When You're Romanced by the God of the Universe

It's 11:11 pm. A pine-scented candle flickers next to me. The wick is too long, causing the flame to bow compulsorily. The glow casts my reflection against the frosted windowpane and refracts back on the glassy coating of my eyes.

I am tired, but I cannot sleep.

As if my exhaustion is bowing compulsorily to the unceasing swirl of internal chatter. These nights, I can't get them to shut up, so I sit up late and try to piece together sentences as fragmented as my thoughts. I might be more grumpy if it weren't so wonderful. 

Swathed by the streetlamp, the snow outside matches the color of my candlelight. I used to dream about being kissed beneath that streetlight. I went through a Jane Austen phase where I lit candles all around my room and wrapped up in shawls to scribble Regency stories or pen letters to nobody, all in a British accent.... 

In the last twenty-four hours, two people have told me I am too romantic for my own good. I took it as a compliment. When you are romanced by the God of the universe, you do become too romantic for your own good--you become romantic for the good of others. Both of these people were women. Regrettably, they have traded in romance for reason, denying--but never escaping--their infused nature of a romantic Creator.   

If only you knew! my heart cries out. If only you would open yourself up to the reality of his desire for you. 

I didn't, all those years pretending to be Elizabeth Bennett. Or the following years I pursued the affection of young men. Or the subsequent months I shunted my heart for my head, traded romance for reason. In recent weeks, I have forgotten the reality he is teaching me to believe. It's only a few days into the new year and already my heart is wandering from the love I came to trust the previous year! 

January descended upon Minnesota with a belated arctic blast not nearly as cutting as the emotional icicles that pierced my heart. God was silent. I was sick all of Christmas and cried all of New Year's. Wondered how 2015 could turn like a switchback and how I was supposed to drive on when I was likely to derail and crash cliff-side into oblivion.

I bellowed into the snowstorm, "AREN'T YOU GOING TO SAY SOMETHING?"

I love you.

That only agitated me further. Agh, God, I know that! You're always saying that. That's the only thing you ever say anymore. Why won't you speak to this pain? Why won't you give me answers!

I have always loved you. I will always love you.

I was in pain. Nothing made sense. All my expectations of the coming year were like gaps in a Jenga tower, tottering before my eyes, collapsing before I even lived it. And God was telling me he loved me. I groaned with remorse because it didn't mean anything to me.  

Jesus, I feel bereft.  

And finally his voice breathed through the void in three words that stilled every fear, soothed every hurt, and spoke to fifteen years of romantic longings: 

You are known. 

   

Linchpins

A friend of mine said, "The Gospel is the story of God bringing his children home."

It is an ongoing story, of which we are aware especially at Christmastime. A thousand Decembers ago, the linchpin of God's story was pushed into the axle as a girl pushed God from her body.

The wheel of that story continues to turn as his children await his second and final coming, the climax our Author promised since the first few chapters. I love to page through the chapters leading up to Jesus' birth and look for the linchpins that God poked into the axles of his plan, keeping the wheel turning.

God chooses to bring his children home through a family when he promises Abram a lineage too great to count. Abram believes him. God makes a covenant with Abram and takes the responsibility of upholding both ends, thus lodging the linchpin into place. The wheel bumps over the ruts of Sarai's disbelief, long years of silence, and the couple's manipulation of beginning that family.

But the linchpin doesn't budge.

God brings his children home through a second barren woman, Rebekah, who gives Isaac twins. The second-born, the lesser son Jacob, is the linchpin that allows the wheel to rattle by favoritism and trickery and cowardice.

It is Jacob's ugly, unloved wife Leah whose fruitful womb conceives a host of sons, among whom is Judah, a linchpin of violence, godlessness, and incest. The wheel of God's story turns for five generations to Boaz, the strong linchpin that redeems the wheel from its road of corruption when he spreads the garment of his cloak over Ruth, promising to protect and care for her.

From the line of Boaz comes David, a new king, a new linchpin, a renewal of God's covenant to establish his son's throne forever. David builds a house for God, in conjunction with Samuel's prophecy:

"He is the one who will build a house for my name...I will be his father and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men, with floggings inflicted by men. But my love will never be taken away from him."

From David's son Solomon come thirteen generations of mostly evil kings, of whom Jeremiah and Zechariah prophesy against, declaring woe to the shepherds who scatter God's flock.

The wheel of God's story appears jammed because of the rust of its linchpin. But God promises a new shepherd to gather his flock together.

He puts a new linchpin in place, and the first people to hear of it are shepherds watching their flocks at night.

That vulnerable baby is the shepherd to replace Israel's leaders. He is the sacrificed lamb given to Abraham in place of Isaac. He is firstborn God who became second-rate man.

Wrapped in garments in the stable, he is the garment that God spreads over us in promise of love and protection, the garment that was gambled away as he bled out, so you and I could come home.

He is the King to replace David when he withstood the flogging for which he did no wrong, endured his own father's love withheld, so you and I could become the home where he dwells.

The gospel is the ongoing story of God bringing his children home. Because of the linchpin of the first Christmas, our hearts become linchpins in the turning of that wheel.

Candlelit Windows

In the quiet of my car I drive down quiet, glowing streets. Christmas light-looking. I haven't done this since I was a little kid. Winding streets are bordered by white icicle-laced homes and trees ribboned with red and blue bulbs.
I slow to a stop in front of a white Colonial-style house. Tall and regal, it is unadorned except for the golden glow of a candle in each of the eight pane-glass windows. My throat closes off unexpectedly; my eyes--suddenly hot and wet. Something deep in my heart thrusts deeper. Roots?
I realize this is my first Christmas with a discovered heart. Nothing leaves it untouched, Christmas light-looking included. I can feel the roots inching their spindly fingers deeper into the soil as they drink, as I stare at the simple elegance of the house.
It is the idyllic setting of a Christmas home. It is straight out of a picture book of my childhood, Peter Spier's Christmas!.
It is Dad pointing out the illustrations to five or six tousle-headed children in footie pajamas.
It is belonging.
It is home.
Oh, Father, I want to see beauty in everything...
I notice the sky: black all around except for the horizon where the moon casts a whitish glow through the growing fog. It reminds me of a scripture quoted in a Christmas movie I just watched with friends: The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. The movie was a cheesy, ABC chic flick that I mustered behind because it was sentimental and nostalgic. It was predictable, whimsical, and the cause of much mocking, especially when the writer threw in John 1:5 (at the moment the two lovers finish decorating the house with Christmas lights).
Yet I loved it. It was another moment my eyes sparked with tears, because the script writer could hardly know the truth of that verse, yet captured precisely why we blanket our homes with white lights.
A friend once told me that a critic sees value in very little. I want to see the value in everything. In that ridiculous movie I saw beauty and feeling, romance and magic. I saw a longing for tradition and legacy, and a hope for the future.
I saw a longing to belong to someone and a longing for home.
I loved it because, in this discovered heart, I have found all of these longings satisfied in the heart of my Father, where the longings originate. When I discovered the heart of God, I found he isn't a critic.
That's why I want to see the value in everything. I want to go on a quest for beauty. I want to see and experience everything as if for the first or last time. I want whatever is in my Father's heart.
As I drive home, I realize why that house brought me to tears. This is the first Christmas that his heart is truly my home, and he has candles in the windows.

Maybe

Maybe it doesn't matter that I can't capture my heart with words. Maybe the heart is meant to surpass the mind, and to try to balance them on the same scale is like trying to level the bottom of a well with the surface of the earth, and then keep the water from spilling over into puddles.

Maybe if the heart causes groanings too deep for words, trying to speak the groans into cognisance will cause me to miss the pleasure of soaking in the deep. There are things too glorious for man to understand, and what causes us to grasp for it when it seems as fruitless as catching clouds? We talk ourselves in circles and after getting dizzy, after finding the tail is attached to our own behind, we start asking questions: the rhetorical, the theoretical, and logical. Gasping like a thirsty, salted sailor lost at sea--

Please...make...sense...

Maybe God is chuckling at us. Maybe his brow is creased and the corners of his eyes are tight because he is hurting, waiting, groaning with creation for the day when he can complete us, and maybe there will be no distinction between the top and bottom of a well. Maybe he is sighing because there is something better for us than understanding, and our trying to divine understanding is like trying to know your lifespan by the germy, crisscrossed lines on your palm.

Maybe trying to know it all is the part in us that tried to overthrow God in the Garden. Eat the fruit of understanding and maybe you will attain life. Maybe it is the part in us made in God's image and anticipating fulfillment. Maybe I will sit here all afternoon and scribble until my ink runs out, and sit back and reread my words and feel an ounce of satisfaction that I captured my inability to capture words so cleverly.

Maybe I will come close to knowing; maybe I could be Einstein or Decartes or Solomon and rise in the estimation of men. Maybe I am meant to fly, but I keep getting tripped up on the runway. At the end of my surmising, all I have is maybe.


May you, being rooted and grounded in love, know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Eph. 3

Froth

     The steamer hisses like a defensive cat, spitting froth up the sides of the metal pitcher. I pull the nozzle up gently and the foaming milk eases. For my third shift, the froth isn’t too shabby. I tap the espresso scoop to loosen the old grounds, refill and tamp the fine powder, crank the scoop and watch the filmy stream of coffee gurgle into the cup.

It's still a little surreal to be on this side of the counter. I was always the girl with the book bag, studying at the corner table, watching the baristas steam milk and drizzle chocolate, wearing plaid shirts and sipping coffee from ceramic mugs they probably molded themselves. It seemed so romantic. Probably too romantic to be true, I thought, and lowered my eyes to my book.

I tap the froth with a knife and pour milk into the espresso, topping it with two swaths of the white fluff; cap it and embrace with a Christmas paper sleeve, and relinquish the creation to its owner. Someone wants a soy latte, so I have to use the other steamer, which is fickle and likes to screech like a toddler who doesn’t know what she wants.

It’s a lot like me, actually. For many years my heart felt like gasket about to blow. It bubbled and churned with unpredictable undercurrents, until the pressure pitched at a too-high temperature and issued a shriek of frustration. Anyone standing nearby became the collateral of the spewed, scalding contents. My heart’s fickle mechanism made me flighty, flitting from one job to alight on another. One relationship to another. I didn’t know how to fix it, so I ignored it, and continued sitting at the corner table.

It was probably too romantic to be true, anyway.

The door opens, ushering in a gust of cold air and a familiar face. It’s Eli, a friend from church, here to get a cup of coffee from the new barista. Do I really get to call myself that? That privileged title claimed only by trendy, pottery-making, espresso-sipping college students in plaid shirts? I am grateful to him for coming. It’s physical evidence that I’m starting to belong. In the same way Dena asks when my shift is, and my writing friends meet at the corner table. In the same way Beth asks me to help her make sandwiches, and Han and I fill the backroom with laughter when I mess up counting tills.

Each one a safe nest for my flighty heart to rest.

Snow drifts outside the window and I shake candy cane bits onto drifts of whipped cream. In my typical impulsiveness I applied for this job and had my interview the next day. But before applying, I asked God what he thought. I think you will love it, he replied. It’s truly romantic, having a place to rest and hearts to belong to. Especially when the place smells like coffee and baked goodness, and God has fixed your fickle mechanism, and the hearts you belong to are teaching you how to froth correctly.

This Curiosity Called Pain

I’ve been contemplating this driving force of nature that simultaneously wrenches the earth and fuses it together. Pain, an anomaly that both constructs the heart into a watchtower and shrinks it into a hardened lump of matter until all that matters is the pain.

I know a man who drowns himself at the bottom of a bottle because of his pain.

I know a woman who is wounded with barbs, but instead of plucking them out so she may heal, she bristles like a porcupine to ward off future barbs.

You can get sucked into despair like a black hole and turn endlessly with no gravity to pull you back to ground.

 

I’ve been thinking that the solution to pain is not its absence, but hope. Hope, also an anomaly, is some sense of tangible intangibility that the pain will end. Pain becomes your greatest foe when there is not hope, because when pleasure is sucked from your surroundings and you are left with hopeless pain, what else is left to do but check out, or drink, or put a gun to your head?

 

I am grappling with my own pain. I let it in by the lake, when the sun glittered on the water and my eyes stung with tears and cold wind, and somehow I knew it would lead me to wholeness. Right now it follows me around, riding shotgun while I drive, keeping me awake at night, hovering while I clean and ever-looking for moments to thrust darts at my heart.

It’s been a long time since I experienced pain like this, but I embrace it afresh, because it makes me feel alive. It doesn’t make me grow resilient, or feel diminished. Rather, it heightens my awareness of the blood running through my veins, the throbbing of my heart.

Why does pain make me aware that I am living? Why do I feel a strange sense of thriving amidst it?

I’ve been surmising that the reason I have never been to the hole of despair is because of an eternal hope burning in my belly, a ball of light that never goes out, of which pain can never loom large enough to snuff. I’ve been imagining a world where pain didn’t exist, a world prior to sin’s birth. Pain was never the intention of God. He promises to come back and restore us to the perfection of Eden, to conquer pain with finality. I think this must be the eternal hope.

I stopped thinking. I asked Jesus why I feel alive in pain, why it doesn’t make me want to die.

You always say that where there is life, there I am. The life you feel in pain is me.

Of course. Isn’t that the first thing I do in my pain, cry out to God to come to me? I never realized, all those times I encountered pain, that he came to be in it. Life. Hope.

I am musing about a God who comes to dwell in my pain. Jesus, after all, is not unacquainted with it. He is the life in my sorrow of this world, and the hope of a world restored.

When You Grow Whiskers

I'm munching a carrot on the deck, reading a book in the sunshine when a young man comes out the front door of the neighbor's house. He's wearing read skinny jeans and has a backpack and a Gatorade, and looks at me as he comes down the steps.

I'm crunching the carrot like a horse because my jaw's gone a little slack, but I can't think of anything to say, so I just stare at him over the top of my book.

Connor? I want to blurt out, but it sounds rude even in my head. More what I want to say is, You have whiskers! but that's hardly any better.

He swigs from his Gatorade and heads down the street.

I sit for a full three minutes trying to mentally fill in a ten-year gap. Last time I saw Connor he was six years old. I was ten, the dirty, barefooted neighbor girl who would build forts in the forest behind the house and make slip 'n slides with a tarp and hose. Of all the boys on the block, Connor invited me to his sixth birthday party at Bunker Beach, where we crashed into each other's tubes in the wave pool and ate string cheese and drank juice boxes. His family moved away then, and only just came back to the house because his great-grandparents died.

And now he has whiskers!

I sit and muse about what a funny thing life is, but hardly get anywhere before another past-life friend is passing on the other side of street. Carl, wearing black socks to his calves and a shirt with a math symbol, was always a rather awkward kid who wore capes and built Legos with my brother Freeman. His family went to the church where my dad pastored. Anytime I see his mother at the grocery store or the library, I try to dodge her, because she talks so much. Mostly about her children, like which math class Carl is in or which science project won in 4H at the fair, and I listen politely and watch Carl stare at his feet, wondering why she won't let him say all this for himself.

Just after Carl passes, Brogan pulls up from work, grabbing shoes from her trunk and texting simultaneously as she goes up the driveway. She doesn't notice me watching her, smiling for the twenty years of friendship she encapsulates. She hasn't reached the door when little Abby Burns comes walking home from school, only she isn't so little anymore, probably fourteen, with thick blonde hair hanging nearly to her yoga pants. I remember all the evenings spent in her basement with the neighborhood girls, dressing up in old dance costumes for fashion shows, or playing round of Truth or Dare--those dramatic years of youth that were so feeling and so fear-filled.

Those were the years where we did not know our hearts, and our hearts were dying to be known.

Now I see past lives pass on the street with barely a glance of acknowledgment, each person absorbed in their own little world, a world constructed by where they've been the last ten years, and where they hope to be in ten. I was thinking today about eternity set in our hearts. How restless I have felt, being home, and isn't that the human condition, to always want to be where you're not?

Because this is not home.
This is the ten-year gap that will one day come to a close, and you'll run into yourself and think, "You have whiskers!"
I'm trying to wrap my mind around eternity. The fact that from the moment of conception, I am. Forever.
I will always exist.
Whether here, or in heaven, or on the perfected earth, I will never cease to exist. It's so astonishing I can only think about it for about thirty seconds before I have to stop.

Then I think about how, because of Jesus, I get to live, not just exist, and that living is an echo of the real thing in Eden, and a foreshadowing of the real thing to come again.
And how you can't live without your heart.
And when you find your heart is the echo of a Father's heart, your life feels like you've been six all along only to wake up one morning and find you've grown whiskers, and there's no ten-year gap to fill in. I think that must be why Jesus calls it "born again."

I've reached the stub of my carrot. A man jogs by and waves at me. Mike, from church.

I grin and wave back.