In Bible class on Sunday my friends and I talked about death and how it can be scary but how really it’s not too scary. The teacher, hoping to generate some discussion, asked us who was scared of death but no one raised his hand. No one. Not one of the fifty people in the room. Maybe we were all posing because we knew the right answer was not to be scared but I think mostly we just weren’t scared and I was proud to be sitting among so much courage and faith.

Finally, the first hand raised, but the hand-raiser had no intention of confessing fear. I looked and it was one of my favorite people, a girl who absolutely always speaks her mind. I’ve heard her say exactly what she thinks to a misbehaving four year old. I love her.

Here’s what she said:

“I don’t want to sound suicidal or anything, but, well… Heck yeah, I want to die.”

Did I mention I love her? 

Right there in that moment I experienced the Maranatha of the early church—the communal cry from the mouths of hungry believers, “Come, oh Lord!”

And I meant it. And Shelly meant it. And we all, for a second, really meant it. 

Heck yeah.

We were talking about the Bible in small group tonight, about how it’s like honey, and I couldn’t help but think about how good the Bible tastes, especially when I’m in the throes of a fast.

Hungry, so hungry, I devour my Bible. I taste it, chew it, imbibe it, gulp it. I pack it into my emptinesses like a lion unsure when the next gazelle might wander across the plain.

I said to the group that a fast makes Bible reading better, more intense. I said, off hand, it’s like the way kids take drugs before they go to the club, you know, to amp up the experience, to awaken them to every little sensation.

Drugs before the club.

So that’s what fasting’s like. A little anyway.

All of this Invisible Children, Visible Children, KONY 2012, they’re wrong, you’re wrong stuff makes my head hurt.

Not because I’m disappointed. Who am I to decide what’s black and what’s white in this very gray-looking conversation? I don’t know enough. About charity work or about Africa or about politics. I am overwhelmed even by the shallow end of these discussions.

I like what my friend Brad said about awareness and action, about how awareness is not action and how sometimes in raising awareness we feel like we’ve taken action. 

But that’s not what gives me the headache… The reason I get overwhelmed by arguments about how best to provide for Africa is the same reason I get overwhelmed by all kinds of other world tragedies—people affected by genocide, sex trafficking, poverty, natural disaster, the threat of nuclear war, drug cartels.

The world is broken. I don’t know how to fix it. And I really want to fix it. But I can’t.

I am not God.

I have to get my head around this: God is savior. He will redeem His broken world. And when I start obsessing over how if I don’t do something to get clean water to some family in Guatemala, they will die of thirst or disease, I need a reality check.

God is saving His people. He will work through me or without me. I am not as important as I think I am.

I can find peace in that. Sweet, sweet peace. Not an excuse to do nothing, but a balm for the pain I feel when I realize I simply cannot do everything.

Now, while I am not God, I am God, in a very small way. I am a carrier of God’s Spirit, a member in the body of Christ. He will change the world through me and millions of others like me. I do need to restore this world—to, alongside others, call it back to the beautiful thing it once was.

I cannot fix it all, but I can, in Him, fix a piece.

But what piece? With all the problems, all the hurting people, all the blood and tears, where should I start?

Perhaps it’s best to start with what I understand, with what’s close to me.

I like the words from Ecclesiastes “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.” 

Today I heard Beth Moore saying that while she donates to charities and prays for disaster victims around the world, she feels most convicted to serve where she is, to help the orphans and widows and victims of oppression who stumble into her life. 

For me, that looks like financially and emotionally supporting my friends and family serving as full-time missionaries in China, Ireland, and Croatia. It looks like moving into a mixed income neighborhood and investing in my neighbors. It looks like bringing food and drawings by my little girls to the widows at my church. It looks like getting involved in a friend’s super-awesome non-profit.

Sure, I contribute to a charity every so often—I give regularly to three because I think they’re wonderful—but those charities are not the biggest way I’m healing God’s broken world. 

If clean water or bringing down Joseph Kony are close to your heart, by all means devote yourself to the cause. But really devote yourself to it. Dig in. Make sacrifices. Get uncomfortable. 

I bring up Ecclesiastes because I think it gets at a way of doing what’s closest: “Do what your hand finds to do.” We don’t need to reach far to find something. And when we find it, we shouldn’t just change our twitter pic, we should “do it with all [our] might.”

Last week Justin met up with a few of his closest friends for a mentoring retreat with the ever-engaging, epically passionate Jim McGuiggan. I was jealous.

And lonely. 

He left for five days which, I know, is not that terrible. I should suck it up. People’s husbands go to war, Gerhardt; get over it. Noted.

Still, I missed him. And I felt somewhat less stable without him. He is, after all, my other half. Apart from him I stand on one foot. 

While he was away I read the last book of The Hunger Games trilogy. And I read a frustratingly challenging book on Biblical interpretation. And I started a most humbling and emotionally taxing conversation with a good, good friend.

In other words, by the 24 hours away mark, I was already a certifiable mess. 

Getting dressed the morning of day 2, I stumbled upon a small bell from Round Rock’s Christmas service. We’d passed these bells out to all our members as we encouraged them to meditate on their greatest joys, the joys only possible in Christ. We had them ring the bells together in celebration.

I picked up my bell, rang my thumb along the curve and thought about my joys. Named them. Held them. Thanked God for them.

Someone had tied ribbon through a hole at the top of the bell. I untied the ribbon, unclasped the long chain already hanging around my neck and threaded the chain through the hole in the bell. 

I wore the bell for the next four days. As life jostled me, I rang, my little bell tinkling with my every move. 

I held the bell in my hand at the symphony so as not to mar the music, but I kept it on at Chuck-E-Cheese where it sounded loudest as I ran from ride to game, chasing eager kids. I let it ring as I pushed the girls on the swings and fed the ducks peanut butter and jelly crackers. I let it ring as I paced my living room, looking for just the right way to explain something difficult to explain. 

Do you know how hard it is to be sad to the soundtrack of one small, simple bell?

When every step sounds like joy, you can’t help but remember and embrace and live joy. 

I’ve been bell-free for two days now, but I still hear it when I need to. I hear it right now, sitting on my tiny porch as the sun sets, contemplating mysteries I’ve yet to plumb. 

While preparing for the Christmas service last year, the one with the bells (We called it Merrily Ring), we interviewed kids for an intro video, asking them questions like “When do we ring a bell?” Not a lot of kids knew the answer. Not a lot of them had ever heard a bell outside of music class. But one kid, probably five, said something like this: “We ring a bell when something’s happened, something good.” 

We ring a bell when something good’s happened—that’s why I think my endlessly ringing bell was so right, true. Because something good is happening. Now. And now. And now…

A few weeks ago I read Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place for the first time. I know now why it’s on all the must-read lists. One must read it. Like one must drink water.

Anyway, this passage caught me by the heart and I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ll just reproduce it here. I can’t say anything to make it better or clearer or more beautiful (except maybe this for the unfamiliar: Corrie is recalling her time in a concentration camp)

“But as the rest of the world grew stranger, one thing became increasingly clear. And that was the reason the two of us were here. Why others should suffer we were not shown. As for us, from morning until lights-out, whenever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of health and hope.

Like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about it, holding out our hearts to its warmth and light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the Word of God.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?…Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

I would look about us as Betsie read, watching the light leap from face to face. More than conquerors…It was not a wish. It was a fact.

We knew it, we experienced it minute by minute—poor, hated, hungry. We are more than conquerors. Not “we shall be.” We are!

Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.

Sometimes I would slip the Bible from its little (sack) with hands that shook, so mysterious had it become to me. It was new; it had just been written. I marveled sometimes that the ink was dry. I had believed the Bible always, but reading it now had nothing to do with belief. It was simply a description of the way things were—of hell and heaven, of how men act and how God acts. I had read a thousand times the story of Jesus’ arrest—how soldiers had slapped Him, laughed at Him, flogged Him. Now such happenings had faces and voices.

I have these two friends, Danon and Barbara, who just recently came to Christ. They’re in their forties and have been together for 25 years. They have eight kids. But, as of last week, they weren’t married. 

On Saturday, they decided to make that right.

My small group got to help with the wedding. Susan made the cake (gorgeous AND delicious!). Patrick took pictures (He’s an actual professional) aided by his keen-eyed wife Karen. Samantha made beautiful bouquets. John ran the sound both. Joey manned a computer for Skyping in Barbara’s mom (he carried her four-inch-high head for the entire ceremony and reception). Justin performed the wedding. 

When Danon repeated his vows, every person in the room sighed audibly. Barbara’s tears, wide streams of joy running down her cheeks, found company as every one us cried with her. 

This was no ordinary wedding. 

But what wedding is? 

They’re all beautiful. All monumental and epic, previews of that glorious last (and first) day when Jesus comes for His bride. 

I talked to Barbara a few days before the wedding and she was visibly shaken with nerves and fear. I didn’t understand it, why she would be nervous now having been with Danon for so long, but listening to her, I realized how different this would be. She’d be sealing the emergency exit door, a door she’d taken great comfort in, a door she’d occasionally used. 

I remembered at Barbara’s wedding, so intimate and simple, what a big deal it is to commit your life to another human being, how scary it must be, what faith it must take. 

It’s one thing to get married at nineteen like I did, before you know any better. But to get married after 25 rocky years, knowing how hard it will be to stay true, knowing how uncertain life can be, that takes guts. And commitment. And a great deal of assurance that God’s plan is best.