They’re really good at making you think that life with Christ is just great and it’s all an adventure. They’re really good at salesmanship. And, if you ask them, they’ll never talk too much about the messy part of following Jesus. Once you meet him, onward and upward, friends. If you really met Jesus, you’d never stumble, never fall, never slide backwards into old habits and lifestyles. And, if you do, someone might be concerned about you, but they won’t be willing to walk with you in the mess. That takes too much time. That doesn’t fill up newsletters. That doesn’t garner donor or parental support.

For the sake of argument, let’s say my stretchy pants are evil. Getting rid of my stretchy pants doesn’t make the men who look at me with lust in their hearts good. It eliminates an opportunity for objectification and temptation, but it doesn’t make them or me, for that matter, good. It eliminates a problem with their thought life, but it also eliminates the opportunity to learn self-control and to truly master their impulses towards lust.

When someone speaks to you out of both sides of their mouth, it’s more than a lie. It’s a deception wrapped in words, actions, and emotion. In order to successfully talk out of both sides of your mouth, you have to have some measure of trust from the person you’re talking to. You can lie to anybody and they may or may not ever find out, but you can’t talk out of both sides of your mouth unless someone trusts you. It’s worse than a lie. It’s a betrayal. When you’ve been duped like that, you start to question reality. You go back in time and revisit every conversation, interaction, and encounter and wonder what you missed. You wonder where it all went wrong. And, if the liar is particularly adept, you start to blame yourself. Because you could never blame them, that would ruin the illusion.

More than anything, I feel the hollow places acutely. I don’t think that’s one of the five stages of grief, but that’s where I’m at. Not really sad or angry anymore, though I’m sure I’ll get there again, but just hollow. As if I’m a tree full of potential, vitality, and promise, but emptied out by a wasting disease. I hope that God will use the negative experience of the past decade to fill in all the hollow places once and for all. I hope for this and I want to believe it, but I’m not so sure.

I hope you can’t sleep until you realize that you had the ability to speak life or death over me during my worst nightmare and you chose death. You didn’t care that I was alone and practically motherless. You didn’t care that, in many ways, I raised myself and didn’t know how to do this. You didn’t care that I didn’t have the support that you did and I didn’t have friends (because you rejected me from the start) and I didn’t want this and I felt like I was dying. You didn’t care that I was doing my best. You only cared that I wasn’t doing your best.

I say this so that you will understand that when I tell you not to give up, it isn’t some foolishly optimistic platitude. It is an encouragement born from both the pain and the hope at the center of my soul.

I feel like the past ten years have been wasted time, wasted potential, and wasted resources. And, from the outside, empirically speaking, they have been. But that’s not the whole story.

What a surprise! What a delight! What sheer bewilderment it is to be alive and hear the birds and see the sunrise and feel the wind on your face and smell the rain coming (if you’re from the Southern United States) and touch icicles and eat cake! (I told you there was a poet hiding somewhere up in here. Maybe she’ll come out swinging when I’m 54.)

Are you starting to see it? What gratitude has done to me? I’m waxing eloquent about cake. Me, who loves the negative, is telling you that it’s a surprise, not a cosmic joke, to be alive.

If all of this is true, and I believe that it is, then we don’t have to earn anything. Second, if there’s nothing to earn, then we can truly rest. This is the whole idea behind Matthew 11:28-30. There is work to do and there’s a burden to bear, but it’s easy and light because our value and relationship with Jesus aren’t dependent upon our performance. Our value and relationship with Jesus is dependent upon the work he’s already completed for us.

Our perspective matters for more reasons than scientific accuracy, though. If I believe that, because my life is hard, God does not love me, then I’m going to start to do a few things. First, I may ask why he doesn’t love me. And, because of my personality and particular struggles with the darkness, I’m going to conclude that if I do enough good/right things, try hard enough, and punish my shortcomings more severely, then he will love me. In short, I’ll blame myself for my difficult circumstances and set out on a quest to control the outcome of my life. This isn’t a totally bad idea, which is why it’s a horrible lie.

Consider your most recently stained garment. How did it get that way? Who was responsible? What were the circumstances? Was it really 100% your fault? I’d wager it was a combination of your own ineptitude to keep things clean (or maybe that’s just me?) and a world full of chaos that you have no control over. Unless you’re going to seal yourself inside some sort of stainless steel bubble and rely on Alexa to get everything right, then you’re going to have to deal with people. And, I’m about to blow your mind, people are messy. Me. You. All of us. We’re hopeless when it comes to a white sweatshirt and spaghetti sauce.

And so, out of fear rather than faith, the first group of people decided that they would start teaching that there was a best way to follow Jesus. If you made the same lifestyle choices that they did, then you were certainly honoring God with your life, but if you didn’t, then your very salvation and faith were thrown into question.

We can’t help ourselves: we can’t wait for the next thing and, thus, we miss the glory of the present. I’m the chief offender and, I hope, that you’ll allow me to invite you into a different way.

But the two go together. If it’s always sunshine, I might think too highly of myself. If it’s always foggy, I’ll dive into despair. We need both, the sunshine and the fog, to grow into the people we were made to be.

When I saw some growing in the walled yard, I stopped and said, “How did you get here?” Literally, I talked out loud to the flowers. I was just so shocked to find them in that place, amidst so much chaos and neglect.

But this is about more than hating to see loose change languishing out there in the street with no real purpose, destined for the bottom of some runoff stream bed or to be buried by a child as “pirate treasure” and never heard from again. It’s not about frustration with “kids these days” and their flippant attitude towards cold, hard cash. Though, those thoughts do cross my mind, that’s not why I pick it up. I pick up the change because it’s evidence, to me, that God sees me. He hears me. He’s always looking out for me.

When we experience artificial light all of the time, do we ever wake joyfully to see the sun? No. We don’t. With our aforementioned black-out curtains and artificial light sources, we shun the limitations of day and night, screw up our circadian rhythms, and forget about God, thinking we have become him ourselves (we are, after all, the masters of light and dark).

It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea.