I’m watching a friend’s little girl. She’s two, almost three, and she calls me Mommy. Which would make me feel special but she calls all grown women Mommy. So…
Still, watching Bettie and being called Mommy feels good and right, because Bettie is my family, my daughter (in a way), and Laura, her mom, is the intensely compassionate sister I never had but do.
Church family is real family. It’s not second to blood. Laura and I are blood, washed in the very same red blood cells and white.
Yes, they said that. London spoke angrily. Eve in earnest.
London is on an “I hate temptation” kick. She tells God almost every night that He shouldn’t let temptation into Heaven because temptation made all the bad guys bad. Then she says, “But if temptation wants to be good and all the bad guys decide to be good you can let them in.”
I think she’s starting to feel evil creeping in the corners of her heart. A few nights ago while making brownies with her dad she quite suddenly rebuked temptation. “No temptation,” she said. “I will not lick the spoon.” And lick the spoon she did not.
When I discipline her lately, especially when we talk about her heart, I can see the frustration on her wrinkled little face. She wants to do better. She wants to make good choices. “Why doesn’t God kill temptation?” she asks me.
Eve, 15 months younger, is just now making a decision about God. She has always prayed, of course, but she prefers the memorized prayers and the ones she can repeat. She sleeps with her Book of Common Prayer for children. She likes Bible stories and loves the physical Bible book, turning pages, “reading.” When I ask her to praise God, to describe Him, she says words like “big” and “mighty,” words from songs she’s memorized.
I watch Eve’s face when London prays and it’s as if she’s wondering who in the world London’s talking to—the way London yells and laughs and talks like she’s talking to a person in the room.
Today Eve asked me, “Mom, what’s faith?” And I said it’s about believing. I told her we have faith when we believe God and believe in God. I asked, “Do you believe in God?” She paused… “Yes.”
“Then you have faith.” She smiled, proud to have faith, whatever it was.
In the last three days I’ve spent 15 and a half hours with two of my best friends. Just talkin’ and what not. Some of the time we yelled at our kids. Most of the time we laughed.
Before I came to Round Rock it had been a long time since I’d had really great friends—partner friends, friends who know you, friends who can make you laugh so hard you spew coke out your nose, friends you talk to for so long that the restaurant closes. I hadn’t had friends like that in years.
When we moved to Texas I told Justin (and God) that all I wanted was one really good friend—not one three states away but one just down the road, one I could meet for lunch.
And you know what? God gave me one, two… I stopped counting at five. Because, really, more than five is just gratuitous. Sometimes I feel like God is showing off.
Tonight (confession: this morning at 1:26 am), I am thankful for friends. Gifts from God. Glimpses of God.
I said something stupid at small group last week. I didn’t realize it was stupid until three minutes after I’d said it, once I’d processed the reactions and realized my mistake, which wasn’t so much a mistake as a public unveiling of the grossness in my heart.
Yuck.
I’d been feeling terrible about it for a few days and had just about decided I’d need to confess it, that perhaps apologizing to the group was the only way I was ever going to forget about it and move on. But then I heard a lesson on, of all things, narcissism, and wondered if maybe there wasn’t something sinister lurking beneath my desire to confess.
I can almost guarantee my small group doesn’t remember my failure last week. Likely they thought it was a stupid thing to say, but I’m 98 percent certain they’ve forgotten about it.
So why do I feel so motivated to confess?
Narcissism: “inordinate fascination with oneself.”
I saw this tweet the other day: “If we knew how rarely other people think about us, we’d spend a lot less time caring what other people think of us.”
I think a lot about what other people think of me, and I wanted to confess because I wanted to manage my image. I wanted all my friends to know, “I know I said something wrong, but I am not so messed up as to not know it was wrong.” I want them to perceive my comment not as a symptom of my sick heart but as an out-of-the-ordinary stumble.
Perhaps, if the confession is especially good, they’ll think, “Wow. Jennifer confesses really well. She is super righteous.”
Yikes.
Sometimes when I confess my faults to others I’m doing it not for forgiveness but for affirmation. I almost wrote “attention,” but then realized the attention was assumed. Certainly people are thinking of me. In confession I want to be sure they think well of me.
I want the person across the table to look in my eyes and say, “No big deal. I still think you’re perfect.”
What I need instead is for somebody to say, “Huh. I hadn’t even realized you did that because I don’t pay that much attention to you.” And then follow it up with, “But that sounds really terrible. Good thing God’ll forgive you of it.”
James says, “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” James does not say, “confess your sins to each other so that you may all think well of one another.”
Too many times I’ve chosen a good reputation over healing.
The girls are napping as I type this. The house is quiet except for the purr of the air conditioner inside and the whirr of the air conditioner outside.
Quiet.
Mmmmmm…
The Lord’s justice will dwell in the desert,
his righteousness live in the fertile field.
The fruit of that righteousness will be peace;
its effect will be quietness and confidence forever.
My people will live in peaceful dwelling places,
in secure homes,
in undisturbed places of rest.
Isaiah 32:16-18
My neighbors have a fig tree drooping with ripening fruit. We’re planning a fig feast next week. Figs on pizza. Figs and cream. Figs with goat cheese. Figs!
Yesterday I watched Chimpanzees the movie with my kids and, surprise, chimps eat figs—figs in the middle of the jungle. The narrator said figs are some of the hardiest fruits in the world, that they’ve grown for thousands of years, that chimps can always depend on the figs, even when nothing else grows.
Helped me understand Jesus cursing the fig tree with no fruit. After all, the fig tree is not a delicate plant. The fig tree is like that Dugger mom, made to bear.
When Jesus talks about His followers bearing spiritual fruit, he’s likely looking at a fig tree.
Archeologists believe figs to be the very first agricultural crop—before wheat or barley. People have been eating figs for longer, likely much longer, than they’ve baked bread.
Most scholars believe Adam and Eve covered themselves in fig leaves after the fall. That leads many to assume the forbidden fruit was, drum roll please, a fig.
Who knew?
Sometimes you see something and it’s so beautiful you’re paralyzed. Your legs caught in quick-dry concrete, you find yourself fixed in space and time—you and the beauty. Your eyes open wider, your vision suddenly panoramic, and your attention narrows so you see in a thousand frames per second—this moment in time lapse. You drink like water from a fire hose and like hot chocolate in the rain and like champagne after a toast.
Today I am trying to describe Olympic National Park. I’m on the hunt for words. Regal words. Ancient words. Words with roots. Words with wings.
I stack the words, found objects, like rough rocks to build an altar.
I do not wish to forget beauty like that.
I will write that the mountains were like snow-crowned kings presiding over evergreen-wreathed valleys. I will say something about singing silence and the statue stillness and the way the sun annointed the view as if to announce (again) “It is good.”
My words will be small and my pencil eraser worn—because of me and my too-small stash of words and because big things like mountains shrink poorly. It’s why we take twenty pictures at the edge of the Grand Canyon and still can’t capture what our eyes and hearts see.
I think it’s why mankind’s been writing about God for a few thousand years, each of us piling every word we can carry onto an ever-growing heap of praise. We stand back and look at a trillion syllables reaching to the sky and we sigh in regret because it’s still too small an altar. We say with the Psalmist, “Who can proclaim the mighty acts of the LORD or fully declare his praise?”
And still we try.
Maybe my efforts at divine description prove I’m a writer, because I refuse to stop sketching God’s face in letters. More certainly my failures (bundled with the insufficiencies of much, much greater writers before me) prove God is God—because He persists in dramatically outshining our alphabet altars.
