golden clay

Crickets rehearse. And summer nights slip away as I spend too many of them sitting on rooftops and cliff’s edges, hearing has-been Christian kids trying to make sense of the Jesus they’ve read about–even met–and the sixteen books they were told to read about purity rings. 

“I’m not a Christian because of that,” I tell her. “I’m a Christan in spite of it.” 

And maybe sixteen books is an exaggeration, but it’s the first summer I’m willing to admit that some of my Christianity has gotten in the way of my love for Christ. 

And maybe the ‘what-would-Jesus-do’ generation has cared more about what other people are doing or not doing and has stopped asking what He’d really do–for the vulnerable and the people who sit in the back pew or don’t sit in any pew.

What He’d like to do through us. 

“I’ve stopped keeping track of the distance I run or hike or walk,” she tells me and it sticks with me for years as I track every kilometer. Count steps. 

She tells me it takes the joy out of it. Calculating accomplishment. 

Another friend sends me a text. “I tend to evaluate God’s love for me based on my performance.” 

And my Christian performance takes the joy out of loving Christ. 

“What it comes down to,” she says. “Is if you believe that Jesus died and rose again.” 

The bare bones. 

And I’m glad to hear that it doesn’t come down to who to vote for or if you drink beer or not.

And maybe it’s okay to doubt North American Christian culture and cling to Christ. Maybe the Nazarene would. 

Maybe it’s okay to step away from fear. To engage with doubt. 

Because that is a way to engage with faith. Like the faith heroes in the hall of fame. 

Like Sarah who laughed at the words of God–and now she’s listed. And I wonder if churches would list her? 

And there’s a place for doubting Christians and sinful Christians–for Thomas and King David.

And there’s a place for a little more grace. And a little more space for looking at Jesus. And less at ourselves–and our shame or our choice to swear less. 

The summer slips away and the nights grow longer and I find myself, lying on the last of the green grass and listening to songs about how He defends me.

And being more okay with how uncomfortable that makes me feel. More okay with accepting grace. And less okay with earning it. 

And maybe that’s what a real relationship is? A real relationship with the risen Christ. 

Requires no performance. 

“I’m so glad I have a daughter,” she holds me close. 

Her arms are home. 

But a week later, I unpack in my quiet apartment and I’m not sure if I was home or if this is home or if home will ever feel like home again. 

“Can you pray that I know the Lord loves me?” I ask her. I can’t think of anything else that matters. 

I lie on the grass and watch the evening light filter through the leaves overhead while I filter through the summer. The regrets. The blessings. The difficult texts I sent and received. The silence on the other end. The excitement in her voice when she told me the news. The disappointment in his voice when I told him the truth. 

I lie on the grass on a Monday night and I wonder how to broach the subject to Him. 

“Come as you are,” she had said to me over burgers and fries a few weeks earlier. “You don’t have to be clean first.” Silly religion gets in the way of vulnerability.

So, I sit on the grass and let time slip away. “Do you love me?” 

And her song comes through my earbuds and shakes me to my soul. Love like this. 

Funny how I often blushed, sitting in the back row at church, when we sang about His reckless love. 

Because the problem is not knowing whether He loves me, but having the courage to believe it. 

“You deserve to know yourself,” he tells me before summer. 

And that means seeing how I’m built and seeing how I’m broken and being able to live with that. 

Because He built me and sees how I’m broken and makes me fully alive.

And maybe knowing myself is discovering how He knows me. 

How He sees me.

How He lifts my head.

And for once on a Monday night, the sun shines brightly through the leaves overhead and the shame and regret and confusion from a summer I’ve just lived is not the truest, clearest thing. 

For once, I meet His gaze. Because looking away is not believing Him. Not really knowing Him.

How He loves me with abundance. And without exaggeration. 

“Do not be afraid,” I must tell myself every day. Because it takes courage to look in the eyes of Someone who knows you. And to see love–unreserved. 

“But you, O LORD, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head.” Psalm 3:3

“What does it really mean to live a sacrificial life?” We talk about it for an hour or more. We talk about it at least once a month.

Sometimes I think it is something to be proven with a sign-up sheet on Sunday morning. 

Or weekly volunteer hours. 

Sometimes I think it is something you can imitate like Jim Elliot’s biography. 

Or George Muller’s.

Sometimes I think it is saying yes to everyone and stretching my circle of acquaintance as wide as possible. Until I’m stretched thin.

But sometimes I think it’s the opposite. 

“I’m learning to set boundaries,” I tell him. “Like God has boundaries.” But I’m setting boundaries that are building walls when I should be setting boundaries that are building purpose. 

“We often talk about revival.” I watch her face in the firelight. “But I wonder if revival will be what happens in moments like this, sitting around campfires.” 

Or over the phone. 

“I’m just missing home,” I explain the reason for my call. I knew she’d be available to sit with me. I knew she wouldn’t be too busy doing sacrificial living to actually love sacrificially. 

“I love social distancing,” she tells me. I can hear the relief in her voice. Months into it, I’ve never heard her so cheerful. 

A pandemic takes away the opportunity for sacrificial busyness. And opens the door for open-hearted conversation.

It takes away the fear of missing out. And opens the door for the courage to step in. 

To love in the moment, not the calendar box. To live by the Spirit, not the time slot.

To live with intention, not compulsion.

Because sacrificial living is not about being available to everyone. It’s about being available to the One. 

But it’s about being available to the One. 

Because you can set a track record of selflessness without a heart of surrender.

And you can build a life of boundaries without being bound by submission to Him. 

Or you can live like Christ lived with love for others, not as something put on, but as something bled out.

With the boundaries of His love written in blood. 

“Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh, and having a High Priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” (Hebrews 10:19-22)

It’s been two years and I’m still taking out photos of her from time to time–the one she says looks just like me. I’m still reading her old emails. I’m still playing her song on my harp once the sun sets and it’s quiet and I need to sit with her memory.

I’m still not sure if grief is a friend or an enemy. I’m still not sure if I want to feel it or feel nothing at all.

It’s been two years since I said goodbye.

“We’re all going to miss her and feel that void, because she built into people,” I still remember him saying.

That was her way. She built into people.

And when she’s here, the people she’s with get stronger, bigger in a way.

Because the size of her greatness never made people smaller by comparison. 

And when she’s gone, I wonder if I’m going to crumble.

But I don’t. We don’t.

Because her words keep adding to the structure of our hearts. They grow with us.

He texts a photo of her poem hanging on his wall. “She was pretty special,” he says. And I’ve watched the way her words have changed him.

He tells me over the phone how he read her letter again. Her words have kept him grounded.

And she tells me how she wants to be like her, a trusted confidante. And we talk easier now.

And in a year of pain and pandemic, I think I know exactly how she’d handle all of it.

Like she handled every challenge in her life, like she handled the final year. “This has been the best year of my life, Kate,” she tells me from her bed in the hospice. And her eyes shine with Living Hope.

It’s been two years and I still take out photos of her, because I remember her in snapshots.

Her wink when he found out she’d secretly given more money away.

Her giggle when she invited me to sip wine with her other girlfriends, as if there weren’t fifty-four years between us.

Her face of determination, carrying her oxygen tanks through the airport, to the church, on our road trip, because she wasn’t going to let lack of oxygen keep her from really living.

And I can’t catch my breath whenever he motions to her picture above the fireplace.

But it won’t keep me from living with Hope.

Her legacy won’t let it.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” 1 Peter 1:3-5

 

We’re talking over Zoom on a Tuesday night when he says we’ve got it wrong, the way we highlight people’s testimonies as incredible stories about them. “Testimonies are about what God has done,” he says. 

They are equally incredible for the murderer, the drug lord, the Karen and your average Joe. 

She asks me about my latest fascination with his books. “His heart,” I say. “His heart is so genuine.” 

His story is fascinating, but it’s his heart that wrecks me. It’s his pure, honest search for truth. His impartial discovery of The Way. 

It’s not the unique beginning to his conversion story that brings me to tears at midnight when I read it. It’s the wonder that his story has the same resolution, the same conclusion, as mine. 

His books fascinate me, not because he is telling me things I don’t know. It’s because he helps me really see the things I do know. 

It’s how he gives me a third-person view of the way the love of God has changed him. Has changed me. 

It’s how I feel when I meet him in the midst of homesickness and we realize we grew up driving past the same fields, the same diner on the same corner of town. It’s validation. 

And I watch her tell her story to strangers across our kitchen table, to an audience of women from the podium in front of the church to the pages of handwritten letters she sends to teenagers, the sick and dying. “I was taking communion on Good Friday and I knew something wasn’t right,” she always says. 

Her story validates the experience of the transforming work of God in the soul.

And that matters because it’s almost impossible to describe. 

All John Wesley can say is that his heart felt “strangely warmed.”

All Nabeel Qureshi can say is “I submit.”

All C.S. Lewis can say is, “I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

And it matters because every story makes me see the gospel over again, in different words. 

It makes me see what’s happened in my own heart, in the language of another’s. 

It matters because it expresses the truest thing I have ever experienced.

It matters because it adds to the testimony of countless Christians across the ages nodding in agreement. 

“Amen. Me too.”

When I first meet her, what strikes me is the way she brings Jesus into everything. 

Not politics, not religion, not philosophy. 

Jesus. The Person. 

She starts talking to Him in the middle of the hike, gazing at layers of mountains against the horizon. Anytime. Anywhere. 

I am quiet when she does. Not uncomfortable. I am distant, an outsider to their connection. 

Distant. 

Like when I stop calling her every week and she stops checking in–and a year later, we meet without the comfort of familiarity. 

Or when he moves far away and comes back different. I don’t know how to talk to him like I did before. I don’t know how to push past the barriers. 

Because commitment is shown through frequent connection.

 “I’ve kept track of you on Instagram,” she tells me over coffee.

Like I’ve kept track of Him, watched His life through the pages of the Gospels. 

And when I finally lay down my book about Him and trace my own outline of the mountains, the words come slow at first. 

Almost apologetically. 

And a week comes and goes as I commit to connection. Just five minutes. Ten minutes. I put away distractions. 

And joy comes as surely as the sun.

And perspective–out of the shadows. 

A maturing love for the Person over the good gifts He brings. 

A love that can never be taken away. 

 

“What do you say to him, Katie?” Dad has me look him in the eyes. I stick out my lip in a pout that’s been common for the full eight years I’ve been alive.

“Sorry,” I look away. I’m not a bit sorry.

“Sorry for?” Dad prompts me.

“Sorry for scratching your car with a stick.”

“And?”

“I was wrong.”

“And?”

“Please forgive me.”

Now almost twenty years later, I realize how hard it is to make a proper apology. To name the specifics. To admit wrong.

Like when I tell them on the group chat that “she always does this” and I know she doesn’t. I know I have to make it right.

Or when she tells me that the show I’m watching is offensive to her culture and my heart’s reaction is defensiveness. I know I need to make it right.

We walk together at dusk and I tell him how I’m re-learning how to lay down my life, my desires, my politics, my agenda, my privilege.

Because I’d rather view my life through the lens of Christ.

I’d rather have eyes that are open to see suffering than closed by excuses.

Because change cannot start in the world until it starts in the heart. And it can’t penetrate the heart without the sharp blade of humility.

He tells me that I need to change, but I want us to move past the discussion.

It’s easier to tell him ‘I love you’ than to say the other three words.

“I was wrong.”

And when the streets fill with a cry for justice, it’s easier to say “I love you” than to go back to the basics of the gospel.

Back to recognition of wrong.

Back under the blade of humility.

Back to laying down my privilege and my lofty view of self.

To quietly acknowledge that things will have to be different.

They must be.

“Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” Philippians 3:8

“I don’t agree with your interpretation,” she tells me. It bothers me for months. 

I feel like I’m eleven again. “We can tell each other everything,” I say to my best friend. 

Until we’re fourteen and I realize there are things she doesn’t tell me. 

And things I can’t bear for her to know. 

I realize we are separate people. But I try to be the same as her. 

“I’ll do anything for you,” I pray when I’m seven. Because I have no doubt He knows best. 

Then I turn twenty-six and I wonder why He says the things He says. 

“I don’t agree,” she says and reminds me she is her own person and I cannot overlap. 

I want to lash out and I don’t know why. My desire for control. 

Like I want God to agree with me. I want to be in control. 

And I realize when he asks me what I’m wrestling with lately, that I’m wrestling with the fact that God is His own, in three persons. 

I’m wrestling with His prerogative to say no. To say what is good. What is not. 

I want to push His boundaries. 

Yet He is the One who gave me mine. My own prerogative to say yes or no. 

To build a relationship with Him. 

I curl up on my bed on a Wednesday night and read the Psalms of David. I read how David cries out for help, in desperation. 

And realize how much sweeter it is to hear an answer from a God who has the prerogative to say no. To bend the ear of Someone who does not feel the need to please us. But delights in showing His love to us. 

Through Christ, who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. 

Who took on the boundaries of a person and died. For us. 

“And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Philippians 2:8

 

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” I tell them.

I don’t believe the old man stopped me in the middle of the sidewalk, in the middle of my prayer for help, on a rainy day in May, out of pure luck. I don’t believe he told me exactly what I needed to hear in that moment out of pure chance.

“What you have gone through has taught me a lot about myself,” I tell her even though I wish she had not gone through it.

Who knew that the way I would learn to grow out of my habit of fear would be by standing in the shadows of her pain? That I would learn courage by proxy.

I put no thought into the comment I still remember making to her across the table in the middle of lunch. “It would be great if we could live together.”

And I do not believe in the coincidence of the way our lives collided.

The way her growth makes an imprint on my life.

I read about Abraham and Isaac. I read about Ruth meeting Boaz in the middle of a workday. And the selection of Esther to be queen.

I read about people with unique personalities, born at specific points in history, doing certain things, which leads to a person being born in a stable at a specific point in history, performing certain miracles. Which leads to a cross.

We go for a hike together on a Friday afternoon and I learn about her history and wonder how she’ll play into my future. Or how I’ll play into hers.

She leans across the table toward me. “It’s amazing.” Her eyes light up as she talks about neutrons and electrons and protons–and planets beyond. I’m just a writer trying to understand.

What everyone is trying to understand. The unimaginable details of the universe.

I’m a writer amazed at the Master Storyteller.

How He will accomplish His purpose in her.

Which accomplishes His purpose in me.

Which builds up them.

And on and on it goes. One perfectly planned coincidence after another.

And when the old man stops me in the middle of the sidewalk, I know I’m going to remember his words for a long time to come.

Because I know they’re not an accident.

Because I believe in a loving God who knows mysteries I can’t fathom.

And who cares about the details to a degree I can’t imagine.

“Indeed these are the mere edges of His ways, And how small a whisper we hear of Him! But the thunder of His power who can understand?” Job 26:14

I first met her at summer camp. She was good at sports and I wasn’t. She was good at talking with boys. Not me. She was bilingual. I knew two or three words in French.

I was the farm girl she introduced to public transit in the big city of Montreal.

She was different and it made me less afraid of what I didn’t know.

And then I met him, my first experience with a real foodie.

And her, the American who introduced me to Starbucks.

And then I lived with a girl who tried to teach me to salsa, but mostly taught me to laugh.

And years later, on a Friday night, she teaches me how to see things differently. “When I think about the friends who challenge me,” I tell her through the screen, “I think of you.”

I say this after running 2.23 miles for Ahmaud Arbery–because I have the privilege to run in broad daylight, a privilege everyone should have.

It’s after we spend an hour talking through Zoom, the three of us, three different backgrounds. One faith. I ask him how the church loses out with less diversity. “A sign of less diversity is a sign of less maturity,” he says.

I think of the ways she expresses things differently. She helps me visualize a side I’d never see without her.

Isn’t that the point of life with Christ? To grow in maturity? To have a multi-dimensional view.

How can we learn to worship if we only see it done one way?

How can we grow in empathy if we only listen to voices exactly like ours?

How can we deal with prejudice in our hearts if we are too afraid to examine them?

They ask me how I came to be in this discussion on race and diversity on a Friday night. I’ve been reading a lot, I tell them. I think about my conversation with her a few days before, about how to live out our faith in these bodies we’ve been given. Now, we talk about how to live out our faith in the skin we’ve been given.

“I’ve been afraid to say something wrong,” I also tell them. Minutes later, I realize why.

I’m afraid of my heart. “…For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” Luke 6:45

He mentions justification and how it comes down to proper theology.

When we know who we are in Christ, we are not afraid to examine our hearts, to listen to criticism and to pursue change.

Because Christ is not the second amendment or the Canadian image of “being nice”.

We are not afraid to see our prejudice without being defensive or devastated.

We can see the path to growth.

As I run 2.23 miles, I realize I have no choice but to run.

And to run with endurance.

Toward a Future that is altogether better. A side we cannot yet see.