Doorstep [part 2]

“Remember that part where you felt lost and all alone?” He said quietly.
“Yeah.”
“I was there, too.”

And yet again, He caught me unaware. It was something like the feeling I get when small talk turns into a conversation with depth and leaves me thinking for days and even weeks about it. It becomes one of those little moments of life that we seem to think are reserved for only those close to us, until they artfully overtake us.

I have found myself saying that my life seems cinematic as of late, but then I realize that the silver screen often makes some attempt at imitating life. It seems that life and art are one in the same to me these days. I get caught up in things like the nuance of autumn and the immensity of a sunset and the depth of a friend’s despair (and restoration) and the way someone’s eyes look when they smile.

I cannot hide how moved I am by the art of story, and by the way the Master Storyteller has brought me to where I am today. I am breathing in the moments that keep approaching me, each with another piece to add to this story. It is a story of redemption taking hold. Of a Kingdom that is ever-advancing and pervasive. Of a God who is quite literally running off the front porch to welcome home His prodigal son with open arms.

It is the greatest and most fearfully wrought story you and I will ever encounter.

[Read part one here]

The Nuance of Autumn

[View more here]

When God Exhaled

Where was I when the world was made? I ask.
You were on My mind, You reply.

Then, with a steady hand and a single breath that created unrepeatable history, man came into being. You breathed out. We breathed in. Humanity, in perfection, simply and gloriously began.

How is it that You, the one who flung stars into the cosmos, whose words are everlasting, knows my name? Not only do You know my name, but You have given me Your name, too. You fashioned us in Your image. Heaven and earth have never seen and will never see anything like it.

What response do I offer to You, O God of the ever-expanding universe? And what response do You ask of me?

You are asking for my heart.

You have spent these 24 years chasing after it. In fact, the things You set in motion to chase me down began long before I was born. And still, I struggle to offer my heart fully to You. But You have chosen to work Your redemption in us. Your pursuit of us never ceases.

How immensely and beautifully paradoxical it all is.

Rain

I find myself peering out the window, waiting for the relentless clouds to yield something more than shade. More than a drop in the temperature. More than a change of the day’s ambiance. I want so badly for it to come, because I know it marks the changing of a season. I feel it coming, moving around inside of me. And therein lay my daily frustration, wrapped up in the absence of something I know I need, but am unsure if I truly want.

Rain.

I intently watch the horizon, waiting for that ominous cloud to make an appearance. I am out of words. Out of excuses. Tired of the sound of my own voice asking questions. Of the finite sayings inside my head. In my restlessness, I hear You speak.

You’re waiting, but are you really thirsty?

[Written in September 2008]

//

A year ago, I found myself in a very dry place. On the other side of the unforgiving heat of the Oklahoma summer. I was stubbornly waiting for it to rain, both literally and figuratively. When Hurricane Ike rolled through south Texas, a small remnant of it spiraled its way across Tulsa.

Surely, I thought. Surely it will rain this time.

That night I took a walk out in the mighty winds and disappointing spatter of rain. The rain never fully let go, but the wind was untamed and unchecked. I kept to the center of the normally quiet streets of our complex, thoroughly shaken by the force of the wind barreling around in the trees.

Whose hands are you in, anyway? God challenged me.
Yours… I replied in a sheepish voice.

That moment has stayed with me. Come mighty wind or stagnant water, come pressing fear or baffled silence.

He is faithful. He is true. He is here.

Doorstep

Autumn has come and gone like a tepid lover these past weeks. And I, perplexed by the constantly changing rhythm of life, have found my heart in disrepair. Somewhere in the middle of it all, He caught me unaware with these words.

I’m meeting you here, He whispered. Right at your very doorstep.

There could not have been a more beautiful moment.

[To be continued]

Welcome to Our World

My niece Rebekah (fondly known as Bekah) arrived just before I went to Africa in June, on the weekend I was able to visit family in Michigan. She has impeccable timing. I like this kid. It never ceases to amaze me how beautiful and powerful a new life entering our world, and more so our family, can be. Welcome to our world, Bekah Ann.

A Simple Symphony

You sing when nobody listens.

It’s a haunting melody. Sincerely wrought, I suppose, from some place inside your heart. Would I be so bold to present something so dear as a song to a room that seems to absorb its very sound? Relatively oblivious souls who carry on over the top of your heart on the strings you strum.

But I hear you tonight. Keep on playing that simple symphony.

Has the songbird ever held back a refrain because she feared nobody would hear? What about the crickets composing the most intricate arrangements well into the night? How are they to know if anybody cares to turn their ear? All creation seems to sing some days. And I, in my hurried existence, often miss my cue to join.

Melody wraps her arms around the air, moving from side to side and floor to ceiling. Let her move tonight.

Reverse Culture Shock

Thousands upon thousands of dollars of cars blur by on the street outside. People nonchalantly mosey up to an ATM and withdraw cash, as naturally as taking a breath or putting one foot in front of the other. Sitting here from my vantage point in a coffee shop, I see enough cups of coffee whose cost alone could feed a family of Africans a full meal. My own part in this culture is represented by the very computer I upon which I scribe these words, and the near-empty porcelain cup of artisan coffee I just enjoyed. It is setting in again, this shock of returning to my own culture from one that is vastly and painfully different from it.

A million numbers, emotions and thoughts are crashing around inside of me.

We’re all so desperately, horribly, shamefully and largely ignorantly American. How is it that just two weeks in a place like Uganda has undone me like this? I feel like I only got a breath of Africa, as opposed to a lifetime of lungs filled with the aching reality of poverty and hardship. A glimpse of a woman drinking filthy water or a scarcely clothed child wandering the slums with no one to look after her is nothing in comparison to waking up with the weight of such a reality each day. A day spent in the blistering heat or a bottle of clean water offered to a family pales in comparison to the toil and harsh struggle of walking for hours a day, only to return with a back-breaking load of filthy water for your already malnourished children.

But somehow, He called me to be there, to take that breath, to see and hear and know the gut-wrenching plight of my African brothers and sisters.

My hands, along with my heart, tremble at the thought of it. A month and four days after my feet have returned to American soil, I am finally allowing myself to truly feel it. At first it seems I was in a daze, unsure of how to process the massive variety of things we took on as a team. It was too fast and too short of a time for me to be there, so I have learned. I think by now that I know there will be another journey to that land. That’s all well and good, a goal that seems noble and acceptable to others and even more attainable than what I feel drawn to now. The question that really burns inside me is this:

What can I do today?

Rescue is Coming

I wrote this admittedly meandering and somewhat moody piece in April as I watched a storm rolling fiercely across the Oklahoma country side. I was somewhere in the midst of my last few months in that familiar place. I had moved into a missionary complex in a forgotten corner of town, situated across from the projects. Several of my friends had been there for a quite intense 8-month discipleship program. I came in on the last part of their time together. They so graciously welcomed me into their family while I transitioned out of a place I knew and loved so well. And as much as I miss my friends who became like family in my five years in Oklahoma, I know that where I am now is at the center of His will.

[I recommend having this on the background as you read...just the music, not the video]

//

There’s darkness in my skin. My cover’s wearing thin, I believe. I’d love to start again…go back to innocent and never leave.

I learned not too long ago that desperation has a sound. I heard it in the voice of a loved one who was grieving the sudden loss of a son. I saw it in the eyes of a friend that were red from tears that flowed from her broken heart. I felt it in my own chest as I have witnessed and pondered the loss and weight of our fall as humans.

Don’t give up now. A break in the clouds. We could be found.

I poured my heart out at the piano last night. All I could sing, over and over, is that God is good and God is near. In times where things are uncertain, yet all-to-certain in many ways, I hear Him whisper to me to remember who He is. To know who He is. And to rest in that, even with a million things tumbling around in my heart and my head.

There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s just that I believe things could get better. There’s nothing wrong with love. I think it’s just enough to believe.

Rescue is coming.

My heart is burning so violently these days that I fear it will bore a hole right through me and jump out at anyone who comes close enough. I keep thinking I am in this season of life to let the dust settle. But the wind keeps blowing. I feel Him in this wind. I hear Him calling me out, daring me to barrel headlong out of my comfortable little existence and into His outstretched arms.

And there’s nothing wrong with you, and nothing left to do but believe something bigger. And there’s nothing wrong with love. I know it’s just enough to believe.

When I was a child, I remember standing at the edge of the pool as my dad stood in the water, arms open and a smile on his face. I took such great joy in running and jumping into his arms, splashing around as we hit the water. I feel the same way now, with significant decisions staring back at me and my toes hanging over the edge of the pool. And in a season marked by alternating bouts of heaviness and great excitement, I find myself perfectly at home in this thing called transition.

Don’t give up now. A break in the clouds. We will be found. Rescue is coming.

Return

With weary eyes I watched as lightning danced from cloud to cloud. We were in a holding pattern over my newly adopted home, circling the airport until the weather cleared enough to allow a safe landing. The world was muffled as my ears protested the fourth descent from miles above the earth in a mere thirty hours. The past two weeks spent on a continent an ocean away from my own was still rattling around in my head and sinking into my heart. The closer I got to the ground, the more I knew…

I was finally home again.

//

We walked many roads while in Africa–many made of dirt and lined with refuse. Many times our knees hit the African soil as we portrayed the Gospel in the form of a short skit. As much as I cringed at the thought of a skit before our trip, I see now how God used us all, despite our limited skills, experience and resources, to reach others with the Kingdom. It would be unjust to glaze over the trip as something summarized in a few words, but the words that I seem to give in response to the question, “How was Uganda?” are these: incredible, difficult, crazy, exceedingly good.

I can only speak for myself in this, but my time in Uganda really broke me. It may sound dramatic, but there was a day where I truly felt overwhelmed with the desperate need of the people there. At times, that very need made their hospitality all the more meaningful. At other times, it made the pushy nature of some of the people we met all the more understandable. How would I behave in the throes of such circumstance?

Admittedly, I ran out of grace more than once, painfully baffled as to how to truly love. But then there would come a conversation or an encounter or a simple observation that would turn it all upside down. It was beautiful. I walked away from the experience with a deeper understanding, I hope, of God’s heart for the poor and forgotten, the widows and the prisoners, the broken and the orphaned.

//

If you’d like, you can check out my Africa blog for some excerpts from my daily journal while on the trip, along with photos and other stories.