Archive | love

In which I catch a glimpse of heaven

December 23, 2012

We drove through the mountains in the snow, holding hands over the gear shift. It was an iron-grey day, a cold swirl of a day, and as we crossed the river coming down from the north, a bald eagle swooped down and low right beside our car. As we reached the other side, the eagle lowered one wing, and arched away, benediction rising. We drove to the base of the mountains, past a herd of bison to the log-stacked lodge. Each sentinel pine on the mountain weighed with snow, slender and distinct, there was just a hint of pink to the sky.

There were pine cones and simple jar candles lining the aisle, holly boughs with crimson berries and burlap laid out, paper hearts hanging from bare branches. At the altar the words “Rise to a better story” prophesy in the blue snow light.

It was a gathering of nations there in the snow. First bridesmaids in cream and gold saris, then Tina appeared in her bridal scarlet and emerald and gold sari, jewels through the part of her hair resting on her forehead. Kupa and his friends, his brothers, from Zambia, from America, from Hong Kong, stood at the front, and Kupa’s eyes were not satisfied with seeing, it’s a good idea to watch the groom’s face for that moment when his bride appears, that look will make you believe in love all over again.

We sang praises to God, we cried, we clapped, we fell more in love, each of us, remembering our own wedding days. When the pastor charged them to be faithful and true, love and honour, and they vowed until death do us part, husbands and wives were catching eyes and smiling. Kupa and Tina got down on their knees and washed each other’s parents bare feet with their own hands, speaking blessing and honour and gratitude to their new mama and papa each. South-Indian Christian traditions enriched the traditional English Christian ceremony: sari draped by Kupa, gold cross tied, seven strands woven, and their vows.

When they were pronounced husband and wife, we nearly lifted the roof off with our cheers. India through Dubai to Canada, Zambia through America, and they found each other, and now we’re all here, drinking wine, and laughing, eating, and celebrating with tears in our eyes, every voice a unique accent of its own.

We all agree that this is what the world should look like – a wedding supper, a global family, saris and dashikis, head coverings and hipsters, good food, thumping music, dancing, tears, and the kind of love that works and breathes and shows up.

These are the sacred moments. And the community gathered to say we see you, we affirm you, we’re with you, and may God give you lots of babies, too. Here we all are in the Canadian west, a big crazy family usually scattered across the earth. The dirt on our shoes was from nearly every continent, but we are family by birth and blood and choice tonight.

We were stomping our feet and whistling loud, kissing and hollering out for more kisses, and then we were also sneaking outside to lean over the railings, men draping coats over women while our breath formed in the darkness, all to watch the moon rise in at Christmas.

Driving home, we agreed, yawning, feet aching, yes, right there, that may have been a glimpse of heaven.

Continue Reading · abundant life, friends, journey, love, marriage, moments · 10

In which I tell you the truth about telling the truth

November 13, 2012

As more of us are becoming vocal about calling the Church to love our gay brothers and sisters, I’ve noticed that the first response we typically receive is: “Well, the most loving thing I can do is tell them the truth about their sin.”

Oh, really.

I’m pretty sure not a single homosexual in the Western world is unaware that most evangelical Christians believe their desires and/or lifestyle to be sinful.

If an entire history of persecution weren’t quite enough, the last few years of advertisements, books, sermons, billboards, protest signs, television and radio programming, “Fag!” name-calling, and hateful Facebook rantings would have done the trick rather nicely. So it’s a safe bet the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transsexual, and/or queer community have noticed the fear and loathing directed their way as “telling the truth” by the people of God. (And I highly doubt most felt very loved by that experience.)

That sentence? It is one-dimensional bumper sticker lower-case truth. It’s not the whole Truth, is it? And it isn’t tough love as I understand it.

I believe that statement is almost always a cop-out. After all, my Bible talks more about the sins of not caring for the poor and orphans of our communities, about our pride, about idolatry, than it does about homosexuality, yet I can’t see a lot of to-scale ”truth-telling” on those topics. And, then we call it “tough love”, this truth-telling, as if that phrase, excuses our lack of grace. It’s a too-small band-aid on a complex issue representing real people with real stories and real lives with political and daily life implications we can’t even guess from our gated communities.

No, I believe that tough love means going down deep, to battle our own selfishness, our own anger, our own frustrations, our fears, our temptations to choose being right over being gracious, to give up on having he last word, to stop convincing by arguing and harsh invectives, pinches and pricks, to win at all costs.

Tough love means Christ will win in me.

So sure, absolutely, it’s time for some tough love: it’s time to walk in the ways of love and truth together – and, yeah, that’s tough.

(The greatest irony of tough love I’ve found is that it’s only found in relaxing. It’s only found in releasing control. Love is the relationship you relax into living. It’s only found in surrender, in living in the moment, in contentment with being and knowing the truth of enough – that He is enough and Love is enough and what I can do/offer/be is enough, too. Tough love is not found in trying harder to be more kind, more gentle, more disciplined, no, tough love says, you do not need to be right or perfect or without flaw to be loved.)

Let me lay a bit more truth on us: truth and love are not mutually exclusive.

Truth isn’t the heavy-handed Papa here to lay down the discipline. Real truth sets free, truth invites, truth locks hands with grace, kisses love, and outlasts all of the fashionable Facebook rants and fear-baiting rhetoric, all of the splinter-spotting by the plank-in-the-eye crowd.

Besides, we aren’t telling the whole truth, not yet.

Are we telling this truth, too?

You are fearfully and wonderfully made.You are cherished.You were chosen even before creation. Your hairs are numbered. You were knit together in your mother’s womb.

No one is righteous, no, not one. God did not send His son into the world to condemn the world but to reconcile us all to Himself.

God is not distant or angry; he is Love. God desires to lavish love on you. He loves you with an everlasting love. His plans for you are good ones, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a future and a hope.

God is close to the broken-hearted. He is not counting your sins.

Nothing can separate you from God’s love.

The most loving thing we can do is tell the truth, absolutely. So let’s tell all of the truth.

And then let’s live that truth, love together, learning together every day, with real people in our real walking-around lives, without judgement or withholding or fear or stereotypes or who’s-in-and-who’s-out rhetoric. I highly doubt anyone will see Christ in another bit of drive-by “truth-telling” of that nature. No, the time for simple slogans is over.

The community of God are the ones who can stop worrying about telling the truth, and start living the whole truth out – the glorious, gorgeous, lavish, wild, unfair, and love-filled truth of the Gospel.

This post was stirred up by my friend Heather of the EO’s letter to her lesbian non-Christian friend, and her friend, Vikki’s, gracious letter in return, as well as the responses and repostings I’ve witnessed.

Continue Reading · faith, fearless, homosexuality, love, social justice · 122

In which {love looks like} the room to change

September 30, 2012

You’ve been away for a week now, and I miss you so much more than I expected. I say “expected” because we both know what it’s like in this house: how busy, how loud, how full, oh, these days. I mean, I knew we would miss you but we have school and preschool, get-togethers, family, friends, church, work, life still happening. Surely I’ll be too busy for longings. Two nights in, I was standing in our closet, with my eyes closed, smelling your clothes. I did all the laundry, and I cried because I missed your gigantic jeans with the frayed hems filling up our old washing machine. I haven’t cooked a real meal all week, we’re subsisting on grilled cheese and pancakes, I guess you’re the one for whom I cook.

This week, I’ve been remembering the years of spiritual disunity between us, particularly around community and church, calling and vocations. Maybe it’s because you’re back in Texas, with our beloved friends-like-family, and the Great State was the scene of one existential crisis after another for me (or maybe I was just too hot, we all know how grouchy I can be when I’m sweaty). So I remembered how burned out and broken I was ten years ago, then, you joined me seven years ago, and we moved, then we went different directions somehow. Remember this?

I railed against institutions and organizations, wouldn’t darken the door of a “real” church, became fluent in fault-finding and cynicism, the word “orthodoxy” made my left eye twitch, while you tacked hard the other way, steering towards seminary, conservative denominations, structures, authorities, you longed for accountability.

Many saw me, and my questions, my wonderings, my wanderings, as a liability to your calling, they felt badly for you, I was holding you back. Why couldn’t I fall in line? I know this. (I felt badly for you, too.) And others on my side couldn’t understand why you were going back into the old ways, when God was moving as a fresh wind, beyond boundaries and walls.

Even though we were so far apart on so many seemingly vital things, we were so happy, weren’t we? we were still us.

People would raise eyebrows at you: What about your calling to pastor? The years were going by. They were concerned. And you would say, I’m trusting God with that one. And then you would laugh and say, Well, I’ll just send them Sarah’s blog, and if they still want us – you always said “us” not “me” – after that, I guess we’ll know it’s a good fit.

We were moving towards each other. But it took a while. You moved, and I moved, and God was moving, and we were meeting at a thousand points in the sky. Today, we stand together, all these years later, in harmony and in step, in agreement, in unity, oneness, even in the places where we disagree (still) (yes, still).

I looked back on that season of our marriage, the season when we were so different, and I remembered you telling me that this was not going to change us. We could give each other the gift of time, and space, room to change without fear.

There wasn’t an urgency of trying to convince each other, was there? I didn’t feel the need to make you believe and think in my ways. I understood why you were there. And you gave me the same grace, didn’t you? You even gave me the extra measure, the freedom to explore my struggles and ideas and weaknesses in a public place, you were not threatened by me. And when you were faced with the choice between full-time vocational ministry or a strong marriage, you chose me. Don’t think I’ll ever forget it. Don’t think I’ll ever forget how you stay here, in a small city in Canada, for me, for our tinies, even now. Don’t think I’ll forget how we each let each other be wrong, for a long time, each.

I had a friend ask me: but how? How do you disagree so strongly on something as vital as your spirituality or your expression of faith? How do you fall away from everything you believed, and yet, yet, not fall away from each other? because don’t you have to solve all your problems before the sun goes down? don’t we have to stay at it, marriage is hard work after all, until all is resolved and everyone is singing from the same sheet of music?

Maybe. But we didn’t do it that way. The sun has set on our disagreements, many times over. We’ve gotten a lot of practice at living in the in-betweens, we figure that’s where the life happens, and we figured we wanted to love well, even, especially, here.

The sun went down, we still disagreed mightily, and we kissed in our old bed anyway.

I remember you saying it to me, over and over: meant to be, Sarah Lynn. Meant to be. We were meant to be, we built it down in the foundations of our story, and so we were safe there. We knew that if we were faithful to God, faithful to each other, that we would end up where we were meant to be all along, eventually, even now.

God gave you to me, darling, and he gave me to you, for this journey, and we figured we both had a lot to learn, and so we gave each other the room to change.

You’ve given me so many gifts but I think of one often: you just aren’t afraid. You are never afraid, you walk in such trust, and expectation, in bold gentleness. Bri, this part of our story would have looked so differently if you hadn’t been so fearless. But because you weren’t afraid, I was not afraid, and we simply rested, even danced, there, in the in-between, and we talked a lot, and we waited. The Spirit moved me, and the Spirit moved you, and we moved together always, to now. We’ll move somewhere else – literally, figuratively – someday, I imagine.

You’ll be home tonight, we made you muffins. I call sleep-in tomorrow morning. Thank you for letting me change. Thank you for changing.

Continue Reading · brian, church, faith, fearless, love, love looks like, marriage · 43

In which I am here, breastfeeding, but not for much longer

September 12, 2012

For six years of my life, I’ve fed my babies from my own body, and now my last baby is a busy toddler, and she isn’t interested, I’m nearly finished with this part of my life. I can feel it, like the shift in weather I sense in the collar-bone I broke when I was six years old, yes.

So I want to remember, for the real rest-work, and for the metaphors of struggle and let-down and release and feeding, and for the weight of responsibility, the lightness of giving, and for the ordinary, every day, pausing holy-wonder. I want to remember that I was here, over and over again, and I was profoundly changed.

Here I am: 27 years old, blackened and bruised eyes from the exertion of a posterior delivery of a nearly 9lb baby girl, and she is curled up on me, fresh-baby-vernix-skin-to-stretched-out-mama-skin, and she’s nursing and I’m born again with the release of birth and the knowledge that this is one thing I can give and do for her, and a longing for the lost babies I won’t hold until heaven.

Here I am: 29 years old, sprawled in the backseat of our old Trailblazer, holding another nearly-9lbs baby, in front of a crowd of strangers, and without thought, I’m trying to wrestle my shirt off through my laughter, I just want to get that baby to latch onto me, I miss him inside, I’m empty, already, but I have something to give him, it’s nothing but raw instinct. The ambulance workers make me wait until we’re in triage at the hospital. That night, I sit awake, all night, and I nurse him, longing to take him home, to be quiet together. I hold the perfect dome of his soft unstitched head in the palm of my hand, and cry with relief.

Here I am: thirty-two, nestled into my own bed, freshly washed with damp hair, and a nearly 10-lb brand new baby girl beside me, her hungry mouth on me, and I look up to see my husband, wonder in his eyes, beside and around us like a parenthesis, and he says softly that this is the favourite sight of his life, always, ever, these moments.

Here I am: crying with pain and longing, bleeding, googling correct latch videos at 3:12 in the morning.

Here I am: arranging blankets in the church pew for discrete purposes only to have chubby arms yank blankets off and suck with noisy bluster and longing, until everyone in the radius is grinning.

Here we are: on the pier by the ocean, in the coffee shop, in the mall. Here we are: at the market, at the church, in our family bed. Here I am: nursing one baby, while a toddler boy sits beside me patting her hair gently, and a kindergarten girl sits on the other side, cradling baby feet, and the baby keeps popping off to grin her gummy smile at them both.

Here we are: in the middle of the night, first thing in the morning, noontime, all times, sleeping, awake.

Here I am: snapping open nursing bras, tucking in bamboo cloths, applying Lansinoh, praying for grace, avoiding dairy.

Here I am: being changed, transformed, worshipping God in the sacred everyday gift of this radical act of giving.

Here I am: in the early days, falling asleep and snapping awake, crying when the milk lets down, drinking water, balancing on the nursing pillows, staining shirts, burning with a fever from mastitis a time or two.

Here we are: together, always together. Here we are: connected, carrying the same blood and milk and bones.

Here I am: with a real breathing metaphor of contentment and peace, with a milk-drunk, blissed-out, flour-sack of a baby, thick with goodness, and something breaks through the veil between earth and heaven, I understand down in my marrow and now I can’t think of God as anything other than Abba.

Here I am: stronger, bolder, fearless, empowered, soul-quieted, a giver, nourished by nourishing, a mama.

And here I am now: nursing a squirming and disinterested toddler, every once in a while, and knowing that one of these times, it will be her last time, and it will be my last time to lay skin to skin, tummy to tummy, with my own babies, breastfeeding, and that time is coming soon.