ponder (v)—to think about (something) carefully, especially before making a decision or reaching a conclusion, which I tend to do a lot of anyway, but especially lately, when it seems like every decision must be oh-so-carefully calculated, and especially now, as I sit in bed battling breakthrough COVID with tissues, a water bottle, and a puke bucket, and it honestly seems like a little bit much after the last month especially. but it’s here, between fevered sleep and what is already too much time lost to the TV shows I stream to take my mind off things… I find myself mulling over and over the words of a favorite poem: “So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it.”

 Faith over fear.

Have you seen that around? Maybe it’s less prevalent where you are, but here, midway up the Lake Michigan side of the Mitten state, it’s been all over the place for the last year or so. It’s on yard signs and bumper stickers, T-shirts and jewelry.

And as a manifesto for our crazy modern times, I have to say… it’s pretty good. It calls to mind Biblical heroes of old going up against the powers-that-be. Like Moses and the Israelites stepping out in faith across the split-apart Red Sea, impossible walls of water rising up on each side of them. Or Noah, ignoring the pressure of culture to follow God, trusting Him even when it seemed absolutely crazy and counterintuitive. Maybe Esther, placing personal comfort aside and her life at risk for the sake of her people? Or David, facing off against Goliath with nothing but a sling, some pebbles, and a towering faith that made the giant before him seem almost Lilliputian. And Abigail, marching right up to the band or warriors set on destroying her household, her only defense her faith in who God had proven himself to be?

“Faith over fear”… yes, it’s a good one. And just as those Old Testament heroes did with the situations they found themselves in, we can apply it very easily to our COVID-torn world today, can’t we?

Faith in God over fear of a virus.

 

Except—

it goes both ways, when we think about it.

Faith in God over fear of a new EUA vaccine.

Faith in the sovereignty of God over fear of the government.

Over fear of a political party.

Over fear of freedoms infringed upon.

And this is where it wears a little thin, isn’t it? When it’s used to prop up so many competing ideologies, we realize that it’s less a manifesto, and more just a catchy slogan that does about as good of a job at summarizing concepts of great depth as most slogans do… that is, not very good.

“Faith over fear” is just one thread of what it means to be a Christ-follower in this wild world of ours. And one strand alone is easily broken, isn’t it? So we have to wonder, then, what manifesto we should be clinging to, if this one doesn’t encompass the complexity of the world we live in.

What about something that models, not only the fearless actions of the Old Testament protagonists, but the One to whom all those stories point? The One who is Jesus Christ, who lives out not only perfect faith in God, but is also Love itself… and there is no fear in love, because perfect love casts out all fear. And “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."

Now that is a manifesto. And in these days of ours, when truth is so often tangled up with lies and fiction is placed beside fact as an equal, this mantra is our lifeline, and more than that, our guide for how to live.

“Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

What does it look like, in this pandemic-torn world, to love one another?

It’s simple, really. When we strip away the clamor of culture and human nature and everything else that shouts for us to “look out for number one”, and instead wait quietly for the Lord to speak, we’re left with that lifeline of a manifesto: that call to follow Jesus’ example. To love our neighbors as ourselves. To honor them— their bodies, minds, and hearts—over our own. To give ourselves up, as it were, for the ones it’s easier to ignore. Because, as Jesus himself said, “‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

This is the way that we live faithfully, fearlessly, and lovingly in these times, friends.

We choose faith over fear, and neighbor over self.

We protect the vulnerable, and place their welfare over our own.

We wear masks.

We get vaccinated.

And in this way, we love like Jesus.

 

 

 

Poem reference— Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry
Scripture references— 1 John 4; Romans 5; Matthew 25

open letter (n)— a letter written to one person (or group of people) that is actually intended for a wider audience, because even if it is just one layer in your story or my story, it matters (as the Frederick Buechner once put it), “not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.”

 

Okay, so you guys? You Christian men, leaders in the church?

You hurt me.

You probably don’t even realize it. I’m pretty sure you have no idea what a catalyst your words and actions were. Yeah, you know by rote that every person has a story, but you don’t realize that those stories are layered.

Everyone is a hundred different things, but in other people’s eyes we usually get the chance to be only one of them.*

I don’t know exactly what “one thing” I was in your eyes, but I can guess that it was some kind of obstacle. You got caught up in an idea, and the problem with ideas is that they’re always less complicated than flesh-and-blood humans. You had eyes only for your idea, and so you stopped seeing the dust-and-bone layer of stories that was sitting there, teary-eyed, in front of you.

(That was me, in case you didn’t catch it.)

I’ll be the first to admit that your idea? It was a good one. Is a good one. Just like you guys are good people.

The complicated thing about good and bad people is that most of us can be both at the same time.*

Even as all of the painful stuff went down, I know I was both. I know you were, too. I know we still are. Good and bad, right and wrong, fallen and redeemed. I’ve asked for your forgiveness, because maybe you’re as deeply hurt by it all as I was. I don’t know, because I haven’t read all your layered stories, either.

Maybe it just all gets to be too much, after years of ministry? I can see that, even with my limited experience. I didn’t work in a church for very long, but there were nights I sat in my car, head bowed, tears in eyes, praying for the bright young lives I was privileged to shepherd. That was about eight years ago, and I still name them in my prayers today.

It’s a hard thing to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time. We have no pause button for when everything gets too much for us to deal with, but neither does anyone else.*

So maybe you were just too tired to muster up the energy to care by the time I came along, with my invisible layered stories. It had been one heck of a year by that point, and you all seemed so sure of yourselves. And I was anything but confident. I had been slowly fighting back a haze of postpartum depression & anxiety for six months, and then the world turned upside down. (That’s just one layer of my story, by the way.) But talk about getting kicked when you’re down, huh? This last chapter was like that for all of us. And I think maybe if you’d known the state I was in, you’d have responded differently? But you didn’t know, and so in your words and your actions, this is what my hurting heart heard:

 

“You may be a lost sheep wandering… but we have ninety-nine here, and more coming every day, so….”

"You just don’t matter enough, even for an apology.”

“You are too much and too little at the same time.”

 

(You guys didn’t mean it that way. I know that. I’m just letting you know how your words and actions came across to me.)

You should know that I’m not writing this because I want you to feel guilty. I really don’t. I’m writing it because hurt caused by the Church is an all-too-familiar layer in too many people’s stories. We Christians are the most contradictory group of people out there, and it’s probably about time we start making that more obvious.

… many of our worst deeds are the result of our never wanting to admit that we’re wrong. The greater the mistake and the worse the consequences, the more pride we stand to lose if we back down. So no one does.*

I don’t think we Christians should be afraid of doing that. Because when we claim to have the God of the universe living in us, people expect perfection. And when we don’t live that out—stuck as we are in the tension of the “already and the not yet”— people around us stumble. Not so much because we sin, but because we fail to show grace and humility when we do. And in doing that, we make it hard to distinguish between our community of stumbling Christ-followers and the perfect person of Jesus Christ.

We have to stop living like we have all the answers. That’s not what it means to be a Christian.

What it means is this: we are fallen people, layers of tattered stories, who believe that while we were yet sinners, Jesus died for us. We believe in the ongoing work of redemption: of ourselves, of each other, and of the world.

It’s so easy to get people to hate one another. That’s what makes love so impossible to understand. Hate is so simple that it always ought to win.*

I’m writing this because you need to know that I am choosing love; love that bears no record of wrongs. I am desperate to live in a world where the impossibility of love conquers the reality of hate, and if I claim to follow Jesus, then this needs to start with little old me. Not with you guys; not with some abstract somebody somewhere… but me in the small sphere of my own life.

I am hopeful that in writing this, I’ll be able to move from saying “I forgive you” to “I have forgiven you”. Hopeful, but not overly optimistic, because I don’t think it’s going to be that simple. (Most things aren’t.) It’s the black and white that give us contrast in art and clarity in life, but it’s the gradient of color that makes things come alive.

I know the black-and-white Truth: forgive others as God forgave me.

But I know the nuanced colors of forgiveness, too: it’s hard work to choose that over and over again.

So the reality is probably going to be this: when I see some of you guys in person, or catch a glimpse of you online, my human nature is going to react first. My stomach is going to drop; my pulse will quicken; I’ll get that nervous, quivery feeling in my limbs; and I will feel the pain again. (Talk about the flesh being weak, huh?) But then, by the grace of God, my spirit (which longs to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God) will catch up and take over. I will take a breath and give thanks; I will laugh and rejoice; and I will pray—again, again, and yet again— that God would soften my heart toward you. I will choose faith in a redemptive God, who makes all things new, over the sure and certain fear of being hurt again.

We will never forget this year, not the best of it and not the worst. It will never stop influencing us.*

And you guys? I am confident that God will use it to influence us all in a good way, because that’s what He does. Go in peace, with my forgiveness.

-Your sister in Christ

 

*All quotes are from the beautiful novel by Fredrik Backman, Us Against You

quilting (v)—the term given to the process of joining scraps of fabric together, and then joining that to at least two other layers, to create a warm covering, which is sort of like the way God joins us together for different seasons of our lives to warm us against what's cold and broken in the world

 

I’m sitting next to a window that’s wide open, though it probably should only be cracked. It’s the first spring-like day of the year, and the earth has ditched it’s thick, snowy blanket for brown grass flecked with green. There’s a bright sun in a blue and white sky, and the air is alive with birdsong, so the temperature seems warmer than it would if this was later in the year.

Still, there’s a cool edge at the back of the breeze blowing in, and so I smooth my quilt over my lap, tucking it around my bare toes. I trace each piece with my finger, finding the somewhat imperfect seams that join each bold, scrappy piece to the ones next to it, and I smile, remembering the spring day three years ago that I sat cross-legged on the floor, piling up this sunset of colored fabric all around me.

Some of the patterns, taken on their own, aren’t necessarily ones that would have caught my eye. That golden one with the brown flecks, for example, or the cream-colored one with hearts. But once I’d laid them all out, measuring and cutting them into precise shapes, and sewn them together piece by piece, I could appreciate them for what they were. I could see the see the beauty they brought to the whole.

Because even though I didn’t immediately gravitate to a particular piece of fabric, it was those pieces that became blocks, and the blocks built the quilt front. And then came the batting and the backing, and the slow process of joining those three layers by hand, tiny stitch by tiny stitch. They added the warmth and structure to the whole quilt: the one I now sat curled beneath in the spring breeze.

Three years in the making. Longer, if you count the dreaming that led up to it.

You see, I had the dearest teacher when it came to learning to quilt. We met as eighteen-year-olds, brand new adults turned out into the world alone for the first time, and in one another we found a friend of the heart, though we didn’t recognize it right away. I don’t think you could find a set of girlfriends more different: she’s an early bird, and I’m a night owl. She’s an introvert, and I’m an extrovert. She’s calm and down-to-earth, while I’ve got my head lost in the clouds, and no one would ever use the word “calm” to describe me.

And yet, somehow, whenever one of us reaches out, the other has a hand there already, waiting. This friendship of ours has stood the test of both time and distance, and has seen us through births and deaths, marriages and moving, and most recently, the pandemic. It has offered a listening ear more times than we could count, and poured out grace upon grace over each failing.

When we lived half a continent apart, relying on phone calls to keep the bond strong, we daydreamed together of the day we could sit in the same room again, mugs of tea at hand, and make these works of art together. It was three years ago that this chance finally came. We found a pattern and set to work, my friend as the teacher and me as the student. She finished hers long before me, of course. But once I’d caught up, and we spread them out side by side on the floor, I had to laugh. Though we’d used the same pattern, our finished pieces were as wildly different as we were. And it occurred to me, then, what a perfect metaphor this was for our dear, dear friendship.

But you can take it further than just that. As I sit here in the sunshine, quilt over my knees, this quilt reminds me of all those people who have touched my life in some way. You see, I’m a firm believer that God places people in our lives very precisely. When we meet each person; the circumstances surrounding those events; the characteristics that shape the relationship… they’re as different as the scraps of material in my quilt. Some friendships might not seem as impactful, or last as long, or go as deep. Some may ebb and flow with the changing days, or be bonds made more of circumstance than common ground. But for one reason or another, but they still have something to add, and without them, there would be a glaring empty space in the pattern.

And I am grateful for each and every one of them.

For each and every one of you.

 

unity (noun) -- the state of being of togetherness; an elusive but important thing that wraps itself around and around us, differences and all.

 

 

You guys… this picture says so much.

In this picture are four siblings, raised in the same household by the same parents.  

In this picture are four siblings who voted four different ways in the presidential election.

One voted republican; one democrat; one third party; and one deliberately withheld a vote.

Each of us wrestled with our convictions. We researched the candidates’ positions on everything from economic to social issues. We prayed for God’s guidance in how to exercise the solemn and beautiful right to vote. And on November 3^rd, each of us walked into our respective polling places and cast our votes accordingly.

And—this is the part that really matters—we each voted our conscience, and we each voted differently.

Why does that matter so much?

Well, first of all, it matters because it illustrates how four Jesus-loving, Bible-believing Christians can follow God’s call to different ends… and still be “good” Christians. Our God is way too big and too radical to fit neatly into one political party or the other.

Second, it matters because it proves that disagreements don’t have to mean division. It means we can have conversations that don’t end in “us vs. them”. It means that there can be an end to this season of bitter dissent, of hands over ears and louder and louder voices.

This picture is a step toward healing the ache in my heart, and the rift in our country, because it is a picture of unity.

It’s a picture—one facet—of America the beautiful.