For all my forgetfulness and frailty, and my doubting in the dark, I know.
I am deeply loved by God. I am flawed and often faltering but forgiven, dusted off, and always lovingly set back on my way. A way in which my eyes are wide open for wonder.
And that is the beauty of having an identity buried in Jesus Christ.
There is nothing about my worth that I have to strive for. I have inherent value because of how God loves me and because of Jesus’ magnificent display of that love on the cross.
And after every restless day and every fitful night, it is the truth to which I always return.
“I write about the things that are on my heart and I try to do it honestly.”
My own words about my own writing on the ‘About’ page of this blog.
But tonight there are too many things on my heart and I can’t sort out the important from the unimportant. I can’t figure out what I need to say. Perhaps in moments like these I shouldn’t say anything. Perhaps I should let my fingers lay quiet for another night or two until my uneasy mind settles. But tonight there are too many things on my heart and I can’t stop them from spilling out into words.
In my heart tonight there is sorrow for Ukraine and Russia; heartache for those who are still in wars forgotten by the West; grief for those whose livelihoods have been swept away by murky, unfeeling waters; frustration for the ongoing fight against inequality for so many different groups of people; weariness in the wondering if some wounds ever completely heal; lingering sadness for the loneliness felt by so many during so many months of pandemic; a longing for love; a quiet hum of hope for the future; plans, and ideas, and worries for my eighteen precious students; a restless expectation for more…
And it is one of those nights where the chaos of my thoughts makes me wonder whether I even know myself. And if I don’t even know myself how can I be of any possible use?
Thankfully, when I don’t know myself, when I can’t untangle the thoughts swirling around in the mysterious realm of my mind, there is Someone else who knows me and understands me. Someone else who loves me. And there is nothing I have to do except rest in the knowledge of that love. It’s the knowledge of that love that allows me to be gentle with myself during these troubled nights. It’s the knowledge that makes me sure that I will wake up in the morning ready to give myself to my sphere of influence.
How frustrating it is to witness God work within the boundary of the freewill He has given to humanity. How maddening to walk in a world where God won’t coerce His creation. How utterly, infuriatingly good of Him.
When Christians choose to turn their backs on the suffering out of some misguided sense of piety, or leaders choose to go to war, or fathers choose to rape their children, I want a god of lightning and thunder. A god who will use his omnipotence to crush the very bones of evil under a single vengeful finger.
But the God of the Bible (despite what we might be led to believe) is not that god. If I want violence to rain down upon the enemies of good I can’t depend on Him. If I want to see evil men brought to shame and ridicule by His hand I can’t turn to Him.
For God to do what I so desire to see done, he would have to resort to violence. He would have to use His power to force people to His will. He would have to violate our free will. Instead He weaves Himself into our ways, never succumbing to our violence, yet always responding to those who beg the heavens for mercy and justice for the forgotten and the abused and the oppressed.
On top of it all, God requests a terrible thing:
“Repay no one evil for evil … ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay’ … Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”*
In essence, He asks that enemies be loved and persecutors be lifted up in prayer.
I would walk away, if it weren’t for those words ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay’.
In the centre of His request God says that He will ultimately repay evil. Though, I would be lying to myself if I still believed it looked anything like my wishes.
He will repay evil with the full goodness of His character. So much goodness and so much love that evil will not be able to survive against it.
And I ask myself, am I really ready to follow that God? Am I really ready to honour the freewill of those who would hurt me? Am I really ready to pray for those who have damaged others? Am I really ready to love those who have done unspeakable evil?
What a terrible, humbling responsibility. To entrust justice to God, and to do the work alongside Him as He would see it be done.
It could be the most difficult thing God asks.
And I beg Heaven to give me the strength to follow.
Growing up I was told that thirty minutes (minimum!) with God in the morning was essential.
“If I don’t spend time with God in the morning, my whole day feels wrong”. An oft-spoken, well-meant slice of anecdotal evidence regarding the importance of time with God, but misleading in its lack of context.
Since being aware of this concept I’ve had many, many days feel wrong and go wrong. Many of them indeed started without intentional time with God.
And this is what I came to conclude:
If I forget God in the morning, then He doesn’t accompany me throughout the day, thus things go wrong. In essence: If I forget God, he forgets me.
When I look upon that once believed idea I feel ill. I see it for what it is. A gross misrepresentation of the character of God. A bare-faced lie. A lie I want to correct, because I’ve learned something since, and I learned it in a season of many days that felt wrong.
In those days that felt wrong, I turned to God.
I turned to God because alongside the lies I believed, I also believed some truth.
I believed that He was the last One standing when everyone and everything else crumbled away from me. I believed that He said He loved me. So I ran towards Him.
I cuddled in close with His character, and in that embrace I found something magnificent about my identity.
I found that God called me worthy of His love and that love was more than I could have imagined. I found that He wanted to pour His goodness all over me. I found that my flaws, my sin, were no barrier to His love or His desire to be close to me. I found that He was and is doing everything in His power to bring me into everlasting life, where the certainty of my identity in Him will bring me peace forever.
And friends, that knowledge made the wrong days feel better. That knowledge helped the wrong days go right. If I forget that knowledge the wrong days feel worse. If I forget that knowledge the right days go wrong.
Spending time with God is not like a contract I must sign in order to have Him accompany me on my day so He can sweep the bad feelings away and use His great power to chop obstacles out of my path.
No. Spending time with God is much more like getting a hug or an affirming word from someone I love before I head out the door in the morning. It is a warm reminder of my value and potential. It is a reminder of how very loved I am and how very loved the people I encounter throughout my day are.
And that reminder is waiting at any time of the day.
One day there will be nothing but beauty to behold.
And when that thought crossed my mind, I panicked. What will my purpose be in those days if I no longer have pain to inform my creativity?
How startling to find that I had attached so much significance to the necessity of pain in the process of creating art.
And yes, of course we need the songs of lamentation, the poems of heartbreak, the paintings of grief. We need to consume them and to create them. Pain is so often our reality, and there is comfort in the art that says ‘I have been there too’.
But when that’s all gone? What then?
Will I be content to write only about beauty? To sing songs only of gratitude? To let my soul overflow only with joy?
I hope so.
But I know I’ll only be ready if I practise it now. So I’m learning to see beauty as it leaks through the cracks of this broken life. To marvel at the colours in a sunset, and at the light lingering in a smile, at insect song in the evening, the rustling melody of turning pages, starry skies, and steam rising from freshly brewed tea.
Then, when God comes in all His goodness and perfection, restoring everything to its intended beauty, I’ll feel at home, because it will be what I was looking for all along.
When I make mistakes and feel the subsequent shame I have to strap myself in, grit my teeth and hang on tight to the truth that shame does not come from God. Because if I let go of that truth I find myself plummeting into these soul-crushing lies:
God doesn’t want me. God couldn’t possibly love me. God is ashamed of me. I deserve to feel bad. I am unworthy of any love.
And now that I have tapped those lies out onto the screen, I see just how ugly they are and I begin to grasp a little of the grief God must feel when he watches those words march into our minds to wound our worth. And as I reflect on that idea God in His gentle way plants a line from a familiar song into my heart:
‘How tender are Your thoughts toward me … countless as the sands of the sea.’
Tender thoughts … The kind of thoughts that never wish harm or heartbreak. The kind of thoughts that always wish joy, peace and contentment. The kind of thoughts that consider their subject to be precious and valuable and worthy of thinking about.
And with that my eyes finally grow heavy, my mind slows, and I hear the whisper clearer:
‘How tender and precious are my thoughts toward you. They are countless as the sands of the sea.
In other words, sleep knowing you are deeply, constantly loved by Me.’
It’s my primary identity. The truth that is now my home.
I haven’t always thought of myself that way. I was much more prone to identity statements like ‘I am a worthless sinner saved by God.’ But there was danger in that identity. When I viewed myself as worthless it was easy to view others the same. When I viewed myself as worthless it was hard to reconcile how God could possibly want me.
But adopting the lens of ‘made in the image of God’ transformed my perception of self, others and God in a way that has been subtly, extraordinarily life-changing.
I believe that when the Bible says we were ‘made in God’s image’ it implies much more than a physical likeness. I believe it implies a likeness in our characters, our desires, our worth. Yes, the reflection of these things is somewhat distorted by sin, but as a broken mirror or stirred up pond still reflects something of the face gazing into it, so still do we reflect God.
And with that understanding I found myself led to this eye-widening, goosebump-giving thought:
As God is worthy to be loved so too are we.
That is, the love that God is worthy of as Creator-Redeemer is the same love of which He says we are worthy.
Worthy. It is a word worth marinating in. A word to let soak into your soul. Worthy is how God sees you. And it is how He sees the person in the house across the fence, or behind you in line at the supermarket, or walking past you on the street.
I misjudged my step onto the two adjacent planks that formed a precarious bridge across the overgrown creek at the back of my parents house. And that one misjudged step sent my right leg plummeting into the small gap between the planks.
The panic was instant as my flesh scraped away against wood and when gravity could drop me no further I assumed that I was trapped and the awful, registering pain made me assume the worst.
I called for my dad who was up talking on the porch. I called him again. The moments waiting for him, unsure if he had heard me, were long and frightening.
In the end, after the initial shock wore off, I tentatively tested my leg and found I could pull it out from between the planks. Only then did I turn and see my father close behind me, his presence a secure reminder that he had heard me and was always ready to help me.
Last night, I found myself in a similar place spiritually. I had fallen and was caught in painful lies about my worth. I felt uncertain that I would ever get out. I begged God to help, angered and scared by His lack of immediacy.
Later I went to His Word and followed an urge to pray for someone else, a prayer that focused on that person’s worth, yet strangely a prayer that helped to lift my own self-worth out from the lies in which it had been trapped. And mid-prayer I felt God’s Spirit rushing to me – like the turning and seeing my dad close behind – His presence reassuring me that He had heard me and He loved me.
The candle in the lantern throws out a warm glow. The Southern Cross rises glittering into the sky as it has done for millennia. Lightning from an unseen source dances over the silhouette of fence and trees.
By the candlelight I write the gifts I was given today: family that drops everything to help in times of need, swimming and pizza shared with dear friends, a smoothie made as a treat to end an unexpected day, the flickering, swaying calm of the light I write by.
By candlelight I read comforting, life-sustaining words reminding me that I am chosen and I am loved by Jesus, my Creator and Redeemer.
By candlelight I let ink prayers flow out to that same Creator and Redeemer. Prayers that praise and plead with so much more confidence in His love for me than they did twelve months ago.
This is Sabbath. Rest. Remembrance. Reflection. And it is a gift I have all too often squandered. But tonight I have savoured and soaked in it. Tonight in a small backyard in a chaotic world heaven is near and its peace abounds.
If this year has brought me anything, I believe it has brought me closer to the heart of God.
And I would never trade any of the heartbreak and disappointment of the year to be where I was at the beginning – fresh-faced and hopeful, unscarred and heart-toughened, for where I am now – weathered and longing, heart-fragile and wiser.
Now, when I read a story of a man on the street – a man who retells being lied to by a father, left in an orphanage, beaten by men with no kindness left and raped by another with the Devil in his soul – I weep. Hot, angry, heartbroken tears for an innocent man caught in a war. A war between love and selfishness. Good and evil.
Now, I turn my tear-tracked face to the side of Love and Goodness, and say ‘Jesus, come back. Come back soon.’
Now, somehow, in the space where I would have raised loud, angry accusations, I’m quiet. And in that silence I can hear His heart break too.
And to be honest, I don’t understand it completely. Why the price of love and freedom must be so high, so painful. Why the Devil inflicts more suffering on some than others.
Yet now, even in the midst of that mystery, I better understand God. That He is waiting in the wings for the ‘just right’ moment to end evil and its pain and suffering forever. That each human that is, was and will be is precious to Him and loved by Him in a way that defies even the greatest and purest ideas of love we could ever create in our mind. That He is calling each one of us into His kingdom to be restored by Christ – restored to resemble Him: lovers of kindness, mercy, justice and peace.
Erin Lucie 