Not that holy and not actually going to change the world

I'm just going to throw it out there that some days are harder than others. For all of us. I guess this is obvious and may sound dumb but I am one of those people that pretends to believe stuff like that but really in my heart, not so much. Those days are almost guaranteed to be the days I don't blog. I'm usually not too too self conscious about my writing but it surfaces from time to time. Like right now I'm wondering if I should change what I write and how. Not like stop talking about Jesus, but you don't have to talk directly about Him because i think you are kinda always talking about Him because in Him all things hold together. But its kind of one of those things that maybe ever writer struggles with is that you want what you write to mean something to someone and be popular and cool change lives and all that. But once you start trying to do that you're basically going to lose your spark, probably. And sometimes you may just be like Picasso or van Gogh or every other masterpiece maker who really isn't appreciated until after they are dead. Well, I don't really think I'm anything like any of those guys, but you get the point. Just write what your heart says and if my heart is on Jesus which it is a lot of the time when i am writing just because that is really how we fell in love then he's the guy I'll write about. And the nice thing about Jesus is that you don't have to be cool or incredible or applauded or have 500 followers because He really is enough. He's crazy about me. Not because of my writing or grades or dreams but just because I'm me. And thats enough. But I get really nervous because writing brings out a lot of the holiness and love for jesus in me which of course is beautiful but if you just see my writing or even most people who see me on a regular basis may think I sort of have it all together. With jesus or whatever. I really really really don't. you just have to trust.me. I don't want to hang out with him all the time. Sometimes I don't even feel like talking to him at all.

I was talking to a friend about changing people. You cant, he said. you're just not going to. Gods the only one that ever changes anyone. And I think about how I have this idea in my heart that I am going to change the world. Or at least a community or a city or some lives. But I'm not because all those things are made up of people. And people are changed by God. We can be his instruments but He is the one that moves in their heart. And the reality is, of course that is true. He was the only one big enough to change me. and to continue to change me. No one else. Yes, God uses our words and our actions and our love in ways that are far more than we ever hoped or dreamed. But he is the one who makes it deep into our hearts, into places that no human can really go within another. He is the only changer.

take my heart

Jesus,

Lives of quiet desperation. They are everywhere, love. Slow starvation. Light dimming in the eyes. Its terrifying. The temptation is to do everything to keep myself from realizing the desperation. To tell myself that I'm mistaken. Its not too much for you.
 You are light. You are life made manifest. Salvation spoken into being. I think, Jesus, that life is really tough because I was made for fellowship with you and I'm just not there. Well, I'll never be fully there until I am with you but I am not seeking fully after your heart. I know Jesus that what you would love for me to do is slow down. I'm not sure why my pace is fast and panicky. When I come to the living water, I think maybe it would be nice to stay awhile. When I get into the Word, maybe just savor it one verse at a time, pondering it, romancing it, letting it settle deep in me. Productivity is suffocating me-I'm so inclined to it. Like I have this idea that the more of the bible I read, the better that is. But you are not looking for me to master the text like its a class I want an A in. Its for us to fall in love and interact and for you to speak softly and tell me the things in my life that you know are killing me so that I can put more of myself into your heart. I'm supposed to let it master me. Break me then build me from the ground up. I have this sense of grandiose service of changing cities and countries and the world. Of changing lives upon lives. Feeding thousands. That is not the point and it is not your way. You invested in living life with people. Just a couple. Hanging out. Joking around. Building their strengths. Recognizing the God image in them. You are calling me to the same. your heart beats to a different rhythm then anything I know. But I am here to know your heart. And it is to my heart that you call. Show me Lord how to make these thoughts my life, not just learning or writing or concepts or ideas. Not just words. Take my heart captive to yourself.

to you and me, love God

My delight,

Hush little one. I am here. I promise that I am with you now and that I will never leave you. Now, love, I know how hard this time is for you. Remember, I know everything about you. I know all the darkness that envelops you; I know the secret wishes and anguishes of your heart, I know your dreams. I know all of it and I love you deeply and passionately not because you love me or because you glorify me or because of the way you look or act or anything. I love you because you are my utmost delight. I love you because I formed you and knit you together in the secret place and you have been written upon my heart since before the universe. So slow down. I have not called you to be successful, but to be faithful. Cling to me. Now, you and I both know that a person only has two hands and cannot cling to many things at once. And if you are holding onto more than one thing you are not holding anything very closely are you. So drop it and just grab me. I will sustain you. I will glorify myself with your life. I will dance order and grace into the chaos of your life; I will paint loveliness in the muck. I am light. In me there is no darkness at all. Do not keep trying to purge yourself of all that darkness that is suffocating you. The only way to get rid of darkness is to let light in. I am light. Oh how I love you. I am enough for you. And you will not find that until you are stripped of a whole lot. You will not know that your worth is not in what you do until you have nothing to do and you are forced to finally look at me and hold out empty hands. I want empty hands. You will not know that I will satisfy the cravings I built in your heart until there is no one else satisfying them. You will not know that I am enough if there are many other things cushioning your life that are just making barriers between us. Stay awhile. You wont spend much time with me if your to do list is a mile long will you? Are you starting to see what a gift this is? This nothingness you are fighting? There is so much more I want for you. I want you to learn the beauty of solitude but I cant with all that noise down there. Silence is mine, darling. Sit in it, soak in it. Come quietly to the tabernacle, enter the sanctuary. Prayer, love, you are just a baby in prayer. Its such a beautiful thing.  Or the Word, I watch you rush through it so often and I am so glad that you look and you want to know it but you have to savor it to really know what it tastes like. It will move mountains in your soul.  Relationships. You must be loved by me to love others. Otherwise you will both end out in deeper pain. Let me love them through you. Because people will hurt you just as you have hurt people so many times. And it stems from a need that no human will fill for any of you. But relationships are what I designed you for. You are relational in nature so you cannot continue to be so afraid of them. Yes, they will hurt. But the sting will not be the same if you know that I will not hurt you. I promise I will never hurt you. You have never known anything like me because there is nothing and no one on earth like me.
But I am here. With you. I’ve got you. But you have to let me. Hold you, that is. And though theoretically you like and understand the idea, you’re resisting me. Being embraced fully does not appeal much to you does it? But deep down its there. The need. The thirst. I love you. I will never stop telling you that because you must know that more than anything else. I love you.

God

our fellowship is with the Father

I just keep tearing people down. And I think maybe thats why I'm having so much trouble being close to God. Because we both know that I am not loving those He adores. There is numb sort of satisfaction to not loving people all that much but compared to the sweetness of Christ I have no idea why I continue to return to this well of poison or why I am so critical. And a lot of people might say don't you think thats a little extreme? WE all judge, we all snicker, we all gossip. Its normal. Well, its killing me. I didn't even realize it, it didn't hit me hard until this morning as I read through first john. Its almost like trying to connect with someone but bashing their wife. Because God said I have betrothed you to me in righteousness and he was not just talking about nice people, or attractive people, but creation. This is one of those things that I know very well on an intellectual level but my heart is just starting to taste truth. But when your heart is sore you just don't really want to love anyone and risk it getting even more bruised. But God will take my heart and hold it perfectly and I can really entrust it to him and then I can love people shamelessly and recklessly.
I just want to learn not to fear openness. Its so easy to pretend and talk about Jesus and do Jesus-y things and no one will even know whats going on. So easy just to kind of go with the flow and ignore that awful sense deep in your stomach that there is something very not right with the life I'm living, we are living.

God is light, in him there is no darkness at all. Nothing kept hidden. All exposed. So bright and brilliant it hurts. Thats so foreign..God, take me there.
you are Light, you are Love, you are everything I am not and yet I have been chosen and called since the beginning of time. Just because of you not because of me. And until I know your love and your presence and how you feel about me, I wont know how to love other people.

I love that. You're not like, keep trying. Love harder. Do more. Stop judging. Be better, for goodness sake. No. You are like, come here. Come here and let me love you. Let me love you the way your heart demands and your soul is starving for and then you will not be able to NOT love others. It simply won't be an option. Thats all I ask of you. That you let me love you. 

note to God

Dear God,

Thank you for being you. I will cling to you. Just you. I trust that the morning follows the night. I trust that no dark is too dark for you because you have overcome the darkness. I love you. No matter what I love you. You're enough for me. Here's all that I am. Its yours. I surrender. Its not much, but you don't ask for anything else. Humble me, that I may exalt you. But when I am brought very low, all the way to the dirt and to the earth come with me so that I am not alone there. Its okay to be sad. You know sadness more than I do. We can be sad together. Thanks for Jesus God. He's real great. I;m so glad you sent him. It doesn't really get old. It still makes me cry when I think about him. He really is the best. Come dissolve this loneliness and purposelessness with your presence. I am enough for you. There is no perfection in my body except your Spirit. And thats okay. Its going to be okay, you say softly in my soul. Nothing can separate us. I don't want anything else.

A Gritty God

Beautiful,

I am the only one you need, come lay all of you at my feet.
I'll gather you up and draw you close.
I don't want you to think that it is easy to be in love with me.
I don't want you to keep searching for a fairytale.
Its not going to happen.
Stop filling your time with busyness with buying and errand running and getting ready for nothing and eating out and spending and working to get money to spend it to just cycle through the day and not think about everything that is really hard and sort of sucks.

I have more in store for you.

Full life does it exists and it starts at the cross.
Come.


-Jesus


I'm so glad that Jesus is a gritty guy because life is really quite gritty at times. I'm really glad he didn't die on a huge gleaming cross that is really attractive because my heart is not gleaming and polished. And we need a cross that looks like our hearts. I'm glad that Jesus is not made real in really emotional church experiences only, but that he is more than our emotions and our institutions and our worship sessions and I'm glad he had dirt caked on his feet and that he cried and that he was mad at people sometimes and that he never tried to make himself into some fairy that would be fun to go along with because he is enough just as he is. His life speaks to me when I am hurt and broken and when I dont think things are very beautiful and when I'm a little bit sickened by myself. He seems to know that. I just really really like him. And he likes me. So much. And I guess that sounds really stupid but sometimes we forget about jesus genuinely liking us. Not even minding all those things that no one else likes or those things that no one else even knows about. Kind of like how your parents love you but they have to and they dont always like you. He always likes me. Thats a miracle.
In second peter, peter says were not just making Christ known by some cleverly devised argument we heard, we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. But whats even better he says, and more sure, is the prophetic word which is like a lamp in a dark place because sometimes its really hard to see the majesty even if we know it. I just love that. He's like, this isnt something were trying to prove or change or make really attractive so you buy into. We simply know. We're telling you because its the best thing there is he. He is the best thing. He's the morning star rising in your heart. Thats beautiful. I can be kind of a beauty skeptic because I've experienced some surface deep beauty. And it often seems that pain goes much deeper than beauty. But Jesus was pain and was also beauty. The fullness of beauty. I cannot be skeptical when it comes to Christ. There is nothing surface deep about the cross. Its the opposite. Its far more than I will ever know. I cannot create expectations it would not exceed ten million fold.

I cant help but feel that if I lived by this my life would look different. The way I treated people would be very different.
Jesus, take me to the cross.

Dear God,

I'm just sort of empty so here I am. You are the only one that can fill me up. I'm lonely though I'n surrounded by people, let down by the holiday frenzy and massive amounts of material things, tired and lazy all at once. I need you, God. Without you, I cant find any life. I'm sorry for running from you. Sometimes I just don't know how to stop. Love, I'd like to learn what it means to pray, to pray hard. I'd like to learn what it means to be silent. I'd like to stop busying myself with errands and conversations and everything but you. You are right for me. I miss being close to you. I miss you so much. I'm just off without you. I'm not me. All I am is yours and if I'm not actively being yours, then I'm not being me either. Come and be with me. or make me come and be with you. Thanks for being patient. Thanks for sending that little guy a long time ago so that I get to write this to you know. Thanks for not minding that I'm sad and messed up and run after everything else when I know and you have shown me time and time again that you are the wildest lover I'll ever have. Thanks for the wind that whispers about you and for painted skies and ending runs early to lay on the grass and think about you. Thanks for Katie and David, sorry I don't love them well. You love them so well. I love you, God. I really do know that you're the best even if I don't act like it. Days where I don't get to be with you stretch long and hopeless. Even though I'm sad today you're the same yesterday and today and forever. Your yoke is easy and your burden is light. I am so weary, so heavy laden, so here I am, coming to the living water. Laying all my shortcomings and sadness and frustrations at your feet. Give me the courage to stay here for a while. Not just gather it all right back up and run away. Don't let me leave just yet.

Krystal

hair cut.

well. I decided I'm cutting my hair today for Libby because I love her and she cut her because she has cancer. You know I'm not really into looks but girls just get this strange attachment to their hair. I'm really attached to mine. Like a security blanket almost. And hair isn't really one of those things I'm very daring with-I've had like the exact same hair cut for I don't know..5 years? my whole life? And all these girls have done it for her already which makes it even harder because I have this dumb thing about wanting to be really cool and blaze my own path and now I feel like I'm just copying everyone else but this is really the nicest thing I could do for her. Libby is so worth it. Its just hair after all. But I'm little bit terrified. I don't want short hair. The more I think about it, the more I think this is the worst idea ever. But libs did it first. Thats why I'm blogging it because then I cant change my mind.

Libby, I dont know if you ever read my blog but if you are reading this (and I'm probably going to text you today and tell you to), I love you. I want to share this journey with you, this sickness, this hair loss. I want to suffer with you; you've suffered with me and been joyful with me for three whole years. Thanks for letting me sit on your couch and cry. Thanks for inviting me to campaigners that one time at chick fil a after the soccer game with Becca and Mackenzie. Thanks for countless cups of coffee and for loving me with Jesus's love because it changed my life. Thanks for loving Ryder well because Jesus loves Grassfield and Chesapeake through Ryder. Thanks for fighting cancer really hard and loving Jesus really hard. Thanks for those really doughy pancakes you made me and Allison.Thanks for reminding me that Jesus is enough.  But really, thanks for living Jesus is enough. He really is.

You have loved me so well.

Jesus love,

Make me more like you.  You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me. Even when I have nothing to say, I can come and just be. Show me love how to cling to you when everything changes and I’m thrown out of my comfort zone. Freedom exists in full bondage to you and abandonment of all the freedom the world offers. I’m so sorry for my short temper and anger and unwillingness to see how passionately love the people that I don’t…

I was doing the 5k run for young life and it hit me that I want to run to and for Jesus. That I want that feeling of delirious exhaustion when I approach the gates of heaven, knowing that I held nothing back. I thought about how running is the heart of young life. Running after high school kids. Loving them hard. Even though that love will not produce the desired results. Even though kids will reject our love and run from us. Even though girls will choose boys over Jesus. Even though you go deep enough that your heart breaks with theirs and for theirs. And that we run only because Jesus came running after us. My dear friend Mike said he thought it was idiotic to say “I found Jesus” because he was never lost. He’s always been here. Its just we were running away from him.

So I was running hit by how unutterably beautiful Christ is and the fact that every time I see Libby or Ryder I just want to cry because they loved me like Jesus does and pursued me and were there for me. They really do look like Jesus. And I wanted to get up at the breakfast and pour out my full heart but I knew this really wasn’t about me at all. Then Ryder was talking and he started talking about Hugo girls who were there and that me and Shanie with the Hugo girls are the picture of young life. And God said so evidently “you do not need to glorify yourself because I will glorify you and more importantly I will glorify myself with your life.” And he also said, “Words are powerful but loving these girls speaks so much louder. Don’t talk about what it looks like to follow Jesus, just run after him. Don’t worry about conveying things, speaking into microphones and powerful messages. Just abandon yourself to my Son and let me work in you.” But perhaps more beautiful is that Ryder constantly points to other people and builds them up and glorifies Jesus through them. Ryder is one of the most incredible people I have ever met in my entire life. And he is always, always shining light on everyone else. That’s exactly what Jesus did. 

nothing compares

I can't stop thinking about the cross. About Christ dying. When Jesus is talking to his dad in the garden right before he was taken he said "Father glorify me with your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed." I can't even imagine that glory..that deep intimacy...absolute perfection. Where is he sent, though? What is God's response? The cross. Utter seperation. It was a lonlieness, abandonment, a forsakenness we could never possibly experience. They were together before the universe existed. Who was even in more pain, The Father or the Son?

Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? 

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And it hit me that all those terrible things God talks about in the Old testement every punishment for their abandonment was met in Christ. Every single one. Judgement was always inevitable. But all judgement was placed on one, in one heart breaking, world changing person's death. In Hosea God says of his people who have cheated on him (which is me as well) he says "I strip her naked and make her like a parched land and kill her with thirst." One of the things recorded in the gospel of John is Jesus whispering "I thirst." I always kind of skimmed past those statements to ones like "I will betroth you to me forever" but the marriage is after the price has been paid and the whoredom has been addressed. Jesus never cheated on Him. But he was judged as the whore for all humanity. Every single consequence of everything all of us we have ever done on that cross, on Christ.

"Only the one who has experienced it can know what the love of Christ is. Once you have experienced it, nothing else in the world will seem more beautiful and desirable."

A close friend asked me during bible study how I could put everything and all of myself into one thing, into Jesus. Its hard a question because you really do have to experience him and have pure holy loved poured on you to abandon every other thing and take after this homeless carpenter and join his ragamuffin group of broken people who strive only to be broken further and follow him where none of us would ever want to go if not for him. There is nothing else and no one else like him. He loves me. He really does. More than I'll ever know or understand or deserve. To exchange all the glory and all the love of God, to abandon his throne first to come and then to die while I was still chasing after every other lover. Nothing compares. This love and this life is really only in him.

Fix your eyes on the Crucified and nothing else will be of much importance..

Love,

Its been awhile..where have you been? I've missed you. I know how hard it is to fix your eyes on me when everything is going right, when incredible things are happening with your life, when you are busy and have lots of people you adore..but, I have to tell you, this is still it. The path is still down to the cross. My love is enough for you. I promise. I know that your deepest fear is being worthless. But worth will not come in people you love, in missions you are passionate about, in lives you change. Worth is not in anything at all that you do. You are worthwhile because I have called you my Beloved, because I came to be with you, and because I died your death. Thats really it. Stop running after less wild lovers and pursuing all these other things. Come back and sit and rest and stay for a long long time and remember that no one needs you,  but that they need me. And that through your brokenness, and only that, just as Christ was broken beyond belief will they be ushered into me who alone can enter the secret place in their hearts and love them well. Let me dethrone you and lead you, lovingly, carefully to the cross. I'm taking you there because thats where I am, that is where we can be together. I do not ask you to be broken alone. But I warn you that you cannot be successful and enthroned and pursue the worlds love and not be alone. Come to me. I love you. My love is enough. Jesus really is enough.

God

(okay, ha, I wrote this earlier this weekend and forgot to post it-I think-so I'm just posting it now)

God,

I was with Jessie yesterday and  she was driving me to Hunter when we realized they had early release and we were both secretly a little excited that we could spend more time together. And this morning when I got a text I would be picked up later I realized that you maybe felt the same way. So happy, that you have a few more precious moments of me all to yourself. That’s who you are. You want to cherish me.  You love when I give you time. And I think I’m giving you all of my time because I do love you like crazy and I do want to give you all of my life, but there is still this thing where I spend so much time doing, doing, doing and you are like “can we just hang out? I just want to love you. I want to show you what love is. All this busyness is yours, honey. Its not mine. I just want your heart. I’ll teach you how to dance. I’ll teach you how to pray. My love is constant, for you it is beyond comprehension, but I would love for you to live like Jesus. The One who went to a different town when people told him to stay, who ignored his disciples, who spent nights in the mountains and mornings with me. Don’t you see? He couldn’t bear to be apart from me. No satisfaction of a good speech or eager crowd or awed disciples compared to the depth and height and breadth of KNOWING me. Because he knew they would turn. He knew that these people, whom he loved enough to die, would never satisfy him. Saving them wasn’t the point. Loving me was and is and always will be the point. Loving me involves giving up all of your life. Living me will let me love them in you. Don’t take offense darling but my love is better than yours. I know each of those girls you love on. I love that you are doing so but come to me, lean into me, dissolve into me that I can love them instead. My love is what is different. Its what is not found on earth.

God I lift up to you the girls you are going to entrust to me.  Perhaps more so I lift up clenched hands for you to gently open because I want to keep them to myself. I want to be a Savior sometimes. Sometimes I just want something to  lay at your feet. But you want me at your feet not all these things I’m piling up. Lord, will I ever lose this huge urge to be significant and productive and important? Will I ever know in my heart that knowing your heart is far better? I just love you, dear Jesus.  That’s what has made these months the best of my life…knowing you. Writing to you, talking about you, being loved and pouring love that is yours on people. Talking about you because you are what made my day right. Seeing that you are better than everything else I’ve turned to for so long. Reading my journal God was strange because the entries were so beautiful. Stunning encounters with you. Yet, I did not know you well. I was so hurt, so desperate, so sad and anxious. And the two seem so contradictory. How could it be? I think I needed to be stripped of a whole lot before I could find you for real. Because when there is a choice between you and Rob my humanness sent me to him. When there is no choice, you. I came here purposeless essentially. No one needing me, no work to do.
There is a constant push in me to be needed. To be important to people. To be necessary. And I am not. You are. 

Most Beautiful Weekend (and Probably Longest Post) ever

My pastor said something that resonated so deeply with my frustration with writing and expressing the way Jesus captures my heart and makes a melody with my life today by saying that when we talk about Jesus its like were lighting a match and hold ing it up to the sun in the middle of the day. Jesus is the sun and my words are the match. You cant see the match because of the utter brilliance of the sun (and really, the Son). I have absolutely nothing to add to his glory, no exhortation that is worthy of Him, no words to convey who He is and the miracles he creates every minute of every day.
 But I will write still, simply because I trust that God want to make something out of my love for him. That he will take these little words and stories and entries and do more with them than I ever imagined. Simply because he is that miraculous.
I just cannot wrap my mind around the love, God's love, for people in me. Its so much bigger than everything about me. I am so small compared to God's love for one single person. And God is making me fall deeply, entirely in love with people. I go downtown and love my homeless friends with more love than I've ever known and come back and have this crazy heart for my suite mates. And it goes on and on.
Its so clear how this unusually hard week was preparation for this beyond beautiful weekend. you must know, my dream was to live life with the homeless in college. I mean friends. People who I know their names and their stories and can just sit and hang out with them. And this weekend that has begun to be made manifest. I went to Moore Square friday night and met two men, Roy and Mike. I could write paragraphs just describing them, but if this is like a novel no one will read it haha, so please just ask me-in person or however, and we can talk for hours. But short story, Roy was sweet but distant and Mike was straight up mad we were there and sick of "do gooders" always trying to help the homeless. I invited them to Help Portrait Raleigh after talking with them for maybe an hour. The next day, Help Portrait Raleigh, was literally like a pocket of pure heaven on earth. We were taking professional portraits of poor individuals and families and it was just incredible to cherish the people who came. They get offered food and clothes everywhere, but rarely do they have hair and make up done, professional shots taken, people exclaiming how gorgeous they are, and just feeling beautiful. Hearts melted at Portrait Raleigh. It was ONE community, that is what is so crucial and so distinct. It was not one group of church people handing something to a group of homeless people, it was all of us having this huge picture taking party, talking laughing, eating together. It was experiencing in ourselves the way God feels about these people we ALL are guilty of ignoring and disdaining. Just a million little things: first family portraits, couples getting a picture together, peoples first picture with Santa at 50 or 60 years old. The fact that people stayed for hours after they were done just because they were welcome and it was a lovely environment. Serving, but without barriers. Without prosperity gaps. Watching women find themselves beautiful. Parents getting portraits to give to their children for Christmas. People who we don't make eye contact with the center of attention. A man praying for lunch, never dreaming of a feast with friends. Going around, inviting people, and then waking with them, because its really scary to go unfamiliar places on your own. opening peoples pictures with them and seeing there child-like, sheer delight at their photo. Then, when I literally could not see the day going more up, Mike and Roy walk in. It was like Christmas seeing those two guys come through the door. I ran and gave them big hugs and I had another opportunity to probe through the barriers searching for his heart. Seeing it there all along. Taking a picture, the three of us. Roy and I just sitting together for at least an hour..sometimes talking sometimes not. Just friends. Really friends.
I know this is going on forever, but then today after church Ansilta and I decided to go back to Moore Square. And it was today that I saw how Portrait Raleigh was so much bigger than I ever imagined. It was a connection we now have with this community. A real connection. This is such a treasure. To go and be able to talk and share stories about yesterday, and to come back today just to show, this wasn't a one day thing. It was the door opener. Now, I can go and just hang out because we know each other. I didn't see my guys but I got to talk to some different people from yesterday and learn more about who this community is. Talking to a guy who said that the surplus of food and clothes makes it so people never have to work. Just being humbled that they are willing to let us sit with them, two girls who know nothing, who have everything, just sit. Nothing to offer. Just coming to learn. To love. To listen. So satisfied with the day and only a little bummed that I didn't get to see my guys, and then I look up and Roy is waking towards me. He looks just like Jesus. Seriously. Jesus was not even joking around when he said being with the poor and the homeless is being with Him. If you want to know Jesus better, get to the streets. Jesus is all over the streets. I can't even describe it. And then Mike was there too. And we sat with them for probably another hour. Talking about our families, where we are from, God, favorite books. And Mike everyday starts of skeptical, harsh and mad and I mean he has such good reasons. He had a family. He had a job. He's white. He sleeps alone outside rather than in shelters. He's extremely smart. This sort of thing shouldn't have happened to him. His biting comments sting. They're meant to. But the longer we talk, the more I treasure him, hearing about his kids, how he taught them the constellations on family camping trips...My words aren't adequate. But by the time we left, you could see he was secretly sad we were leaving. He told us to tell our parents we loved them. He's right-mom, dad, I love you. I do not say that enough. I love you.
You know I rest my fingers and I just feel Jesus whispering in my heart. you poured it all out, love. Its enough. he is enough for me. And I am enough for him. Its just..overwhelming. I did nothing to deserve a life this beautiful and holy. I can't believe that Jesus loves me so much and that this is who he is. And that not only can I, but he wants me to pour all of my life first into him, and through that, inevitably, inot loving people. Loving people who are not loved by the world. And showing me what they mean to him.

"Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever."
only God could have words written two thousand years ago in the hand of Paul that describe my heart better than I ever could have.

Longing

I urge you to do nothing. I literally plead with you to sit and do nothing for a long long time and try really hard to feel and listen to yourself. I think maybe one of the most important parts of a journey with Christ is facing our longing. Now this entire semester has been the saddest and the best most beautiful months of my life and it has been a time of unearthing longing. Deep within us, the deepest most intimate part of us, is a longing that is unsatisfied. And I think maybe the entirety of our lives is trying to satisfy that longing and pretty quickly running from it and hiding it and burying it. And everything in the world offers a cure to longing. But Jesus does not. Because he knows that longing is not something that can ever, ever go away in our lives here. And so when we come, consumed by longing to God, he does not say, like everyone and everything else, "no, thats just a figment of your imagination. Thats not real or true." He also does not say "Yes, that will go away with more. If you just get a better job or a better spouse or better kids or better pills or better body or better grades or write a better book or more friends that will go away." I think maybe this is what he says:

"Yes. Yes, love, I know. I know you're experiencing this gut wrenching, terrifying longing. I knjow it full well. And it will not be satisfied by any of those things." (Noe, this i sa really scary moment because we were hoping he'd say that something would make it go away) "I designed you with that. I designed you for affliction because I am the God of all comfort. I came, dawned flesh and came, so that we could suffer through longing together. Because if there was no longing, there would be nothing to suggest there is anything beyond this present life. And though that would provide comfort for now, that would be the most tragic thing in the world. There is hope in something beyond you. There is longing to remind you that there is something better. Something yet to come." 

Gerald May said that the secret to falling in love with life is to befriend our yearning instead of avoiding it, to love our longing rather than trying to resolve it, to enter spaciousness of our emptiness rather than trying to fill it up. 

And the best feeling in the entire world, really it is the best, my heart aches so hard for you to know this for yourself, is to be brought low, lower than you ever wanted to go, and realize that you are nothing. I hate discovering that I am nothing, that no one needs me, that there is nothing I need to do, that all my busyness, no matter what kind of busyness it is is ALWAYS just me running from longing and trying to hold on to my own significance. But when you enter that dark place, the God of all comfort is waiting. And then you discover the cloud of witnesses, the Pauls and the saints and christ-lovers that have come before who know it as well. And the Word becomes alive because you're there with paul as he writes, and its both of us at once and there.And jesus is so so so much better when you actually need him. 

It is not possible to share in the comfort of Chirst without sharing in the sufferings of Christ. And the sufferings of Christ is the terrible sense of separation from God. It is the darkest part of human existence. We have ripped ourselves away from the One we were woven into. But until we enter into that truth we won't know the hope, the life that comes with it. 

We all know that inward uneasiness that there is a  way of life vastly richer and deeper than this hurried existence, but instead of embracing it and seeking it, we try to shove down the uneasiness with a multitude of temporary fixes, trying to slap on enough bandaids when the problem is cancer of the soul. 

Its one of those days where its so big in my heart, this moment seems so monumental and my eyes are welled with tears and my heart is swollen and God is lovely and I can't express it and its the worst. These words aren't adequate. Its too big for words, for any expression I could offer. Its a soul thing, you know? But it all comes back to the truth that my words are nothing, but God and His Word is absolutely everything. Let him whisper these deep truths into your soul. he will. Draw near. Do nothing, be nothing. Cry. Its okay. He loves. Oh, how he loves.