Saturday I helped friends move. 

I heaved a hundred clothes-heavy hangers into my trunk. I artfully packed the art into the back of an SUV. I carried boxes and furniture, baby gear, and socks up and down a sloping driveway. 

It wasn’t until I picked up the top drawer of their dresser, filled with papers, mementos, and jewelry and all the things we hide from thieves by placing them in the most obvious of places, that I realized what it meant to move a friend. 

Before, I thought helping move a friend was living love.

At that moment I realized they were living love, too.

Asking friends to help you move makes you vulnerable. Your friends will touch every single thing you own. They will pick up your toilet brush. They will see the size of your shoe collection. They will flip through your books as they take them to the truck. 

They will see your house naked, dirty baseboards and corner cobwebs now exposed.

They will clean out your refrigerator and your pantry. They will know which brand of peanut butter you buy and how many bars of chocolate you keep on hand in case of emergency. 

I realized Saturday that couples get married without knowing as much about each other as I now know about my friends.

And they’re okay with that. Because they love me. 

Love isn’t simply about service. It’s also about intimacy, and the quickest road to intimacy is vulnerability. 

Today, August 12, 2012, Justin and I celebrate 12 years of married love. 12 tribes of Israel. 12 apostles. 12 years. 

They say 12 is a perfect number, in the Bible at least, and these twelve years have been perfect. Of course, they haven’t been perfect, too.

Marriage is wonderful (full of wonders), frequently fun (sometimes routine), mostly comfortable (occasionally awkward), super challenging, and pretty much the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.

But it’s not easy.

Usually people post lengthy descriptions of their union’s perfection on the day of their anniversary. That’s because anniversaries are days when we remember the good stuff and forget the bad stuff [We should celebrate anniversaries more often].

This morning, though, I’m thinking about the “bad” stuff, because on my anniversary I like to celebrate hard-won victories, the mountains we’ve climbed, the depths we’ve plumbed, the evil forces we’ve defeated. If marriage were easy I wouldn’t have so much to celebrate.

Looking back, I’m reminded that my husband and I are not perfect, that marriage hasn’t been a walk in the park, and that 12 years into this thing we are still figuring each other out.

And that’s what makes being married so great. It’s constantly shifting territory, wide open to exploration and innovation. Loving one another is an always moving target as we’re ever-growing and ever-changing into different, more interesting people. Marriage isn’t the kind of thing you do for a year and master.

My perfect-for-me husband is not perfect but hard-working, skilled, educated in all-things-Jennifer, and full of the Spirit of God. Our marriage is not the result of a fated, fairy tale love, but rather the product of years of refining, tearing down and building up, like a master poem—a work in perennial progress. 

It is a terrific poem. In twelve more years of writing, editing and re-writing it will be better. 

We celebrate today knowing God is doing a great work in our love for one another, knowing He is strengthening us, filling us with courage and patience, and shaping us into our best selves for and through this marriage.

Yesterday I turned my back too long, a dangerous thing for the mother of two crafty kids. When I finally investigated the too-quiet I found London and Eve, their bodies covered in tempera paint. “We painted ourselves!” London said with glee.

Twenty  minutes earlier London had creeped into my room and asked to paint. I’d said, “No.” I reminded my green-armed, red-legged eldest of this and she said, “Eve told me you said, ‘Yes.’” I looked at Eve. She made her guilty face.

I fumed. Tossed the girls into the bathtub. Had to drain the water twice. I scrubbed the paint-dripped floors and the paint-splattered dining room table. All the while muttering…

And then I went into the bathroom. I knelt beside the tub and washed Eve’s hair with strawberries and cream. I  scrubbed London’s long legs with a rag. I lifted Eve out of the water and wrapped her in a big pink towel. I held her shoulders and looked in her innocent blue eyes. I held her. She smelled clean. 

I thought, “Nothing in the world is as perfect as this.” Except, of course, pulling her sister from the tub ten seconds later. 

I love that God washes us. As I saw today, a little water can make all the difference, the memories of disobedience and the mess of consequences wiped away. I love that God sees us like I see Eve and London in those perfect post-bath moments: clean, fresh, pure, perfect.

Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Hebrews 10:22

I spent the morning reading about love and wishing I were better at it.

I carried my open pocket Bible all over a crowded Chuck-E-Cheese, because Chuck-E-Cheese is a mindless place and my kids were actually behaving and so why not? I made notes in the margins with a pencil and then stashed the pencil under my left thumb while I used my right to shove a token into the ski ball slot.

I read that way because I’d started and couldn’t stop, because I’d been so confused and frustrated when I came to the text and now, two chapters into my favorite three chapters in John, I was convicted.

I sometimes feel a tension between loving the church and loving the lost. Maybe I’m not alone. I think it’s because sometimes I don’t love the way the church treats the lost.  

But here’s the deal: I want to love the church. I have to love the church. When you hear Jesus saying, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” it’s significant to note that He’s talking brotherly love, family love. Not love-the-sinner love.

Of course there’s tons of love-the-sinner passages in the Bible. But I think sometimes I give the sinner more love than I do my own people.  

Sometimes…

I am full of kindness and gentleness in speaking to the lost, but I’m abrupt when speaking to God’s children.

I believe the best about an outsider’s intentions but immediately question the motivations of my brothers.

I am patient and long-suffering with a Facebook friend who violently disagrees with my  beliefs all the while quickly dismissing the friend whose exact theology and methodology doesn’t mirror mine in one specific way. 

I feel bad (we’re talking physically sick) when we Christians have a public disagreement. But the thing is, I think sometimes we just need to have one. It’s like marriage—sometimes a good old fashion disagreement does a whole lot of good. But I always want to do it in love.

I saw that Facebook meme today, that one that says “I hate you” and “I disagree with you” are not the same thing. I was thinking, “I hope we remember that when we’re dealing with each other.”

I hope we can disagree in a way that shows our unity and our love for one another. Sometimes I’m not so good at it. I want to be better. 

If, as Christians, our hope is ever to shock those with whom we disagree by the strength of our numbers, I worry that we have either overestimated the size of our group or joined up with the wrong crowd. 

We are a small gate, narrow road, minority-minded people as God’s people have always been.

We are the boy David pitted against a giant, Gideon and his three hundred men with lanterns in the dark, a rag-tag group of ex-slaves marching around a city wall. We are pilgrims, strangers, wanderers, underdogs.

“Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not.”

That is our heritage. We are the things that are not.

Given that heritage, underdogs and weaklings and strangers, we ought not be surprised if bigger kids steal our lunch money. It is our destiny.

According to Paul, we are often bullied but never bully. We bless our bullies and do not curse. Romans 12:14

Jesus said,“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.”

It is our lot to be hated. But it also our calling to endure it. And to bless.

^“To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it.”

Perhaps we’re out of practice in the West, having been bullied so little, but our responsibility as followers of Christ is to take hatred (or disagreement) sitting down—to look in the eyes of a person who attacks the things we love and to love him. To bless him.

In his memoir Eugene Peterson recollects being stalked by a flannel-wearing bully named Garrison Johns. He describes the beatings, the embarrassment of being called “Jesus Sissy.” One day, Peterson, tired of turning the other cheek, snapped and, inexplicably, started fighting back. In a moment Peterson realized his own superior strength. And in that moment Peterson took charge. He pummeled the bully repeatedly, pinning him to the ground. 

Having pinned his nemesis, Peterson yelled for the boy to “say uncle.” A light bulb went off in the “Jesus Sissy“‘s head and the next words out of his mouth were, “Accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior!” Peterson held on until he did.

I’m afraid Christians are guilty of that.

Far too often, excited by our own strength, we bully the bullies.

In the name of Christ.

David is infamous for two big mistakes. Bathsheba is one. The census is the other. God told David not to count the people and David, the proud King and conquerer, counted them anyway. 

I don’t know why he did it. The text says Satan incited him. I have a suspicion David wanted to count his people because he was impressed with how many there were. 

Joab, so disgusted by David’s command, gave the king an incomplete number.

What does it matter how many fighting men live in Israel? God lives in Israel. 

But we like a count. And we like it to be big.

We feel stronger having counted the good crowd at worship, the voters we sent to the poll, the number of chicken sandwiches we bought in a day.

We feel strong because we believe there is strength in numbers.

There’s not.

To believe there is power in our size is to misidentify (and perhaps miss altogether) power’s source. 

This is especially bad when, disconnected from the Source, we use our perceived power to gang up on our persecutors. Or worse, those with whom we simply disagree.

“But he said to me, ’My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” II Corinthians 12:9-11