I’ve been struggling lately as I try to live out the day to day implications of trusting God with something. Not so much with trusting God but trusting Him with and in my hardship or struggle or whatever.

I trust in my head and my heart, but my hands get fidgety.

I’ll be specific: Justin and I are selling our house in Tennessee. It’s been on the market for six months. We’re selling it because we felt strongly led to minister in Round Rock, TX. Today, I am confidant this was the choice God wanted us to make.

But then there’s the house, a house I know God could sell tomorrow. But, here’s where the trusting comes in, He hasn’t.

So, I pray. I ask friends to pray. And I wait. I try to live on less money gracefully and joyfully. I live most moments of each day completely at ease, knowing God will take care of me.

But here’s the deal, sometimes I know God wants to teach us something in the waiting. So I start looking for lessons: And I spend way longer than I probably should trying to figure out why God’s waiting. My list of possibilities includes some truly ridiculous scenarios.

In addition to all the “why” meditating, I also do a lot of “what” thinking: What can I do to make it more marketable? What would be the best way to stretch this twenty dollars? etc.

Anyway, I find that if I let it, my mind begins buzzing with things I need to do and possible mistakes I’ve made in the past that I need to learn from. Peace seems extraordinarily far away amid all this noise.

And yet, I know I’m trusting God. I have no doubts He can pull me out of this small inconvenience. And I have no doubts that He wants the best for me. But what’s best for me? And is this situation really all that important in God’s eyes? Those kinds of questions swirl in the brain fluid, muddying my mind.

Anyway, I’m trying to figure out how to balance the importance of DOing something and the importance of confidence in God. How do we both do all we can to make something happen and embrace the reality that, for all our work, God is the one Who’ll decide when it happens?

I don’t just want to believe in God’s ability to rescue me. I want to live it.

Any sage advice?

Here is something I’ve noticed: People don’t like big churches.

Yesterday after my post about full churches and empty churches I received a lot of feedback, a lot of it suspicious or critical of big churches. Which I thought was interesting as I hadn’t even mentioned its being big—just its being full.

I completely sympathize with this big church queasiness. I grew up in a church of 150. In college I worshiped with two churches, one about 200 and the other around 15. I thought 200 members was pretty big, and I often felt disconnected.

I prized the kind of community that develops when a small body of believers learns and struggles and celebrates together.

Later in life I moved to a city with this one large church of Christ. And everyone I ever heard talk about it lowered their brow when they did—like something about it was sketchy. But the only criticism I ever actually heard articulated was this: It’s just so big.

Every once in a while I hear people talk about the Round Rock church growing and about how they hope it doesn’t get too big.

I am not critical of this mindset. I get it. I like small church.

But I am concerned that in dismissing bigness we’re disabling the Spirit of God as He works in our churches, asking Him to do just as much as we’re comfortable with. When we shoot for a nice, reasonable 350, I think maybe God gets frustrated.

Anyway, I’m wondering what it is about the big church model that’s bothering so many people? Why is bigger lesser? And then, if smallness is to be sought, what can growing churches do to stay small without limiting the power of God?

I just looked at the CD I was handed on Sunday—by the church that turned me away—and I would like to proudly say that it lists “nearby churches we recommend.” It reads “It is our pleasure to partner with some of these churches in advancing God’s glory.”

Maybe this list is a solution. A beginning place at least.

This morning, for the first time ever, I found myself being physically turned away from church—the doors sealed and a line of people out the doors told to go home.

“We’re so sorry. Come back next week. Have a CD.”

Justin and I were visiting a church we’d never been to before. We anticipated a crowd and arrived fifteen minutes early only to find the parking lot full. The guy in the orange vest pointed us across the street and around the corner to a secondary lot. He said we could ride the shuttle. Shuttle?

Anyway, we parked at the bank.

Waiting in line to register the girls for class, we overheard the family in front of us being informed that their four-year-old son’s class was full. He’d have to go into the auditorium.

A full class? I figured I’d heard wrong.

Luckily we checked our girls in without a problem and headed to the lobby only to find a line of people waiting to be escorted into worship. I noticed someone counting and then heard a woman say, “We only have single seats left.”

“That’s fine,” I thought. “Justin and I can split up.”

We stood in line. We waited. The line didn’t seem to move much. And then, the seats were gone. Even the single seats.

Just gone.

I kept waiting to hear what I should do now. Wait to be escorted to a room with a video feed. Wait for seats to be placed in the aisles. But that didn’t happen. The line slowly dissolved as everyone filed out the big glass doors.

Justin and I were the last people standing in the lobby. Completely confused.

I’m still a little confused.

That has absolutely never happened to me. Not even in a door-knocking campaign daydream.

At first I was pretty frustrated and a little perturbed with the church for not planning ahead. Justin and I had driven all the way to Dallas to visit churches. And here I’d wasted my Sunday morning slot.

But then Justin and I were talking, and he said he was glad we were the ones turned away—so that maybe a couple who didn’t know Christ had our seats—and I thought that was a wise thing to think.

Then I got to thinking about how many people had come to this church on this day—a lot of people—and I wondered how many churches in America were turning people away because they didn’t have enough room.

And I realized the overcrowding wasn’t so much this church’s “problem.” This church had to turn people away partly because churches all over the country are failing to bring people in.

The seats here were full, in part, because other seats in other churches were empty.

Truth is, all across America, most of our buildings have scores of empty seats. But, what’s also the truth, people don’t want to come in most of our buildings.

So some get swamped.  And most stay empty.

That’s a problem for all of us.

Solutions?

The downtown Austin farmer’s market is joy in a park. Sitting at a table under a tree in 70 degree weather eating pumpkin bread, holding my husband’s hand and watching my daughters dance this Saturday I was reminded once again of God’s touchable love.

As we sat there under the tree, wallowing in love dust, I heard the singer/songwriter guy introduce a song he’d written, a song inspired by a breakup with a girl, a girl who’d left him for a painter. In addition to being a musician, he’s a potter. The song was delightful.

Basically, he challenged her to find as much happiness in a painting as she might in a bowl. He said, will a painting comfort you like a bowl of hot soup. Will a painting feed you?

I loved the thought, and while in the past I’d totally have been the girl who said “Yes. A painting feeds my soul!” I realized in the moment that all I wanted was a bowl.

A painting is beautiful to look at but lonely to live with. It inspires, delights, provokes—all good things. But you don’t cozy up with a painting on the couch. You don’t reach for it when you’re sad. You don’t run your fingers around the rim of it while you make a hard decision. You don’t feed your family with it. You’d never puke on it.

A bowl is ordinary, everyday, familiar. A painting is dramatic, stunning, and other. And if we’re talking men and love, I’d rather have the bowl. Make it a mug. I like a man I can hold, a man who’ll take care of me, a man who’ll live in the ordinary by my side.

Paintings are pretty to look at but delicate, even breakable, smudgable. And they don’t hug back.

Nobody’d ever say that about a mug full of warm chai tea.

Post Script: Sometimes a girl is lucky enough to find a  painted bowl. I’m lucky.

Maybe it’s the English teacher in me, but I get goosebumps when I run across dramatic irony in the Bible—those moments when I know more than the people in the story do about the very story they’re living. This is one of those moments:

In the book of Daniel, chapter 2, King Nebuchadnezzar asks his sorcerers and magicians to interpret his dream—without, by the way, recounting it— and they say,

“What the king asks is too difficult. No one can reveal it to the king except the gods, and they do not live among men.”

The sorcerers are a little bit right. God hasn’t been living among them (probably because He wasn’t invited). But, little do they know, He’s recently come to town, walking amidst the shackled men and women of Israel.

There is a God who lives among men. And Nebuchadnezzar is about to meet Him.

God said to the Israelites, “I will put my dwelling place among you.”

John said about Jesus: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

And Paul said to the Ephesian Christians: “In him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”

I had this dream a few months after Bobby died. It was one in a series of dreams in which Bobby would show up at family functions as if nothing had happened. Everybody just acted like everything was normal. Even though they knew.

Anyway, I was smarter than that. I wasn’t about to waste a second with my brother. So, basically, I’d just follow him around hugging him. I remember, in the dream, even after waking up from the dream, that the hugs felt real.

So I’m on the back porch of my Uncle Phillip’s house, a house he sold before I graduated from high school, and I’m acting like a Bobby-parasite when Bobby finally turns to look at me. He’s loving—I can still see the compassionate smile on his tan, peaceful face—but a little fed up with dragging me around.

Then, in the most exciting dream moment in the history of dreamworld, he says to me,

“Jen, just calm down. Jesus is coming back in five years any…”

And right then, in the middle of his sentence, he stops, raises his eyebrows, and drops his jaw—like he’s just spilled the biggest secret in the history of the world.

Because he has.

In a split second, he disappears. And I never see him in a dream again.

I used to think about that dream a lot. But then I didn’t as much. I realized today I hadn’t thought about the dream in years. I realized, too, I had dreamed it eight years ago. And  Jesus still hadn’t come back. And I was sad.

And a little suspicious that maybe Jesus had been forced to reschedule.

Deuteronomy is like a slap in the face and like a hug you crawl up inside. It’s like rain falling on dry, cracked Texas dirt, and it’s like the drought that let the dirt get dry. It’s the kind of book that makes you get up, even before you’ve finished reading it, because you’ve just got to DO something. And it’s the kind of book that you just can’t stop reading because you don’t want that smile—the smile on your face that doesn’t start on your face but way down in your heart—you don’t want that smile to ever go away.

When Deuteronomy ends, when Moses dies, you feel like something good is over. And you wonder if that something good will ever live again.

Listening to Moses’ song, more depressing than any country song, something in me feels really, really sorry for the Israelites who didn’t pull it off. And really, really happy for me because Jesus did. And now I can.

Deuteronomy is the fifth book in the story of God’s people and in the 34 Old Testament books that follow, we never again see the full glory of God’s promise, not for any extended time anyway. The first half of chapter 28, the promise of blessing that will “overtake” God’s people, gets lived out only in dreams.

I’m reading through the Bible a little wonky this year. I did the New Testament first. And I dawdled, so that I’m only now walking out of the Pentateuch. I’m standing on the same cliff Moses stood on, looking into a promised land that, I know, will disappoint me. I feel kind of heavy, knowing that I won’t get to end my year with Jesus. Knowing instead I’ll end it with Israel.

Moses, as he’s about to die, sings that song for the people of Israel. He has it written down and commands that it be taught even to the children. It is a terrible song, a tragic song. A song he says will “confront them as a witness.”

Last night I read it, thinking about Moses not getting to walk into the promised land, how completely ticked off he must have been. He knew these people would squander what God had given them. They’d abandon the God who’d saved them. And yet they would be the ones to see at least the tip of the promise. Not Moses.

I’m realizing in this moment that this story is easier to read because I read the gospels first this year; it’s easier to see clearly when I’m wearing my Jesus-colored glasses.

I’m not Moses—thank God—no matter how strongly I relate to his plight. I’m a girl who, like the Israelites, doesn’t deserve the promised land but who got to live in it anyway. I just want to do a better job than they did now that I’m here. I want to see those promises in chapter 28 bloom. I want to “choose life” that I might live…

“…loving the Lord your God, obeying His voice and holding fast to Him, for He is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.”

Still reeling from the sudden death of her husband and the prolonged critical illness of her only child, Joan Didion undertakes a reflective journey into the nature of grief in her book The Year of Magical Thinking.

It is, perhaps, the saddest book I have ever read (with the least hint of sadness in the title). But it should be read. I’m profoundly affected by having read it. 

Didion writes from a perspective almost missing from the world of grief literature. Even after this emotionally devastating series of events, Didion maintains “no eye is on the sparrow.” She ends her book with those words. Wrecking me. 

Her calm emotional honesty disturbs.

Toward the close of the book she reflects on grief’s surprises. She writes,

“Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

Sometimes I forget how tragic it is to be lost, to live in a darkness with no light. Tonight I cried for Joan Didion and all of the others grieving a life without the hope of ever seeing anything beautiful emerge from the grave.

I went to Publix yesterday—my hometown grocery store. I lived just across the street from one growing up. I remember the names of the check out ladies, the smell of the deli counter.

I like being in a Publix. I like the vague but pleasant sense of nostalgia.

Anyway, yesterday, while pushing through the bakery section, I saw a little girl standing beside her father smiling as the bakery lady reached into a case and pulled out a single sprinkle-coated sugar cookie. I laughed, remembering my official “cookie club” card and the joy of free cookies at Publix.

I was excited for London to get her very own free cookie and even excited to buy a dozen—for old time’s sake. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had one.

I opened the box, took out a cookie, shook off the extra sprinkles, and put it in my mouth.  And I almost melted into a puddle in the middle of aisle 9. The cookie was good, sure, but the memories that flooded into my body, memories previously cooped up behind a dam, those memories were powerful, tangible, palpable. I could see seven-year-old Bobby. I could see my outfit. I saw the full array of options in the cookie display case. I even saw the exact font on the computer-printed dessert labels. And the smells. And the tastes. Even the feeling of independence that sent electricity through my legs as we abandoned Mom’s cart and ran, on our own, to the bakery. Free cookies, a “credit card,” my brother, and freedom—joy, joy, joy, joy.

I’ve eaten a lot of cookies. At first I thought I’d purchased a dozen, but now that I’ve eaten fifteen of them I’m realizing I was wrong.

I don’t want to stop eating cookies. But I don’t want to run out either.