When bad things happen....

When someone threw open the back door and hollered that Levi’s hand had been caught in a barn fan, I envisioned blood.

Those moments running across the yard, skirt catching around my ankles, I steeled myself. Flesh and bone would be sheered, Levi would be howling, the pain a searing wildfire. I could hardly imagine how those fan blades, 2 feet long, 2 pounds each, whirring at deafening, blinding speeds, might hack up a little boy’s hand. Or just hatchet it off.

Three hours later, my Mama met us in the lane, us home from ER.

I smoothed out the worried angst scribbled across her forehead. “He’s got all of his fingers, no stitches necessary.”

I open the door to help Levi out of the passenger seat. “The bones of the index finger are crushed and we’ll have to see a surgeon.” Levi holds up his splinted, bandaged hand to show Gram.

“But he’s got a hand!”



The tension lines loosen. Mama’s shoulders relax and she breathes.

“God’s grace,” she whispers. “God’s grace.” She pats my arm and I feel her relief.

I am guiding Levi into the house and rest and words come but I refuse them voice, dare not say what surges close the surface. “And if he’d lost his hand, what of God’s grace then?”

Can we ask these questions?

Because I know that as I get a pillow for Levi who’s cried out and swollen, the mother of a neighborhood 13-year-old is standing beside her son’s body resting in a coffin, the hole dug in the graveyard. Last week her boy had cut the grass at their country Mennonite church. This week, a farm accident has them reading his obituary over the radio at noon and his mother’s heart quietly cracking, a delta of fractures spreading.

I pull a blanket up over a weary Levi and wonder. Does anyone whisper in the neighbor’s house, “God’s grace, God’s grace”?

Surely God was watching over both boys. Surely He heard our prayers for our sons this week, our prayers since the day we knew of their unfurling in utero. Surely He is good. And He gave. God’s grace?

I think of my Dad, and the day he stood by earth’s gaping mouth and they lowered down the pint-sized coffin of his daughter. Was God drowsing the day the truck’s weight crushed her lungs, her skull? Was an Omnipotent God impotent that day, powerless to turn a steering wheel, save a child? Do I believe in a mostly indifferent, distant God who rouses himself only now and then to spill a bit of benevolence on a hemorrhaging humanity? A weak God who only breaks through the carapace of this orb by chance, surprising us with a drop or two of grace, a spared hand, a reprieve from pain, and then finds himself again helpless, limp?

Do we think that is an easier God to worship than the alternative?

The phone rings and it’s my brother-in-law with news of the neighboring family's funeral arrangements.

“John, I can’t fathom that kind of grief. Or why.” I don’t say how uncomfortable I feel that our son sleeps on the couch, whole and here. How we don’t deserve this.

“I spoke to an uncle of the boy yesterday.” John’s voice is certain. “The family really has peace. They look at how it all happened, all these atypical events that seemed to coordinate, and how even just one circumstance could have changed the outcome.” Levi stirs on the couch.

“They seem to accept that it was meant to be this way.”

Incomprehensibly, they too say it: God’s grace, God’s grace. The unwavering faith of fissured hearts that can stand in funeral parlors and say, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes, blessed be the name of the Lord.” The kind of granite faith that says “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?... “Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines… and the fields yield no food… yet I will rejoice in the Lord” (Hab. 3:17-18).

Do I know that kind of faith?

I speak of God’s grace when we wake healthy, when rain falls on our fields, when we fill our plates and stomachs. But what if my bones were pitted with agony, our crops wilted in parched ground, our children’s bellies swelled with starvation? What of God’s grace then?

If I reject the notion of a God who generally remains aloof (or powerless), one who only randomly intervenes with a meager sprinkling of grace, I am left face to face with a God who gives grace and saves my child’s hand… and gives grace and let’s a child die.

I am left with the alternative: a God who gives what I may not perceive as good. Is that the essence of who God is? Is such a God worthy of worship?

On worn, water-splattered cue cards, I can hardly make out the inked words I wrote down years ago, have carried through hard times, fingered on dark nights. “Surely, just as I have intended, so it has happened, and just as I have planned so it will stand” (Isa. 14:24). A sovereign God who intends, whose plans stand.

I flip the card, make out the words on the back side, ““See now that I, I am he, and there is no god besides Me; It is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal” (Deu. 32:39). I praise Him for the grace of life, the goodness of healing. How do I understand that He too puts to death, that it is He who wounds?

And the text of a new card, fresh and clear, (the tattered one finally wore away), words I know to be the crux of all that is: “And [Eli] said, ‘It is the Lord; let Him do what seems good to Him’” (1 Sam. 3:18).

The elemental essence of the cosmos distills to this: He who orchestrates the incremental, finite details of this universe does what seems good to Him. Not to us. To us it may seem catastrophic, hideous, nauseating. Pint-sized coffins, wandering orphans, monster tsunamis; the stuff of a sin-ravaged, pain-pussing planet. But the heart of God pulses at its gory center.

“What is needed, then, is to see God in everything, and to receive everything directly from His hands, with no intervention of second causes…,” writes Hannah Whitall Smith in 1875. “To the children of God everything comes directly from their Father’s hand, no matter who or what may have been the apparent agents.”

The fingerprints of God smudge everything. His heart beats everywhere. The contours of His face surface in every moment. I confess: something in me recoils when I think of hurricanes and floating corpses, dark corners and violated innocence, splintered souls and mossy gravestones.

But I am left with the haunting question, echoing off soul walls: Do I take it not as cliché but as stone truth, believing in the marrow of my frame, that He’s meaning it all for good (Gen 50:20), persistently working all things together for good (Ro. 8:28)? That He is who He says He is: good. He claims to be a God of “light and in Him is no darkness at all” (1 Jn. 1:5). Can I take Him at His Word? Haven't I known Him as the light piercing through my pitch, the beam penetrating all that cloaks and smothers. And I trust His heart, His Word: He does not “willingly bring affliction or grief to the children of men” (Lam. 3:33).



The chairs are hard, the walls bare, sitting in the surgeon’s waiting room. Levi is staring out the one window and I am fingering circles through his brush cut, looking out too. And I'm thinking again on that story Max Lucado tells, the tale told of the man whose horse ran away and his neighbors loudly bemoaned his loss. The worn farmer merely says, “We’ll see.”

When the horse surprisingly return the next day, leading with him three wild horses, the neighbors extol such bountiful blessing. To which the wrinkled sage merely says, “We’ll see.”

Not so many days later, the son of the farmer was laid up with a broken leg, the result of trying to break in one of the undomesticated horses. Neighbors offer their condolences on such a bad turn of events. The farmer responds characteristically: “We’ll see.”

Shortly thereafter, all young men in the district were drafted into the state army. Except for the farmer’s son. He’s still limping about with broken leg.

Levi fiddles with his splint and I wait to hear a nurse summon his name and think how our story isn’t over. We'll have to see. What may seem good to us may actually be but means to lead us to a better good---that seems more painful.

What may seem adverse to us, in the plot line of the Storyteller, is for our ultimate betterment.

God’s story lines in the lives of His children are formulaic: they are all good. The events may jarringly twist and surprise, even seem to pry out our heart, chunk by mangled chunk, but, in the fullness of time, there are no bad endings.

And I am still thinking on that 15 minutes later, sitting in a white and chrome room, the surgeon explaining that the bones in Levi’s index finger are broken and contorted such that they will need to open up the finger, rebreak, and align bones with wires. Nerve damage from the surgery is a real possibility. Mobility is not certain. Physiotherapy is.

It’s a small act and I hardly dare to even call it practice, this saying, “It is the Lord, let him do what seems good to Him.” For there’s nothing terminal here, nothing heinous, nothing even that remarkable. A four inch piece of skin, a three hour surgery, a bit of pain (possibly more) later. While minefields tear off limbs and scalpels carve cancerous breasts off chests, babies weakly cry for milk…and then fall silent. And a Mennonite mother down the road grieves over turned sod, a face she can't touch.

Yet even this is practice, as trivial as it seems. This is daily soul-stretching, the exercise of bending knee to His Sovereign perfect will. This learning to say, "All is grace.”

Regardless, nonetheless, always: "God's grace, God's grace."

'All that happens becomes bread to nourish, soap to cleanse, fire to purify, a chisel to carve heavenly features. Everything is a channel of His Grace.'

Photos: of Levi. Three hour surgery begins today at 8 am EST. All, regardless, is grace...
Post later today, an interivew with author of Gum, Geckos and God

Sing

Gathering around Mom V.'s grave on Monday, it was repeatedly mentioned how Mom sang hymns while she worked. A way of choosing her view.
From Laddie, by Gene Stratton Porter:

“I don’t remember that I have ever passed that house without someone singing,” he said. “Does it go on all the time?”

“Yes, unless Mother is sick.”

“And what is it all about?”

“Oh, just joy! Gladness that we are alive, that we have things to do that we like, and praising the Lord.”

“Umph!”, said Mr. Pryor.

“It’s just letting out what our hearts are full of,” I told him.

Father God, what spills out of the fullness of this heart today? May it be praisesongs. My view.

(HT: Kind Amy)

Choose the View

She bought it for the view.

Moving to town was hard; everyone who’s lived in places where you witness the sun rising and setting over earth’s rim knows. You still listen for gravel’s crackle under tires going down the lane. You ache to watch sky come close to land and breathe green life into her.

Mama needed to still reach out and feel a bit of that country when she drove down her long lane stretching, drove away in a dust cloud to town. So she bought on town’s hem, where the stitch of asphalt falls way to a long skirt of green grasses swaying.

Screws hold street numbers to the bricks over the garage door and the mail slot next to the front door clangs open, shut, every day around two, but Mama washed dishes overlooking Herefords grazing in the dappled shade of the willows, clumped close where the river bends. Cars drove down her street, and sometimes she hears sirens blaring, but she eats mashed potatoes, meat and gravy, looking out at a singular white mare chewing slowly by the willows, tailing swatting flies, the woods fringing a field of leafy soybeans. Mama still felt the land, felt close to us, felt those soiled roots where she came from.

She hadn’t heard of the building permit till she had washed three weeks of meals at that sink. I was there the day the man who applied for the permit walked by, met her on the driveway, mentioned that he was going to build a shed behind her, cutting off that green skirt.

I stood in the doorway, leaned hard against the jam. Mama managed words, something about living 30 years on the farm and that view making the move to town manageable. Choked out that she wouldn’t have come if it weren’t for those fields comforting, calling.

“Money can’t buy a view.” Mr. Perkin shrugged his shoulders, turned toward the neighbor’s door and the next breaking of the news.

Wasn’t long before the neighbors passed a petition. Mama decided instead to bring cookies, flowers, to the elderly Mr.Perkin and his wife, offering her best wishes. She stayed while they showed her the plans, nodding, smiling.

She sat through the hearings at town council, and the appeal to the provincial level, the briefings of how Mr. Perkin could build in three other locations on his land at the other end of the street without interfering the view of any of the neighbors, how no other property owners had implement sheds for RVs on their lots, how Mr. Perkin had sold these lots twenty years ago with the promise he would never build behind the owners. Things change, and so does a man’s word.

The next door neighbors went west for weeks, right after the hammering began. Watching those stud walls slowly go up in front of the windows and brick up over land and trees and sky smothered. They beat a (temporary) escape.

I wasn’t expecting what I saw when I drove in sometime last week, came directly around the back of Mama’s house, wanting to see if any frayed green still clung.

Within steps of the property line, an eight foot grey fabric vapor barrier sheared off 30 feet of verdant life that just last week rolled from here down to the river and away the other side. The asphalt roof poked another 15 feet into the blue. I raised a hand, wanting to brush it all way, shake out leaves and blade and emeralds growing. I grieved for Mama.


I found her in the kitchen, at the sink. I’m not sure what to say. “Well, Mama...” She turns. “I’m sorry… I saw it, and I’m sorry. ” I’m searching her eyes.

Mama smiles, grabs my hand, and pulls me towards her and the kitchen window.

“See?” She’s beaming. I look out the window, confused. From in here, looking out the kitchen window, I don’t see a barricade clipping off life. The only view’s out on a blooming profusion of pink fuchsias.

She's giddy. “I can’t take away the shed. But I can choose my own view!”


I lean in over the sink, closer to the glass, and try to figure this. “You stood on top of the deck railing? And leaned all the way over there to hang a hook? How did you get it into the overhang?” I crane trying to see better. “And then you balanced up there to hang that flower basket?” I can’t quite envision it.

Mama happily nods. Affirmative.

“Why look at a wall when I could choose flowers?” She laughs, radiant.

She’s right. And I’ve chosen walls. Do I count the times I have chosen to stare out at obstacles, chosen obstructions as my spiritual landscape? I have to ask: Why ? Why choose that soul view?

· Do I like fuming over things I can’t change?
· Do I like being sad, distraught?
· Do I like ugly vistas?

What if I went home and hung the true vine, the bright morning star, the radiance of God’s glory, in front of some unsightly walls I’ve been looking out on?

Looking out at Mama's profusion of blooms, I realize I have forgotten: I choose my view.

The fuchsia erupts close to Mama’s window pane, little sparks of pink falling, lighting, and I remember.

I choose joy.

I choose Jesus.

For when I choose to “look full in his wonderful face… the things of this earth grow strangely dim in light of his glory and grace.”


Lord, remind me, that I choose my view. And cause me to choose You. "But my eyes are fixed on you, O Sovereign LORD..." Psalm 141:8

Photos: Mama's old view, new view, and the view she's chosen

What A Coming, Glorious Day

As a family we gather today at the the graveside. We bring flowers, ones she grew, divided, gave us. Because a year ago today...


I stand in the hallway, watching the dark drift in, inky and thick. My head aches. It’s been a long day: wringing out cold cloths for the sweat beads threading across my mother-in-laws fevered brow, carefully stirring ice-cream to a soft, palatable consistency, offering up small spoonfuls with the whispered encouragement, “Good, Mom! Now swallow? That’s it. That’s it!”

I lean up against the cool of the cement block wall outside her room and wait. In a few moments it will be my turn. I’ll push open that heavy door again, cup her gaunt face in my hands, and say my good-bye.

How do I say good bye to a woman who, over the course of 22 years of turning her home into Friday night Good News Bible Club, rescued hundreds of unchurched kids from the sinking mire of hopelessness and dragged them up onto the solid ground of Jesus—one of who was me. This woman, her bringing me Good News—the best news—led to my sister, mother and eventually brother all being plucked from the drowning pit and ushered into staggering new life.

How do I say goodbye to the woman who prayed to have a ninth child – yes, she wanted and prayed for the ninth---and raised that boy up to be the only boy I ever held hands with, who is the father of the six children I tuck into bed every night, and who wraps me up in his big Dutch arms, presses his soul into mine, and walks me through this thing called life?

No, I have no words—not the right ones, anyways. How to gather up the perfect ones to express it all to the woman who was instrumental in my faith, my marriage, and the legacy my children inherit? I wait, fumbling through my mind, groping along for phrases, words, that will somehow express what I feel, this overwhelming gratitude.

The illuminated herald over the lobby doorway keeps interrupting. In neon red, four letters blazing in the black, herald the imminent: EXIT.

Exit. This way to vacate the premises. Depart here.

The lump in my throat stings. And from the dark and down the hall, Margaret in 113 begins again. At first, weeks ago, I could hardly tolerate it when Margaret’s cry would drift through the hospital halls at all hours. In a plaintive, desperate plea, like a heart-pounding bird, trapped and caged, the frail woman calls to the universe, “I can’t get out of here! Hurry! Hurry! Get me out of here, Murray, get me out of here! I can’t get out! Help, Murray, Help!”

The exit sign glows. The halls fill with Margaret cries for release.

My father-in-law steps out of Mom's room, and my sister-in-law slips in. I’m next. And all I have is a trembling chin.

My father-in-law’s thick fingers find mine and he squeezes. I can hear him humming, braiding his song in the lightless dark, with Margaret’s pleas:

“What a day that will be when my Jesus I shall see,
And I look upon His face,The One who saved me by His grace;
When He takes me by the hand
And leads me through the Promised Land,
What a day, glorious day that will be."

I join in, softly humming too, he and I staring up at the exit sign.

I know, Margaret, I know. The waiting room wears on us, doesn’t it?

"Get me out of here. Help. I am done with this dull ache, this gnawing restlessness, this never finding what I am looking for. I just want to catch a flight Home."

Yes, to depart the waiting room, head towards the exit sign, and grab our flight home to Him and all this heart has been crying for.

My mother-in-law’s glorious day came Saturday.

She left the waiting room. Her flight departed. And she's soared.

Our glorious day will be soon, Margaret, soon....

Kneeling to Pray on Saturday

"For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever!

Amen."

~Ephesians 3:14-20

What Love Does to Things

From the inbox:
The posts this week on the "ugly-beautiful" reminded me of Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh's "The Hospital." ~Kim


The Hospital

A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward
Of a chest hospital; square cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, wash basins - an art lover's woe,
Not counting how the fellow in the next bed snored.
But nothing whatever is by love debarred,
The common and banal her heat can know.
The corridor led to a stairway and below
Was the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard.

This is what love does to things: the Rialto Bridge,
The main gate that was bent by a heavy lorry,
The seat at the back of a shed that was a suntrap.
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge;
For we must record love's mystery without claptrap,
Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

~ Collected Poems by Patrick Kavanaugh

Seeing Past

A week of seeing the past the (supposed) ugly to the beautiful. Because all His gifts are good gifts... if we have see past and through...

ugly: rusting, dented lawn tractor

beautiful: faithful workhorse that's cut our grass for the last twelve years

ugly: hole in a smile

beautiful: first lost tooth! "I'm getting bigger!"

ugly: greasy rag

beautiful: shop cloth working hard

ugly: rust and flaking paint

beautiful: little girl's very own bike!

ugly: bent wheel
beautiful: her wheels


ugly: shop floor in disarray, pick-up truck disassembled
beautiful: he's getting it done


ugly: nail in the dirt
beautiful: a reminder of incomprehensible love


ugly: angulated break of index finger on right hand,

requiring surgery to open finger and insert pin
beautiful: he's still got a finger!
(The fan blades in the barn were 24 inches long,
flying round at 750 rpms.)

ugly: Dad's hands "Look at mine next to your's, Levi. All beat up and old."

beautiful: Dad's hands. All beat up and old,worn well.

"Those who admit the truth of what I have said

know, I am sure,
why we are bound to love God.

But if unbelievers will not grant it,
their ingratitude is at once confounded by His innumerable benefits,
lavished on our race, and plainly discerned by the senses.

Who is it that gives food to all flesh,
light to every eye,
air to all that breathe?"

~Bernard of Clairvaux

Conversion Economy

She sits in a hospital waiting room, scissors in her hand, snipping up old men’s shirts. Plaid ones, cotton.

The man three chairs down is wearing one the same shade of brown as the one she’s shearing. I wonder if he notices.

He’s reading an outdated Reader’s Digest, glancing at his watch now and then, listening for his name to be called next for that escorting down the hall.

A man wearing a cap emblazoned with Molson Canadian wheels a woman with a bandaged foot into the room. He sits to wait their turn, one hand on the back of the wheelchair; she grimaces, arches her back to escape the pain rocketing from swelling ankle, turns our way. I look up from my book, cringe at her wincing, watch her watching Mama cut up shirts, distracted from the throbbing. I look over at Mama.

In one hand, the one with the truncated finger, she’s holding a slender metal ruler, white numbers fading on black. She’s measuring. And then, quite precisely, those scissors clip woven threads, sharp blades flashing. Cutting edge turns at a plaid intersection. And in a moment, another square falls atop the stack growing on the chair beside her.

She’s cutting quilt squares out of thrifted men’s shirts, a bag to be had for $5.00 the second Wednesday of every month. A Spirit-sensitive conscience made her ask one of the Wednesday volunteers if she might roll them up like sleeping bags so she can fit dozens of shirts in a bag. (Yes, of course.)

And now wherever she sits, hospital waiting rooms, deckside with grandchildren splashing about, at the kitchen table, receiver cradled to ear, she’s always with scissors in hand, her bag of abandoned shirts within reach, cutting out identical squares. Plazas of plaids from shirts that once backed broad shoulders bent under sizzling July sun, that old men wore to the pharmacy to fill this week’s prescription, that wives slid steaming irons over then slipped onto waiting hangers.

And then time and fashion discarded them to crinkled balls at the bottom of black garbage bags, an empty curb in front of the Sally Ann, a sagging rack for the monthly bag sale.

I reach over and smooth out the last square on a pile atop a chair in this surgery waiting room. This is the touching of the discarded revived, the ugly-beautiful, pieces of pain transformed, waiting to be stitched into a thing of exquisite usefulness.

For nothing's wasted in the economy of He who redeems.

Lord, thank you. You waste not my pain, my sadness, my ugly brokenness. In Your hands, all is pieced together into a thing of beauty. Wrap me and warm me today in the scraps of what's been.

Photo: a quilt Mama made for me, unwanted pieces redeemed

Simple Beauty

"If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents."

~Robert Browning

Coming home into the setting sun Saturday evening, we slowed to a stop on the gravel in front of Abner Steckle’s Mennonite farmstead, windmill drowsing at dusk.

The day’s last rubber-banded bouquet (of delphiniums, lavender, baby’s breath and calla lilies) lay in the bucket of water at lane’s end, next to a hand-painted sign, white-letters on black, "Cut Flowers."

In lieu of cashier, a glass jar wrapped in peeling masking tape offered the faded notice “Self-serve.”As I fished about for proper change, from across the pristine garden with its bands of blooming hues, in the direction of the side porch, came the quiet splash of water.

The kitchen window stood open, one casement slid up. Bathed in slipping sun’s gold, one of Abner’s daughter stood dipping her dark, never-shorn hair into the kitchen basin, wringing out the week past. Sunday morning meeting called for Saturday night divesting of the bonnet and pumping the sink full of water.

My money tinkled into the jar. Abner’s daughter again immersed her crown of glory and rinsed. The fragrance of the lavender and lilies filled me. But it was Abner’s daughter, swooping down and rising out of the kitchen sink’s waters who had left me awash in a deep quietness, who had cleansed and renewed me.

The bouquet Abner’s daughter had picked for me would curl, brown, and fade away.

But never her etching, in a sunset-gilded window frame, of the beauty of simple things.







"Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.

Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life."

~Robert Louis Stevenson

Lord, open my glazed eyes to see simple beauty in life's plain things, common things here on the path right before me. And cause me to give You thanks.

Repost from the archives

True Beauty

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,

nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by men,

a man of sorrows,

and familiar with suffering.

Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised,

and we esteemed him not.

Isa. 53:2-3

The Ugly-Beautiful

(Part of a series this week...)

She was homely and knew it, or so my grandfather said.

That is how he always told the story to us anyways, and that is how I remember it; he told it many times and I remember it often, even now. I don’t remember him telling us her real name, and her name isn’t the important part, really. The track of the story I rewind to is when she first came to their farmhouse, a girl to help in the house with the six stairstep children, my grandfather looked around his mother’s skirt up at the girl standing awkwardly on the front step. Then looked away, repulsed.





“A face as homely as hers needn’t be made worse with staring eyes.” I can still hear him saying that.

“All six of us kids avoided looking at her face. She was that ugly.” And that was always the place in the story I shriveled up and ached for that woman whose name I’ve never known but whose pain I’ve touched. I’d turn away from Grandpa. It seemed wrong and unfeeling to say these things.

“She stayed with us till all of us children were pretty much raised. She scrubbed our dirty clothes and made our bread. Worked the garden. Whatever Mother needed of her. Every day for years and years. And the day she left….” And this was the part of the story where he always looked away, so I wouldn’t see that liquid emotion rising. His voice would lose its gruffness and soften. He’d choke the words out. “I thought I had never seen a more beautiful woman.”

Our eyes always met then, and I could see how love, rippling out, still burned and moved a man seventy years, an entire life-time later, after that woman drove down a country lane and away.

That is the only name I’ve known that nurse woman by, how I asked Grandpa for this story from time’s files. “Tell us the story again of the most beautiful woman in the world.” As a child, it seemed like a real, fairytale transformation, the ugly being made beautiful.

And I guess, in a way, it was a supernatural transformation. For isn’t love other-worldly? A love that actually changed the features of a woman’s face, that powerfully reshaped the arteries of a heart, that adjusted cornea, retina, pupil to see differently. The nurse’s faithful love for my grandfather’s family, my grandfather’s deepening love for this woman whose hands stirred up batches of oatmeal cookies while ears listened to children’s stories and hearts melded. Love took the ugly, put mud on its eyes, and worked it slowly into blazing beauty.

The French have a phrase for it: d’un beau affreux; in German, hubsch-hasslich. The ugly-beautiful. That which is perceived as ugly reconfigures as beautiful. The impressionist painter, Paul Gauguin, encapsulated it as, “Le laid peut-etre beau…” The ugly can be beautiful.

It is not the way we’re wired, to see the shimmering of the exquisite in the disdained. Hours old, human beings are innately attracted to what is commonly accepted as appealing. Newborns, shown side by side images of an attractive face and a less attractive one, spent 80% of the time looking at the attractive face of the pair.

“Attractiveness is not simply in the eye of the beholder,” suggests researcher Dr. Slater of the University of Exeter. “It is in the brain of the newborn infant right from the moment of birth…”

Then I wonder, if we are ever to see through ugliness to beauty, do we not require an actual rebirthing, a kind of reforming? From birth, true, we’re inherently drawn towards certain elements that we equate with beauty. But, (is it possible), since we now live post-Fall, our notion of beauty too is awry, bent?

Evil murmured “… in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened….” But in our pristine Eden days, our sight was already perfect. The Liar (who deceived us about the fruit, about the character of God) duped us about our own sight. So, could it now be that our perception of true beauty is actually deformed and skewed? I wonder. And I think that to reconfigure our perception of beauty, perhaps we ourselves are the ones needing reconfiguring, rewiring, yes, rebirth. Rebirth into a kingdom where the Prince is born into a manure smeared feed trough, where the King’s Son cries, naked, pulverized and forsaken, on the town garbage heap, the blood from the rusty nail spikes driven through his wrists trickling down his outstretched arms, crusting on his face. Rebirth into a kingdom where Love is the currency that can radically transform the unredeemable.

In the Jesus kingdom, the ugly has the glimmering possibility of beauty. The Son of God isn’t nauseated by the stench of twelve years of soaked menstrual cloths when He lays hands on the bleeding woman. He doesn’t see her as an unclean woman to be shunned according to Levitical law, a hideous object of disgust. Instead, He’s compassionately drawn to her, a woman in need of love’s gentle touch.

Neither is He repelled by the crazed eyes, the foul talk on bad breath, the unsightly convulsions of the naked body of the demon-possessed man. Jesus sees past the ugliness of abject flesh to the tender beauty of a soul, a tormented soul in dire need of love’s releasing power. Throughout the gospels, we read of a Man not repulsed by the vile and the depraved, but One who seeks it out, is attracted to it, a Man, Divine Perfection Himself, who brushes shoulders with the sin infested, the rejected and filthy, this world’s most contemptible and base.

Why? Why is Jesus drawn to the despised? Why is he attracted to what we very purposefully step far around? Maybe because in the ugly he sees the need of Grace’s wonder, the magnificence of redemption, the hope of radical rebirth. Maybe because in the ugly he sees the dazzle of miraculous, transformative beauty.

In Christian circles, we elevate what we deem beautiful, endeavor to create spheres of pristine beauty, and perhaps rightly so, for “whatever is good, pure, lovely, think on these things.” But I wonder if maybe in the upside-down kingdom of God, what we regard as unlovely is, in Jesus, lovely.

Maybe very little in this world is ugly, really. As the composer John Cage writes,

“The first question I ask when something doesn’t seem beautiful is why do you think it is not beautiful? And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.”

Because, somewhere, underneath the grime of this broken world, everything has the radiant fingerprints of God on it. With Jesus eyes, we have the astonishing opportunity to daily love the unlovely into loveliness.

How would the Jesus-body change the world if they saw that “Le laid peut-etre beau”? That ugly can be beautiful? What would happen if kingdom people chose to:

• Daily search out the messy, the ugly, the forgotten discarded and reconfigure it into a thing of beauty. (Can’t the lens of love work that redemption?)

• Embrace the outcasts, and, in that act, so embrace God. (For when we reach out to touch the least of this world, do we not touch very God?)

• See the world’s ugly, those whom we find unappealing, heart-unattractive, as containers for the Hope of Christ-beauty. (Isn’t that our own autobiography?)

How would this globe transform if we chose to find traces of His beauty in every ugly thing and in every person, every “enemy,” we encountered?

I am ugly and know it, and not because of a mirror, but when I see what lurks and writhes in the dirty parts of my soul. And His love, in the anguish of the Cross, in the long daily work within, is faithfully transforming that which is too hard to look upon, to live with, into something (hard to fathom) beautiful. A soul that, wildly, is being polished to reflect the image of Beauty Himself.

And I wonder if our names in this grand story don’t really matter, for He’s giving the ugly ones His own name, Most Beautiful, and we are moved and softened and brought low with emotion by a staggering grace that daily, endlessly, confounds: The ugly can be made beautiful.



Lord, today give me eyes for the ugly-beautiful, d’un beau affreux. Show me today, Father, where can I love the ugly-beautiful to loveliness? That's the way of Your love.

Photo: a deformed daisy shaped like a heart

Finding Grace in Hard Places...

Come Saturday afternoon, when the preparation work is done, time to find a quiet place with delicate petals and long quiet, and settle into life-nurturing words. Words that prepare for the work of grace. Transformative words that will linger, percolate down to the hard places, soften with healing oil. Good, long-lasting words.




Some books offer bullet points, sterile checklists, action plans. Well and good, even needful. Some books wax eloquently, poetic and lyrical, but leave us hungry for something meaty and filling. Rare is the read that serves up something deeply soul and mind satsifying that is, too, lush and rich and worth savoring.

Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places is that rare read. It's as Edward Gilbreath writes; this is a book with "a storyteller's charm and a Bible teacher's grit." (If you've read any of Mark Buchanan's works, this book deserves a place on the same shelf.)



The striking literary prose of this book leads us into L.L. Barkat's own story, a river running with pain, shame and abuse. How does one find a way across life streams that threaten to sweep us away? One finds stone crossings, grace that is "as real and solid as stones: tangible, weighty, something to hold on to."

And as we prepare for a Sabbath, this is a good book for a Saturday afternoon (for a life) of reflecting on the radical power of grace. For as L.L. Barkat writes,

"Grace. That's the centerpiece of Stone Crossings, shared through the hard and hidden places of my life and the bible. In sun-dappled creekbeds and strawberry fields, in the dark belly of a whale and on parched desert plains, grace makes its appearance page after page. Then it gently calls out, “Where have you been, where are you now, where do you want to be?”

Questions worthy of deeply pondering, especially for us bruised and broken ones, with our own woundings. ... I have a few more for the wise L.L. Care to join us for a cup of tea on the front porch? You take the swing and I'll pour the tea.



L.L. this is, truly, a book to revisit, an intelligent book of beauty and depth. I've been thinking on this shimmering line, one that rings true for me, "

"I can't ever remember even one [sermon] about God my lover who seeks me in a blatant Song of Songs kind of love that brings a person to her knees."

Might you share more why you may not have heard a sermon like this, why you step out of your church experience to speak like this? And how do you personally meet God daily as your lover? How does that practically live itself out in the grit of our everyday life?

L.L. Barkat: In the past, my church has tended to depict God in terms of safe, traditional images: father, shepherd. I don't know that this will continue under our new pastor; he seems to be in touch with the richness of scripture, its unabashed portrayal of God as Lover. Why, just this Sunday, he talked about God as a dance partner who takes us by the hand and whispers, "Look in my eyes."

Personally, I have struggled with addressing God as Father. I think anyone who reads Stone Crossings will completely understand this struggle. For me, God as Lover is actually safer and more inviting. The tenderness, gentility, and deep longing implicit in that image speaks to my heart and wounded soul.

Experiencing God this way also tends to motivate me more seriously. The thought of disappointing the Lover of My Soul creates a poignant urgency that other images like Father or Shepherd fail to produce, at least for me. For anyone who wants to see how this plays out in the "grit of everyday life", from dealing with sin to bringing praise and pleas, I suggest a quiet visit to my prayer blog Love Notes to Yahweh.

The truth of God as our Lover, and us living in intimate love communion with Him is a powerful one, L.L. And yet, we all may have experienced, at one time or another, how terrifying relationships may be. You thoughtfully write:

"Maybe I am still more wounded than I think, hesitant to invest myself in others, to give myself fully like my mother did, fearing I'll end up with nothing... In my worst moments, I even view the ordinarly relationships of life as obstacles to my fulfillment and achievements."

How do we bruised ones, perhaps with scraped identities and broken places, take the risk to invest in relationships? I often express it that "relationship is the essence of reality"-- and as you write, we can reflect on how God Himself is "really a relationship in orbit." Might you delve deeper into the idea that Christianity is foundationally a set of relationships? And how might that look in our everyday life?




L.L. Barkat: As you might guess, being a child of divorce many times over and having grown up in a threatening family environment, I find relationships to be one of the more challenging aspects of life. Give me a blank page to fill, or put me in front of an audience to speak and I'm fine. Ask me to sacrifice in relationship or open my heart just a little bit wider and I become timid or resistant.

Like you say, I believe that the power of Christianity is made manifest in relationships first and foremost. So I can't let myself off the hook on this matter. Regardless of my past and my learned behaviors, I try to build relationships and I talk to myself a lot in my head to keep moving forward. I also rely desperately on the Holy Spirit to show me the way.

For instance, I remember one night when my eldest daughter was being very needy at bedtime. She kept pulling on me and fussing, not wanting to let me go. I could feel my heart rate accelerating and my cheeks getting hot. I was breathing too fast and becoming irritable. Then this Still, Small Voice explained that if I would simply sit quietly and fill my daughter's need by holding her close, the need would soon dissipate. She just wants to know that you really love her, suggested the Voice.

Of course, the Spirit was right. I sat quietly in the dark and held my daughter close. I let my breathing get in sync with hers. Slowly, she became limp in my arms, at peace and ready to rest.

One of my favorite examples from the book, of a similar moment of truth with the Holy Spirit, is in the chapter on forgiveness. There I was minding my own business, relishing some bitterness about my grandmother, and the Holy Spirit broke into my thoughts with an unusual assertion... that I was being an idolater, putting myself up on a pedestal in an act of self-worship over and against my grandmother. Now, I must tell you that the Spirit has had further reach with this. Just the other day, a woman wrote this, after reading Stone Crossings...

"For years I have been told that until I could forgive the ones that harmed me I could not heal and grow. Until I read [your] words in the chapter on forgiveness, nothing any one said, nothing I read in the bible or any where else made an impression on the hate I held inside. I realize now that I treasured that hate and made it an idol. [Your] words have opened that door to freedom for me."

Moving, L.L.. And that the Spirit is moving through these stories, ripples of healing. For me, reading of your interior dialogue at the crossroads of when you chose to come home full-time has had a powerful effect. You wrote of your seven-month-old daughter refusing to eat while at daycare.

"After two weeks of this, we took Sara to the doctor, who asked us, 'Has something shanged in Sara's life? Babies who are distressed sometimes go on hunger strikes.' I was at a crossroads. My daughter wanted me, but I wanted a life. What's more, I wanted house."

Might you share how sacrifice continues to factor into your life and choices. How do you experience God's grace in those cross-road places?




L.L. Barkat: Okay, I'm having a private moment of mild amusement right now. Because here I was sharing that I talk to myself, in response to the last question, and now you mention my interior dialogue. Clearly I talk to myself more than I thought! But it's not really just to myself I suppose. It's a process of laying out the pieces of my life and my struggles with sacrifice, before God in my thoughts.

I wish I could say that I simply do things out of a heart of great love and selflessness, but it is more as you say. Life feels full of sacrifice, sometimes little and sometimes big. Washing laundry I didn't soil, cooking food that will feed others, holding my tongue when I'd rather speak, sharing my finances and my substance, and so on. Yet I actually experience grace more fully in the hard places of sacrifice because I'm reminded of Jesus' selfless sacrifice for the world. In moments when it hurts a little to give, I remember that it hurt Him a lot more to give His very life, and yet, and yet... He reached through the hurt to embrace us with grace.


Thank you, L.L.. And on the afternoon before Sunday, you've brought us to a good place, with good words reaching through our hurt, embraced by grace. We'll sip tea, and turn the pages of a deep book meant to be slowly savored. A book on grace and the Cross and a steady stone for all our steps through and a story that helps us "find the rock of God's grace in the midst of [our] own broken and hard places. And his grace will give [us] a new story to tell" ...


To hear excerpts of Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places (InterVarsity Press) click here
To read L.L. Barkat's blog
To read excerpts of Stone Crossings on Amazon

To Grow True Holiness...

"The life of true holiness is rooted

in the soil of awed adoration.

It does not grow elsewhere.

That which grows elsewhere is not true holiness, whatever else it is.

No blend of zeal, passion, self-denial, discipline, orthodoxy, and effort adds up to holiness

where praise is lacking."

~ J.I. Packer

The 1000 Gift List continues endlessly, watering praise...

We thank God for gifts unmerited....

:: candy-stiped zinnias ::

:: smoothie mustaches ::

:: bikes on the back walk ::

:: sand washed off in the bathtub ::

:: drying beads of clean toes ::

:: sweet corn waving its slender green flags in the garden ::

:: chalk flowers sprouting on the garage floor ::

:: tying up soccer cleats ::

:: the smell of his t-shirts ::

:: a trail of legos and dreams and new innovations ::

:: shy, ripening hope of zucchinis ::

:: my mama buttering scones and pouring tea ::

:: empty sinks ::

:: wings brought on a thumb, big eyes pointing ::

:: stunning reality ::

"All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ.

Even before he made the world, God loved us...

God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.

So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son.

He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins.

He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding. "

~Ephesians 1:3-8

Lord, to grow true holiness, I need to cultivate awed adoration for You. Work this soul soil today. Today, let me not lack praise. Else none of it adds up to the holiness You seek...

Consider beginning today to cultivate your own soul soil of awed adoration.

Photos: from a week of simple praise

Tomorrow: interview with author L.L. Barkat -- please, come sit with us a spell... would be our delight...

When to Speak...

I walked the wheat yesterday. Tracks led through and I followed the path, the sun and wind and sky coming too.

The heads are filling out. I felt them. I walked and stalks lined the route, heads leaning over, waving, and I held out my hand and touched them, one after the other, and felt the kernels within, beads swelling with bread of heaven. It fed a place in me. They seemed to know that, each head bending low to brush me as I passed.

The fields are ripening gold in these long summer days and it won't be long now.

Somewhere out in the midst of her, I stood still. That sun overhead, I grew warm, ripening. And then heavy... bowing low, lowering down to terra, sitting on earth, encircled by wheat. The earth felt firm and solid beneath, sure. Slender stalks exteneded from its dark richness, silk smooth and svelte.

I closed my eyes. And she was quiet. Silent. Millions upon millions of grace stalks, a sea slipping over horizon's rim, an ocean mirroring sun's gold, and she lays soundless. I listen but the fields say nothing.

Then the winds pass through. I feel it run through my hair, cool on my face. And each stalk flows with these currents and the sea ripples and this wheat world whispers, a shallow river rushing, gushing, swishing, hushing. Then the wind is gone and wheat words have left too. She's still, quiet again.

I reached up, felt for a wheat head, arched one down close, and heard her silence. This mother of many swells with bread bounty. But only when the wind passes by does she speak.

I laid down and listened to the wheat yesterday. And later, when I wandered back up to the house, and children pressed, and Little One cried, and two testosterone-surging boys tussled and toppled, I remember what she had told me and I waited.

And let the words only come when the Spirit passed through....

Lord, let the words from these lips today please You, words that only come when You move, Spirit-filled words...

Scripture Food:

"The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it... So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” John 3:8

"Whoever speaks, is to do so as one who is speaking the utterances of God." 1 Peter 4:11

Desiring God 2008 National Conference Speaker Interview: Sinclair Ferguson -- Acceptable Speech

Photos: our wheat fields in first light

To combat the demons...

The son of author and international speaker Carol Kent, JP, an exemplary Navy officer and Christian, is serving a prison life sentence for murder. The August edition of "In Touch" magazine includes his story... and this leapt off the page:


"JP Kent will never again see the outside world. He recieved a natural life sentence when he was 25 years old and has served eight. But eight years in prison has enriched his relationship with God and given him an eternal perspective.






To combat the demons of isolation, JP tries to think of the things he has to be thankful for. He writes them down and reads the list when the going gets tough."

"Give thanks unto the LORD, call upon his name..."

~Ps. 105:1

Lord... whatever storm clouds gather today, whatever demons that stalk, cause us to do battle with a heart bowed low in gratitude....

~~

May we invite you to join the Gratitude Community?

Just grab a scrap of paper lying around and begin counting the blessings, with your own 1000 Endless Gifts:

Why begin your own One Thousand Gift List --(drop me a line if you do, and I'll add you either simply your name or a web link to the "1000 Endless Gifts" list -- it's a privilege to join you in giving Him all worship, all praise, all thanks...)

Read the listing of the endless Gifts

Nourishing, Unchanging Center

Under my feet on a day in early summer lie ruins of a Roman building, bits of stone from a long buried medieval road, a crumbled wall that failed to keep the invading Franks out in 497 A.D. Across this plaza, I watch tourists in black patent heels and Nike running shoes descend steps down into history, down into the crypt 100 yards below the shadow of Notre Dame.

Old Parisian men sit near the statue of Charlemagne mounted on steed, watching the world stream by, saris, light swathed and flowing, weaving through studded denims and goth teens mumbling into cell phones, fiddling with ipods. Taxis rush by on serpentine routes plotted on green GPS screens. The courtyard flashes with shutters freezing international smiles onto LCD blues dimmed by blazing sun overhead.

Somewhere on this cobbled stone square before the cathedral, under this milieu of colors swirling and languages murmuring, somewhere over time crumbled, a plaque marks Paris’ center, kilometer zero of French national highways. The center of Paris, the traditional center of the country of France, lies within line of sight of the Dame’s perched gargoyles.

We brush through the clamor, walk over centuries powdered, find our way to ancient doors open.



Arias, heaven-song rising, calls us in. I stand under the carved central portal of the last judgment, with its statues of the enthroned Christ judging the living and dead. From the massive, ornately carved doors, into the lofty darkness, we can see candles flickering along the central nave. Where the crossbeams of the cross-shaped cathedral intersect, at the altar table, we can see ethereal robes of white gathered, heads bowed. There, at the center, we can see the bread and the wine.

Sonorous organ strains soar the heights.

We step into this cavern carved with earthy peasant hands, into streams of celestial light. Quietly, reverently, we walk under towering arches of stone, these larger-than-life praying hands that clasp over the souls that wander through this place.