rehearsals a day. She never missed a recital, a competition, or a show. She gave her time, her money, her vacations—all for us to pursue our dreams. Then we added cheerleading, theatre and singing to the mix.

Life was hard, fast, busy, full, and healthy.  We learned how to take it on with full force.

She taught us it was okay to be a strong, assertive, feisty, passionate, hard –working woman.  She made her mistakes, owned those mistakes, and grew from them. She taught us the beauty of being independent.  She was a listening ear and a shoulder to lean on. She was the voice of reason at times and the strength of empathy at others.  She gave up so much of herself as she poured into us.  She supported. She was our biggest fan and our hardest critic.

Now, she has moved from Mom and friend into her most beloved title: “CiCi”.  Grandma was not the correct title when we started having our own children. But CiCi, short for Cindy, is just perfect.  She no longer works for corporate America, but she does work full time as CiCi.  She watches and cares for my children while Ben and I are working or traveling. She is the first on the trampoline and the first in the pool, and they love her as much as I do.

CiCi has become the name not only the grandchildren call her, but MOST call her. Yet it’s not the title that has earned her respect and place in so many lives. It’s her relationship, her example, and her countenance. She is open hearted, without judgment, and willing to stand for others. She is a hand to hold, and can laugh at herself and life when needed.  She pours a nice glass of wine, eats cupcakes for breakfast and still goes to TaeBo with me.  She’s the first on the guest list of a party and knows the importance of letting go and having fun.  She is the 3^rd parent at times, doting grandmother at others, but friend always.

She has led a life of love and of strength, sometimes quiet and sometimes loud.  She has given me an example of service.  She has taught me how to take life and either savor it, or grow from it.  She has taught me about what it means to keep moving forward. She rides the waves of life, relishes in the beauty of it, weathers the storms that come, and fights to rise above.  She jumps in feet first knowing that sometimes the water is cold, dark, deep, shallow, rough, or even docile.  All the while knowing the secret is that abundant life is always moving, pushing us towards growth, and also towards finding enjoyment.

Her birthday is coming up on June 2^nd, and although she’d kill me for disclosing her age (ha), I wanted her to know how unbelievably thankful I am for her.  I hope by hearing a little of her story, you are reminded (as I have been) of those who have impacted your life, and what an impact our lives, our choices and our responses have on others.

How can we live more intentionally?
For CiCi it is no question – she lives, and does, for others. And she is fulfilled in doing so.

So a very Happy Birthday to CiCi, my Mom, my friend.  I love you.
I’m proud to be on this journey of life with you!