peace, be still

As I have discovered the value of the written and well-loved prayer, one of my favorites has become a prayer “for quiet hearts,” found in the Book of Common Prayer:

O God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Often when I sit down to write here, my heart is not remotely quiet. There’s a lot of tension, disquiet, a sense of striving—for the right idea, the right words, the right way to explain myself. There have been times I’ve asked God if it’s time to be done, if after 15 years of writing on the Internet I have said as much as I need to say and the world has heard enough from me.

This morning in prayer, I asked again what the Spirit had to say to me. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

I hoped for something obvious, like “Stop writing,” or “Keep going.” Instead, He said, “Be still.”

As translated by the NASB in Psalm 46:10—cease striving. I’ve spent a lot of time mulling that phrase and the Hebrew words it comes from. I picture a child’s sleeping body, utterly limp, or the perfectly still surface of a pond—no tension, no motion, no bracing.

As spoken by Jesus to the turmoil of the storm—peace, be still. Or perhaps a booming command of “Silence!” would capture the nature of His words more accurately. “And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm” (Mark 4:39b)—no tension, no motion, no bracing.

Or, as put by Moses in the face of a battle against the Egyptians—you need only to be still. To stop talking, to say nothing, to let God fight instead.

And so I release my own bracing for the impact of writing the wrong thing. I release my tension around disappointing the people I value. I am quiet, restful, limp in the hands of God, waiting to receive the word He might give me and refusing to willfully dig it out on my own strength or my own clock. Waiting for Him to do battle on my behalf.

Words keep failing me, and maybe it’s because words must fail eventually. Maybe it’s because it’s not possible to capture God and His heart and His work in the space of a few paragraphs of cold letters on a page. This has to be lived, embodied, touched, felt, known, seen, shared—for the first time I’m realizing I cannot have this walk with Jesus alone. I cannot have it online. I cannot have it only in my head, as if my truest self were just my mind, divorced from my body and heart and gut.

The convenient thing about an intellectual faith, a faith built on righteousness by good doctrine and knowledge of the Bible, is that it’s fairly self-sufficient and immensely scalable.

The inconvenient thing is it bears almost no resemblance to Jesus’s vision of the kingdom of heaven.

One is a formula I can watch on YouTube from the comfort of my home. The other is a fully embodied experience of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus that can’t be mass-produced, faked, bought, or sold.

And so of course words fail—words, which I love so much! Words which I have spent my life honing, crafting, and using to express my deepest thoughts and feelings as I learn and grow. But words can’t help but fall woefully short of the truest reality unless they, like Christ, become flesh.

Israel had many words. The Ten Commandments are called, literally, the “Ten Words”—and they had hundreds and hundreds more commands than that. They had a whole history of kings and prophets recorded in writing. And still, the Word had to become flesh.

The knowledge had to become life.

The truth had to become human.

What good have I done, if I write a dozen profound books about Jesus but fail to live and walk with Him in my real, offline life? He says “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”—and His examples are feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, not writing brilliant essays of what it’s like to feed the hungry or clothe the naked.

God didn’t tell me “Stop writing” but neither did He say “Keep going.” He said, “Be still.”

So in returning and rest, I follow Jesus, and I learn to bring my whole self—not just my head—into communion with Him. It is not scalable, nor even really shareable. But it’s all that matters.

I hope you're happy

Have you seen those “I met my younger self for coffee” reels? They’re based off a poem by Jennae Cecilia, from her book Deep In My Feels, but they kind of took on a life of their own a few weeks ago, as viral trends do. I didn’t make one, but I saw them from nearly every influencer, brand, or business owner in my feed. In all the ones I saw, the predictable pattern was an older, wiser, less anxious “self” showing up to comfort a scattered and scared younger one, who was eminently grateful for the hug, tears, and pep talk.

The question that kept popping into mind for me was, “Doesn’t anyone have a younger self who is disappointed in what their future self has become?” (Or am I the only one whose younger self was a jerk?)

If I met my 21-year-old self for coffee today, she’d be so uncomfortable I think she’d clam up and refuse to speak to me, or—more likely—nod along with me agreeably while inwardly screaming “ARE YOU TELLING ME WE TURNED INTO A HERETIC?!”

I know her so well, but she doesn’t know me at all. She can’t fathom the changes wrought by heartbreak, sleep deprivation, or depression—the chipping away and continual molding of marriage, motherhood, and parenting. In her worldview there is no circumstance in which exiting her evangelical world and returning to liturgy makes sense; there is no universe in which questioning complementarian theology (let alone rejecting it) is anything short of a moral failure. There is certainly no space in her imagination for a day when she would contemplate the legitimacy of baptizing infants, chuckle a bit at the timeline of the end-times she drew in the back of her study Bible, or—God forbid!—sit in pews with people whose beliefs are varied and unknown to her, and haven’t been screened out by a lengthy “statement of faith” on the church website.

If she found out she would one day be the topic of concerned whispers by the elder board or disappointed remarks by mentors and friends, I think she’d have crawled into a hole and died (maybe after shaking me violently and screaming “HOW DARE YOU TURN INTO THIS?! HOW DARE YOU RUIN MY LIFE?!”).

But I hope she would be able to find, somewhere inside, the piece of her that was always there—compassionate and thoughtful and not-quite-a-clean-fit to the world she was trying so hard to fit into. I hope, like Glinda at the end of Wicked, she’d find some capacity to say, “I hope you’re happy”—even if she couldn’t imagine following me off the ledge.

Because that’s what I’d say to her. I don’t want to scold her, or rush her, or talk down to her about her narrow thinking and fear of the opinions of others. There’s so much life in between, so much of God’s slow and patient cultivation. If I spook her now I could interrupt it all.

So—I do. I hope she’s happy. I know she was, in many ways. But I know now there’s a certain depth of flavor missing from happiness when it hasn’t yet been seasoned with sorrow.

I wish I could tell her not to be afraid when things change, life hurts, and people hurt most of all. I wish I could tell her not to flinch when she hears the voices saying, “Look at her! She’s wicked! Get her!” But I can’t, she’s not ready. I’m not even ready—I still flinch at the thought of the labels they’d give me now.

All I can do is reassure her that the road she’s on still leads to Jesus, even if it’s lonelier sometimes. Her delight in the Scriptures and desire to share their wisdom with others won’t change, and in fact will only expand and deepen as she follows the guidance of the Spirit. The God she has known since childhood will prove Himself changeless and trustworthy, and He will provide gifts of reassurance that He is not simply waiting on high for her to screw something up—that His character is always to have mercy.

And I’d try to tell her that she’ll find God only gets bigger and more beautiful the more she explores Him and gazes upon Him—even when the path that leads “further up and further in” makes some turns she won’t see coming, some risks she doesn’t quite want to take but also can’t resist. She will taste freedom and never want to go back.

So, to my 21-year-old self, the one who would be deeply disappointed in me: I hope you’re happy, my friend.

I know I am.

the Pharisees vs. the Gospel

In the not-quite-nine years of this blog’s existence, I have published 249 posts and currently have a backlog of 99 drafts. So if you’re reading this, this post managed to become the 250th post instead of the 100th unfinished draft. Random fact of the day.

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One of my very first weeks at the Anglican church, a line from Father Joe’s sermon stuck with me: “In my previous tradition, the Baptist church, what we seemed to care about most was how to be really good at arguing.”

I’ve never been Baptist, but I’ve been in a fair number of churches where the primary value was definitely arguing. The “best” Christians were always in a defensive stance, holding onto the Bible as both sword and shield, as if our purpose was to guard God Himself from the people and ideas “out there.” I learned all the tactics and talking points, and I learned the Bible really well so I could make even better moves than most. When I was in it, it was fun, like playing a sport with my “team,” and all the camaraderie and belonging that entails—even though in reality, we were little more than gossips and keyboard warriors, too cowardly to have meaningful discussions with real people about real things that didn’t fit neatly into our categories.

If I had stopped there with my study of the Bible instead of digging deeper, if my life had stagnated instead of winding through periods of intense pain and change, if God had not proved far more faithful to me than I was to Him, I’d probably still be having fun playing for that team in our imaginary game—while blind to the real war trying to rip God’s Creation apart.

This is the war Jesus came to fight, not as a great arguer or even a great warrior, but as a human baby, a growing boy, a man of sorrows and a suffering servant. He expanded the boundaries of God’s holy kingdom by feasting with the poorest sinners. He rebuked those who weaponized the Scriptures by being the Word of God in the flesh. He seized authority over all Creation by bowing His neck to His accusers, He ascended to the throne of heaven by being crowned with thorns and raised up on an execution tree, and He shattered the power of death by committing His spirit into the hands of God.

And He left us with one job: to take the good news of His kingdom to every corner of the earth, welcoming people from every tribe and tongue and nation to the glorious banquet halls of His communion table, where there is no space for the greed and self-importance of the flesh. This vocation is the continuation of Christ’s mission to sew the world back together, to undo the power structures and value judgments and myriad abuses of a post-Edenic humanity through the abundant hospitality of the Holy Spirit. To usher in the New Creation.

The real war is not the old game of “my church vs. the outside world.” It’s not Christians-who-are-right-about-everything vs. Christians-who-are-wrong. It’s not cultural ideas vs. God, who needs His army of Bible-wielders to shield Him; it’s not conservatives vs. progressives; it’s not men vs. women or white vs. black or rich vs. poor.

In this country, like ancient Israel before us, it’s a lot more like the Pharisees vs. the Gospel of Jesus Christ (see Luke chapter 15).

We can all stand on the defensive around an invisible idol, protecting our small god and his many demands and limitations from anyone’s questioning, or we can lay down our weapons and come together to the table of the bounty of the King of Kings. He is delighted for anyone to repent and return to His open arms—the question is, will we, too, be delighted when even sinners are welcomed to eat at this table? Or, like the embittered older son who did everything “right,” will we resent our Father’s goodness toward the prodigals, and reveal ourselves to be a long way off from the true heart of God?

Jesus said of the Pharisees in His day,

“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.”

Matthew 23:2-4

This was the reality of being on that argumentative “team.” I could tell you all the right things to do and think and believe, and back them up with Bible verses—but never lift a finger to love you through your real-life pain, proving my knowledge to be meaningless.

I’ve grown weary of spending my life on the defensive for a God who does not need my defending. Let me spend it instead throwing open the doors of His love, mercy, and grace for every hungry soul I can find, whether they fall in line with my particular statement of beliefs or not.