A Whole Heart

“But the high places were not taken out of Israel. Nevertheless, the heart of Asa was wholly true all his days.” – 2 Chronicles 15:17

“For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him.” – 2 Chronicles 16:9

One Mystery Science video I watched recently with the kids talked about how we get metals from the earth: it’s not as simple as digging them up. Most metals exist in such close combination with other elements that these mineral “ores” must undergo a process called “smelting” to be extracted. Smelting involves heat. It takes temperatures thousands of degrees hotter than an oven to separate the metal from its ore. 

With each successive king in Judah’s history, it’s easy to ask the same question our kids used to ask about everyone: “is he good or bad?” But we often find it’s not that straightforward. Kings may tear down some altars but not others. They may govern wisely but marry foolishly. They may start off well but make a poor decision, as we see with King Asa, who renewed a covenant to follow God wholeheartedly, but then turned to seek the help of the Syrians rather than God when difficulty came. The same word is used for “wholly” and “blameless” in these two verses: shalem, related to the familiar shalom. God desires that our hearts are shalem towards him, are blameless and true in the sense of having no other ultimate love, no other ultimate object of worship and desire and help. 

There is a shift between the end of chapter fifteen and the beginning of chapter sixteen, and it is caused by one thing: war. It is external trial that brings out the condition of King Asa’s heart. “I have refined you,” says God, “but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction” (Isaiah 48:10). I picture my heart strewn with ores: mixed motives, desires, and loves running like veins through the geography of my mind and soul. This pandemic is like one big smelting furnace, an act of extractive metallurgy upon the core of my being. Every challenge and trial makes me ask, what am I really looking to for help? What do I really believe is the point of my day? What is my calling really about in this time? God is searching endlessly for one precious thing, more precious than the purest gold: a heart that is whole towards him. To that heart, he says, I will give strong support. That is a promise worth holding on to. “In this you rejoice,” writes Peter, “though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:6-7).

Me Time

“The Lord was my support. He brought me out into a broad place; he rescued me, because he delighted in me.” – Psalm 18:19

In her book Bossypants, Tina Fey gives suggestions for “me time” activities moms can do to carve out time for themselves: “Go to the bathroom a lot. Offer to empty the dishwasher. Take ninety-minute showers. (If you only shower every three or four days, it will be easier to get away with this.) Say you’re going to look for the diaper creme, then go into your child’s room and just stand there until your spouse comes in and curtly says, ‘What are you doing?’ Stand over the sink and eat the rest of your child’s dinner while he or she pulls at your pant leg and asks for it back. Try to establish that you’re the only one in your family allowed to go to the post office.”

Our first newborn was a relatively fussy baby who didn’t settle easily into sleep routines, and I remember at one point being so desperate to take a shower that I just moved a bouncy chair into the bathroom and set her down squalling in it. In a way, these days feel like a movement back to those times, when the idea of “me time” was a relative joke. We aim for “teacher breaks” and “don’t find me unless you’re bleeding” quiet times, but when it’s all said and done, I don’t really gain freedom from the demands of the kids until they’re asleep. There’s always the possibility one of them will need a butt wiped, a hurt addressed, a problem solved, an achievement recognized, or an item fetched.

Being more present now for all of that is undoubtedly one of the gifts of this time, and probably what I will look back on as one of the most meaningful things about it. But to do so without breaks is to get to a point where I lose patience and perspective. And without babysitters, school days, activities, or work outside the home, part of adjusting is rethinking what “me time” means, and how to find it.

This verse sums up what I need, I think: a departure. A leaving of my work, and an entering into a place that is broad, where I can stretch out and recover all the parts of myself that get cramped in my work world, where I can look around and look up without distraction. Where instead of constantly giving, I can receive. Most of all, where I can receive a sense that there is someone who sees me, understands me, and delights in me. 

What does a real Sabbath mean for a parent? What does rest look like for a homeschooler who picks up parenting once the school day ends? What does “me time” look like when you’re rarely ever alone? A big part of finding my rhythm in this new life is feeling out the answers to these questions, sometimes, it seems, by trial-and-error. But if David could write these words during one of the hardest times of his life, I hold out hope that God can support us during these times as well, that as we ask him, he can bring us to the moments of rest that we need.

Finding A Sacred Space

“And listen to the pleas of your servant and of your people Israel, when they pray toward this place.” – 2 Chronicles 6:21

One of the losses we bear during this time are spaces. We’ve lost classrooms and operating rooms, sanctuaries and stores. Some of those spaces can be recreated: we converted a bedroom into an office space where Dave can do video visits with patients privately. We divided our dining table into four sections with tape so the kids have desks for their schoolwork. It’s temporary, but it works.

Solomon’s temple was temporary, too. Jewish historian Josephus notes, “the temple was burnt four hundred and seventy years, six months, and ten days after it was built.” But there is still something profound and moving in reading about its construction and dedication, about the attention to detail that was given, about the moment when God’s glory filled it like a cloud in the midst of which no one could stand. It’s a reminder that God choosing to dwell with us is not something to be taken for granted, and that there is beauty and holiness to be found in the places he inhabits.

God dwells within us, now. We don’t have to go to a particular place to find him. But I think there’s still something significant about having a sacred space. It’s a declaration of intention. It’s an illustration of holiness. It’s a reminder of God’s constancy. Having a space we have either created or found, that we can set aside for God, that we can return to, that we can fill with the marks or memories of His presence, is even more important now that we’ve lost the ability to gather in churches and retreat centers. On a neighborhood walk the other day, I found a corner by a wall behind some bushes, where probably no one ever went. I sat down in the overgrown grass, and suddenly all I could see was sky and foliage, and it was like I could breathe again for a moment, like I could see in that little space the bigness of God, so much outside of my daily struggles. When I’m indoors, I go to a corner by a window with a rug and some pillows and a few of my favorite things. I keep a candle there I can light when I’m alone to say, “God, here I am. Here you are.” 

Where are your spaces? This is a good time to create or find one, to let the boundaries we now live in bring renewed creativity and intentionality when it comes to finding a sacred space. 

Overland to the Islands

by Denise Levertov

Let’s go — much as that dog goes,

intently haphazard.  The

Mexican light on a day that

“smells like autumn in Connecticut”

makes iris ripples on his

black gleaming fur — and that too

is as one would desire — a radiance

consorting with the dance.

Under his feet

rock and mud, his imagination, sniffing,

engaged in its perceptions — dancing

edgeways, there’s nothing

the dog disdains on his way,

nevertheless he

keeps moving, changing

pace and approach but
not direction — “every step an arrival.”

Meritocracy

“For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” – Romans 5:7-8

We live in a moral ecology, writes David Brooks, built on assumptions that include “the centrality of accomplishment”: we are not measured by how well we conform to code, or the “thickness” of our relationships, “but by what we have individually achieved… promoting the self is the prime mission.” One New Yorker article describes how this works when it comes to education: up to high school, you just need to show up. But college is different. It’s a bottleneck, a sorting mechanism. “You are either selected or rejected. And it matters where… The narrower the entryway, the broader the range of opportunities on the other side. College, in turn, sorts by qualifying some students for graduate and professional education… And graduate and professional education then sorts for the labor market. It’s little gold stars all the way up.”

Little gold stars all the way up. Even as someone who has outwardly stepped off the escalator of career ambition, I’m finding that it’s incredibly difficult not to apply some system of meritocracy to everything else: my parenting, my housekeeping, my marriage, my ministry, my hobbies. My spiritual life. Soaked deep into me is the assumption that my accomplishments determine my value. I like to think, oh, I’m beyond wanting to get into Harvard, but really, it isn’t that simplistic, and it never was. There’s a good thing in me, that wants to be excellent, that thrives best with challenging goals, but I live in a world based on meritocracy, so immersed in it that we can’t even tell we are. I have to constantly distinguish between good thing for God’s glory and good thing that makes me good. Between effort and fruit, between self-justifying works and holy discipline. And the line between those things can be thin.

The most spiritually formative experiences in my life have been those that cause me to hit the limits of my merit. Marriage. Parenting. And now I can add to the list: quarantine. Even starting off with all the advantages I could have—a spacious house, no need to work, a healthy family foundation—I am struggling to accomplish it all, to homeschool, parent, housekeep, cook, write, self-care, support a necessarily absent spouse. I’ve let creep in, as I so easily do with any new venture, this silent but deadly belief that I ought to be able to, even that I am measured by how well I do it. Part of what this time is doing is confronting me with the functional meritocracy in my life. This is what Paul was trying to do in Romans. He is saying, the way that God loves you has nothing to do with what you have accomplished. More than that, it has nothing to do with how you have messed up. Jesus says you alone are worth his life, completely apart from anything you have or haven’t done. How would my life look different if I truly believed this? 

God Has A Purpose

“Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.” – Proverbs 19:21

You feel overwhelmed sometimes. Overwhelmed at the interminability of the days, stretching on, bare in the worst ways and full in the hardest ones. You are surrounded by bodies, yet alone. Every day feels like an enormous effort, calling for vast reserves within yourself that you wake up some mornings not sure that you possess. 

Is this time a surprise to you? Was it not what you were expecting this year? It is not a surprise to God. It is fully within the intention of his purpose for you. God knew this time was coming. It is not a surprise to him. He has prepared you for it whether you know it or not.

The temptation to speculate as to the nature of those purposes is strong. And maybe even now you see that something unique is happening, things being unearthed, gifts being exercised, in the crucible of it all. But that is not mostly the point. The point, for today, is just to know that many are the plans in your mind, but what will stand in your life is the purpose of God for you. And he surely has one. 

“You are living through an unusual time… You see that, for the time being, you have to be limited in your movements… It is a new experience for you to feel both the desire and its unreality. You sense that nothing but God’s love can fulfil your deepest need while the pull to other people and things remains strong. It seems that peace and anguish exist side by side in you, that you desire both distraction and prayerful concentration… You know that something totally new, truly unique, is happening within you. It is clear that something in you is dying and something is being born… You feel a strange sadness. An enormous loneliness emerges, but you are not frightened. You feel vulnerable but safe at the same time. Jesus is where you are, and you can trust that he will show you the next step” (pp 15-16, The Inner Voice of Love, Henri Nouwen).

Rejoice

“Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” – Romans 5:2-5

Did you know that there are four main Greek words translated “rejoice” in the New Testament? Chairo is the one used most frequently (75 times); it means “to be glad,” and we’re familiar with it from the book of Philippians. Agalliaomeans “to jump for joy”; euphraino means “to cheer up.” The word Paul uses here is kauchaomai, and it has two meanings: “to glory in a thing or on account of a thing,” and “to boast.” It adds a kind of subtle redundancy here, to “glory in the hope of the glory of God.” 

The definition of “rejoice” from the dictionary is: “to feel or show great joy or delight.” If I had to explain the meaning of kauchaomai to one of the kids, I would say it’s to be happy about the nature of something so much that you need to show your happiness. It has to come out in some way. It’s a boasting in something, not to selfishly brag about it, but because you really want to show it off. Paul says that we should feel this way about the hope that we have.

Someone once said, “Man can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air, but only for one second without hope.” I remember a friend once asked, “what is something you are looking forward to?” and I thought it was such a good question. What we look forward to keeps us going, doesn’t it? But the hope we have as believers isn’t just looking forward to the next exciting experience or anticipated pleasure. It’s not counting on when something bad will end. It’s not self-generated optimism or wishful thinking. Paul is quite specific here: it is hope of the glory of God. The glory of God is everything about him; the excellence and magnificence of every one of his qualities. There is a sense in which we experience God’s glory now: we stand in this grace; his love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. But there is a sense in which we anticipate much more to come, both here on earth but especially one day in the eternity to come.

And here, the awful mystery: this kind of hope comes in suffering. The more we continue in suffering, the more we endure, the more it shapes the nature and quality of our inner selves, the more, somehow, it leads to this exact kind of hope. This is why we rejoice in our sufferings the same way we rejoice in our hope: so happy about the very nature of its work in us that we can boast about it, that we must express it somehow. 

When I think about someone who rejoices this way, Joni Eareckson Tada comes to mind. She wrote a short booklet entitled Hope… The Best Of Things, in which she wrote: “I sure hope I can bring this wheelchair to heaven. Now, I know that’s not theologically correct. But I hope to bring it and put it in a little corner of heaven, and then in my new, perfect, glorified body, standing on grateful glorified legs, I’ll stand next to my Savior, holding his nail-pierced hands. I’ll say, ‘Thank you, Jesus,’ and he will know that I mean it, because he knows me. He’ll recognize me from the fellowship we’re now sharing in his sufferings. And I will say, ‘Jesus, do you see that wheelchair? You were right when you said that in this world we would have trouble, because that thing was a lot of trouble. But the weaker I was in that thing, the harder I leaned on you. And the harder I leaned on you, the stronger I discovered you to be. It never would have happened had you not given me the bruising of the blessing of that wheelchair.’ Then the real ticker-tape parade of praise will begin. And all of earth will join in the party. And at that point Christ will open up our eyes to the great fountain of joy in his heart for us beyond all that we ever experienced on earth. And when we’re able to stop laughing and crying, the Lord Jesus really will wipe away our tears. I find it so poignant that finally at the point when I do have the use of my arms to wipe away my own tears, I won’t have to, because God will.”

Sorrow

“How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?” – Psalm 13:2

Last week we were starting our homeschool day when Elijah became inordinately upset over something relatively minor. It turned out I hadn’t done something exactly the way his kinder teacher had. Do you miss her? I asked. He nodded, and suddenly his anger melted into tears. Somehow the reality of what we’ve all lost hit me as I sat there. I couldn’t really tell him he would get to see her again soon. I just held him as he cried. 

Grief is so often a postscript for me. I busy myself with making the best of things, creating and carrying out action plans, thinking about how much better we have it than so many others. But as my kids teach me, it is okay to be sad. The sadness is there, and sometimes it must be held gently and given space. Elijah ended up drawing a picture of his classroom we sent to his teacher, a little memorial that included all his favorite parts of the room: the rocking chair where she sat, the rainbow rug, the smartboard with penguins on it, blue window drapes and the peace table. If I were to draw a picture of all the things I miss about our old life, in it would be coffee shops. Friends around a dinner table. Our fifth-grader graduating from elementary school. Our son striding off to swim practice in his parka, loaded with all his gear. Our church sanctuary, filled with people and music. 

I wrote about this psalm near the start of our one-year reading adventure, but this time around, I find myself not wanting to think past verse two. I am consistently amazed by David’s ability not only to acknowledge his sorrow, but to sit with it in God’s presence. The thing about grief is that it’s so lonely. No one really understands how it feels. Sometimes I picture it like an ocean that I sink into, an underwater place from which I can gesticulate, but not speak distinctly. When I’m there, it’s hard to describe how I feel. And what I want there aren’t words anyway. I want presence, a hand to hold in the dark, and it seems to me that is what David has with his God.

There are new, surprisingly good things growing up out of this time. If I were to draw a picture of our lives now, it would be full of unique memories that will likely never happen again. But I’m finding it’s good to be as intentional about our grief as we are about our gratitude. If the one opens our eyes to the gifts of this new time, the other allows us to acknowledge the losses we bear. And when we pray our grief to God, we experience his presence and allow him to work in us in that place.

Overlooking Offense

“Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.” – Proverbs 19:11

Being around the same people at home for extended periods of time has its own challenges. Introverts have lost routines for solitude, extroverts have lost social gatherings. We’ve all lost physical outlets like gym classes and team sports. And there are a million small ways we annoy each other. We’ve gotten to the point where, if the kids can last two hours without someone crying, screaming, or fighting, they get to put a marble in the jar (“is this teaching emotional suppression?” I asked my friend. “Nah,” she replied. “I call it emotional regulation.”). A full jar earns them a movie night, and even though this has resulted in some interesting behaviors (“just wait ten minutes before you cry—we’re almost at the two-hour mark!”), rare are the days we make it all the way through without some kind of emotional outburst.

Sometimes increased proximity unearths issues worth talking about. But part of living together is learning how to overlook an offense. That verb literally means “to let pass by,” as if you are standing on a bridge, watching water flow by under you. Overlooking is not passive: it is not refusing to respond, or burying your feelings inside. Overlooking is actively acknowledging an offense exists, and then consciously deciding to let it go, let it flow down that stream out of view. Not holding it against someone. 

This verse says to do so is our glory: this word means ornament, and is often used to describe outward adornment, like jeweled stones (Exodus 28:2, Ezekiel 23:26), anklets and headbands (Isaiah 3:18), or crowns (Proverbs 4:9, Isaiah 62:3, Ezekiel 23:42). To overlook an offense is not weakness. It is our splendor, something which adds visibly to our beauty. It shapes our characters and gives us an inner beauty that shines out. But in another sense, when we do this we walk in Christlikeness, putting on the very glory of a God who himself is our adornment: “In that day the Lord of hosts will be a crown of glory, and a diadem of beauty, to the remnant of his people” (Isaiah 28:5).

Overlooking an offense does not come without cost. It can take emotional reserve, mental energy, time and effort. But this is how we learn to be slow to anger, to respond with sense rather than react without thought. And in the end, it can become something of great beauty.

Time In The New World

“The Lord is king forever and ever; the nations perish from his land.” – Psalm 10:16

“In every critical event, there is an opportunity for God to act creatively and reveal a deeper truth than what we see on the surface of things.” – Henri Nouwen, Discernment

Many people have commented on how this pandemic has forced the clearing of calendars in an area where people are typically busy and overscheduled. Miraculously, nearly overnight, my own days have been wiped clean, all the daily and weekly markers simply vanished. I used to make five, six school and swim runs in a day: I haven’t started up the car in a week (Dave has driven during the times we’ve gone out to now-overcrowded parks). There will be more and more zoom events scheduled as schools and activities boot back up virtually, but in the meanwhile, we’re all forced to sit in this space where our sense of time has been warped. I am starting to understand how my six-year-old feels. Even pre-pandemic, he would ask us regularly, what day is it?

The Greeks had two words for time. Chronos is clock-time, time in compartments, in series of events. The other word for time is kairos, and I like how David Brooks writes about experiencing it in nature: “The wilderness lives at the pace of what the Greeks called kairos time, which can be slower but is always richer. Synchronous time is moment after moment, but kairos time is qualitative, opportune or not yet ripe, rich or spare, inspired or flat—the crowded hour or the empty moment… The soul communing with itself in the wilderness is at kairos time, too—slow and serene, but thick and strong, like the growing of the redwood.”

A deeper truth I’m seeing in this unscheduled space is how much our busyness forces us to live in chronos time: life as measured from segment to segment, activity to activity. Our view of time becomes so myopic that we’re less able to discern the movement of God, which so often occurs outside of our calibrations. Henri Nouwen writes in his book Discernment that kairos time is when “time becomes not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God’s good work in us… Time points beyond itself and begins to speak to us of God… To start seeing that the many events of our day, week, or year are not in the way of our search for a full life but rather the way to it is a real experience of conversion.”

I see that conversion in this Psalm. The point of conversion is verse 10, when the writer emerges from despair and lament to suddenly say: “The Lord is king forever and ever.” It’s as if he’s emerged from his myopia, put on his spectacles, and glimpsed God in kairos time: the God who outlasts nations. Can you imagine forever? Yet God is there, so far outside of our calendars. And it is from this truth about God that the writer then says: “you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strength their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice” (verses 17-18).

It’s disorienting when our routines are taken away. But these changes bring an invitation, to sink for a moment into a different view of time. To allow time, and the happenings of our lives in that very time, to speak to us of God, and to practice discerning Him in it.

The Grace And The Impatience To Wait

by Walter Brueggemann

In our secret yearnings

we wait for your coming,

and in our grinding despair

we doubt that you will.

And in this privileged place

we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we

and by those who despair more deeply than do we.

Look upon your church and its pastors

in this season of hope

which runs so quickly to fatigue

and this season of yearning

which becomes so easily quarrelsome.

Give us the grace and the impatience

to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,

to the edge of our finger tips.

We do not want our several worlds to end.

Come in your power

and come in your weakness

in any case and make all things new.

Amen.