"I am Eighty-Two Years Old!"

Yesterday I met a beautiful woman.

We were walking around a park, witnessing the creation both of the Father and of His "sub-creators," as J.R.R. Tolkien would say. 

We loved watching the mothers strolling around with their babies while the elderly, behatted, sometimes bespectacled people sat around stone tables, chatting and playing games.

In one gazebo, we saw yet another group of sweet elderly people. But one of them, rather than staring or even smiling, actually beckoned us to come over. The wrinkles deepened in the corners of her eyes as she waved her fragile yet strong hands.

As we walked in, she and her friends began laughing; she jumped up and down and clapped her hands for joy. Her friends gathered round to take pictures with us, but she was interested in more than that.

She wanted to dance.

So she grabbed my friend's hand and began twirling herself around, laughing the whole time. She then skipped over to another friend, and then another, grabbing each person's hands and twirling.

When she would stop to take a picture with one of us, she would wrap her wrinkled arms around our unwrinkled faces, deepening her own wrinkles with even more laughter.

And then, as I began conversing with her, she clapped and jumped up and down as she said, 

"I am eighty-two years old!"

Her friends laughed and commented on how happy she was; I commented on how healthy she was. She couldn't care less about our comments, regardless of their content. She was too busy dancing.

When I turn eighty-two years old, I want to look back on eighty-two years of softening and enlarging my heart, of keeping it open to my Creator and to all people but closed to cynicism, of keeping it open to thankfulness and grace but closed to self-pity. I want to laugh and clap.

I want to be too busy dancing.

Why Meeting in Homes is Great

Having church anywhere is awesome, but I thought I would just compile some of the reasons I love meeting in homes:

1. Your can have a dog in your lap.

2. You can drink coffee while listening to the lesson.

3. The coffee is free.

4. You can have refills.

5. Sometimes people bake muffins.

6. They are also free.

7. If your baby starts crying, no need to take him outside; someone else will be glad to hold him for you or at least help you cheer him up. Everyone around you is your friend, after all.

8. If that doesn't work, you can always stuff a free muffin in his mouth.

9. Just kidding. Do not stuff a muffin in your baby's mouth.

10. A/C too high? You don't just have to sit there and bear it in your dress and high heels ("why didn't I bring a cardigan?"). The blankets are in the basket over there.

11. Oh, and by the way, you're probably not wearing high heels because you took them off at the door. Or you were smart and didn't bring them. Or you're even smarter and don't own a pair.

12. When you walk in, you are prepared to listen, but also have the comfort in knowing you will be listened to.

13. Flexibility. If someone has an urgent need, everyone stops right then and there to lift it up. If a song is laid on someone's heart, it can be sung. If a word is laid on someone's heart, it can be read or said.

14. Not. Intimidating.

15. Inviting someone to your home feels easy and natural anyway.

16. The bathroom is, like, right there. Which is good because you just had about 3 cups of coffee.

17. I should probably also say something about the whole authentic community thing.

18. People genuinely knowing you, and yet still loving you, is an awesome feeling.

19. You genuinely knowing other people, and finding that you are now willing to forgive, love, and work at relationships where before you would have run away, is an awesome feeling.

20. And even if no one else in the home loves you, at least you still have the dog in your lap.


None of this works, though, unless people are willing to make it work. The home is not some magic place in which people suddenly stop sinning or being selfish. We have to be willing to get into each other's messes and actually enter into each other's lives, to care for each other as family and sacrifice for each other. To give until it hurts, and receive until it hurts our pride.

Because Jesus makes his home in us, we make our home in each other. And that is how the world knows our true home is elsewhere.

Nothing New Under the Sun and Micah 6

If the wages of sin is death, what exactly is death?

Futility.

It's the abrupt ending of a linear path that otherwise shows such promise of progress, of a better world, of a better life -

and then silence.

Because of sin, the whole creation was subjected to futility. Through painful toil we eat all the days of our lives, and though we labor, the ground still produces thorns and thistles. In painful toil we now strive for successful careers in an economy that constantly pushes back. The majority of people, who have no faces on television and no voices, toil to just eat each day. The last line of the curse upon mankind is futility:

"dust you are and to dust you will return."

King Solomon meditates on this futility: "Meaningless! Meaningless! What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? ...Like the fool, the wise too must die!"

When Israel continues to rebel against God and oppress the poor, Yahweh says through the prophet Micah that he will relinquish his blessing, reminding them of the futility of their sin (that is, following themselves rather than God):

"You will eat but not be satisfied; your stomach will still be empty.... You will plant but not harvest; you will press grapes but not use the oil, you will crush grapes but not drink the wine."

Your first reaction might be that all this sounds overly morbid and depressing...but let's be honest: How many times have you had thoughts like this? Feeling anxious because we only have a few short years on this earth, and wondering how not to waste them? Feeling dissatisfied with your current life because you don't want to waste time doing what you're doing? Even in the happy moments, burying uneasy thoughts, wondering why you're still not satisfied?

I write this because I have had these thoughts many times. I think often we try to just dismiss them and crush them because they're not normal and not okay. We have everything; we are supposed to just be happy and not ask those questions. We have no right to be unhappy because we are not starving, we have not had too much trauma in our lives, we do not live in a war-torn country.

The Book of Micah says that Israel would "eat but not be satisfied." Israel had times of great abundance and was the envy of surrounding nations for its wealth. But God said they were still spiritually empty because they kept sinning and would not turn from it, and so he was sending times of scarcity on them. Rather than acting justly and loving mercy, they were hoarding ill-gotten treasures, cheating the poor with dishonest scales, full of violence and deceit.

What was the ultimate punishment? Not necessarily war, although this did come on the people. Not poverty, although times of suffering would follow. Futility. No satisfaction, no enjoying the fruit of their labor, but enduring a meaningless existence. The same punishment that was exacted at the Fall.

I think we continue to feel this punishment today; the Fall's depth has not lessened. Though we may be less primitive, we may have more material things (well, some of us...until you remember that 2 billion don't even have a toilet and 1 billion will not eat enough today), and we may be saturated with all sorts of information and philosophies to tell us whatever we want to hear, we still feel the effects of futility. Though with modern medicine we may prolong our lives, we can never escape physical death...or even worse, the death of the soul, which can happen much sooner.

But Jesus says we can be born again. He says we have a way out of this meaninglessness and futility. Not by transcending the world and detaching ourselves from it, as some would say; not by doing a bunch of things so we can be "good enough" for a deity; rather, by believing He has power over futility - over death and our deathly ways of living. In Him, there is something new under the sun. We have new life, we have new hope, we have direction even when we can't see two feet in front of us. Even while staying in the world, slogging through the mud and grit of life, we hold tightly to the pierced hand of the one who whispers in the crowded street and the back alley,

Behold, I am making all things new!

Suddenly, we can work a dead-end job and still have joy and satisfaction. Suddenly, we can look at unlovable people and see who they were born to be. We can be uncertain of our direction in life and still be able to laugh at the days to come. Our plans can even fail, the soil of our lives still unyielding, and yet we have hope. All because He went through the worst of our pain, endured our darkest thoughts and all the insults we have to hurl, joined us in physical agony and emotional torment, and came out victorious on the other side, not only alive but with a life that will never die, in a Kingdom where the hungry can feast and the thirsty can drink, and this gives us hope that such a Kingdom can penetrate this cursed world. 

Sometimes, when I catch myself chasing after the things of this world, I find myself dissatisfied and struck anew with the meaninglessness of life. But when I look at the only One who is something new under the sun, the only One who can make all things new, and I give my disobedience over to him and ask to be made new...

I eat and am satisfied.

This week, a high school girl killed herself.

I'm sure many high school girls and other precious people around the world found it too difficult to live this week, but this girl killed herself in my city, at a high school just a few bus stops away. It's always that much more difficult when something like that happens close to us, even if we didn't know the person.

I've been to that high school before, walked around it with my friend Jane. It's supposed to be the best high school in the city. To me it looks more like a university than a high school, with its huge campus boasting multi-story buildings and dorms. Here, it is not uncommon for high school students to live away from home.

I asked my friend why the girl did it. Was it being away from her parents? Was it the heavy work load? I always comment on how hard my high school friends have to work, how they never seem to have a moment to themselves. And right now is crunch time, the worst of exam season. It would make sense. It's happened before.

But that wasn't the reason, apparently. School officials read her journal.

She liked girls.

I may be on the other side of the world, but I'm still keeping up with what's happening in the States. And if it's difficult to be gay or lesbian in the States, I know it must be difficult over here, where it's relatively under the radar and few people are discussing or acknowledging it.

Regardless of what we think about the propriety of men liking men or women liking women, this should never have to occur. No one should ever feel that trapped. It's not about the fact that she liked girls so much as the fact that she did not feel free to bare her soul, with its changes and struggles.

In order to be trapped, a person must first box herself in. She must burrow deep into a hole where she thinks no one can hurt her. She must hide. But what happens when her hiding place becomes her prison? When the choice to hide herself is no longer her own, but the choice of someone fixing a stone door over her cave? Telling her she can never come out, that no one wants to see her as she truly is? The damp earth becomes suffocating, even to the point of death.

We refuse to show ourselves to those around us. We refuse to admit the darkness, the doubt, that constantly lurks underneath our smiling faces. And because we hide our own darkness, our differences, we encourage others to hide theirs. Because we are afraid, we project fear onto others. And so, one by one, we all burrow into our caves. Until everyday conversation is a strain, because no one is truly revealing themselves anymore.

I wish someone had told that girl that she could reveal herself, in all her mess and magnificence. That she had known, deep down, that she would be unconditionally loved. That as she worked through the turbulence of adolescence, she would have had that blessed assurance of a hand that will never let her go.

But a person who must hide herself every waking second is lost in every sense of the word.

C.S. Lewis writes that being truly "saved" does not entail the cancellation of sin and shame but rather the willingness to bear it to the world, pointing to God's grace all the while and trusting Him alone to cover it.

"As for the fact of sin, is it probable that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. Is it not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying and lusting as a schoolboy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God's compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe" (The Problem of Pain).

It's as though the Free are dancing around naked, not because they are stainless and pure but because they are covered by something other than clothes, something other than what the world gives to mask shame. All of the messiness and grit is out in the open, but we refuse to be humiliated. Yes, we will continue to boast in our weaknesses, proclaim our failings from the rooftops, air our stubbornness and our stupidity and our different-ness, laughing all the while and feeling completely unashamed, because of the One who eternally covers us, molds us, and will never abandon his creations. Our hidden things out in the open are all to His glory.

I long for and dream of a world in which no one feels so trapped that death seems to be the only way out. Where no one wants to shrink to the point of oblivion. But those who do not know Love cannot come out of their caves, because they have never known the One who is completely loving, completely trustworthy, and completely unfailing. No one has ever shown them that such love exists. Therefore, to be out in the open means to be torn apart. And so these precious souls wither, souls who never had the chance to hear about grace.

Finally, speaking of Heaven and the Kingdom, Lewis writes,

"...Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place."

They would, if they knew the public place was also the place of grace.