golden clay

Mama drops me at the edge of the paved road and I’m about to start into the field with a crossbow over my shoulder when she laughs, “I love how you just changed from a dress into your camouflage.”

It’s like she’s always told me. Being a woman is a balance.

It’s strength plus dignity. Dignity plus strength.

“Strength and dignity are her clothing.” (Proverbs 31:25)

And my mom wears it like royalty.

I’ve watched her wash filth off the floors of the barn, her face speckled with pig poop and her hair in tangles.

I’ve watched her at a party, with make-up, with a pretty gold necklace from my dad, with shoulders back and head high.

Grit.

Glitter.

She’s told me how she clenched her teeth as a little girl, and wished she was a boy. Because being a boy looked better.

But I’ve rarely wished that I was a boy, because I’ve watched her be a woman. And she’s worn it royally.

Like my friend who gets out of bed at 4 A.M. to feed her crying infant.

Or my Grandma coming to the door with her oxygen tank, perfectly dressed, ready to meet the day.

Or the girl by the fireplace in the middle of the wilderness who just carried a canoe on her back for one kilometre.

I sit in a classroom at university and my professor tries to tell me that, to be a successful woman, I have to be like a man. Men are wonderful, but I don’t want to be like them.

I hike behind her on a trail, backpacks filled. Dirt-smudged faces. Greasy hair. She tells me how they have defined what a woman is and is not.

I think it is not so complicated.

“To be a woman is not to be a man.” (Elisabeth Elliot)

Why did God create binaries? I don’t know. He did.

And it was good.

I walk down the dirt road by my house, thinking about it all. The politics, the economics, the connotations to the word “girl”.

None of that matters for a moment.

I whisper thanks to a God who made me a woman. Who gave me this role, in this world, at this time.

I want to wear it His way, the best way.

I want to wear it well.

 

After the sermon ends, she leans across the row and whispers to me, “God encouraged me this week.”

“How’s that?” I ask.

“He gave me a bushel of peaches.”

Her eyes dance as she tells me the story of the miracle peaches. “God didn’t have to, but He did anyway.”

I remember another woman saying those exact words one week earlier as we sat and folded hundreds of napkins together. “Remember that verse in James?”

“You do not have, because you do not ask.” James 4:2

It’s like the first time I put on my glasses and I looked out the living room window and traced the crisp silhouettes of the trees along the driveway.

A few days later, I pray as I walk. The sun begins to set over the fields.

“Lord, please fill me with joy.”

My strides become faster and stronger. I don’t just want the peaches though. I want the whole darn basket of fruit. So, I ask.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control.

I ask for all of it.

And watch the sun slip below the bush line.

“I’m not going to be shy anymore, Lord.”

Not in prayer. There’s no time for that.

I jog through a city trail, slush from January snow soaking through the tops of my running shoes.

“Please show me what you want me to do next.”

Decisions. Like Alice in Wonderland, deciding which door to enter and which key to use.

When only rumours of summer have started, I walk into the middle of a freshly planted field and crouch down in tears. “Please show me what to do. If you want me to do this, I’ll do it. If you want me to go there, I’ll go. Just please make it clear.”

I think the smiling interviewer across from me at Boston Pizza is, perhaps, my clarification.

But it’s really a dead-end.

I forget that dead-end signs are not stop signs. It’s simply a point where the road ends, and you have to change your mode of transportation.

And you walk past the sign, down a hill, to a beach, and swim across the lake to a mountain, and climb both sides of the mountain to a valley, and…

Summer fades into me sitting across the table from more interviewers. Three times in one week. A call from one. A call from another. A deadline. A decision.

“Please just show me what you want me to do.”

I get another call. Everything on the checklist falling into place and clarity filling my heart.

Nine months of waiting for an answer.

I accept a job.

One week later, I get another phone call and another e-mail. Other options of where I could be.

But I’m not there.

I’m here.

And God is sovereign.

Sovereign.

A fancy word that means I can’t screw up His plan.

It’s a week where anxiety flees.

Because God’s sovereignty scares away the phobia of road blocks.

Because I still don’t know anything, but I know Someone who does.

“‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish my purpose,’…I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it.” (Isaiah 46:10-11)

“Don’t you wish we could save this view,” she says. It’s not a question.

We look across miles of mountain tops.

We’ve reached the peak of one of them and I snap pictures like a mad woman.

Until I turn off my camera.

It’s an impossible task. Documenting majesty. Who does that?

A week later, I sink my toes into red sand as the edge of the Atlantic pushes against my ankles.

I snap a picture.

It’s like a castle in a snow globe. A tiny, obscure castle in a snow globe.

A copy of a copy of a copy.

“Do you think there will be mountains in heaven?” she asks me.

I don’t answer. I don’t know.

There will be God in heaven.

I watch the waves churn. All of this creation. A copy of a copy of a copy.

It leaves me wanting more of something greater.

A day yet to come.

Glory.

“ ‘Behold the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.’” Revelation 21:3b

We sit around the fire and sing.

We sing with dirt on our faces.

Dirt underneath our fingernails.

We sing with scrapes on our knees and blisters on our hands.

And when everyone goes into their tents, I take one last look at the moonlight bouncing off the wrinkles in the Churchill River.

The silence writes a story.

I wonder why I love this so much. This wide-open wilderness. Three days away from civilization.

For eight days, I have not read the newspapers.

Unplugged from the real world.

But everything seems more real where the skies are bigger and the wind is more vocal and the birds are less shy.

Why is it that when I get my internet back I feel more disconnected?

In the wilderness, there is no opportunity to worry about the information on a screen.

Food, sleep, and relationships. The things that matter are the things in proximity.

Not the clouds in cyber-space.

It’s simple. Catch enough fish so we can eat. Talk to the girl sitting beside you at the fire because she’s the only one you have there.

Pray. Because the wilderness is where human frailty is realized.

In the bush, the weakness of the body is apparent. The binary between life and death.

The soul is unmistakable.

And the cross is the biggest reality.

“Pray that I follow Jesus with a whole heart,” I tell him.

Because, lately, my loyalties have shifted.

All the loudest voices teach me to build my own castles on earth. With the bricks and mortar of self-dependence, prestige, and money.

And it’s hard to hear the still small voice that reminds me of a Kingdom elsewhere. Of crowns, rewards, and treasures that are worthless in earthly stocks and currencies, but are high value in heaven.

Lately, my loyalties have shifted.

Because the King I serve once “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). And that’s not the rock-star-with-nice-hair type of leader towards which our human hearts are drawn.

He asks the same of me.

To give it all, to get down on my knees, to serve.

But my loyalties have shifted.

Because earth’s treasures seem to sparkle brighter.

And heaven’s glory seems far away.

But I’ve pledged allegiance to the unseen King of Splendour.

I can only hold so much treasure in my arms. Fifty percent of this world’s currency and fifty percent of heaven’s currency. Half-hearted.

And when I get to heaven and fifty percent of it turns to ashes. What then?

I’d rather be like King Josiah “who turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might…nor did any like him arise after him” (2 Kings 23:25).

Sometimes words are a limited human resource and no string of them expresses the glory evident in the moment.

We watch her walk the aisle with one hand wrapped around her Dad’s arm and two eyes fixed on her groom.

Like a Day that is coming soon when “the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready” (Revelation 19:7).

You are holy, holy, holy. We stand and sing.

Deep silence fills my heart.

Because what can you say when you see the gap between Majesty and man?

Between heaven and earth?

Between purity and sin?

His glory unbearable.

His holiness unapproachable.

Because of Christ, there is a day approaching where He will “present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless” (Ephesians 5:27).

I watch the bride and groom join hands. A perfect union.

Awestruck.

I sit through a Sunday course where they throw out terms of acceptance for a changing society; they teach us open-mindedness.

I sometimes try to walk the tight rope of society’s definition of an open mind because I cringe at the thought of offending people, and I am told that this is the age where everyone can do what they want.

Like when “Israel had no king; all the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes.” (Judges 21:25)

And I have tearfully begged God not to let me do what is right in my own eyes because I am learning how much it can hurt.

But I subconsciously make a mixture of different ideologies and it ends up mirroring a failed high school chemical reaction.

The God of the Bible is God + There is no god + Everything has god in it.

I just can’t make a BLT out of turkey, biscuits, and mustard.

Over coffee, I chat with a guy who thinks the opposite of me in almost everything. I realize I do want an open mind–a mind that clings only to Truth, but eyes that are open to seeing his valuable soul.

A mind that is open to believing in a God who is bigger than my mental capacity.

A mind that is open to understanding love in the ground-shaking way it was demonstrated for me on a cross.

He says it to me over lunch one day, “It is the nature of absolute truth to be exclusive.”

That is the beauty of it. I cannot follow Christ without Him changing my heart, slowly excluding my sin, excluding the ugliness of my thoughts.

Because if “love is patient”, it cannot be impatient. If “love is kind”, then it cannot be unkind. (1 Corinthians 13:4)

And if Jesus is “the truth” (John 14:6), then I can step off my tightrope and put my feet on firm ground.

(Reposting: Life has been crazy lately and this is an oldie and embarrassingly bad writing, but I was once again completely amazed by my mom’s selflessness this week–and every week.)

She scratched it in her sprawling cursive on a long to-do list she left for me on the counter. I typed out four condensed pages of the way God got hold of Mom’s heart and how He flipped her snow globe over and all the pieces went swirling ‘round, everything tipped upside down. I’m home alone whispering “wow” because I see it clearer now. I was born in perfect timing – Mom showed me the world upside down.

The world said faith and works paved the road to heaven, that motherhood was a weakness, and that God was not love. God said faith opened heaven’s gates, motherhood was the strength of daily death to selfishness, and that God loved with sweat, blood and nail prints in His hands. Maybe the elderly man who said we were “backwards” was right. Mom taught me to run backward in a world that runs forward to hopelessness. God spun her unhappy soul until she was spinning wild with joy. He was gracious enough to catch my little hand on the hem of her skirts and take me for the ride until I was ready to choose to do the same crazy backward twirl.

That’s how it works. God’s grace touches one life, which touches another and another. Sometimes no one even really notices and sometimes they’re twenty years old when they finally start to see points in the plot, God pouring His grace in between every line.

“It looks like Ireland,” he says. The green wheat fields stretch from side road to side road. Every spring, it’s like this.

Everything seems to grow on its own when you don’t see the science behind it, the calculations, and the careful planning.

On Wednesday, a thought sprouts in my mind. How did that get there? Three years ago, not even my imagination could have conjured something so sinful.

I get comfortable because I’m the only human who knows that my soul actually looks more like a nuclear waste site than a newly sprouted field in Europe.

On Thursday, Dad calls the seed company to make sure we have the right soybeans to plant.

I wonder what seeds I’ve been planting in my soul.

I text her for accountability, and open my Bible on Friday because I need to start planting the right seeds again.

“For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life” (Galatians 6:8).