She awakes
looking into a mirror.
Strength, goodness, and valor are there.
His first, and have become hers—
two halves of a split picture, the Imago Dei.
The One who breaks apart darkness and light,
water and ground,
God’s space and human’s space is now become
the One who knits together whole new beings from inside Himself.
And he who breaks apart the creatures by kind,
who himself is broken in two,
incomplete,
not good,
cannot be knit whole outside of her.
When I was about 12, the people I most could not stand in life were other kids my age who acted like know-it-alls. Ironically, I think the main reason they bothered me so much was because I was convinced that I knew it all—or at least knew better than they did—but I didn’t have the skills to assert my voice with confidence. I felt a strong sense of injustice that the people who pretended to know it all were the ones being heard, and I—the one who, in my view, actually knew it all—was being ignored or passed over.
Oh, 12. It’s not an age I miss.
What I do miss sometimes is the certainty of being right. Being sure that my perspective is the best one, that I’m the one who has considered all the contingencies, that I can righteously claim that if Jesus were to come comment on XYZ topic, He and I would be pretty well aligned. The older I get the less space there seems to be for self-righteous self-certainty. I think I expected the opposite.
I recently read this quote from Anne Lamott: “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”
That quote makes my evangelical bones shiver a little. Didn’t I take half a dozen “spiritual gifts quizzes” that told me I had the gift of faith—precisely because of how I answered questions about certainty? It was never hard for me to believe what I was supposed to believe, and to also believe that I was 100% right. Did that make faith my spiritual gift? Or might my certainty have been a spiritual handicap?
To ask the questions differently: Has my spiritual gift atrophied as I’ve grown older—despite the fact that my walk with Jesus has grown in length and depth—because I’m less of a know-it-all at 31 than I was at 12? Or was I mistaking my propensity to take refuge in knowledge as an unalloyed strength, when it is sometimes my Achilles heel?
Looking back across the churches I’ve lived in over the last few decades, my sense of injustice is still a little bit activated—no longer because I’m convinced I’m the one who really knows it all, but because I think we as a collective may have a know-it-all problem.
Like I measured my “gift of faith” by how much certainty I had, many Christians and congregations measure the genuineness of people’s faith by what they factually “know.” Rather than placing the value on knowing Christ and Him crucified (experientially and actively, as well as propositionally), the unspoken litmus tests for these churches sound more like end-of-year school examinations. How well do you know (and can you spontaneously rehash) your specific church’s statement of faith—right down to its stance on the controversial culture war issues of the day? That’s how we know if you’re a real Christian. That’s how we know if you belong here.
Add to this the fact that all different denominations or non-denominational churches will have a slightly different set of these implicit test questions, and a different set of answers to them, and it’s no wonder the know-it-all problem in Christianity has become a unity problem as well. We are a movement shattered into a million shards.
If the goal is Jesus, then what truly matters is knowing Jesus, recognizing His voice, and faithfully following His lead. But if the goal is being right (and displaying how right we are), we will struggle mightily to exercise our faith in a way that makes space for the Spirit of God to do His work in us and in the world.
When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith would not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.
1 Corinthians 2:1-5
I believe this is one reason why moving into the Anglican tradition has been such a relief for me. We say the Nicene Creed together every week before we participate in communion, and all the rest we discuss amicably, over coffee and snacks or a feast with mulled wine, as the less-than-primary issues they are.
When Jesus was about to face Pilate, and with him the powers and principalities of darkness, His prayer to the Father was “that they [believers] may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me” (John 17:21).
Unity within the Church, and between the Church and the Trinity, is our testimony to the cosmos. All of Creation and its inhabitants are watching.
Do we look anything at all like the One we claim to represent?
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.
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a Pacific Northwest-native writer, photographer, and Bible nerd with a lot of big ideas and a never-ending sense of homesick. Here, in words and in images, I process my inmost thoughts and invite you along on my lifelong pursuit of truth + beauty - ever inspired and sustained by the changeless nature of my beautiful God, and by the hope He offers in His Story.
