(November rain is falling in South Carolina today. Please stay, please stay awhile).

My heart is not always very kind.

I want it to be but often I’m lost in my own emotions, plans and goals. I’m discouraged by criticism, selfishness and petty preferences. I don’t have a think skin towards sarcasm and I often take things personally that weren’t intended that way. Sometimes all of that results in a defensive heart not a kind one. In a self-driven agenda not a self-sacrificing one.

We teach children to be kind why then do we, as adults, so often fail in this area? Why do I? Why do I forget that everyone else matters just as much as I do? That their thoughts, opinions, feelings and desires should be treated with respect and grace even when I disagree?

Why do I treat kindness as an optional attribute? If I have extra time or feel particularly gracious I’ll be kind but if not…

It takes courage to be kind.

You can be rejected, you can be ignored. Being kind doesn’t make us immune to criticism – sometimes it opens us up to more. If you’re like me and have a thin skin that can be a confusing reality to accept.

For me, the prerequisite to kindness is embracing what Christ has said is true about me. I am loved, I am redeemed, I am here temporarily and I am on a mission to serve people.

Those irrefutable truths equip me to fight a battle our culture is losing.

Someone marked by kindness is living with intentionality; no one accidentally spends their days sacrificially.

“Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution” – Kahlil Gibran

Kindness takes noticing people

We can’t meet needs we never see. If busyness was a disease every one of us would be ill but, what’s so beautiful is that kindness can be contagious too. Everyone has needs in their lives. Everyone has a part of their heart that aches

“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see” – Mark Twain

Kindness takes time (but honestly not that much time).

Three extra minutes to listen to someone’s story can change their day. Smiling at the person across the street, stopping at the store for the bread you know your spouse loves, washing the dishes when it’s not your night, telling a friend that they’re beautiful, surprise cups of coffee, a single flower, one-word texts.

Eye contact when answering a question, a smiley face on a post-it note, covering a shift, making the bed, re-filling a glass, feeding the cat.

There are a thousand ways to brighten a day, to communicate to someone that they matter, they matter, they matter, they matter.

Kindness is a learned language. In a way, we each have our own dialect. The unique ways of being kind that we each bring to the world are all important; the way I speak it and the way you speak it are different.

They both matter.

Speak kindness fluently. It changes lives.

“Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless” – Mother Theresa

Autumn is sneaking in the back door.

The temperatures at 7:17 a.m (which is exactly when I need to leave for work) have been hovering around 60 degrees. Perfection.

I feel most alive in early fall and early spring. The physical relief of cooler weather makers me want to run a marathon (still haven’t though ) or….at least do my tae-bo tape. I sleep better, run errands faster and just enjoy the days more. I’m miserable when I’m too hot. Seriously. It’s one of many reasons I’m glad I got married in December.

That dress in 100 degree temperatures? I’m hyperventilating at the thought.

Who would choose to live in SC for any length of time?

Oh wait.

Also, see that girl on my right?

Black, halter dress and wedge heels? That’s one of my BFF’s – Whitney (or, more affectionately, Bean).

She’s getting married on Saturday.

We’ve been roommates, hall-mates and house-mates. She was the first one to know I liked Tom and the last one to spend the night at my apartment before I got married.

She’s a special girl who found a special guy and I’m so thrilled to be a part of their day. I’m headed to the upstate after work today for a few days of celebrating her & August (the lucky man).

So proud of you, bean!

Gooooooood times

Have a great weekend, everyone (yes, weekend – thanks to Whit’s weddin’ today is my Friday ).

Our greatest secrets remain our heaviest burdens.

The narrow road to freedom is strewn with thorns.

The demands of our faith are high. The rewards, infinitely greater. We deceive ourselves when we hold to an easy spirituality, to a hobby faith. Our experience of Christ deepens with our surrenders, our failings, our vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability is not immediately rewarding.

It’s terrifying, it demands our pride in image, reputation and self be sacrificed. It demands persistent risk. It demands lonely sojourns into the depths of hearts. It demands our surrender to something unfathomably greater than our ego.

I gave up not so long ago
So steal my heart and take the pain
and wash the feet and cleanse my pride
take the selfish, take the weak,
and all the things I cannot hide
take the beauty, take my tears
the sin-soaked heart and make it yours
take my world all apart
take it now, take it now (Worlds Apart – Jars of Clay).

Accountability is ineffective without vulnerability.

When we hold each other to our projected images, to general confessions, to half-hearted service we experience neither the depth of grace nor the cleansing sting of truth. We fail to live for something greater.

Above all, vulnerability demands both courage and humility.

There are land mines: unsafe people. Ill-timed truth.

Yet, we cannot quit. We must press on with a vision of something greater. Someone Greater.

“Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion,  then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.  Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves,  not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others” – Philippians 2:1-4

In the place where truth and grace are fused vulnerability is born.

Truth without grace is legalism. A suffocating faith.

Grace without truth is relative belief.  An insignificant faith.

Truth married to grace is the path to surrender. To Christ. To vulnerable living. To communal grace.

There where grace and truth meet, and only there, can the broken self can be embraced. There the soul need not stand on its own merit. There our battles can be admitted. There truth can be absorbed – it no longer crushes the broken soul. There grace isn’t a Christian buzzword, it is life, it’s everything worth having. There is both;

There is the Power to fight battles we may engage in for life.

There is the Courage to reveal our souls.

There is Hope.

Our greatest secrets remain our heaviest burdens.

There are those my heart will always ache for.

Some I know well. Some I only see from afar.

Both I pray for. Both I cry for. Both I grieve for.

Last semester one of my beloved professors spoke on grace. He  asked us how much we were willing to sacrifice for another’s good. If, in their pain, sin, brokenness and weakness, they asked you sacrifice your;

Would you do it? Would I do it?

What if they didn’t ask but demanded? 

There was a man who saw the invisible. The words engraved on human souls; the lies, sin, selfishness, lust, anger, loneliness, fear and pain.

The needs desperately concealed by trying harder, working longer and hiding deeper.

Christ sacrificed everything for our healing. Surrender is accepting my call to do the same. Wounded healers – those who have experienced their own season of vulnerability, fear and growth are tasked the joy of helping others on their journey. Their scars are their credentials.

Yet, in practice, in daily walking, in breathing in and out – how is this surrender, this living with hands and feet full of faith, visible?

In a paradox of God’s creation; the invisible reveals the visible. Prayer, more than anything else, guides our footsteps into surrender. Into bearing each others burdens. As Oswald Chambers wrote;

Once we lose sight of God, we begin to be reckless. We cast off certain restraints from activities we know are wrong. We set prayer aside as well and cease having God’s vision in the little things of life.

A desperate reliance on God’s guidance is crucial to daily surrender. When He casts our vision we can rest assured it is the right path. 

Without His vision we’re prone to serving out of our need to be appreciated, overextending ourselves or committing to things in which we’ll do more harm than good.He knows the limits that accompany each stage of our own journey and he’ll us help us understand them and grow through them.

When our hearts seek His we’ll be given grace to carry another’s burdens (what a priceless gift). Grace to absorb the unkindness that will always come. Grace to differentiate between times to be silent and times to speak.

May we willingly, eagerly, unconditionally serve with Your grace. 

These are they who hold my childhood memories; moments clasped tightly between yesterday and today.

Time & love have created bonds built by tears, pain and grace. These links are not un-breakable – any bond is jeopardized if abandoned. Life’s realities are often difficult. Intimate relationships require daily maintenance.

Yet, families forged through fire, laughter and the sustaining grace of God are among the most rich of life’s relationships.

They are my memory keepers. The ones who’ve shared my holidays, celebrated my victories and comforted me in my sorrows. We lived through moves up and down the East coast, 12+ years of home-schooling, many disagreements, various jobs and life changes. It’s not been easy – I’d never want to mis-represent it as effortless - but it’s been worth every apology.

Now, my world is changing in a significant way. My “family” is slowly becoming this man. He joins my original memory keepers as a place to store hopes, dreams and desires.

We will have our own “remember when’s”, our own seasons of pain and joy, our own memories to hold with care.

My home is where he is.

As life changes I’m unspeakably grateful that family cannot be lost, that relationships – with effort – remain intimate and that time and memories create a lasting bond. My memory keepers are my greatest treasures.

The Lord has been pressing this truth on my heart over the past week. It’s not an original thought but stood out to me from one of my many textbooks (I’ll eventually have time to figure out exactly which one .

Life is painful. That is reality. Given that fact we have two options;

1) Lock our hearts away, refuse intimacy and live in idealistic isolation;

The poet, Carl Sandburg, captures this idea in his poem “The Fence”. He tells the story of a wealthy family determined to keep life’s difficult realities at arm’s length. They construct an impenetrable, iron fence to retain  control over their circumstances. Despite their illusion of control there are three realities they cannot curb. The closing lines read;

“Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow”.

Life is painful. That is reality. The second response is;

2) Love freely. Live as an avenue of God’s healing grace. Forgive much;

A man (after my own heart) approached Jesus to clarify which, of all the commandments, he should prioritize most highly. What was the bottom line? Jesus’ words, quoted here from Luke 10:27, clarify what should ultimately capture the interest, energy and dedication of his followers; 

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Life is painful. That is reality.

Now technically, we as believers, are only given ONE option in how to live. Scripture, Jesus’ life and church history are replete with the commands, standards and examples of sacrificial love and grace-infused community. We are to be Christ incarnate to the people in our lives; we are to embody truth and grace, healing and confrontation, mercy and justice. Relationships are to be pliable, durable, authentic, and able to withstand conflict, confession and criticism. They should be forums to give and receive grace; living, breathing, active grace.

Anyone overwhelmed? Me too.

Central Park is far from Eden. Our self-centered world values competition, self-promotion, manipulation, and individual success stories. Our pleasures, pastimes and values are subjective, often immoral and rarely beneficial. Our standard, our aim and our Model remains the same but our world has changed drastically.

C.S. Lewis captures the struggle to live in hope-filled love far more eloquently than I have. His words, describing selfish love, call to mind Dante’s Inferno. Interestingly, Dante’s ninth and final circle of hell is not ablaze with fire but is conceived as  a lake of ice – frozen, isolated, alone.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

There are so many aspects of this truth that I could emphasize here; the need for self-awareness in love, the crucial element of healthy boundaries and freedom to say “no”, the dual roles of silence and confrontation, the need for personal healing and proper understanding of one’s spiritual identity. However, building on the foundation just laid, I want to emphasize the crucial role of forgiveness. If we are to adhere to the lifestyle commanded by God and modeled by Christ (as well as avoid the isolated pitfalls of fear, selfishness and idealism) we must be able to forgive.

Is this hard? At times, excruciatingly. Must we do it? Yes. However, for personal application purposes, my question has been, “how do I know when I have forgiven a person, an offense or, in many cases, both”?

Very few of us keep an axe in our closet, waiting for the ideal moment to harm those who have hurt us. However, I believe many of us are guilty of slanting stories a certain way, publicly criticizing those who have hurt us, refusing to support our “enemies” and creating disunity in the body. Additionally, we know the content of our hearts. All signs of a lack of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is surrendering your right to revenge

We paralyze ourselves when we refuse to forgive, when we demand an apology in order to move past an offense, when we rehearse heated, confrontations in our minds, mentally replay hurts or frustrations and wish painful consequences for our offenders.We lessen our emotional energy to love, cloud our thinking with thoughts of revenge and weaken our life-giving intimacy with our Lord.

I have many issues with Catherine Ponder’s worldview; however, I fully agree with this thought;

“When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free”

The lifestyle of courageous love, healing grace and future hope that we are called too will never be possible if we remain trapped by past hurts, alienated from fellow believers, resistant to vulnerable relationships, angry fearful, bitter or resentful. It takes great humility to forgive and immense grace to trust again. This is an intrinsically Christian process, it cannot be otherwise. In some ways this is fundamentally an issue of trust. Do we believe God sees our hearts, cares about our hurts and will bring justice on his terms? I’m passionate about this topic because I believe many (including myself) are in danger of being trapped in hurt; refusing to forgive. This attitude keeps the past fully in the present until resolution comes.We truly are desperately, irrevocably in need of God’s grace, Christ’s healing and the Holy Spirit’s conviction to live this way.

What we are called too is beautiful – a life of unity, community and love. Where we are called to create it, an earth consumed with itself, is counter-cultural, discouraging and often openly antagonistic.Will we achieve Eden on earth? No. Must we strive anyway? Yes, and, by the grace of God, there are moments of Eden along the way that encourage us to continue in light of our future hope.

I want to close with two crucial truths that must supplement that discussion just presented;

1) Forgiveness is a process. I do not want, in any way, to undermine the pain of legitimate hurts. My heart aches for those living with the realities of pain, abuse, insecurity, anger, fear, rejection and addiction. Wounds leave scars. However, there is a significant difference between being a wounded healer and simply being wounded.The necessity of forgiveness is not negated by significant pain but I believe the process of forgiveness is proportional, in depth and length of time, to the hurt inflicted. Allow yourself to grieve the death of dreams, the loss of relationships, the absence of desire, the pain of addiction, the weight of sin. There is a time when every tear will be wiped away but it is not in this lifetime. Don’t rush the process, allow yourself to experience the loss, but always prioritize forgiveness in the midst of your grief.

2) Boundaries are Biblical. We are not to be foolish with our affections, hearts, Spiritual gifts or love. Forgiveness does not necessarily mean full restoration to prior relationship..We need to be wise as serpents; honestly assessing the health of our relationships, realizing those we will  love best from a distance, and innocent as doves; always willing to love with purity, honesty and grace – free from resentment, bitterness and desire for revenge. We are called to live sacrificially, with intentional laying down of rights and sacrificial gifts; not as victims – available to anyone’s manipulative agenda.

Relationships are like jolly ranchers.

Seriously.

They’re a burst of flavor, color and happiness.

…much like the intimacy, memories and joy that stem from authentic relationships.

I do some of my best thinking in that place “between asleep and awake where you still remember dreaming”. Lately, I’ve been musing over this topic of relationships, particularly friendships. They’re something our romance obsessed culture has sadly underestimated in value. We live in a highly individualistic society that emphasizes self. The time demanded for perpetual self-improvement renders time for self- sacrifice non-existent and leads to the shallow, short-term friendships and relationships that permeate our society.

No wonder people feel lonely.

Relationships are hard, I give you that. They take time, work, sacrifice, selflessness and forgiveness. They’re not always ‘fun”….

After all there are sour apple jolly ranchers (please, oblige me my theme .

However, the fact is that our relationships with brothers and sister in Christ are eternal ones. Life has little interruptions to intimacy; moves, family, school, jobs. However, one day, we’ll be together for good. The rewards of a whole-hearted, reciprocal friendship are rich, lasting and life-changing. Worth the investment. Worth the effort. Worth the sacrifice. Worth the forgiveness.

As with many topics, C.S Lewis has a fitting quote on this thought.

“Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” – C.S. Lewis

“Let us love one another”.

There a lot of different flavors of jolly ranchers; you don’t have to marry everyone you get to know or only get to know the people you think you’ll marry (an unfortunate too-often occurrence here at CIDO

It really is a privilege to walk through life with one another and to our detriment if we don’t invest in the blessings and efforts of authentic friendship.

I ran across a question yesterday that stopped me dead in my tracks, or more accurately, slowed me in my eating of a piece of watermelon. It was buried inside a back issue of Christianity Today (which thanks to a recent rainy afternoon spent in the library I have discovered whole volumes of). The question was this,

“Of all the events that have shaped you most lastingly…how many were interruptions?” (Buchannan, 44)

I sat there for a while, licking watermelon juice off my fingers, and thinking about what kind of circumstances would have caused Mark Buchanan to think of the question in the first place (and if he was interrupted in the process of writing the article). Then I started to think about my life.

I am the type of person who needs to work on scheduling flexibility into her daily routine. This is different than spontaneity. For me spontaneity is the complete abandonment of routine and flexibility is the ability to handle an interruption in my schedule without getting frustrated or stressed. Once I get on task (and admittedly it can take me a while to actually begin to accomplish something) but once I do, I like to power through until it’s finished. I dread (only a slight overstatement) being dependent on other people in order to finish a task as it inevitably lengthens the process as we attempt to coordinate schedules. I love people, I love being with them…on my terms and timing.This is just not going to fly on the mission field where the method of telling time is the sun not the second.

In the land of southern chit-chatters patience is a character trait somewhat forced upon you. When a lovely southern person takes a full minute to tell you to “have a good day and come back and see them soon” (something New Jerseyans communicate in literally 2.5 seconds) one must simply breathe (several times, in the ample gap provided before a reply is expected) enjoy the richness of their drawl and appreciate their apparent enjoyment of your company; all while trying not to think about how many things are left unchecked on your to-do list.

This same article summarizes what I want to be true of me with these words, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and…..he went around doing good” (Acts 10:36,38): he wandered , and he blessed. He was a vagabond physician, the original doctor without borders. His purpose was crystallized but his method almost varied. “My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted until I discovered the interruptions were my work (Buchanan, 44).  “Most of us live afraid that we’re almost out of time. But you and I, we’re heirs of eternity. We’re not short of days” (Buchanan, 45).

With that perspective life gets simpler. I find myself seeking out those dear southern ladies for a chat, taking the long way to cafeteria, calling my younger siblings cell phones, making time, loving people, being loved. Interruptions can be the spice of life. God’s fingerprints on our carefully ordered universe’s, serving to make us more like Christ, reminding us that He is in ultimate control and teaching us to anticipate His next move – never knowing what lessons and blessings are coming our way…disguised as interruptions.

____________________________________________________________