golden clay

(Reposting: This Easter weekend, please recognize that the cross and the resurrection are necessary because we cannot stand in front of a Holy God apart from the work of Jesus Christ.)

I’m six years old and I walk up to Santa Claus, trying to ignore the crowd of parents and kids who are pressing into the little white picket fence in the middle of the mall.

Santa pulls me onto his lap. “What’s your name?”

“Katie,” I say, trying not to back away from his bad breath.

“Have you been a good girl this year, Katie?”

“No, I’m a dirty rotten little sinner,” I say it as a matter of fact.

Santa Claus forces a laugh, “Oh, no you’re not.

I don’t smile. “Yes, I am.” The plumpness of my stocking does not look promising.

I knew, even then, that no amount of good deeds would outweigh Santa’s scale of bad ones. A year later, I came face to floor and met the concept of grace because Daddy had told me countless times that the only kind of person God will allow into heaven is a perfect one. That leaves out…

…

…

Everyone.

Except Jesus.

You got that?

There’s no counting. There’s no list of good deeds in heaven. There’s no naughty or nice list. There’s just a book.

“And anyone whose name was not found recorded in the Book of Life was thrown into the lake of fire.” (Revelation 20:15)

When I was seven, I knew I wanted my name in the book. So I stacked up my good deeds, like they once stacked the Tower of Babel and the deeds were “filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). So, I threw them all away for Christ.

Ephesians 2:8-9 “God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.”

On days that start too early, the dishes in the sink are personal confrontation. The person blaring their music on the bus is purposely poking holes in my eardrums.

Then I read 1 Corinthians 13:5: “Love is not irritable.”

Every little dilemma shows the necessity for grace and a window to ask for help from the One who loves perfectly.

It’s Friday afternoon and my roommate and I run outside in our bare feet because the sun is shining. The snow is still piled on the edges of the sidewalks, but we’re laughing and dancing down the streets because we’ve caught a waft of spring.

It’s the best thing to get done when the textbooks we have to read are stacked to the ceiling. It’s the best thing we’ve done all week when we run outside together and start a bingo dabber war just because we can—just because we’re happy to be alive.

We don’t go inside until the sun is sinking and our hearts are filled with peace.

“This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Psalm 118:24

It’s one of the busiest weeks in March and I wake up with a scrambled brain and my throat as dry as the air inside the house. “It’s just a bad week to be sick,” I tell my mom over the phone.

But by Thursday, I’m wondering if maybe it is a good week to be sick.

“If God had eliminated the problem He would have eliminated the particular kind of blessing which it bears,” says Elisabeth Elliot.

I am forced to cancel the busyness and rest.

Surely, in every little, little trial—and every big one—there is grace.

In a week crammed with résumé designing, career workshops, and networking, I realize again that I can only make my résumé a page long.

I remember the three hour conversation in a coffee shop close to midnight with the black-haired girl, and how it changed my life and maybe hers a little too. You can’t put that on a résumé.

Or the two A.M. instant messaging and his spared life.

And the desperate midnight prayers on our bedroom floor.

Always, it comes back to the way she leans her head against her bedroom door and I stand against the door frame and we laugh about how fast the world changes.

What really matters is “…to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19).

He compares music to colours. We listen as he tells us the colours of Chopin. He uses his hands to talk, grabbing at thoughts like they’re floating around in the air.

I sit on her bed and she tells me how she could never explain it before, the mystery of music. Yet, music is her life. She jots down notes, piecing it together over twenty years and for another eighty years to come.

Indescribable.

My professor can’t explain why a six hour opera is bliss. It just is. He cannot explain it.

I cannot say why my eyes fill in a piano practice room on a Saturday afternoon and I have to stop playing because my shoulders are shaking uncontrollably. Or why she starts sobbing in the middle of the day when someone sits down at the keyboard and plays Mozart.

It is too big to describe.

Sometimes, I stop in the middle of the sidewalk and look at the sky, overwhelmed; I can’t explain it. I just jot down notes in my mind, piecing together who God is. We can only describe Him with one word at a time: awesome, glorious, holy. What are words?

The snow blankets the world in a sound-proof cocoon. It is easy to be alone in the silence just as it is easy to feel alone in the noise.

I run laughing, like a child, through the snow drifts.

Out of loneliness, the soul learns to trust.

The sky is the colour of sapphire. I look up and see it.

“For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him.” Psalm 62:5

Books stacked to the ceiling on the theme of suffering: I can find those.

I always pause at that part in Job—after the long list of everything that Job has lost. Then, I read, “Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped” (Job 1:20).

Every time, it’s as if I have never read it before.

Also how Paul rejoices while in chains.

They both infused their moments with humility; their purpose was God.

Suffering was a partner for their cause: advancing His glory.

When it comes to suffering, I can only think in fragments.

But…my purpose is Christ. I “count it all joy” (James 1:2).

I breathe in snow crystals and the cold flakes all pile on my grey winter hat as I walk across campus towards my first class of the New Year. The last few steps up the stairs of University College are always forced, like my feet are a weighted appendage that I cannot control. I know I am too weak to participate in this class, to fight the perversion it promotes. Freud seems to reign there, in my professor’s thoughts and I’ve always felt that if Freud could speak to me, he’d look me up and down, disdainfully, and say, “My thoughts are revolutionary; they will last forever.”

I sit in class and stare out the window at the opaque crystal sky and smile, then cover my smile and pretend to turn my attention back to the piece of writing we are work shopping. I imagine my professor glancing up from the story he is squinting at and seeing my Protector standing there in the room, or even just the brightness of my Saviour, and we’d all be on our knees in a milli-second, proclaiming Him as God. My professor mentions Freud, the dead guy, and it all seems small and irrelevant because God is revolutionary and “of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:33).

The clock strikes twelve and my mind starts turning around and around as a newborn year breathes its first shallow breaths. I am caught in thoughts of tomorrow and things I cannot control. It’s like He puts out His hands and calms the troubled waters and I remember to “take every thought captive” (2 Corinthians 10:5). A few seconds later, I’m playing back the past and I have to stop again to make my thoughts “obedient to Christ”. I resolve. He builds the worries into hopes, hammers the regrets into master-pieces and twists ‘round the questions into prayers.