Dear God,

I’ve been away for a long time. Much too long. Running hard. But an awful lot like the church of Ephesus. I know your works you say to me. I know your toil. I know you are bearing up for my names sake, not growing weary.

But I have this against you.

You have forgotten your first love.

Do the works you did at first.

And I look up to you and know that its truth. I know I cant slow down. I can always think of something to do other than be with you. Other than prayer. Other than your word.

Make me a lover of your presence. It is worth waiting on.  It’s the only thing. What you have done in my life this week, what I have witnessed, begins to flash across your mind. And I want to exhort you. I want to say, Jesus- how could you bring such beauty into my life? How could you be so bold yet graceful? But I know that I need to wait. Wait on the words. On the thoughts. Wait on you. Let you have your way with me in this space. Not consume it. Not dominate it. Not rush you. Wait on you. Return to the love I had at first.

And I think, Jesus, I have to put something good in the blog because I haven’t written at all. And I realize how I still have an agenda, a product, even for our time.

I belong to you. But as I write that, I hear myself ask “do you?” not because you are not doing all you can to restore me to what you made me for. Because how can I belong to one when I am first in my life so often? Am I really giving myself away? To you? Or am I giving myself to everyone but you? Making time for every one other than you?

Daddy I am trying to spend time with you.

I know little one.

Dad, I’m scared.

Why little one?

I’m scared of slowing down.

Why little one?

Because I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know how to belong to you. I want to cling to the multitude of relationships I’m in. I don’t want to let go of anything.

Babe.

What.

I cant hear you...are you speaking to me?

I love you.

How do I know that’s not just me? Who typed that I love you?

Well, I know. It’s the only thing I’m sure of.

I love you.

You’re crazy to do such a thing.

Stay awhile, little one.

I have lots for you.

You’re not asking me for something?

Only to stay with your first love.

I don’t struggle with what you ask me to do, do I?

I struggle with what you don’t call me to.

I have trouble believing there are things you don’t want me to do for you.

But you just want to be with me.

I don’t even know if I am tired or not. I think I will go to bed soon though. There is so much. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface, have we? My life is one of surface scratching.

I see glory fall into this place, lord.

Today I learned what a conduit of grace is. It’s when I stand under a shower when I am tired and sticky and grimy and the water comes gushing down and it goes and goes. It doesn’t end. Maybe showers are the closest we get to what it feels like to have grace being poured upon us.

julian and jeremy

O, Lord, I will never get enough of you. I have much to learn and reflect on from what you spoke to Julian of Norwich many, many years ago…

I can never have perfect rest and true happiness until I am so attached to Him that there can be no created thing between God and me.

Lord, I beg you for that kind of attachment to you. You have made us only for yourself. We have being through the love of God. The smallest thing lasts because you love it. She said that your only desire is that our souls cling to you with all of our strength, clinging to your goodness.

And I think Lord, of all that a week with you has brought…a new friendship with a man named Charlie in Moore Square, singing old songs with young students on a Tuesday night while the rain poured down, being fed and cared for by a marvelous family friend, sitting on the rocks of a river and reading about the wonder seeping through Mary’s magnificat, lots of laughter, lots of deep conversation, lots of bike rides, lots of learning. That is one week with you. You fill me up. Julian said no created being can ever know how much and how sweetly and tenderly God loves them. That it is our nature to long for you and your nature to long for us.

Who are we that you are mindful of us, let alone long for us? How do I become more yours lord? Let me dwell on your goodness this week. Let me understand that I am unworthy and you are all goodness and let every interaction and word and breath I take flow from that knowledge. Grow my attachment to you, my desire for you, even when it means taking away the created things between us. There are many. But you are faithful. And I wonder at the mystery that today is Sunday and I get to go sing your praise and gather with body of believers. Prepare my heart for it lord, for what you have to teach me and say to me this morning.

Jeremy Taylor said, “What is most important to God is that we submit ourselves and all that we have to Him. This requires that we be willing to endure whatever his will brings us, to be content in whatever state we are in, and to be ready for every change.”

community

God, you are redemptive. You know my heart. You know that I resist community so often. And you know that I have been begging you for a sense of belonging, for a people that will build me up and encourage me and challenge me and PRAY for me and you have done it and you are doing it. And I look and I see that you are a healer. You are healing my fear and distrust and separation from the body of christ. All through this community group that meets on wednesday nights for a few hours. And I think back to an afternoon not too long and so long ago sitting on the grass with a dear friend and a very broken heart about needing, craving, community. Friends in the lord. Needing what the church of acts had with each other. Needing to be loved by other college students. To have a place where I am real with people. All the way. Truthful and vulnerable and the whole thing. And I think of tonight. And the way my group loved me well. So remarkably well. They pray for me and they appreciate me and we worship together and share together and again it is redemptive because you are lovingly breaking the walls that have been in place for such a long, long time that said not to let anyone and not to be real and to hide and to stay safe and in those tall, terrible walls I was all alone. And its crazy to see how evident my sin is during group just as it is evident to see filth in the light. The desire to isolate, the judgements on others, the resistance to community, the inability to pay attention during prayer, the fear of attack-those things are not from you. They are lies, all lies, and you are a God of Truth. Everything about you is fully true. There is no falseness in you, but these thoughts and fears and dangers aren't real. What is real is that I can be open and true with my group, I can be absolutely who I am and they will love me because they are yours and you love me. In all my messiness and brokenness you love me. And I trust that, but I am just now learning to trust the body. Because I say to you, God-this body-its people. and people are not like you and so I can not trust them and I cannot know them like I know you. And you say, Love, these people I have transformed into the body of Christ and you are a part of that body and I am making you, making the body, more like me. You must trust them. You must love them. Just as I love you. I have given my whole self to you when you have proven and shown that you will reject it and by doing that I am sanctifying you, I am making you what you cannot otherwise become. Christ is being formed in you. And you get to do the same with people. Trust them and love them and do life with them because I am making you like me and that is how I treat human beings. 

child of God

Every tuesday night we have this thing called Raleigh Worship. Its quite a beautiful idea really. A bunch of college students come into a sanctuary at 9 pm on tuesday nights and sing hymns and other songs to jesus. A few kids play guitar at the front and pick the songs each week and the rest of come to worship the love of our lives. And we sing. We're not harmonious or in tune but we pour out our hearts and sing loud and sing soft and somewhere in the middle we stop and pray and it reminds us that when it comes down to it, its just us and him. All the rest fades-school, career, ministry, and He loves us and loves me so well through my worshiping him. Today was a little extra good. I lost my voice this week (which I am secretly kind of happy about because it is my battle scar from spending a really beautiful weekend staying up way to late and having way to great of a time with high school girls) and singing was quite a struggle. But through the little fact of not being able to sing my usual way, God had so much to show me. I was struck by the sense that he loves my raspy, terribly off tune, mostly whispering praise as much as my best praise. I could feel it. I could feel how delighted he was with my praise tonight. And it hit me that my entire life is like that, not just my worship. It was so obvious that he adored it because it is my expression of love to him, but so is my life. So are my classes and spending time with girls and with him and all that I do, and yet to so many things I hate my imperfection and inadequacies and inability to serve well but none of it is any different than my singing. He loves it all the way a parent loves the work of their child. He loves it simply because he loves me and delights in me. and so I stood there, joyfully mouthing the words that weren't coming and realizing how his love has nothing to do with my performance in anything.
But that wasn't all. I could hear. I could hear the voices around me and they were stunning. And I needed them to worship tonight, because my voice failed to go forth, but theirs did. And we sung together. And what I could not do, the believers surrounding me could. And I can hear so much more clearly when I am not singing. I was extra attuned to the voices around me, the chorus praising him. And it was such a strong sense of the beauty and power and mystery of the church being the body of christ here on earth. There is nothing like that. Nothing in this world I love so much as the body of christ.
It was just a rich day with my voice gone. The effort it took to speak that made me realize that I am not entitled to a voice and that it is a gift and the heightened desire to listen and to choose words carefully because I didn't have so many.
I got to see this girl that I love as well. Her name is Cheyenne and she is in the 4th grade. Today we did homework together. Kids learning is one of my favorite things. Really learning. Even little stuff like multiplication. That is miraculous to me. Watching a mind start to get that for the first time. All the finger counting and picture making before it becomes second nature. And it points back to Christ too. And the way we are born again and we have so much to learn. And we need spiritual milk before solid food. Children of God. Today I got to deeply aware of my status as a child of God. And that God adores his children better than the greatest parent in the world. And that it is for all of us. The arms of Jesus are for ever single one of us. They are for Cheyenne. They are for my YL girls with deeply broken families. They are for my professors. They are for me. That is a beautiful thing really.

rockbridge weekend

Got to go to young life camp this weekend and lead a cabin of 6 high school girls. What a gift. Don't even know how to put it into words. I wrote a little letter to my cabin and then to jesus so I'll post them here. Mostly just struck by the fact that God would love me so much to let me go and get to know them and Him and pursue them a bit when I didn't even know how to. And that they would share a bit of their lives with me. Overwhelmed by the goodness of our Lord.

To my cabin,

I loved getting to share life with you this weekend. I loved learning about Jesus from you, not from your words but from your lives. Because you suffer just like he did. You know more about suffering then maybe I ever will. And you still love. I don’t want you to lose your ability to love. And my greatest hope is that your love and affection is channeled into the one who loves you more than anyone ever will. I trust him as I see your joy, your pain, and your love for each other, what makes you come alive. I trust that though I don’t know how to love you well, I don’t know how to be your leader, I don’t even know how to know you that he knows all these and more. He loves you so much sweet girls. He loves to see you laugh, to see you dance, sing, rap, whatever it is that you do…he made you to do those things and you delight him by being who you are. How do you go through all that you go through? How are you so strong? I see the pain beneath the laugh and I thank you for the sliver of reality I got to glimpse this weekend. I know that healing is hard. It is painful. But it is good. You are daughters of the light. Nothing needs to be kept in darkness. Nothing hidden behind laughter. Nothing scares Him. He’s seen it all, felt it all, lived through it all. Nothing about your life is too much for him. Thank you for your tears, I know you hate them. Thank you for letting me in a little, for being real with me, for loving me well and showing me Christ. I love you. I love you more than I can explain. With a love that is not my own, that of Jesus Christ who pressed on my heart all weekend that I can not comprehend the depth and height of his love for you. I think of you as you are in your homes now. I know that this is where it gets hard. I don’t know what you’re doing right now, but I hope His love does not feel less real. I hope that he is loving you just as hard as he has been all along and that you know it. I hope that in these weeks to come I am able to pursue the way he does, love you a little like he does, share life with you. I am so unworthy to do such a thing, I wasn’t even supposed to come this weekend, but he let me come along. Work alongside Him. Experience his joy in pursuing you and his sorrow in the ways the world has tainted and hurt his brides.

Thank you jesus...

 for letting me in to the work you are doing in the lives and hearts of six lovely girls this weekend. How can I thank you? How could you have entrusted me with something so precious, something of such deep importance? You are crazy to love me like you do. Stay with them lord. Keep showing them who you are and how you love them. Be close beside them tonight. So close they can feel you. The work is not in vain. It is for your glory. Lord, these girls are looking for lovers. They don’t want to be alone lord. But you are the Love of their life. I don’t want them to settle for anything less then you. There is so much brokenness in this world, but especially in the lives of these six girls. Only you can redeem it. I cannot. No one else can. You alone. When I was in high school I thought that what I found in You at camp could not be found at home in day to day life. That is a lie. You want every day of my life to be as exciting and as saturated with you as the best camp, the best trip, the best community. This weekend, living life together, encountering you together, is what we made for. It’s the closest to reality we’ve gotten in urban ministry. I love them. It is hard because I don’t know how to love them, but I rely on you. I trust you to teach me what I do not know. I trust you when you tell me to just be faithful to you. I trust that if every day I commit to whatever you ask, you will show me how to pursue them and you will change their lives and their hearts forever. There is nothing you cannot do. I love you lord. Bring healing; bring life, life to the full. For me and for them. Thank you for showing me what you look like through the girls this weekend. For loving me so much that you’d let me be a part of this. For loving them as much as you do, more than I’ll ever know. Pour out your spirit God. All the time, on all of us. We need you so badly. I love you my King.
 

midday love letter

Dear Jesus,

I have half an hour in between class to write you a love letter. What a gift. You have entrusted me with much. You tear me that you may heal me. You break me down that you may build me. You say, what will I do with you, Krystal? With love like the morning dew, that is gone by the time the sun has fully risen. I know, Jesus. I know that I have a love that  fades fast. And you have a love that is steadfast. And I know jesus that you look at me, look deeply and say that your desire, the Fathers desire is for steadfast love, for mercy, not for sacrifice. And I say, what does that mean love? To give mercy not sacrifice. And you weave things together perfectly and you have brought me the writings of a man who knew you well, a man named Dietrich, who reminds me that spiritual love is not the same as human love. That spiritual love is not desire, not the desire I have to be fulfilled as a human being but service. Service purely to Christ. And that I interact with people through you, never directly. And that I love them without looking to what they have to offer me. A love that is pure. A love that is selfless. A love that allows them to be saved by Christ not by me. I will save no one. I will save no wayward, broken soul. No community in shambles. No poverty. I am not redeemer. You are redeemer. You are Savior. You are the fulfillment of my desire. And you allow me to be lost in you and my mission to be lost in yours. Which is perfect. You make all things new. You are the king of glory. You say, open up your gates and let me in. I’m not so sure about that. Honestly. Today is a day I’m not interested in letting anyone in, especially you. Because today I don’t feel like existing deeply, I feel like being busy and irritable and doing lots of work so I don’t have to think about much. But then you say, not today my love. Today is a day I have MADE, rejoice and be glad in it. Be still, still, and know that I am God. And know that I am good. And know that this day is holy, unutterably holy, because I have called you by name and I have also renamed you. And TODAY you receive your true image, which Jesus Christ has given you, the image HE HIMSELF embodied and has now stamped on all men. And today is also the day that you can meet people with the word of Christ and leave them with it. And meet them and offer them the image Christ gives to both of you. 

king of glory

Who is the Lord? The King of Glory. [psalm 24]. Let him in the psalmist cries. Let this king of glory in. What happens when he comes into us? Were changed. I have been around many people lately who have been trying to tell me that we created god. That he is a social construct, that the there are hundreds of religions and that we all have our own version with similar qualities and that truth is relative not absolute.

What do I have to say to that? I don’t have a precise statement that will affirm the reality of Christ or the truth of Gods Word. I will not pretend to know a logical argument that proves Christianity or ignore the track record Christians have had since the time Christ lived. I will not deny the racism, hatred, and darkness that have been present in this Church, this bride of Christ, but I will say that God does not deny it either. He acknowledges our failure to represent him to the world and does not desert us.

I can only say that I do love him. I do think that he is very much real, very much alive, very much light and love. I do believe that there is a king of glory and that the earth does belong to him and that I was made to belong to him. I know that I have nothing unique to say about the validity of Christianity, people far more intelligent than I am have affirmed and denounced it. I believe in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and Love as absolutely, eternally, undeniably true with everything in me and I believe that he can save me and that I cannot save myself. My own intellect and reasoning is not where my hope lies. My rationality and philosophy, my self, is not what I trust in. Nor is society or culture.

I look at these psalms before me and I love them and I trust them. I do love this Word. One thing I have asked of the Lord, psalm 27 says, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord forever, gaze upon the beauty of the lord.

I seek your face God…take me in. Make me bend low. Make me serve more. Make my love more like your love so that the world may know that I am yours. It is only by our love that they will know whom we belong to. Whose face we seek. Whose face they see when they look at us. Take me in O Lord, as I lift my face and my hands to you, teach me your ways. Hem me in from behind and before. Come in, O king of glory.

Christ Jesus has become to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption so that it is written let the one who boasts boast in the Lord. (1 Corinthians 1:30)

why I give thanks

I’ve come to the other end of my day. Its Sunday night. I’m home alone, and its time to come to my God and meet with him. Though it is Sunday, though it has been full of the Lord, since this morning I have little time just us. And I look over this day and this week and what I have learned and what I have to be THANKFUL for. I am thankful for a girl named Katie who adopted 13 girls and lives in Uganda. She’s 22, and she’s my hero. Not even because of the adoption but because of her adoration for Christ. I found her blog: kissesfromkatie.blogspot.com and its changing me. I am thankful for Jesus Christ and his love for Raleigh North Carolina and that there is a church named Vintage 21 where He is changing me and there is a church named Tapestry and He is changing me and there is a girl named Takya and she is changing me because she was happy to see me today. I am thankful for the orphans and the sons and daughters in Port au Prince Haiti whose pictures I taped on my prayer wall over my bed who I could never get out of my heart, who I want to see again, ones I knew well and ones I barely know at all and all ones that God knows fully and perfectly. And I am thankful for a God that calls me beautiful when I do not feel beautiful and when I do not even want to be called that because I like the safety of my aloneness. And I am very very thankful for a weekend spent with 44 sophomores in college who are each very intelligent and each very high achieving and each very very loved by a Savior and desperate for more life and life to the full even though I don’t want to be called to college kids because I am one I am called to them because I am one. And I love the fact that jesus wants me. He wants me right now and he wants me always. Always, always. And he doesn’t need by intellectual capacity, my work, my praise and he doesn’t want me for anything I have to give he just wants me. Because I was made to be wanted by Him. I was made to be loved by him because being loved by God is how we glorify God and we were made to glorify him.

I am so tempted and eager to believe I am called anywhere but here, to any life but this one and any people but these. None of it is true. I am here for a purpose and that is to love my Savior and to make his name known and to let light burst forth and to invite and encourage and beg others to join me in pursuit of Him. And he is making me a part of the redemption of this city and this college and this community that he loves so much. And if there is somewhere else he’d like me to be, he is going to make it known to me. He will show the way if I say, “here I am, send me.” But no matter where I am sent it will be the same-this business of loving jesus and loving people-letting him love people through me- and that is going to be hard and feel not right and feel like it would be better somewhere else EVERYWHERE I go. Because it is always hard and always beautiful to follow Christ. Hard because were human and beautiful because He Loves.

And I get excited when I write because I remember how very good he is. that he is more than enough for me, just as himself. I don’t need to be entrusted with ANYTHING and he is enough. And YET he has entrusted me with MUCH. So, so much. So many little lives he lets me be a part of. So many adults, kids, students. So many classes. So many moments I can surrender to him. So many people I can love. 

Jesus,

I want all the focus on you. I want to be where you are and where you want me. If you want me in Africa, if you want me in Raleigh, if you want me in DC, as long as my home is one that people can come into where jesus Christ is glorified and proclaimed as king, where the poor are no longer the poor and where I am very poor where there are lots and lots of girls, then that is what I want lord. If you say go to academia, then I will go. If you say go back to Haiti, I’ll go there. It matters not. You know. You are sure. I am not. Sure of anything. I am just the grace consumer. That’s my role in all this. Consumer of grace. Pray-er. Make me more of a pray-er. That prayer is like breath. That this writing thing happens all the time ten times a day I write my heart to you. That I speak to you. That I praise you. That I fall for you over and over again. It is always lovely to remember that I have found what I was made for and that is you.

I just want to know you and love you and hope that by our love your name will spread across the earth. And know that my significance is not by any means the most important thing. In fact, it is the least important. What is important is running to you and getting caught up in you and loving you. Loving and loving and loving you. As hard as I possibly can. And just going where you are. Where you are is where I want to be. I love you so much lord. I come away from you and I come back and I think true life is here in your arms. You have the best arms I’ve ever known.

bonhoeffer

There is much to say but little time as I am about to go on a school trip for fall break so I'll keep it short. Its been far too little posting, not due to lack of things to say but lack of time to weave them together into text and post them between going home all last weekend and leaving again now. My very wise friend kimberly reminded me today that prayer is not a means to an ends-it is an ends in itself. Regardless of what it does for me or who I am  praying for, Jesus is so worth praying to and with. It is not preparing for some higher better thing, it is the higher thing. The highest thing. Union with Christ. Bonhoeffer also has something quite beautiful and convicting to teach me:

If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed even when there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but mush weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary we keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize, it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.

This entire chapter (the first one in his book Life Together) literally slammed me. Both with conviction and deep, deep relief and joy because it pinpointed to source of my frustrations and discouragements and disillusionments so that I keep thinking that we, as Christians are not what we are supposed to be that we are not loving our poor that we are not loving each other and we are not loving are God. Which there is truth in our brokenness in the fact that we are being sanctified, being made perfect, but isolation from and irritation with the church and people and the work I get to be a part of is rooted in this seed of deception that keeps me thinking that Christian brotherhood is an ideal we are missing when it is already reality and has been reality since Christ came here and brokenness is part of that reality and that I am called to be THANKFUL for the gifts and the people and Spirit and the life he has already given me and never ever to become and accuser or complainer of ANYONE in my life especially before men but also before God.

Keep shattering my wish dreams Lord, and giving me your truth instead. Keep that heavy hand of grace upon me. Crush me that I may be made whole. I love you.